NEUROTICISM: Understanding Our Attempts To SELF-REGULATE Around Unconscious Pain

Hey guys I'm Heidi PRI welcome back to my Channel or welcome if you're new here for the next month and a half on this channel we're going to be talking about neuroticism and self-regulation specifically how the neurotic patterns of thinking and feeling that we might develop over the course of our lives are actually our best attempts at self-regulation when we don't have a clear understanding of what Is happening for us unconsciously so to get us started on topic I first want to differentiate it from the big five definition of neuroticism so if you don't know

what the big five is it's a system that looks at personality through five different dimensions one of them being called neuroticism and that is not what we're talking about here today though there might be significant overlap with the Big Five's definition of neuroticism and the type of Neuroticism that we're exploring here what we're exploring here is essentially the original definition of ticism so this term harks back to the era of Freudian psychology and a lot of what I'm interested in exploring over the course of this series is the more youngian interpretation of this term so

Carl Young spent a lot of time looking at how the conscious and unconscious mind interacted with each other and which problems arose in our lives by Virtue of that which was not consciously available to us so a lot of what Young or Freud would have considered neurotic we would now give a more specific DSM diagnosis to but essentially neurotic Behavior patterns can be thought of as things that we do compulsively or things that we might think of as self-sabotage so things like addictions perfectionism ruminating thoughts compulsive behaviors rigid patterns of thinking or behaving obsessions liant

thought patterns Essentially any part of our psychology where we are making a poor relation between our subjective inner world and the world of things and people outside of ourselves so the way that I think of neuroticism and neurotic behaviors or neurotic thought patterns is that it's our best attempt at self-regulation in the absence of a proper and accurate understanding of how our inner subjective World largely our world of feelings and inner states is connected To the world outside of us so the world of people people and objects and neuroticism can be thought of as the

mental and emotional pain that we experience often in a very deep and very persistent way when we're unable to resolve our problems directly or when we're unable to take ourselves out of painful emotional states directly because we don't have a clear idea of what in our external World those internal painful states are related to So we're going to look at a bunch of reasons why we might develop Neurosis as well as how we can start interacting differently with deep unconscious wounds in a nutshell young thought of neurosis as problems that were not fully conscious so

the difference between a conscious problem and a Neurosis is that a conscious problem is something that we can look at the pros and cons of and weigh them out inside of our minds and make a logical and rational decision That integrates how we feel about how to solve the problem and how to move forward even if we don't have the best possible solution but when we were up against a Neurosis essentially what's happened is that some part of the problem has gone underground and is not in our conscious awareness so young has a quote that

goes the neurotic is ill because he is unconscious of his problems and young believed that someone became neurotic through a three-step Process step one is that the person was confronted with a problem in some significant area of their life so some area where this problem really has to be worked through in order for you to have a fulfilling well-rounded life so this could be a work problem a relationship problem a problem that's a little bit more abstract like developing a sense of self or individuating from your parents and your family of origin but essentially step

one was that a Significant problem arose for you in life step two was that you failed to confront that problem directly the problem was evaded in some way rather than dealt with and in the way that Neurosis was originally conceptualized in the era of Freud and young there was a very negative slant to this that kind of chocked up an inability to confront problems directly to a character weakness or just having a weak will so it was kind of framed as You had this problem you could have dealt with it but you chose not to

out of fear or cowardice and this is today where we're going to slightly diverge from Young I believe that now now at this point in history with the plethora of information that we have about early childhood development that was not available back in the era of Freud and young we can look at this slightly differently and we're going to get into that soon but essentially what we can Agree on here is that when a life problem is evaded because for whatever reason whether it is a weak will or some of the other reasons we're going

to talk about as this video goes on you cannot directly confront a problem what tends to happen is you develop a defense mechanism that shoves the problem out of your conscious awareness so some of the ones that young gave his examples were repression projecting numbing out in some way when we encounter the problem Doing compulsive types of activity that keep the problem out of our awareness if we're super busy all the time or super obsessed with something else maybe the problem doesn't have time to make it into our conscious awareness unconsciously avoiding situations that might

trigger an awareness of the problem or misplacing the emotions that we feel around the problem onto other people or other objects in our environment and we're going to focus Really strongly on that one today there's a quote I really love by a man named Kenneth tinan that goes a Neurosis is a secret you do not know you are keeping so this is when we have some want some need some desire some emotion some impulse whatever it is that lives in our body and is being registered by our emotional system but that our conscious mind is

