Steve Andreas > Books Authored > Six Blind Elephants > Chapter 12
Steve Andreas > Books Authored > Six Blind Elephants > Chapter 12 | |
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The distinction between self and behavior is a widely useful example of redirecting attention to a more specific aspect of experience. When someone has a bad experience, they sometimes think of themselves as bad, a much more general categorization that is not useful in discovering how to change their response.
Since the self is the one who is trying to find a solution, if the self is bad, it is going to be very hard for a bad self to find a good solution, and this can easily lead to despair, even when someone isnt aware of the underlying logic. To make this distinction between self and behavior, you can say, OK, you had a bad experience, and you want to be sure that it doesnt happen to you again. That doesnt have anything to do with who you are as a person; it just means that you made a mistake. That recategorization refocuses their attention on the behavior that they want to change, rather than their conclusion about themselvesthat they are incompetent, evil, hopeless, etc. Even if they think of the specific behavior as one of a set of behaviors, that is still a much more specific category than their whole self. This makes the task of finding a more effective new response much easier and less overwhelming.
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