Too Much Is Not Enough

We are each dealt a particular biology, psychological history, and current social environment. From these parts emerges a new entity—the Psyche—with attributes that did not exist before. Even the neuron, as remarkable and complex a structure as it is, does not possess consciousness. Experiential phenomena emerge from the activities of many neurons. Opinions, actions and will are properties of the Psyche but do not exist within any of its component parts. Some individuals have good cognitive abilities and are able to predict the likely outcome of making one choice versus another. Nevertheless, they may knowingly choose a less rewarding alternative over a more rewarding one. The technical term for this perverse tendency is impulsivity.

Dependence occurs when the individual becomes unable to control incentive use despite its obvious destructive consequences. There may be sincere attempts to quit or cut down; nevertheless the individual predictably relapses and encounters again the scolding voice of self and others: “Don’t you have any willpower?”

Willpower
Free will refers to the idea that we have the ability to influence our actions intentionally. The contrasting view, Determinism, holds that we actually have no free will because all of our decisions and actions are completely determined by cause-and-effect principles, though they may be unknowable to us; the experience that we have free will is merely an illusion.

Unlike turkeys, whose behavior is determined by specific aspects of their immediate environment, some humans are able to set long-range goals, develop plans, and make adjustments to their plan until their goal is achieved. They appear to have an intentional influence over the course of their life. Advocates of freewill argue that a new phenomenon emerged with human cognition, which makes us fundamentally different from turkeys. Alternatively, determinists argue that it may just seem that way because we are so much more complex than turkeys.

We cannot resolve the free will debate by simply asking people whether they intended to do something or not, because we cannot be sure whether the intention led to the behavior or the behavior led to the experience of intention. The subjective experience of free will is not evidence for its existence. We can never be sure that A causes B, as there could always be a third variable C that causes both of them. While it seems that our intentions cause our actions, there may be causes of which we are unaware that produce both of them. In fact, there is evidence that even before we are aware of the intention to perform an action, the neural precursors of the action have already occurred.

There is a middle position: Libertarianism. This view holds that human behavior is determined by many causes, including biological factors, psychological conditioning, and current social pressures, but this very causality provides the opportunity for us to have an intentional influence on how things play out. The more we discover about the cause-and-effect relationships, the more power we have to impose our will upon the world. Even if willful control of our immediate behavior is an illusion, you can use your appreciation of cause-and-effect relationships to intentionally change the course of your life.

Willpower—overriding the path of least resistance to follow your intended path—is taxing. You cannot intentionally guide behavior every moment, because you often need to focus on other things. Following the path of least resistance is often a good thing because it frees up cognitive resources; the default path is harmful when it leads to relapse. Acting as intended at those moment when the cognitive resources required to exercise will are otherwise occupied requires training. Like a martial artist you can rehearse the intended coping responses so you can perform them automatically during stressful moments.

Rational processing is a gift, but it is important to appreciate when it is available, and what it can and cannot do:

• Rational processing can produce rapid change (e.g., “I used to believe in the tooth fairy, but then I realized that it was my mother and since then have never relapsed to the earlier view.”) This is contrasted with the many repetitions required to change a habit.

• Rational processing can influence future behavior through a variety of means including: pre-commitment, rehearsal of desired performance, or modification of environments.

• Rational processing is only possible when there is a surplus of cognitive resources. It is not available when cognitive resources are otherwise occupied by complex cognitive demands, strong emotional states, or diminished by fatigue or intoxication.

• Rational processing is too slow to influence behavior in real-time. Performance, to be smooth and responsive to a changing world, requires a rapid, holistic processing. Typically when you try to consciously control ongoing behavior, you disrupt it.
Procedural Skills to Exercise Will
Operating the bio-psycho-social system you inhabit is a bit like driving a car. To operate the motor vehicle, you must appreciate that pressing the accelerator makes it go faster, turning the wheel steers it, etc. Once you learn how it works, it becomes a matter of practice with some guidance from dad or a driving instructor to achieve competence.

Those who live in cold climates are forced to develop additional skills to cope with icy roads. While it seems unfair that northerners have an extra burden to bear, fairness is irrelevant. Northerners and southerners must each cope with the reality they are presented. As partial compensation for the additional demands, northerners get to be better drivers in icy conditions.