not fully aware of and according to Young this leads to a fear of life based on a disturbed or Diminished process of adaptation so essentially if we do not learn the skills that we need to face the challenges of our lives directly we develop fear and anxiety about the process of living and a wide range of habits or thought patterns that are aimed at attempting to control and contain our experience of life rather than authentically and spontaneous L engage with it and one of Young's Hallmark quotes on the topic is all Neurosis are a substitute

for legitimate suffering so now we're going to start unpacking what it looks like to suffer illegitimately or in a neurotic way versus what it looks like to get in touch with your true emotions your true experience of reality and to begin suffering legitimately the opposite of neuroticism can be thought of as an align ignment with reality and the ability to self-regulate based on an accurate Connection to reality so if we are not neurotic at all what it means is not that we never feel pain or never suffer but it means that we are understanding clearly

what our pain is related to and which actions we can take to best manage it so the goal is not to get rid of your feelings when we cure ourselves of neurosis we will still will have a wide range of feelings and a lot of them will be unpleasant but we'll be able to associate our feelings with the right Things so what we're going to be talking about a lot throughout the course of this video and the course of the next month and a half is what self-regulation looks like when we are self-regulating essentially it

means that we are reasonably aware of our own emotions as well as where our emotions are coming from and we're at choice to a reasonable extent around how we want to deal with our emotions so we're not necessarily reacting quickly out of impulse we're Not reacting from a place of trigger we are for the most part able to tell what we're feeling when and then we're also able to make Intelligent Decisions around how we want to deal with that emotion including when we want to do things like strongly Express an emotion versus when we want

to not express it so this doesn't mean that we're always inhibiting our emotions it just means that our emotions are not controlling us we are in the driver's seat of how we're Responding to our emotions the problem is that if certain emotions or a lot of different emotions are repressed for us we are not going to be at Choice when it comes to how we respond to them because we're not going to be sure exactly what it is that we are feeling so I kind of liken this to having a vitamin deficiency if you don't

know anything about nutrition let's say that we are living in a world where the field of nutrition was ever invented and people Just don't really know much about what foods we need in order to serve which functions biologically if one day your hair started falling out in clumps because you had a vitamin deficiency but you had no idea that there was such a thing as a vitamin deficiency you might get really obsessed with asking yourself the question what is wrong with my hair why is it falling out in huge clumps in the shower and you

might get really fixated on trying to find the right Shampoo or trying to find the right hair care routine that would stop your hair from falling out when in reality your hair is actually responding perfectly appropriately to the vitamin deficiency so it is following the laws of science perfectly there is nothing wrong with your hair the problem is that there is an underlying need in your body for a certain vitamin that is going unsatisfied and so it is causing your hair to fall out and this is very Similar to the experience of neurotic habits often

the thing that we get really fixated on because it's the thing that we most visibly see the results of or feel the consequences of in our daily life is actually not the root problem and so the more we fixate on it the more we fixate on finding the right shampoo the more we are actually going in the wrong direction so we're going to bring this into the realm of psychology just like it's possible to not know about the Field of nutrition and have no awareness of the fact that a vitamin deficiency can lead to hair

falling out it's also possible to have humongous blind spots when it comes to what keeps us psychologically healthy and when we have blind spots in that area and there's certain psychological vitamins we aren't getting we're not necessarily going to understand why we keep feeling the same types of pain over and over again so an example is let's say as a child you Didn't learn about assertiveness you didn't learn that it is an absolutely crucial part of Human Relationships to be able to check in with yourself say no when you don't want to do something and

design your life around the types of things that you authentically do want to do and the types of people that you authentically want to be around so we can think of this concept of saying no and being assertive as an essential vitamin that we need psychologically Ally in order to stay healthy if you do not have this vitamin you are going to start experiencing severe and recurrent consequences so you might find that you are chronically doing things you don't like doing or being around people you don't like being around and you might find that you

are chronically distressed by that and chronically needing comfort from other people and you might have this idea in your head why am I so needy why is it that I'm constantly needing to Be comforted by people when the people around me don't seem as distressed as I do and they don't seem to need as much care and support as I do and this is equivalent to noticing that your hair is falling out but not knowing what the root causes your emotional system is actually responding perfectly normally to constantly doing things you don't want to do

and being around people you don't want to be around that is naturally disregulated and when we are Disregulated we naturally need comfort from other people or from ourselves so you might look at this as I just need to be less needy I need to reach out to people less I need to seek less comfort and this is the equivalent of looking for the right shampoo that is going to stop your hair from falling out your hair is doing the right thing based on the vitamin deficiency and you are needing the appropriate level of comfort for

