Miguel

Journals
1

I was thinking of writing an intro to this journal and sharing older entries first, but I thought it better to post this now (also because who knows if I finally share anything else or not :smiley:). As always, please point out spelling and grammatical errors, or any other aspect that may help to clarify the post.

It’s a relatively recent entry from my diary (adapted for better understanding and omiting some superfluous details) which came to mind from @Andrew’s posts related to deep suffering and trauma, but also related to why the feelings come back again and again, perpetuating themselves.

"Last night on TV I saw a rerun of [an old, local interviews program] in which one of the guests was XXX. I remembered how good it was to listen to him when I was a teenager/young when I felt so lonely and bad, as a companion very early in the morning in his radio show, or very late at night in his TV show. Above all, for his endless optimism, for his charitable gestures helping people in the face of terrible circumstances, always talking about how they had managed to moved forward or to continue seeing life as something worth living despite the traumas experienced. I felt gratitude for the good received from him in those times of fear, depression, anger. I remembered then some of the songs I knew through his shows, which helped me so much at that time; so I look for one of those on Youtube.

Until then I did not feel more than some gratitude and maybe nostalgia, but it was more of a remembrance. After listening to the song, Youtube offered a list of related songs from that time. I listened to some. The remembrance became more emotional, not because of the contents of the songs, but because they also accompanied those dark days. After listening [another song from YYY] I began to feel sad. I thought more and more about that time, about “how young the singers were”, “how young and bad I was”, and I felt sadder.

Looking into why, I noticed that part was due to the feelings associated for so long and so strongly to those songs and singers (which I continued to listen to for many years). However, I also felt compassion for the Miguel of that time and, above all, pity. Suddenly I remembered a scene of the movie ZZZ and my ill daughter with whom I had seen the film, her current situation [she was institutionalized again at the time I wrote this diary entry], and the common factors with my own health problems of my youth.

So, I searched and watched the scene in Youtube! I cried a little. I felt pity, empathy, compassion, sorrow for my daughter. But finally I felt the same emotion for me, but now it wasn’t for the young Miguel: for the present Miguel, the one listening and watching… I got a little worse and cried some more.

I knew that I hadn’t kept the “hands in my pockets” (I allowed myself to think and do things I shouldn’t have thought and done, fuelled by feelings).

However, I suddenly thought how easy it would be to abandon myself permanently to that kind of emotional states, to feel sorry for myself, to feel sorry for others, to feel angry, to be able to complain; and I felt strongly the seduction to do so. I further thought how easily justifiable it would be “with all my problems” (past and current) to abandon myself to these emotional states as a way of life, as when one takes a horrible but known, easier and shorter path (in this case, easier than trying to constantly feel good through felicitous feelings).

After that I calmed down to a neutral point, watched some TV and went to sleep.

It was only today that I reflect again about how those negative states can become so subjugating while producing at the same time so much suffering. Who wants to live in fear? Who wants to live in anger? Who wants to live sad? Why then we come back again and again to those feelings?

So I reflected, as I have done before, on this hypothesis: I had to somehow get some satisfaction or benefits from those terrible emotional states (like those of the sadomasochist; like scratching even if it hurts; like keep eating when one is about to burst).

I noticed that the satisfaction or benefits I would get in this case consisted of a mixture of compassion towards me by others; of resting, by not having to separate myself from instinctive emotions; of being able to complain (“why me”); of receiving more attention; of vanity, telling or showing my suffering to others; of pride, in showing others my accomplishments despite my ongoing problems and suffering!; etc.

But this time I felt more strongly these negative feelings nourishing my self, fuelling my sense of being, feeding my identity, being Miguel. They invited to be, and facilitated being, someone with those “rewarding” characteristics. They were like the little demon in the stories that speak seductively in your ears, so you follow a path of endless suffering (the bad feelings) but with endless instictive rewards (the twisted good feelings derived from power, irresistible charm, etc.).

Fortunately, after so many years living that way, I know that character, that mask, that self that wants to follow that path, who feels the attraction of being someone through bad feelings followed by twisted good feelings; I know its craving, an addict getting benefits from suffering.

So I was able to see that seduction even under the strong influence of emotions. But now, writing, I noticed that from my “actualist condition” I often look that self (my self) “from above”, with mockery, believing that I know all its tricks, its manipulations, its chimerical world. However, this experience make me think (by contrast) about all the times that I just act, not noticing the benefits and satisfactions pursued by “me” through suffering, not aware in those moments that I can’t help but feel one with the feelings, the mask being my face, the ego being one with this body instead of perceiving it as something distinct and constructed.

