LIFE AS FAIR GAME

LIFE AS FAIR GAME________________________________________________

Techniques used to cope with anger, anxiety, and depression and be well

How to handle aggression and tackle lies, slander, gossip, rumors and win

Self-help practice techniques to attain freedom from resentment, hostility and rejection

The 4 moral rules used to approach aggression – reason, honesty, kindness, love –
and the 4 action rules to fight it– will, courage, purpose, patience

Self-help practice techniques to overcome embarrassment, shame, inadequacy, social intimidation, fear, desperation and anxiety: expectations and perspectives


LIFE AS FAIR GAME
________________________________________________

Techniques used to cope with anger, anxiety, and depression and be well
_____________________________________________


LIFE AS FAIR GAME


Self-help practice techniques to attain freedom from resentment, hostility and rejection
_______________________________________________________________________

Self-help practice techniques to overcome embarrassment, shame, inadequacy, social intimidation,

fear, desperation and anxiety: expectations and perspectives
_________________________________________________


by Boris Musteata Peter Jalesh


Novatrix Library
101 W, 55th Street, Suite 7D
New York, NY 10019


Dedicated to Joanne

Contents
Brief summary of the book
Preface
How to use this book
Chapter 1: LIFE AS FAIR GAME
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Emotions+ mind=feelings
1.3 Use reason when assessing an upsetting situation in which you are a participant
1.4 Frustration – the origin of negative reactions to events or situations
1.5 What is an aggression?
1.6 Bad attitude but no offense
1.7 Fear, anxiety and the self-esteem
1.8 The offense and the unconscious dilemma
1.9 Mind and feelings should act together in harmony
1.10 Become an objective observer and keep a detached attitude
1.11 Des-identification and desensitizing: loosening the attachment to events
1.12 Positive thinking
1.13 Expressing love
1.14 Writing love letters
1.15 Writing letters of complaint, claims and demands
1.16 Humble yourself
1.17 Directions of change and control: embracing the enemies
1.18 Change your response to aggression by changing your mental state
1.19 Four moral principles to follow: reason, honesty, kindness, love
1.20 A simple responsiveness worksheet to clarify behavioral tendencies
1.21 Resolving obsessions and phobias
1.22 Aggression against one’s values
1.23 Summary of the four main phases and skills
1.24 Envy – an offensive-defensive aggression
1.25 The main principles of fair game
1.26 The sense of values
CHAPTER 2: Techniques to control and pacify your anger: writing techniques
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Self-help healing techniques and their healing effect
2.3 About text writing techniques
2.4 “Worksheet, structured exercise” to fill out
2.5 Text writing technique and the unconscious mind: topic oriented
2.6 Different techniques for different people: conflict-subject writing, mindless writing, journal, tape recording
2.7 Theme-less text writing
2.8 Conflict-focused text writing
2.9 Journal keeping
2.10 Cathartic writing technique
2.11 Adjustment texts; prayers
2.12 Adjustment texts to be memorized or displayed
2.13 Worksheet used to address your healing stage
2.14 Recording grievances on tape
2.15 The four punch healing technique 2.16 Modify frequently your behavior trying to adapt to each day political color
2.16 Modify frequently your behavior trying to adapt to each day political color
2.17 Let it happen
2.18 Dropping anxiety: imagining that the whole world acts in your favor
2.19 Impersonation
2.20 Projection, displacement
2.21 Increasing your self-esteem: emptying pride of meaning
2.22 Pro and cons: to dodge the negative effects of an offense by avoiding the aggressor or to tackle openly the aggressor
2.23 Changing roles – a way towards forgiveness
2.24 Immediate conflict resolution
2.25 The moral attitude as the driving force behind the world actions
CHAPTER 3: Techniques to control and pacify your anger: Visualization techniques
3.1 Introduction
3.2 How visualizing techniques work?
3.3 Ways to practice visualization
3.4 Evoking a happy moment from childhood
3.5 Direct visualization
3.6 Visualizing an upsetting scene or a situation in which you want to change your attitude
3.7 Visualizing a complex situation
3.8 Visualization of the act of giving love to “enemy”: Blessing the Guilty One
3.9 Visualizing an “enemy” that is trustworthy
3.10 Visualizing giving a reward to you “enemy”
3.11 Visualizing “greeting the enemy”
3.12 Visualizing a change in the aggressor’s behavior
3.13 Neutralizing through visualization a stressful situation
3.14 Transferring your pain to others through visualization 3.15 Visualizing “lending your anxiety and pain to God”
3.15 Visualization of an “impersonated aggressed”
3.16 Visualization of a past situation at your choice
3.17 Visualizing “giving forgiveness” to the “enemy”
3.18 Cathartic visualization
3.19 Visualizing an “I don’t give a laugh about it” situation
3.20 Visualizing past, present and future to heal a present negative reaction to the world
3.23 Visualization of a dialog with the “enemy”
3.24 Meditation and breathing as support to visualization
3.25 Conclusion
3.26 Combining writing techniques with visualization techniques
CHAPTER 4: Notes on slander, gossip, rumors, and the way to handle them successfully
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Rumors: political, moral or combined
4.3 In a multi ethnic assimilated society rumors tend to be creative and vibrant
4.4 Visualizing a rumor, people teasing and your right response to it
4.5 Gossiping as a means to promote lies
4.6 Approaching a rumor on rational bases
4.7 Applying writing and visualization healing techniques to rumors
4.8 Understanding the circumstances in which aggression occurs
4.9 Acknowledging your fault of being innocent
4.10 The power of a bulling crowd and the persistence of the individual evil
4.11 How to deal with rumors and how to clean yourself from their harmful outcome
4.12 Changing the angle about a rumor in a replicated environment
4.13 Put things in perspective to make rumor go away
4.14 Changing the model of the self-world
4.15 Going after the source of the rumor and applying control
4.16 Corollary statement
Bibliography
Other books authored


