ActionBites: "Comfortable" The Hidden Disease

Thursday, November 07, 2013

"Comfortable" The Hidden Disease

I wrote this way back in 2006. I think it still stacks up.

What have I learned since I first wrote this? I think we can have a very poor understanding of our feelings and what we tend to assume is comfortable is not the deep, sink in and feel wonderful and cosy feeling that is really comfortable, but just a dry, dull absence of real pain. We can wander about with this 'feel nothing' feeling and not even know that this is less than the good feelings we could be enjoying every day. Much like the difference between being truly happy, and being not unhappy.

Why You Should Be Uncomfortable About Being Comfortable

When Self Deception Masquerades As Comfort

Seldom do we consciously realize there is a little voice that resides in our mind. It whispers to us, when an opportunity presents to us, saying that “we should not take the risk”. The voice just like our parents used when they talked to us, when we were tiny tots. It reminds us that we should keep doing what we’ve always done, because that’s where we are comfortable. Safe. Keeping to a known quantity, where we know what to expect. Familiar territory.

We listen to that voice as we are growing up. Eventually it becomes so much a part of our experience, that we internalize those instructions to the point where we no longer need someone “outside” to tell us – because now we’ve incorporated it into our internal landscape. It’s where we learn to know to verify what we know and convinces us what we should do. It’s where we know how to get what we get. It’s the voice that has kept us doing those things that are comfortable and sometimes it shares the space in our head with other voices, When you bring them to mind, you may recognize when you think about it, that those voices belong to someone from your past. Perhaps a mother, or a father, or a grandparent. Bring the voices to mind now and see if you can locate who the voices remind you of... both in the tonality of how they sound, and in the kinds of things that those voices say to you. Is it someone you know? Is it your own voice you hear when you listen?

What those voices have in common is that they share a single intent, Simply, the intention is to keep you safe.

They all want to save you from disappointment, or accident, or harm. Just like they looked after us when we were a small child with little experience, and fewer resources in both emotional, intellectual, education and personal skills than we have now as adults.

So how do you know when to trust those voices, which whisper to us and urge us to keep to the safe, the known path; those little voices that want only to keep us safe, the only way they know how? Learning to respond now with all the resources you have as an adult, and not as the child that you once were - vulnerable and with limited choices - is the beginning of personal growth and the start of living a self-determined life.

Now what I'd like to ask here is what you do in your own life to visit some of the assumptions that we make on 'Automatic'.

Have you begun yet, to question those things that you just know you know?