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PART VIII C CRITERIA FOR FULFILLMENT, FORESHADOWING AND REALISM

• Foreshadowing as the key to overcoming compelling patterns• Listening to Foreshadowing As a Step in Overcoming Compelling Patterns: Process

Versus Outcome• Accepting the Message of Foreshadowing and Accommodating to Results As a Way of

Overcoming Compelling Patterns• Throwing Off Imposed Criteria For Fulfillment, Pseudo-incorporated, And Pseudo-dis-

incorporated Preferences And Values To Arrive At Deep, Personal Authenticity And Care

• Avoiding Imposed or Self Defeating Criteria for Fulfillment While Reorienting to Inner, Healthy, Personal Criteria for Fulfillment

• Care, Empathy, and Intuitiveness Replacing Alienation and Despair• Psychotherapy as a route to becoming to true to oneself, gaining emotional

independence, and finding true inner freedom• Using journalizing, experimentation, and relentless practice to succeed with and fully

incorporate recovered and revised criteria,– PART A. Prerequisites for fundamental lasting change in one’s personality– PART B. As these developmental tasks are mastered, people begin to be able to learn new ways of

being.

• Return to personal criteria For fulfillment and an integrated, authentic self• Arriving at acceptance of reality and becoming At one with the world

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Dealing with Foreshadowing As the Key to Overcoming Compelling Patterns

• Visions Out of Sync. When we are young we can be all kinds of things in our imaginations and can play act them out. They are not tested by the constraints of reality. Eventually we pass through a period during which we try to make ‘it’ be, make ‘it’ happen and are outraged when others smile and say, ‘you’re dreaming, you’ll find out!’ In adolescence we begin to try to realize our passions, fulfill our dreams, fulfill our criteria for our hopes. We make trial runs and usually find the promise of the fantasy was empty. We pick ourselves up and try something else.

• This is a necessary stage of development. This is how we learn to realistically reshape our visions. This is when foreshadowing begins to develop. First we envision something and get excited about the prospects. Then, because of our earlier reality training, the foreshadowing uncooperative reality seeps in like fog distorting and clouding our vision.

• Our relations with our earlier life implicit parents and peers strongly influence both the shape of the vision and our reactions to the foreshadowing. Typical reactions to foreshadowing are: giving up prematurely in despair, pressing on in defiance of the odds, perpetually preparing and delaying, blaming our surrender on others, pretending that we could if we wanted to but don’t want to. In reality, it is all failing to have trained ourselves to be accurately sensitive to foreshadowing, listening to its message.

Envisioned Future

Foreshadowed Future

1.

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Listening to Foreshadowing As a Step in Overcoming Compelling Patterns: Process Versus Outcome

• In the child, there is a wide split between dreams of being, having, and doing marvelous, incredible things seen in the adult world and the delights of absorption in simple, little things in their immediate, real world. It is the little pursuits of curiosity and experiments with prowess or finesse in the trees, weeds, with toys, language, muscle, games of wit, and the like that build the mind and ego, expand skills, and surprise with new knowledge about themselves and their world. It is the process of living that is so satisfying. It is personal courses that are set and followed. It is the daily watching with awe their own evolving and unfolding as a self, a person. It is in this world that incorrect hunches simply reveal a little more about the object, task, or self rather than being signs of failure and missing the mark.

• The fantasies of being, doing, and having necessarily reflect negatively on what one is not. The child, adolescent, and, still, the adult, has to focus on the deficiency, the lack, the ‘not there yet and not good enough’. With implicit others looming in the mind and saying you should or should not be, do, or have, the person sets process aside and focuses on visions that conform to the voices of the implicit others. With authentic, personal criteria for fulfillment, there is a focus on and engagement in the process. Listening to foreshadowing is welcome and easy. With the focus on having to be, do, or have, or not be, do, or have, the process is an impediment and the urgency of the vision clouds the foreshadowing.

Imagined.

Approximating2.

Journalizing the experience of focusing on process versus outcome the realism of listening to the messages of foreshadowing.

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Accepting the Message of Foreshadowing and Accommodating to Results As a Way of Overcoming Compelling Patterns

• As our knowledge of the world, rules and conventions, cause and effect relations, patterns in relationships, differences in cultures and people all expand, foreshadowing becomes more accurate.

• If we mature with respect to what we want, envision, and set as goals for ourselves, throwing off the imposed expectations and goals others have for us, and become more true to ourselves, the chasm separating envisioning from foreshadowing diminishes.

• As we gain mastery in skills, we become more efficient and successful in reaching our goals. • As we grow in knowledge, maturity, and skill, we learn to combine these three and our goals and

imagined outcomes become more realistic and, consequently, the realized outcome tends to more closely approximate what we had envisioned.

• Throwing off imposed expectations of implicit others allows us to learn the value of doing something for our own sake, doing something we intrinsically value and enjoy and at that point, the process of engaging in an activity becomes the focus rather than the results, rewards, or approval.

