Feel aversive towards continuing the loop. Mentally shudder at the part of you that tries to continue.
I haven’t had much luck with implementing this sort of mental movement into a sustainable practice. I think training yourself to shudder or in some other sense despise your own mental activity is contraindicated by a number of therapeutic models.
A core assumption of most models of self-care is that approaches should be “integrative”. In other words, unacceptable inner voices, impulses and desires should be first compassionately acknowledged, rather than immediately dismissed/ignored. You don’t have to act on the impulses, but you do have to listen to them and acknowledge that there is some brain-module that thinks you should be doing this thing right now. Otherwise that brain module is just going to keep sending its message with increasing urgency.
Subjectively, I find that the consequences of training myself to “clamp down on” and “reject” or “aggressively disapprove” of my own mental activity only results in a kind of increased subconscious pressure trying to force these undesirable objects/impulses into awareness.
My solution has been to accommodate even my most annoying impulses, such as the impulse to browse Facebook, by bargaining with myself (“I’ll do that on my lunch break”) rather than rejecting the impulse outright (“No, that’s a bad thing to want to do”). This is more sustainable for me and results in fewer complete breakdowns of apparent willpower.
Since writing this (which was several months ago), I’ve been thinking more towards a more wholesome self-care type approach, where it’s important to understand what all the parts of yourself are trying to say. I think CFAR emphasizes this quite a bit in their curriculum.
When it comes to diagnosing action-intention gaps, e.g. you “want” to do something but don’t actually do it due to hidden aversions, the sort of attitude you propose leads to helpful dialogues with yourself that are often a much better long-term solution than the brute-force “hate the ‘bad’ parts of yourself” thing I put in Step 1.
I haven’t had much luck with implementing this sort of mental movement into a sustainable practice. I think training yourself to shudder or in some other sense despise your own mental activity is contraindicated by a number of therapeutic models.
A core assumption of most models of self-care is that approaches should be “integrative”. In other words, unacceptable inner voices, impulses and desires should be first compassionately acknowledged, rather than immediately dismissed/ignored. You don’t have to act on the impulses, but you do have to listen to them and acknowledge that there is some brain-module that thinks you should be doing this thing right now. Otherwise that brain module is just going to keep sending its message with increasing urgency.
Subjectively, I find that the consequences of training myself to “clamp down on” and “reject” or “aggressively disapprove” of my own mental activity only results in a kind of increased subconscious pressure trying to force these undesirable objects/impulses into awareness.
My solution has been to accommodate even my most annoying impulses, such as the impulse to browse Facebook, by bargaining with myself (“I’ll do that on my lunch break”) rather than rejecting the impulse outright (“No, that’s a bad thing to want to do”). This is more sustainable for me and results in fewer complete breakdowns of apparent willpower.
Yes, thank you for pointing this out.
Since writing this (which was several months ago), I’ve been thinking more towards a more wholesome self-care type approach, where it’s important to understand what all the parts of yourself are trying to say. I think CFAR emphasizes this quite a bit in their curriculum.
When it comes to diagnosing action-intention gaps, e.g. you “want” to do something but don’t actually do it due to hidden aversions, the sort of attitude you propose leads to helpful dialogues with yourself that are often a much better long-term solution than the brute-force “hate the ‘bad’ parts of yourself” thing I put in Step 1.