As I explained in the last post, I went into a Christian cult looking for a way to preserve this incredible feeling of love and bliss I experienced as a child. The tool I was given was hypervigilance. That tool became a sort of algorithm of conditioning in my brain. A full 7 years later, I left religion altogether. I still believed in God, but I knew I needed to walk away from the form of organized religion.
But here’s the funny about conditioning: it doesn’t need the original environment or belief structures to continue running in your brain.
We know this on some level in our culture when we think about trauma recovery. We see a veteran having a PTSD flashback experience. The soldier comes home from war. He lives in an environment where there is no war. But the conditioning he picked up in a warzone is still running in his brain. How do we help the trauma victim heal from the trauma?
It’s been helpful for me to see this in a different way. It’s not that the original conditioning is bad. It’s actually a sign of health and wellbeing for the mind to quickly learn new conditioning in a high stress environment as a way of protecting us. It’s when there is a mismatch between old conditioning and a new environment that we see it as bad.
The conditioning is neutral. It’s just a meme or code running through your brain designed to protect you. Yay brain! Thanks for keeping us alive from perceived threats.
So what does this have to do with personal development?
Well, long after I stopped believing the religious stuff, I still had the base layer of conditioning: hypervigilance. In particular, I was taught to be hypervigilant over my thoughts and inner life. If I wanted this nice feeling–and who doesn’t want to feel never ending joy?–I needed to watch my mind.
Here’s some of the verses I memorized to support this:
“Guard your heart, for from it are the wellsprings of life” “Take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” “Be perfect, even as your heavenly father is perfect.” “Now those who belong to Christ Jesus crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.”
The funny thing about conditioning is that it needs to be very simple. It does not understand theological nuance. The conditioning I picked up sounded more like that Christmas song “You better watch out, you better not cry, because Santa Claus is coming to town.”
My song went more like this, “You better be hypervigilant so you can be perfect. If you do this right, you’ll feel never ending joy all the time.” I was explicitly taught that being perfect is 100% possible, as long as you’re in this special state of grace. You needed to be “in Christ.” When God looked at you, he saw Christ, and Christ was perfect, so therefore you would be perfect.
The road is narrow, we were told, and few find it. If you achieve it, you will feel the overwhelming love of God at all times, even in martyrdom and the most intense suffering you can imagine. You will then be a beacon of love to the world, and help more people live in this amazing state of bliss.
They might have used other words, but when you take all the things I was told, and distill it down to a simple algorithm a brain can process and execute on, that’s the gist of it.
~~
I came into personal development for a very simple reason: I wanted to make more money so I could pay off my large student loan balance, and I didn’t know how to do that with a philosophy degree.
But of course I was drawn to the personalities who focused on changing your mindset, getting your mind right, doing “thought work.” My old conditioning was drawn towards what it knew. Sort of like someone who keeps dating the same person over and over again, wondering why their relationships always turn out the same.
Instead of being a spiritual elite, I would become a professional elite.
The problem was, I didn’t really like what I was doing. It was boring and required a set of skills I had no interest in acquiring. Not for their own sake, anyways, not for the fun and enjoyment of it. I was only going through this personal torture because I had some old conditioning that told me if I worked really hard monitoring what’s in my head, I could get what I was really after: peace of mind.
Instead of doing this list of spiritual exercises to protect my experience of God, so I could be a spiritual elite, I needed to pay thousands of dollars for coaching, listen to podcasts, and work really, really hard to monitor my thinking so I could be a self-development elite and “successful” and “wealthy.”
It’s funny, I came to personal development just so I could figure out how to make more money to pay off my student loans. That’s not super complicated. You get a job, keep more than you spend, and chip away at the loans until they are paid off. But with the old conditioning, I fell right back into hypervigilance and tried to control my thoughts so I could be “elite” or “good” at something. Which, in my mind, was how I got the nice feeling. I felt bad with the loans, therefore, paying them off at lightning speed would make me feel good again!
Old conditioning + personal development = hypervigilance disguised as personal growth
It was all very innocent and due to a simple misunderstanding. I thought my okayness came from being hypervigilant.
