stage Four
Questioning Your thoughts
Once we accept the limitations of religious (Stage One), scientific (Stage Two) and societal influences (Stage Three) we are still left with our individual psychological and physical coping strategies learned from birth and practiced into the present day. Questioning your thoughts is vital to finding mental freedom and physical health.
It’s ironic that the person you can know best in this world, yourself, is often the very person that eludes self analysis. Why? Usually because we are too close to the truth, and often we don’t want to admit what we do see, because we don’t like it much. Who we are doesn’t match up with who we want to be.
Stage Four is a big beast of a stage and you can get lost in here, potentially for decades, or forever.
Don’t get lost in here… but do stay as long as you need.
For me, there is no way around examining your thoughts. Call it self-analysis, self-therapy, self-exploration, self-examination, personal development, personal growth, self-improvement or whatever term you want to use. If you don’t learn about why you do what you do then you are doomed to repeat the same mistakes and patterns throughout your life. Your thoughts are the entry point to unravelling these puzzles. If madness is doing the same thing multiple times and expecting a different outcome, then Tears For Fears were right, and it really is a mad world for a lot of us.
Except, the great thing is, you can understand yourself through questioning your thoughts, and this can lead you to change what you don’t like in your life. This doesn’t mean everything turns out all pretty all the time, but it does mean you know the mistakes you are making, and so can decide whether you really want to make them again?
childhood is key
You don’t have to be a Freudian to see how your upbringing shaped the way you behave as an adult. If you were brought up in a family that believed in working hard at school to achieve good grades, then chances are you followed through on this, or rebelled against it violently. Alternatively, if your parents told you school was a waste of time, and it was more important to get out in the world and make money, then that was likely what you did, or felt you had to do.
This kind of learning isn’t set in stone. We all have heard of or know people who broke their mold. I am also not saying that there is no responsibility. Your upbringing can’t be blamed for how you choose to behave as an adult, anymore than you can blame society. But, it does help explain your actions.
We all have a deep reservoir of unconscious/subconscious learning from childhood, that undetected, can make us run on autopilot to an alarming degree. Investigating our actions through the lens of our upbringings helps shed light on the depths below.
Do you seem to spend your life pleasing everyone but yourself? Look at what your parents expected of you as a child – did they expect you to look after their emotions, to make them happy? By questioning your thoughts you can answer questions like these.
Do you struggle to make and keep money? Did your parents think money was the root of all evil? What do you think about money? Even if you want it, do you still find yourself complaining about the trouble it brings?
Do you think that everything always goes wrong in the end? Did your parents hold this view, and were happy to express it? Are your thoughts tied down like this, always looking for where plans will collapse?
Do you push people away so they can’t hurt you because you were hurt in the past?
Any of your thoughts that seem automatic, and certain, are particularly worth questioning through the lens of your upbringing.
emotions
We are biologically evolved to have quick emotional reactions. Our emotions, especially fear, are thought to be regulated in the amygdala, which is one of the oldest part of our brain that formed deep in our evolutionary past.
Professor Steve Peters excellent book, The Chimp Paradox, is all about understanding this part of the brain and how it relates to our lives and behaviour. Though I don’t agree with Peters’ methods to manage this part of ourselves, his explanations are very easy to understand and a helpful introduction to questioning your thoughts.
Our emotional reactions can happen lightning fast and evolved this way to get us out of danger in the quickest possible time. This is our fight/ flight/ freeze response to threat -see large sharp toothed animal – legs moving us as fast as possible in the opposite direction, or grab a spear and fight, or play statues and hope it doesn’t see you- no thought required.
Our emotions can also get us into a lot of trouble. You know that nasty thing you said to your parent / spouse / child and immediately regretted it? Thanks amygdala! As both Peters & Stephen Covey, in his Seven Habits, series of books teach, learning to pause between stimulus and response is key to living a life that isn’t controlled by your emotions.