Your relationship with the incentive has created dangers with which you must now cope. Success depends upon your ability to respond competently to a particular set of challenges. You are bound to encounter certain high risk situations again and again. Each one is an opportunity to practice responding as intended. I suggest to my clients they look at these crises as sparring partners that are part of their training. The martial artist may not like receiving pain from his sparring partners, but accepts it as part of the price to achieve his goal. Of course, it does not matter whether you like it or not; you are bound to encounter high risk situations, and you will either adhere to your commitments and make yourself stronger or follow the path of least resistance, thereby causing yourself and others unnecessary suffering.

Mindful responding during a crisis is rare because most people don’t recognize they are in a crisis until it’s too late. You will have to recognize that you are at risk of relapse and awaken yourself so you can perform intentionally. Be aware that at first it will be quite difficult to execute the coping tactic during a crisis, because the cognitive resources required to behave mindfully will be occupied by whatever is going on at this high risk moment. With practice, the intended response becomes easier to perform.

To get a child to trade something of genuine value for a trivial incentive is so easy that to do so is considered immoral and, in some cases, illegal. Some adults remain as vulnerable to state-dependent phenomena as they were when they were children, and for them provoking a relapse is as easy as taking candy from a baby.

A predisposing cause of relapse is the mentality of childhood. Children assume that their state-dependent perceptions and beliefs are accurate reflections of objective reality. They label their appraisals in ways that crystallize these experiential phenomena into “things” that have an independent reality. For example: “Mommy is bad,” carries with it the tacit premise that “she really is bad and it’s not just that I’m cranky.” The dispassionate observer understands that the child’s cranky state influences his current appraisals, and mommy won’t always seem bad. Later, when the child is in a different emotional state, his appraisal will be influenced by a different state-dependent filter. Naturally, the child is always unaware of the Soul Illusion and in each situation believes that he sees things as they really are.

When a child experiences fear—say in the doctor’s office just before the inoculation—her emotional arousal comes with the tacit premise that the fear is based on a real threat and its intensity is related to the awfulness of the situation. Some children experience such strong emotional states that they must be restrained by adults, even though they are told, “It will just sting for a moment.” Likewise, children often believe that the intensity of their desire for a certain incentive correlates with the degree of pleasure they will actually receive from it.

Many grown-ups continue to think that their perceptions, expectancies, and appraisals are undistorted reflections of a permanent objective reality [see The Soul Illusion]. An important developmental milestone is the appreciation that subjective experience—including cravings, negative thoughts, and anxious feelings—is merely a temporary, state-dependent phenomenon, which exists only in the mind of the beholder. The objective world is populated with events; it is only within your subjective reality that beliefs, emotional reactions, and the story that gives it all meaning exist. The technical term for this realization is, Meta-Cognitive Awareness.

Operating the vehicle you inhabit so that it follows the path of greatest advantage rather than drifting in the direction of least resistance requires the ability to shift from the perspective of the vehicle, whose actions are determined by cause-and-effect principles such as the PIG, to the perspective of the operator of the vehicle, who is sensitive to your core motivation.

There is an ongoing battle for your attention and the winner gets to influence your subjective reality and hence how you will perform in the objective world. Whether or not you are able to exercise will during a particular crisis often depends upon how certain conflicts play out.

 When there is conflict between ruminative self focus and real-world problem solving, exercising will involves shifting your attention from the more abstract rumination to the more concrete problem solving in the here and now.

 When there is conflict between local incentives and your core motivation, exercising will involves shifting your attention from the more concrete local payoff to the more abstract principles and interests described by your core motivation.

The Exercise of Will
During high-risk situations, it is critical that the rational processing system, which is sensitive to your core motivation rather than to local conditions, is the entity operating the vehicle. For this reason, the necessary first component of the exercise of will is alerting the operator. Exercising will at the critical moments is analogous to the demonstration of musical and athletic virtuosity: The apparent instantaneous and effortless reactions result from considerable effort expended in preparation and practice.

The steps below describe this process in excruciating detail so that it may be understood intellectually. However, this is a procedural skill, which, when executed successfully, takes almost no time to perform.

1. Recognize a warning sign that you are in a high-risk situation [see Chapter 5.4].

2. Make the meta-cognitive shift from the state-dependent perspective of the creature (the experiential processing system) to the dispassionate perspective of the operator who appreciates your core motivation (the rational processing system).

3. To make the meta-cognitive shift, dissociate from your local trance and assume the perspective of a kindly observer, who is aware of your thoughts and emotions and understands that these state-dependent phenomena always feel valid and permanent but are merely the experiences of this biological creature at this moment. (Some clients personify this procedure by imagining me, the kindly therapist, eavesdropping on their thoughts and pointing out thinking errors).

