Here is the updated version, and I’ll say it makes less sense than the original:
"Abdication” means a formal renouncing. It means to formally give up and it’s mostly used in kind of royalty terms when we abdicate the throne, abdicate a place of importance. Abdication has to do with giving up power over our emotional state, a formal renouncing. And we often make comments or commentary that create a story. In this session we’ll talk about one particular kind of story where we give up a lot of power over our emotional state. What’s critical about this story is that whenever we say words to accomplish this feat of abdicating power, those words form a whole imagery in our head to create a virtual reality. And in that virtual reality we play out the whole scene and it reinforces a whole paradigm in our belief system. And we get an entire emotional response feedback, based on the virtual reality from those words.
What’s more is that a lot of times these words are a short hand for a lot longer meaning. We say something in abbreviated fashion, but if we break apart the words we find out there’s a lot more agreements underneath it. As you listen to this exercise, and we look at the word phrases that I point you here as examples, I want you to consider how powerful it is to use words as symbols to create whole dreams of virtual realities in our mind that aren’t true. But we get feedback as if they are. So they appear to be real even though what we are saying isn’t true.
I was chatting with the client and I asked her, “What determines our emotional state?” And after doing the “Gratitude” exercise and having some mastery over shifting her point of view, which she learnt through hunting her attention, she could say, “Our attitude”. Then I asked her, “What do we say determines our emotional state?” She said, “Well, other people and outside circumstances”. And I had to laugh cause it was joyful to see she nailed it.
This is where we abdicate our power over our emotional state. We say, “The weather is really depressing”. And how many times we said, “That guy really ticks me off” or “That driver is frustrating the heck out of me”. These are the places where we use our words to structure an agreement and that agreement then determines our emotional state. That’s what we do, but what we say is, “That person is making me upset” or “The weather is having this effect on me”. Or we say, “That person makes me so happy”. A lot of times it appears that way and it appears true. So let’s break it down, so that we can be honest and exacting with out words and more in line with the truth.
Let’s say it’s cold and snowy. One person can say, “This is really bothering me out”. And another can say, “Oh, this is so beautiful, I love this, I enjoy this weather”. Now, one person saying, “This weather bumps me out, this weather depresses me.” The other says, “It makes me so happy”. Now, is it the weather that’s actually determining our emotional state? Does weather somehow go into each person’s emotional body and do something to facilitate a different emotional response? No. The weather is just the weather. It’s just doing what it’s doing. It’s not out there to determine anybody’s emotional state. With our agreements about weather we determine our own emotional state. We decide consciously or unconsciously about our agreements that this weather really depresses us or thrills us. What’s really happening is that we have an agreement to be down or up emotionally depending on a weather. We ignore that completely and say that the weather’s causing it.
What’s really happening is we have an agreement to be depressed or be down and we are committed to that agreement and when the weather is down we act in accordance with that agreement we have about the weather. It’s kind of “if-then” situation structure of agreement. “If the weather is lousy I’m going to feel this way.” Then let’s be clear. There’s the weather, this independent entity, there’re the agreements we have about it and we respond emotionally to the weather according to the agreements we’ve made. And how we respond emotionally to it just by agreement. Big problem here is that we don’t notice the agreement. What we do is instead of noticing the agreement we run off to our story, “The weather is causing me to feel this way.” We run those stories and in those stories we are telling ourselves to commit to the story that the weather is determining our emotional state. This is pure fiction. What’s actually determining our emotional state is our agreements about the weather. But we tell ourselves a lie we believe.
If you’ve been doing the “Gratitude” exercise you’ve found out that if you really focus your attention, you create your emotional state and you create it to be whatever you want it to be. I just give that “Gratitude” exercise as repetition, so that you can see, “Yeah, at any moment I can change my emotional state, shift the point of view I see things from and I create a whole different emotion.”
What we’ve done is we’ve abdicated in our lives power to these agreements that determine our emotional state. We say, “He frustrates the heck out of me”, “If she does that one more time I’m going to get so pissed.” These are putting the power over our emotional state onto someone else, some other circumstances and then saying, “It’s them that’s causing us to feel this way.” As long as we do that, we are putting ourselves in a role of victim, where we’re powerless and by that token we are not in control over our emotions. They are responsible for our happiness, for us being upset.
