By exploring your inner self to look for your core values, you can find great forces that will guide you in your decisions. This will also help you figure out what to seek and what to avoid. Through this core ACT process, you can start harnessing your own moral compass. We all have a lot of mental knots and twists that, once unraveled, make life so much easier and pleasant. But that's healing, not overadapting like the pressure mold technique that I described above. The difference between a (self-)healing path and an overadapting path isn't always easy to tell, not by yourself. But if you look at it in the following way, you'll easily tell the two apart. Healing is a process of becoming who you are, whoever that is, in your most natural form. It's a process of giving room, of resting, and of getting to know yourself with a friendly, benevolent curiosity and a really open mind. You accept whatever you find in yourself and give it all the room it needs. It's not easy, and it takes time (actually a lifetime) because there's precisely no objective other than unfolding, and you'll encounter a lot of stuff that you won't know how to handle at first. But it should have the taste of adventure, like a gaining of space, instead of an augmenting pressure. Sometimes the process is breathtakingly fabulous, sometimes it's scary and confusing, but at the end of the day the journey, as a whole, is wonderful. Personal core values can serve as your guide posts to highlight what you really cherish, and when you are in a difficult situation, you can choose to behave based on the standards you have set for yourself. Be Conscious of Your Emerging Values Mindfulness plays a crucial role in discovering your values. To do this, you should first find a quiet place where no one can disturb you. Exploring your inner self to find your personal values requires your own space and time. Turn off your phone, listen to calming music, or anything that can help you focus and relax. Some people use aromatherapy.
Lavender oil is especially calming. Remember Happy and Sad Moments in Your Life Begin the process of discovering your personal values by writing down the moments in which you experienced great happiness or sadness. It carries the sensation of a deepening friendship with yourself, including accepting and even liking the rough edges, a main characteristic of all true friendships. It shouldn't seem like a hyper-demanding ultra-severe education by a sadistic Jesuit that never takes his piercing eyes of you and is ready to sneak up on you from behind every corner, ruler in hand to measure and punish you at will. Nor should you experience it like an endless, fierce beauty contest or Nobel Prize competition with yourself and/or the rest of the world. Healing is being yourself, right now, and becoming gradually more and more comfortable with that. Overadapting, on the other hand, is becoming who you think you should be, in your hypothetical most perfect form, which is the exact opposite of healing. It's forceful and tiring, and feels like a long, long failure interspersed with the occasional victory (over your poor natural Self mainly) that in the end doesn't even last long enough to savor. One can become addicted to these little victories and to the suffering in between. It so happens that the brain prefers a familiar shithole to a potentially happy unknown. And, as every game-addict will know, it's also notoriously keen on the little spikes of dopamine that are released when you reach the next level (be it in a video game, or in your mold-fitting endeavor). This makes it daunting to get out of your self-created sadistic Jesuit boarding school - but not impossible either. Try to remember the peaks and valleys of your experiences and take note of the details that surround every memory. Focus on the memories that had the most significant influence on your life, instead of those in which you earned recognition or praise. For example, you might have experienced great joy when your family visited a beach for the first time. This may not have been the best moment for your success, but this could be the root memory for your personality and how you bond with your loved ones. Explore the common themes that run through your strongest memories, which could be influenced by your religious beliefs or political affiliation. There's a good chance that you will find specific things that trigger strong emotions of anger, sadness, injustice, or a combination of these things. Take note of the things that are missing and then try to look for value during your most joyous moments.
Examine Human Needs in General We all have our basic needs based on the composition of our bodies and our common needs within the society we belong to. Our personal values generally stem from our needs. Once you have identified your shackles and understood how they work, it's easy to slip out of them. You may need to do this recurrently, especially in the beginning when they slip themselves on again without you even noticing. The question that takes all of this a little deeper is: where does this image of a more perfect `me' come from? Before you read on, take a moment to reflect on this. No, don't read on, think about it yourself. So what did you come up with? If you dig deep and arduously enough, you'll find that it comes from . It's their conscious and unconscious unrelenting pressure, their rejection of your neurodivergent `you' and their continuous desire for a `you' that's more convenient for them, that planted this seed in you of feeling not good enough as you are. They don't just plant it, they water it, too, all the time. And now the seed has grown into a jungle vine suffocating your very life. Hence, we feel strong passion and commitment towards our values. By exploring human needs, we can gain a powerful boost to define our personal values. Basically, the universal needs of humans include: Physical requirements (food, water, shelter, clothes) Peace (hope, acceptance, ease of mind) Connection (consideration, respect, warmth) Autonomy (self-expression, dignity, choice)
Play (joy, humor, adventure) Meaning (understanding, participation, celebration) Create a Draft of Your Personal Core Values Who is `them' exactly? That differs from person to person, but usually you shouldn't look far. For neurodivergents, neurotypicals are always a major `they'. To make things worse, however perfectly you adapt and then overadapt, there is no scenario where you overadapt and get to live a meaningful, happy life. There's no happy ending to overadaptation, for anyone concerned. If you're overadapting, you'll inevitably lack authenticity. That's exactly the very essence of overadaptation: instead of being your authentic you, you `are' someone else. This very lack of authenticity is perceived by most people, consciously or unconsciously, as something disagreeable and a sign of untrustworthiness. If you overadapt you'll never really make it into the hearts of other people. They'll intuitively 'smell' a lack of backbone, a failure to dare to be who you really are. Make a temporary list of the personal core values you believe you cannot live without. In this step, you have to connect your personal experiences with the values that are important in your culture (and to you) on top of the fundamental needs of humans based on our biological composition. Write the values using wording that holds true for yourself. For example, if you value truth, you may want to write this as I value the courage of honesty and integrity. Try to start with at least seven core values, but take note that this could be trimmed down to at least three core values later on in the process. Write About How You Usually Practice These Values Personal values could be different from the strategies you use to define them.
More often than not, these strategies are based on the values of your family. By understanding how you practice your personal values, you can gain better insight into the values that influence you to do things that you can be proud of. For example, you may choose service as one of your personal core values. A successful complete (over)adaptation, if that's possible to begin with, actually ensures that no-one will ever respect or really love you. A complete overadaptation where you perfectly correspond to all of their desires is biologically impossible. But let us, for the sake of the argument, assume you pull it off. What would you have accomplished then? A murder without a corpse, because the corpse is still walking around, talking (like they want it to talk), smiling (like they want it to smile) and doing whatever else your persona does or doesn't do, like a programmed puppet. They cannot love or respect you, because you disappeared behind the overadaptation puppet. It's the puppet, the walking, talking corpse they appreciate, while somewhere in the depths of your mind and body the real you is rotting away, unloved and repressed in the dungeon you relegated it to, hated even by the remainder of yourself. In short: whether you succeed or not in overadapting yourself to them, either way, you lose. So, overadaptation? Thanks, but. Will you practice this value by running for an elected position or by volunteering in a charitable organization? If you value peace, do you discourage noise in your home, or are you more active in seeking reconciliation between people who disagree with each other? It is crucial to make these strong connections between your values and the things you do every day. Look at the Results of Your Decisions You can do this step in either imagined or real situations that require decisions. How would you decide if you value love of family, and you have to pick between staying with your loved ones and pursuing a career overseas? If you value independence, and you are given a choice to move in with your special someone, would you do it?
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.