Chapter I consists of a short definition of terms used all the way throughout the book and the evaluation of various relations between situations of aggression and the mental, emotional and physiological effect on the subject of aggression. Moral aspects such as good will, empathy, understanding, compassion, and love are presented as half way of approaching “life as fair game”. The other half belongs to the four action-principles: courage, will, purpose and patience. Also this chapter will introduce “light” self-help “positive-thinking” techniques to address anger, and depression and presents the first “Worksheet, structured exercise” used to clarify behavioral tendencies.

Chapter II acquaints the reader with other techniques that can be used to control and correct one’s reaction to aggression and other stressful situations like insults, offenses and unintentional wrongdoings. Most of the techniques presented here are practical ways to discover the origin of one’s anger and heal it; it addresses also other byproducts of anger like depression and anxiety showing how one can effectively shorten the time of healing. This chapter deals mostly with “text writing” healing techniques.

Chapter III deals with “visualization and projection” healing techniques. Visualization is the technique used to reach an agreement with the real world by recreating - like in a play - the scene and the actors involved in the aggression. Hostility, envy, ill feeling, antipathy and small acrimonies are solved here.

Chapter IV goes beyond an individual aggression and talks about gossips, rumors, public slander, etc. situations that are maximizing the aggression effects described in Chapter I.

Chapter V presents other techniques to control the stress produced by gossip, rumors, public slander. Though this chapter relies on the already approached techniques presented in Chapter II and III, it also provides variants to those techniques and relates them differently to new situations.

Chapter VI talks about Yoga and Zen meditation. Some simple breathing exercises are also described. Those exercises are related to obtaining peace of mind and calmness and are meant to restore the full capacity of those under stress and in pain to live their life in full and to work efficiently.

Chapter VII expands on the four moral rules to approach aggression – reason, honesty, kindness, and love – and the four acting rules to fight aggression with dignity and win – will, courage, purpose and patience.

Chapter VIII explains in detail what “Life as fair game” means and reminds to the reader that people involved in the game are all humans, each of them being a source of virtues, talents and merits, every one of them in need to fulfill and bolster their dreams while running away from failure, pain and suffering. This chapter also provides a dignified approach to conflict resolution.

Chapter IX is a summary of afflictions and the most appropriate techniques to cure them. The summary is presented as a worksheet with concise footnotes regarding the effect of a technique or another and pointers to subchapters that contain interesting data related to them.


