You can make your anxiety work against you or for you.
And one of the ways...
I made a program,
called The Future Authoring Program that I think helps people do that.
One of the things you see when you're talking to people and they're trying
to solve problems is that they're afraid to face the problem.
So then their anxiety is working against
them, and you can think about it as antagonistic to rationality.
But then I could say, well, why don't you think for a while about
what your life would be like if you didn't face this problem?
Because if you think that through, if you have a problem and you really think
through what the consequences are going to be in three to five years of not facing
it, then you're going to get more afraid of not facing it than facing it.
And that's great, because then your anxiety,
instead of standing in front of you... Instead of having a Dragon that's guarding
the path in front of you, you have one chasing you down the path from behind.
That's a lot more useful.
And so...that's just a...
A minimal example of the utility of getting your emotions and
your thoughts aligned the same way.
The same thing happens with aggression.
One of the most common reasons that people
come and seek psychotherapy, really, is because they're too agreeable.
But what that means is they're not assertive enough, they haven't integrated
their capacity for aggression, and so other people can push them around,
and they're very conflict avoidant.
And so, the consequences of that across time is that you don't stand up
for yourself well enough, and you get taken advantage of.
And that spirals badly downward.
And so partly what you do when you're
doing assertiveness training with people is you find out what they're angry about,
and they're usually angry if they're not assertive enough
because other people are taking advantage of them.
Or you could say,
because they're not putting their own necessities forward with enough force.
It's hard to distinguish between those two things.
But anyways,
you get them to talk about what they're angry about.
That often makes them cry. Often = many times,
and then you get them to kind of envision what they would want to have instead,
which they're often afraid to do, because people are afraid
to think about what they want, because that makes it more clear when
they're not getting it, and that's painful, right?
Or maybe they're afraid of hoping so they won't specify a clear aim.
But anyways, you get them to think about what they might want, instead.
You get them to think about the costs of not pursuing that.
And then you help them develop strategies for integrating their aggression
and with their thinking so that they can
come up with a plan to approach the world in a more confident way.
So, for example, someone might come to me and say, I'm being bullied badly at work.
And so then I'll say, well, what are your options?
Do you have to put up with it?
Well, we'll figure that out because maybe you do.
Maybe you don't have options.
But here's how to find out.
Get your damn CV together.
So it's pristine, right?
It's ready to go.
Get over your fear of a new interview
because people are generally afraid of that.
Get over your fear of applying for a new job.
Start thinking about what it would mean to have a different job.
Start thinking about what it would mean
to have a better job, even, because maybe your fear is just making you stuck here.
But I can tell you one thing.
If someone is picking on you at work and you don't have options, you lose.
So you get the person to start building a strategy.
It's like, okay, if you're going to tell this person
to stop, you have to know how to make them stop.
And the one thing you need for sure is an option.
And...
If you don't have an option,
then maybe we start thinking about the fact that you need some more training
or something like that, because you cannot negotiate if you don't have any power,
because especially if you're dealing
with someone who's really out to get you or really disagreeable.
If you don't have a leg to stand on,
they'll just push you over and maybe they'll jump on you, too,
because that's what they're like, and they enjoy it anyway.
So it's no joke.
So...
You put your options behind you and then you start to think about strategies.
So I tell people, look, if you're being harassed at work,
you document it every time it happens and you write it down.
So you've got, like, 20 stories about it and it's fully documented,
and then you go confront the person at some point, but with at least three
pieces of evidence and you have some sense of what you tell
them about what will happen if they don't stop.
So you have to figure out, well, they don't stop.
What are you going to do about it? Leave?
Not if you can't leave.
So you have to be able to... What is it?
Wield a big stick and speak softly.
But you see that way it's...
That's how you take your aggression,
which is an absolutely necessary part of your psyche and manifested up into
a sophisticated means of dealing with the world.
You don't just suppress it, you say, well, I should be able to put up with it.
Or I wish I wasn't so angry or something.
It's like, forget that.
All it will happen is your blood pressure
will stay high and you'll die of a heart attack because anger, for example,
is a very toxic emotion, and it does cause heart damage over time.
It's the only emotion that we really know that's being linked to things like
cardiovascular risk and anger is toxic because
it's like you're driving a car, you're stepping on the gas and pushing
on the brake at the same time because anger tells you to run away and to attack
at the same time because you don't know what's going to happen.
