Are you irritated? Exasperated? Annoyed with
certain people and their behavior? Or just plain
despairing and not knowing what to do next? Of
course you don’t want to live with these people.
They are rude, inconsiderate, selfish,
frustrating, arrogant – and the list goes on. It
seems that life gives us plenty of chances to be
irritated, exasperated, or annoyed by others.
For many of us it is an everyday occurrence.
Right up front I want to put you out of your
misery and give you this gem of information that
it took me seven years to discover.
The jewel is that everything you find so
impossible in that difficult other person, and
in all those others that make your life hell, is
not about them at all. It is actually all about
YOU. Yes, you. This can be difficult to accept,
but unfortunately, the buck stops with you. All
the problems you are experiencing are all about
you. Does this annoy you? Are you disappointed?
Are you surprised? I was certainly annoyed to
discover that what gets on my nerves about
others is really all about me. After all, if we
could prove that the root of our problems was
the wrongdoing of others, it would allow us to
keep blaming others and avoid change,
essentially a much easier option. Believe me, I
tried to blame others, but eventually concluded
that it was not a healthy option. At least, not
if I wanted to keep those dear to me in my life.
I also discovered why my problems had so much to
do with me.
It seems that so much of what goes wrong in our
relationships comes down to how we think of
ourselves, how much self-confidence and
self-worth we have, as well as, the expectations
that we have of others. This is why the
following information about how we develop is
vital because it is a cornerstone for
understanding why our relationships go wrong.
Let’s start with the first fact, which is that
we are the centre of our own universe.
BORN SELF-ABSORBED
We are all born self-absorbed. This is our
instinctive survival mechanism and it is hard
wired into each and every one of us, without it
we would die. Part of our healthy development as
children is to be egocentric until about the age
of seven. This is not acceptable to many
parents, who are concerned that their offspring
will grow up to be selfish brats, lacking all
consideration, unless they are promptly taught
to think of others. Consequently, from an early
age we learn that it is not acceptable to be too
self-absorbed and as such, self-love is firmly
discouraged. When young children love themselves
they have no sense of self-discipline, so we
will not think twice about giving them exactly
what they want, when they want it. The result: a
spoilt child – which is not what a parent or
society aspires to.
From a very early age we are taught that our
behavior needs modifying and, whilst we know we
are the most important person alive, others are
busily telling us that we are not. Our first
conflicts happen very early. Now, as sensible
adults we understand that we need to learn
self-discipline, but what is also happening is
that in our parents’ desire for us not to turn
out to be self-indulgent egotists, we are also
learning some extremely important but covert
messages. The most common message is, that
unless we modify our behavior, we learn that we
are not particularly loveable.
Furthermore, in our desire to get our needs
quickly met we learn that many of them are
socially unacceptable, which can lead us to
believe that our needs are not valid.
Inadvertently, this often results in us
believing that we are not particularly valuable
and we doubt our own worth. Consequently, we
absorb that the self-confidence that we were
born with, when we only had to open our mouths
and scream to get our needs met, is slowly being
eroded. Self-love and self-liking are entwined
with being valued and getting our needs met as
children.
As young children we learn that to be loved,
most of the time we need to be the way others
want us to be. Many of us, as children, learned
to submerge our needs to a greater or lesser
extent if they did not please our caregivers.
The degree to which this happens is different
for all of us, and depends on the level of our
caregivers’ understanding and knowledge.
Unfortunately, those with little knowledge of
childhood development or who had stern parents
themselves, will often be harsher and with a
lesser understanding of a child’s needs. Lack of
acceptance severely impacts on our
self-development. Unless a balance is struck, a
child’s self-liking and self-worth slowly
dissipates. The parenting job is very difficult.
It is a juggling act to meet children’s needs as
well as teaching self-discipline.
Let’s look at how easy it is to modify
children’s behaviour. It all starts with our
brain and mostly with our unconscious. I
appreciate that this may sound extraordinary but
did you know that the unconscious influences
virtually everything we do? It seems that not
many of us do and most of us have very little
conception of what the unconscious really is.
The unconscious operates on multiple levels, and
this chapter explores how that occurs and the
impact it has on relationships. With
understanding, you will be able to see with more
clarity what is going on around you. Before we
talk about it in more detail, let’s look at a
simple example of how the unconscious can be
impacted. This may be quite simplistic but it
will help us to grasp how powerful the
unconscious is.
