Summary

Top photo via Tim Foster / Unsplash

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Self-sabotage is when we say we want something and then go about making sure it doesn’t happen.

Alyce P. Cornyn-Selby

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In A Sea Of Bad Choices We Never Pick The Worst One

The Usual Mantra: “My thoughts and reactions and behaviours are irrational and terrible and abnormal and there’s something wrong with me.”

A Better Mantra: “Even though I don’t understand everything yet, part of me is acting to keep me safe today. As I make some other options safer, I’ll see what happens tomorrow.”

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Gripe + Superthreat = Bingo

The Gripe is the obvious problem that keeps happening. You’re aware of it, you complain about it and you may have tried really hard to get rid of it. It’s your “conscious first suffering”.

• Bob’s Gripe: “In my baseball social league on the weekends, when I’m at bat, looking at the pitcher winding up, I get really anxious and completely lock up.”

Although we don’t know it at first, The Gripe has the protective purpose of keeping you safely far away from:

The Superthreat is the thing that doesn’t happen. It’s much worse than The Gripe and you’ll do anything to avoid it because it’s so bad. Initially, you won’t be aware of it. It’s what is really controlling us. We think The Gripe is controlling us, but, in fact, we control The Gripe so The Superthreat doesn’t. It’s your “unconscious second suffering”.

• Bob’s Superthreat: “When I was a boy learning to play baseball, my Dad was always there. When I was a teenager, my Dad had a heart attack in the shower and I had to break the bathroom door down. He died in the ambulance on the way to hospital. If I had got to him fast enough, he would still be alive.”

When you find The Superthreat, you can write down:

The Bingo is a statement that sticks these two together. It’s an emotional truth that always makes sense, even if it’s not rational and even if you don’t like it. It acknowledges the choice you are faced with.

• Freezing up at baseball kept Bob safe from failing to save his Dad’s life:

  Bob’s Bingo: “My Dad was always batting for me and when he needed me the most, I failed to bat for him and he died. I’m not going to go through that again.”

When you see the emotional logic of the worse choice you avoid, you gain more control over everything.

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Example: Panic Attacks Kept Adrienne Safe From Killing Mom

• Adrienne’s Gripe: “I’ve had panic attacks at various times all my life but at my new job I’m having an intense panic attack almost every day.”

• Adrienne’s Superthreat: “Being dangerously powerful at work means I could kill someone if I’m not careful just like I almost killed Mom when I upset her by accident.”

• Adrienne’s Bingo: “Am I really that dangerous?”

  Source: Bruce Ecker’s story about Adrienne from 10:34:

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Example: Drinking Kept David Safe From Bad Feelings And Being Alone

• David’s Gripe: “Every day, I’m forgetting more basic stuff about my grandchildren because I drink so much alcohol every night. I love them so much and I want to see them grow up and have them know me.”

• David’s Superthreat: “If I gave up drinking, I’m scared of not having the feelings of relief it gives me and my wife might leave me because she would drink alone.”

• David’s Bingo: “I have to choose between drinking and my grandchildren.”

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Submit to the present evil, lest a greater one befall you.

Phaedrus (Fabulae Aesopiae)

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What Happens

We think The Gripe “just happens” and that we do NOT choose it, but we do. It’s emotionally coherent. It’s adaptive. It’s rational.

We never willingly cause ourselves pain but if we MUST choose between a lesser pain and a greater pain, we DO rationally, coherently, choose the lesser pain. Everything we do is our best option at the time because if we had a better option, we’d do it.

The Gripe keeps us SAFE TODAY. It’s our CURRENT BEST SOLUTION to the problem of: “Something I do or don’t do now, that I have no control over, that I want more control over in the future”.

We are always consciously aware of the LEAST BAD choice because we experience the actual consequences of it. And then we complain about it: “It happened AGAIN!”.

• Emily’s Gripe: “I know it makes me the Bitch-Queen, which I hate, and it also makes me exhausted, which I hate, but I have to continually check up on you and you have to tell me everything at all times and you always have to do what you say you’re going to do and you can’t change your mind ever.”

If we try to “fix” The Gripe and succeed in doing LESS of it, this brings us CLOSER, involuntarily, to The Superthreat, so we will, in fact, experience MORE distress. And then we blame ourselves for being “irrational” or blame others for triggering us.