a person who is living a life They're unhappy insid of but the way to solve the problem is not to learn to be less needy the way to solve the problem is to figure out what vitamin you're missing and give yourself that if you learn how to practice discernment and say no when you want to say no you are eventually going to need much less comfort from other people because you are not going to have the problem of being chronically dissatisfied with the choices that you're making so a Neurosis Can be thought of as whatever

problem we get fixated on that is not the root problem that we are trying in vain to solve the pain of the root problem through so again trying to find the right shampoo when in reality we need more vitamin K or trying to be less needy when in reality we need to find a way to be more satisfied with our lives so that we're not chronically unhappy and in need of comfort and this is where we're going to start blending Developmental psychology with Young's conception of neuroticism so remember if wek back to his idea that

neurosis develop as a product of facing some problem in life that we choose not to face up to directly what I want to talk about now is why that might happen besides us just being weak willed I believe that a lot of problems in life that we do not face up to directly actually happened because we have a blind spot around the skill that we Would need in order to face up to that problem directly so again if you never learned assertiveness as a skill it's not not going to occur to you to be assertive

in a situation when you need to be that situation is not going to strike you as now is the time to be assertive that situation is going to strike you as now is the time to submit to what somebody else wants you're not going to recognize it as a challenge that could be overcome in this way so my Theory on why we often fail to face up to the problems in our life directly starts with our developmental blind spots at some point in our development in some significant way we fail to make an accurate connection

between our internal state so what's going on for us in our subjective inner world and our external environment so what our inner state is responding to in our environment usually because the people that we are looking to to get Information about that are not necessarily clear on it themselves or they're not able to properly contextualize it for us essentially what happens is we either internalize something as normal when it is not normal or we internalize something as not normal when it is normal and both of these conditions are going to skew our perception of how

our inner state is connected to our outer environment so I will give some examples of this because It's much easier to explain through example than through Theory let's say you grew up in a household where one of your caregivers is chronically emotionally abusive to the other caregiver ier but you are never told that what is happening between these two caregivers is a pattern of emotional abuse what you are taught is that this is a normal healthy relationship maybe nobody says that overtly but because nobody says anything to the contrary you Believe that the way your

one parent talks to the other parent is perfectly normal and maybe the main reason you believe that is because when the emotionally abusive parent says something unkind or derogatory or insulting to the other parent the other parent does not react maybe they have a pattern that causes them to withdraw and shut down in the face of verbal abuse and so you internalize their lack of reaction as this is just a normal way That people speak to each other the problem is that when someone insults us or when they say something to us that is not

true about our character or when we are projected onto our bodies do react to that our systems know and deeply understand that there is a danger to being seen in a negative and inaccurate Way by someone we are close to so if that parent now insults us or is derogatory towards us our bodies are still going to clock that as a threat But our conscious minds are not necessarily going to clock it as a threat our conscious minds are going to go my parent is behaving towards me the exact same way they behave towards my

other parent and I've learned through looking at my other parent that the appropriate response to this is to Simply ignore it and go on with my life and so when it happens I'm not going to understand consciously why I feel disregulated as far as I'm concerned Nothing of real consequence has happened to me so if I am feeling a strong emotional response it is just because I am crazy or irrational in some way because again nothing out of the ordinary is happening but again that feeling is still present in the body maybe my body feels

tense and angry maybe it feels threatened and scared maybe it feels disgust or shame but essentially now we have a mismatch between our physiological State and what We believe is happening in our conscious mind and that mismatch has to get resolved somehow and if we are not conscious of it we will resolve it unconsciously so we might suddenly find ourselves in a pattern of over eating or of drinking too much alcohol or of really desperately craving validation out of other people that we are good and okay but we might not understand why we are desperately

craving any of that because we have no idea that something Is happening to us that is eliciting our normal responses when we have a need for Comfort if we had an awareness that the way we were being spoken to was actually causing our disregulation we could deal with the problem directly we could set up boundaries and say you can't speak to me that way and particularly if we are adults we can remove ourselves from situations where people are speaking to us that way or projecting on to us in that way we could go talk to

a friend or A therapist and explicitly seek out comfort and validation but again if we have no idea why our body suddenly feels antsy or on edge or just off we are going to assume that we are just having a random or crazy emotional reaction and we're going to talk about how that can lead to neurotic patterns of thinking and behavior after a few more examples an example of internalizing something as not normal when it is normal might look something Like let's say you grew up in a household where you were very significantly emotionally neglected

so you never really had a felt sense of what it's like to be in Intimate connection with another person and to be really deeply seen and mirrored and understood so you don't have any framework any template on a sematic level for what it feels like to get close to someone and maybe what happened for you as a child is that you were for The most part left alone but maybe your parents came around and paid attention to you if they were scolding you or if they were criticizing you in some way or if they were

