Ben Thompson Can Change

Something just happened in my family that shocked us all. As the shock wears off, the pain starts setting in—this really hurts.

I have always struggled with how to deal with pain. I’ve tried ignoring it, numbing it, creating it, and experiencing it. Only the last way seems to be of any help.

Ignoring it creates chaos in my mind and body. Unresolved conflict, emotion, and pain, in my view, if not dealt with emotionally and openly, will be experienced physically. I can’t hide!

Numbing it works for a while but then I become addicted to the numbing agent, no matter how unhealthy it is. Numbing only creates a need for more numbing.

Creating it means I know there is pain in my life that I “should” feel but can’t for some reason, so I will make myself hurt. So, risky behavior, abusive relationships, self-flagellation, picking fights with others, all come from trying to feel something I can’t.

Experiencing it creates change. Without all the attempts to repress it I am left with the truth—this hurts and I don’t like it, but it’s here. If I allow myself to feel it and be open with it, I will eventually heal from it. In fact, it often changes me for the better because I let it teach me its lessons.

Right now I am experiencing pain as openly as I can. I’m talking about it, writing about it, praying about it, and connecting to it. The world will never be the same and any attempt to try to keep the same will only create more pain.

Here’s the complex part: I am experiencing this pain while at the same time experiencing greater freedom in my life. Pain and freedom are independent variables, it turns out. Together, they allow a richer life, but don’t tell Don Draper or Lindsay Lohan:

“The way to grow while enjoying life is to create a higher form of order out of the entropy that is an inevitable condition of living.  This means taking each new challenge not as something to be repressed or avoided, but as an opportunity for learning and improving skills.” 
~Mihaly Csikszentmihayli in Flow

This quote comes from Flow. I can’t recommend the book highly enough. I realize I am a freak about personal change and achieving optimal performance, so keep that in mind. Flow is all about what I am about right now—making life enjoyable.

Life can be enjoyable, but it heavily depends on me organizing my life in a way that it brings enjoyment.

Here’s what I am doing about it:

I tend to stand back and not meet people. Even when I do meet them, I don’t ask any further questions about them. Except now, I’ve made it a challenge to meet more people and to ask the next question. Every meeting is now a challenge to connect with somebody else and know something interesting about them. I find this highly enjoyable, and I’ve met some really cool people.

My wife and I are writing a marriage blog together (marriageyouneverwanted.com, please check it out). It is immensely enjoyable because it is a challenge to write 3 blogs/week, and also because it arose out of a life altering challenge I undertook. A few years ago I decided I would master the challenge of reducing my reactivity to this crazy person I married and love her regardless of whether or not she did it all right. It was amazing and amazingly difficult, but totally worth it!

I took up the challenge with my health as well, especially with eating and cooking. I took it upon myself to master my insulin levels and understand the biological processes going on with my foodstuff. Now, I have it under control and brought order where I once only saw chaos and a spare tire in my middle. I lost 30 lbs. in a year because of my pursuit, and gained about 5 books worth of knowledge.

Finally, I have gained more and more control over my thoughts. Again, from Flow: “One’s mind typically is besieged by the usual visitors: the shadowy phantoms that intrude on the unstructured mind…” My mind was lost in a sea of unorganized and mainly negative images and I had to get far away. And I did!

I am here to tell you that you can gain control over your thoughts. The way, though, is not through controlling the thoughts, it’s through controlling consciousness. It doesn’t matter what the thoughts are, it matters how I view them. In a sense, I neurolinguistically reprogrammed myself, and you can too.

The most important question I ask myself is “What is true?” This brings a ton of order in my life because I organize myself around what is really, objectively true. Then, I can work with subjective reality, which is 100% under my control with practice. Consciousness is bliss.

I guarantee you that if you are not living an enjoyable life it is because you spend most of your time trying to change what is, and very little time on what you have control over. Here’s what is true: your life can become enjoyable almost instantly if you can make the shift.

“If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is in your power to wipe that judgment out now.”
~Marcus Aurelius

Get a dog, move to the mountains, stop eating, and die.

This was my plan when I as 16. I knew I probably wouldn’t hang myself, pull a trigger, or drive off a bridge (I didn’t want to destroy property), but starving myself to death—perfect!

I remember telling this to my counselor at the time. Instead of putting up resistance, he had me talk more about my master plan and the details. It turned out the plan was more effort than I wanted to expend and was not very practical (who would feed the dog after I died?). Plus, starving to death began to seem like a very slow and painful way to die. I tried to change the location to a beach somewhere, but it just looked silly in my mind to starve in paradise.

Truth is I didn’t really want to end my life, but I didn’t really want to live it either. You may have had similar thoughts and your own starvation plan.

