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Drama. Sometimes, there's nothing better than a big juicy drama, either as a lead player or a bit one. Drama can feel like living. There's so much emotionality, so much STUFF happening that you must be alive, you must be feeling, this all must be real, right? Drama can make you feel like you're IN – part of – something. Well, the something you're in is your own muck and you're face down, squirming in it and calling that motion "living." Drama, in other words, is a means of not living because drama is about being in a play and performing for an audience. Life is offstage. It's time to close the show. Here's how.

Cast of Characters

Lead: You.

One way to know you're the lead in the drama is if you think someone else is the lead in the drama. "I'm so over that fight I had with mom; she just won't let it go." Drama stems from a factual completion – like a breakup – without an emotional completion. Drama is about pretending. Pretending you're over it; pretending you don't care anymore; pretending you're unaffected; pretending you're not angry. Drama is a fake connecting thread to a person when the actual thread has been cut. Instead of connecting to each other via real communication, you connect via acting. If there are secrets, secondhand information, lots of unsaid stuff between you and someone else, and big emotions about the person – secret glee that they didn't get that job! rage that they did! - then you are the lead in a drama.

Bit Player: You.

If you "got sucked into" (read: "chose to participate in") someone else's drama, you are a bit player in a drama. Bit players generally get into the show by making unwitting statements – "Congrats on your new job!" only to have the person's spouse go, "What? You're quitting?" If you invest your energy in these people's crizzap, you're a bit player. In other words, you've made their drama into your drama. All of a sudden you find yourself trying to right something when you didn't even know you'd done anything wrong; you talk to other friends about it; you send apologetic or frustrated emails to the main players. If you both accidentally incite something AND subsequently get involved in its aftermath, you're a bit player.

The Ex, Mom, Co-Worker, Friend

Actually, no one else matters; this drama stars YOU.

Prologue

You dated The Ex for a few years before the two of you broke up a year or so ago; you're still up in The Ex's junk (like maybe you're in business together); you're OVER it you tell yourself; The Ex can go off and do whatever – you don't care. Then, via secondhand information (from someone who's about to become a Bit Player), you find out that The Ex is dating someone else.

Curtain rises.

Act I

You stew for a few days. It's agonizing for you. What did Bit Player say exactly? What does Bit Player know? I mean, it's not like you care about The Ex anymore; you're just curious. You spend a lot of time telling yourself you don't care. You go on fishing expeditions and pretend that's not what you're doing. You ask your source, "Hey, how's Bit Player doing? What's Bit Player up to? You know, I haven't talked to Bit Player in ages; what's Bit Player's email?" Maybe you contact Bit Player to get more info. At any rate, at some point, you are unable to let this go. For someone who's over it, you suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure are putting in a lot of work and emotions in finding out what's going on. So you decide to contact The Ex. You know you have to say something innocuous and casual – this, after all, is the character you're projecting to your audience (which is primarily comprised of you but also contains your friends, your family, The Ex, your co-workers – anyone with whom you're being fake about your feelings).

So you contact The Ex in some manner. At a core level, you know this is going to get some kind of reaction out of The Ex – that's the whole point. But, because you're acting so totally cool and uncaring about the whole thing and because your comment is so meaningless in and of itself – well, any reaction is surely not about YOUR drama. If The Ex goes all crazy, then that's about The Ex and not about you – or so you tell yourself. Of course, if you're not looking for a reaction… why do you even bother saying anything? You shove that thought aside. "Hey, heard you and your new relationship ran into Bit Player." While you're at it, you decide to send Bit Player an email, just to dig as much as you can about a person you claim you don't care about anymore.

Curtain.

Act II

Scene 1

You know – K-N-O-W – that this is going to set off a shitstorm in The Ex. In fact, that's the whole point – to evoke a burst of emotions in The Ex. Because if The Ex gets all upset, then you can relax; The Ex's upset means that The Ex still secretly cares. Phew. Of course, you tell yourself that you never anticipated there would be any reaction to your casual text message. Telling yourself that The Ex overreacted feels good! You now go about your business like nothing happened.

Scene 2

Bit Player receives Lead's email. Lead's email is filled with vagueness, and you can't exactly tell what's going on. What did The Ex say to Lead? It looks like The Ex put some really nasty statements in your mouth. It's all "Whisper Down the Valley" in which one person told another person who told another person. You don't know what was said to whom, but you feel anxious – like you somehow did something wrong. You feel terribly misunderstood and decide to correct things; you feel something got out of control and it's somehow your responsibility to control it, as if it should have been in your control to begin with. You respond to Lead, trying to explain yourself.

Scene 3

Lead gets Bit Player's email. You don't know what to make of it. It wasn't very informative. Now you really need to know what went down between Bit Player and The Ex. Your emotions are in a total flurry, though maybe, beneath it all, is a kind of depression. There's energy, anxiety – you don't even know why or what you want. You do a lot of work to convince yourself that you're just experiencing natural curiosity about a friend because, at some level, you know your emotions are way outsized for the situation. At a very core level you CAN'T be upset about The Ex because, if you look there, well, that's a total emotional black hole. You act even harder, all the while digging around for some piece of information that will make all these feelings go away.

Scene 4

Meanwhile, Bit Player gets a furious email from The Ex. "What the fuck did you say to Lead? Lead says you revealed everything about our conversation. Jesus, what is wrong with you? I thought I could trust you. You're an ass."

You fly into a tailspin. Huh? What? You discuss this with friends. "I haven't seen either of them in years. Last I heard, they were long broken up. In fact, The Ex said they were really good friends now and were both off seeing other people. What the fuck is going on? Now The Ex hates me – and I didn't even do anything. And why the fuck did Lead say anything?" You can't really be mad at the secondhand source for saying something to Lead. After all, if you genuinely thought you were saying something non-gossipy and meaningless, then the secondhand source didn't break any trust. And anyway, when did The Ex's personal life become your secret? You write a baffled, hurt, and maybe kind of angry email to The Ex.