This leads us to a whole different behavior which we get into later with relationships. Which is about we then have to control that person and make them do certain things so that they don’t do the things that make us upset. We end up trying to control another person, which we can’t do, based on the assumption they are controlling us or our emotions, which they aren’t doing. But if we believe the story that they tick us off, we believe they do and then we have to compensate with this story of “Oh, I have to make sure that they don’t do this” or “I have to make sure they do this, this way.” We end up trying to control people. Why? To minimize our reactions not to them, but to our agreements about them. The whole time not noticing that it’s our agreements, cause we hypnotized ourselves with our own story that they are causing it.
Let’s break down the structure of just the words and why words are so powerful in this. If we say, “He makes me feel”, “She makes me feel.” If we look at the actual words structure, this is saying, “They have a power to create in me a certain emotion.” We abbreviate it down and say, “He makes me feel”, “She makes me feel.” Just a couple of words. But if we look at the structure of what’s actually being said, it’s that they have a responsibility and power over what I feel emotionally. And they are able to control my emotions. If we said it that way, we’d kind of go, “Hah? That doesn’t make sense!” But if we say it in the short hand version and that comes out of our mouth so fast, we don’t know the lie that’s going on, we don’t know how we’re abdicating power over our emotional state and say, “Oh, they are in charge.” And this is huge.
This is one of the critical stories that we use when we’re playing a victim role. We use this story to blame others about how we feel emotionally. The structure is abdication of our power over our emotional state. And when we abdicate power, we abdicate responsibility. And when we abdicate responsibility, we abdicate control. Of course that may be great cause now we have who to blame and to feel justified, to feel right. And not that it’s any great thing, but we get a lot of attention for it. But we also then have to try and control a lot of other people’s behaviors so that we don’t have to deal with our own emotional reactions. This is a lot of work and expending a lot of energy for virtually no reward. And this is actually a great loss to our relationships.
The word structure is something we need to hunt in our thoughts, in the words that come out of our mouth. But also the other place that we’re going to find this agreement is often where it’s not spoken. That place can be just in the reaction. We might be in traffic. A driver does something and we get mad at him. We feel it emotionally, have an emotional reaction and somewhere in our mind and in our attitude we’re holding them responsible. We’re looking around the traffic and we’re just starting to get more and more frustrated, more and more stressed. We might not say the words, “They are frustrating the heck out of me”, “They are making me upset.” We might say, “Traffic is doing it.” We might say, “If it wasn’t for this traffic I could relax.” We might just be sitting at traffic and stressing, not attributing it to anything, but what’s going on emotionally is that we’re stressed out and if we have to name why we are stressed we might say, “Hey, I’m not getting there on time”, “I’ll be late”. That means some circumstance, time, schedule is controlling our emotional state. We are attributing some set of circumstances to why we feel the way we feel, circumstances that we can’t change. The critical thing is that we’re saying, “The circumstances are controlling my emotional state.”
The other way we might find how we’re attributing power to a circumstance is if we say, “If it wasn’t for this traffic, if I could move this meeting, I’ll feel a lot better.” If we look for a circumstance to change or try to change it with the idea that it will make us feel better, we’re indirectly attributing our emotional state to that circumstance of time, of schedule, of traffic, of a person’s behavior. “I would feel so much better if you did this instead.” We are making our emotional state dependent on that person. We’re abdicating power over our emotional state every time we say something like that or we imply something like that. And that’s part of the victim story and it’s essentially declaring ourselves powerless. It’s a little challenging to create happiness when you continually tell the story, think the story and commit to the story that other people or other events are responsible for your happiness. You can’t really stop your unhappiness while you’re busy attributing your happiness and your emotional state to things or people or circumstances outside yourself.
The assignment is for you to watch your words, thoughts, behaviors, actions and emotions and to notice where you’re attributing how you feel emotionally to something other than yourself. The most obvious places to look for this are: 1) the words that come out of your mouth; 2) what you’re thinking in your head; 3) your emotions (both pleasant and unpleasant). When you find yourself in any emotional state just ask yourself, “Am I attributing this to any particular thing?” And see if you’re abdicating, if you’re giving away your power to something outside of yourself.
Something to know, when I bring this kind of dynamic to people’s attention they might say, “Oh my God, I’ve been giving my power away to this person all this time.” That’s never happened. I assure you that you have never given your power away. Because when we say, “That person makes me really mad” or “That person makes me happy.” Are they really getting our power? No. They don’t have some kind of extra force in their hands now. And when people say the same about us it’s true about us either – we do not have power over them either. We neither get power to control others’ emotions, nor do we give up power to other people.
