https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=pEoql5o6Vx8
I think people get so used to sort of the toothache of past pain that it almost blurs out in their mind. It’s like that sound, the ringing that eventually your brain stops processing. But I think you have a very good rule of thumb, which is the 18 month rule. And I wonder if you could help people understand that it is not a suffering that you have to take with you like a ball and chain for the rest of your life. There are ways to release it, but it does involve circling back and processing it through language. Yes. Well, let’s define what processing means. Okay, so, you know, let’s say that you had a pretty painful history of being bullied when you were 13. And you’re still carrying that with you. You carry it with you in your posture. You carry it with you in your assumptions about people. This is all implicit, right? It’s not explicit. You carry it with you in the form of resentment and questions about what it might have been. And you carry it with you because you’ve been demeaned by it. But you know, you’re not 13 anymore. You’re 40. And those experiences are not transferable in any simple manner to your current reality. So you go back and you think, okay, what happened? What exactly happened? And what happened means is what were the causal pathways that put me in that position of vulnerability and inferiority? And you want to specify them as carefully as possible because what the part of you that’s hanging on to that wants to know is, have you changed enough so that that won’t happen again? And if the answer to that is yes, even through thinking, you realize, well, I’m not that person anymore. Or you go back to the experience and you figure out, oh, this is what I did and I could stop doing that. Then the icy hands of that traumatic experience will release that you will be released from it. Because what your mind wants to know, your unconscious mind, let’s say, is, have you resolved this issue to the degree that it is unlikely that it will occur again? And that’s what it means to have processed it. And this, I think, is really important for people to understand that memories stick until you gain security. Memories stick to alert you to dangers that you’re recreating by avoiding the history. So if you were bullied, you’re going to either end up usually in the bully victim paradigm. You’re either going to go out there and say, well, I’m going to get them before they get me. Or you’re going to go out there with you sort of shuffling along, staring at the sidewalk, slumped shoulders. And you’re going to be inviting more bullies into your life. And so until you figure out the causality of how you ended up being bullied, you’re going to gravitate to either of those two poles as either a fight or flight mechanism. But if you go back and process and figure out, OK, here’s the steps that happened that ended up with me being bullied. Now I know how to avoid the bullying situation. Then that pain will recede. It’s there until you listen. It speaks until you’re safe. So there’s this great scene in this documentary called Crumb, which is about the underground cartoonist Robert Crumb. It’s the most brilliant documentary I’ve ever seen. And it’s highly instructive, that documentary. It’s about a terribly edible family. But it’s also about the successful struggle of one of the brothers in the family who became a famous underground cartoonist to free himself from that. And part of the documentary details his terrible experiences as a 13 to 17 year old with women. And he was he was one of these people that Robert Crumb, who was not at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy. He was outside the dominance hierarchy in the land of absolute contempt. And he made this card when he was about 13 or 14 with a broken heart on it and described his realization that he was such an outsider that he would never be successful with girls, you know, or period, but particularly with girls. But then that freed him up. And he started to cartoon more and draw more and listen to old music. And he kind of developed his own pathway. And then he became a very successful illustrator. And then he became very successful with women. And so but but what but he drew this picture to illustrate what he was like when he was 13. And he it’s very self-critical. And he draws himself as kind of hunched over thick glasses, really skinny, underdeveloped, weak chin, bad attitude, poorly presented, badly dressed, like a walking a walking testament to resentment. And weakness. And it wasn’t until he realized that that that he was playing that part and that that was also fueling his rejection. Was he really able to to move towards overcoming it? And so partly what you want to do is to go over your past and figure out, okay, what stupid things did I do or what in what manner was I insufficient so that this negative destiny was more likely to visit me? Now, you don’t assume that everything that happened to you was your fault or under your control, because everything isn’t your fault and everything isn’t under your control. But you do want to figure out, okay, well, if I played some hand in this and that could be rectified, well, then I should figure out how to rectify it, because then I won’t be in this situation anymore. You know, you talked about the bully victim who invites more bullying. It’s like, well, if you’ve conducted yourself in a manner such that you’ve attracted the attention of bullies and you haven’t stopped doing that, then you’re still going to attract the attention of bullies. And so your mind is very alert to such things. It’s always looking for where you’re weak and vulnerable and warning you about it. And and it’s just an alarm bell, right? It isn’t necessarily a problem solving mechanism. And so alarm bells might be going off in your head all the time, and that’s very unpleasant. But the difficult process of articulating it and thinking it through can free you from that. And so that’s what the past authoring program is for.