Curtain.

Act III

Scene 1

Bit Player receives an email from The Ex. In fact, a flurry of emails go back and forth between you and The Ex whereby you wind up kind of apologizing for something you don't even think you did wrong. It's not like The Ex told you the new relationship was a secret. The Ex is accusing you of breaking trust – and you're letting The Ex do exactly that. You have bought into The Ex's belief that you did something wrong. But you can't quite figure out how to correct it because, no matter how much you explain yourself to The Ex, The Ex is still mad. You're looking for The Ex to excuse you from the drama, to say, "Sorry, you're right; I was drunk when I wrote that email; ignore it; you did nothing wrong." You keep trying to get that response from The Ex but it just doesn't happen. You're at a loss. You're in the drama-nado now, swirling around, out of control, trying to get everything back to where it was and utterly failing.

Scene 2

The Lead just can't let this go. You hate feeling this way, but you have to find out what was happening. You don't even know if you care. Things were in some kind of stasis before, and now they're not. The email with Bit Player wasn't satisfying; your secondhand source doesn't know anything more; while you know you got a rise of The Ex (thank God), it's not really that satisfying. What you want is to rip open The Ex's skull and find out exactly what emotions lie in there, to somehow know for all time specifically what The Ex feels about you and then somehow get ongoing updates wired directly from The Ex's subconscious to yours. It's all so stressful and depressing. There's not really much more you can think of to do – of course, you've been in this emotional space before. "Kind of depressed all the time" is your steady state, and you slide right back into it.

And so it ends, kind of boring and unresolved. Lead, Bit Player, and The Ex are all slightly riled up then it all dribbles away to a space where no one knows anything more than they knew before but everyone's a little bit angrier and disconnected.

Curtain. Omnes exeunt.

Oh, By The Way…

If you think you're Lead, well guess what? The Ex thinks the same thing. The Ex is going through a marginally different version of the exact same drama that Lead is. In The Ex's drama, The Ex is Lead and you are The Ex.

What's This Show Really About?

So the first thing to recognize is that, whether you're a Lead or a Bit Player, the show is not about anyone other than you. In the example above, you're probably not into The Ex anymore. However, the breakup with The Ex set off a terrible cascade of self-esteem issues with you, self-esteem issues you brought to the relationship (and which, in all likelihood, contributed to its end). In other words, in a certain sense, you're right – you are over The Ex. What you're not over is hating yourself or feeling that you'll never be good enough or any of a host of other issues. You invested The Ex with meaning, like "The Ex is in love with me; therefore I'm loveable." When The Ex left, so did your loveableness. So the drama is not about getting an emotional rise out The Ex; it's about getting an emotional rise out of YOURSELF via The Ex.

The Bit Player is no different. "The Ex hates me!" "The Lead thinks I said horrible things!" You have invested these people's responses with meaning: if The Ex hates you, then you're horrible; if the Lead perceives you badly then you're a bad person. You are turning to these external people to correct feelings within yourself – if you're liked and understood then you can feel okay about what you did. In the above example, you believe you somehow did something wrong by saying whatever it is you said. But you only believe it because THEY believe it, i.e. in fact you don't actually think you did anything wrong. You simply feel in trouble for something; you've probably felt "wrong" in a lot of other situations. This is a pattern for you. You invest in the drama in order to feel "right" about yourself.

Ending The Run

Step 1: So the first step to getting offstage and into your life, is by getting real. Getting real in this case means acknowledging your feelings as valid even as you're judging them. Do both at once.

"I know it's stupid but I feel [depressed, stabbed in the gut, enraged, etc.] that The Ex is seeing someone else."

Putting down your feelings means putting down yourself. Own them. If you can own them without the judgment, even better. Don't worry about what you "should" feel; focus on what you DO feel.

Step 2: Ask yourself when you've felt this way before. In a past relationship? With dad? With more or less everyone you get close to? Patterns can be very tough to crack. However, knowing you're in a pattern can also be weirdly calming. A pattern tells you it's totally about you, a fact which can often take the sting out of whatever the other person was up to.

Step 3: Figure out what you really feel about the other person. Are you still in love with The Ex? Do you, the Bit Player, really feel you've wronged Lead and/or The Ex? Give yourself permission to tell yourself the truth. Play the following game – "If I were someone who… what would I feel?"

"If I were someone who was genuinely no longer in love with The Ex, what would I feel when I found out The Ex was dating someone else?"

"If I were someone who believed I did nothing wrong, what would I do when I received The Ex's email?"

What you would feel can serve as a reality check to help you figure out what to do next.

Step 4: Examine what you DO feel but behave based on what you WOULD feel. Would, not should. If you would feel about The Ex's new relationship something ala "that's cool" then ask yourself how someone who felt "that's cool" would behave. Would that person yell? Write detached notes? Start dating someone they didn't care about just to get revenge?

If you're the Bit Player, would you write a note back to The Ex? If you would, what would you say in it – would you still defend yourself? Would you call instead of email? Would you ignore the whole thing entirely? What you would feel is actually what you do feel; you just haven't stepped into being that person yet.

Nota Bene

By the way, this is all self-help, but the truth is it's a lot easier to get through something like this with some counseling assistance. If you're in a drama, it's because you have a lot of emotion tied to something, and it's often simpler to untangle it all with a disinterested, outside party. However, whether you do it alone or with someone else, the steps are exactly the same.

The hardest thing about choosing life over drama is that, because drama is pre-scripted, you know where it's going to end. For all its emotionality, drama is safe, and it's that sense of safety that makes you show up and do the show day after day after day. Performing your life is so much easier than living it. Being real is scary when you don't know who the real you truly is. But the only way you're going to find out is by getting off that stage, by leaving your audience behind, and stepping outside into the world.

“I know, I know – I should save – but what do you think of my $250 highlights?”

“We told our friends not to buy us any presents for our engagement party; we’re better off than they are and they couldn’t afford what we wanted anyway.”