Preface

Every one of us has a story to tell and my story differs from yours. We don’t know what other people’s story is and also we don’t “feel” it. Whenever we meet people we must understand that. It is a fact that nobody’s story could help correct ours. People who read biographies of famous individuals that brought to fruition high moral accomplishments succeed to live for a while in a state of trance before they go back to their life and forget everything of value from their reading. They understand though that the mistakes they made in their life are still there and also that the suffering created to others and by others is there.
This book tries to accommodate both objectives: help you correct your mistakes and also help you diminish and control the suffering created by others, especially the suffering associated with aggression. As this book focuses on how to adjust your behavior to address and fix your response to aggression and aggravation it also teaches you how to accept undesirable situations with a peaceful mind and even go as far as feeling joy towards what is normally considered being unwelcome happenings. The important thing the book tries to prove is that in each adverse situation you have to think what is the best way to resolve it: it is a problem you’d have to resolve and also it is a game. This book will teach you what this game is all about and also will train you how to play it to your advantage in cases when you feel vulnerable and at risk while playing it. Nobody is going to choose your way out and you’re the one who’d have to say: “I have the will, I have the determination, and I have also techniques I could choose to engage myself in this game and win”. Remind to yourself as often as you can that “life is a game”. Society, companies, and people are the initiators of moves in which all of us participate in equal measure (more or less) and in which our participation is important as far as keeping the game alive and fair. In order to keep it fair the participants should follow elementary principles: some principles are moral and practical others are spiritual. Practical morality is societal. Spiritual morality – either religious or otherwise – has a different purpose and scope. Both groups of principles though try to find a response to negative events. They have to be observed in order to help one progress towards the only goals that matters: peace of mind and happiness. We don’t talk here about pleasure. This book is not a hedonistic approach to life. Also this book is not about how you could achieve rewards for your ego. Everybody prefers praise and honor to shame and humiliation, though the true skills to help you live in the real world come from controlling your suffering. This book helps one’s “ego” survive undesirable and unfortunate events by providing various strategies used to ease the mental discomfort and suffering and diminish or completely obliterate the effect of those events on one’s life. This text is also an education instrument. Any time you have any problems that remind you of unresolved emotional responses you’d have to go back to this text and get reinforcements. Remember though that your past plus this very present is called your life. This is what you live and think about. There is no thought that lies outside your life. Culture and education reinforce and modify your thoughts. Using those thoughts you judge the events coming into your life as being good or evil. Though those events are independent of your will you could diminish their outcome that could affect you through an attitude of acceptance, indifference or rejection. In this sense you can feel connected to or disconnected from the world. It is natural to want to be connected to good and feel happy and be indifferent or disconnected from the evil. Learning about means that you could use to rationalize the influence of world events on your life and control your sensitivity to them will make you succeed to raise your awareness and inner-strength to deal – according to your desire – with unwelcome situations. Reality – even if felt as being an outsider – is not your enemy. Situations and events are created by conditioning factors that could be unraveled and settle with. How could you look at conditioning factors that contribute to someone’s immoral behavior? The same question you can ask about conditioning factors that initiate an aggression with the intention to offend. If you think that such a conditioning could be true, that is, that there are always conditioning factors that lead to any situation whatsoever that means that there is nothing you could do to avoid an offense to be produced. It could mean that if you take an offense as an inevitable event you should remain unaffected. But then such a conclusion induces a defeatist image of the world which doesn’t help too much your torment and suffering created by a vicious offense. Probably there are some conditioning factors behind the scene, very difficult to be deciphered though. The problem is not if the conditioning factors exist or not, but the strategy you could follow to alleviate your suffering. This is what this book is laying down for you.
Keep in mind though that there are other hundred means, techniques and strategies – only a few described in this book – that you could use to alleviate your mental and emotional problems and that in practice there is a way out from everything including pain and suffering at any level. Such strategies that an individual could easily choose and apply provide solutions - my solution and your solution – to various psychological problems. They are simple and practical, simpler than whatever solutions are needed to solve problems that concern a community or the whole human race, the humanity. An important point here is that if you succeed to put things into perspective you can easily overcome your pain and suffering; your affliction loses its weight and wrongs done to you no longer carry any importance. What is about your situation, you may ask, that could be compared with horrors endured by people caught in natural disasters, wars, terminal illnesses, families tragedies? At a close examination it appears that most of the offenses committed against you – aggression, lies, slanders, and rumors - are insignificant happenings. This is what one calls reasoning. Though, on the virtue of distinguishing evil from good you still could act against evil showing a detached and self-confident attitude and preserving at all times a controlled behavior towards the aggression and offense.
