Your conditioned self is and will always be a part of you. Your default operating system—your core beliefs and habitual behaviors—are deeply ingrained. By living deliberately, you’ll be actively engaged in overriding your conditioned self. Let me explain why this is so important. According to a variety of psychological models, from classic Freudian theories to new mind-body therapies, the unconscious—or subconscious—mind is the part of us that holds our repressed memories. It’s the place where our core beliefs reside; it’s the home of your conditioned self. When you’re operating from your conditioned self, your unconscious mind is in the driver’s seat—running you and your life. The premise of Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious, or subconscious, mind is that some past experiences are too painful to remember, so the mind pushes them down into the subconscious, thereby protecting us from emotional pain. Although these painful memories and associations are repressed, Freud believed they still played a significant role in determining human behavior.1Subsequent psychological theories teach that it’s not only traumatic memories that are stored in the subconscious but also our core beliefs and habitual patterns.
Not long ago I ran across an article by Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., entitled “Mind Over Genes” that echoes many of my own theories. He explains that during the first six years of life, a child unconsciously not only “acquires the behavioral repertoire needed to become a functional member of society,” but also “downloads beliefs relating to the self,”2and that it’s our biology that enables this process. As babies, we are hardwired to absorb lessons from our families and culture and store them in our unconscious mind. During our early years of development, he writes, our brains are operating at low EEG (electroencephalography) frequencies, so we are all functioning in what he calls a hypnogogic state: “While in this hypnotic trance, a child does not have to be actively coached by its parents for they obtain their behavioral programs simply by observing their parents, siblings, peers, and teachers.”3
The unconscious patterns of our conditioned self are set in place during early childhood and remain powerful drivers of our behavior into adulthood. Lipton writes that “as neuroscientists emphasize, the conscious mind provides five percent or less of the cognitive activity during the day. Ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of our behavior is directly derived from the subconscious.”4That’s an astounding number. We’re on autopilot at least 95 percent of the time! That’s why I call it the default operating system; it’s the one we fall back on again and again. When we’re relying on our default operating system, we’re relying on messages from the subconscious mind—powerful, deep-seated messages of which we’re totally unaware. So overriding those messages represents a tremendous challenge.
As you implement your action plan and pursue your Life Vision, you’ll be taking the idea of living deliberately to the next level. You’ll be engaged in the process of overriding your conditioned self and allowing your authentic self to take charge of your life. That requires constant vigilance, because, as Bruce Lipton points out, “the moment you lapse in consciousness, the subconscious mind will automatically engage.”5And when that happens, your old patterns will automatically kick back in.
Creating a Life Vision and identifying specific goals and action steps for achieving it are powerful tools. You’ll be engaged in replacing your default operating system with one that allows you to live a more joyful and fulfilling life. You’ll need to stay mindful of your default operating system so you can recognize when it starts to kick in and take over. And you’ll need to maintain a relentless commitment to observing and course-correcting yourself, so you can override your conditioning and create the life you want to have.
Your Solemate Tool Kit
As you move forward, all the tools you’ve acquired in this book are crucial elements in your arsenal of support—essential for improving your relationships, managing your fears, building your self-esteem, and, most importantly, nurturing your relationship with yourself. Using these tools will help you override your habitual patterns and behaviors, stay focused on your Life Vision, and accomplish the action steps needed to achieve it:
• The Five Steps to Managing Fear (page 94)—This is a valuable technique to help you address specific fears and help you step outside your comfort zone.
• Weighing the Pros and Cons (page 97)—You’ll want to use this exercise to help you make decisions about your life and your relationships.
• Reality Checks (page 98)—This is a valuable tool for helping you overcome self-doubt when you’re embarking on any new experience or making a decision about your life. Checking in with reality is a way of overriding your default operating system and moving out of trance states.
• Honoring Your Intuition (page 136)—Your intuition is your connection to your authentic self, a valuable tool for helping you live in alignment with your Life Vision.
• Developing Your Inner Nurturing Parent (page 122)—Loving and nurturing yourself is the surest route to building and sustaining a healthy relationship with yourself. This is a good way to silence your inner critic, which represents one of the greatest barriers to your success.
• Practicing Emotional Intelligence (page 130)—Live with deliberateness. Develop your ability to manage your emotions effectively. This will support your efforts to improve your relationships with others.
• Enlisting the Power of Thought (page 131)—Align your thoughts with your Life Vision. Stay focused on what it is that you want.
• Taking Responsibility (page 109)—Remember the three levels of creation: creating, promoting, allowing. When you feel yourself blaming others, look closely at the role you play in situations as they arise.
