Escaping Permanent Misery

In our second year of life, we select and consolidate our worldview. . . This happens before we acquire the necessary life experience and maturity to understand the nature of the obligations we assume in this way. . . For most of our lives, we strengthen this worldview and protect it from any threat. We avoid all situations that threaten this worldview.

-Eric Berne.

If for years you seem to be stuck in the same intolerable situation – constantly running out of money two days before the paycheck, always ending up with uncaring and cold partners, remaining stuck for decades in a job you hate, feeling permanently frustrated in everything you undertake, hating your living situation for years on end –  the only way out of it is to ask yourself these questions:

1. If I didn’t have to be constantly miserable about and struggling with this situation, what would I be doing instead?
2. What specifically is so scary to me about this thing that I’d be doing instead?

Accepting that one remains in the intolerable situation because its familiarity is comforting is hard because a feeling of guilt immediately follows. “If I choose to live this way, then I must be to blame,” people think. But this way of thinking is precisely one of the defenses that Berne is talking about in the quote I gave above. There is no need to feel bad. This is an adaptive mechanism that everybody uses. All it means is that you are human, and that’s definitely not your fault. 

An example of how this worked for me is under the fold.

I couldn’t get published (as much as I wanted). I dreamt of doing tons of research, I knew I’d love it but I just couldn’t get myself to the table and write. In the rare times when I could get myself to the table and write, I’d produce something people didn’t want to publish. After being rejected by at least 30 journals over the years and feeling like a total loser, I finally asked myself what was making the alternative so scary to me.

Here is a list I came up with in answering this question.

“I’m afraid of becoming a successful research scholar because. . .

• many of the most successful research scholars I know are either horrible human beings or have pathetic personal lives. Or both. And I don’t want to be like them;
• if I let go of the role of a promising young scholar and become a scholar who stopped promising and has started fulfilling the promise, this will mean I’m no longer young;
• people will hate me;
• I will have to come into contact with many new people, and that scares me;
• I will be very happy and I don’t deserve that.”

And then I prepared responses to each point:

• but many successful scholars are great people and are not miserable. For instance, Jonathan Mayhew.
• I’m not young either way, so what’s the point of being an old loser as opposed to an old successful person?
• no, they won’t, that’s ridiculous. Talking about these undefined “people” simply allows me to avoid assigning the responsibility for making me feel like I can only please if I fail where it rightfully belongs (see Berne’s quote).
• Ditto.
• Ditto.

Since managing to interiorize the responses and displace the original list, my career as  a research scholar has flourished.