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 ...
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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