Luke Ford

Ross Ellenhorn writes in this 2020 book:

* Research shows us that deep and lasting change is typically the result of contemplation… To make a personal change in your life is to make a decision and to commit to that decision. The only way to make a committed decision that can lead to change is to do the hard, very human work of contemplating the pros and cons of your situation before you act. There’s no chicken – and – egg riddle between contemplation and advice. Contemplation always comes first when you succeed in making the change you want to make.

* …most people in the United States who quit habitual drinking do so without treatment. That’s right: Most people quit this highly addictive habit on their own. What’s more, people who quit drinking on their own stay sober longer than those who enter treatment. They take a serious, hard look at themselves and decide that not drinking is better for them than drinking. Their sobriety likely lasts longer than that of people who achieve sobriety in treatment because the self – propelled sober person holds firmly to their own internal compass throughout their recovery, instead of following someone else’s advice. In other words — it’s an inside job.

* 1 Staying the same protects you from awareness of your aloneness and sole accountability for your own life.
2 Staying the same protects you from the accountability for “what’s next.”
3 Staying the same protects you from the unknown.
4 Staying the same protects you from your own expectations.
5 Staying the same protects you from the expectations of others.
6 Staying the same protects you from seeing where you are.
7 Staying the same protects you from the insult of small steps.
8 Staying the same protects a monument to your pain.
9 Staying the same protects you from changing your relationship with others.
10 Staying the same protects you from changing your relationship with yourself.

* …successfully reaching a goal is one very important way a person can relieve the tension between where they are in relationship to that goal and the goal itself. Of course, there is another, less effortful way to rid this tension: by giving up. No goal means no discrepancy, which, in turn, results in no tension.

* people with a lower sense of their own self – worth are less likely to use their emotions when making decisions than are people with more self – worth. 19 Harber agrees wholeheartedly with the affect – as – information group, that better and quicker decisions are made when people depend on their emotions as signals. But people first have to “trust and respect the source of these signals, that is, themselves.” In other words, you have to have faith in yourself in order to have faith in your emotions, in order to use these emotions to make decisions and then act on them.

How we deliberate over a decision is a lot like reading a newspaper. You read some piece of information, stated as fact. You accept this information as fact, however, because you feel the newspaper is credible. And if someone — let’s say, for the sake of argument, the leader of the free world — doesn’t like the facts in the article, and also doesn’t want to put in the hard work of doing their own research, they might try to persuade you that the newspaper isn’t credible, that maybe it is even FAKE NEWS. If you don’t trust the newspaper, you won’t believe in the facts it contains. Discredit the messenger, and all its messages are themselves discredited.

* This loss of faith also strengthens the restraining forces that hold you back. When you lose faith in yourself and the world, the anxiety fostered by your awareness of your existential accountability and aloneness can become unbearable.

* When you lack faith in your own agency due to disappointments in your life, your accountability and aloneness — those things we all try to keep out of our awareness, but that personal change inevitably bring into awareness — now feel scarier than scary. And so playing possum begins to make some sense. It protects you from the awful experience that you are alone, accountable, yet not a credible source for getting from here to there. And so you begin to look outside yourself for the answers. Not because those answers are really out there, but because you can no longer stand the idea that you are the source of all answers regarding your existence.

* Hope moves you forward toward things you want. And when you move toward things you want, you also face the anxiety that you are on your own in doing so. When you don’t have faith that you can reach the thing you want, or don’t recover from failing to reach it, hope becomes scary. It scares you because it turns aspiration and desire into disappointment and frustration. And because it threatens to make you lose faith in yourself and in the world.

* Whenever you feel the pull toward sameness it’s because you are simultaneously feeling hopeful and fearing that hope. This means that your hope isn’t necessarily injured or depleted when you stick to staying the same; rather, it is there, chugging along, yearning for things it appoints as important that are lacking in your life. It’s just that this hope also worries you, so you restrict its ability to move you forward. Fearing hope, you put a lid on it, because you are so anxious about that always – present problem of your possible disappointment, and the resulting sense that you are helpless in getting your needs met.

* Once you no longer trust yourself, you are perpetually threatened with that unbearable feeling of helplessness in getting your needs met.

* When you focus on what you could have done differently, you’re also not focusing as much or at all on the possibility that the world is capricious, malevolent, and depriving, unresponsive to your efforts to make meaningful, satisfying changes. Thus blaming yourself offers an alternative pathway to an intolerable and hopeless point of view.

* On the other hand, engaging in counterfactuals that assign cause to a dangerous and chaotic wilderness can also act as an alternative pathway. In doing so, you turn away from shamefully believing that the problem is all you, and thus reach the same hope – preserving benefit as turning inward. If the problem isn’t you, you might be strong enough to endure, despite what little the world around you has to offer.

Ross published this pamphlet online: Ten Reasons Not To Change.