Self-Change - ctrpoint

In June I listed three steps on "How to Avoid Going to the Dogs."
It generated quite a response, most of which had to do with the desire for more
detailed information on the three steps: paying attention, stepping back, and waiting.
Last month's issue focused on the first of these three. This time we take a look at the second.

Rollo May is a leading American psychologist who has influenced the course of psychotherapy for decades. I met him once and told him that if I had to choose what I believe is the single most important sentence he has ever written, it would be this one:

“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose.”*

I think of the pause to which he refers as the interior act of stepping back from the surround into nonattachment. It is there that we have a chance at the kind of decision making that leads to right action for ourselves and others.

Stepping back is not the same as stepping away. When we step away, we turn our backs on things and disregard them.

Regard is the French word for seeing/looking. When we disregard a person or situation, we are no longer seeing events as they take place.

In stepping back, however, we continue to see. In fact we see much more clearly.

Nonattachment is not the same as detachment. Detachment negates. It involves a kind of shutting off.

Nonattachment is neutral, neither positive or negative, and open rather than closed.

Stepping back into the openness of nonattachment, we can truly see things for what they are - and then make appropriate choices about them.

Here's an example from the case of a recent client who came to me for educational hypnosis. He is 16 years old and going to college while working almost full time as a software engineer. Our work together went quite well and he asked if he could focus on something else at the same time.

He had made a number of older friends at school and they often came to his home to have parties which were held in the very large guest house on the back portion of his parent's property. The guest house has its own entry to the property and plenty of parking on the street just past the gate. The parties were large, loud, and lots of fun. The guys conversed with him from time to time and the girls danced with every now and then, but they weren't as friendly at school and somehow he didn't feel quite comfortable around them much of the time. He thought maybe it was just because he was, in his own words, "still immature and hugely introverted."

I suggested that he try a very effective technique at the next party. The idea was for him to sit down, get into self-hypnosis, keep still, become nonattached, and then step back from everything and watch.

It didn't take long at all for him to really see, through just watching, that his new friends were attracted to the house and not to him.

That night he had a dream of going to all their homes, seeing parties going on, and being ignored at door after door when he tried to get inside.

Now he had a choice. He could continue to have the parties, knowing the situation for what it was or he could shut them down - which is what he chose to do.

The choice he made was not as important as the fact that he had a chance to make a choice to begin with.

Very often, we get pulled in. We stop really seeing and before we know it we wind up in situations we never would have chosen in the first place - with consequences we regret.

Have you ever had a chatty coworker - the kind that wastes your time? You try to be polite (because you're "supposed to") but sometimes it just drives you crazy. Then again, you may have worked in an environment in which a feud was underway, with both sides trying to sign you up on their own side.

When these things happen, stepping back is the only sane thing we can do. Otherwise we can easily get pulled into other people's agendas - and no one can tell in the beginning where that may lead in the end. Stepping back into nonattachment leaves us free to not respond, to respond neutrally, or to respond by speaking up for ourselves or someone else - whatever decision is truly appropriate.

Stepping back is truly vital in family relations. It enables us to respect limits and limitations - limits on what we do and say to others, limits on what we will accept from others, and the limitations of others who may be doing their best but not yet measuring up to standards that are important to us.

Finally, here's a good reason to step back from enmeshment in other folks' "situations, " "issues," and agendas - whether at home, school, work, or social gatherings:

We think
they are
who we
think they
are - then
something
happens
and they're
not who
we thought
they were.**

Through the continual practice of stepping back, we can avoid being disadvantaged by that.

It enables us to keep ourselves from going to the dogs - or being dragged off by them - in any number of other ways, as well.

*Rollo May, The Courage to Create (1975; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 100.

It's easy. Every Wednesday
for a few minutes between
10:00 and Noon sit down and
turn inward - through prayer,
meditation, self-hypnosis or
any modality you choose -
and send out good thoughts
to everyone else in the circle.

J. Kingston Cowart
www.self-change.com
619.561.9012
Post Office Box 19005
San Diego CA 92159

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