Lampshading

Cross-posted from Seven Shiny Stories

7. Experiment

Eva bursts into tears whenever she has a hard problem to deal with, like a stressful project at work or above-average levels of social drama amongst her friends. This is, of course, completely unproductive - in fact, in the case of drama, it worsens things - and Eva wants to stop it. First, she has to figure out why it happens. Are the tears caused by sadness? It turns out not - she can be brought to tears even by things that don't make her sad. The latest project from work was exciting and a great opportunity and it still made her cry. After a little work sorting through lists of things that make her cry, Eva concludes that it's linked to how much pressure she feels to solve the problem: for instance, if she's part of a team that's assigned a project, she's less likely to react this way than if she's operating solo, and if her friends embroiled in drama turn to her for help, she'll wind up tearful more often than if she's just a spectator with no special responsibility. Now she needs to set herself up not to cry. She decides to do this by making sure she has social support in her endeavors: if the boss gives her an assignment, she says to the next employee over, "I should be able to handle this, but if I need help, can I count on you?" That way, she can think of the task as something that isn't entirely on her. When next social drama rears its head, Eva reconceptualizes her part in the solution as finding and voicing the group's existing consensus, rather than personally creating a novel way to make everything better. While this new approach reduces the incidence of stress tears, it doesn't disassemble the underlying architecture that causes the tendency in the first place. That's more complicated to address: Eva spends some time thinking about why responsibility is such an emotional thing for her, and looks for ways to duplicate the sense of support she feels when she has help in situations where she doesn't. Eventually, it is not much of a risk that Eva will cry if presented with a problem to solve.

Helpful link to a completely harmless source of information for those who don't get the reference: lampshade hanging.

When I was young, I went to psychologist because I was afraid of the dark. She made me find the origin of my fear, so i enlisted something like: recent burglary in our apartment, war, my imagination, some TV series, and said that all those mixed together can make you be afraid of the dark at night (10 years old kid can do that, yes, though I am not sure if I repeated what i heard from others). So, not after seeing that there is nothing in my backyard, but after seeing the origin of my fear, I stopped.

That is why I think that finding the origin of some behavior is important when trying to stop it. For example, you can find out that your self-respect is causing your immunity to being insulted. So, if you want to be offended by something, you might want to undermine your self-respect first. You can as well imitate, and try to get really angry when someone offends you, but you will possibly feel fake, and eventually, you will go back to your pre-change-attempt behavior.

Your behavior can be learned, as well. If your father was a person-type that always steps aside, you can be like him. In this case, you will have to learn the other behavior, by observing other people doing it, and trying to imitate them (just like you learned from your parents?). These are my personal experiences, though, and I would like to hear some expert's opinion on this topic.

The last thing I want to point out is, be aware that you can make mistakes. You want to fix something in yourself, but you can make a mistake and try to fix something that you don't really want to fix. Like, you see that people who are devious have more success than you do, but this does not mean that you should become devious, for example, it can make you unhappy. (I am not stating anything about being devious, it's example).