The Six False Modes of Being I’ve Identified so far: The Heart of Negativity, Emotional Vampire, Dull Giant, Philosophy Knight, Demanding Critter, and Emotional Cynicism
Today my Self-Doubt was fed up with always having to struggle to get things done. You know the feeling: When you try to do something, but then all these other thoughts come in that make you want to just forget about what you wanted to do, and engage instead, perhaps, in some pleasant distraction.
Well, my Self-Doubt (with the help of my Critic), decided it would be a good idea to try and come to a compromise with these parts of myself who were always getting in his way. Rather than fight with them, he thought he could get them to all come to an agreement about what to do.
As soon as he had decided on this task, a number of forces became evident to me. I began to visualize them, and six made themselves apparent at that time:
- One appeared like a hawk, hovering over the rest of the forces. An ominous feeling came from it, and it had blood-stained wings. It was extremely negative, so negative, in fact, that I call it “The Heart of Negativity”, thought I don’t know if that’s accurate. This part of you shuts you down with hopelessness, a lack of faith, joylessness, and negativity.
- The next (going off the picture above), was one I’d run into before. This was the “Emotional Vampire” – this guy likes intimidating people, finding pointless but pleasing things to do, and doesn’t care how he accomplishes what he wants to. He puts thoughts in your head that get you to start doubting or defending yourself.
- This guy, the “Dull Giant”, appeared first. He is concerned with physical needs, and will easily abandon things that you think are important in favor of things like eating, sleeping, exercising.
- The “Philosophy Knight” is always checking his beliefs against what is going on. He seems almost mechanical, just thinking about whatever is true or false without much emotion. This side of you decides on a course of action and just keeps going even when it doesn’t make sense.
- The “Demanding Critter” gets impatient, angry, uptight, and creates a huge fuss whenever it’s not doing something it wants to do. And when it is doing something, it often does it for reasons such as: proving a point, winning, getting some cheap feeling of superiority or excitement.
- “Emotional Cynicism” is the part of you that frowns at “Free Hugs” videos. He doesn’t give a crap about all that touchy-feely emotional stuff, in fact, he’s downright suspicious of it. Your idealism, your upbeat attitude, all of them just seem misguided to him.
As my self-doubt soon found out, not only do these guys tend to not agree on anything, but when questioned they get very explosive, giving you those kinds of feelings that, when you want to get things done, make you want to give up. After going through this encounter, my self-doubt decided that it wanted to become more powerful, so it didn’t have to just bend to the demands of these guys anymore, but could stand up to them. Let’s see how that goes.
P.S. I call these guys “False Modes of Being” because the way they go about things seems backwards, wrong, and petty. But then again, these sides of me don’t think so. They’re quite pleased with their mode of being.