otherwise trying to correct your behavior and so now as an adult you might experience a lot of trouble in the realm of getting close to people because if your model of human intimacy is one where people leave each other alone for the most part and anytime they're asking questions or trying to get closer to the Core of you it's because you are in trouble you might actually see a healthy secure person asking you questions about yourself or trying to offer you feedback on something as then criticizing you because in your mind you're only model for

being seen is when you are being criticized so you may falsely attribute any attempts at someone trying to get closer to you as someone trying to kind of find out that you are imperfect and punish you for it in some way and so now Because you're going through life without that experience of being deeply seen and known and loved and supported for who you are on a deep level you might feel chronically deeply lonely but not have any conscious awareness of the fact that that is what you are feeling because again nobody sat you down

as a child and said hey what you're experiencing is emotional neglect it's actually not love and Intimacy in the way that other people experience love And intimacy so you might be walking around your life having all these kind of surface level relationships that you keep at arms length thinking to yourself I'm having healthy and normal relationships well your body is clocking constantly the lack of intimacy and support that you need to stay healthy as a human so you might feel low-level feelings of depression of a lack of satisfaction in your life of anxiety and not

have any idea where those feelings Are coming from because you have internalized something that is not normal which is to live your life in isolation when it comes to intimacy as normal so if you have an adverse reaction to that loneliness you're not going to clock it as loneliness you're going to clock your strong emotional response as abnormal or something just being wrong with you and you might have a lot of self braiding thoughts around why can't I just be happy with what I Have I have such a good life not understanding that you're missing

a vital nutrient so these are a couple of examples of blind spots that we might develop that essentially predispose us to not being capable of meeting the problems of Our Lives head on if I'm trying to confront the problem of having an intimate relationship which is a very important life event with my total blind spot around what an intimate relationship looks like I'm going to Really struggle to meet that challenge head on because I don't have the skills I need to confront it directly the same is true if the challenge that I'm facing is let's

say navigating the workplace but I grow up in that household where I see verbal attacks as normal if I I have a boss that is really domineering and difficult to work with I'm probably not going to clock it as a problem the way people who grew up in a healthier household would and so I might stay at That job for a much longer period of time and I might feel a lot of the consequences I might grow steadily more anxious and depressed but not understand where those feelings are coming from because I think I'm being

treated normally and so I'm not going to progress in my career in the same way because I don't have the skill I need for staying regulated at work which is what gives me a clear head to be able to tackle the problems of my workplace so Essentially these blind spots that we develop early on in life can impede upon our ability to tackle the challenges of life headon and there's many many more examples than those two that we talked about that can lead to us struggling to develop a certain skill set we could have parents

who just have really poor emotional literacy skills so we could really struggle to identify What feelings we're feeling and when and why and what they're connected to that can Set us up for a really difficult time facing the challenges of life we might have shame bound feelings and needs and I have a whole video that I will link in the description of this one that goes over that in detail we might have things going on in our home environment that are intentionally obscured from us in a way that makes it impossible for us to understand

the relationship between object and subject so an example of this would be let's say you have have one Parent who is having an affair and the other parent knows it but you don't know it and so parent be the parent who is not having the affair they might be really struggling with what to do about this and they might be kind of waffling on and off do I stay in the marriage do I leave the marriage and you might clock that parent's emotional distress but you can't make sense of it because you don't know what

it's related to but it's very significant and it indirectly very much Involves you you so your system is probably going to try to make sense of it in whatever way you can so you might think to yourself my parents suddenly seems way less happy what did I do that made them unhappy because that's how children think why is it that some days they're really angry and some days they're not what am I doing that might be making them angry or not and if you had the real information you could exist in reality with this problem

right you Would know this actually isn't about me this is about the other parent who's having an affair and the conversations that my parents are having around that that I am unaware of because they happen when I am not in the room or when I'm asleep but the emotional environment it creates inside of the household I am very much a part of and impacted by but I don't have the information I would need to have in order to make sense of this so I'm going to make the best sense Of it I can based on

the information I have which is incomplete and is likely to lead me to the wrong conclusion you could also just be raised by people who are quite emotionally in congruent maybe their attachment systems don't allow them to be directly in touch with their emotional experience so you might hear your parents saying that they are fine or that everything's great when they are visibly not fine and everything is obviously not great but you might Start associating a distressed parent with the feeling of being okay so then as an adult when someone asks you how you are