“I know it’s outside my budget, but I NEED that new car.”

“I can’t live any cheaper; I mean if I cut everything out, then why even bother?”

We often pretend that money is some external object, unrelated to internal self-definition, but how you spend your money tells you everything about how you view yourself. Do you give yourself expensive treats that you can’t afford? If you have a lot of money, do you spend it on things you don’t really care about, disposable items, like shoes you wear once for example? Do you fail to return things you dislike figuring it’s not worth the effort? The way you spend money translates to the way you live your life.

STEALING FROM PETER TO PAY FOR JEAN-PAUL

“I make six-figures a year. I bought a $700 sweater – so what? I go out to dinner all the time; I treat myself to a several hundred dollar spa treatment; my hair costs $400. I have the money so big deal!”

While this cash hemorrhage may look like you’re just enjoying the benefits of a high-paying job, you may, in fact, be mortgaging your future. The way to know is to look at the areas of your life that have nothing to do with money and see if your spending reflects a pattern that goes across all areas of your life.

Food: Do you tell yourself you want to lose weight but you’re just going to eat this cupcake then go back on your diet?

Love: Do you have “empty calorie” relationships that you kind of know are going nowhere, letting time keep drifting by without finding anything real? Or do you kind of dodge dating/relationships altogether, telling yourself you want to be in a relationship but you’re just too tired (or something) to date now and you’d rather spend time with your friends?

Work: Are you miserable at your job and keep talking about getting a new one but somehow stay at the same place anyway? Do you get irritated with your friends when they say things like, “Well maybe you should get a new job” like they just don’t get how complicated it all is? Do you procrastinate at work, doing a lot of things last-minute rather than organizing your schedule better? Do you dicker around on the internet all day at work or maybe spend an inordinate amount of time picking through Zagats to plan your overpriced evening meal?

Conflict: Do you tell everyone about your conflicts except the person you’re actually having the conflict with? Do you get upset with other people and complain rather than doing something about it? Or get all passive-aggressive on them? Or simply pretend you’re fine?

The commonality here is that you’re giving yourself a “gift” in the present in the hopes that the underlying issue will all just kind of magically work itself out in the future. You are, in effect, putting a band-aid on a gaping chest wound. Your belief is that, somehow, in the future, you’ll be this different person, this new person capable of dealing with the problem you’re failing to deal with now. You won’t. The way you change the way your future self will deal with problems is by changing the way your present-day self deals with problem. Your spending pattern, then, tells you everything you need to know.

LIVING SMALL

“Look, I have rent, car, insurance, my daughter’s school, clothes, etc. I’ve pared myself down to the bone. There’s no fat left to give up!”

Giving “everything” up is often a justification to spend big in some area unrelated to money – like you’ve made this big financial sacrifice so that should somehow “pay” for your choice to pursue an acting career. You’ve given up seemingly everything but you still can’t afford your life. There’s nothing else you can do! But, of course, there is. Living small is based on the belief that if you pull nourishment from other parts of your life, you’ll be able to heavily nourish the one part of your life that truly matters to you and that that is somehow all worth it.

When you really get down to it, when you examine your “small” life, you will see that there are many places where you’re not living so small – you’ve invented this world in which there are certain things you “can’t” give up and have organized your entire life around maintaining those. To pick the “I wanna be an actor” example:

Living Small:

· You live in a craphole studio with a roommate to cut back on your expenses.

· You shop only at thrift stores.

· You buy second-hand furniture.

· You never go out or only to places that are free.

· You have no health insurance.

Living Big:

· Your cell-phone bill is in the hundreds because you “need” a cell phone so your agent can call plus you got rid of your landline so that’s economizing right?

· You need new head shots.

· You need a great haircut – you’re an actor and you’re being judged on your looks plus you have to go to this art opening later and you know you’re going to be seen.

· You turn down “extras” work because you need to be perceived a certain way by the industry.

· You can’t take a day job because how would you audition?

· When you do do outside work, it needs to be arty because you’re an artist – like it’s okay to do costumes for a puppet show but it’s not okay to temp at an investment bank.

· You keep people in your life that you hate – your agent, other industry types – because you need to maintain connections for future work.

· You have to live in Manhattan; you cannot move to Brooklyn or Queens (well, maybe Brooklyn, but NOT Queens).

This list could go on. For someone who lives small and has given “everything” up, you sure seem to have a lot of requirements. The issue is not about wanting to pursue a career in a risky, generally low-paying field; the issue is about wanting to do it YOUR WAY. What you’re unwilling to give up is a very costly self-definition. “Starving artist” has a sort of nobility to you that “auditioning legal secretary” doesn’t. Or, even worse, “I’m 35 and it didn’t work out for me and I need to do something else with my life.” And you are paying a dear price to maintain your self-delusion. Your whole life if defined by what you’ve given up for whatever it is you claim you really want – and the more you’ve given up to get that thing (that relationship, that gig, etc.), the more it has to payoff the next time when it fails to pay off this time. Living small life=living big lie.

BUDGETING YOUR LIFE

In order to properly budget your life, you first need to detach money from meaning. Money doesn’t mean anything; material objects don’t mean anything. The problem, in fact, is your effort to derive meaning from objects. If you want a $700 sweater, by all means go get one – just realize that neither the money you spent nor the sweater itself actually means anything. If you believe they do – like if you find yourself talking to people about your $700 sweater – then you need to start examining what it is you’re using “$700 sweater” to convey. What does the object mean to you and what kind of response are you looking for from other people?

Budgeting your life doesn’t mean spending more or spending less. It means spending your resources on what it is you really want instead of purchasing alternative objects or emotions. Overspenders sabotage their futures by the way they spend in the present, i.e. they purchase things they don’t need instead of investing themselves in getting the things they do. Underspenders unequally distribute their resources; by being self-sacrificing in the present, they can justify maintaining something in their life that clearly isn’t working (job, relationship, etc.) because they’ve “paid” for it by what they’ve given up. Things can be different if you want them to be. Here’s how you do it.