And yet our emotions must never be ignored. They are always telling you something important. That gut feeling, about that person/situation you don’t like is often right. Your gut is more and more being understood as your second brain, with 500 million neurons, compared to 100 million neurons in your actual brain.
Ignoring emotions – repressing them – is a recipe for blindness to what you really want, or want to avoid. It can also come out in unexpected ways. In a simple example, if you find yourself suddenly exploding at the bad driving in front of you, (and yes I know how many terrible drivers are out there!) it’s likely a sign from your hind brain that something other than traffic is bothering you. If you leave the thoughts behind this unexamined, you may find deeper problems arising, such as mental or physical illness. Also read the article, Mind Body Healing, to learn more about how our stress response affects us long term.
How well you have learned to manage your emotions is often down to your parenting. This doesn’t mean you can blame your parents if you blow up and call your wife a b**** q**** from h*** when she reminds you again to put out the rubbish. Your parents were brought up by their parents, who likely didn’t learn healthy emotional control from their parents, and on it goes, generation to generation, way back to those pesky, (fast acting, highly successful), reptiles.
As with societal pressures, the pressures of your upbringing may be inescapable but you are always responsible and accountable for your actions however well understood. This is a good thing because it means you hold the way out of old patterns and into a life of healthy action.
personaiity
Our personality is generally considered to be a mix of genetic predisposition, and environmental learning, particularly in childhood. What percentages of the mix are on either side is open for debate and probably variable between individuals.
The Big Five personality traits are: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. I am not going to wade into these (feel free to do this here), but what I recommend is looking at your life and the challenges you face to point you in the direction most important for you to explore.
Where you are facing challenges, whether this is in social/romantic, work, parenting, financial, or any other area will provide ample ground to find out who you are in the world. Become aware of your thoughts but also, listen to your body, both your emotional reactions, and pure physical pain and ills. They are passing you a message. Read When The Body Says No to help you here, and read the article ALIIGNED. For myself a big problem was being too nice and I explore this below as an example.
niceness
So many of us try to be nice. Though it seems at first like this must be harmless at worst, there is now mounting evidence to show that being too nice, and putting others needs before your own, can be detrimental both to your mental and physical health.
Being nice, which is often accompanied by people pleasing behaviour, is also described as a Goodist personality, because the person is always trying to do good, usually for others. This behaviour in a person can lead to repressing their own emotions, especially anger. John Sarno, Gabor Mate, and Jeff Rediger explore this and show how this repression of emotion, especially anger, can lead to physical ill health, with sometime terminal results.
This is an area where questioning your thoughts, exploring your inner world and asking how you became a people pleaser may keep you alive and healthy. If you want help stopping being too nice read Aziz Gazipura’s book Not Nice.
Stopping being too nice was a major milestone for myself, but not before I had been through major bowel surgery for an acute attack of ulcerative colitis. This disease I have no doubt is tied completely to repressing your emotions and trying to please others.
The repression of emotions such as anger, and the behaviours such as people pleasing, and perfectionism, that go along with this repression, are learned in childhood, usually from a parent who again is passing on their own way to cope with the world.
authenticity
Exploring why you have become who you are is not about finding fault, or blame for how you, or your life, has turned out. Neither is it, as I have said already, about excusing behavior that has brought harm to you or others. Questioning your thoughts to explore what you have learned in childhood is about opening your eyes to the influences on your behavior, and more importantly, it is about opening up to finding what you want in life. It is about finding your authenticity.
If you are a people-pleaser and you stop people pleasing, what do you want to do with your life? Are you currently working in an office because you don’t want to upset your parents, but really you want to do something more outdoorsy?
Do you like your own company and feel most comfortable with one or two friends, but feel you should be more social, and go out more?
Do you want to earn lots of money, but have always told yourself that money is evil?