If it were not for the PCEs, we could not believe that the identitiy can cease to be; that in reality I am not “I”. In the PCEs I am this physical body only, without the sensation or the aspiration to be something else, to be someone. It then ceases all seduction by bad feelings and by the benefits obtained through them.

Yesterday I suffered by and for myself, a suffering generated by memories about traumas and by the current state of my daughter BUT ALSO by the underlying or subsequent satisfaction or benefits I would get. Because these facts, as mere facts, are not the cause of my suffering: many times I’ve heard the same songs, I’ve watched and remembering the same things without feeling sad or disturbed (even this morning I remembered one of yesterday’s songs recurrently, and I’ve just spoken to my daughter on the phone, without these facts producing any pain, discomfort or negative appraisal).

So, the causes are not past or present facts…
The causes are in the self.
They are in myself, in me; and I am the ultimate cause.
The ultimate cause is me itself.
It’s me".

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Yes I agree Miguel: The ultimate cause is ‘me’. I think knowing that helps us to eliminate it by honing in on it.

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Great subject matter. Why do we chose suffering: a hypothesis? Well technically speaking speculation since it’s not falsifiable. But still extremely well worth reflecting on.

And reading your reflections, particularly…

So I was able to see that seduction even under the strong influence of emotions. But now, writing, I noticed that from my “actualist condition” I often look at that self (my self) “from above”

If it were not for the PCEs, we could not believe that the identitiy can cease to be; that in reality I am not “I”.

Our mission seems to be to stay conscious of facts even when the affective faculty makes a major play for control. And by facts, I mean the big facts about time and space and purity. Not the little facts about money or health or evidence or as you write:

past or present facts…

The intelligence unimpeded and perception unmediated wants to enjoy being alive for the obvious reason that now is the only time it can actually enjoy it. Whereas the affective faculty wants us squarely within the group. And you have given a very solid reason how the affective faculty is using your circumstances to further it’s instinctual aims. And our intelligence can contrast that with things actual like the memory of the PCE or the fact that now is the only time we are actually alive.

On a side note, forgive me for introducing something else, it’s no wonder people are up in arms all the time. The affective faculty needs a tether. Our best known tethers before Richard were reason and morality. But reason is very difficult for most and morality is quite manipulatable. And neither are as good as the memory of the PCE. Let that or other facts of infinitude be our tether.

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Here is a draft of a potential article derived from the posts John - #46 by Miguel and John - #62 by Miguel

Besides the welcome opinions, I will be grateful if you can point out any language errors I may have (or bizarre/weird expressions, typical of me writing in Spanish with English words).
I will make corrections and successive revisions by modifying this very post, indicating the date of the last version/update.

LAST CHANGES: November 8, 2022

Do I want to feel good?

In my experience there is an oversimplification about wanting to feel good (or, at least, better) but not being able to (not succeeding). It is often expressed as follows: “If you want to feel good you will feel good; if you can’t feel good it is because you don’t really want to or don’t want it intensely enough; not because you can’t.”

Even supossing this assertion is always true (I’m not saying it is), the simplification I want to point out consists in taking desire/wanting as an indivisible whole, preventing the analysis of possible coexisting conflicting desires.

Incidentally, it is not superfluous to point out that whoever asserts this rarely conceives of the possibility that someone might attribute to impossibility (to not being able to) their not wanting —or their not wanting it intensely enough—:

  • “I am not able to want to feel goood/better [but I wish I could]”.

  • “I am not able to want to feel good/better intensely enough [but I wish I could]”.

“I am not able to want it/I am not able to want it intensely enough” can be translated as “it doesn’t happen to me to want it/it doesn’t happen to me to want it intensely enough”; and I do not know why.

I will share here some of the results of investigations that allowed me to discover why I did not want to feel good/better —or did not want to feel it intensely enough— (or, according to the other interpretation/perception —common in those of us who have had certain levels of depression, but also possible in people who have not— why I could not want to feel good/better —or could not want to feel it intensely enough—).

Often in a sentient being coexist different wants/desires that can oppose, contradict, obstruct each other:

  • I want to have A and I also want to have B which implies not having A.

  • I want to relocate because of A but I don’t want to relocate because of B.