~~
When I came across the understanding I coach from now, it was so simple, I couldn’t really see what was on offer. I was still carrying around this piece of conditioning, trying to insert it into these new insights I was having.
It’s really amazing how much has fallen away for me in the last two years. My relationship with my husband is so much more peaceful. We communicate more from a place of honesty and love, and less from insecurity. I left the career I was trying to build in corporate sales, and realized I really, really love growing marijuana. Ha! That came out of left field.
My pregnancy was easy. It wasn’t just that I had a pretty easy time of it. Even when it looked hard and complicated and scary, I lived from this different place that made the whole experience okay. I still would experience bouts of intense anxiety, but it no longer looked like there was something for me to do or fix. It was just there as part of the process. The 15 years of chronic depression fell away totally and completely.
In fact, the reduction in my personal suffering was so dramatic, I started to think I had something to do with it. See, even though I didn’t believe the content of the religious beliefs, even though I didn’t believe the content of the personal development stuff, the old conditioning is still in my brain. That’s how conditioning works. It’s supposed to be subconscious and undetectable. It works best when you don’t notice it.
There have been studies on attraction that show men are attracted to women with certain characteristics in their eyes. It turns out, those characteristics correlate with youth and fertility. A man can look at two images of the same woman, but one of the images has been manipulated so that the eyes have these youthful characteristics. When asked why he thinks one is more sexually attractive than the other, he will make up reasons that don’t exist! That’s how good our subconscious conditioning is at going undetected.
~~
As I have mentioned before, there is a mysterious kindness of life drawing us back to who we really are. Even the apparent suffering is there to bring us back to our natural state of health and wellbeing. Yes, the conditioning is there and real. And ultimately, it’s proof of our innate health and wellbeing. But we are not our conditioning. And for some reason, life would like you to know that. I don’t know why. But it’s kind, and it wants to bring you home.
So life is bringing me home, slowly. I had a baby in January. A beautiful, perfect little girl. I was ready for this post-partum thing! I know how to handle bad feelings! In fact, I have this new understanding that helps me navigate things.
BUT the old conditioning was still there, undetected. And it, oh so innocently, did its cut and paste routine.
My mind decided it knew how postpartum should look. Yes, I would need some extra time to recover because I had a c-section. 12 weeks should be good, right? I’ll ease into working out. I’ll support my body with these healthy foods. I’ve already raised other people’s babies, so I know what I’m doing.
All of that makes a lot of sense. Babies are easy for me, and my baby is extra easy. She started sleeping through the night, every night by 8 weeks. I was able to go back to work part-time. I loved my job, and it was great to have a break from the baby. Sure, I wasn’t building my new coaching business like I thought I should, and some things would slip through the cracks with the household stuff. And oh…. My husband is now working 70+ hour work weeks, I don’t have any family who lives nearby, I had to fire my nanny, can’t afford the going LA rate for a new nanny….
And all of a sudden I felt like shit. I got my period. I had no idea that’s what usually happens when the baby starts sleeping through the night. My hormones went crazy. And we’re in the largest crime surge in Los Angeles in decades, so going for walks around the block in DTLA became a non-option. I don’t have an income, inflation skyrockets… Every week a new, horrible thing would be added to the list.
Insert old conditioning.
Hypervigilance + list of things you’re “supposed to do” = happiness.
~~
Once again, it was all very simple. I hated parts of my childhood growing up, and it looked to me that it was up to me to never repeat that experience. I wanted nice feelings. I knew I could have them, because I’ve had them before. I just needed to be hypervigilant over my thinking, so I could do the things I needed to do, so I could make it so I had nice feelings.
But what does hypervigilance do? It stirs up thought. A lot of stirred up thinking doesn’t feel very good. It feels like exhaustion and overwhelm. It looks like collapsing on the couch and disappearing into my phone to escape my thinking for a few short hours while the baby naps. It looks like thinking I’m a shitty partner and mother because I’m not doing this massive list of things I should be doing, to get us the life we need to have, so we can feel good.
I’m not only making myself feel bad, I’m making the people I love most in the world feel bad. And if I’m just a little more hypervigilant about it, I can get back to the nice feeling.
