mental discipline

OCD Disorders and Obsession So, most of us have at least some OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). I mean really, everyone gets obsessed or goes through an obsessive phase about something, a hobby or someone at some point in their life. Usually when you are younger... However, for those special people who have obsession as a dominant part of their persona and those souls that ended up enduring as the object of the obsessiveness life is viewed through a very different lens. Let's back this up a little bit and deconstruct this mind space so you can see how we even get to this place where obsession takes over. Before an obsession leads a person to spending enough nights outside someone's house... enough to flatten and grind vegetation down to nothing in various places. Before an obsession leads to abusive pathological behavior. Before an obsession leads you to commit crime after crime, theft after theft, vandalism after vandalism, harassment after harassment, what is really at the bottom of it. While I am not pretending to know everything, nor every variation of this issue, a few insights have come out of this process. Insights, Perspective: Understanding and Misunderstanding As people were constantly looking around at our surroundings at other people at their lives. What are we really seeing? The people we are observing? Or are we looking at a mirror image of what's in our own head. We have to rely on multiple sources of information to have a more wholistic view of what is going on. Collectively, this is a necessity to where our collective consciousness is. That's part of the basis of most misunderstandings. Anyway, it is part of the assumptions that we make... whether or not they're correct. This is the fundamental flaw of envy. You're staring at someone else, thinking all kinds of things, but you may or may not have complete and true verification of the facts... or their side of the story on how accurate are correct you are about anything. Maybe you do have some accurate information but you still don't experience things from their point of view you're still judging from your own point of view. Context can be everything. Wanting What We don't Have and Other Pesky Emotions Each of us has our own self our own identity and ideas our own emotions and somehow we have to find a way to get along. At some point every single one of us wants something that we don't have. When this happens we look around us, naturally... and anyone that looks like they might have it can become the object of what we desire. Notice that might is the key word in that sentence. We only go by superficial appearance, what we can see from the surface and from the sliver of a glimpse we may have into someone else's life. In facing this mental conundrum, we could keep an open mind and maybe say to themselves... hmm, well that circumstance may look like one thing but I bet I am not seeing everything... However, someone who is more committed to wanting what they think someone else has may end up making decisions that are more consistent and will support the thinking that someone else has something they don't. If this attitude is not kept in check and in perspective, it can be easy to emotionally spiral from a place of figuring out a healthy way to satisfy desires to a not so happy place of becoming the person who tears down other people's lives and becomes a criminal to satisfy those desires. If at this point we don't learn how to moderate temper and keep those feelings in check, this process can get out of control before we ever know it. This is the point we go from being just another frustrated individual looking for some kind of change, into being this creepy individual doing all kinds of abusive and criminal behavior. As a disclaimer... I'm going to say I don't know all the variations of this scenario, nor do I understand the clinical side of mental and emotional illnesses. This article along with all of the others are a result of our first hand experiences. Based on what we have learned about our circumstances, the persons stalking us, who they are, what we know about their lives, the discussions we've had, the effort that we put into to changing the circumstances... in this case this is what we have been dealing with. How Do I Work with My Feelings and Why Should I want to? Some of this may sound basic, I mean too basic... but there's a few things that you can do. First, we have to remember that we learn whether we are consciously trying to learn or just cruising through life. So, those little things that we never give much though to throughout the day often end up having a bigger impact on our life over time. This does involve some self-control and self-reflection but it's not all bad in fact you can develop some skills with these two techniques. 1. The 2 Minute Rule. This is something that we developed in our family many years ago because we have a family member that would incessantly complain about really just one person and it was never ending. It was so bad that you couldn't have a normal relationship with this person everything ended up coming around to how much they couldn't stand someone else. After they died of cancer some of us got together and said hey let's not do this what can we do to not fall into this trap of never ending complaining? Does the basis of our relationships have to be negative? This is why the 2-minute rule came into being and it works like this: If for any reason any at all you need to complain (no judgement) you get it out of your system in 2 minutes or less and then you must start working towards a positive outcome. If not the listening party reserves the right to walk away. (Seriously, who wants to hear constant complaining) That's it simple and straightforward. Sounds like a mental prison though doesn't it? If you really attached to your complaining it could be. If you're training your mind to think differently and your training yourself to emotionally respond differently it won't be. A Mental Prison or a Way to Fundamentally Change Thought Processes Here's what happened. At some point and I'm not sure when.. I just started to think differently. My first line of thinking was resistance. Even if you can't stand someone else's complaining, that does not preclude you from wanting to have your own complaints be dominant. After I worked through my initial resistance (remember I had a life with a very negative person and my motivation to the unknown was prompted by this) my motivation shifted. After a while, in these circumstances where I hit a figurative wall of insufficient understanding, I naturally started looking for something different something positive, something I wasn't seeing. This wasn't a light switch transition. This was a quiet transition that only steps into the foreground of consciousness when you come across one of those stereotypical people that complains constantly. At that point, it becomes clear. You were no longer like complaining person nor do you relate to relationships and human connections in the same way they do. 2. Leave some space for what you don't know. No matter how smart you are and no matter how much you do know no one knows everything there's just no way. We all have to have assumptions. If for no other reason than the amount of effort throughout most people's day takes up the conscious space and energy, often there is just not enough 'personal capital' to then expand our conscious perspective to include all the things, relationships, circumstance that we are not putting conscious energy on. Life is such that we can't live without them. That's half the reason stalkers can do what they do, they live in the assumptive spaces of lives. This is also the space where they cause the most damage. We likely won't stop making assumptions... but in dealing with a stalker, you will become very aware of the assumptions you do make, and the blindspots those assumptions create. You also become aware of what you don't know. So we have a space even if it's a very small space for that possibility of something that you may not know. These are a few things that I have learned from surviving some really negative people and a stalker.