While living we’re all actors (more or less)! In life we act like love giving people to get back love from those that could give it or expect nothing in return from people that can’t give it. And like in a play where a role is played until exhaustion life repeats events, reactions, laughs and cries. If as an actor you analyze an offensive situation you see that from your point of view the relation between you and offender seems to be completely different than the same relation from the offender’s point of view. That means that direction of representing the same relation is very important. By saying that, you already get a hint of how easily such a relation could be fixed. You and the offender are playing on the same stage. If you look closely at the offender he/she is not aware that by offending you he/she could generate such a deep discomfort. As soon as the offense takes place it goes away from the offender’s mind, it vanishes. Aggressions are always forgotten, resentments are not. In a play they are all forgotten, though. Going back to life ask yourself why do you react so sensitive to an offense? Keep thinking afresh about that. Before the offense took place and nothing at all happened to affect this relation between you and the offender there was no reason for you to get emotional. Then there is that moment when the offense takes place. We’re talking here about a verbal offense which is – because of its use of the language – a superficial, non-essential, trivial matter. If you think that it is not a trivial matter this is because of your cultural background, your ideological doctrine or your “faulty” background. It is true – you might acknowledge – that another person would have ignored the whole “aggression” thing. As you look into your past you surely could find that you felt offended by certain persons on the same “issue”. You barely remember those circumstances, you don’t remember clearly the offenders and how the offense was brought up. You’re totally indifferent to those events and to those people. How did that happen? The way in which you interpret reality (your reality) changed, it got altered. You are not a part anymore of those old times, your mental picture about yourself changed; you got rid of inhibitions, obsessions or in some cases, phobias. When you get offended you readily confuse a statement that is meant to offend with something that offends you. And this is where your problem is. The statement - that is meant to offend - points to such-and-such emotional weakness of yours which turns loose under a mental impulse. Emotions are ignorant. They gather to see what the mind is “seeing”. When a lot of emotions gather, the emotional degree of the mental response increases. What happens to you when all accumulated emotions fire at once? Mind and body feel a sudden impact and respond to the event in their own way: mind, overwhelmed by stress, “malfunctions” creating an anxiety feeling, bodily functions relieve themselves of mind control and release toxins (sweat), etc. That says that you have to do everything possible to decrease the accumulated “unresolved” emotions and so lessen their capacity to fire at once. As we know – more often than not – which are those few subjects that could make us sensitive we could foresee sometimes situations that make us vulnerable. If this is the case the techniques described in this book could be used proactively. The result is that we could desensitize ourselves and find out that we are not anymore vulnerable as we come upon a situation that used to make us exposed in the past. Freed from a deep reaction we could become good actors able to play “life as fair game” in a world uncontaminated by aggression.
There are two different cases to consider. First one is when aggression comes from a specific individual. Such a case is easy to handle. Some of the techniques delineated later on show how to deal with individual hostility and win. When the aggression seems to come from a group of people say always to yourself that the feeling that the world is against you is an exaggeration and that it is certainly not true. Also acknowledge to yourself that most of us are mistreated at a time or another by others which mean that it doesn’t make any sense to think that you’re a special case. It may be surprising to you to know that some of the techniques would help one adjust to himself/herself rather than to the crowd’s attitude.
Unfortunately, of late the offensive and aggressive attitude became a normal and accepted behavior. Also, is it sometimes theorized that in order to keep a balanced mind and emotional makeup it is indispensable that one retort to an aggressive response. I totally disagree with such response. You might ask why people aggress other people with the intention to do harm. Why aggressive people (man or woman) develop the need to create an obvious injustice to another person at their choice? Most of the time because they don’t get their wishes satisfied, because they couldn’t achieve what they wanted to achieve, because they don’t posses whatever others posses, etc. Also the aggression comes from feelings of intolerance and negative stereotyping. Another version of aggression is prejudice and usually comes from groups of people that try to keep their identity untouched by not allowing anybody that does not display the characteristics of the individuals that make the groups to become part of it. Being prejudiced (meaning pre-judged - making a judgment based on an unfounded and biased attitude towards a person or a group) is contrary to reason and fairness. (Remember that to be prejudiced is as bad as prejudicing others). Envy (wounded pride) is another cause. If it is not envy than it is greed. Greed or gluttony is created by a need to get everything in excess of what one needs. Envy is sometimes created by goals that are unattainable, like thinking that if one of your peers is wealthy you should also be wealthy or that if one of your peers is talented you should be also talented. The satisfaction one gets from causing the unhappiness to the privileged makes the unattainable privilege less harmful. Hatred (rationalization to paroxysm of hostility) is the worst cause. Some people though have a propensity towards aggression which is triggered by their innate negative aspects of character such as antipathy, envy, greed, resentment, hatred, self-indulgence or simply meanness for its own sake, (when someone for instance is taking pleasure from hurting people through enmity and aggression). It is in their DNA.

