{"id":15343,"date":"2013-05-16T08:20:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-16T12:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/hameblog\/2013\/05\/16\/fighting-for-freedom\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:50:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:50:12","slug":"fighting-for-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2013\/05\/16\/fighting-for-freedom\/","title":{"rendered":"Fighting for Freedom"},"content":{"rendered":"
My friend Lisa<\/a> sent me a video the other day about procrastination, and how we beat ourselves up with it and because of it. The video made a good point, that procrastination is always the result of falling into a “master\/slave” relationship with ourselves, which naturally makes us want to resist whatever we’re told to do.<\/div>\n<\/p>\n
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(The speaker drew the point back to childhood, saying that this is how parenting is usually done, and rails against that. I have to admit that I fast-forwarded through much of the video and I’m not linking to it here, because I’m not into the “blame my parents” game, because he took half an hour to make the point I made in one sentence above, and because I’ve Googled the guy and he sounds a bit culty-creepy.)<\/div>\n<\/p>\n
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An author I love is Cheri Huber<\/a>; she writes deeply compassionate books about Zen that are utterly brain-bending, yet her conclusions are inescapably elegant and ring true like a Tibetan Singing Bowl. She’s really big on this idea of conditioning — changing ourselves so that we’ll be “acceptable” (which, of course, begs the question that we’re naturally un<\/em>acceptable and have to be constantly changing and fixing ourselves to be worthy of love).<\/div>\n<\/p>\n
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One of the ways we try to do this, she says, is by developing “sub-personalities”. Over the past few years, I’ve been identifying my various sub-personalities and their attendant strategies for winning. Some of them seem purely negative when they show up, but as they say in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, “all behaviour has a positive intention”.<\/div>\n<\/p>\n
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Here’s my cast of sub-personality characters so far:<\/div>\n<\/p>\n
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\"\"<\/figure>\n

<\/a><\/div>\n<\/p>\n

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So yesterday, because of my correspondence with Lisa, I was thinking about my inner drill sergeant (far-left, middle). He’s always barking orders at me, just like yer man was saying in the video. But on taking a closer look at him, I had an insight:<\/div>\n<\/p>\n
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He’s a soldier. What do soldiers do? They fight for your freedom.<\/div>\n<\/p>\n
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Now, just like with real-life soldiers, I very often disapprove of their methods and completely disagree with their wars, but I can’t argue with the fundamental intention of protecting freedom. So that’s what the sergeant’s trying to do: win my freedom.<\/div>\n<\/p>\n
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Which takes us into Havi Brooks<\/a> territory: she says we should talk to our monsters rather than try to kill and destroy them, because at their hearts is a need. By talking to them, we can find out what that need is and finally satisfy it — even if just for a while.<\/div>\n<\/p>\n
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I guess what’s next, then, is to ask what lack of freedom the sergeant is trying to protect me from. I suspect it’s about getting enslaved in an unconscious world of default choices that won’t make me happy. But his orders can become like laws: oppressive, when divorced from their original intention, imposed by force and without reason.<\/div>\n<\/p>\n
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I can use the sergeant’s discipline to get stuff done — stuff that’s important to me. And I can get him to calm down by assuring him that we’re safe. In fact, I think “safety” is all any of the negative characters need.<\/div>\n<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n<\/p>\n
Maybe this stuff is crazy, but it works for me.<\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My friend Lisa sent me a video the other day about procrastination, and how we beat ourselves up with it and because of it. The video made a good point, that procrastination is always the result of falling into a “master\/slave” relationship with ourselves, which naturally makes us want to resist whatever we’re told to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15343\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}