OF COURSE I think take this understanding, slap on the old conditioning, and then drive myself crazy. That’s what a mind does.
~~
Mavis Karn is a three principles practitioner who uses the phrase, “That’s a cool app.” She points to the wisdom and intelligence in our bodies taking care of us even when we’re unaware of it, and says, “what a cool app! I wonder what other cool apps we have we don’t know about.”
I’ve been “procrastinating” and feeling worse and worse, until I finally gave up on seeing it as a problem I needed to solve. Problem solving wasn’t working anyways.
Here’s what I’ve realized. Hormonal systems are very sensitive to chronic stress, and hypervigilance creates chronic stress in the body. My body was giving me the gift of procrastination to help me recover from making a human being. What a cool app! It did the same thing in college. Back then it was burnout trying to protect me from this insane schedule I thought I needed to maintain to be a good girl. I just saw it was this bad habit of procrastination I needed to overcome because I had some old conditioning.
Religion and the cult of self-improvement taught me to gaslight the wisdom of my body. But life was too kind to let that go on forever.
~~
Know what’s amazing? My baby started teething last week. My easy baby needs me to hold her, comfort her, and do silly faces all day. She doesn’t want to sit in a car seat. She doesn’t want to take long naps so I can make the apartment look perfect and tackle my huge pile of paperwork. I’m not even sure I’m going to be able to go vote in what I think is a very important local election for Los Angeles.
And for the first time I’m really seeing what this conditioning is. It’s a vestigial organ that has no purpose. It’s this free floating piece of code rattling around in my brain, causing me suffering when I believe it, with no reason for its continued existence.
I read through 20 years of journals last weekend thinking I was going to find what went wrong, what happened in the past to cause all this personal suffering in my present, and maybe how I was wrong or bad to cause all this. I didn’t find it. I saw my innocence. I saw a little girl, and then a young woman trusting the adults in her life who told her perfection was attainable. I saw this brilliant, loving girl praying for everyone she knew to experience God, because when she experienced God it was pure bliss, and she wanted the whole world to feel that.
I don’t suffer because of the things in my past. I suffer when I believe my old conditioning. I just get a doomy feeling sometimes, like we all do. I feel something nagging at the back of my mind, and I feel a little anxiety. My old conditioning gets triggered, and I’m off to the races looking for all the ways I’m wrong and bad. If I scour my thinking enough, I’ll find the bug, and fix it.
It’s like I have an old pair of shoes that don’t fit. In fact, they weren’t even my shoes to begin with. They don’t even match. But I’ve been trying to stuff my feet into them for as long as I can remember. Every time I see them in my closet, I need to try them on, just to make sure. Just to see if it’s really my fault they don’t fit. Maybe I can change my feet and get it right next time.
I’m not sure what’s going to happen to the shoes. Right now it feels like I don’t always notice putting them on, but when I notice them on my feet, I take them off. And sometimes I notice when I’m putting them on, and stop. Maybe one day they’ll stay in the back of the closet. Maybe they’ll even disappear.
I don’t know.
I don’t think it matters either. They’re just ill fitting shoes. They mean absolutely nothing about me, my feet, my purpose in life, or the kind of work I should do. They mean nothing about my partner, my baby, my body, my health. They mean nothing about my childhood, the spiritual abuse I went through, or the decade of major depression I experienced. I don’t need to make the shoes bigger or make my feet smaller, or just have a better attitude about them pinching my feet.
It doesn’t mean anything if I put them on without realizing it. It doesn’t mean anything if I wear them for a week before I notice them.
It’s just an old pair of shoes that never fit me, that aren’t even mine.
For the Harry Potter fans, it’s a Boggart. And I say, “Riddikulus!”
**What a cool app!**
What if the intelligence of life is in all things?
What if it’s supposed to hurt when you touch a hot stove?
What if the design of life is such that a lot of thinking is meant to feel bad?
What if it’s all there to nudge you back to your innate health and wellbeing?
What if it’s not up to you to settle your thinking? What if the intelligence of the system is that it settles all on its own?
What a cool app… wonder what other cool apps we have we don’t know about…
Practical Wisdom 