if you are in mild to moderate distress you might consciously think well that's within the realm of okay I am okay and then if you're in that range of mild to moderate distress but you find yourself really struggling to cope with it once again you're going to come back to that assumption that I am crazy I have irrational emotions and something Is wrong with me because you don't have the emotional vocabulary to accurately understand what you're feeling and to what extent and this is where we enter into that neurotic territory when we are not conscious

of what causes us to stress those things that cause us distress go right on causing us distress if we don't know that being insulted or being projected onto is distressing we are still going to experience distress in our body when we are projected onto Or when we are insulted if we don't know that part of intimacy is giving and receiving feedback in a supportive way we we are still going to Crave intimacy and we are going to reject it consciously when opportunities for developing it come along because we're going to misidentify it so we are

still going to feel all of the pain of having the problems that we don't know we are having and we are going to need to find a way to self-regulate without knowing The true cause of our bad feelings so now we're going to be trying to self-regulate in a way that is going to be extremely hit or but when we hit it's going to be very tempting to grab whatever it was that helped us in that one instance and become very fixated on it so I kind of liken this to the experience of having some

sort of illness and you don't know what the illness is but you know that you chronically feel unwell and let's Say you find a medication that works about 70 to 80% of the time and it doesn't work the other 20 to 30% of the time but you have no alter alternative of course you're going to take that medication you are probably going to take that medication religiously every single day and you're not going to forget to take it because when you don't take it there is a 100% chance that the pain is going to come

back or a near 100% chance and why would you not at Least reduce your chances to 20 to 30% that just makes sense so when we are in emotional or psychological pain but we don't know why and we find something in our environment that temporarily soothes the pain 70 to 80% of the time or in some cases 20 to 30% of the time whatever it is we keep doing that thing because it is very hard to live with chronic psychological pain so if I am in overwhelming pain in some area of my life but I

don't know why or where that Pain is coming from because it has gone underground or it is coming out of an area that's a blind spot for me but I find that getting drunk or ordering pizza or spending money or disappearing into a fantasy world where my life is completely different Works to soothe my feelings of distress most of the time I am probably going to start doing those things chronically it just makes sense because the better regulated we are the more we are able to meet the demands of Our lives so anything we can

find that helps us self-regulate in the absence of understanding where our pain is actually coming from we are going to grasp on and we are going to use unless and until the medicine starts causing side effects so let's say we develop a habit of chronically overeating because we are chronically in unhealthy relationships that we don't recognize as unhealthy and the real problem is that we have again that chronic need for Comfort but we Don't recognize it as such we just know when I eat pizza or chips or drink alcohol I feel good and the rest

of the time I don't feel so good and I don't know why so this might kind of work for us until it doesn't until maybe we stop liking the way that our body looks or feels as a result of all of the excess calories that we're consuming and then we might only be conscious of the problem of not liking our body so we might kind of chronically be at war with Our body where we get caught in these cycles of yo-yo dieting of gaining weight and then losing weight and then exercising and then going back

to emotionally eating because we aren't aare Ware of the fact that our habit of emotional eating is not a character flaw it's not just something that's wrong with us it is the solution to the underlying emotional disregulation that we are experiencing and until we start dealing With that underlying emotional disregulation figuring out what it's connected to in our external environment and dealing with that problem directly we are going to forever be in this back and forth war with our coping mechanism because we're not seeing it as a coping mechanism so we don't understand why we

can't seem to stop doing it maybe it feels inexplicable and compulsive that is a neurotic pattern of thinking and behaving or let's think about that other Example if we never really learn what deep intimacy feels like our bodies still register the loneliness of not having deep Intimacy in our lives even if we have other relationship ship that we think are perfectly healthy so maybe you go on to get married to someone who is also a victim of early emotional neglect and who also thinks that having a very surface level relationship where you're not deeply seen

or known or understood is what intimacy is and so Now you're in this relationship that you think is perfectly happy but for whatever reason you start developing compulsive obsessive romantic thoughts and Fantasies about your coworker or someone else in your life and maybe you cannot figure out where this sense of liance is coming from why is it that even though you're in a perfectly healthy and happy relationship as far as you're concerned or if you're single but otherwise happy with your life you just Cannot drop these obsessive fantasies it might be because those fantasies are

soothing that deep ache that your body feels because your body knows that it needs intimacy and deep connection and to be seen and known for the whole of who you are but again your system might register anyone trying to get to know you in a deep way as someone attacking you or trying to discover the ways in which you're not perfect and that might give way to these very Obsessive thoughts about other people because in those fantasies maybe you are actually getting your intimacy needs fulfilled so often when we're in liance we're imagining a scenario

