ADDICTED TO PROBLEMS

Most people when asked, “What is a problem?” would answer that it’s something they worry about, that it’s something arduous, difficult, and probably they have too many of them. But what really is the anatomy of a problem? It’s certainty versus uncertainty. It’s what you know versus what you can’t predict.

Our man, Bill, has a goal that his printing business be successful. He is certain that he can do a number of things to make his business work, but if he is faced with an event that he failed to predict, such as an economic downturn in his city, he becomes uncertain of what to do. He is faced with a problem, and his goal, his intention, is countered by an event which makes him uncertain about how to keep his dream of a successful business on track. If a problem becomes big enough, a person will become that problem. When Bill can’t collect from his customers and when he can’t sell enough printing, his business becomes economically depressed like the city’s economy. In situations where a person fails to resolve a problem successfully, he will likely take on the characteristics of that problem, e.g. when a child continually fights with his parents, he is likely later in life to behave just as his parents did.

It’s an interesting fact that people like to feel certain and they don’t like to feel uncertain. Thus they will cling to those characteristics and things which make them feel certain, those actions or characteristics which win in life – those conditions which have dominated and controlled in life, even if these oppose their own basic goals. People like to know what is going to happen. They feel secure when they can predict outcomes. Thus previous uncertainties (past problems that dominated) become their present certainties, and they cling to past problems in order to solve future potential problems.

Humans insist on having reasons for whatever they do. If you ask a person why he is behaving in a particular way, his answer, his reason, will often be sourced in an uncertainty that he believes won out over a prior certainty. The interesting part of all this is that we end up with a problem telling a person how he should behave, how he should think, and how he should react to different situations. If a boy was dominated by the bullying of his father, he may take on the characteristics of a bully. If his father dominated by reason, he is likely to become intellectual. But if his father’s reason did not dominate, he is not likely to take on that characteristic. Most people are an accumulation of past problems made up of those uncertainties they faced that overwhelmed them. Those uncertainties give them direction and orientation in life. Yesterday’s uncertainties have become today’s certainties. But his isn’t a very good grade of uncertainty. It’s too limited, too defined, and too stimulus-response. Man can become restricted to what has been successful in the past. When life is filled with many problems, man often becomes not a very good match for the problems of his day. He is fettered and restricted by a limited range of thinking. His goals and intentions become predicated by and restricted to what has been successful in the past. When the uncertainties of the past become the only certainties of the future, life becomes very dismal and full of worry.

The way to free man from this age old cycle and break his addiction to past problems is to broaden his viewpoint, to unfix his attention from the uncertainties of the past. Man is limited only by his degree of willingness to consider new things. As long as man’s attention is fixed on the past, he will be doomed to a galaxy of problems in his future and his solutions will be only a repetition of the past.

The Guide To Unconditional Personal Freedom has drills addressing this subject.

© 2008 SEEKERS LLC