• Shifting the focus from the eventual outcome or reward and approval down into the process allows us to let our minds sink deeply into the object we are working on or the people we are working with. We get to know it or them as they are in themselves. When we do this we can also begin to sense processes in them that are similar to our own and yet to allow differences to show themselves to us, and finally allow them to begin to develop toward authenticity just as we are.

• Our patience, timing, and sensitivity grow and our depth and breadth of understanding of and integration with reality grows. Things and people around us begin to flourish.

Realized outcome. Hmmm, pretty close!Imagined outcome.

3.

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Throwing Off Imposed Criteria For Fulfillment, Pseudo-incorporated, And Pseudo-dis-incorporated Preferences And Values To Arrive At Deep, Personal Authenticity And Care

• Foreshadowing skill acquisition may result in feelings of anxiety, or distress because the message is that you may not be able to acquire the skill. Denying the foreshadowing with bravado does not eliminate the anxiety. On the other hand, to admit that one does not have that particular capacity seems to lead to loss of face.

• The role of foreshadowing in accepting and pursuing life plans and goals functions differently from its role in skill acquisition. In this case, committing oneself to imposed or inappropriate life goals and plans leads to despair and alienation. One senses the foreshadowing and suppresses or sets it aside, yet it resurfaces and hovers around the edges of awareness creating perpetual simmering despair. As a result, there is alienation both toward oneself and toward those real others whom the implicit others represent. This alienation generates the familiar sham of ‘polite’ relations that seem to really be properly but thinly disguising hatred.

• When the person accepts a general life goal of authenticity and of developing the one’s ego and inner strength in face of whatever life may bring, this kind of alienation does not arise. When one has accepted imposed criteria for the level or type of conditions of one’s life, there can be perpetual anxiety over possible loss of those conditions, be they good or bad. In this case people can develop alienation from any aspect of reality, any part of the world, that threatens one’s status and external security. With the loss of the ‘proper’ conditions, the person feels life is no longer sustainable and contemplates suicide.

• After the person has thrown off the negative implicit others and their imposed standards, goals, manner living, or style of life, and required conditions of life, they are no longer hampered by identity, concerns about appearance, or self worth. Arriving at this stage, the person is now free, strangely, begins getting engrossed in whatever comes their way.

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Avoiding Imposed or Self Defeating Criteria for Fulfillment While Reorienting to Inner, Healthy, Personal Criteria for Fulfillment

• Sometimes a person learns adopted criteria which involve the conditions of other people. They feel responsible for the way other people feel, for their style of life, conditions of life, or general well being. Sometimes a person’s criteria may involve the way other’s, particularly parents or a romantic partner, feels toward them. If the other does not seem to love them the way they want to be loved, for example, their criteria are not met, they do not feel fulfilled, and are distressed toward the other. Such a person may try to act, be, look, or have in ways that they feel should elicit the required feeling from the other. When this seems to work, they doubt the other’s sincerity. When it doesn’t work, they resent and blame the other. Usually with such criteria, there is a foreshadowing of disappoint. They are ostensibly expecting the other to respond in the desired way, yet, secretly anticipating disappointment. Their reactions to the other’s compliance or non compliance are puzzling and disenchanting to the other, setting the stage in the future for a tendency to withhold what they think the suppliant desires.

• The underlying foreshadowing involved in this cycle is accurate but disregarded. Consequently, the person with inappropriate criteria such as dependence on specific feeling reactions from others is locked into an endless pattern that always leads to disappointment and lack of fulfillment. Such a person feels that they can never win, regardless of what they do. However, the other, their accomplice in this scenario, typically feels somewhat the same way. They both tend to turn toward each other and then away and perhaps even to substitute partners. They seem unstable, unpredictable, fickle and finicky.

• Fickleness and finickiness disappears when one identifies with the whole of life and its processes, when authenticity is the goal, when acceptance and letting the other be themselves becomes the criteria. The person no longer has to be an ‘identity or image’ for the other not requires the other to have required, specific feelings and reactions. Rather, the person sees themselves, everyone else, and all of life, as a process with a right to be true itself or themselves. In place of insecurity, striving, feigning, defensiveness, and manipulation, a there emerges openness, acceptance, and engagement.

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Care, Empathy, and Intuitiveness Replacing Alienation and Despair• When living under the sentence of the negative implicit others, alienation may take

the form of veiled cynicism and acceptance of a perverse picture of reality. The accompanying feeling is often that life is not worth living and to compensate one is free to secretly try to get away with whatever one can and acquire as much or drain as much hedonistic pleasure as one can while alive. When one is able to see that the sentence was unjustly imposed, can be extracted, and life can be perceived or conceived differently, it is possible to see life as neutral and as having the possibility of being seen as a reflecting of how one feels about oneself. At peace with oneself, at peace with the world. With this transcendence the person’s mode of being in the world shifts from alienation, cynicism, and disenchantment to engagement, involvement, and care.

