NORMAL CAN BE ABNORMAL
When you were born you immediately acquired the beliefs of your family. You took on your family's football team, religion, political party, and attitudes to other races, relatives, the lot.
As you grew older you abandoned some of them, revolted against others, and developed some different ones of your own as you grew up.
Along with this you learned your place in the family, the role that you should play. Your sub-conscious mind believed that all the feelings you had were normal. You might not have liked them, but they were normal.
That's right; your normal, familiar, safe state is the problem. The normal world you learned about as you grew up is your comfort zone.
This is your "culture", what you learned was "normal" from infancy.
We humans have a strong inner desire to be normal. We were tribal people once, and maintaining our normal tole in the family tribe was vital for survival.
We instinctively seek to maintain that role, with its feeling state. It is really important to us.
So feelings that are “normal” for you may in fact be abnormal in the world that you want to be in. Your “normal” may include feelings of failure, boxed in, and unable to achieve.
Some people acquire a dominant procrastinator’s role early in life. That means that the feelings that result from procrastination, the after effects, are sub-consciously sought so that the person feels “normal”.
You "learned at your mother's knee" or wherever you learned your infant wisdom - and it was the adults and older siblings, if there were any, that provided your learning. What you learned were direct instruction or statements about you and others that you believed because those people put their statements into your uncritical infant mind. You even sub-consciously absorbed much from the atmosphere and assumptions of your family.
The feelings of procrastination make you feel at home with yourself - loved perhaps, and belonging.
If you are in this situation, and keep finding you are accustomed to the pattern of failure, frustration, unhappiness, or alienation, the time has come to make a change. You don't consciously keep acting to produce this feeling that you belong. It keeps appearing even though your childhood relationships ended decades before.
Part of this is called "hanging on to identity feelings" or "identity objects". We can't let go of feelings or objects from the past because they tell us who we are. Hanging onto procrastination is part of who we know we are.
A much better thing to do is to have identity feelings and objects in the future.
This requires a conscious, deliberate decision to change, and a vigorous use of the Reward System.
That means imagining a future that you want and the feelings that belong to it and some objects, events or people connections that are in that future, and using these as self-identification.
You can do that.
As an exercise now, imagine something really great in the future - make it up, pretend! Use the Reward System to put it there.
P.S. ("Normal", in my view, is a dirty four letter word. Oh, I know there are six letters! But it's a dirty four letter word with NO tacked on. If this worries you, just remember that I have ADHD.)
© David Townsend 2014