where someone just kind of magically knows sees understands and gets us without seeing any of the bad shameful difficult parts of us and so it kind of bypasses the work that would need to happen in real life for us to get that type of intimacy which is we would need to have conflict We would need to show the less flattering parts of ourselves to someone else we would need to get comfortable giving and receiving feedback with someone who we're close to but in our fantasy world we don't have to do any of that we can

just imagine ourselves having deep intimacy without needing to do any of that other stuff that we have internalized as fatal to relationships when in reality it's the stuff that builds deep intimacy so we're just going To feel like for no reason we are having these crazy fantasies and thoughts about someone else despite the fact that we are perfectly happy with our relationship status as it is and we might become highly aware of the fact that these thoughts about our coworker or that other person who we're fixated on are at risk of destroying our marriage or

our life and so we might see those thought patterns as the problem and go to war against those thought Patterns when in reality that neurotic thought pattern is in some deep way a gift and that's what we're going to spend the rest of this video talking about the fact that our neurotic patterns of Behaving and thinking are also a deep and important insight into the parts of ourselves that we have repressed and those repressed parts of ourselves are what we need to get in touch with and integrate consciously in order to feel whole as people

so one of My absolute favorite young quotes on this topic goes we do not cure our Neurosis our Neurosis cure us so when we switch our frame of thinking from this neurotic thought pattern or this compulsive behavior is ruining my life to this compulsive thought pattern or behavior is giving me incredibly important information about what I need in order to feel whole we can start working with those Neurosis instead of against them and from personal Experience I can confidently say that I would never have begun in attachment healing journey in the first place if it

had not been for my neurotic patterns of thinking and behaving starting to take over my life so I grew up fearful avoidant and I aired avoidant enough that I didn't really care enough about my relationships failing left right and Center to pursue attachment healing for the sake of having healthier relationships I started pursuing Attachment healing because my substance and food abuse issues were getting so intense that I felt like I was going to spend the rest rest of my life locked in a battle against my own Neurosis if I didn't start getting at the underlying

root of them and I started reading books that connected neurotic patterns of thinking feeling behaving eating drinking to underlying unmet needs one of those needs being the need for deep connection with other people which led Me to the realm of attachment work and had those parts of myself that knew what I needed not been kept alive in some way through those neurotic patterns of thinking and behaving that started disrupting my life so heavily I couldn't ignore them anymore I would never have done the Deep work that was required to actually learn skills for self-regulating and

connecting with other people which ultimately led me to a place where I felt like my life had Really deep meaning in a way that I didn't even know was possible so I want to encourage us to stop hating on our neurotic patterns of thinking and behaving and start welcoming them as Messengers for parts of ourselves that we once had to Exile or cut off that we now might be able to actually integrate in a way that makes our lives better so we're going to talk now about what it looks like to use our neurotic patterns

of thinking and behaving and feeling as Keys to the unconscious so something that Freud once said about Neurosis is that it is the inability to tolerate ambiguity if you have no idea what is causing your bad feelings it's natural to feel a sense of anxiety when they come up but a key part of self-regulation involves being able to coach ourselves through ambiguity without becoming anxious to the point of overwhelm and needing to reach for the first possible solution to our pain And the nice thing is that the better we get at understanding our pain the

less anxiety we are going to feel in response to it because we understand which principles are governing it so we know that it's not going to last forever but in order to get to that place paradoxically the exact skill we need to start developing is the skill of existing inside of ambiguity when we are children we don't understand anything we are born into This world and everything about cause and effect is one giant mystery to us and ideally what happens is we have parents who can show us the world in a way that makes sense

and who can help us connect the way we feel internally to the world outside of ourselves and because in that secure environment we learn to internalize that a bit of anxiety is often followed up by discovery that helps us to make meaningful sense of the world we don't Panic when that tinge of anxiety arrives we don't have anxiety about our own anxiety we can sit in a place of ambiguity for a bit of time until we figure out what is going on because again we can rest assured that we will arrive at an understanding of

what's going on and why we're feeling the way that we're feeling if you did not have that secure caregiving environment as a child you unfortunately need to cultivate it for yourself as an adult so This means teaching yourself the skills for getting comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity and this is something I have a whole video on around self-containment specifically which is linked in the description of this video but for now we're just going to talk about how to move away from a sequence of events that looks like have a feeling that you find distressing then

panic and then because you're panicking reach for the first possible explanation you can Think of around why you might be feeling this feeling that you don't understand and then TR to solve the problem based on the story you made up around it which inevitably if you did not have the proper diagnosis does not make the problem go away permanently so then in the future the feeling comes back up and then you go right back into that Loop of panicking again we have to start nipping all of this in the bud by when that feeling that

you don't understand comes Up learning to tolerate the ambiguity of not yet understanding it so we're going to go into a multi-step step process around how you can get better at this step one in this process is just learning to notice our feelings in the first place and it's okay if we have to work backwards through our thoughts to get to our feelings which is actually often the case for those of us who a a little bit more neurotic so an example of this would be there was a period of Time I went through where

