Hunting The Muse

Psychological Damage and Context Shifts

I was reading about little Ms. Smart and the theories that she might have been a bit psychologically influenced in her time away from her family. The theories aren't anything extraordinarily far-reaching, just a bit of that thought of the hostage bonding with their captors. There were a bunch of quotes from Patty Hearst about how when you're in a situation like that that rules your life, it's like all other truth gets stripped away and in order to survive, you can only operate within the truth that you are living.

It just got me thinking that it sounds very familiar to what real life is like in general, especially in the struggles we have to evolve and move forward in our lives. I obviously am removing "scale" from the equation here, as a kidnapping is clearly more traumatic than missing a New Year's resolution. But the abstract similarity remains: Just as how Ms. Smart's lost time with her family is a tragedy, it's also easy for us to look back on our lives at our missed opportunities or the ways we sabotage our choices and free will and view those as tragedies.

But then once in a while you have these clear breaks, like Ms. Smart being returned to her family. Traumatic, but a freeing up of energy, a release, a rebirth of potential. But how do you get there?

I guess first it requires the recognition of a problem, or something that needs to change. But second maybe what it really requires is a context shift. Something to shake up routine perhaps, but even deeper than that.

What are the ways we can invite context shifts upon ourselves without inviting trauma at the same time? I heard an excerpt from Tony Robbins once where he described a technique where you imagine your bad habits continuing indefinitely, and also imagine your discontent with it growing indefinitely, until it just gets intolerable and you break (and finally get motivated to change). I really hated hearing that approach because it's too negatively oriented to me and to me it sounded like it was about simulating trauma and inviting self-hatred. Not everybody gets motivated to change from self-hatred, not everyone's self-hatred patterns end in an "Enough is Enough" statement.

I think this is simply where environment matters. I'm not convinced about travel because you always have to come home. I think there is more to be said for investing heavily in controlling and improving your living environment, from your living space to your social patterns to your network of mentors - everything you physically interact with.

People tend to measure their evolution in terms of what they can physically manifest. So it makes sense, really, that it is things on the physical plane that affect our ability to manifest.

I'm personally trying to become a bit more physically oriented. I've started redoing some of my apartment. I might be gearing up for my house search. I need to commit to spending more time investing in my social network, and I'd like to find a couple of mentors. What other main ingredients would there be along these lines? Posted by Curt at March 14, 2003 03:01 PM