Self-Observation on my desire to achieve something big

• I can only think of my life that it must be a success story. By success, I mean something big. Anything else is almost meaningless and is many times just a waste of energy. 

• It is putting a burden on everything that I do in my life.

• Nothing is good enough.

• It feels good to think about the time when I will be truly successful. 

• This is an order I have given myself. I feel I need to sacrifice myself for this.

• This goal is not a cause but an effect. I understand from books, psychologists, and others that this is a sign that I have low self-esteem. I don’t see it this way. 

• I allow no real playfulness for myself. Now I realize that I sort of look down on people who are not hard-working super-achievers. 

• Everything is hard to achieve. Close to impossible.

• I do not allow myself to fail. 

Chain of thoughts coming when I am able to go deeper

• I think I have set this goal for myself. I don’t remember when. But it is coming from me. At least this is how I perceive it.

• My mindset is such that everything is very serious. 

• I identified my life with this goal.

• I just now realize that I have set myself a goal that is impossible to reach.

• I also realize that there is something paradox in my thinking: I set a goal that is near-impossible to reach and only then I will be fine. But: I sort of ‘know’ that the only way to reach it is if I change completely. Then sadly it means that I must have a problem with my own self. 

• Can I only reach what I want if I change myself? Is this a good logic and life goal? 

Self-Observation on why I am holding my breath back

• I feel fear when I look at why I am holding my breath back
• I don’t know what I am afraid of.
• I see that my whole body is in a state of stress.
• I also feel some kind of shame I think.
• It is the exhalation that I don’t do. No problem with breathing in.
• I feel stuck. Do I feel stuck with my whole life?

Chain of thoughts coming when I am able to go deeper

• I am afraid of what would happen if I fully relaxed my breathing. What would happen if I let myself be fully relaxed?
• My view is that if I would fully exhale, something bad would happen. Something that would hurt me. I don’t dare to.
• I got used to this state. I can hardly imagine now how it would feel to have relaxed breathing.
• I do not dare to let my true Self come to the surface.
• It may have something to do with having a goal in life. I mean I think I would be more relaxed if I fully knew what I wanted.

Self-Observation on my feeling of missing something from my life

• I am missing something but I cannot say what.
• I feel sad.
• I blame other people and the world around me for not giving me what I want. It is their fault.
• It is not worth doing things. 
• This thought makes me nervous and panicky.
• I don’t know what to do about it, how to get out of it.  
• I cannot breathe normally. I keep my breath back.
• I feel as if this is my main belief about my life. How I am.

Chain of thoughts coming when I am able to go deeper

• I am sad because I have this image that ‘I did not get the things I wanted. The things that I deserved.’
• I know that I have been feeling like this since I can remember.
• Then I start to think that I am selfish and spoiled to think such things. But it does not help.
• Then I start to think that it is not that bad. It is better but I still have the pain in the back of my mind. I know it is just a matter of time that it comes back.
• Then I sort of realize that I am trying to convince myself that my feeling of missing something is not real. This is how I protect myself. 
• Then I realize that I am right. I did not get the things I wanted and thought that I deserved. It doesn’t hurt that much now that I could be honest with myself. It is a bit better now, there has been a small shift.
• I see that my honesty helped me to let go of my protection a little bit. I call it honesty, it may be something else. 

Self-Observation on my constant hunger

• One of the main themes in my life is that I feel I don’t get what I want. There is this constant sense of lack.
• What I feel is fear, weakness, and confusion. So eating comes to my mind. At least this I can control.
• I feel embarrassed. 
• This is an addiction because I feel I am dependent on food. Why am I dependent?
• What is most stressful is the confusion. It feels as if I am just waiting for something to happen, not sure what to do.
• I want more, more, more. I just cannot satisfy myself. To me, it just means that eating will not help. It is not food that I want…
• This is a somatic sensation in my body and it has to do with my throat. But this is far from just somatic.  