I noticed that I was having a lot of self-hating thoughts and generally I'm someone who is pretty nice to myself and so that kind of struck me as odd I remember going why is it that lately from the time I wake up in the morning till the time I go to bed at night it's like I'm looking at myself and my life under a microscope and only analyzing the things that I absolutely hate about myself or about my life or that I think I am doing Wrong it's like this inner critic is suddenly very online

and I was very conscious of those thoughts I was aware that I was troubled by them but I wasn't really identifying the feeling underneath those thoughts and so I sat with it one day and went what is the feeling underneath these critical thoughts and I went the feeling is hate I have rage and anger and actually blinding hatred that I'm directing towards myself right now and I don't Know why I didn't recently make any big mistake that I'm mad at myself for but for whatever reason I am feeling hate very intensely and that is step

one when you have a neurotic thought pattern or a neurotic feeling or something that you're getting obsessed with or fixated on can you stop and just figure out what the feeling that you're feeling is not attaching it to a story not trying to figure out why you're feeling that just literally identifying the feeling in one Word hate anger anxiety sadness whatever it is disgust fear Panic just recognizing the feeling that's it that's step one isolating the feeling itself from the story that you have around the feeling so my story might be I'm not working hard

enough I don't look good enough whatever it is but the feeling is hate that's all I need step two is to consciously identify it as a neurotic feeling what this does not mean is telling yourself that you're Crazy so I don't want to go telling myself I am insane for feeling hatred because there's no reason for me to be feeling hatred what I'm actually going to be doing here is the opposite of that I'm going to be telling myself I feel hatred and I don't know why I don't have a satisfactory logical explanation for why

I feel this chronic overwhelming hatred towards myself it's not really resolving when I'm trying to improve myself the self-hate hatred persists or It changes form and just comes back in another area so it really seems like maybe I'm not making the right object relation between my internal State and my external world if I were the hate would be getting resolved through my actions but it's not so I might be making the wrong object relation which qualifies it as a neurotic feeling but the feeling itself is real that part is very important so I'm going to

keep repeating it Step three is to deny ourselves the meaning making process temporarily so putting it on hold so deliberately telling ourselves I am actually not allowed to try to figure out why I am feeling so much hate right now I am not allowed to make any story or any assumptions about this until I do step four which is just being present with the emotion itself and getting to know it getting familiar with it what does the hate feel like in my body where does It show up can I point at the area of my

body where I feel it the most strongly how often am I feeling it when did it start what other feelings get triggered when I start feeling this feeling so all we're doing here is getting really familiar with the raw sensation of the feeling not the story we have around it but what it is like to experience that feeling in our bodies and we might even want to draw pictures about what it's like this is a tactic I Tend to use when I'm struggling to not create stories about something if I were to sit down and

just draw what it feels like to be experiencing this feeling what would I draw would I draw an ocean that I feel like I'm drowning in would I draw a dark night that I feel like I can't see through what is the raw sensation like of this thing this is the art of teaching ourselves how to be present with pain without trying to escape it by Understanding it and resolving it there's nothing wrong with understanding and resolving our pain and I want to make that clear but if we have gotten used to ascribing our pain

to the wrong things we want to First unlearn learn the wrong things which requires us to go to the source of the pain or the uncomfortable feeling that we're trying to resol and just get to know it which is step five just be present with whatever comes up and allow yourself to Be surprised by the experience of your own pain or your own Joy or whatever it is that you have repressed it probably has qualities that you don't know about because you've been spending so much time fixating on whatever is going to take it away

or whatever is going to distract you from it that you don't actually know everything that exists inside of it so in this example that I've been working with here when I was feeling all of this hatred I was Eventually able to understand that what had happened recently was I had been betrayed in a very significant Way by a romantic partner and instead of directing my hate towards that person because I had a model of the world that it is not safe to hate other people especially to hate your attachment figures I directed all of the

hate that I was feeling towards myself because I was a safe person for me to hate but before I knew any of that and when I was Just spending time getting to know that sensation of hatred which eventually gave way to pain which gave me a lot of information about what I was actually experiencing a lot of other things came up that really surprised me there was a sense of Freedom that was inherent to moving through that pain that I had no idea would be there there was also very complicated feelings that I didn't want

to feel I happened into days of just recognizing that I still had a ton of Sexual feelings towards this person that I didn't want to have I wanted to be angry and hateful but I couldn't be there was things in my system that I needed to move through in order to arrive in reality about everything that I was feeling including things I thought it made no sense for me to feel and that's often what happens at this step we start feeling everything including the things that we wish we weren't feeling including the things we feel