  • I want to feel A but I don’t want to feel B which is associated with feeling A.

  • I don’t want to feel A because of the detriments, but I want to feel A because of the benefits.

  • I don’t want to feel A, but for that I must feel B which feels worse than A.

This mixture can even lead us to “not knowing what we want”.

So, wanting to feel good can be vitiated/obstructed. I will consider the two most general ways I detected in myself:

  • “I” may want to feel good as a resultant/imagined pleasant state BUT at the same time “I” may not want to feel intermediate unpleasant states necessary to get to feeling good.

  • “I” may want to feel good but AT THE SAME TIME want to continue to feel bad, revealing that “I” MUST get some kind of pleasure/benefit/utility coexisting with the displeasure.

This is what I discovered many years ago for example with anger: wanting to stop feeling angry because of its unpleasant hedonic tone BUT AT THE SAME TIME wanting in certain circumstances to continue to feel angry for providing me with utility and/or a pleasant hedonic tone (I was glad then when I found it analyzed by Richard at http://actualfreedom.com.au/richard/listdcorrespondence/listdsrid2.htm. Right there he mentions “glee” as another feeling of mixed hedonic tone -that “malicious satisfaction” or “merriment or delight, often caused by someone else’s misfortune”-).

It is important to emphasize that although I speak in past tense, OF COURSE it still happens to me not wanting to feel good/better even AFTER knowing the causes/whys due to instinctive automatisms, weakening/disconnection of the pure intent, etc.

I hope this introduction will help to better understand some of the causes/whys of not wanting to feel good/better, which I list below (in capital letters) illustrating them with some examples.

Avoidance

Example: discomfort from having to do X.

I wanted to feel good/better BUT at the same time:

  • I wanted to avoid (did not want to) feel for an indefinite time a MORE displeasant hedonic tone if I followed the “keep my hands in my pockets” suggestion (observing, not expressing or repressing what one feels and thinks).

  • I wanted to avoid (did not want to) adding OTHER associated or resulting feelings of a unpleasant hedonic tone. In the example, it was common that if I managed to feel the feeling more fully, if I could observe its details, etc., it would emerge behind/under that discomfort fear or shame at the prospect of doing X.

  • I wanted to avoid (did not want to) investing energy in the process of change.

Avoidance also exists in several of the causes/whys that follow, but I separate them because they have more specific characteristics which are more useful to analyze.

Victimization

Example: sadness.

I wanted to feel good/better BUT at the same time:

  • I did not want to lose the pleasant hedonic tone produced by showing myself sad to others, eliciting their expressions of empathy/compassion, etc.

  • I did not want to lose the pleasant hedonic tone produced by OTHER feelings resulting from being sad, such as self-pity or pride/vanity generated by the appreciation/admiration of others (or myself) due to “the things I had to live through”, “my very special perception of existence”, “my superior sensitivity”, etc.

  • I did not want to accept before others and myself that I had more power/agency to be less sad than I was. So, to reduce sadness would make it more difficult to blame “what happened to me”, luck, society, family, government, etc., losing part of the pleasant hedonic tone produced by blaming.

Moral obligation

Example: anger/indignation.

I wanted to feel good/better BUT at the same time:

  • I didn’t want to lose the pleasurable hedonic tone produced by the pride/vanity of intimately aligning myself with higher values, fulfilling a duty, etc.

  • I did not want to lose the pleasant hedonic tone obtained by the approval/empathy of third parties (“Any decent person would be angry/indignant about that”; “How could you not be angry/indignant about what he did to you if it violates a minimum of decorum?”; etc.).

  • I did not want to lose the pleasant hedonic tone obtained from trying to educate/convince/change the other regarding an idea or act that I considered wrong/perjurious.

Example: recurring sadness over the loss of a loved one.

I wanted to feel good/better BUT at the same time:

  • I did not want to feel the unpleasant hedonic tone produced by the feeling of disloyalty/betrayal/guilt generated by the possibility of feeling good despite their absence.

Punishment

Example: feeling offended.

I wanted to feel good/better BUT at the same time:

  • I didn’t want to lose the pleasurable hedonic tone that I got from the other person seeing me upset, with the goal of punishing him/her (assuming/knowing that at some point I could make him/her feel bad, could produce guilt, make him/her “reflect”, etc.).

