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

by Gary John Bishop

Your love, your self-expression, are there to be broadcast to the world, not shut down, manipulated and controlled in the ruins of a once blooming friendship or relationship. Resentment is for fools and the unaware.

THE ROOT OF HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT PEOPLE

Start with thinking about the times when you make conscious excuses for your unconscious thought processes. Those excuses are another hint toward your conclusion. Try to be aware of when you make those excuses and catch yourself doing it. But I’m not talking about legitimate excuses for legitimate problems.

What is the common denominator, the all-pervasive conclusion, that allows you to predict and make sense of people? Set aside your usual BS, scratch at the surface of your thoughts, tell yourself the truth. What are you really trying to avoid about people? People are what?

This second saboteur, your conclusion about others, could be anything: People are . . . • stupid • untrustworthy • a threat • unreliable • uncaring • selfish • cruel • manipulative • untrustworthy Which one captures your baseline experience of people? It might be none of the above, but these are just some samples of what it could be for you. The real question is, what’s yours?

SOCIAL CONCLUSION—“PEOPLE ARE _______________________.”

Remember, this isn’t just an opinion of people. This is what you have fundamentally concluded about human beings.

We rewrite our dreams or stuff them away in the darkness to avoid having them shattered. We keep them tucked away. For hope. For later. Maybe. We trade them in for a life less lived.

This is the conclusion you’ve made about life itself. How do you feel about life? I don’t mean just your life. Life. The whole thing, all of it. What stirs for you when you take a look at where you’re at, including all of the family and relationship stuff, what’s going on with your work, your neighborhood, your town.

Take it out even further to social issues and political concerns you have, the problems and tragedies currently facing the country and the world.

Deep down in your subconscious, there resides a life conclusion:

A LIFE WITH CONSEQUENCE Without your even realizing it, your conclusion about life shapes and influences the everyday paths you take and burdens you to live with the consequence.

What you’re dealing with internally often doesn’t match up to what is going on externally.

You don’t have problems! You have your problems! The perfect issues, specific to you, that allow you to continue with this daily absurdity. And that’s what it is. Absurd. Your whole fucking life is absurd now. All because you’ve told yourself that life can’t be any different from what you have come to believe.

But how many people have done the work to see if they truly believe their own view? How many of them settle for their explanation to themselves, one that they’ve had so long and believe without question, without introspection? What if they are actually avoiding something? Perhaps what they are really doing is trying to steer clear of the complexity or hassle or burden or stress or morality that they associate with becoming successful or making money. Or even avoiding the chance, God forbid, that they might fail, publicly, for all to see?

“The reasons and purposes for habits are always lies that are added only after some people begin to attack these habits and to ask for reasons and purposes.” —Friedrich Nietzsche

If you want to eventually get to exist beyond your own conclusion about life, you’re going to have to figure out what it is first. And now is the perfect time to do so. This can be tough because these life conclusions are often the least obvious. They’re so pervasive, they’re so soaked into every part of our lives, that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what they are.