If you’re an overspender:

Look at your credit card bill at the end of each month. For each $10/$100 (depending on your finances) you judge yourself to have bought unnecessary items, spend that many minutes per day thinking about what it is you really want and how you plan to get it. In other words, if you spent $1500 last month and decide that $1000 of it was for unnecessary stuff, make an agreement with yourself to spend 10 minutes per day thinking about where you are your life, what’s missing, what the money might be substituting for. If you already know these things (or once you figure them out), spend 10 minutes a day figuring out what you’d need to do to get what you want. Once you’ve done that, spend 10 minutes a day implementing your plan. This isn’t about saving money; it’s about saving you.

If you’re an underspender:

Do the reverse of the overspender, i.e. figure out how much you’ve deprived yourself of and agree to spend a minute for every $1/$10/$100 you would have spent in various aspects of your life if you had the money (or, if you’re well-off but miserly, if you’d chosen to spend the money). Would you be living in your current cheapass apartment? Would you own a house? Would you be out there dating more because you wouldn’t be so hung up on the cost of going to a bar or restaurant? Now spend your underspent time really thinking about whether everything you don’t have in your life is worth it. Did you always want kids but you’ve lived so small that you could never afford them without giving up your dream? Is it YOUR dream or the dream of some past version of you? Are you holding on because you want it or because you’ve given up so much for it that it HAS to pay off or your sacrifice won’t be worth it? Then, if you decide you want things to be different, start thinking about what would need to change in order for you to get other things in your life. Then start implementing those things.

Both the overspending and underspending examples amount to the same thing: understanding yourself via the way you spend (or don’t spend) your money. If you look, you will find parallels. If you’re financially generous with everyone but yourself, then you can be sure that there are many other areas of your life where you’re putting yourself last. If you buy off your guilt – like by paying rent for someone you dumped or by buying chocolates for someone you’ve wronged – then you are, in all likelihood, making emotional purchases in multiple different life areas.

Money is a metaphor for your life. Worth, value, earn, deserve, spend – these are all words that apply to cash transactions as well as interpersonal ones. Your money is a mirror of you. If you’re willing to look at it and see what it’s telling you, then you will find your time investment paying dividends in the only coinage that truly matters – that of being true to yourself.

Do you find yourself in some relationships – with mom, boss love – where, no matter what you do, you always wind up miserable? Do you react in a way you don’t want that leads to consequences you don’t want whereby you feel like one version of you made a big mess and left another version of you to mop it up? If so, it’s time to examine reality.

WHAT'S REAL?

When we’re young, we don’t know what “reality” is. Children can believe anything – that elephants deliver the mail, that a cement floor is a really a pool of taffy, etc. While we have certain built-in physical self-protective mechanisms, e.g. flinching, we, as children, have to learn what is harmful. We also learn what makes us “happy,” and “happiness,” in painful environments, generally means “not in pain,” “currently not under attack,” “safe.”

Physical pain needs no reinforcement – touch a hot stove once and you’re done. Psychological pain does need reinforcement; because there’s no physical harm to the body, it requires ongoing fortification. This, incidentally, is what makes abuse abuse – it’s not the one-time whack or the occasional put-down that causes entrenched psychological damage; it’s the ongoing, continuous nature of the incidents that gives them their lasting power and, thus, makes them abusive.

We’re designed first and foremost to survive. We don’t have some separate subsystem in place for psychological pain; it piggybacks on the one we have to save our physical bodies. Fear of actions you intellectually know won’t hurt you – calling a guy you like, standing up to mom, saying no, etc. – are equivalent to the fear you feel if you were to, say, fall through a hole in the ice and almost drown. You feel that your body, your very being, is going to die, and you will do anything to circumvent this. And, in the same way that you might be extra cautious about thin ice – perhaps even avoiding ice skating altogether – you are extra cautious to avoid the issues that caused you emotional pain.

You may want a better relationship with mom, for example, but the action necessary to get is, to you, deeply unsafe. Self-protective behavior can’t be intellectualized away because that behavior was learned the hard way, by pain.

Self-protection trumps desire every time. This is why people stay in bad relationships or go from one bad relationship to the next. It’s not the familiarity that drives them over and over to the same kind of relationship; rather, it’s the safety – which they misidentify as “happiness.”

Look at it this way: let’s say you learned early on that you’re never right and that vulnerability equals pain. You might then find yourself in a relationship with someone who’s very controlling (“Safety – if I just follow those rules, I’ll be fine.”) and self-absorbed (“Safety – I won’t have to expose my self.”). You may recognize all of the negative qualities in the other person and may be miserable much of the time but you stay – or find someone similar to replace them – because, to the core of your being, you believe is you assert yourself or expose yourself, you literally will not survive.

AND THIS SHOWS UP IN LOVE HOW?

You’re drawn to people in whose shadow you can exist. You want to be needed by someone, hopefully someone who will tell you what to do so you’ll never be “wrong” and suffer the consequences of being wrong.

So you, the one in the bad relationship, are attracted to the people who make you feel all the things you can’t feel inside yourself – loved, alive, normal, right. They don’t make you feel this way all the time; in fact, most of the time, you’re totally miserable around them. But they make you feel it some of the time, and some of the time is better than none of the time. It’s not the negative that you’re drawn to, but the brief moments of positive.

Unfortunately, you’re now in the worst of all traps – relying on other people to “make” you feel something about yourself. You are now their puppet; they can “make” you feel anything (not that you have feelings, and not that you’re responsible for them if you do have them – what you feel is always someone else’s fault). Usually, they don’t even know or care what you’re feeling, but, thanks to you, they have complete and total control over you nonetheless.

So one of two things happens: 1. You form long-term relationships with people who treat you badly. By servicing their needs, you’re somehow safe. You cling desperately to these relationships and debase yourself to their memory long after they’ve ended.

2. You go from relationship to relationship – or date a lot or have long gaps between seeing people – and somehow magically never really connect.

