You’re Not Who You Think You Are

When I was a young man, I was an avid reader of self help books. Anthony Robbins Unlimited Power and Awaken The Giant Within. Brian Tracy Maximum Achievement. Walter Doyle Staples Think Like A Winner. All of these books suggest that through willing ourselves to think positive thoughts we can become the person we want to be. One might characterize them as endorsing the omnipotence of thought.

The problem is that it doesn’t work. Thought is not omnipotent. I remember one experiment I conducted during my sophomore year of college. I had been reading Emery and Beck’s Anxiety Disorders and Phobias: A Cognitive Perspective in the nerd box. I was fired up and determined to control my overwhelming social anxiety by controlling my thoughts on my walk back to my dorm. Unfortunately, my social anxiety overtook me without my being able to identify the thought that had triggered it.

The reason that these cognitive techniques don’t work is that there is something deeper going on. As children and adolescents we are conditioned to think and act in certain ways. Based on the way that we are treated and the messages we receive from others, we develop a sense of our identify. We develop strategies for coping with the world. The problem arises when these strategies don’t work. Instead of helping us to navigate the world, we become stuck in our neuroses.

The Buddhist pioneer Ram Dass used to day: “You’re not who you think you are.” This is very important. Your identify and your coping strategies are a function of the messages you received about yourself as a young person which then get reinforced because they become self fulfilling. If you think you’re a loser, you’re going to act like a loser and people are going to treat you like a loser.

However, once you understand that your identity and coping strategies are a function of what happened to you, you realize that they are not your intrinsic nature. They are the identity and coping strategies you formed to cope with a specific environment. While it seems like they are who you really are, it isn’t true.

The first step in freeing yourself is to recognize that who you are right now is not who you are destined to be. Once you understand why you’ve adopted the identity and coping strategies that you have, you are free to try something different. Doing so is scary because what you’ve done so far has gotten you to where you are. Your mind is terrified of trying something different. But if you’re stuck, you need to realize that your identity is not fixed and you can experiment with new thoughts and actions.

There is an important concept in Buddhism called kleshas. Kleshas are the obsessive thought, feeling and action constellations that we repetitively act out. We think we are our kleshas and we fully identify with them. We are, in effect, trapped by them. The key to beginning to free yourself from your kleshas is to become mindful of them.

You must create some psychological space between them and your observer self. As you observe them from a distance, you achieve a certain amount of freedom to question them and try new ways of thinking and acting. In cognitive psychology this is called reality testing. You try something new and observe what happens. You might be surprised.

A number of years ago I was riding the elevator up to my car from The Wynn Casino after a long day. The other passenger was an attractive young woman. I had gotten up early, worked out and had a tough day at the poker tables. I was tired and my self esteem was depleted. I looked at her but she didn’t seem to notice. I figured she wasn’t interested and became even more down on myself. “Of course she isn’t interested in me,” I thought to myself. I was struggling just to get to my car and my breathing was labored due to being exhausted. So I didn’t say anything.

But as I left the elevator she said to me: “Have a great night.” What? I was stuck in my head, making assumptions about the situation that I had made countless times before due to my own insecurities and kleshas, which turned out to be completely wrong. Had I taken the chance to say something to her before it was too late, perhaps something new and fresh could have transpired. But I shut down the possibility due to being stuck in my own head.

The application of this mindful discipline is almost unlimited. In whatever area you are trying to break free, you simply need to be mindful of what you are doing, consider that there are other alternatives that might work better and be willing to experiment with them. Obviously it is easier said than done. But this is how you set yourself free.