Someone in my Change Your Mind course put it this way: I’m a work in progress. I’ve had a dysfunctional and abusive environment growing up. So I’m working on it, and there are times I’m doing great, and times I’m not doing great. And then I had this phone conversation with my mom, and I was not able to change my mind. The conversation was very sour.
What they’re describing is really tender and real. We’re trying, and the mind, the body, take a while to catch up, to change. And to acknowledge that and admit that is tender. It’s open. I think it’s just helpful to first realize that this is how growth happens.
One way of thinking about it is four stages. Stage one, we’re doing it and we don’t even know we’re doing it. We’re not self-aware, we’re not mindful, we’re just doing it. Stage two, we know we’re doing it and wish we weren’t doing it. We wish that reaction were not arising, but we can’t help it, or part of it, or we can’t stop that way of feeling. Stage three, the reactions are arising, the tendencies are arising, but we don’t act them out. We have a lot of breathing room from them, even if they’re arising only inside our mind. And then stage four, that reaction doesn’t occur at all. We’ve really, really moved on.
Another way of describing it is unconscious incompetence, then conscious incompetence, then conscious competence, we can ride the bicycle, but we really have to focus, and then unconscious competence. Milarepa talked about this too, in his own way. In the beginning, nothing came. In the middle, nothing stayed. In the end, nothing left.
That’s how learning happens. That’s how the nervous system changes over time. And that change process starts expanding and spreading inside the nervous system, revealed by a growing sense of being untroubled. Often it starts that way with lower stress triggers first. Parents, for most of us, are on the zero to ten potential trigger scale, a ten. Even if we love them, even if it was a secure relationship, secure attachment, because they’re so central to us.
You basically are relatively early in this process of moving from states to traits, growing and healing, which is great, actually, it means there’s plenty of upside potential in the days and years to come. And you ended up with a force five hurricane, mom. I would laugh at myself when my parents were still alive. I was in my 60s before my father passed away, my late 50s for my mother, and I’d done 30 years of inner work. I’m a therapist. And still they would use a certain tone with me and it was like I’m nine years old and pissed off yet again, or hurt, or frozen. So it’s understandable. Give yourself a break. Stick with it. Keep learning, keep growing.
Here’s exactly what I want to walk through: why practicing on your hardest relationship first backfires, a specific way your own mind can quietly set you up to fail, and a real filter for deciding whether to actually say the difficult thing once you’re ready.
