I am watching Sara’s class on relationship manuals and I have a question. I understand intellectually that I can decide how I think I’d feel if the person followed my manual, in my case it’s “confident”. I understand that I can create that feeling of confidence myself.

While usually I’m open to creating my own new thoughts, here, it seems a lot harder. I want this person to do certain things, so I will think certain things about myself. Without him doing those things, I actually don’t BELIEVE the thoughts.

For example. I want my boss to call me, but not too much and not to little, just enough that I know I’m valued but not too much to be annoying. If he did this right, I’d feel secure and confident. Since he’s doing it wrong, I feel insecure.

I have a belief that “I don’t know how to make myself feel secure without his actions”. Do I do a model on this, first? Do I first have to believe that I can do this, before jumping into trying to make myself feel confident and secure? I’m currently feeling afraid that if I feel confident and secure on my own, that I will get blindsided. I guess under this is a belief that I should be trying to read other peoples minds and change my behaviour to proactively make them happy. I’m reluctant to allow myself to feel confident and secure on my own, because then I’d have to give up my mind reading, and my brain tells me that mind reading is important to keep people happy, and that if they’re not happy, it’s basically a crisis that I must fix immediately.

Hmm. This is….an interesting knot my brain is in. Where would you suggest I start? Lots of models in here….

I see:

T: I’m open to creating new thoughts, but this seems harder
T: If I feel secure and confident on my own, I won’t know if someone’s upset with me
T: It’s important for me to predict if someone’s upset with me
T: If I’m constantly assessing how others feel, they’re less likely to be upset with me
T: I have to try to read people’s minds in order to make sure they like me
T: If I’m not getting approval from others, I might be missing something bad about myself that needs to be fixed
T: If I’m not getting approval from others, maybe they secretly hate me and I’m going to be blindsided by it
T: If I’m not getting feedback / approval from others, they must be mad at me
T: My hypervigilance helps me to predict how people feel
T: I’m good at predicting how people feel
T: Reading peoples minds makes it less likely that they will be upset with me
T: I have to make sure people like me
T: It is not okay if someone is upset with me
T: If someone is upset with me, it usually can’t be fixed
T: If someone is upset with me, it means I’ve done something wrong and should change
T: I can’t handle people being upset with me
T: I should modify my behaviour to change how others’ feel towards me
T: It’s my responsibility to make sure others like me

Anddd then I have thoughts about these thoughts like, holy crap. No WONDER I don’t want to give myself confidence and security.

Please help!