4. Initiate this process by doing something concrete such as taking a deep breath, shifting your posture, or using the reminder card, which was specifically designed for this purpose. (It is critical that you make this shift in time. The window of opportunity to escape an unfolding trap is tiny.)

5. Exercise will by guiding the bio-psycho-social vehicle along the intended path, rather than the trajectory that would have been followed by a driverless vehicle.

Consider a time when you were driving your automotive vehicle along a familiar route, and you were so absorbed in your thoughts—planning some future activity or ruminating on a current concern—that you didn’t notice passing a certain landmark along the way, or the music from the vehicle’s sound system, or the feel of the steering wheel in your hands. Even though your conscious mind was so completely preoccupied that you didn’t notice all these things, a part of you was driving the vehicle and operating it perfectly safely.

Since your conscious mind was preoccupied with its thoughts, who was operating the vehicle? It must be a part of you of which you are not conscious. This unconscious, experiential processing system is capable of guiding complex performance while making little demand on your finite conscious resources [see Two Minds]. Indeed, most of the time you are not consciously operating the bio-psycho-social vehicle you inhabit, because your attention is focused elsewhere, or not at all.

By contrast, “mindful driving” means being fully present in each moment, consciously aware of sights, sounds, thoughts, and bodily sensations as they arise, so you can respond intentionally rather than follow the path of least resistance. When mindful, you can act in accord with your interests and principles despite the influence of local stressors and temptations that would promote relapse.

The Karma of repeatedly exercising the behavioral sequence that leads to incentive use is that it gets progressively stronger until it becomes autonomous. Once that happens it requires willful effort to interrupt the sequence of events leading to incentive use.

The Path of Least Resistance
The path of least resistance describes the predictable, cause-and-effect sequence of events that a biological creature would follow if it did not have an operator aware of its core motivation, or if the operator was asleep at the wheel. Getting this creature to follow an intended path in the face of local conditions that would promote incentive use requires an operator capable of exerting will to override these local forces.

Real life demands substantial cognitive resources. Investing these dear resources to intentionally guide behavior at each moment is not a realistic strategy. Will has its greatest impact when exercised during the critical moments of a crisis. From my perspective as the therapist rooting for good outcome, I want an operator who appreciates the client’s core motivation in the driver’s seat at these critical moments. If only I could follow my clients around and alert them—in a kindly, non-judgmental way—when they are in a high-risk situation, so they could wake up and operate the vehicle mindfully. Of course, there will be no external voice to tip you off.

A major part of the passage from dependence to self-determination is developing the capability to shift from the perspective of the biological creature, which must obey cause-and-effect principles (such as the PIG), to the perspective of the operator (who has a particular destination and route in mind).

The metaphor of the operator and the creature is a bit misleading, because it implies a separation between the two. In fact, the state of the creature affects the motivation, perception and other state-dependent attributes of the operator. The ability to operate the creature requires an appreciation of this recursive relationship. Perhaps the primary responsibility of the operator is to protect the creature from strong emotional states and other local conditions that would compromise the operator’s abilities.

Getting a mortal creature—driven by desires and fears—to act as intended requires the power to override these primitive motivations. Exercising will, like exercising muscle power through resistance training, is a discipline that demands some dedication and patience. The thought experiments and trance formation media provide opportunities to exercise the faculties required to override the influence of local conditions and behave as intended.

These exercises share the commonality of inviting you to experience a particular phenomenon by getting you to focus your attention on a particular stimulus. Your ability to experience phenomena intentionally depends upon your faculties of concentration and imagination. Like muscles, these faculties grow stronger with exercise and atrophy with disuse.

For some people, merely thinking about the incentive or, perversely, trying not to think about it, increases the urge to use it. Moreover, arguing with yourself about whether or not to use the incentive keeps your attention on it, making you more vulnerable to falling into its trance. Any thought or image of the incentive is a clear warning signal that you are in a high-risk situation and now is the time to exercise will. One coping tactic is to pose Will’s Question: “What is the best use of my attention right now?” The answer to this question identifies the path of greatest advantage.

Whenever you ask Will’s Question, you force a decision: To continue to follow the path of least resistance or to exercise will by purposely shifting your attention in a way that changes your motivational state. The exercise of will refers to the effort required to change the focus of your attention for a sufficient period to elicit the intended state change.