• Communicating Effectively (page 170)—By communicating effectively from your authentic self, you build better relationships, are more likely to get the results you want, and reinforce the power of your authentic self.
Be the Change You Want to See in the World
By engaging in the personal-development work you’ve done throughout this book, I hope you’ve already begun to integrate many of these tools into your life and are seeing some of the transformative results. As you embark on your new life, I encourage you to refer back to the book again and again, using it as a resource for addressing the specific barriers you face in realizing your Life Vision, or any time you find yourself needing extra support. Think of it as your tool kit for developing a loving, healthy relationship with yourself—for transforming your life by becoming your own solemate.
Your journal and action plan are powerful resources for staying on course—for tracking your progress, celebrating your accomplishments, and setting new goals that will continually expand your comfort zone. I also encourage you to share your transformational process with others, learning from those who can help you move forward, and using where you’ve been and what you’ve learned to help others. Mahatma Gandhi said that to induce change out in the world you have to first become that change. It is my hope that this book has helped you to find greater joy and peace in the sacred space of your aloneness, rediscover the magnificent and powerful person you are, and become the change you want to see out in your world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are many people who contributed to the creation of this book. First and foremost are: Susan Dynerman, whose brilliant help and unflagging support played a major role in bringing this book to life. My literary agent, Molly Lyons, the first to catch the vision and whose call to action moved mountains. My editor, Patty Gift, for her unerring editorial instincts, creative vision, and unobtrusive support. And Joelle Delbourgo, for her encouragement and resourcefulness. Thanks to Laura Koch, Anne Barthel, Jacqui Clark, Reid Tracy, Margarete Nielsen, Nancy Levin, Carina Sammartino and the entire Hay House team for making this experience such a joy. I’m grateful to Shawna Carboni, Robert Kiess, M.D., and Roger Abdell for reading and providing feedback on book chapters. I thank my clients who generously agreed to let their stories grace the pages of this book, and I thank Pamela H
amilton for her research and fact-finding expertise.
I extend my heartfelt gratitude to Terry Kellerman, Ursula and Walter Friedl, Karen Köbel, Silvia Roell, Erika Marshall, Anita Landa, Debra Sherman, Joyce Cousens, Carol and David Krentzman, Betsy Peck, Lidia and Rick Sylvia, Mary Jane Golden, Deb and Bruce Holden, Maria Kogan, and Matt and Lindsay Oberman, all of whom provided support in a thousand different ways.
I’m indebted to the many people who have been sources of inspiration and whose work has informed my own. These include Carl Jung, Milton Erikson, Gregory Bateson, Murray Bowen, Braulio Montalvo, Virginia Satir, Salvador Minuchin, Alexander Lowen, Stephen Wolinsky, Harville Hendrix, Louise Hay, John Bradshaw, and Insight Seminars founders John Roger and Russell Bishop.
And finally, I want to thank my children, to whom I also dedicate this book, for being the incredible, resilient, loving human beings that you are.
APPENDIX
SAMPLE ACTION PLANS
Jane Doe’s Action Plan
Life Vision:
I am a confident, powerful, and self-sufficient woman, loving and respecting myself, expressing my feelings and setting healthy boundaries with others, enjoying a successful and fulfilling academic career in history and politics, and feeling whole and complete on my own.
Barriers:
• The limiting beliefs that others’ needs are more important than my own and that I’m ugly • Putting others’ needs ahead of my own
• Withholding my real thoughts, feelings, and needs from others
• Eating junk food and not getting enough sleep
• Engaging in relationships in which I feel disrespected and unvalued
• Lack of outer supports
• Fear of being alone forever
Goal #1: Build a stronger inner support system by the end of this year.
Action Steps:
• Start a new routine of going up to bed by 9:30 p.m. on weeknights, reading for 30 minutes, and going to sleep by 10:00 p.m. by February 10.
• Find a psychotherapist and start weekly therapy sessions by February 10.
• Read three books on nutrition and develop and start adhering to a new, healthy eating plan by February 25.
• Develop my Inner Nurturing Parent by saying positive and loving messages to myself on a daily basis.
• Write in my journal every morning and record my feelings and progress.
• Go through the Five Steps to Managing Fear whenever my fear of being alone surfaces.
Goal #2: Build friendships with at least three new people who are uplifting, fun, and respectful by August 31.
Action Steps:
• Renew my membership at the YWCA and start taking group exercise classes by February 15.
• Find and take a salsa dance class at the adult education center by March 1.
• Attend a class on effective communication at the adult education center by March 10.
• Find and join a book club by April 30.
