My life is one thing after another!

As I noted last week, the straight-jacket of delu­sion is caused by an inter­nal process. In other words, we are straight-jacketed by what goes on between our ears.

Not all of our men­tal games, but assuredly the “know­ingâ€Â part.

West­ern­ers are con­di­tioned to believe that fig­ur­ing things out is the bare min­i­mum for a suc­cess­ful life. Expla­na­tions trump expe­ri­ence, every time. Peo­ple are will­ing to spend years and count­less dol­lars try­ing to fig­ure out “why they are the way they are.†It’s almost as if there is a belief that dis­cov­er­ing this elu­sive “truth†is essen­tial to one’s well-being, peace, and ease.

Except that there is no elu­sive truth. There is you, your expe­ri­ence now, and your sto­ries.

I was talk­ing with a client the other day, and he was describ­ing a com­mon occur­rence. Some­thing hap­pened to him, and feel­ings arose, and, rather than share the facts and feel­ings, he described going into his head—where he’d spend end­less hours try­ing to “mak­ing sense†of it all. After­wards, when he’d pack­aged things up, he’d report the expla­na­tion of the expe­ri­ence to his part­ner. He did this because, he said, “I am not com­fort­able shar­ing my feelings.â€

Yet, he and his part­ner are work­ing on deep­en­ing their com­mu­ni­ca­tion.
This is not a help­ful way to do that!

Before I give you the anal­ogy I came up with (a good one, if I do say so myself…) let me unpack facts and feel­ings, and then sto­ries, by describ­ing a cou­ple of things from my day yesterday.

1. Facts

a) I had a morn­ing meet­ing, and left early to go for a quick break­fast. The restau­rant was out of what I wanted to order, so I left.

b) At the meet­ing, the banker told me that before we could pro­ceed, both Dar and I needed to get sev­eral sig­na­tures notarized—difficult, given our sched­ules, and costly.

c) I decided to make up for no break­fast by going out for lunch. I was ignored for 10 min­utes, so I got up and left.

Those, as Sergeant Fri­day used to say, are “Just the facts, ma’am.â€

2. Feel­ings

The feel­ing was fairly warm anger. As in, “Boy, did I piss myself off for a bit.â€

3. Stories

I annoyed myself for most of the morn­ing, mostly while walk­ing about the neigh­bour­hood. I did a vari­a­tion on, “Stuff like this always hap­pens to me. Why do ‘they’ treat me like this?†etc. etc. I guess I would say that I watched myself tell myself the sto­ries, felt the feel­ings, and stayed present.

Then, Dar got home, and it was time for our daily conversation

So, what did I report to Dar­bella? All three things, in their cat­e­gories. “Here is (the bare bones, the facts of) what hap­pened to me, here is what arose as a feel­ing, and here is the story I told myself.â€

And that was it. I did not try to get Dar to agree with my sto­ries, and I didn’t even par­tic­u­larly believe them myself. Once you stop mak­ing sto­ries real, stuff hap­pens and then it passes.

There would have been a time when I would have gone into my head, and embell­ished the sto­ries. I would have gone into a long “thing†about how this was just one more exam­ple of a series of indig­ni­ties I have suf­fered. Then I might have tossed in some stuff about my par­ents and upbring­ing, end­ing with a pile of blam­ing and fin­ger pointing.

What I did do was to notice the facts, have the feel­ings, pay atten­tion to the sto­ries, and report it all, and then let it go.

What was miss­ing was end­less analy­sis - which is what leads to delusion.

Here’s the anal­ogy, no doubt com­ing from remem­ber­ing that the Toronto Film Fes­ti­val is on right now.

This is what hap­pens when we refuse to share our lives with peo­ple we are in inti­mate dia­logue with.

We get it into our heads that they don’t want to hear about our expe­ri­ences (the facts) and the emo­tions we are cre­at­ing. We keep that stuff to our­selves, and only tell them the story we are shov­el­ing about our lives—the con­clu­sions we have reached. And those con­clu­sions typ­i­cally are about blam­ing oth­ers and being a victim.

And it’s not even that telling oth­ers about our sto­ries is a problem.

The prob­lem comes when we think that the story we came up with has any­thing to do with reality—that the story is some­how true, as opposed to one inter­pre­ta­tion of many.

Our inter­pre­ta­tions are like movies we attend. We may get so wrapped up in the movie that we are unaware of the the­atre, the other view­ers, or the fact that what we are see­ing is not real—this even has a name—the sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief. At the end of the movie, how­ever, we blink a cou­ple of times and real­ize that noth­ing about the movie is, in any sense. real.

Our delu­sion is that the sto­ries we tell our­selves to explain our day to day real­ity is both real and true.

The first step in grow­ing up and get­ting over our­selves is let­ting go of this delu­sion. Once you see that the story you tell your­self is sim­ply an aggre­ga­tion of imag­in­ings designed to prove what you already believe, you can smile, shake your head, and stop giv­ing this story significance.

In other words, your sto­ries are this moment’s ver­sion of what you are try­ing to con­vince your­self of, and none of them has any more to do with “now†than a movie in a the­atre is some­how real.

Breathe, tell your story, laugh, and let it go.

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