And so it really amps up the physiological demand on your body,
including your heart and your musculature.
So if you stay like that for, like, 10 years,
you're going to age 20 years,
and that's a bad plan.
So you take your underground emotions
and you integrate them into a sophisticated reality.
Jung said...
So first of all, you unite your mind, your thinking.
Let's say, with your emotions.
So that makes one thing instead of two fighting things.
That's a good one.
And then the next conjunction he talked about was:
it isn't enough to unite your mind and your emotions.
And he thought about that as a male female pairing symbolically.
That's how it would manifest itself sometimes in dreams.
So you take the masculine element and the feminine element,
the thinking and the emotion unite those.
And that makes you more like one thing
now all of a sudden that's represented as symbolically male.
That one thing. And it unites with something else that's
now represented symbolically female.
That's the body.
So you take the mind-emotion integration and integrate that in your body.
So what does that mean?
You act it out, instead of just thinking, it's a contradiction in action.
There's actually a technical term for it.
But that's when you think and believe something,
but you don't act it out.
And so that means there's a dissociation in you somehow between
your abstract representations and what you manifest in action.
Well, that's another form of discontinuity that isn't doing you any good.
The drivers going one way and the car is going the other, and you won't even be
able to understand yourself, if you do that.
But even more, you're not putting your principles into practice.
So, your being is dissociated.
So, once you get your mind and your emotions working together,
then the next thing to do is to act that out consistently.
That was the second conjunction as far as Jung was concerned.
And then the third one was this is the tough one.
And this is the one that's related to phenomenology.
You erase the distinction between yourself and the world.
That's a tough one.
Imagine you're dealing with someone who's hoarding.
Now, people who are hoarding are often
older or neurologically damaged, or they have obsessive compulsive disorder.
But then you walk into their house and
there's, like, 10,000 things in their house.
There's maybe 100 boxes. And you open up a box.
And in the box there's some pens and some
old passports and some checks and their collection of silver dollars and some
hypodermic needles and some dust and a dead mouse.
And there are boxes and boxes and boxes like that in the house.
It's absolute chaos in their absolute chaos, not order, chaos.
And then you think is that their house or is that their being?
Is that their mind?
And the answer is: there's no difference.
There's no difference!
So I could say, well,
if you want to organize your psyche, you could start by organizing your room,
if that would be easier, because maybe you're a more concrete
person and you need something concrete to do.
So you go clean up under your bed and you make your bed and you organize the papers
on your desk and you think, well, just exactly what are you organizing?
Are you organizing the objective world or are you objecting your field?
Are you organizing your field of being like your field of total experience?
And Jung believed that.
And I think there's a Buddhist doctrine
that sort of nested in there that at the highest level of psychological
integration, there's no difference between you and what you experience.
Now you think, well, I can't control everything I experience,
but that's no objection, because you can't control yourself anyway.
So the mere fact that you can't extend
control over everything you experience, there's no argument against
the idea that you should still treat that as an extension of yourself.
So you could say, well, let's say you have a longstanding feud with your brother.
Well, is that a psychological problem? Is that him?
Is it a problem in the objective world, or is it a problem in your field of being?
And it's very useful to think that way
because you might ask, what could you do to improve yourself?
Well, let's step one step backwards.
The first question might be, why should you even bother improving yourself?
And I think the answer to that is
something like: **So you don't suffer any more stupidly than you have to!**
And maybe so others don't have to either.
It's something like that, like there's a real injunction at the bottom of it.
It's not some casual self help doctrine.
It's that if you don't organize yourself properly, you'll pay for it.
And in a big way.
And so will the people around you.
And you can say, well, I don't care about that, but that's actually not true.
You actually do care about that,
because if you're in pain, you will care about it.
And so you do care about it, even if it's just that negative way,
it's very rare that you can find someone
who's in excruciating pain who would ever say,
Well, it would be no better if I was out of this.
This sort of pain is one of those things
that brings the idea that it would be better if it didn't exist along with it.
It's incontrovertible.
So you get your act together so that there
isn't any more stupid pain around you than necessary.
Well, so then the question might be, well,
how would you go about getting your act together?
And the answer to that?
And this is a phenomenological idea, too.
It's something like
look around for something that's bothers you and see if you can fix it.