23 November 2024
Quick re-cap: We’re discussing the 4Ps of a well-spirited life. Those four p’s are people, purpose, processes, and product. Our whole time, to date, has been concerned with processes I feel are necessary to live and maintain that well-spirited or eudaimonic life. We’re getting near the end with three processes to discuss. Those three are self-control, being where your feet are, and embracing failure.
As some of you will have inferred, many of the factors being discussed within processes are interconnected i.e., when one improves, other’s follow or vice versa. In delivering therapy, I encourage people whose lives are not what they want them to be, to begin with one good thing: learn to do one good and important thing well, before beginning a second pursuit.
Which good thing varies person to person. If you’re a young person, living in your parent’s basement, it’s probably going to be getting your mental health in order so you can make the first move toward a more autonomous life. If you’re a retired person, it may be about improving connection with loved ones or leaving a legacy that’s important to you.
Self-control is something we sense in others very quickly. If a person is dysregulated (out of control) we expect them to be loud, impulsive, sometimes rude, sometimes dangerous. But that’s only one half of the dysregulated population, the half psychology classifies as hyper-aroused. Per Dezelic’s (2013) Window of Tolerance, synonyms for hyper-arousal include anxiousness, chaos, aggression, impulsivity, and being easily overwhelmed. Hyper-arousal can foster addiction, eating issues, obsessive behaviours, and personal rigidity.
The other half of those people suffering from dysregulated behaviours are less noticeable, appear less in public, but suffer at least as harshly as the hyper-aroused population; these folks are referred to as hypo-aroused. Synonyms (Op cit) include being absent or dissociated (tuned out), shut down, and/or unavailable. Hypo-arousal can foster disconnectedness, functioning on auto pilot, emotionlessness, and/or memory loss. Either end of the arousal continuum is toxic.
And what is toxicity? It stems from the Greek idea which pertained to bows, as in bows and arrows. The toxic substance was applied to the end of arrows so that, if successfully delivered, the arrow not only caused trauma to the flesh but to the bloodstream and/or the nervous system, as well. Toxins kill. Hypo- and hyper-arousal can also (easily) lead to death.
This is why one of my favourite premises is that everything we do is a choice. For most people, sadly, they fail to learn or accept that premise, living with the counter premise that wishes have wings. If we are adherents of evidence-based thinking, each human being’s most precious possession is their time. It cannot be bought, traded, or created short of fostering good health within self and others, which may, if we are fortunate, increase the length and ease of life. Which brings us right back to choices and self-control. If you accept that you can make choices all day long, you begin to assume ownership of your self and your life. If you reject or ignore the responsibility, involved in accepting your choice-making capacity, you live Socrates’ unexamined life, or what I think of as a life of defaults: you like what the marketers, loud people, and cultural norms of your time insist is right. Living an examined life is challenging the ideas of the loud social mediums of our time.
Nothing about accepting responsibility for your choices is easy. If we take a person with addictive behaviours, as an example, we can see some of the challenges that person encounters. To begin, their career—in addictive behaviours—was a choice: the first time they used alcohol, cocaine, or cannabis, that was a choice. I have met many people who tried some or all of these drugs and said, “No thanks, not for me” and basically lived without these substances. I have heard dozens of 12-Step accounts from people in AA, NA, or both stating that the first time they got high their lives changed in one euphoric blast.
That blast went something like this. They chose to attend a high school dance with tremendous reluctance and anxiety because they were convinced they were “losers” i.e., people not getting what they wanted in the maelstrom of high school attendance. That night, a buddy offered them a substance and that substance blew their mind. They danced frequently and with many partners they thought would never even look at them. They felt like great dancers, popular people, accepted people. What I have heard, many times, is that the first high was the first time that person felt “normal.” Those folks had been subsisting in the almost constant belief of being below par as a human being.
Fast forward ten years and that person is living in brutal couch-to-couch circumstances, cadging drinks wherever possible and living a life of relentless addictive urges. How do they end up clean and sober a few years later? Again, the 12-Step expression that best captures my understanding of the experiential reality is becoming sick and tired of being sick and tired. There comes a death knell—the internal and external indicators that the life of raging addiction is a one-way ticket to an early demise. It might be fear, frustration, anger, rebellion or any combination but they make a choice.
That choice gets them to their first meeting and things change or they don’t. Either way, some choices are beginning to be made, and my suspicion is that the introduction of choice-making is so foreign to that brain that the neural circuitry opens a whole new sub-network of contemplated change orders rather than running 24/7 on default behaviours. That new sub-network is how the light gets in.
I want to be crystal clear about this: it ain’t easy, it feels way harder than the default, it’s uncomfortable as hell, and it hurts. But...it’s also the only way out. Most readers will know the steps that person has to make to get a life organized into a manageable project. Both of our subject concepts are involved everyday and most minutes of those days: maintaining self-control long enough to make responsible choices. If you don’t have the self-control, you’re reacting to emotional impulses. If you have self-control, you’re making evidence-based choices based on an accepted principle that says something like: If I lose my shit, I’ll screw this up. Take a breath, take a break, walk away to chill out if you need to, but don’t loose your composure because the minute you flip your lid, you’re out of the window of tolerance and into hyper- or hypo-arousal i.e., out of the zone of self-control.
Thank you for thinking and acting. More next week. Be well.
Summary
Sources Referenced:
Dezelic, M. https://www.drmariedezelic.com/
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