Consequences

To summarize, I may have wanted to feel good/better because of the unpleasant hedonic tone that a feeling produced in me, but at the same time:

  • I didn’t want to feel worse temporarily by having to experience it fully, observe it, do nothing for or against it, etc.

  • I did not want to feel the unpleasant hedonic tone of other underlying/associated feelings.

  • I wanted to retain pleasant hedonic tones coexisting with the unpleasant ones.

Since the resulting NET hedonic tone was still unpleasant, in order to reduce it even more (or, depending on the circumstances, barely to maintain it at certain levels) I resorted to unspecific/general acts/activities that generated a pleasant hedonic tone. In my case and according to the times (without hierarchical order): video games, reading, movies, TV, music, masturbation, company of various kinds, food, pills, cigarettes, work, study, etc. (some activities were incompatible/impossible depending on what was the bad feeling, the trigger, the cause of not wanting to feel good/better, etc.).

Other actions/acts that generated pleasant hedonic tone were context specific. Taking the example of the discomfort of having to do X:

  • Rationalize that there was really no rush to do it, that it didn’t really need to be done, that I could substitute it with doing Y, etc.

  • Justifying the feeling (“How can I not be annoyed; it is natural”, “How can I not be annoyed by wanting to have the future time free”, “How can I not be annoyed about Z having put me in the situation of doing X”).

How to want (or be able to want) to feel good/better

Little by little I began to:

  • Dispose/Expose myself to feeling worse temporarily to experience the feeling more fully, observing it, doing nothing for or against it, etc.

  • Dispose/Expose myself to feel the unpleasant hedonic tone of other underlying/associated feelings.

  • Dispose/Expose myself to observe and not feed the pleasant hedonic tones related to the unpleasant ones.

While all of this contributed to feeling good/better and being happier, the last point contributed especially to being more naive and harmless.

I reiterate that although I speak in the past tense to highlight how I managed to progressively become more and more unstuck, not wanting to feel good/better (or not being able to want to feel good/better) continued and continues to happen even AFTER learning about the above mechanisms. However:

  • Frequency of occurrence of each of the causes of not wanting to feel good decreased (as a consequence, the periods during which I felt good/better increased).

  • When any of the above-mentioned causes appeared again, the amount of time of the displeasant hedonic tone caused by the feeling was decreasing, due to being more and more willing to feel worse temporarily, willing to feel the displeasures of the associated feelings, willing to feed less the related pleasures (plus other elements resulting from investigation).

  • Even when I could not feel good, these mechanisms were part of what allowed me to eventually feel better/less bad ( the level of discomfort/displeasure produced by the same feelings tended to diminish).

  • All this reduced the need to resort to thoughts (rationalization, justification, etc.) and activities (games, internet, etc.) aimed at maintaining/decreasing the displeasure felt.

LAST CHANGES: November 8, 2022

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There is that oversimplification that you mention. I was wondering/hoping that your introduction was going to segue into a questioning of the assumption that the failure to feel good stems from a lack of want or will or desire to feel good. The current assumption is:

  • If one truly wants to feel good, then one will feel good. And if one is not feeling good, then it’s because one don’t truly want to feel good.

Have you examined that particular assumption or arrived at a definite conclusion that a failure to feel good stems from a failure to (properly) want same?

(An organism may deeply desire something yet still be incapable of attaining it for all kinds of reasons, and not for a failure of wanting, choosing, or even trying.)

I don’t have a comment on the rest of your post at this time. The rest of what you wrote hinges, I think at least to some degree, on the validity of that initial assumption/conclusion.

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P.S.

This is an observation that supports the assumption that an increase of wanting to feel good correlates to an increase of feeling good/better. But that still doesn’t mean that wanting to feel good is all that is needed to feel good. It may be one (important) factor that contributes to that outcome, but there may be other factors, other than just wanting or not wanting, that determine the ultimate outcome. The recommendation then to simply “choose to feel good” would be unhelpful or incomplete. Akin maybe to a recommendation to “choose to be rich” or “choose to be a gold medalist.” Indeed, one doesn’t stand a chance of either becoming rich or a gold medalist without first choosing to do so, just that the choice itself doesn’t necessitate, for all peoples, an immediate or even ultimate delivery of the desired outcome.

P.P.S. No bizarre or weird expressions detected. Based on experience, I’m of the opinion that foreigner speakers generally speak and write English better than native speakers. Your writing reaffirms my opinion.