Hence, aggression could be judged as a behavior disorder though if it is connected to extreme situations it has a survival component that could be judged as normal. What can you do to protect yourself? Unfortunately you cannot assert yourself strongly in order to meet head-on the aggressor and remedy such a situation to the benefit of both sides. In any situation in life to use evil to retaliate to evil is wrong. If the situation is even worse and involves a group of people entertaining a hostile attitude you can’t do too much. During my therapy work I met lots of characters. Some of them were selfish, stingy, intolerant, aggressive, offensive or prejudist. They’d do everything they could to compromise everyone’s reputation just for the fun of it. The truth is that they did that because they felt insecure. On both sides of the line offender-offended in any situation and at all times there are insecure people, people with low self-esteem and low confidence who want to succeed in the social role that they chose for themselves. This struggle is sometimes unmanageable.
Therapists try to find a way to look deeper into the social cause of aggression by analyzing the broad aspects of mental persuasion – like global information highway, for instance, with its violent ingredient carried by news and other media products - that became part of each and everyone’s everyday life. In any form aggression creates conflicts and tends to harm somebody. From the start they stipulate that a social situation of conflict creates a state of neuroses on all sides: the aggressors and the aggressed. In order to resolve it both sides need some “therapeutic” intervention. As it always happens not all sides of the conflict would be willing to reconcile their problems and it all comes down to the offended being in need to heal their discomfort (anger, depression) in some way. There is a negative relation between anger and aggression, though by refraining to respond with anger the aggressed could reap some benefit. What one gains by refraining from anger and resolving peacefully his/her anger? In a metaphoric way of saying it “the energies spent on anger get freed so that they could be used to carry out other activities”. This liberation of energies is though not complete if one has to fight the depression that accompanies anger. Let us remember that any event leaves a mark on our unconscious mind. While living, we carry with us a bag full of unconscious markings. Usually those markings are relatively quiet and their intervention in our daily life gets unnoticed. That we’re all equipped with conscious mind means that we could live every day by adjusting properly to new events and conditions. While we get stressed or angry we don’t recognize immediately what is the contribution of our unconscious mind to those events. The more we try to resist the aggression through anger the wider the irruption of unconscious elements becomes. That’s why one of the cleansing techniques insists on using every opportunity in order to reveal and clean our unconscious mind of old and unresolved obsessions or phobias that have contributed to the current undesirable reaction to aggression. The more are we able to elevate buried guilt and traumas and deal with them consciously the better are the terms we could get dealing with ourselves and the lower get the unconscious responses. What are those unconscious responses and what is their weight when judging one’s life? Do they express one’s character or they are just unwelcome products of fear that unleash defensive acts outside one’s character and ethics? To some people that harm other people and who live outside basic moral principles and outside the law the conscious evil is more powerful than the unconscious participation. Those, for whom law and moral principles are natural norms that need to be followed, must undergo therapy to decrease their unconscious burden. That side should develop strategies to survive well and to continue to proactively enforce its capacity to respond to offenses. The point is that people who harm systematically others succeed to gradually develop skills, they become more sophisticated in the way they lie about others, more keen in the schemes they design and more clever to extract pleasure out of suffering of the defamed victim. That’s why it is important for the victim to become also skilled in disposing of some of the vicious effects of an offense or make them ineffective.
The undesirable effect of a too sensitive response to an aggression could interfere with normal life. Psychological and biological factors are contributing equally to the onset of those troubles. Some people who are very sensitive or instable need to resolve situations that seem complicated as they get reinforced by predispositions from early experiences. The ideal extent of the exchange between you as an individual and a group should be equal (both ways), that is, you should know how to balance the interaction with people. This is one of the psychology rules of the game we call “life as fair game”. After a while your interactions will reveal your private values: they should be within what this book describes as good conduct: reason (understanding), honesty (sincerity), kindness (empathy), love (affection). Will, courage, purpose, patience and peaceful endurance will get you there. Are you worried that you’ll loose playing the game? Do everything you can to win! All win if you win. The first rule you should follow is that you have emotions but you’re not your emotions. The same is true with everything else: thoughts also are not you but part of you. Also, all those above are not independent of you. They all live within you and they are hypothetical responses to the world. You have to remember this rule as often as you can. Your emotions – healthy or malign – are temporary. You’re