Why does everyone - the therapist and people here - seem to not get your point? Could it be you? Can you answer a couple of questions?
What CAN you do to help yourself? You reject exercise, sex, “knowing” yourself, etc. What actions have you taken to help yourself (beside asking others)?
Can you help us understand what things ARE related? What are these unrelated things the therapist brings up - that you might be comfortable sharing? Are you sure they are not related?
Have you tried other therapists?
Why do you think that “liking” things is simply looking at the past? Do you really have no topic that you would like to learn more about?
How can you say that none of this involves mental health? You said that this (whatever this is!) affects your ability to volunteer, exercise, and have sex.
Of course things make you feel! Why do silly ideas like this register with you, but common sense ideas like exercise become a non-starter?
Stop blaming others for not “getting” you and missing your point. You seem to miss others’ points quite readily.
See, now I think that’s being silly. We do live in the present. That’s the only place consciousness can happen, the rest is either memories, or dreams/hopes.
The fact that it is intimately tied to the past, doesn’t change that.
Nor does the fact that the future is a heart beat away, and most always on our mind, in one way or another.
True enough, you will always be you.
I don’t mean to suggest what you should do, I know nothing about the physical you, all I have is a few memory traces built up by my imagination, using the blocks of information you’ve share.
So I’m sharing thoughts, I’ll admit I’m hoping something in there might help a little. but that’s on you. Oh, I see Coffee had some great observations. Hope you don’t mind me repeating it. You now what they say, Mahi Mahi, the fish so good they had to name it twice.
Pretty much what has been said. I’ve done exercise but I never felt better after doing it, no endorphines or whatever people say I’m supposed to feel. I’ve tried knowing myself but I just get silence. I’ve tried journaling but that didn’t help either, getting my thoughts on paper never led to a breakthrough.
Because if it was the thing itself then it would work for everyone else but it’s just you.
We don’t. Sensory wise we live in the past and our brains make predictions to compensate for that.
Sex always either felt like work or a toll I had to pay.
One of my favorite Star Treks is the opening of Deep Space Nine. Captain Sisko goes into a wormhole and meets beings who don’t experience time. They ask him to explain time, and he uses baseball as analogy, but really, they are trying to explain to him how he “lives in the past”. They keep showing him this horrible memory of when his wife died, and they say, “but you live here”. He eventually understands that he has not been living a full rich life that he could be, that he is not connecting with his son, that he is blaming his job for his problems.
So, yes, there is plenty of data about how our past has a hold on our emotions. If you want to get technical, there are milliseconds between when something happens and when our brains process that information. There is also plenty to be learned about how to enjoy the moment, even though it’s fleeting, even though our neuro processing can never quite catch up to it. Sure, it’s all chemicals and electric impulses, but I find that wondrous. I can feel my lungs fill with warm air and enjoy that, regardless of what I know about oxygen or memory or anything else.
Nothing. Or rather I expect it to end in misery and unfulfilled.
I don’t like fiction examples because they can just reflect whatever the person wants to be true instead of what is. You have to have the means to live a full life for one and it’s not just a striking realization that wraps everything up in 30-90 min.
But even enjoying the moment is based on the past because of past associations we have with things, right? I mean everything is a neutral stimulus, it can’t be the thing itself doing anything because then it would affect everyone the same way. Like…I can’t figure a way around that, no matter how much I think it over.
No. On this point, absolutely not. You would have to create their entire life experiences in exactly the same environment. It’s not possible. It ignores inherited differences too. Our differences are what make life intetesting.
No. What I’m saying is reach one of us unique, and you can’t say how any one of us will react to same stimulus because we don’t know enough to predict that. All we know is it won’t be exactly the same for everyone.
Sometimes, when can’t explain your conclusion its because your conclusion is wrong. You’ve concluded something, but you can’t explain why. Maybe you need to examine how you concluded that, and rethink it.
Well what I mean is them saying things don’t make you feel, when I read the whole second lesson I felt like something about it was off but couldn’t pin down what that was exactly. But something about it didn’t add up I just couldn’t put it into words. It’s like that BS alarm you get when someone tells you something suspect.
That was my first guess. Everyone is different and reacts to things differently. The analogy they used was gluten, and how it’s not the wheat but it’s you. But the wheat makes you react that way, you don’t choose that. So it does make you feel. You can say it “triggers emotions” inside of you but to me that sounds like splitting hairs and getting around the fact that we don’t really control how stuff makes us feel, we just control the reactions. Even if you could train yourself otherwise that is then based on you made to think that’s good by something else.
I’m sure there is a more eloquent way to put it but I don’t really buy that much into their claims that its all childhood conditioning or something like that. That has a role but there is more to it. Plus if that were true I’d never end up liking what I like today because I was at odds with the “normal boy stuff” in my childhood.
Maybe I’m just looking to “win” over these people and have them admit they’re wrong. Maybe that’s what it’s all about. That if they don’t admit defeat then I’m wrong.
I thought the allergy one was pretty bad because the thing is making you react like that even if your body is overreacting.
This is how A Buddhist I know explained it:
"6. The point AGAIN is that the objects themselves don’t produce emotions. They might trigger emotions, and you may feel certain emotions or certain ways about things, but the things themselves are not responsible for how you feel.
Can you see the difference?
Suppose I have a particular food allergy. Maybe to peanuts. I can say that yes, peanuts contain something that I personally have an allergic reaction to. But the peanut is not why I have the allergy. I can say “peanuts cause me to have a reaction” but that’s not entirely accurate way of explaining what is going on. Actually, it’s that “peanuts have something that I myself personally react to”. The peanut is just a peanut whether I’m allergic or not.
Likewise, if some thing happens that makes me laugh, even though, yes, you can say it is a specific thing, that thing is only the object that I am laughing at because of what I think is funny.
The emotions we feel are reactions to things. They come from us, not from the things we feel emotions about.
It doesn’t make any sense then, to say that it is “wrong” to enjoy something simply because the thing itself is just a thing and the enjoyment of it comes from your own mind."
Though reading it over again that part about explaining the peanut really sounds like splitting hairs to avoid accepting that it makes you do that.
That itself isn’t, I believe that. The thing is what other people are saying that seems different to that.
My problem is in thinking that I’m not actually connecting with something else and that I’m just weaving some enchanted story in my head rather than connecting with something or some force on a deeper level.
In short it bothers me that it’s all in my head, or something like that.
Your enchanted story is woven with the connections you think aren’t happening.
But it’s not all in your head, it’s also in your fingertips and senses, and in your heart, and in your gut, and in your loins.
Open your eye and recognize it.
Stop with the expectations for a while.
Let it be.
I don’t know what you mean. If you can imagine that you are weaving a story, then you have a sense of what a story is. How do you normally tell truth from fiction? Do you daydream? How do you know those aren’t real? Have tried pinching yourself?
Well I do day dream, and I know that’s not real. I also pretend and imagine stuff a lot from the media I consume. But I know it’s not real, I just pretend it is. But I guess my fear was that I wasn’t connecting with anything when I listen to the wind, or hear the waves of water, etc and that it was just me making stuff up in my head. I don’t know. It’s not making a lot of sense and I’m finding it hard to put in words.
I guess it’s the notion I’m connecting with or tying myself to some essence in the stuff I like. Wind and water are one thing, the ground and earth, it’s sorta mystic-y now that I think about it.
