G
Guest
·You'll never win a chessgame with yourself
To those of us who suffer from terrible and highly bizarre delusional thoughts: one of the biggest traps for us, during those delusions, is that we INSIST it's possible to "think" our way out of them. We keep trying, day after day, hour after hour, trying to reason with ourselves, trying to figure out the one loophole in the sinister little monster. The "if only.." or the "...but if THIS was true, then..." approach is an effort to use Cartesian logic against the world's most formidable opponent - yourself.
It is YOUR mind that conjures up the delusion and YOUR mind that feeds it every day. To then expect that YOU (pitted against your own mind) can "reason away" the very construct YOU created is ...well, to use a technical term, just plain silly.
Cannot be done.
Ever.
The TRAP of these ruminations is that aspect of you who is entrenched in the delusion keeps egging you on - "come on, big fella...don't you want to fight me? Don't you want to try YET AGAIN to counteract the conviction I fill you with? Oh, come on....I dare ya."
And we bite.
And we fail.
And always will.
If you were literally playing a game of chess with yourself, eventually "one of you" would capture the other's king. But that wouldn't indicate a Winner. It would just have been the natural progression of the number of potential moves finally playing themselves out until one of the two colors' kings stood vulnerable. It would be "game ending" by exhaustion, and no real winner would rise.
And this is VERY important: in chess, there are only so many possible moves - there IS an end, because eventually even playing you against you, the board will block you in - and someone's king will fall. That is NOT going to happen with mental games. There is no limit of moves. The board, the playing field, is infinite. It never ends - as long as you keep playing.
The reason is this: in order to WIN at chess, you need to plan. You need to "see ahead" in your opponent's mind, to predict possible future moves - ideally, many moves ahead - and to foreclose against the ones that could be most damaging. Simultaneously, you must advance your own aggressive position, hopefully providing some red herrings of your own potential future moves, and secretly planning your actual stragegy....changeable at every juncture as you observe and assess your opponent's on-going changing approach.
It's DYNAMIC...and it's one person against the other's ability to predict, foreclose and sidestep the mindset of the other.
In delusions, you ARE the opponent. And trust me, the delusion-maker part of yourself is a thousand times more invested in you KEEPING the delusion than you are in talking yourself out of it.
You cannot "fool" your unconscious. But....it can fool you.
Stop the daily or hourly arguments with yourself. Stop trying to figure out the Answer to your obsession. The only way to get away from the power of the thoughts is to think ELSE - to force your attention away from the challenge. Stop accepting the bait - it you FEEL the delusion is true, tell yourself "okay, well, that's how I feel right now...that's why they call it a delusion, lol" But resist the temptation to get down and dirty with it and try to wrestle it for solutions or Truth.
The way to de-activate a delusion is to make it take a back seat to your cognitive focus. Give that one some thought.
Love,
J
To those of us who suffer from terrible and highly bizarre delusional thoughts: one of the biggest traps for us, during those delusions, is that we INSIST it's possible to "think" our way out of them. We keep trying, day after day, hour after hour, trying to reason with ourselves, trying to figure out the one loophole in the sinister little monster. The "if only.." or the "...but if THIS was true, then..." approach is an effort to use Cartesian logic against the world's most formidable opponent - yourself.
It is YOUR mind that conjures up the delusion and YOUR mind that feeds it every day. To then expect that YOU (pitted against your own mind) can "reason away" the very construct YOU created is ...well, to use a technical term, just plain silly.
Cannot be done.
Ever.
The TRAP of these ruminations is that aspect of you who is entrenched in the delusion keeps egging you on - "come on, big fella...don't you want to fight me? Don't you want to try YET AGAIN to counteract the conviction I fill you with? Oh, come on....I dare ya."
And we bite.
And we fail.
And always will.
If you were literally playing a game of chess with yourself, eventually "one of you" would capture the other's king. But that wouldn't indicate a Winner. It would just have been the natural progression of the number of potential moves finally playing themselves out until one of the two colors' kings stood vulnerable. It would be "game ending" by exhaustion, and no real winner would rise.
And this is VERY important: in chess, there are only so many possible moves - there IS an end, because eventually even playing you against you, the board will block you in - and someone's king will fall. That is NOT going to happen with mental games. There is no limit of moves. The board, the playing field, is infinite. It never ends - as long as you keep playing.
The reason is this: in order to WIN at chess, you need to plan. You need to "see ahead" in your opponent's mind, to predict possible future moves - ideally, many moves ahead - and to foreclose against the ones that could be most damaging. Simultaneously, you must advance your own aggressive position, hopefully providing some red herrings of your own potential future moves, and secretly planning your actual stragegy....changeable at every juncture as you observe and assess your opponent's on-going changing approach.
It's DYNAMIC...and it's one person against the other's ability to predict, foreclose and sidestep the mindset of the other.
In delusions, you ARE the opponent. And trust me, the delusion-maker part of yourself is a thousand times more invested in you KEEPING the delusion than you are in talking yourself out of it.
You cannot "fool" your unconscious. But....it can fool you.
Stop the daily or hourly arguments with yourself. Stop trying to figure out the Answer to your obsession. The only way to get away from the power of the thoughts is to think ELSE - to force your attention away from the challenge. Stop accepting the bait - it you FEEL the delusion is true, tell yourself "okay, well, that's how I feel right now...that's why they call it a delusion, lol" But resist the temptation to get down and dirty with it and try to wrestle it for solutions or Truth.
The way to de-activate a delusion is to make it take a back seat to your cognitive focus. Give that one some thought.
Love,
J