Both the relationship and non-relationship versions amount to the same thing: they allow you tell yourself you’re normal without actually having to expose yourself emotionally. In order to maintain the lie that nothing’s wrong with you, you need to find a mate; “normal” means connecting with someone, right? But, whatever mate you find, you need to ensure that you won’t be harmed the way you were harmed when you were younger. Of course, the fact that you’re horribly maiming yourself in the present-day is irrelevant; it’s about protecting yourself from past harm, not current harm, that drives everything.

IF YOU’RE THE UNHEALTHY RELATIONSHIP TYPE:

You stay in the relationship because the person you’re seeing expects absolutely nothing of you. You’ll never have to assert yourself because they want to control everything; you’ll never having to worry about not feeling normal because you’re told what to do all the time – THEIR expectation is YOUR normal; you get to feel valuable because you have a tangible list of things you’re doing for your mate – this list assures you that they couldn’t survive without you (you try not to the think about the fact that they could replace you at any moment because you’re not really a person to them).

So instead of love, you get utility, which is perfect for you – love is dangerous. You already KNOW your feelings are wrong; thanks to the strict relationship rules, you can often feel really right. Following the rules makes you feel normal. You can never make anything worse because you’re not allowed, really, to do anything at all. You’re safe.

IF YOU’RE THE DODGING RELATIONSHIPS TYPE:

You go out, date, hookup, have “relationships” that always die. You need them to tell yourself you’re normal – nothing’s wrong with you, right? It’s just that you can never seem to find anyone who works out! Weird!

You start feeling something for someone, something stronger than feels safe or wilder than feels safe. Not that that feeling ever gets to your conscious brain; you take action the second you start feeling it. You pretend you’re normal by saying things to your friends like, “I really like this one!” or “We’re having a good time, this is good.” Things to indicate you’re open, willing, reaching for love. You’re setting up evidence of your normalcy in advance for when it fizzles down the road (and it always fizzles), evidence to prove it couldn’t have been your fault because you were into it and wanted it to happen. While this “evidence” is often relayed to other people, it’s really, of course, for you.

So, when feelings for the other person arise, you need to figure out a way to get rid of that person without doing anything traceable. They need to somehow disappear, and it needs to look like it’s their fault. Therefore, you PUSH.

Pushing always involves either external circumstances or something being wrong with the other person. In either case, it’s evidence that’s there’s nothing wrong with you; the reason this relationship ended – which is totally different from the last relationship’s ending and the one before that – had nothing to do with you.

Pushing looks like this:

Just as things seem to be heating up, you somehow magically have a ton of work to do! Or mom’s in town! Or you just got a creepy vibe on your last date! Or any of a million other external circumstances that interfere with your actually continuing to see the person you have unacknowledged feelings for.

“I mean, what – I’m supposed to quit my job to go on a date?!?” “My sister’s going through this crisis and I have to be there for her.” “This week is just crazy for me.” “I already made dinner plans with [random person X – this lady I met twice on a plane, my old housekeeper, a journalist friend who’s staying with me for a few days].”

You somehow have time to see non-meaningful people or your best friend whom you see all the time but you just can’t drag it all together to actually make a meaningful love date – my nutso week, my boss, work pressure, I’m just exhausted, I already made plans with a friend this weekend. Somehow, all of a sudden, NOTHING is cancelable. It’s with great regret that you just can’t manage to see that person you’ve been dating. Maybe you even complain to your friends, your later “trial” witnesses, about your wacky schedule. Regardless of what you do, you’ve managed to create a circumstance where the other person is so turned off by you that, if you ever do call them, they (hopefully) won’t really be interested anymore – which is fine; them rejecting you allows you to get rid of them while still appearing “normal.” (Because if you felt abnormal, you might find yourself doing some self-examination which might lead to DANGEROUS behavior – and that’s needs to be avoided at all costs.)

At any rate, if the person persists, well, you can always go back to being flaky until they finally go away for good. Alternatively, you also might delay calling for so long that you embarrassedly tell your friends that you’re horrified, you got so sucked in by work, and now you just can’t call. You blew it, sigh. Sometimes, because you really really want love and your emotional garden is so damned parched, you just randomly call the person 2 months later. “Hey, what’s up?” You then talk about making plans which magically don’t really come together. You want it, but you have to make sure you’ll never get it. The push always works. Relationships, after all, follow the laws of Newtonian physics in that the object at rest tends to remain at rest. If you don’t both do work at the beginning, it’ll die. So it dies, you’re blameless, and onto the next.

By the way, sometimes you may even marry or form long-term partnerships with these people to maintain your self-oblivious “normalcy.” Those are even better because, once you’re married or committed, you can stop acting and just completely disconnect – you don’t have to ask yourself any questions when you have a spouse right? Maybe you stop being there for them as much; maybe you start drinking a lot or doing drugs; you go out with friends; you just mysteriously don’t wind up spending a ton of time alone with the other person. One excellent way to do that is by having kids so your partner won’t notice how absent you are and will, as an added bonus, have an investment in being blind to your behavior because of their need to pretend that you’re actually a family.

WELL HOW DO I CHANGE THIS?

The most difficult part of self-awareness, the first step really, is assuming that 100% of your emotions are fake. All of them. Here’s the problem. We assume our emotions are giving us accurate information, e.g. “I’m feeling angry; I must be angry at you!” The problem is that, prior to true self-awareness, your emotions are NOT unbiased reporters of your actual feelings. Your emotions have one intention: to make you take self-protective action. It goes like this:

• Someone tells you you did something wrong. • Addressing this requires one of two things, standing up for yourself or apologizing. Your subconscious knows that “standing up for yourself” and “being wrong” require immediate action; you can’t ever stand up for yourself or apologize (and, thus, be wrong) because those two actions had horrible consequences for you in the past. • You need to get this person to shut up or even better go away and, ideally, never confront you with this kind of thing ever again. Thus, your response: • Emotion: You get angry, furious. Which leads to: • Action: You verbally lay into the person, enraged.