But what is actually happens is that they get that kind of an emotional reaction from us because we push their buttons and by pushing their buttons all we’re really doing is activating the agreements they have. When someone pushes our own buttons what they’re doing is they activating the agreements we have already preprogrammed in our belief system. They touch upon that agreement (maybe they make comment about our intelligence or our looks) and we give a predetermined emotional response according to what we believe about our intelligence or about our looks. If they give us a compliment, we give an emotional response and we can say, “They make us feel good”. But actually they didn’t. All they did was give us a compliment of words that activated our emotional response based on our agreement that we have about getting compliments.
And sometimes getting these emotional reactions depends on a specific point of view you have at that moment. Going back to the “Attention” exercise and to what point of view you are perceiving things from. Someone gives us a compliment about our looks. Sometimes we feel very flattered and feel good about ourselves. At other times we might respond by feeling “less than” or perceive it as if they are lying, not telling the truth or just telling us what we want to hear. And it could be the same compliment, but our reaction changes depending on what point of view we are at that time.
So to be clear here, it’s not that they make me feel, but that they push a button that activates the agreement I have. And it may appear that we have power over them, but only to the degree that we can push a button that activates the agreement that they have. If they don’t have that agreement, they don’t have that emotional response. And if we don’t have that agreement about ourselves, no matter what they say about us, we don’t have that emotional response. So the critical element here is our agreements about ourselves.
So let’s look at the agreement structure. We say, “This person makes me so unhappy.” What we’re saying is that person is changing our emotional state. And somehow we tell ourselves with that story that they have the power to change our emotional state and if we buy that story, it appears true. Cause they do something we react and if they hadn’t done it we wouldn’t have had that reaction and wouldn’t be in that emotion. So that appears true. But let’s look at what’s actually happened. We make the agreement, “If they do this one more time, I’m going to be so upset.” We commit to that agreement. We put our belief, our faith, we create that structure, “If they do this one more time, I’m going to be so upset.” So we have this agreement and then completely independently they do something. They do that exact thing. We are not responding to them anymore, but we’re now responding to that agreement we’ve already committed to. We have this agreement, our power is in the agreement and they do whatever it is they do and now our reaction is dictated by the agreement we’ve committed to. Our power never went to them, but we put it into the agreement of “I will have this emotional reaction if they do this.” If we don’t have that agreement, we don’t have that emotional reaction.
What if we made the agreement, “Gosh, if it’s cold and snowy and minus 4 degrees, I’m going to be so happy.” And then it’s cold and snowy and we see it and we go, “I’m just going to be happy.” Weather didn’t control our emotions, but our agreement, that we put power and commitment into, did.
We give and we’ve given lots of power over our emotional state through our commitments to our agreements about people and about circumstances. But all the power we’ve given has gone in those agreements through those stories. Then we can say, “Power has always been and still is within our realm. It’s just within our own agreements.” Then it’s a lot easier to get our power back from our own agreements than it is from other people. They don’t have to do a thing. Getting our power back is not depending on them.
Your assignment is then to hunt what we say, attribute through a story, imply that someone else, some outside circumstance is determining our emotional state. The first reaction you’ll notice when you catch yourself thinking or saying something like that will be, “No, no, no, that’s not true.” And we want to deny and dismiss it. This is not where we want to go. Refrain from the denying and dismissing it and go, “Yep, I just said that” or “Yeah, I just thought that” or “Yeah, I just caught that.” Notice what happened, spend time with that, don’t deny it and don’t dismiss it, because we’ve just put a lot of power into the agreement. And we want to put our awareness on it and notice the impact of that. Notice, “Oh my God, I’ve just made that agreement.” There’s nothing to say about it, there’s nothing to diminish about it. But what we do want to do is say, “I realize I just made a lie.” We want to recognize the lie and the significance of it. We want to recognize how that statement isn’t true and say, “Yeah I recognize, that statement isn’t true. That person does not have power over my emotion. I don’t have to respond that way if they do this or that. Now I’ll be honest with myself and see where the power really is. What I’m really saying is that I make myself so angry through my agreement about this person. That’s what I am doing.” Now we’re being honest and we say, “Ok, power over my emotional state is within my own agreements. I recognize that’s what I really say. If I say, “He makes me mad” that’s not really true. Now I see that I make myself upset or mad and I do it through the agreements I make about this person.”
Notice that at this point we haven’t changed our agreements of how we’re going to react. But what we have done is change the agreement about where the power is. We’re going to go and change our agreements of how we’re going to react, but first we need to gather the power we used to tell ourselves we didn’t have. That’s the power we’re going to grab by shifting the statement from, “They are determining our emotional state” to a much clearer statement of truth, “I determine my emotional state through the agreements I have about people and circumstances.” We can’t really go change our agreements about our reactions until we recognize that that’s what our emotions are determined from. Which means that we first have to stop attributing our emotional state to other people and other circumstances.
