Pause Your Machinery: Frog in Hot Water Relationships

Stop and take a moment to “pause your machinery.” The concepts and techniques I present throughout my latest book, Your Mind Is What Your Brain Does for a Living, require mindfulness to learn and master, and this brief written exercise will give you the opportunity to rest, step outside the pattern of passive reading, and bring yourself into the present moment to reflect and see how the information I want to share with you can be integrated into your own life.

Keep your written answers, because they will be valuable for you to review and refer to later. You may want to buy a notebook or open a computer file so that you can keep all of your responses together in one place.

Think back on my concepts of Door 1, 2, and 3 from earlier in my book.

• If you’re not choosing Door 1, describe in writing the specific elements of the relationship or situation that make you choose not to accept it warts and all.
• If you’re not choosing Door 2, describe why you aren’t changing it. Have you committed to changing yourself or do you just want the other person (or persons) to change? If you have changed, is the other person changing or committed to changing?
• If you’re not choosing Door 3, describe why you aren’t leaving it. What are your emotional reasons? What are your intellectual reasons?
• Referring to your exercise at the end of Chapter 7, think mind­fully about whether your identity is preventing you from choos­ing Door 1, 2, or 3. If so, describe how.
• Do you feel that you have “amnesia for pain”? If so, describe how it works and how, up till now, it has made you a frog in hot water or has the potential to make you a frog in hot water. When you feel pain, describe what happens when the amnesia for pain starts its process that soon makes you suppress it, forget about it, ignore it, or anesthetize yourself so that you become numb and live with it.

An excerpt from my recent book, Your Mind Is What Your Brain Does for a Living, now available at Amazon.