Your emotion, in other words, did NOT truly relay your feelings. Your emotion had a function; the function of anger, for example, is to shut down communication – kill the messenger because you don’t like the message.

This is why you need to assume that all of your emotions are false. You’re not angry, you’re frightened. You’re not happy, you’re safe. This is a painful and scary place to be. You can’t count on your own feelings anymore – everything’s suspect. Most importantly, you need to stop acting on them. Just the act of not acting, of giving yourself breathing room to think about what you’re feeling and doing (and, incidentally, of not taking action that’s counter to your current-day desires), will jumpstart the process of change. Stopping is change.

Getting real means acknowledging real reality – that you’re acting out of a need for safety and that’s it. Even if peeling back all the layers seems like too much right now, breathe a little easier knowing you’re behaving for a reason. You’re not a self-destructive self-loather; you’re simply seeking a safety you no longer need.

“This is the right thing to do.”

“I just made a terrible choice.”

“Why did I do that? That was dumb!”

“I think this is the best thing for me.”

One character of decision-making is that we tend to place judgment on potential outcomes or courses of action, i.e. “good” and “bad” decisions; “right” and “wrong” choices. Judging decision-making all seems to be a natural part of a logical process: we think things through and make a behavior choice – the “best” decision – by thinking things through and coming up with a binary, black-and-white world of right/wrong/good/bad.

But good or bad, right or wrong for what, exactly? Is it the “right” thing to do or the thing you’re going to do regardless but using “right” to justify your behavior? Does “good” really mean “easy” and “bad” mean “frightening”? Is “right” equivalent to “I’m in control” and “wrong” equal to “someone else is in control”?

So one problem with judging potential courses of action is that the core basis for your judgment often goes unexamined. By labeling it, you don’t have to really understand it. What you’re judging, really, is your own logic, and you act as if that logic is somehow objective. It’s not, of course; it’s serving something – avoiding what you fear.

MY LIFE AS A TRANSISTOR

Another problem is that we often reduce our choices to two because the other choices are just too messy to think about. Binary choices, which leave out a host of other choices, make us feel somehow in control, as if the distillation means we’ve thought through all courses of action and look – just two left! And, conveniently, I want to do one and not the other! One’s “right” and one’s “wrong”! It can feel overwhelming to pick through a host of complicated alternatives, and “this choice just feels right” can be a very soothing balm to all that confusion.

BUT, WAIT, AREN’T SOME CHOICES BINARY?

No. But many choices have the ILLUSION of seeming binary. In fact, there are – depending on where you are in your personal growth – a minimum of three solutions to every problem: the right or good one, the wrong or bad one, and the one you simply don’t want to think about. Try replacing “good” with “safe” and “bad” with “scary” and you will begin to get a sense of what those judgments are really servicing.

But binary logic can feel very compelling and not like a trap at all. One way to know you’re getting stuck in a binary choice is that binary choices generally reduce down to one confrontational/active component and one non-confrontational/passive component. For example, “I’m sick of the way mom is treating me. I’m either going to confront her about it or cut my contact with her to almost nothing.” Confront or end it – that’s binary.

Another problem is that we tend to draw causal relationships between feelings and solutions. “I’m unhappy at work. I need to either quit my job or ask my boss for a raise.” Of course, maybe you need to do neither. For example, maybe you’re unhappy at work and unhappy in your love life and unhappy with a family relationship and your unhappiness is internal and has nothing to do with work. Thus, in this example, neither quitting your job nor getting raise would solve your problem because your binary solution is unrelated to the true problem. But the binary solution SEEMS related – and that’s the trap.

So what’s a more effective way to make decisions?

REMOVE JUDGMENT

Decisions don’t need to be justified; they need to be thought through. Instead of good/bad/right/wrong, look at it this way: there are no right or wrong decision; there are only actions and their consequences. And those actions and consequences service something within you – fear and desire.

DETERMINE WHAT DRIVES YOUR CHOICES

Choices operate on a continuum. At one end are choices based on desire; at the other end are choices based on fear. They can be difficult to distinguish because fear often couches itself in the language of desire. Just because your statement starts with “I want” doesn’t mean you’re operating out of desire. Example:

“My ex and I have a country house. Our relationship has been over for a year and we’ve moved on (well, my ex has at least and I tell myself I have). We bought the country house when we were together, and my ex and my ex’s new relationship invited me up to it for the weekend. It makes me sick and sad to think of going. I know I shouldn’t. But, well, we’re selling the house and I really want to go up there and make sure that they don’t take stuff I want. So maybe I really should go. Yeah, I’m probably gonna go.”

So, if you go, are you going out of fear or desire? In your logic: You’re just going to keep an eye on your property. And maybe it’s time for you to see your ex with the new relationship so you can face that feeling and move on, right? And, hey, it’s your house too – why shouldn’t you go? Anyway, it’ll be nice to get out of town for the weekend.

No.

You need to pick apart your logic. Here’s how: Replace “I want” and “I should” and other similar phrases with what you believe is going to happen if you DON’T do what you think you should or want to do. Replace “I want” with “I’m afraid if I don’t [fill in action] then [blah blah blah will happen].”

So, instead of “I should go to the country house with my ex & ex’s new relationship,” try “I’m afraid if I don’t go to the country house with my ex and my ex’s new relationship then…” Then what will happen? Then they’ll get all the good stuff! “I’m afraid that, if my ex and the new relationship get all the good stuff then…” Then I’ll be cut out of my fair share. “I’m afraid that if I’m cut out of my fair share then…” Then they’ll have more and better than I do. “I’m afraid if my ex has more and better then…” Then it will mean my hold on my ex is slipping, that my ex doesn’t need me. “I’m afraid if my hold on my ex starts slipping then…” Then I’ll feel like a zero, a nothing, a hopeless loser, unloveable. “I’m afraid that if I’m a nothing and unloveable then…” I don’t exist.