So we’re going to take this layer off, practice being aware that we create our emotional state and we do it through agreements we have about people and circumstances and then we can look at the agreements we have about other people and circumstances, because now we know what they are and the significance they have. And we’ll be much more motivated to look at them and not so quick to blame anybody else for how we feel.
There may be a hesitation to saying, “Well I don’t want to say that I make myself upset with my agreements about other people.” Well, ask yourself, “Is it true?” This is about being honest and acknowledging, “Oh, this is what I do. Ok, this is the way my agreements and stories are structured. And other people being responsible for my emotional state? This one is pure fiction.”
This isn’t about agreeing that that’s the way we want to continue living. This is about taking an honest assessment about how we really are living. So that we can deal with the real dynamics that we live by. And once we are honest with the real dynamics that determine our emotional state, we can change them and put more and more power over our emotional state in our hands and less in those agreements. But we’ve got to be able to be honest, “Yes, I have these agreements here. This is how they pull my emotions. And I acknowledge and accept that this is what goes on.” What we’re doing is really deepening the clarity and acknowledging the dynamics that we didn’t see before.
So, to recap the assignment. There’re agreements where we abdicate the power over our emotional state. We’re going to hunt those words, things we do in the external world and we’re going to hunt for them in our thoughts in our own mind. Those are the two places to hunt for them. We can also hunt for them at subtler levels. Just having an emotion. You might be going, “Hm, what am I attributing this to? What does it feel like this is about?” And see if there’s a story. There may not be a story present that we catch, but we may notice the emotion and if we notice the emotion we may find that the mind is trying to rationalize, “It’s because of something outside of me.” And then we go, “Aha, is it really that? Let me notice that that emotion doesn’t have to be that way, cause it’s not really about that person. It’s about the story about that person. Ok, now let’s deal with that story about this person, let’s shift my point of view. Let’s clean this power back over my emotional state. And say, “Ok, it’s really in my domain.””
Another place where it might be subtle is somewhere in the stories. We may have a story where it’s implied. One of the ways these agreement make it hidden in the story is if we’re looking to change something or we’re looking for something to change in order for us to feel better. Or we’re trying to change something because we’re upset with the way it is. These are the kind of behaviors that we can look into to see that, “Ok, that circumstances determine my emotional state and I’ve concluded that if I change that outcome, that person, get this person to stop that behavior, I would get a different emotion.” That’s one of the ways it’s hidden.
These are all subtle ways that we attribute our emotional state to outside circumstances or other people. Once we acknowledge that, once we see that lie, that total fiction, we can go, “You know what? That’s not true that that’s determining our emotional state any more than the weather or a piece of furniture determine my emotional state.” So we can identify that story as fiction. That has a big impact right there.
The second piece is to reframe the story into what is actually happening. What’s actually happening is that I’m determining my own emotional state through the agreements and stories that I commit to about this person or about this circumstance or about myself.”
The way to help you support doing this is in the journal, throughout the day, in the evening to go through and write down those comments, those thoughts and then rewrite them in a way that’s more truthful.
Yes we will change all those agreements. But in this assignment we catch ourselves from abdicating our power. Eventually we will become so aware that it’s a fiction, that we just won’t engage in it anymore. And that dynamic will literally slow down and stop all by itself just as our awareness grows.
One of the things that will become so clear in this exercise is we’ll help witness stay the observer and see where our attention get hooked through the story and we’re going to start to really identify that character mask of the Victim that tells that story of abdicating power.
Sometimes people will see that and say, “Ok, if I just make all these agreements, then I’m going to make the agreement that I’m going to be happy about everything and commit to that.” That’s a wonderful direction to go and one we can eventually get to. However let’s be honest. We already have a lot of our personal power committed to these other agreements about what will make us happy and what will make us upset and angry or sad or fearful. And because we make the new agreement that we’re going to be happy about everything or certain things, even if someone is yelling at us, we have to be honest with ourselves that that new agreement we make may not be as strong and as powerful yet as the ones that we’ve been living by for years.
In this exercise we won’t actually actively go and try and change any of those old agreements, but by doing this they will be exposed and they will be exposed for the lies that they are. And just by realizing that they’re lies, they’ll start to dissolve. So this first part of the exercise is actually the key to dissolving all those agreements, providing you can stay with your attention and keep it in that observer-witness point of view. As you hunt and find these agreements, pay particular attention to where your attention goes when you find them."