Ashamed of feeling including the things that we think we should not be feeling or we need to monitor oursel around feeling because if we are used to not being at choice when it comes to how we deal with our emotions so if for the majority of our life we've just been having feelings and then reacting to them the only way we might know how to monitor our behavior is to try to keep ourselves from feeling certain things in the first place so if we have this model That every time I feel attracted to someone I

need to go be with them it might feel really threatening if someone who we have decided not to be with or if someone who has decided to not be with us is someone we're feeling attraction for we might feel like I need to shut down that attraction at all costs because it's going to cause me to go and try to be with this person but in this process what we're learning is just being present with our feelings and Getting to know them without judgment and without the need for action and this skill of being present

with feelings without acting on them is likely a very new one for you it's a new one for a lot of us but you can probably already see how this is starting to put you in the position of being able to respond with intentionality to your feelings rather than simply reacting to them and the thing about this step is that it moves us into the next one which is just being Comfortable with living in a slightly Messier and more ambiguous way for a while so when we are used to living in a neurotic way what

it means is that we are avoiding ambiguity like the plague anytime we have a feeling that we don't know the cause of we might jump to the first thing we can jump to to try to control that feeling or get it to go away and what we are training ourselves to do here is the direct opposite of that it is to live with the question of What is going on for me and why am I feeling the things I'm feeling for long periods of time because the longer we keep those questions as kind of open

cases in our awareness the better we become at understanding the real underlying causes of our thoughts and our feelings and our compulsions and our neurotic habits when we allow our feelings we have repressed back up into our conscious awareness for a while it's Going to be hard to make sense of them we might have no idea why we feel distressed one morning and then Happy by midafternoon and then angry in the evening all of our feelings might start to feel like giant question marks because we are not immediately trying to compartmentalize them and get rid

of them or change them and yet we are still in the process of learning and educating ourselves around where they are coming from and what they are actually Connected to in either our environment or our past so this is kind of the process of detaching our emotions from the things that we used to connect them to and allowing them to exist in a state of ambiguity until we get better at making the real connections and then we can reattach those feelings in a more accurate way to their actual causes so very very slowly we learn

to just be present with our feelings as they come up get to know them get to Sense into them get to learn the different qualities of them and then over time we construct new systems of meaning that are more accurate and probably we're going to need help in this process so we might seek out help from enlightened Witnesses in the form of people like therapists or support workers who can help us make sense of ourselves because they have the emotional vocabulary that we are currently lacking we might need to do a Lot of reading a

lot of self-exploration a lot of talking to friends or trying out new social environments to notice what we feel in different environments and to start getting attuned to the feeling of yes I like this this feels like me or no I don't like this this doesn't feel like me and through that process we start to learn our authentic preferences our authentic wants our authentic needs and ideally life ends up surprising us a lot In that process when we are no longer pushing our emotions away from us and avoiding situations that bring up feelings we don't

want numbing out from feelings we don't like obsessively fixating on things that make us feel good we're leaving space to actually get to know ourselves in a holistic way and often we find out that we have a lot of traits desires quirks that we didn't know about and that is ultimately a pretty cool process and where it leads Us is to that place where we are able to more readily tolerate reality because when we are aware of who we are what our needs are what our values are what our underlying drives and motivations and wants

are even really intense pain can be weathered and we can self-regulate through really challenging circumstances because we are deeply in touch with what matters to us which gives the pain in our life meaning meaningful pain what Young calls Legitimate suffering is the opposite of neurosis Neurosis is is when we are stuck in a pattern of trying to resolve our pain through a means that cannot possibly resolve it directly so we are unknowingly perpetuating that Pain by wasting all of our time trying to solve it in the wrong place and the act of healing from Neurosis

is the act of getting in touch with the full range of our emotions and learning to solve the problems of our life at their core so We're switching over from a life of illegitimate suffering as young would put it to a life of legitimate suffering where even the pain and the challenge that we encounter is aligned with a sense of meaning all right I am going to leave it there for today but we have a lot more on Neurosis coming up in the next month and a half specifically around how our neurotic patterns of thinking

and behaving get in the way of healthy self-regulation and Co-regulation so those are things we're going to be discussing at length in the weeks to come as always leave any questions thoughts anything you would love to see covered in the month ahead in the comment section below I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again really soon [Music]