not those emotions not even for that temporary moment in time. Also, mental content of every moment doesn’t define you. Then what are you? You own those manifestations. You can observe your mind and your emotions, control them, and direct them towards a desired outcome. If you put side by side a moment from the past and a situation that you’d like to resolve your mind binds the two. The positive effect of such a binding could immediately felt if you think of a desired outcome. And what would be the desired outcome? It is a state of balance, peace of mind, emotional control and self-esteem. What you should know is that your mind could build an appropriate complex of emotions and feelings to see you through difficult situations. We take always our present, current emotional response to a situation as definitive regardless if it is or it is not in accord with our will (mind-will). In reality in order to correct a “wrong” emotional response means simply to put it back into a reasonable place. Sometimes you have to ignore the cause of a negative emotional response before solving it by moving it into a “reasonable” place. Let’s say that you build up a fear about something like for instance illness, accident or death. This fear expresses something that didn’t exist a while back in your life. That time you were ignorant of such a fear. If you could get back in time this fear would be resolved since at that time you it didn’t exist. Fear comes from the understanding the nature of a threat and by a build up of the emotional baggage that would accompany a response to it. In this transformation your sense of ethics counts most. Among principles (which we’d call prime derivatives from love) that could correct and help you carry out the task to achieve happiness - even when surrounded by hostility, enmity and hatred – are understanding, tolerance, compassion, empathy, responsibility for your attitude towards the world. Patience is the most important quality: it encompasses ingredients like courage and maturity. It is the way to watch the aggression and the offense slipping into no-thing, fading off, disappearing. Courage is needed to help you attain a noble purpose: to be invulnerable to aggression and become immune to pain and suffering that ensues from it. Luckily, while you’re waiting peacefully for your pain to go, you may notice in a manner of days that some concerns related to aggression prove not to be true. All of us, usually, go too far imagining words, gestures and signs as significant to our case while in reality we invite them to happen by displaying attitudes of displeasure, discontent, restlessness and lack of will to cope with the situation. Insecure people also become withdrawn and steer more adversity their way.
In order to correct such sensitive responses to aggression one has to use self-help healing techniques.
The first question one may ask is: Are the techniques described in this book working well on both aspects of a negative experience - emotions under scrutiny (thoughts) and manifested emotions (feelings)? Aren’t those techniques static, that is, aren’t they working as artificial games while ignoring the most important aspect of our life, the real experience consisting of our daily activity, our social, interdependent involvement, our sense of public recognition, acceptance and our sense of shared values? They are! Though the techniques could correct any negative mental experience you’d be asked after practicing them to focus your attention onto real life, expressing yourself in the place of work in which you live and act, and get involved more into it trying to express yourself fully. To apply those techniques while separating yourself from the real existence would be a grave mistake. The healing techniques are capable to restore your attitude, to give you confidence, to put your personality to use in a more meaningful way. They help you take an active role on mastering psychological effects created by the exterior reality or by internal mental events.
The second question one may ask is: What we could achieve by using a technique or another and how do we start? Of course, the first and last purpose of such a practice is to make you happy, to heal any mental or emotional conflict that you may feel. When – by practicing any of the techniques – you feel getting back to your strength and free to act as you please, then you could say that the technique was helpful to you. It would be wonderful to have separate techniques for each case of aggression as for instance a technique to heal an “envy” attack, another to heal hatred, etc. and to be able to differentiate the effect of a technique as opposed to another. Such a measurement is difficult though it could be statistically relevant if one could record what different subjects submitted to treatment have to say about their healing process. Isn’t this techniqueology the same as the one used by traditional psychology? You could start your journey by obeying the order of the day: strike down anger, negative thinking, bad thoughts, obsessions, fear and their defensive responses like depression, discomfort, pessimistic views and uneasiness, unrealistic approach to life, inadequate response to situations that need courage. You can’t avoid undesirable things; things that offend you and make you suffer: courage and will-power will help you carry on. The world is not perfect enough so that you could say yes to what you want and no to what you don’t. Also it isn’t easy to change the environment you’re working in or leaving it for another one with the idea that one would be less hellish than the other. You’ll have only a partial say when you think of changing your surroundings starting with your family, your friends and the company you’re working for. While thinking of your family the idea of choosing another family is