A Mason's Work

[00:00] And yesterday I said something at the end of the episode that I want to come back to.
[00:03] When we lose the signal, that honest signal about what we feel and what happened,
[00:10] and we kind of subvert that or turn it into the approval of friends over this sort of should of gratitude,
[00:20] we tend to lose that forever. That's not hyperbole.
[00:23] It's just how the mechanism works at scale and over time.
[00:26] One kind of transmutation doesn't cost you much, the transmutation.
[00:34] A thousand of them run kind of automatically over years, and the signal stops arriving.
[00:39] Not because there's nothing there, but because you trained yourself not to feel it.
[00:43] And that suppression becomes the default.
[00:46] That kind of stuck becomes the entire walls of the cell you've created for yourself.
[00:53] So before we talk about what to do, we need to talk about where all this comes from.
[00:57] Not that we're going to just kind of Freudian our way through this problem,
[01:02] but rather if we don't know why we do the things we do,
[01:06] we certainly can't in many ways spot them when they come up and then come up with a better solution as we go.
[01:13] So this is a kind of double application of the middle of the process,
[01:19] the awareness, reflection, analysis, action process that I mentioned in my book.
[01:25] And so we're going to go back and forth between that reflection and analysis cycle here
[01:30] as we talk about how we turned this strong response into a subverted response of gratitude
[01:38] and then an approval seeking behavior through, you know, talking to your body over pint.
[01:45] And so when we start to look at this, it's best to look at the objective, right?
[01:52] The things we tend to believe about the world are designed to do something for us.
[02:00] They're a genesis that is creative in its application.
[02:05] We are thinking up solutions to preserve and conserve and manage risk.
[02:15] As people grow and age, they change the way they interact with the world.
[02:23] Here's a kind of place to start looking for this stuff.
[02:26] When you find that you have a behavior that justifies you being comfortable and sitting still,
[02:38] that was the design intent of the behavior.
[02:43] So when you were growing, when you took a risk one time, you had this response where it's like,
[02:50] hey, rather than go through all of the pain and suffering of real risk and real vulnerability or whatever,
[02:57] I just kind of swapped out for the easier solution.
[03:03] This is biologically normal, right?
[03:05] So I don't mean to suggest that you're in any way broken because this is the way your brain works.
[03:12] This is the way a lot of brains work.
[03:14] And so moving to a place, finding an emotional response in a given situation that is both socially acceptable and justifies inaction,
[03:24] or even better, justifies inaction and at the same time gets you attention,
[03:31] this is like choice behavior for the young brain.
[03:35] The young brain matches onto this behavior and then solidifies it into a default response.
[03:41] So you go from being able to meaningfully take in the world the way it is,
[03:47] and essentially using these stimuluses when you're confronted with them,
[03:51] to then find a way to justify staying stuck.
[03:57] And oftentimes we do it in a way that seems super productive.
[04:02] Of course I should be grateful.
[04:05] Of course wanting more than what I have is greedy.
[04:08] Of course men like me don't pursue that kind of thing.
[04:14] But these kinds of rationalizations are all designed to act, again,
[04:21] as this almost preservative layer to keep the flower from seeing the real world,
[04:28] to keep it pressed and in a safe space so that you don't have to go out and do the things.
[04:34] As we work to this, as we talk through this over the, you know, tomorrow's episode as well,
[04:40] we're going to figure out kind of what to do about it.
[04:44] And how do we take those really, really strong responses that we get
[04:48] and not turn them into all of the normal kind of negative things that we would have expression wise,
[04:56] all of the kind of hard responses.
[04:58] We're going to learn to subvert that and turn it into something useful over the next two episodes.