When we don’t want our lives we starve ourselves of relationships, experiences, fun, happiness, good thoughts, better jobs, joy, etc. We keep them out of our lives because we can’t see our lives and happiness existing together. They aren’t compatible.

I spent my teens and much of my twenties slowly starving myself. I could not imagine enjoying life and I accepted depression as “just how it has to be.”

What’s interesting is if you knew me in my teens and twenties, you would not have known any of this, and may have assumed the opposite. I worked hard to keep up my appearance, but inside I kept rotting away.

Then, I heard something I needed from an unexpected source. After three different antidepressants failed in the course of 4 months, my psychiatrist told me, “If you don’t change your life, you are not going to get better.” I left mad—she should have told me this before I went through 3 medications, but maybe she knew that’s what it would take.

Let me say it to you so you can be angry at me: You are not going to get better if you don’t change your life!

My life was set up to fail! My life was set up to starve! As long as I lived in the patterns I did, I was not going to get better. Happiness did not fit into my victim story, I had squeezed it out of the plot. Victims don’t find happiness, only more victimization.

Heroes, though, create great stories. They don’t get victimized, they get challenges to conquer. The new plot developed as I invited new people, new experiences, new beliefs, and new patterns into my life. No longer was I a victim looking for some cosmic swoop of justice to save me, but rather a hero challenging and defeating the forces of my old self.

Now, I can see I am in paradise, and like I saw at 16, it just looks silly to starve here. The present provides a feast of everything I need to live an enjoyable life. Let’s feast together!

Any movie about an underdog team opens with a team so far from good that we can’t imagine the champions they will be at the end. The Biggest Loser begins with huge people and we think, “They are so far away from being healthy and thinner.”

Seeing people far away from change is what makes great stories. However, if you watch the movies or the TV shows, what you find is they are not that far from change at all. In fact, there is usually a moment when they finally get it—I don’t have to be this way and I need to change myself right now. It was right there inside them the whole time, they just couldn’t see it.

In churchspeak we often talk about those who are “so far from God.” I couldn’t disagree more, which is why I squirm in my seat when it is mentioned. I believe the problem is how close they are too God without being able to see it.

Imagine this: You’ve started feeling a presence or need in your life and you find yourself visiting a church. During the service someone tells you your heart is “so far from God.” Does this make you want to pursue God or give up?

Scenario two:  You’ve started feeling a presence or need in your life and you find yourself visiting a church, and you are told you are close to what you seek, even though that might be hard to see right now. Does this make you want to pursue God or give up?

In my crazy life, the problem has never been my distance from God, it’s been recognizing there is no distance at all. Therefore, I now live my life with the belief I am never far from God or from change, and this allows me to face the world with limitless possibility!

I wanted to share the fears about writing the last blog by sharing the thoughts I noticed in my head:

You can’t write this, somebody might be offended.

Don’t write this, it’s too hot of a topic.

You will lose all credibility with people if they know you had an addiction to pornography, especially since you still used it while you were married.

Oh no, I didn’t attribute all my healing and success directly to God and Christ. Everyone will think I’m arrogant and full of myself.

I hope I don’t make it look too easy and people who do struggle think I am oversimplifying it.

Who am I to write about such a topic? What do I know?

I can’t write about being over addiction because that means I’m just setting myself up for failure. Addictions are forever and I am just fooling myself.

What if it embarrasses my wife?

When I look at my fears it is easy to see why it feels safer (and smarter) to keep my mouth and keyboard shut. And  yet for so long, fear kept me in my shell, afraid my openness  would cause others discomfort. Fear kept me in my problems and made them worse.

But now, I can tell you pushing through fear and dealing honestly and openly with it is what frees my life. As long as you and I live in fear, we squash and cover up the beautiful life God put in us. I do not talk about God often in my posts because it would be redundant. When I am in freedom, I am in God, and the distinction fades away.

My goal in life is to be a person who liberates others because of my presence. Fear does not allow this, addiction does not allow this, and being worried about what others think of me does not allow this. Only facing life honestly and freely allows liberation.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
~Marianne Williamson- A Return to Love

My life began when I became conscious and realized all my behaviors and actions did not happen by accident. Everything I do is a result of programming and learned responses. This will be a hard message for those who think they are spontaneous, because even spontaneity is a learned behavior (often to make us think we have more control by doing whatever we want).

We are a product of our programming and we do what we are programmed to do, whether they are healthy or unhealthy behaviors.

Does this depress you or cause a reaction in you? It does me, big time! It means the jams I get into, the unhealthy behaviors I exhibit, and the addictive cycles and depressions do not happen by accident…I have something, if not everything, to do with them.

At this point in the Matrix, Neo pukes because he can’t handle this new knowledge. I spent about a 6 months in disbelief, anger, and depression about this truth. I am a slow puker, I guess!