Intentional Trance Formation
A change in the focus of attention evokes trance formation. The change may occur as a result of the appearance of a highly salient stimulus or because you intentionally changed it by asking Will’s Question.

The method of Intentional Trance Formation has two parts: The intentional part—that is, deciding what trance is intended—is determined by asking Will’s Question; the trance formation part requires continually re-directing your attention back to the answer and willfully helping the process through suggestion. 

Intentional Trance Formation is one approach to escaping traps that result from the Soul Illusion. The method is simple to describe: To escape motivational states that may promote relapse or to elicit motivational states that promote behaviors consistent with your core motivation, dissociate from what is going on in the here and now and ask, “What is the best use of my attention right now?” Then focus on the answer and use your imagination and cognitive resources to help the trance formation.

We want your core motivation—rather than the most salient feature of the local environment—to influence your motivation and appraisals during high-risk situations. Intentional Trance Formation is the method of willfully changing your motivational state by shifting your attention from the salient stimulus that has captured it to the answer to Will’s Question.  To experience hypnotic phenomena directly, please click here.

Suggestion, the use of imagination to manipulate subjective phenomena can be used to counter many addictive traps. This procedural skill requires a creative imagination and the ability to focus your attention for a long enough period to achieve the intended result. The payoff for investing effort to work with the experiential exercises described in this section is the enhancement of willpower

When you tell yourself to raise your hand it goes up, but when you tell yourself to calm down, become sexually aroused, or to salivate, you may not get the desired response. This is because consciousness is a property of the rational processing system, which can operate your skeletal muscles, but cannot directly control your passions.

There is, however, an indirect method by which you can exert conscious influence on your biological responses: Instead of willing the response, aim your attention to the stimulus that elicits the intended response. For example if you want to salivate, instead of telling yourself to salivate, imagine licking a juicy but sour lemon—the same approach works with sexual arousal, anger, and other emotional reactions.

Thought Experiment: Evoking a cringe – Take a few moments to relive a time when you embarrassed yourself, you will find that the more vivid the image and the more detail you can conjure up, the greater the cringe effect.

If you were able to experience the cringe, then you successfully initiated trance formation—that is, you willfully aimed your attention to a particular stimulus—in this case, an embarrassing moment—in order to produce the intended state change.

Because this is an early exercise and I wanted to make it easy, I used cringe imagery rather than efficacy-enhancing imagery, which would have been more useful for our purposes. Special exercises designed to strengthen your ability to use your imagination in an intended way are included in this kit precisely because most people actively resist efficacy enhancing imagery. Some people actually suppress images of themselves as competent or successful because they were specifically trained to be modest or self-deprecating. For some individuals, the bias against efficacy-enhancing imagery is a major obstacle. Below are two sources of it:

 Asymmetry of Positive and Negative Imagery: Because it is more threatening, negative imagery is more salient than positive imagery. Moreover, stimuli that promote incentive use are intrinsically more salient (hotter) than stimuli that promote self-determination—especially during high-risk situations.

 Bias Against Self-Suggestion: Paradoxically, it is easier to accept a suggestion from a hypnotist—who may know nothing about you or your situation—than it is to accept your own suggestion. A popular misconception is that there is an authentic you and pretending to be better than you are would simply be prideful self-delusion. People resist positive self-suggestions because they view efficacy-enhancing imagery as intentional lies about the authentic you. In fact, there is no authentic you. The one that shows up at any given time is the one that emerges from your current subjective reality. Barry performs better socially when he perceives himself as clever and attractive than when he feels socially inept and shame-worthy. Even though the former appraisal is more accurate and helpful than the latter, Barry acts as if the more salient suggestions were valid. By so doing, Barry transforms these negative suggestions into objective reality by performing poorly.

Please click here to download a free audio file that invites you to experience hypnotic and other trance formative phenomena. Even though you will perform these exercises in a relaxed environment and have the aid of an audio, maintaining your focus on the target stimuli—despite internal and external pulls on your attention—requires a kind of mental strength. Using this method to escape pathogenic trances in real time is considerably more difficult than evoking the intended phenomenon during practice. Exercising your faculty of aiming attention as described in the thought experiments in this section will strengthen your ability to resist the pull of salient distracting stimuli.

