Self-Coaching

It’s critical for you to understand that when it comes to your awareness, your conscious thoughts are not alone. With conscious awareness, you can, for example, be totally conscious and aware of your compulsive, worrisome ruminations: What if I get sick? What will happen to my job? What if I lose my job? What if...? but equally unconscious of the reflexive insecurity that spawns these neurotically laden thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. So, the question is this: with all the cross-fertilization—conscious-unconscious melding—how in the world do we separate truth from untruth, facts from emotionally driven fiction? In this Self-Coaching podcast, join me as I help you prepare for the specific Mind-Talk steps that will enable you to make these critical distinctions.

Today, we’ll discuss three types of thinking:1.) Spontaneous thoughts. Unprovoked thoughts that erupt spontaneously into consciousness, Oops, I forgot to make that call. These are thoughts triggered by the unconscious that emerge into consciousness from the unconscious.2.) Conscious, intentional thinking.3.) Insecurity-Driven thoughts. These are reflexive thoughts that evoke doubt, fear, or negativity. These thoughts are not consciously driven (you may, for example, become aware of your fearful thoughts after you feel them).

In today’s Self-Coaching podcast I want to introduce you to my technique of Mind Talk. Mind Talk is a four-step program that will allow you to assert the full power of your conscious mind in order to neutralize the distorted, neurotic thinking that sustains anxiety, depression, and all emotional struggle. This technique is the core of my philosophy of Self-Coaching and will require a series of podcasts to fully equip you with the foundation necessary to succeed in liberating yourself from your struggles.

Today’s episode is the first of the series.

I begin by laying the preliminary groundwork for the steps ahead. We begin with a more through understanding, a demystifying, of how we think. Our conscious thoughts need to be seen in a different light. You need to understand that you are not your neurotic thoughts, these are interlopers, perpetrated by insecurity. Today’s podcast will help you recognize the importance of separating your true self from the neurotic entanglements of habituated, insecurity-driven thinking. Next week we’ll explore the role that the unconscious plays and following next week’s episode, we’ll begin a discussion of the four steps involved in applying Mind Talk.

If you’ve been listening to my recent podcasts, you would have heard me say that the reason you struggle emotionally is that you have become a passive victim of old, insecurity-driven habits. And make no mistake, a passive mind will always be susceptible to manipulation by insecurity. Essentially, a passive mind, one that capitulates to the doubts, fears, and negativity of insecurity, insists that neurotic struggle is….well, just the way it is.

Bull!

Once you awaken your sleeping giant of consciousness (active-mind) you can learn to overcome neurotic passivity and begin the important process of neutralizing reflexive, anxious thinking. Join me in this Self-Coaching podcast to see how a traumatic experience from my past led to my understanding of the absolute power your conscious mind has over that in you, which seems powerless.

In today’s Self-Coaching podcast, I talk about decontaminating and neutralizing the destructive, reflexive habits of the past that operate just beneath your level of consciousness. These less-than-conscious influences, which I call part of your shadow personality, are the reason why we struggle. Keep in mind that these habits are less than conscious, not unconscious!Using my Self-Coaching technique of ‘mind talk,’ you can learn to bring these destructive habits out of the shadow and into the full light of conscious awareness. Once exposed, you can apply my four steps that will help you begin a process of neutralizing the neurotic baggage of the past while putting you on a liberated, uncontaminated path of wellness.

We all have what I call a ‘shadow personality.’ Although a non-nurturing parental environment can be a major contributor to the shadow personality, any disruptive developmental challenges that all children face—fear, poverty, separations, loss, illness, and so on, can result in feelings of vulnerability and insecurity. These influences comprise the shadow of your here-and-now personality. Like the backdrop of a play, the shadow personality has an indirect, reflexive influence on your life. And it’s these influences that constitute the insecurity-driven habits that fuel your emotional struggles.

In this podcast, I introduce a new Self-Coaching tool: conscious correction. With conscious correction, you will learn how to bring reflexive neurotic aspects of your shadow personality into focus, enabling you to “pump the brakes” slowing down your worrisome habits while neutralizing the acquired, destructive influences of the past.

Let me wind up my Self-Coaching series on the non-nurturing parental environment with a discussion of the indifferent parent and the defective, abusive parent. Although these examples represent extreme forms of defective parenting, to a greater or lesser extent, they play a part in the lives of many who suffer emotionally as adults.

Essentially, the indifferent parent is one whose life and personal needs supersede their child’s. This type of parent may be openly neglectful and distracted. They are less likely to be held to account for the damage this lack of connectedness has on a child’s sense of worth and self-esteem. They are too selfish to establish an adequate and loving relationship with the child.

The Defective, Abusive Parent, in contrast, tends to have a much more direct and deleterious effect on the child’s emotional development. Many psychologically wounded parents suffer from alcoholism, debilitating anxiety and depression, personality disorders, drug addiction, and so on. As you can imagine, a defective parent’s ability to provide an adequate nurturing environment is limited by the extent of their dysfunction. Because of this dysfunction, there could be neglect, emotional or physical abuse, along with erratic and inconsistent attempts to show love. Children who grow up in these homes are the children of chaos.

Last week’s podcast dealt with the overcontrolling, anxious parent. In this Self-Coaching podcast, I distinguish between the overcontrolling parent and the co-dependent parent. Whereas the overcontrolling parent is invested in controlling and protecting every aspect of a child’s life, the co-dependent parent lives vicariously through the child to compensate for their own shortcomings. Because of their own emotional neediness, this is a parent who, rather than being the source of emotional stability for the child, winds up using the child to feed their own fragile ego.

Back around 1969, overly anxious, controlling parents began to be called “helicopter parents.” Helicopter parents have a tendency to hover over their children—helicopter-like—micromanaging every aspect of a child’s life, saying, “Watch out!” “Don’t pet that dog!” “Don’t eat that.” The child becomes merely an extension of the parent’s anxieties, fears, and insecurities. In an attempt to stay one step ahead of anticipated mayhem, helicopter parents just can’t help jumping in and getting involved. Too involved!

Join me in this week’s Self-Coaching episode as I explore the ego-shaping influences of growing up with anxious parents.

In the Self-Coaching episode, you’ll learn that by recognizing the similarities between your present-day insecurities and the nurturing/non-nurturing environment provided by your parents (as well as other significant shaping influences) during your early developmental years, you give yourself an important edge. You gain the ability to step apart from your own personal mental congestion and recognize how your present struggles have been shaped by your early learning and conditioning—the programming of your brain.

In this Self-Coaching episode, I ask the question: is it possible for therapy to become…addictive? No question that receiving professional guidance and perspective can be appropriate in times of intense stress or duress, but over time, ongoing palliative therapy can easily morph into a dependency. Especially when you begin to believe that you don’t have to deal with your day-to-day struggles; I’ll just wait until I see my therapist.

Once you become convinced that you don’t have to handle your struggles anymore, or worse, that you can’t handle them, then the die is cast. Why do you think people remain in therapy for years and years? It’s because they’ve become convinced they can’t possibly do any of this psychological problem-solving on their own. As self-trust dwindles, so too does your capacity for psychological self-regulation.