After my six months of conflict and struggle, I found a way out. I saw if all these things were programmed and learned, I could unlearn them and write new programs. New programs not requiring me to look at pornography when I became stressed out or resentful of my wife; new programs that gave me the ability to act in ways leading to health rather than disease; new programs allowing me to enjoy life to the fullest.

It took some time, too. I still looked at porn, but I was much more conscious. In fact, it was almost laughable as I watched myself do it (here I am, this totally “evolved human” and with all my great intelligence and ability, I am hiding in the bathroom watching people have sex, really?). And, I saw what I was doing emotionally: trying to fulfill a “need” in a way that can never satisfy the “need,” because I needed something to help me feel shame and guilt in my life. Porn offered the best, most easily accesible alternative.

When I applied consciousness, the behavior seemed absolutely ridiculous. I could feel the control the behavior had over me. I could see all the arrangements I made to be alone with the internet. I could see how much mental energy I spent in the debate of should I vs. shouldn’t I. I could pinpoint exactly why I needed the feeling I was trying to produce through the behavior. It wasn’t so scary anymore, because I understood it. Is porn still incredibly appealing because it’s designed specifically to be desirable to my brain? Heck yeah! But scary? No.

And this is the same for any maladaptive behavior. I began to watch myself interact with my clients at work and all I could see is how much resistance I put up when a client did not meet my expectations of them. I began to see how I put myself on the hook in relationships and how I was afraid to give an assertive answer. I saw how much of my life energy I wasted trying to convince others of what I thought they should do. I saw how unhelplful running past failures over and over in my brain really was.

And with consciousness, and only with consciousness, comes a choice. I now have the power to choose my responses and reactions. I now have the power to find another way to deal with my stress and resentment. I now have the power to change myself in relation to anything in the world.

I now live a greater part of my life in this power of consciousness. I do not want you to think just because you gain consciousness, it all becomes easy. No, when I made the choice to change, I made a choice to fight against what was so deeply ingrained in me–I had lived in depression since a child and in addiction since I was 13. My modus operandi up to that point was shame and self-loathing. Change doesn’t happen over night, but it does come quicker when you stop trying to apply the old maps to the new territory. It’s time to write your own rules. Porn no longer has to fit in your life, just like it has no place in mine.

I am going to stop short of giving you answers, and this may tick you off. Here’s why I am doing this to you: The answers came to me after I became conscious and did the work of applying it. When you become conscious, your creativity and your mind will bring solutions where you once saw helplessness. You begin to access those inner resources blocked out by all your old programming, and you take your life into your own hands. You will write new programs!

In case you have not concluded how crazy I am yet, let me tell you about my dreams:

My current dreams are where I fail. I’m dead serious. I literally dream every single night about screwing it all up, and I can tell you exactly why–the old programming is ticked because the new programming is taking over. Dreams are where your mind works out your life, and I am rocking the boat hard. My current dreams are saying, “What the hell? This is not how you are supposed to do it.” Every night I see the life I left and it affirms me to keep moving forward in consciousness.

All I can say is, “The water’s warm!” Let consciousness free your life…

A friend recently told me he would like to read more about what it means in my words to “live freely.” Suddenly, I found myself excited with 1000-word blog written and ready to post.

Then, I remembered how annoying I previously viewed happy and free people. I hated them and did not want to listen to them ramble about how they found so much joy and beauty in life. I mean, what made them so freaking special to have a good life while I was doomed to wallow in depression and addiction.

Now, I am one of “those” people I hated (I’m not kidding, I despised happy people), and I totally get it. It is hard to stop talking about how great “living freely” is.

Let me try to get my excitement across in any economy of words. Living freely can be described as:

Excitement. Effortlessness. Flow. Love. Fun. Gratitude. Release. Grace. Light. Joy. Conflict. Struggle. Conquer. Friends. Boundary-less. Freeing. Passion. Dreams. Overflow. Limitless. Energy. Powerful.

I think I captured it. I hope you notice conflict and struggle. Conflict is simply and profoundly the universe’s way of saying, “Defeat me so you can move on to greater freedom in your life. By the way, you are not defeating me, you are defeating the part of you in conflict with me.”

Life, when lived, is freedom.  It is my life and it is up to me to seek out freedom and happiness, because trying to make ”out there” work just right so “in here” can be okay is slavery. My depression and addiction were the maps I used to navigate the world I saw, and what a dark world it was. Freedom is drawing new maps when the old ones were crap (crap is a technical cartographer’s word used to describe a bad map).

The new map shows me the problem isn’t the world, and if the problem isn’t the world, then the world isn’t part of the solution. The solution is me because the problem is me. X marks the spot, and I am standing on the X the whole time.  Therefore, I changed in order to become free!