absurd. Remaining connected to your world as is and accepting things – good or bad – with equal generosity of spirit defines the skills of a good player. Strike then down resentment, unconstructive thinking, negative addictions, worries and their defensive responses like hopelessness, anxiety, negative views and discomfort, and use courage and determination to get healed. Many aspects of our life look similar. What can you say for instance about happiness? Happiness is when one is happy! Things seem more complicated when we talk about anger and depression because those feelings seem to tear us apart. They don’t! They just cloud your sense of reality in an unpleasant way. This cloudiness is only mental and what you’re changing and turning around by using the techniques described in this book is that mental-emotional state. Your mental state seems affected by events, acts, attitudes that is, reality. That reality looks like acting against your mind, influencing your thoughts, knowing your mind-set and possessing it. Nobody though could know, sense, possess your feelings. You feel as you feel and your feelings are your private living experience, the private part of your consciousness that is the foundation of any new experience. By separating thoughts from emotions we simplify the body-mind awareness so that we could talk about someone’s “feelings playing with reality”. Though feelings seem to respond to a situation only in so far as the work of emotions overwhelms the thinking. When you hear one saying that “he is acting using his senses rather than his brain” that’s what one means. In those situations playing with feelings rather than with thinking becomes important.
A third question usually one may ask is: Do any of the techniques described in this book provide total healing? It depends on what you call total healing and how deep the “illness” is: how old the obsessions are, how anxieties and phobias have been stored up and what the mental and physical shape of each person is. If anxiety and other nervous reactions emerged due to some late event and were not connected to some past excessive ordeals then, indeed, most of the techniques could be successful and heal a negative reaction down to completion. If the new anxieties may and did develop in relation to phobias and obsessions from the past – that got never attention and kept accumulating “unresolved” – then the healing process may take longer. How could shorten your anxiety healing period? It’s part of your strategy that starts with you saying: “I shall find ways to diminish my excessive bodily and mental response to negative stimuli until I get them down to normal levels”. Reason, will, determination and healing techniques are part of your healing strategy. After using each technique the feeling of welfare and self-confidence would be temporary. You, as a patient, should find out for yourself – while repetitively practicing a technique or another – when the feeling of being healed becomes reality. At the end of the book we’re going to review simple procedures that could be used on a daily bases that provide a feeling of improvement and bring peace of mind, joy and happiness.
A fourth question one may ask is: What are the basic and the most helpful techniques described in this book? There are some light correction-techniques described in Chapter I for people living in a state of disorientation or depression due to their low capacity to adjust to stressful situations. The basic self-help therapy techniques are described in Chapter II and III. They would assist you on achieving new skills needed to adjust your response to interrelationships that cause stress and aggression. And what is more important is that they’ll give you mental strength to respond to unknown and unforeseeable stressful situations. The fact that you can connect your emotional response to reason and increase your confidence is like creating a new character to yourself. Another important fact is that - with the exception of some worksheet structured exercises - none of the other techniques asks you to invest a lot of time to understand and use them or to tailor them to your specific needs. If during the self therapy you focus your attention towards others rather towards yourself by aiming tolerance, compassion, and love towards the outside world you could succeed to build the foundations of your new personality. You would act on it. Ethics are the core of the matter we call life. It could show you a different world where evil doesn’t exist or if exists it is not specifically directed towards you.
A fifth question one may as is: Due to time constraints it would be difficult to some of us to use - on a daily bases – a sophisticated technique like a worksheet, structured exercise. You don’t need to use those exercises on a daily bases. If you use them now and then, when you have time, this is enough. A worksheet structured exercise should help you draw an outline of your problem so that you can advance in seeing it, taking it into account and “involuntarily” resolving it. Also, failing to practice any of the relief techniques due to time constraints or unwillingness should not upset or depress you. You’d succeed just by trying in a rational way to apply good judgment, to put things in their real perspective and order of value. Always think that by doing that over and over again the relief and peace would ensue. The difference between offense and praise is so small that you must think of achieving freedom from both in order to harvest the benefits of “being able to live at peace with your mind”. Your mind should not thrive for any words, be they words of praise or words of offense. Life grows out of honesty. Also remember that everybody and everything functions as a conditioning factor to life. Every moment the life is changing. There is nothing unchanging.