Once you see that your logic is based is fear, you need to really think loooooooooong and hard about whether or not you want to live your life out of fear of being nothing. The truly horrible thing is that, when you make choices out of fear, you end up getting exactly what you were trying to avoid. Is there any way that spending a weekend in a country with your ex and your ex’s new relationship is going to make you feel like anything other than nothing?

You might not be able to get all the way to the bottom, to the true, core fear (“I don’t exist”), but, if you can even go a little bit of the way, you can know you’re operating out of fear no matter how much it sounds like desire, no matter how logical your reasoning seems, and make a behavior decision depending on how you want to lead your life.

By contrast to fear, desire’s answer to what will happen if you don’t get what you want is simply that you won’t have it. Let’s start with a biggie - “I’m afraid that if I don’t have the love of my ex in my life then…” Then I guess I won’t have the love of my ex in my life. Oh well. I want it, but if I don’t get it, then that’s the only consequence. Not, “If I don’t get it then I’ll be [devastated, a zero, a raging loon, etc.]”

To determine if the issue you’re dealing with is based on desire, replace the judgment/”I want”/”I should” with “I want to be a person who…” “I want to be a person who spends a weekend in the country house with the ex and the ex’s new relationship.” Uh, no. “I want to be a person who gets stuff from the country house.” No. “I want to be someone who has a loving relationship.” Yes.

Fear takes the specific and generalizes it (“If I don’t have the love of my ex then that will prove I’m unloveable AND I’LL NEVER BE LOVED.”); desire disconnects the specific from the general (“Not having the love of my ex does not equal not having love at all; there’s plenty to be had elsewhere.) With desire-based choices, you may be, for example, saddened if you don’t get what you want; with fear-based choices, you’re crippled if you don’t get what you want.

PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE

Here’s how you break it down. First, what’s the issue; in the above example, “weekend with ex.” Second, is it fear or desire? Third, what are the consequences of your binary choices (as these will lead you to your fears)?

Then here’s how you build it back up. First, what do you want, big picture in terms of this issue? Second, what are the ways you can get that desire? Third, what are you going to do? Example:

“Every time I see mom, she talks about my weight, and I hate it. I’ve told her to quit bugging me about it, but she won’t stop. So I’ve now reached the point where I’m either going to have a major confrontation with her or cut off basically all contact.”

Break it down.

What’s the issue?: Talking to mom about my weight.

Fear or desire?: “I want to be someone who can’t have my mother talk about my weight.” Sounds like fear.

Action/Consequence 1: “I’m afraid that if I don’t confront my mother then…” Then it will confirm (in my head at least) that she has no respect for me, and, if she has no respect for me then I’ll blah blah blah etc. etc. Sounds like fear.

Action/Consequence 2: “I’m afraid that if I don’t cut off all contact with my mother then…” Then I’ll be reduced to a screaming, helpless ball? Then I’ll only be able to view myself as a hideous, fat pig? And if that’s true, then… etc. Sounds like fear.

Time to rebuild.

Desired outcome: “I want to be someone who has a strong relationship with mom.” That sounds good. “I want to be someone who is capable of setting boundaries.” That also sounds good.

Possible course of action:

Confront mom – that seems to end in fear.

Do nothing – that seems to end in fear.

What’s the thing I really don’t want to do? How about “lose control of the outcome”? Confronting mom will wind up in a huge fight whereby I’ll feel justified in cutting her off – that’s me trying to control the outcome. Cutting her off is also me controlling the outcome. In fact, cutting her off seems to be what I want to do because she’s reflecting back at me something I hate about myself. So what’s my third course of action, the one I could take in which the outcome is uncertain? Well, I could be vulnerable and share with her how sad I am that we’re not closer; I could take responsibility for the fact that I’ve created a relationship with her where she can’t feel free to speak her mind; etc. In other words, I could have a whole vulnerable talk where I might get hurt and rejected, i.e. where I have no control over the outcome.

So beneath “I want mom to quit bugging me about my weight” lurks a fear of loss of control – of self-control. “When mom talks about my weight, I lose it; I’ve put control over my emotions in mom’s hands. I hate it, and I’m blaming her for it.” The problem isn’t mom; YOU’RE the one who gave her control. Thus, the problem, in this example, is your own boundaries. You can choose an action based on who you want to be in this moment – a vulnerable, attempted-relationship-strengthening groping boundary-setter or a controlling, angry, closed-off crazy person.

At the bottom of good/bad/right/wrong, below binary choices, is something relating back to you. The circumstance is triggering a fear. “Good” or “right” decisions mean decisions that allow you to avoid the fear; “bad” or “wrong” decisions or are swirling near the fear or are there to justify the fear-based good/right decision (having there be a “wrong” decision is very helpful in making the “right,” i.e. fear-based one). Remember, there are only choices and their consequences. Choices are based somewhere between fear and desire. By choosing desire – by reaching for what you want regardless of whether or not you think you’ll get it – you’re choosing you.

“I’m angry that my friend just blew me off – anyone would be.”

“Yeah yeah, it’s great that this project is happening, but now look at how much work I have to do.”

“I’m getting married, and I’ve never been this stressed.”

We often think that the way we react to a given circumstance is somehow a set in stone. "These idiots completely screwed up my project, everything's out of whack, I just lost my best employee - of course I'm stressed out!" We normalize the stress, using the situation to justify the feeling and, subsequently, the behavior. However, your reaction is a CHOICE, not a given, and you actually have other choices.

This isn't to say that some situations don't induce anger, frustration, or stress. Rather, once those feelings arise, you have a vast choice in what you do next. Do you sit there and bad-mouth people to your friends? Spin a situation over and over in your head? Talk about how bad future problems are going to be because this present-day problem screwed everything up? Those are all choices.

SO WHAT ARE MY OTHER CHOICES?