Dang! I’m doing it again. My old self would abhor me right now and then go find some way to numb out from reality. Trust me, Old Self tries to come back sometimes. His thoughts try to infect my mind, but New Self reminds me I know exactly where the old map leads, and why would I ever want to go that way again?

I’m officially off my rocker and it’s never been more fun! I hope I described it well, Dennis. I kept it a bit existential because 1) it is and 2) my past blogs are a bit more practical about how I am applying this.

“Piece of ______!” I responded recently as water started spraying everywhere from the faucet connector. Nice reaction, Mr. Bencanchange. What can I say, I still have some reprogramming to do when it comes to my reactions!

I need me some prehab.

Are you in a prehab program? I ran across the term today on a Robb Wolf podcast with the MovNat folks and instantly took a liking to the term. In the context of the podcast, prehab referred to exercising in a way your body needs to for life and injury avoidance rather than for a display of muscles. What good are your muscles if you can’t duck under things or make a quick pivot?

As I am in the field of mental health professionally, I can tell you almost everyone I see could have benefited from some prehab, because by the time they come to me, something has already been injured. How could they have prepared for what would eventually lead them to therapy?

My personal prehab program focuses on reducing reactivity—becoming more like water and less like a boulder. I’m not trying to sound Zen, but it is hard to find a better metaphor. How do I practice flowing rather than blocking? How do I encounter and then move around obstacles with the least resistance? As the anecdote I opened with shows, I am more boulder and less water at times, especially with home projects.

Prehab for me means staying engaged in conversations with my wife when I want to cut off because I feel like she is attacking me. It means reacting to the slow driver in front of me or the tailgater behind me with acceptance rather than frustration and unnecesary risk taking. It means listening to people when I think I can give them a solution faster and save the time. It means accepting what is rather than cussing at it and getting angry.

Here’s one slapping me in the fact right: Prehab means having a strong work ethic in the job I don’t enjoy in order to apply the work ethic to work I do enjoy.

We can deceive ourselves and live on the dangerous assumption that we don’t need to practice. Whether it is public speaking or basketball, practice is essential. However, we hope when the situations present themselves, we will magically be able to act and react gracefully in the right way, even though we haven’t trained for it.

Obviously I can’t prepare for the infinite amount of situations I might face. And fortunately, I don’t have to. If I engage in a prehab program where the focus is not on preparing for a specific situation, but on my reactivity to whatever comes my way, I will be better equipped to handle most any circumstance.

When you are surprised by new situations, what reactions come to you automatically? Based on those reactions you know how you are programmed to respond.

Prehab—not a bad idea! What will be your new automatic behaviors?

In case you are wondering about the ______ at the beginning, I said, “Piece of a wonderful chance to practice non-reactivity!” Yeah, right!

Monica and I sometimes go underground and participate in Marriage Fight Club. I just broke the first rule.

Marriage Fight Club is a different type of club. Membership depends on your willingness to fight your reactivity and resistance—to not fight when it would be the easiest course of action.

A couple comes to the middle of the floor for a face-off, and if you attend, you have to participate. Then, you draw a topic out of a brown derby. Topics like sex, parenting, in-laws, religion, politics, finances, and fitness, to name a few, might be drawn.

Next, the couple is asked to begin by talking honestly and openly about the issue, back and forth. It starts to get intense when one person takes a jab. The group watches with intensity as the partner absorbs the blow and attempts to fight reactivity and resistance. Sometimes it is too much and a jab is thrown back to the original attacker, leaving him or her with a chance to stop the reactivity in its tracks or choose to send it right back. Back and forth it goes.

It can be brutal, especially when the egos take over, however, they fight until somebody breaks the cycle and reduces reactivity to a point where calm is restored. However, when it becomes clear they cannot make it to this point they are cut-off. They must live to fight another day, and learn from their experience in the ring by feedback and watching other couples.

The joy of MFC comes when a participant or couple figures it out. When fire leaves the eyes and the face relaxes, the body follows in releasing its tension, and a strange energy enters the room. No longer is the person engaged in a battle of egos, but in a battle against resistance. The war turns into a challenge to understand the other and to change the relationship they have to the other. The energy is openness and love. It changes the room.

You can start your own MFC. Beware: it is not for the weak and it can hurt, maybe even leave bruised egos and hurt feelings. But you may realize you already feel bruised and broken in your current relationship. Practice by talking openly about a topic with your partner and focusing on yourself and non-reactivity. Maybe we’ll meet in an alley some day and you can show us your skills.

We even have a corny saying: Sticks and stones will break my bones, and words will always hurt if I use them to hurt others.

*Marriage Fight Club does not really exist. This blog entry is for entertainment purposes only.  If you are engaged in serious fighting and abuse in your relationship, get help, now. For most of you, though, you could benefit greatly by reducing your reactivity to your partner, and you can start the change right now. Be ready to practice…a lot!