Explore your values. What do you value in life? Not Nice, and The Happiness Trap, are particularly useful books to help with this exploration, and you don’t have to be too nice or unhappy to benefit from them
Finding what you really value in life is key. Questioning your thoughts is the best way to find your values. Deep down you know who you are, most often you’re just afraid to be that person. This is what is truly meant by Just Be Yourself. If you have ever recoiled at this phrase, as I once did, when I saw how turned off people were by me at times in my life, try to remember that we all mess up.
You can never be perfect, and you will never be everyone’s cup of tea. And that’s okay. It is much better to be yourself and find that person, or tribe, that really gets you, than it is to pretend to be someone else, or try to be what others want. And remember that we all change over time. We can learn and grow and those mistakes along the way are part of our growth.
stay as you are
Let’s say you don’t want to grow you want to stay as you are. You say you don’t want to question your thoughts. I’m fine as I am, I don’t want to change. This is what Carol Dweck calls acting from a fixed mindset. Fine, stay as you are. No one is forcing anyone to do anything. You are not a bad person if you don’t want to embrace change. You are a human, and as intrinsically worthy of living your life as the most enlightened Sage there ever was. No judgement, but perhaps you might miss out? It is always your choice.
Change from within
You have listened to your body. You have questioned your thoughts. You have looked at the challenges you face, the ones that make you miserable. Now what? How do you actually make a change that will improve your life?
Though external change can be necessary – changing a job, a location, friends who are not really friends, or a relationship that brings only stress, the main change that will improve your life always comes from within.
I have found Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy is the best way I know to understand why you do what you do. IFS provides an easy to follow way to connect with your thoughts ata deep level and get to really know you own personality and emotions. The books No Bad Parts and Self Therapy are manuals for this exploration. IFS sees each person’s mind as made up of lots of different Parts of yourself. A lot of these Parts have been created in childhood, and are like sub-personalities.
You might have a Part of yourself that wants to please people, and another Part that is angry at pleasing people. You might have a Part that likes to socialise, and another Part that prefers to be on their own. By exploring our psyche through Parts we can get a broader and clearer picture of ourselves. We can also do this without putting pressure on ourselves to be right in a certain all or nothing way.
Though we often think of ourselves as a certain type of person, we all experience a broad variety of emotions and states. We are sometimes courageous sometimes scared. We are sometimes honest, sometimes not so. We are generally loving parents, but will on occasion wish we never had kids at all. In short, we’re much more complex than a simple this or that type of person. IFS gives us a framework and language to explain this complexity about ourselves.
Living authentically then means acknowledging and accepting all Parts of ourselves. Change can now take place by looking at those Parts within us that are acting in ways which hold us in jobs, or relationships, for example that are painful and unhealthy. We can also understand what Parts of us are causing worry, anxiety, anger and any emotion or feeling.
IFS is also a simple way to help us understand our bodies. By using meditative techniques, see the Healing Meditation in Meditation – 3 Ways, we can get in touch with where bodily pain or illness can be related to Parts of ourselves that may be holding back emotions, and thoughts, that need to be accepted.
By accepting your thoughts and feelings, and the Parts behind them, we can then transform these Parts, so that unhelpful feelings and thoughts can be released. This brings true change in our lives by reducing or letting go of fears, worries, anxieties, angers.
We can also heal long held traumas from the past from experiences we might have thought of as scarring us forever. Here is the depth of IFS as a powerful transformative tool. IFS opens up all of your thoughts and learning and experiences to the light of healing. If you have labelled or been labelled as this or that kind of person, or thought of yourself as doomed by your upbringing, or unhealthy choices you made, you can find a way out of the maze through the techniques of IFS.
finding you are more
The way out of trauma and into true change means bringing in the concept of a part of ourselves that is different to all other more obvious Parts. This is what IFS calls Self. It is similar to the Observing Self in mindfulness and ACT therapy, and parallels what many spiritual traditions refer to as soul or spirit. (See Glossary.) I prefer to call it Universal Consciousness as this is most accurate for me.
Whatever the words used to try and describe it, this is that felt sense inside of loving acceptance of all Parts of ourselves, and essentially all Parts of others. That sounds like a stretch right?
