Gremlins
Thursday August 25, 2005
I talked with Faol. After he left for work a friend called me and talked about an hour basically processing something that came up between her and her lover. It seemed like a minor thing to me that she was blowing up into something a lot bigger with her fears about what might happen.
One of the things that she does and does not believe she does, is do what I call gremlining. She sees it as considering all the possibilities and planning so she will be able to handle whatever comes up. But that is precisely one of the gremlins from the book, Taming Your Gremlin.
The idea from the book is that the gremlin convinces you that it is really just about being safe, but when you start looking at all the things that could go wrong you basically program the belief in your subconscious that something will go wrong. The subconscious doesn’t really understand that the detailed thoughts one has about what could go wrong are only fears and speculation. It either takes it has real, thus and so will happen, or as detailed instructions as to what to make happen. It definitely changes the emotional tone about events. And this increases the likelihood of doing something, or perceiving something in a particular way, or reacting to something in such a way as to bring about the imagined problems. It could simply be an increased sensitivity to tone or a misperception of what someone actually meant, or any number of things that “proves” the fears.
Anyway I have tried to discuss it with her before and she always tells me that I am wrong and that she is just… fill in the blank. And while I have to accept the likelihood that she knows herself better than I do it is a behavior that I have seen over and over again for several years. And I really do believe she is largely in denial over it although it is not my job or business to do therapy on her.
I know from my own experience of it how difficult it is to stop, how embedded in the thinking process it can be, how natural and normal that pattern of thought can seem, and how downright insidious it is once one begins to catch it happening and try to put a stop to it. I have been trying to break that habit for a couple of years now and while I can do it for weeks on end (at least with very little of it) something will happen that upsets me more than a little and I will find myself in the midst of doing it for hours without being able to break it. But I see the difference in my general mood when I can stop it. I feel more confident and less blaming of others and of myself when I am not processing all the possible things that could go wrong, all the ways someone might disappoint me with their words or behaviors.
Tom and I had a lovely reconnecting in the afternoon. I didn’t have
the stamina that he had this time and we had to wind down sooner than he wanted
to but then he slept on the sofa afterward and admitted that it had taken
a lot out of him. LOL We are getting old I guess. It doesn’t stop us
from doing a lot but we sure have to recover afterward.
Copyright © 2005 Kyril Oakwind