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Thank you for sharing how you managed to feel better after experiencing unpleasant feelings. It’s clear that these mechanisms had the effect of minimizing unpleasant feelings, but it’s not entirely clear whether any of these directly produced the motivation or will or want to feel good.

[Rephrasing the question]: Were the disposing/exposing activities, whereby you immersed yourself in unpleasant feelings, initiated by a more fundamental or underlying want to feel good/ feel better?

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. . . .

. . . .

Interesting. You incorporated a motivation or a want to welcome/feel the unpleasant feelings when they arose, rather than evade them. Out of this activity, is it that a less tainted desire to feel good eventuated? If so, can you elaborate how you think the one led to the other?

I’ll stop for now in trying to analyze and wait for your responses and clarifications. My interest in this stems from my own recent reevaluations of what it takes for this self (speaking personally) to attain a more persistent state of felicity and innocuity. Various approaches, techniques and methods are being experimented with.

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Thanks for your observations/questions, @Rick.

Right.

To more accurately convey that I do not believe that the assumption is enough or always true, I’ll change this ambiguous/confuse paragraph

with something like this:

Even supossing this assumption is always true (I’m not saying it is), the simplification I want to point out consists in taking desire/wanting as an indivisible whole, preventing the analysis of possible coexisting conflicting desires.

Indeed. “Simply choose to feel good” is another form of that simplification, whic assumes that a decision (in this case to feel good) is something indivisible and coherent, when in reality it may depend on/be conformed by other explicit or implicit decisions that may be conflicting/incoherent.

Likewise, the usual statement seems to imply a guarantee that if we really want to feel good/better we will necessarily achieve it. I can’t say that much.

What I can say is that the odds are greatly increased if conflicting elements are better known. In my case, this led to the decreasing of not wanting to feel good/better AND to increased periods during which I felt good/better (but not ALWAYS and not NECESSARILY: even knowing the mechanisms I mention, there could be other factors conditioning the final outcome).

Thanks for also checking this out.

No. The main driver was to discover through observation and investigatioon the aforementioned causes/whys of the limited results I kept having (reaching only certain levels of well-being over many years, them being inconsistent/short, etc.). Once discovered, it was sensible (not meaning easy) to try to experiment with strategies in line with those discoveries even without a higher fundamental level of wanting.

Yes

When the coexistence of the causes/whys of not wanting to feel good is decreased/deactivated, wanting to feel good/better simply becomes more effective in achieving feeling good/better (even if the intensity/disposition to want to feel good does not increase; if it is also increased, obviously the efficacy/probability is increased even more).

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In my experience, it is indeed 100% that if I want to feel good, I feel good. It’s not an oversimplification or even a simplification, it is rather what is factually the case.

But it’s been a long and often difficult process to be able to see that it is the case. It means seeing , and accepting, how thoroughly perverse (as in having things twisted/turned around) / vile / rotten I am, where I don’t even want to feel good (because of X Y and Z) even while claiming and even often believing , myself, that I do.

But in hindsight every time I didn’t feel good it’s because I didn’t want to, I wanted to feel otherwise more than I wanted to feel good. Miguel has gone into some nice detail as to why that has been the case for him, and for me and others it will be different. There is some commonality of course.

Like, when I am stressed. Do I want to feel good? Yes, but… and there’s the but. “Yes but I am worried I lost the money of the wire transfer I sent with the wrong information”. I wanted to worry about it, it felt right to worry and be anxious, I could not / did not allow myself to feel good despite the fact being that I may lose the money. So I felt anxious instead – and the relief when the funds were returned.

It really is so simple. The often extreme resistance people have to the simple idea, is just an indication of how twisted the human condition really is, that such a simple thing is not seen, and believed to not be true, or there is some magic special quality some has over another that lets one do it but not another, etc.

But it’s definitely not like “I want to be rich” and then factors affect it. It’s more like an alcoholic “I want to not drink” but they drink anyway. The reason? It’s because they do actually want to drink lol. This is a distinct from say “I don’t want to have cancer” which is the "I want to be rich "situation.

But tell an addict they do it cause they want it, they will protest, they will say they don’t want it, they will feel ashamed, they will beat themselves up, they will get upset, and then they will drink more (or whatever) anyway, now blaming you perhaps… but it doesn’t change the fact that they do it cause they want to do it!

That being said it might not do any good to tell an addict this in this manner ^, that is a separate conversation though.

