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My thoughts tonight are pretty daunting. It's as if I'm subjecting myself to psychological torture by brooding over past failures/mistakes and worrying about what may or may not happen in the future.
I'm not sure it's a struggle of how to go about change (I understand the mechanisms: starting with baby steps, setting goals, good diet/exercise, reward accomplishments, maintaining a support system). I think it's more of me being too stubborn to conform to societies "demands" and lacking the ability to invoke my will to do things that aren't immediately gratifying. Basically, I'm a coddled spoiled brat with no discipline. While at the same time being a self-righteous, self-loathing, pretentious prick, that thinks my own suffering is a better alternative then taking part in, and essentially propagating, the systems and social structures that I perceive to be an abomination.

Now I think I'm just spewing rationales that allow me to externalize the causes of my own misdeeds, resolving any responsibility/guilt, which in turn perpetuates the problem.

I'm starting to think I'm some sort of masochist, but the part of me that gets any pleasure from all of "this" must be subconscious.

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All We Perceive said:
Sounds like you're on the right track.  However, email exchanges is a poor method of communication in the therapy context.  Talk about these things in person, and assuming your therapist is decent, you should make some headway.

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All We Perceive said:
Your therapist doesn't seem very skilled.  He or she should be able to direct your communication into a pretty coherent flow and then help you make a plan to achieve the goals of your desire.  Tbh, your email is really super generalized, and I don't think it's answerable to your satisfaction.

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Mufungo said:

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curious mouse said:
I sent this e-mail to my therapist...
sadly not much of a response came from her.

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Have a go at writing a response to yourself from the therapist's position. What would have been an adequate response that would have been more satisfactory to you?

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Mufungo said:

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curious mouse said:
The answer is staring myself and everyone in the face, it's just a matter of taking action.

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It's a matter of who/what taking action?

What/Who's stopping that action from taking place?

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Mufungo said:
If you were to hazard a guess, what is the purpose of stopping yourself from taking action? Or in other words, what might you be getting out of not taking action? And/or, might you have anything to lose by taking action?

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Mufungo said:

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curious mouse said:
I'm not necessarily looking for a satisfactory response. I'm looking for the truth. I just feel like we're all constantly lying to ourselves and each other. Or at the least, suppressing the truth.

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If that's the case, then you've kind of set yourself up for failure with your desire for the truth. What I mean is, if it's true that we're all constantly lying to ourselves and to each other, thereby suppressing the truth. Then according to these criteria, it would be impossible to ever expect the truth to come back at you in the form of an email, is it not?   

So maybe the answer is to re-calibrate your desires to ones that are actually possible in this world. Maybe.

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cherokee said:
i want to punch your therapist in the face

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Mufungo said:

So a weigh up between immediate smaller rewards versus delayed greater rewards.

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Mufungo said:
Yes, if someone believes they don't have the ability to become what they want to become, then why would they ever try?! It makes sense that that belief would prevent someone from starting that very thing they expect to fail at.

Self-efficacy or belief in one's own competency is really useful when doing things and to believe the opposite is not useful. Imagine if you started to doubt your ability, or worse, begin to thoroughly believe you're incapable of brushing your teeth or wiping your arse?!

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Mufungo said:
Yes, it is possible to re-calibrate your desires. Desires change over a person's life, how do you think that happens? Perhaps through learning, new experiences, age, boredom with past desires, etc...  Someone might even explore what they "think" their desire is and find out on deeper exploration that they in fact really desired something else entirely. Such as the man having a mid-life crisis who desires a red Lamborghini and a 22 year old girlfriend might actually be desiring "to be young again" and then on deeper exploration might actually want "to feel free and not have the weight of responsibility on my shoulders" and then on deeper exploration might actually want... 

For example... using the desire for truth...  If it's ok for me to ask... 
       
If you have the truth you were looking for, fully and completely, then what do you want, through having that, that’s even more important.     

...the answer might be something like "peace of mind", or "feeling secure", or "happiness", or something else, but I don't know what the answer might be for you. The answer doesn't need to be logical either, follow your gut. Use your own sense of congruence/incongruence to decide on what's the correct answer for you. And if truth is just a means to getting something else, then maybe there's a better way to get that other thing instead of desiring truth, thus desiring truth could become redundant because it doesn't really succeed at getting what it was intended to get. I hope all that makes some sort of sense. This is just the surface level stuff, but what I'm getting at by offering an example is that there are many ways to re-calibrate desires of which this is just part of one.

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Mufungo said:
"shoulds"...  one of the least motivating modal operators. Change it to a "could", "would", "will", "have to", "want to", etc or whatever feels more motivating. It might be an idea to banish the word "should" from your mental lexicon never to be uttered again.

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Mufungo said:
Lots of clichés are coming to mind...  "A journey of a thousand miles starts with..."  "How does one eat an elephant? ..."

With writing and art, is this stuff that you just do because you like doing it? Or is it stuff that you want to like to do but that you haven't yet started? If it's the latter, then I'd be making a list of all the things which are equal to or better than writing books and art, just to be more open to the potential options available...

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Mufungo said:
What would you want to determine your true intentions for? What if you have heaps of intentions and what if they keep changing??!!

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Mufungo said:
...one thing I've noticed in this discussion tonight is that you seem to grab hold of abstract nouns, like "truth" or "intention", and then talk about them as if they're concrete nouns. This is a logical phallussy, or in other words, cognitive masturbation, reification. Convert the abstract noun to a verb or an adjective, then insert a concrete noun, a few more verbs/adjectives, and other contextual criteria to make it make sense..  For example, "what is my true intention?" might become "what do I intend to do right now?" or "what do I intend to do at work tomorrow?" or "how do I intend to enjoy cleaning my room?" or "how do I intend to write my first novel?", etc, etc. Sometimes you might feel ambivalent and intend to do/think things which seem like they're headed in oposite directions. Heck, what you intend might change from moment to moment based on the new information at hand... i.e. The new now.  But ask yourself the right question (one that's well formed with all necessary details), then you'll start getting better answers... 

That said, the way we think is like a habit and takes a bit of practice to change, so you might have to spend a period of time catching yourself when you use abstract nouns in unusual ways or when you use words like "should". But you seem to be psychologically minded and slightly obsessive, so it might not be all that difficult for you.

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