Author


How to use this book

Like any other self help book this one is addressed specifically to a category of people that need help (self-help) while dealing with adverse situations that could generate stress, pain and suffering. For years I had this thought that every aspect of human behavior could be approached from a completely new perspective, not yet digested by psychology. It is merely a matter of developing such perspective from one’s subjective experience rather than from solutions found in other text books.
A subjective experience is still limited although by rendering a personal experience in general terms it is like making it available for countless practical interpretations. The importance of such an attempt is to provide different techniques that could be used by those in need of improving their mental and emotional level while dealing with hostility and aggression. The techniques given in this book work at the level of persuasion, that is, they have to be used and used again until they produce “more” effect, until you see significant changes with respect to your attitude, and your behavior towards the offense and apart from the offender that you – otherwise - cannot control.
How do you choose a healing technique? All techniques described in this book are suitable to heal problems related to anger, depression or abnormal emotional outbursts to “normal” situations and could be applied to a case or another interchangeably. They operate on three major bases: 1) One is des-identification that promotes “acting as” or referencing the “other” (the “offender”) as being the “real” subject of the offense; 2) Another is spiritual and promotes “performing lovely deeds or good actions towards the offender; 3) The last is desensitization – that consists of desensitizing the subject of an offense, moving the distress from the unconscious residue into a conscious state, cleansing the mind of obsessive references to the subject of the offense, thinning out the bounding between mind and the emotional base. Either visualization or writing techniques are all built up on those three psychological bases. The writing techniques give expression to unhappy feelings and old memories that are the bearer of similar feelings. By writing about them you confront the unconscious mind and put forward obsessions and phobias in an objective space (the page) where conscious mind get aware of them and act on them at its will. The result is that what was harmful becomes harmless (desensitization) so that you could become less emotional to the subject of an offense or aggression. The subject of the offense enters the world of ordinariness. Using those techniques allows you to actually feel that transformation. On the other hand, visualization could enable you to be an actor and “act” while using your life as a script. That gives you the “needed” illusion that you could express yourself and so convert your anger, anxiety or feelings of being upset by an offender either by asserting your feelings and asking for your rights - and so relieving yourself of pain – or by converting the harmful feeling into love towards the offender. The last part of this technique has some spiritual touch though the true spiritual technique is a more complex approach involving practice of meditation or religious dedication.
Every chapter in this book begins with a narrative of its title and its most common definitions and situations for which the title stands. We avoided using - as much as possible – specialized terms employed in medicine and psychology in order to make the text available to a large segment of population interested in this subject matter. That’s the reason why mind, thoughts, emotions, feelings and other terms are used in contexts that are easily approachable by readers who don’t have any education in psychology. Each situation is exemplified by reduction to the most general cases in order to give to the reader some way to connect the text

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 21.11.2011
ISBN: 978-3-86479-651-7

Alle Rechte vorbehalten