~~~
Maria is in the kitchen chopping vegetables for
the evening meal. Her son Tom, is five years old
and comes rushing in with muddy feet on the
kitchen floor she scrubbed that morning. She is
angry and shouts at him, waving a hand that
holds the long sharp knife. She is unaware that
she is even holding the knife. She has had an
argument with his father and the muddy floor is
the last straw for her.
What did Tom see? He saw his mother threatening
him with a long sharp knife. Before, watching
children’s cartoons on TV, he had seen his
favourite character stabbed by a monster with a
knife. Being so young and impressionable it is
quite possible that he will carry the awful
thought that his mother could be so displeased
with him that she might kill him. There is often
conflict between his Mum and Dad. Maria is hot
tempered and Tom has seen her brandish knives
before when she has been in the kitchen arguing
with his father, and once she even threw a
saucepan lid at Tom. The thought that Mum could
kill him if she became really cross flits
through Tom’s mind, but it is too confusing and
painful to contemplate so it sinks out of his
awareness into his unconscious.
Later in therapy, or in reflection, he may
realise that he has never felt very safe around
his mother, but never consciously understood or
acknowledged that. His fear seems irrational but
maybe justifiable. At some level he internalised
that women are dangerous and they can’t be fully
trusted.
INFLUENCING VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING WE DO
Lets look at some facts about the unconscious.
The terms unconscious or nonconscious, are
becoming increasingly mainstream as
psychologists realise that a significant amount
of sophisticated mental processes take place
out of the conscious mind. Timothy Wilson in his
book Strangers to Ourselves, Discovering the
Adaptive Unconscious, says that our five senses
are taking in more than 11 million pieces of
information at any given moment. This is an
incredible thought. Scientists have determined
that by counting the receptor cells, each sense
organ has the nerves that go from these cells to
the brain. Our eyes alone receive and send over
10 million signals to our brains each second.
Yet, the most liberal estimate of how people are
able to consciously process this, is a mere 40
pieces of information per second. So, what
happens to the other 10,999,960 pieces of
information? It is processed out of conscious
awareness. It would be a terrible waste of a
magnificent design if this incredible sensory
acuity, when not consciously able to use the
information, were not able to function – because
we were consciously processing all this.
Wilson goes on to explain that our minds operate
most efficiently by relegating much of our high
level thinking to the unconscious, in much the
same way as you would put a modern airliner on
automatic pilot. Or, when you use your computer
to send an email, you have no conscious idea of
what is going on behind your screen in order to
send that email to the other side of the world,
or even next door.
The modern view of the unconscious is that it is
a collection of modules that operates out of our
awareness while doing other things. This enables
us to breathe without thinking about it whilst
eating. So, our unconscious enables efficient
functioning. Your unconscious will be able to
judge if you are about to do something
dangerous, like step in front of a car while
daydreaming as you walk down the street. It will
enable you to recall the name of the high school
teacher who was fantastic, but until you thought
about it, was not in your conscious memory.
Likewise, the unconscious is hard at work when
you are reading a book and realise that your
thoughts are a million miles away.
Our unconscious is automatically processing so
much of what we do. Take driving a car. Remember
when first learning to drive a car how much
there was to think about, now for the majority
of us we get into a car and we are “in the
zone”. Like athletes, when we become
unconsciously skilled as opposed to consciously
skilled, we can operate at our optimum.
The defining feature of the unconscious is our
ability to operate on automatic pilot, which has
five key characteristics. It is nonconscious,
fast, unintentional, uncontrollable and
effortless. All valuable in the appropriate
place. For example, we are able to learn so much
out of conscious awareness, like children when
we learnt our mother tongue. We were not aware
of learning it – it went into our implicit
memory. This implicit memory (which we cover in
more detail later), is one of the most important
functions of the unconscious and it computes
information more quickly and more effectively
than our conscious minds.The unconscious is designed to scan the
environment. It detects patterns easily, but
does not unlearn very well. It is a rigid,
inflexible inferencemaker. It develops early and
continues to guide our behaviour into adulthood,
says Wilson, and it will categorise and
stereotype others. This process seems innate and
it seems we are prewired to fit people into
categories. However, the big disadvantage is
that being set in its habits, our unconscious is
slow to respond to new and contradictory
information and this is where many of our
problems with others arise.
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