Mindset (Page 9-13)

There is something inside of us that avoids help from what we perceive to be the wrong places. I have no doubt that with my sister’s help I could have found myself free of the device that was torturing me. The thing is I was never going to allow her to help me. It was an issue of trust really. She was not the person who I associated with solving any of my bigger problems and this was no place to give her a go at one. This was a big problem and it deserved the big guns whether she could see that or not.

None of that was true. My sister could have solved the problem but my mindset was not going to allow her the opportunity. Often we have solutions to our problems that are well within our reach but we do not actually believe that they will work. It does not seem to matter if they will work… if we cannot bend our will to at least begin to believe they will work then it is likely we are correct.

Eventually mom and dad arrived on the scene. They were not like fire fighters going straight to the task of saving my life either. They could not help but laugh… and I cannot blame them today, but I saw no humor behind this then. It did cause me to calm down a bit. I was in a panic, and the chuckles from my parents (once they figured out I was in no real danger) were enough to surprise me out of my panic. After all, shouldn’t they be hysterical as well?

In the same way we do not understand why many people in our lives do not participate in the panic we are feeling. Most of the time people are off wondering the same thing about us as it relates to their own tragedies. The reality is that we can see the struggles of others more clearly and most of the time we have a solution to their problems rather than our own. Perhaps this has something to do with the design of our universe; no man was really meant to go it alone. 

In the midst of the frustration and pain I was feeling I could hear the parties in the room trying to come up with a viable solution. I heard something about getting a saw and for some reason I believed the saw would be used to cut my head off and clear it from the chair. This thought did not settle me. Instead of thinking logically I was already imagining the worst.

Before the ax and saw arrived, and in a moment of pure calm and understanding, I heard my father’s voice break through the fray. It was simple, profound, and glorious… and I wondered if it would work. I put his words into practice immediately to see because I was so excited about the possibility. He said, “Whatever you did to get into the chair, do the opposite to get out.”

Until that point I had not even begun to think about how I had gotten into the chair in the first place. When he said this to me my knee jerk response was that I had no idea how I had gotten in there. This was true… I had totally forgotten because it was not the most important thing on my mind by then… simply surviving was the most important thing. I could breathe, I could move around somewhat restricted… but survival was occurring and so whatever mechanism is needed to survive had already been replaced with irrational panic about how long I could really survive with this chair on my neck.

Sometimes people get comfortable with the chair on their neck. They allow themselves to be limited by the weights they have put upon themselves and the struggles they have faced in life. Instead of simply getting out of the situation the way they got into it, they set up their entire life to support and deal with the situation.

Many recovering addicts do this very thing. The 12 step programs can never actually be completed they are a lifetime commitment that the individual makes. The mindset is, “If I take this off I will immediately put on my addiction.” Perhaps this is true, and perhaps many lives have been saved through these programs but what if we better understood the mechanism that causes us to accept that new reality? At some point in time a person has to again face the life they begun with, the one that made them say they needed the addictive substance. Of course the program is the new addiction, a better addiction, but one they cannot live without.