• Check the calendar section of the paper and plan and do at least one social activity each weekend.
• Express my needs, feelings, and boundaries to others on an ongoing basis.
Goal #3: Complete my master’s degree within the next three years.
Action Steps:
• Research master’s programs in history and in political science by May 1 of this year.
• Prepare for and take the graduate entrance exam by September 1 of this year.
• Check with Human Resources at work about their Tuition Reimbursement Program by June 1 of this year.
• Complete and submit my school applications by November 5 of this year.
John Doe’s Action Plan
Life Vision:
I am a healthy, fit, and energetic man, loving and accepting myself and others, enjoying a balanced and fulfilling life, and expressing my creativity in my home-based graphic design business and painting studio.
Barriers:
• The limiting beliefs that I have to be perfect at all times and that I’m unworthy and undeserving of love • Being very critical, impatient, and unforgiving with myself and others • Working 12-hour days in a job that I hate
• Fear of not making enough money if I leave my current job
• Using alcohol to manage stress
• No time to exercise
Goal #1: Leave my job and work in my own home-based graphic design business and art studio by the end of this year.
Action Steps:
Meet with my financial advisor to discuss my plan to start my own business by February 1.
• Read books on starting your own business and talk to people I know who have done it.
• Donate the old furniture stored in my upstairs loft by March 1.
• Hire a decorator to help me turn my loft into an office and art studio by March 1.
• Refurbish and paint the loft as needed by March 31.
• Complete a strategic business plan by May 1.
Goal #2: Lose 15 pounds and achieve greater physical fitness, health, and energy by June 30.
Action Steps:
• Find a new gym that I like, hire a personal trainer, and start working out three times a week by February 5.
• Join Weight Watchers and start attending weekly meetings by February 5.
• Learn about different meditation practices, find one that I like, and start meditating 20 minutes a day by March 1.
Goal #3: Experience more loving, accepting, and peaceful relationships with myself and others by the end of the year.
Action Steps:
• Buy and read books on spirituality, forgiveness, and compassion.
Invoke my Inner Nurturing · turing Parent and say loving messages to myself each time my inner critic comes up inside of me.
• When I feel judgmental toward others, remind myself that the other person is doing the best he can in that moment.
• Be aware of which ego state I’m communicating from in each moment, and move out of the Critical Parent and into the Adult ego state when I slip into my old pattern.
• Treat myself to a massage at least once a month starting February 2.
NOTES
Chapter 2
1. Sam Roberts, “It’s Official: To Be Married Means to Be Outnumbered,” The New York Times, October 15, 2006.
2. Ibid.
3. Sam Roberts, “51% of Women Are Now Living Without Spouse,” The New York Times, January 16, 2007.
4. Ibid.
5. U.S. Census Bureau press release, “Facts for Features,” July 19, 2004, http://www.census.gov/ Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/002265.html.
6. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Series P-20, No. 372, “Marital Status and Living Arrangements: March 1981” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982).
7. U.S. Census Bureau press release, “Facts for Features,” July 19, 2004, http://www.census.gov/ Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/002265.html.
8. Jason Fields and Lynn M. Casper, “America’s Families and Living Arrangements: Population Characteristics,” Current Population Reports, U.S. Census Bureau, March 2000.
9. BBC News, “Living Alone is ‘The Norm,’” January 11,2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1754824.stm (accessed November 11, 2007).
10. Linda Hantrais, Family Policy Matters: Responding to Family Change in Europe (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2004), 62.
11. William J. Cromie, “Why Women Live Longer Than Men,” The Harvard University Gazette, October 1, 1998, http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/1998/10.01/WhyWomenLiveLon.html (accessed January 15, 2008); Jennifer Jones, “Around The Globe, Women Outlive Men,” Population Today, August/September 2001, http://www.prb.org/Articles/2001/AroundtheGlobeWomenOutliveMen.aspx (accessed November 10, 2007).
12. U.S. Census Bureau press release, “Facts for Features,” July 19, 2004, http://www.census.gov/ Press-Release/www/releases/archive
s/facts_for_features_special_editions/002265.html.
13. Bella DePaulo, Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006).
14. See, for example, the following articles: Lea Winerman, “Helping Men to Help Themselves,” Monitor on Psychology 36, no. 6, American Psychological Association (June 2005), http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun05/helping.html (accessed November 20, 2007); Willow Lawson, “Boys Don’t Cry,” Psychology Today, July/August 2004.
Chapter 3
1. Faces & Voices of Recovery Public Survey. Washington, D.C.: Peter D. Hart Research Associates, Inc., and Coldwater Corporation, May 4, 2004, 1.
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