PRETZEL MANAGEMENT OF THE VICIOUS CIRCLE OF UNHAPPINESS
By
Bill Cottringer

“Life probably gets annoyed at us for thinking too much. It’s like going to a great theatre production on Broadway or music concert at Carnegie Hall with virtual earphones, books, cell phones and DVD’s.” ~ The author.

A key to understanding and dealing more effectively with many of life’s problems has to do with knowing how we get into and out of the infamous “vicious circle” of negativity. What is this negative vicious circle that can trap and paralyze us into thinking, feeling, and behaving “madness?” It has to do with the gift vs. curse nature of self-consciousness and the pretzel-like dynamics of thinking, feeling, behaving and the words we use in our reality checks.

First of all the relationship between what we experience, how we think and feel, and what words we use to explain this process to ourselves and others, is all tangled up in a virtual interactive pretzel, where you can’t really tell where one thing ends and the other starts, or which effects which or which results in which. That is the epitome of confusion and entanglement.

The process goes something like this. We can experience things non-verbally and to varying degrees of unconsciousness. Then we attempt to interpret and further understand these things in our mental world of thoughts and feelings through the use of words. But we usually don’t stop there. We begin to think and talk about our thinking and talking to ourselves. The trouble is, the more we participate in this second level of ‘thinking about thinking’ and “feeling about feeling” the more it traps us into inaction paralysis and nothing gets resolved or untangled. It just keeps getting worse, depleting the positive energy to undo it.

Here are a few real life examples of how such a vicious circle internal dialogue goes:

• I feel depressed. I don’t know why and that just makes me feel more depressed. I try to get un-depressed but that is not working. That makes me feel even more depressed. Things are hopeless and they will stay that way forever. Now I am totally depressed about being depressed about not being able to get un-depressed.

• This relationship doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. We can’t communicate and I can’t deal with the other person’s need to be right all the time. This all makes me unhappy and that makes the relationship worse and that makes me feel even more unhappier. Thinking about all this gives me an unhappy headache.

• The more I look into all the problems we have in this company, the more problems I see. The more problems I uncover, the less time and resources I have to fix them. Then the worse these problems get from going unfixed and they become even more unfixable with even less time and resources to fix them.

• This person seems to be manipulative and untrustworthy. Everything he or she does verifies this hunch. I try to demonstrate honesty but it is misinterpreted as dishonesty. This just makes everything more dishonest and impervious to change for the better. This is getting nowhere in a hurry.

Back in my earlier career as a mental health therapist during the early seventies, we were confronted with many patients displaying this type of vicious circle thinking and feeling. And the repeated failures of attempting to “cure” this problem with textbook solutions just added to a bigger and more controlling vicious circle. Then an “ah-ha” moment occurred. We realized we had to physically and psychologically break up this vicious circle. The physical intervention was either drug or electroshock therapy, which was really a short term fix; and the psychological intervention was called the therapeutic double- bind, which turned out to be a more long-range cure.

This therapeutic double-bind is simply basic permission to not have to solve an unsolvable paradox. The positive, freeing injunction is: “It is okay for you to be depressed and if you can’t change that is quite okay. Of course if you want to learn how to change this all, we can work on that too. Either way, you are okay as is or however you want to be.”

What does the therapeutic double-bind do to unlock us from the trap of vicious circle thinking and feeling, which just keeps us locked into vicious circle behaving? It buys time and lifts the weight off our shoulders of having to unravel the pretzel of our thoughts, feelings and words, which starts spiraling a positive vicious circle of thinking, feeling and behaving.

If there is one thing we can learn to change in all this which would have the most desirable impact, it is this: Questioning the over-simplified, artificial positive and negative categories we place everything into—good or bad, true or false, useful or useless, right or wrong, productive or destructive, winning or losing, ad infinitum. This is the single key of unlocking the adverse control of the vicious circle.

Ironically, it takes self-consciousness and thinking about thinking and feeling to create the problem, but if you keep using it, the solution will finally appear. The real enemy is “words” and the feelings they help create, which we can think about and make worse to the point of not being able to do anything about it all. This makes us feel even worse and less likely to break out of the vicious circle we have imposed on ourselves with these words, at least until we begin to question their value, accuracy and realness. Then we finally wake up to the real purpose as to why we created words—to represent the realities they stood for and pointed towards, not created.

Author's Bio: 

William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security in Bellevue, WA, along with being a Sport Psychologist, Reality Repair Coach, Photographer and Writer. He is author of several business and self-development books, including, Re-braining for 2000 (MJR Publishing), Passwords to The Prosperity Zone (Authorlink Press), You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too (Executive Excellence), The Bow-Wow Secrets (Wisdom Tree), and Do What Matters Most and “P” Point Management (Atlantic Book Publishers). This article is part of his new book Reality Repair Rx coming soon. Bill can be reached for comments or questions at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer@pssp.net