• Emily Trying To Fix The Gripe: “I tried relaxing and telling myself I didn’t need to know everything but that lasted about two days and I got even more freaked out.”

The closer our life circumstances bring us to The Superthreat, the MORE distressed we get, which means we’re compelled, unwittingly, to do MORE of The Gripe to protect ourselves. And then we complain about it: “It’s getting WORSE!”.

We suffer The Gripe to avoid the greater pain of The Superthreat.

This is typically baffling because we’re driven by avoiding what we DON’T want and we’re not aware of the greater pain we’ve avoided.

• Emily’s Superthreat: “All my life, the people I’ve relied on have betrayed me by withholding critical information from me so they can stab me in the back with it later.”

Sometimes, we succeed in replacing The Gripe with A Different Gripe. But it’s an arms race with no finish line because it’s an arms race between unarmed parts of ourselves.

When The Gripe gets bad enough, for long enough, we start to look for help. When we say “I have a problem”, we’re half-right. Our first sufferings keep us safe from our second sufferings.

The difference between what we know and what we do is what we unconsciously believe.

• Exhausting herself chasing information kept Emily safe from being betrayed:

  Emily’s Bingo: “The price of being betrayed versus the price of bitchy exhaustion. I wonder which is higher?”

  Emily’s Alternate Bingo: “I pay a heavy price for having to know. I wonder if it’s still worth it.”

  Emily’s Alternate Bingo: “If I’m going to be betrayed sometimes anyway, is all this bitchinesss and exhaustion worth it?”

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Why To Find Your Bingo

After you find the safety relationship between The Gripe and The Superthreat:

• Often, they both naturally dissolve by themselves (see How To Inhabit Your Bingo below), and

• You can intentionally operate on The Superthreat (talk to me about this), and

• You can design particular experiences (“juxtaposition experiences”) that have the effect of neurologically updating your problematic emotional truths in a “targeted limbic update” (talk to me about this). When you disconfirm the unconscious knowings that maintain your distressing symptoms, they get “unlearned” or, more accurately, “updated”, and the symptoms typically vanish.

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Example: A Messy House Kept Fred Safe From Losing Friends

• Fred’s Gripe: “My messy house frustrates me so much but I hate cleaning up even more.”

• Fred’s Superthreat: “Bare, tidy homes remind me of all the times as a kid when we had to tidy up a place before moving out and leaving it forever and never seeing the friends I made there again.”

• Fred’s Bingo: “If I tidy my house, I’ll lose someone forever.”

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Example: Being Used By Men Kept Gloria Safe From Being A Homewrecker

• Gloria’s Gripe: “I can’t say ‘No’ to any man, no matter how bad he is for me.”

• Gloria’s Superthreat: “In High School, I had an affair with a teacher who was married with children. He got really scary so I broke it off and then all Hell broke loose and everyone found out and he got sacked and it broke up his family and I was responsible.”

• Gloria’s Bingo: “Being violated hurts less than being a homewrecker.”

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When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside of you as fate.

Carl Jung

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How To Find Your Bingo

The Gripe is easy to find because it’s what you experience:

Too many doughnuts, too much beer. Too much cleaning, shopping, gambling, gaming. Too much purging, crying, drugging, cutting. Too much people-pleasing, too much road-rage, too much sleep, too little sleep. Too much fear, frustration, worry, anger, anxiety. Too many panic attacks. Too many nightmares. Too much lethargy. Too little hope.

• Harry’s Gripe: “Whenever my best buddy talks to girls, I always get irrationally enraged at him. I hate doing it and we’ve had fights about it, but I can’t stop.”

The Superthreat might not be easy to access at first and can be difficult to find by yourself. Superthreats are supergood at hiding because they’re unconscious. It’s like a fish thinking about water or a bird thinking about flying. What to do:

• Think about what The Gripe might be keeping you safe from.

• Temporarily, intentionally deprive yourself of whatever The Gripe is and see what happens.

• Imagine the PROBLEMS of THINGS NOT SUCKING. Imagine The Gripe is not available to you. What are the terrible consequences you would then experience?

• When you imagine the various absences of The Gripe, what difficulties arise?

• Imagine the opposite of The Gripe and then look for new problems.

• Complete the sentence: “If I didn’t have this problem, the infinitely worse consequences would be …”

• Complete the sentence: “I would bear ANY PAIN if it meant I could permanently avoid …”

• Complete the sentence: “If I didn’t have The Gripe, I’d be terrified that …”

• Ask yourself: “Is there a TV show, movie, book, song, story that triggers the same feeling as my problem?” When you watch, read, listen to the characters doing whatever they’re doing, you feel strong affinity?