That is a natural reaction and it will only be through trying IFS yourself that you will find if it is too much of a stretch, or the gateway to this deeper acceptance of your own actions, and your thoughts and feelings, as well as those of all humans. We are all the same deep down.
If it is too much of a stretch then maybe that is just too much right now. Take a break. Give it time. Come back to it. Self, Spirit, Universal Consciousness, however you want to relate to it, is always here.
what Change can bring
What will happen if you choose change? What happens if you question your thoughts, and find your values, and apply acceptance to all Parts of yourself, and start to understand your thoughts, and why you do what you do, and what you want to do in your life, and act from a growth mindset?
You can achieve many of your goals in life. You can achieve financial success. You can find a life partner. You can improve your health and stay healthy. You can feel happier and more satisfied by living a life in line with what you value, rather than what you were taught as a child, or what church or society teaches you must want.
Growth is not always easy, but if you stick with making choices you value, then you will go forward in life to places that are more fun and enjoyable. And you will do so with less worry, frustration and conflict in your life. Sounds pretty good right?
but... in the end...
Why does there have to be a but?
Because for most of us, even when we do all the good stuff, and good work on ourselves, and act in line with out values, and learn what real happiness is, and how to achieve this in a lasting way, even after all this we are still scared.
To quote from the Linkin Park song, In The End – “In the end, it doesn’t really matter.” I both love and hate that song. It is an incredibly negative song lyrically, made all the more sad since the lead singing force of this song, Chester Beddingfield, committed suicide after years of battling depression. But the music is brilliant and the song lyrics, whether or not they are intended to be about our mortality, powerfully demand we stare into the abyss and ask, what is all this for?
This is a question the majority of us ask at one point or another and either find an answer to or just ignore. It is a question you will still be asking in this stage of The Roadmap. And you won’t have an answer. Any answer you might have supplied in the past, under examination, just doesn’t stack up.
Let’s see that it action:
1) Life is for proving to God we’re worthy of a paradisaical afterlife – Stage One’s rejection of traditional religion rejects this answer.
2) Life is for enjoying in all it’s magnificence. Or, life is chance, a crazy stroke of luck in a cold heartless universe – Stage Two’s questioning of science refutes this as a definitive answer.
3) Life is about following the rules of your culture / country / community / business to gain their approval through fame / wealth / a grand funeral /fill in the blank – Stage Three says this is all an illusion.
4) Life is about self-discovery and choosing a life based on what you value – Stage Four sounds just right. The Goldilocks stage. The best you’re going to get stage. Except that the universe still feels very cold and, honestly, you’re still left thinking – what was it all for?
Practicing The Roadmap - stage four
As in the previous stages continue to Get Into A Growth Mindset view with what you are learning in The Roadmap.
Continue to take time to yourself and spend time alone in nature as a way to help connect with the stillness inside yourself. Continue with all of the Meditation practices in Meditation – 3 Ways and practice Healing Meditation as often as you want.
By now you will be understanding yourself more fully as detailed in ALIIGNED. and you will be knowing who you are, your World Identity and healing those Parts of yourself that need help.
Continue practicing and learning Internal Family Systems (IFS) and the IFS concept of Self which I call Universal Consciousness, You will be feeling this sense of Universal Consciousness in your daily meditations and particularly in the Healing Meditation.
Key Guides for this stage – Mindset, Healing Back Pain, Cured, When The Body Says No, Not Nice, The Happiness Trap, Self-Therapy & No Bad Parts
are you ready for stage five?
Stages One, Two, Three and Four are all concerned primarily with finding out who we are in the world, our World Identity as I call it.
But, as discussed, even if we achieve a healthy self-knowledge, even if we find success in the world, and happiness and contentment, we still die in the end. And, at a cosmic scale, everything dies and changes. All human achievements are like specks of sunlight in the life and death of our universe.
That’s why, because this question keeps nagging at us, we have to move on to Stage Five.