How about, "This totally sucks that those idiots screwed this up. But, God, I love what I do, and I'll figure out a way to make this okay." or "You know what? They made a mistake. I guess my options are more limited than they were. That bums me out. But I had no control over the situation, so I'm just going to sit here and make the best of the options I have and enjoy myself. The payoff for me, the pleasure I get from doing the work, still overrides the displeasure I get from some of the people I work with and some of the decisions they make."

Your reaction to a situation is determined by your emotional state when you go into that situation. In other words, THE SITUATION HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR EMOTIONS. For example, if your reaction to a given situation is anger, it’s because you’re angry about something else to begin with. You then carry over that emotional state to everything in your life. It’s your go-to. You, therefore, have outsized reactions to a given situation; your meter is off. You lose a sense of how [angry, stressed, crazy] you should be. The way to determine the validity of your emotions – and your subsequent behavior and feelings – is, first, to look at where you start.

EMOTIONAL SET-POINTS

Are you easy to anger? To stress? To cry? Or are you a slow burn but once you go, you GO? Ask yourself, on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being highest, where your general emotional state is. Are you more or less a constant 7?

What happens is that you start high and your emotions spiral higher and higher until you lose all sense of logic and just feel your [rage, frustration, fear]. Example:

ORIGINAL ANGER BASELINE: 5 (you’re not always anger, but anger’s really easy for you to access; you have a range from irritation to blind rage)

1. You make an internet date with someone - a total stranger.

2. They blow you off.

3. You get angry. You feel judged. You feel used, played. You just lost your Saturday night!

BASELINE RESET: For a person with, say, a baseline of 1 for anger, they might jump to a 3, a 30% increase in anger – it’s irksome to be blown off! You, however, started at 5. Your anger level with this person is now 6.5 – you’re pretty angry.

4. You send them a note about how you waited for them and they didn't show.

5. They don’t respond. Wow, that’s really rude. A non-angry person might feel a 2 – the other person is sending a message you don’t want to hear but oh well; this is a rude person you’re dealing with so why get pissed? But not you. You’ve just added 20% to your 6.5. Now you’re up to a 7.8!

6. A few days later, they respond with a legitimate-sounding excuse. This, perhaps, drops your anger back down to a 6 or 6.5. You’ve now been heard; maybe, just maybe, they had a real crisis. A non-angry person, by the way, would be around 1 (or would have moved on entirely).

7. You, however, have a whole little drama in your head about what you're going to write back. The reason for this drama, of course, is that you’re ANGRY.

8. You decide to be open but a little punitive (not that you phrase it to yourself that way but it's what you email back).

9. They don't respond to your note.

10. Now you're really upset - Fuck them! You’ve just added another, say, 20% to your anger. Back to your 7.8.

REALITY CHECK

This person is a total stranger you met on the internet, a totally disconnected, impersonal space. Why are you so mad?!?! Your anger is at a level as if you’d been betrayed by your best friend. A 7.8 because some douche you don’t even know is rude and a bad communicator?

When you overreact from the start, each subsequent event compounds the previous until you’re totally out of control. Your start point level determines how much personal meaning you attribute to the other person's actions. If your start point is a 1, you’re never going to really be that upset by the other person. If it’s a 5, you’re half mad to begin with.

If the behavior of a total stranger feels personal, look within! Why is it so personal – what’s that about? What were you drawn to in them - what did you project - that's making you so upset? Irritation at standing around and losing your Saturday night? Sure. Anger, resentment, feeling judged, maybe sadness ("I really had hopes for this one!") - no. Those feelings have nothing to do with this total stranger and everything to do with your own feelings of inadequacy and low self-worth.

One way to determine reality is to ask yourself, “If this had happened to a friend and not to me, what levels would I say were normal?” Maybe a 3 or 4 when you’re standing in the bar, a 2 or 3 when you're firing off the note, and a 0 or 1 by the next day? If your levels are above those you'd think standard for a friend, then you instantly know the issue is about you - which is freeing, because it takes the power back from a total stranger and puts it onto you.

SO HOW DO I LOWER MY EMOTIONAL SET-POINT?

There are two basic ways: identify the fear or find the joy (or both of course).

The first way, identifying the fear, is easy to say and torturous to do (and is where therapy can really help). It means recognizing that your emotions are entirely about YOU and parsing out what you’re really feeling. “I create situations where I have unrealistic expectations of people who then go on to disappoint me. I do this in lieu of forming real relationships because I’m afraid to be vulnerable with people. My anger offers me an excuse to avoid connecting for real because I’ll find some flaw in the other person that will make me angry. My anger, in other words, keeps me protected.”

The second way, finding the joy, allows for a reduction is your emotional level. As you’re feeling your anger, add (in the above example), “I’m really happy that I’m reaching out and trying to connect with someone. And there’s something kind of hilarious and fun about the bizarreness of internet dating. Plus, what the hell – I’m telling the universe what I what.” That reminder of your own joy, that you’re getting something of the overall process even if it’s not so great right in this moment, will lower your emotional state. Remind yourself that you’re doing this for YOU.

BUT WHAT IF I CAN’T FIND THE JOY?

If you can't genuinely can’t find the joy, if you repeat a situation over and over that only makes you miserable, then that means you're doing whatever you’re doing out of fear of stopping. Complete the sentence, "I'm afraid is I stop doing this, then…" What will happen? People will think I'm a loser? I'll be nothing? I'll have no means to prove to others that I'm valuable? I’ll be alone? I’ll be empty?

Don’t forget – “doing” also means “doing nothing.” Inaction IS action. The same thing applies; find the joy in your inaction or look for the fear that prevents you from acting.

One of the hardest things to grapple with is that your emotions entirely about you and not about other people. But there's enormous power in that recognition because, while you have zero control over changing anyone else, you have absolute control over changing yourself. Be grateful for the recognition, even if it's a fearful one, because that recognition means you have the power to change. (Of course, one of the reasons we blame others is that we don't want to admit the problem is ours because we're so afraid that, if it is, we'll have to change, i.e. do something we utterly fear.) Just remember, how you approach a situation is your own determination. If you're feeling stress, anger, upset, then stop and find the joy.