We are all condemned to the limitations of subjective reality and so our perceptions and appraisals are creations of the Psyche and not unbiased representations of objective reality. Our understanding of reality is always distorted in one way or another, as different stimuli capture attention, elicit emotional reactions, and thereby bias state-dependent phenomena. When you become angry your perceptions and response tendencies change. The anger that produced these changes does not exist in the objective world; it is a subjective experience that was created by and exists solely within you. The truth when you are angry is different than the truth when you are contrite.

One client, who was working on an anger problem, reported that during a chaotic situation at an airport ticket counter someone kicked him in the back of the leg. When he turned around to “confront the asshole” he confronted a handicapped girl in a wheelchair, which had rolled, out of control, down a ramp and hit him. He reports that she was terrified by the rage on his face when he turned around. His subjective reality changed instantaneously as a result of the new information, although objective reality now included an apologetic adult and a terrified little girl.

Your motivational state is, to a large extent, determined by the stimulus that captures your attention. Some stimuli are more attention grabbing than others. Stimuli that are particularly salient can elicit a state change without your conscious intention. Stimulus Salience refers to how bright or attention grabbing a stimulus is, not necessarily how meaningful it is. The picture of one child suffering as a result of an earth quake may be more salient and elicit a greater emotional reaction than statistics of thousands killed

If there were a rattlesnake by your feet, you would be in a different emotional state (fight-or-flight) than you are in now, and it would be hard to pay attention to this text. This adaptive response results from our descent from organisms that noticed threatening stimuli; those who did not react quickly and powerfully are not our ancestors. A rattlesnake in the room with you is both salient and meaningful. But for an individual with snake phobia, even the idea of a snake—which is not objectively dangerous—can elicit a state change that is not adaptive.

Reward refers to the pleasurable effects of using an incentive. Reinforcement refers to the effect using the incentive has on future behavior. Reinforcement not only strengthens the behavioral sequence that lead to the incentive, but also enhances the salience of stimuli associated with it. The Karma of repeatedly experiencing powerful reinforcement is not only the creation of autonomous paths to relapse, but that stimuli associated with getting or using the incentive become increasingly capable of capturing your attention and eliciting unintended state changes—or trance formations. As a result of their association with the incentive, certain stimuli—persons, places or things—become salient. If you allow them to capture your attention they can elicit trances that will distort your perception, motivation and other state-dependent phenomena in ways that are counter to your interests.

Your biology, past reinforcement history, and current social environment determines what is salient. Your rational processing system gets to determine what is meaningful. To follow your path of greatest advantage you will have to know what it is, and develop the competence to resist the pull of highly salient stimuli and willfully select the target of your attention.

Suggestions are invitations to explore a particular subjective reality. Whether the entity that creates it is a hypnotist, salesman, or you, the suggestion is always a creative fiction rather than a claim of objective validity. Typically, the suggestion is designed to promote the interests of its creator—unless that entity is neurotic.

The interests of the stage hypnotist are served when the subject performs foolishly and the audience laughs; the interests of the salesman are served when the customer buys. Your interests are served when you get yourself to act as you intend despite the influence of local conditions that would promote relapse.

The method of hypnotic suggestion, demonstrated by stage hypnotists, can be a powerful tool in the service of behavior change. But because the procedure is portrayed as comedy, the public has developed the wrong idea of how it works. The popular misconception that hypnosis compels the mindless subject to obey the suggestion of the controlling hypnotist probably results from the stage demonstration called the challenge—for example: “Your leg is getting heavier and heavier/you can try to lift your leg/but it will be so heavy/that you won’t be able to do it.” This sounds like a battle of wills between the hypnotist and the subject, but it is not. In fact whatever happens is produced completely by the subject and is an intra-personal rather than an inter-personal phenomenon. After you have read the explanation, you can experience this classic hypnotic phenomenon by exercising your faculty of imagination with the Heavy Shoe audio invitation.

As you will see, the script is full of lies, such as “your shoe is made of lead/ your leg is too heavy to lift” Scripts such as this are used to demonstrate that simple verbal suggestions can influence the experience and behavior of a cooperative subject. The demonstration can produce humorous or shocking consequences when the subject acts as if the reality suggested by the hypnotist were actually true. Acting as though an objectively false suggestion were true—e.g., your shoe is made of lead—produces behavior that would appear absurd to an observer, and so the audience, who are not asked to buy into the false suggestion, finds it humorous.