Chain of thoughts coming when I am able to go deeper

• I realize what I feel is not actual, physical hunger, but the desire to eat. I mean when I can look a bit deeper, I realize that most of the time I am not even hungry when I want to eat. 
• My mind connected eating with my feeling that I am missing something.
• I also realize that I have learned this behavior. Now I realize that it is a collective behavior. We learned this coping mechanism from each other.
• I cannot say what it is that I do not get. I feel trapped this way.
• I feel shame and embarrassment. Not only because I got overweight but also because I feel needy.
• My neediness: It is normal in the sense that I really did not get things that I should have. What is not normal is that it is still stuck in me. Probably time to let go.
• There is something deeper here than just my neediness. Fear. Fear of losing my safety. I lost connection. At least this is how I understand it now.
• When I become conscious about my need for connection, my hunger is not that important because I feel that I am not that dependent on ‘that indescribable need’. As the only thing that can ‘save’ me.

This is a quick help that you can any time come back to while in the process of giving up smoking. With the below, you can HOLD YOURSELF in the process by observing&releasing your thoughts and emotions as you are going through them. This can make all the difference in success.

When you give up smoking, the thoughts and feelings that your smoking is meant to suppress will surface or strengthen. There are two lists below. The first one is the thoughts and feelings that you want to have. The second list is the feelings and thoughts that come up when you quit smoking – the unwanted, painful, suppressed ones. If it makes sense for you: The first list is the feelings and thoughts that you want your suppressed feelings to be replaced with, and the second list is the ones that you are letting go of. 

The thoughts and feelings can certainly be different, I am listing here those that usually come up with most of us. So make your own list if that helps. (Or bookmark this page if it is good enough. It will come in handy.)

What I want

• I want to feel my self-worth.
• I want to know that I can do whatever I want with my life. I don’t have to set strange limits for my own life.
• I want to feel proud.
• I want to be my True Self. Fully. The most liberating feeling.
• I want to realize that I have not done anything wrong. 
• I want to realize that there is nothing wrong with me. And thus I don’t need to be fixed.
• I want to be active and not care about my actions too much.
• I want to feel strong.
• I want to help people to be less ashamed and anxious. 

What I don’t want to feel or think

• “I have done something wrong and there is a problem. Something is my fault.”
• “I feel lonely.”
• “I am in a panic.”
• “People are so stupid and careless around me.”
• “I feel depressed, or sad because I have a sense of loss inside. I should have gotten something or something should have happened but it didn’t.”
• “I feel empty inside. No connection to anyone or anything. (And now I have lost connection to my cigarette too.)”

Notes:

• Quitting smoking is all mental. 
• Remember: Nobody ever got harmed by releasing their suppressed emotions. 
• The more, deeper you allow yourself to feel your suppressed feelings, the faster you will go through them. 
• Anger is absolutely one of the main feelings that most of us have when quitting smoking. When it hits you, make sure you do not harm yourself or others. 
• Much of our suppressed emotions are in our bodies. For example, crying and shaking are healthy and very effective. 
• It is ok if you become inactive in the beginning. Just let yourself go through it at your own pace. 
• Do not try to ‘guess’ what feelings and thoughts will come. And do not try to control them.   
• It is ok if you don’t know what you are feeling, or why you are feeling the way you do.
• Do not exchange your smoking for another addiction! 
• If you are determined, that is probably more than half the battle. (Just an idea: If you become undetermined along the way then ask yourself why? Why do you want to stay dependent? What is it that you lack and find that your dependence will give you?)

Just like with the quick help for self-observation, I am not using bold, or too large letters should you need to open this page in a public place where it is not good if anyone sees what you are reading.

“The reason why I can’t become emotionally and mentally independent is that I am afraid I will lose my safety if I do so.” If this resonates with you then you will find two interpretations around this in this article to help you with your own self-observation.

I am bringing this fear from my childhood

The development of the self is in stages. In early life, before we get to the stage of becoming mentally and emotionally independent there are two preceding stages. They are called co-dependency and counter-dependency. As their names depict, these stages are about dependency. We are totally dependent on the outside world not only physically but more importantly emotionally and mentally. 

