Stop Doing That Sh*t: End Self-Sabotage and Demand Your Life Back

by Gary John Bishop

If you spend your life wanting to be happy, by its very nature you’re constantly starting from a place of unhappy.

For what it’s worth, that day in the future will never come. Why? Because even when you do accomplish great things, when you do get there, you very quickly realize it’s still the same you.

YOU haven’t really changed. And that’s the problem. Different life, same you, and ultimately that’s what you’re trying to change!

You’re more about self-fix than self-improve.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the guy who coined the now-famous term “flow,” tells us that the more complex we become as human beings, at both societal and individual levels, the more we experience psychic entropy—which is a fancy way of saying that the more complex life becomes, the more miserable we’re likely to become. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, can fill the void.

Like everyone, you have fallen into the trap of trying to fill the void by constantly trying to fix what you think is wrong or not good enough about yourself or your life.

Perspective check: you currently exist on a planet inhabited by millions of species of animals, draped in oceans and mountains with gushing volcanoes and waterfalls and creeping deserts; spinning in an endless universe, with stars and suns and solar systems that stretch wildly beyond anything your limited little imagination can muster—and yet you’re fucked up because your job sucks or you are carrying more weight than you want or your nose is bigger than your friend’s or your phone is three models older than everyone else’s.

I’m asking you to check in.

To begin to take stock of what you have turned this life of yours into.

Ultimately, who is to blame solves nothing. All it does is explain and keep you stuck.

Look, I know there is stuff in your life that you were either blind to, coerced into, or forced into or any number of ways in which you don’t feel as if you had much of a choice in the matter.

Fine. You’re still on the hook for the quality and success of your life in the aftermath of that stuff. Period.

It might not have been your doing, but it’s on you from t...

What I’m referring to is based on something Martin Heidegger called “thrown-ness.” These are the things in your life that you didn’t choose, didn’t pick, but were thrown into.

You had no say in any of this, yet it doesn’t matter if you think it’s fair. It doesn’t matter if you like it, loathe it, resent it, or appreciate it. You’re here, and you’ll have to deal with it like everyone else before you and everyone after you. This is where the road to peace of mind begins. Acceptance.

“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.” —Jean-Paul Sartre

Either way, you’re going to embrace all of it (every single, last drop) or you’re going to be a victim to it. There’s no in-between. Either you’ll own it or it will own you.

There’s another thing you were “thrown” into. Conversations.

A giant, meandering forest of opinions reaching back God knows how long into the past, and you’re so deep in it you can’t even see it. What were people talking about before and immediately after you were born? What were the critical conversations going on around you as you grew up?

If, for instance, your parents didn’t have a lot of money (and most likely neither did their parents), you were born into their views and experiences of finances as a scarcity mind-set.

You might be doing better, but you’re currently embedded within a group of unspoken financial rules and limits that you had no say in putting together. You have agreed to them, though. No one made you do that.

What if you have now become conditioned by your own agreement, to a “glass ceiling,” a limit of what you can and cannot do with money? What if your adult life is spent trying to reach for that ceiling, not only financially but in every area of your life? What if none of

that “trying” was designed to actually ...

Human beings are much more engrossed with the task of getting to the goal than actually achieving it or, God forbid, facing the horror of having to permanently deal with life AFTER they’ve done the something they’d always wanted to do.

So, how good can you stand it? You might well shock yourself with the answer to that one. If you can tell yourself the truth, that is. The life you currently have would be a clue.

There’s plenty of information out there about the degree to which your everyday life is lived at a less than conscious level. Most of it points to the idea of your everyday actions being driven by some unnoticed and subconscious urge or drive for anywhere between 95 percent and 99 percent of the time.

You barely control your conscious thoughts at all; it’s the unconscious that’s really in charge.

This is the argument for maintaining conscious presence and awareness. The “default mode” of the brain is to operate on autopilot using filters, instead of conscious thought. The brain enters when it is needed to solve problems and do complex tasks, and then sits back to rest when it is no longer needed.

THE INVISIBLE YOU

The problem is, the moment you take on something new, those embedded, predictable patterns and behaviors kick in. They sanitize your passion for something new, sober you up with a healthy dose of doubt or dissatisfaction, and draw you to act on the old familiar,

safe, and mundane (and sometimes destructive) behaviors that had you stuck in the first place!

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” —C. G. Jung

You can explain your life, but how much of a say do you really have in it as you drift along? For example, you might know why you get angry. You might even have gone to the anger management classes, learned the techniques,

and read the books. Like most people, you are probably left with some strategies for avoiding or channeling that anger rather than finally getting to the heart of what it’s really all about. That trigger still dominates.

The reality is, whether you find yourself in these examples or not, you have no idea what specifically constitutes your subconscious makeup or how powerful it really has been in shaping you. You do, however, deal with its impact every single moment of every single day. It’s called your life.

Let’s deal with the elephant in the book. Many people go the simplest, easiest route when trying to understand why their life took the turns it did. This is also a route we have to destroy now and forever. What’s the easy route? Blaming your parents for your life; they’re the softest target of all.

The back door of excuse will remain, and as long as that’s there, you’ll use it. It’s a boring and humdrum route. The highway to resentment and lack of fulfillment.

Before you start throwing anyone under the bus, remember that everyone in your life was thrown into the fire, just as you were, and has lived inside the trap of their inherited BS, just as you have done.

Listen to me carefully. The single most important thing you can do for your life is to release anyone (including yourself!) from blame for how your life has turned out.

I find it funny when people say “Be in the moment,” as if there’s some kind of freaking alternative. You’re always here. You’re just not always here for what’s here.

Choose. What are you going to fight for? The past or the future? Your self-sabotaging BS or a long-awaited freedom?

Your “truth” and “the truth” are not the same, even though you have designed your life around the idea that they are.

Our past is the template upon which our entire future is based; therefore, it’s little wonder we live such lives of limitation and frustration.

But what I want you to consider is that this exercise is your entire life in a microcosm. What you have relied upon as the truth is nothing more than your personal experience of incidents and circumstances, except that in your case you have carried these experiences around, as if they were carved in stone, and fabricated a life out of them.

Is it any wonder many people have trouble getting free from their past? They’re looking in all the wrong places, arguing with

family and friends, trying to reconcile a past that they see as “the truth” with people who obviously had an entirely different experience from theirs.

Then they get furious about that! Your truth is NOT the truth to anyone but you, and if your truth does not light you up, it might be tim...

Once established, these truths of yours go deeper and reach further out and begin to take over your life, reaching all the way back from the past and crawling into your future like an existential shadow. You’re hooked on them. And I mean hooked.

On one hand, you can never change the past, but on the other, you can choose to change how you see and explain it. Which in turn changes how you feel about it. Which then, in every sense of the word, changes the past for you. At the very least how it impacts you.

You? You’re victimizing yourself into a truly forgettable life. Like most people, you’d rather explain your life than intervene in it.

Your past is basically an explanation, something you came up with to explain why you are you. Period. An excuse. This shit has just got to end.