Barry’s Neurotic Trance
But some things are neither true nor false. Are you a hero or a loser? There is no objective answer to that question. Concepts like that exist only within your mind. But how you perform in the real world depends, to a large extent, upon your subjective reality at that moment. The heroic version of you would react differently than your loser persona. Consider Barry’s predicament: He wants, very badly, to perform well, but his self-evaluative perspective produces the wrong trance:

Barry exhibits a much sharper wit in social environments where he expects to perform well than in situations that evoke his “loser” persona. The appraisal: “I’m a loser,” or the expectation: “I will perform well,” exists only in Barry’s mind and not in the objective world. Nevertheless, his subjective reality influences how he will behave in the objective world. Whether he reacts to the snide insult at the office party with a witty come back or humiliation depends to a large extent on his subjective reality at the time. His retort is more likely to be clever if he is in a confident trance than if he is in his “loser” trance. He wants to bring on the clever version of himself and enjoy a social victory for a change, but he expects to be weak and intimidated as usual. Observers who know Barry have their predictions—one expected an embarrassing pause and another expected him to say something stupid. But these expectations exist only in their minds. Whatever Barry actually does becomes part of objective reality, while all the other possibilities fade into oblivion.

It would be good for Barry if he performs well during his crisis. But there is a conflict between his intentions—to be the cool and clever Barry—and his expectation of humiliation. Will his expectations or his intentions determine which Barry shows up at the critical moment?

Expectations have the advantage—both Barry and his friends believe them to be true. From our dispassionate perspective we can see they are merely creative fictions which are neither true nor false. Barry’s only real limitation is the one that he created.

Unlike insults and injuries that come from outside and tend to heal with time, Barry’s recursive problem has been with him for a long time and continually diminishes his fun, increases his misery, and prevents him from establishing an intimate partnership. Such problems tend not to go away by themselves but strengthen with practice.

The illusion of state permanence, a variation of the Soul Illusion, refers to the tacit premise that we will always perceive things as we do now. This may be true for you now as you read, as it is for my clients during their therapy sessions. If only you had access to these cognitive gifts when next you encounter a high-risk situation. Sadly, this is not to be. Instead, you will be influenced in the same way you were the last time you were in a similar circumstance.

The hypnotic state clients experience in my office as a result of a formal trance induction is just one of the many different trances they experience throughout their day. Subjective experience emerges from the Psyche’s attempt to interpret sensory input. The interpretations are biased by a range of factors, including beliefs. For example, skiers with different beliefs about their abilities may experience different subjective realities on the same slope.

There is nothing unusual about hypnosis—everything we experience is trance phenomena. You can evoke one kind of trance by listening to a trance formation audio file, but you don’t need a formal hypnotic induction to change your experiential state. Consider the following thought experiment:

Thought Experiment: The Emergency. Imagine that you just got a message that someone in your family had been seriously hurt in an automobile accident and you must get to the emergency room right away. Your biological state would change immediately and you would run or drive there as fast as you could, heart pounding, thoughts racing, and experiencing great distress. When you got there and discovered the report was untrue, you would experience relief, a very different trance. Objectively, the report was never true, yet it had a great impact on your physical and emotional state.

State-dependent phenomena—including motivation, perceptual bias and response probability distribution—are determined by the subjective reality that existed in your mind, not by what was objectively true.

Your subjective reality is a creative fiction that you are continually inventing. To be sure, your overt behavior becomes part of world history (and so can never be undone), but the trance that gives rise to it is purely subjective and does not exist outside your consciousness.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference,” is an eloquent statement of the Enlightened Path.

Here is the way to know the difference: The only things you can change are your thoughts and actions; everything else is outside of your control. Consider how the Serenity Prayer applies to ruminative self-focus. “The things I cannot change” include outcomes, the past, what people think of me. I must have the serenity to accept these realities.

Given your awareness of situations or personal characteristics that diminish the quality of your life, it is natural to apply your problem-solving skills to improve things. The goal is clear enough: Maximize pleasure and desirable outcomes and minimize pain and miserable outcomes. Unfortunately, problem-solving methods applied to the self tend to trigger self-evaluation and hence ruminative self-focus, which in turn increases the likelihood of suffering and bad outcomes.

Ironically, problem solving in the service of escaping suffering, or achieving gratification, drives the recursive mechanism. The irony shows up in many neurotic and addictive disorders. For example, individuals with social phobia are often successful at minimizing social contact, which prevents the exposure to social situations, which is the cure for social phobia. Substance abusers are notorious for coming up with ingenious methods to access their chemical of choice despite the heroic efforts of families or treatment programs to protect them—the relapse, of course, exacerbates their suffering.