In these first two stages, we are dependent on our mothers, fathers, or other people who take care of us, who love us, who calm us, who mirror our feelings. This is how such highly evolved creatures like humans develop. We need the connection, the relationship. And we want to be dependent at all costs. And glitches happen in these first two stages to almost all of us. Glitches where this connection breaks (or sometimes worse). When this connection fails (speaking of neglect, abandonment, abuse, etc.) we develop fear. And all sorts of twisted beliefs and behaviors that result from this loss of connection. And our natural course of development gets blocked and we are unable to get to the next stage in our development; Independence. We need to act as independent individuals and look independent, but inside we feel that it is yet uncooked. Some of us decide to ‘forcefully grow up’ – by deciding to detach from our origins – and some of us become even more dependent. And the coping mechanisms are endless.   

So there we have it. We want to become emotionally independent and happy individuals, but we can’t. We are afraid to make that step. Our fear of losing our safety is everywhere. It is so much part of our thinking and so much in front of us that we can hardly realize it. (If it is not the fear then for most of us it is the inner image that “I still need something before I decide to become a ‘full’ individual”.) 

I am projecting my arrogance on the world around me and on God

If you look at your fear with the knowledge that you are interconnected with everything in the world and with God – or a creator or higher power; as you understand it- then the realization can be different.

Then you can come to the conclusion that your fear actually comes from your arrogance and from your mindset of thinking that you are special. The key word here is that you feel special. You feel ‘special’ as a separate and independent being and your logic in understanding the world is built from this logic. And you want to fulfill your life along this ‘logic’. If you are still reading these lines then I assume that they still resonate with you. So let’s go further.

What happens in essence is that you are afraid of God. You instinctively know that God (however you call it) exists but you are afraid that if you gave up your sense of being ‘special’ and sense of being separate would be the end for you. And there is the fear of God’s ‘behavior’. You look at God as a being who would destroy you, who would be cruel to you, who would just give you suffering, or maybe God doesn’t even exist, there is actually nothing there. This is the projection of my own arrogance on the core of my own being.  

(How much this is a different way of looking at my fear compared to the above interpretation about the ‘glitches’ in early childhood is a question. Maybe not so much. In both cases, there is a loss of connection. And that is the root cause of my fear.)  

Probably there is. Here is why. The world we live in is insane in many parts and so our mindset and thought systems got glitched too… This is the starting point. 

In order to recognize the insanity and twisted nature of the world we live in and also our twistedness we first must recognize it. This recognition is the suffering that we experience. And here is the underlying reason why suffering is needed: We are so twisted currently that we currently believe that suffering and being unhappy is normal. Phrased differently: Most of us find that suffering is needed, that it is normal.  Our Self needs this suffering – as a guide – to realize that our thinking is twisted. Once we realize that suffering is not needed it will vanish. Until then, self-development needs it.

The seemingly paradoxical image that the Self is looking at its own Self.

A possible reason why my meditation is not deepening is my shame. The root of my ego.

The same can be true for prayer and other forms of spiritual practice.

Sometimes I am able to realize my trauma through a comment that someone made.

Examples

‘Oh, so you are the smart one!’ vs looking for praise

• The situation: I am talking with someone about something that I want to do, how I think about it, and how much I am happy to find that I understood it, understood myself, and know what to do. And then I get this comment – not necessarily the same sentence, but the pinch of sarcasm is there: ‘Oh, so you are the smart one! I am happy for you that you figured it out, I wish you all the best with it.’ And then I feel uneasiness, maybe I get angry at the other, maybe try to talk myself out of this situation, maybe I get sad, etc.
• What happened in reality: I was proud of myself that I figured something out. The actual content doesn’t matter, my goal was to get praise. And chances are that I triggered that something in the other person. And strangely, I got the opposite of what I wanted.
• The trauma: Since childhood, I am carrying this trauma that I feel I don’t get praise for. This is one of the most common traumas that happen to most of us in early childhood. Children go through certain stages of development and at one point we all realize that we are actually capable of doing things and we are getting clever. This is a fantastic and healthy step we make. Nothing can be more natural than a child wanting to share this with the world and naturally with the ones closest to him or her. And the trauma happens when the ones closest to us, who we love the most do not recognize this. Usually, they carry the same trauma. Speaking of how family patterns get passed on from generation to generation…

‘Why are you so sensitive?’ vs looking for help in calming myself’ 

This example is more complex, it contains an interplay of different traumas and unmet needs.