• Ask yourself: “What do I want to do that I can’t do?”

• Ask yourself: “What do I want to stop that I can’t stop?”

• Ask yourself: “What do I crave that I can’t have?”

• Find out what you have to do to make your problem WORSE. What has to happen, what do you have to witness, to compel you to do MORE of The Gripe?

• Find the resistance. Resistance is how we experience changing our solution to the problem. The more resistance you feel, the closer you are to The Superthreat.

• Ask yourself: “What is my resistance keeping me safe from?”

• Ask yourself: “How, specifically, am I resisting?”

• Ask yourself: “What do I have to do, or think about, to INCREASE the sense of resistance?”

• Complete the sentence: “If this resistance wasn’t there, I’d be scared that I would experience …”

• Harry’s Superthreat: “I desperately want a girl but there’s no girl for me who won’t leave me. I never met my biological mother and my adopted mother died when I was six.”

The Bingo is a written statement which describes how you are faced with a choice between The Gripe and The Superthreat. It’s:

• Hot (powerful, ever-present, instantly recognisable when you think about it), and

• True (feels deeply, viscerally accurate, even though you may not like it), and

• Irrational (unreasonable, childlike understanding, black and white reasoning, life and death, always and never, everyone and no one, good and evil, must and must not, accusatory, judgemental, even ridiculously absurd).

What to do:

• Write down various statements.

• Find the most hot, most true, most irrational one.

• Make it as short as possible while remaining completely emotionally true.

• You’ll know when you’ve found it when you read it and go “Bingo! That makes sense and feels completely true.”

• Being angry kept Harry safe from being lonely and abandoned:

  Harry’s Bingo: “I can react to my best buddy as he is or I can react to being reminded of what I can never have.”

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Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world - no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.

Neil Gaiman (Sandman: A Game of You)

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Jackpot Bingo Is Best Bingo

Usually, you’ll have a Jackpot Bingo, which describes most of the “stuff you don’t want that keeps happening”. This is the most important type of bingo to find.

It is completely normal and OK to have more than one bingo.

We continue experiencing and learning all our lives, so we can naturally acquire more bingos. The more you’ve experientially learned, the more bingos you’ll potentially have. The powerful, long-lasting ones are often learned in childhood.

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Example: Being Frigid Kept Isabelle Safe From Being Disgusting

• Isabelle’s Gripe: “I’m so depressed that I’m so ugly that my husband doesn’t find me sexy which means I don’t enjoy sex.”

• Isabelle’s Superthreat: “I have lots of dirty, sexy thoughts and desires towards my husband that I can’t express.”

• Isabelle’s Bingo: “Being repeatedly hospitalised for depression protects me from the shame.”

  Source: “Provocative Therapy” by Frank Farrelly & Jeff Brandsma:

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We often meet our destiny on the paths we take to avoid it.

Jean de La Fontaine

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How To Inhabit Your Bingo

Write your bingo on a Post-it note or index card or similar.

Put it where’ll you’ll see it every day:

• on your refrigerator
• on your bathroom mirror
• on your bedside table
• on your phone home screen

For a week or two, just inhabit the emotional reality of it, without trying to fix it or argue with yourself about it.

The mere fact of being reminded of your bingo, seeing your choices in front of you and knowing they’re true, will often change things automatically. I know this is hard to believe, but it’s true!

We trade-in The Superthreat to get The Gripe instead. When we make this trade-off explicit, we naturally, almost magically, get more control and choice over both.

When you write it down as a short sentence and are reminded of it for a week or two, your brain will automatically, without effort, start to form new “Gripe-inhibitory” and “Superthreat-inhibitory” cortical dampening circuits. This means you’ll experience less of The Gripe and The Superthreat.

Tips:

• If you find more than one bingo, write down a separate note for each.

• In your daily life, when circumstances arise that remind you of your bingo, read your bingo to yourself while you are dealing with the circumstances.

• After a while, it’s normal for your bingo to change a bit - just write down the new bingo.

• If you find your bingo and write it down and inhabit it for a while and nothing changes, you’ll need to operate on The Superthreat directly and/or experience a targeted limbic update. I can help you with both of those.

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