• Freed from the ‘have to’s’ and ‘should's’, the person is now able to be open to whatever comes and capable of seeing everything that comes exactly as it is in itself without a posture of suspicion or inappropriately giving the benefit of the doubt. Now, one’s ego or self esteem or identity is no longer at stake with every new challenge and circumstance. Now it is possible to care for whatever is before one and whatever one is doing or being. Becoming engaged, there is no longer a sense of struggle and striving but rather a loss of awareness of self, the focus is on the thing or person itself. Being free to become fully engaged allows the person to develop empathy and strong powers of intuition or seeing into the heart of things. Being reality grounded, miscuing and miscalculation decreases and the person begins to flow in harmony with the processes around them. This growing sensitivity means one’s creativity is no longer restricted to oneself, no longer just a personal benefit, but unobtrusively and gracefully promotes the well being and release the creativity of everyone else in one’s social environment.

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The Long Road of Psychotherapy Toward Gaining Emotional Independence, Becoming to True to Oneself With True Inner Freedom

• To reach this level of self transcendence, one has to commit to two challenges. First, in undergoing psychotherapy scars are opened and wrong turns exposed. The past is recovered and reinterpreted to expose the way the social environment constrained options and shaped choices.

• Second, the relentless uncovering of the process of internalizing parents and peers who later become dominating forces is undertaken. Along with this process, there is the difficult challenge of casting off these implicit others and gaining emotional independence. Simultaneously, the client learns to become their own inner psychological detective, stalking every sign of the influence of the implicit others and extracting them. Detecting how the implicit others warped one’s true criteria for fulfillment for one’s life and for many small styles, manners, preferences, and values. Courageously going deeper to find one’s buried, underlying personal criteria, eventually you begin to be able to allowing these personal criteria for fulfillment to surface and to take over.

• Finally, you begin to allow yourself to enjoy their fulfillment, to be yourself, and to feel fully alive. This is one important way the journalizing and think-aloud technique can help. This helps open the way for detection of earlier, distorted twists and turns of one’s life and address their causes and effects, conceptually isolate them and deal with them in one’s daily living outside of the therapy session.

• When a person lives out their life trying to fulfill criteria imposed by the nature of their implicit others they may paradoxically feel pride and security on the one hand, and on the other hand feel a profound despair and a strange, nagging, indefinable longing for freedom.

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Using Journalizing, Experimentation, and Relentless Practice to Succeed With and Fully Incorporate Recovered and Revised Criteria, PART A.

• A. Prerequisites for fundamental lasting change in one’s personality:– 1. As a person begins to cast out their negative implicit others and replace them

with positive, accepting implicit others.– 2. As they begin to see the world realistically, as neither all positive or all

negative but as having a wide range of characteristics, and as not revolving around one’s self.

– 3. As they, as a result of the above, begin to assess the world and each new situation and each person objectively rather than projecting their prior image of the world onto situations and people.

– 4. As they begin to learn what they truly feel and want and enjoy and do not want and do not enjoy, rather than twisting information to conform to the demands and wishes of their implicit others.

– 5. As they begin to view their future more realistically, as full of both potential and difficult challenges.

– 6. As they begin to be able become fully engaged in the processes of whatever they are involved in and to disengage and mirror their acts for self correction rather being alienated from themselves, being unable to fully engage, and disengaging to judge, criticized, and blame themselves.

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Using Journalizing, Experimentation, and Relentless Practice to Succeed With and Fully Incorporate Recovered and Revised Criteria, PART B.

• B. As these developmental tasks are mastered, people begin to be able to learn and strengthen new social, cognitive, and behavioral skills and abilities and cast off ineffective and self defeating but recalcitrant patterns.– Since the person a Gestalt with all of these factors interconnected, the work of

therapy only just begins with the transformations in A. The next challenge is applying these transformations to the task of changing persistent habits. This requires a battery of homework activities.

– If the person has been keeping a journal of their progress in PART A factors 1 through 6, they now continue journalizing. Now journalizing turns to recording situations in which old patterns are still in force. When these situations are identified, the person can work out a plan to experiment with new ways of being, seeing, feeling, and acting in these situations. Keeping a record allows you to more easily identify what is working for you and why you think it is working.

– When one of these in vivo experiments seems promising, the next step is to practice arduously. Each time one practices, the new skill becomes more natural. Also, each time one practices, the skill becomes more refined, you see and understand more and are therefore free to make the experiments more refined.

– As the new skills become more refined, you record how and why you think this is so. You reach a point when the new ways of being feel right and comfortable and therefore become fully incorporated. As this happens, your old criteria for what is or will be fulfilling are revised and the new criteria take over and all factors begin to flow naturally and effectively. Now begins the period called Mastery.

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Return to Personal Criteria For Fulfillment and an Integrated, Authentic Self

MIND Personal CFFIncorporated

Intentional Processes

MIND Personal CFFIncorporated

Intentional Processes

ACTACTACTACT

A Self United With Itself, With Inner Peace and Authenticity, Becomes Spontaneous

and at One With the World

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Acceptance of Reality and At One With the World