• The situation: I am talking with someone about a stressful event that happened to me recently and I am describing how fed up I am, and since then, I am just not able to pull myself together. (And maybe I talk about some other things like how unfairly I think I was treated and all the rest of it.). And the other person has this comment (again, not necessarily the same sentence): ‘Why are you so overly sensitive again? Get yourself together and carry on.’   
• What happened in reality: I got stressed, I could not get out of it, and unconsciously was looking for someone to help me calm down. Instead, I got a message that I should be able to calm myself down (Actually worse, because I was ridiculed also). Did I trigger something in the other person? Probably, since I got a harsh reply. Can I complain? Well, probably not. At least not for the other person refusing to help me calm down: I did not ask for it. (Imagine another possibility: When the other person does go into the game I started and agrees with me and puffs up my anger about the person I described as unfair. Then the whole situation can evolve into a game of two people sharing their victim consciousness. Or who knows where the dramatic discussion will take us in our interplay of traumas.)
• The trauma: Children in their early years do not yet have the capacity to calm themselves down. They need someone to calm them until they get to that stage where they can. When the ones close to us cannot help us we still need to find ways to cope with this. The usual examples are the suppression of our feelings – which will result in depression -, and thinking that there is something wrong with us – which will result in shame. (Imagine yourself as a very small child, or as a baby whose nervous system isn’t yet fully developed. And you don’t yet have thought patterns to help you out either. And on top you are also ‘still’ highly sensitive and truly connected to the ones around you – hopefully your parents and/or people who love you and take care of you. And you face an unsolvable situation at your stage of development.) 

The opportunity

When you can connect the dots from such conversations, you always have a window of opportunity. What works is that I first understand what really happened (connecting the dots), and then I ‘transform’ the trauma.

We are all different and connecting the dots does not have to be this analytic as above. But self-observation and practicing to understand myself better surely help.

The transformation part is truly miraculous. In Psychology practice, it is the conscious revisiting and processing of the trauma. In religion, all regions have an element of atonement and salvation. I will write more about this miracle a bit later and link it here. Sorry, I am not yet there.

“My Overeating represents my shame about myself and about my life.” If this resonates with you then this post may be for you.

If you have this recognition then it is very probable that you are going in the right direction. I wish others had this conscious recognition too. 

What does my overeating represent in my life? What is the mechanism?

Overeating is an addiction like other addictions. It may or may not be as physically destructive as some others but for the mind, it is the same type of thought pattern.

The “job” of an addiction is to help you with the pain that you are feeling. It does it by suppressing it with the “help of a substitute” so that it is not that painful. In our mind we have a sense of lack, we have a need. And we want to satisfy that need. 

So why shame?: That sense of lack that I mentioned is a sense that there is something not good enough, something is missing (certainly not the food). Since you are reading this article, I assume that you already intrinsically feel the connection. If you look deeply – maybe give yourself a pause, or meditate on what you are feeling – you may recognize that you think that there is something wrong with you actually. You think that you are not good enough.

Luckily this is not the case. There is nothing wrong with you. But this article is about the recognition of shame and a little bit about the mechanism. Not about the ways to let it go. That goes well beyond the scope here.

Anyways, here is a little appetizer (bad joke, sorry.):

What is on the other side?

The lack of an unrealistic thought that you are not good enough – and thus the emergence of the true perception of your real self: Which is the knowledge that you are valuable and essentially healthy. Which brings peace of mind, healthy pride, and a whole lot of healthy behaviors, opportunities, etc.

If you believe in God (in any way you relate) then the other side is the valuing of God. When you value yourself, you value God. It is the same thing.