But this isn’t just a random analogy, it is indeed like I am addicted to the anxiety, stress, worry, etc. (The drinking is just a type of more obvious manifestation cause you can easily picture just literally not grabbing that container and pouring the contents into your mouth.) The actualism method is a very fine way to gradually see this to a more and more thorough and fundamental level. But it requires a lot of sincerity and a willingness to see yourself how you really are and not how you picture yourself to be.

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Speaking personally I think I’ve found out that one primary reason why I allow feeling bad to continue…the impression is that if I feel good in an event where I naturally feel bad, then I’ll not be motivated and energized to fix something

Just as an example to illustrate the crux of what I mean - If an ICBM tipped with a nuke was on it’s course to my location and there are 20 mins remaining, if I feel bad like being scared n panicky, then I’ll be driven to take action n save myself(like jumping into a sewage gutter😂)…but if I choose to feel good instead, then I’ll just sit back…laze around…and not take any action to save myself

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Indeed, the article only deals with the way in which wanting is not enough when conflicting desires coexist, defining what seems to me a conceptual and methodological simplification/oversimplification (taking desire/wanting as an indivisible whole, preventing the analysis of possible coexisting conflicting desires).

However, the first version of the article was more ambitious and dealt at the beginning with the possibility that MAYBE ultimately in ALL “wanting but not being able to” the “not being able to” was ALWAYS due to forms of not wanting (such as those analyzed in the article).

Then I doubted considering different physical and psychological cases (from the impossibility for someone to do certain physical things while having a certain disability no matter how strongly he/she wants to do it, to psychological cases, including scenarios equivalent to wanting to be rich vs. being able to be rich, not wanting to get cancer vs. not being able to avoid it, etc.).

Ultimately I had to analyze/consider the boundaries of agency, so fortunately I gave up and circumscribed the article much further :smiley:

So these ideas and your answers to Ricks’s comments about this, have to do with the ideas expressed by Rick here:

And I was just going to ask @Rick if he could develop/exemplify them. ¡BUT NOT HERE! :smile:

Here is better: FEELING GOOD ! The What, How, Where, When, etc. of It?

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@Miguel I can really relate to everything you articulated in that post. I can see a lot of parallels in my own journey of better understanding the method and having the will to change the status quo. You have really articulated it well, thanks.

@claudiu I totally agree with what you are saying and I can see this. I would elaborate that experientially building up that you can get to being happy/felicitous is really important because it becomes something experiential rather than some hypothetical wished for state. Like an alcoholic going a day or then a week without drinking, knowing it is an experiential possibility.

There are other complications though such as understanding how that happy/felicitous feeling tone is different to other affective positive inducing emotions. For me, learning that the other highs related to imagination, learning, horniness or sexual gratification were shown to be conditional in the exposure to depression/anxiety helped. I had to get to grips with the tone of these feelings though, sort them out and understand how they differed from a more felicitous/naive/sincere/sensuous happiness.

What I see now, even with recent issues, there is this idea of being happy and I know how to get there but when an emotion arises there is some idea/belief that the emotion must play out as though I am at its mercy. Despite multiple times learning that is not the case, the habit persists. Going to the alcoholic analogy, they feel high or low and the same inclination is to drink, they drink in joy and pain, the habit of drinking persists regardless of the emotional response. There is always a choice not to do the same old same old.

Hi @rick, you do ask very pertinent questions. I agree there are other variables that may interfere with the ability to be happy.

When I was in the grips of depression and anxiety, I still tried to do the method and make myself feel good but it wasn’t working. Pre-accident, I was having EE’s and PCE’s and was making good progress with the method and all progress was reset. It took a long time before I could sensibly think. There are still things you can do to increase your chances of getting to a better position to enable the opportunity for felicity to arise. I needed to do all of the necessary things to get back to feeling a more normal baseline first, medication, CBT, counselling etc. There may be other things one can consider like I did in getting medical help, improving sleep, improving diet or fitness for example. Certain choices that will help and be conducive to being at a better baseline.

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Hey @son_of_bob Yes, that is my conclusion as well, even though it could be said to deviate from actualism proper. I explore that deviation in my follow up post to Miguel’s question. FEELING GOOD ! The What, How, Where, When, etc. of It? - #117 by rick

Thank you for sharing the challenges you faced after your accident, and those adjustments you made which you found helpful towards improving your well-being. It’s wonderful that we can exchange notes while trying to figure out, for each of us, what is and what isn’t, and what works and what doesn’t.

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