The Little Purple Notebook On How To Escape From This Universe
Copyleft � 1998 by Maximilian J. Sandor, Ph.D.
Subscription Information: Maria Loren
[email protected]
Website:
http://transmillennium.net/pnohteftu/
The Terrible Triangle: Non-Confront, Hope, and Fear
One night in early spring, Timmy D. hears a strange noise near the front
door. As Timmy turns on the lights to see what is going on, a mouse is
rushing over the floor and into the closet next to the front door.
You've probably guessed it by now: yes, it's Charlie Churchmouse III. Jr.,
who just got evicted from the Chapel down the road because of indecent
behavior (I'll spare you the grizzly details here).
Now, Timmy D. could just simply kick Charlie out of the closet and that
would have been it. But it's 2 o'clock in the morning and Timmy D. has a
much better solution: Timmy just waits it out and hopes that Charlie would
go away by himself.
The next morning Timmy D. doesn't get the warm fur coat out of the closet,
just in case Charlie is still around. After all, spring is here and the
temperature just went up by more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit and is nearly
over 30 already and there was no blizzard warning on the Weather Channel
last night and a light jacket is good enough anyway since it's only a
twentyfive minute walk to work.
Later on that day, Timmy D. comes down with a cold and stays in bed for two
days. Meanwhile, the notorious Charlie Churchmouse III. Jr. met the
beautiful mouse lady from the trashcan next door. She's a simple housemouse
and under normal circumstances he wouldn't settle for anyone who is not
of noble descent like himself. But he wants to start a new life and forget
his ugly past. So, what the heck, she's great looking - let's party, he
thinks, and she's convinced that the rumors about him aren't true, people
exaggerate all the time, and even if the rumors would be true, he would
certainly change
his wicked ways once they would have a little family together with a dozen
or two cute mousekids.
Besides, Charlie just moved in this huge mansion with a giant fur hanging
down from the ceiling. Even if things wouldn't work out, she was sure, she
would get the mansion and at least part of the fur if they should ever get
divorced.
(To make a long and complicated story short, they married overnite in
Mouse-Vegas and started immediately to work on their offspring which is, of
course, a responsible and hard and noisy task.)
Timmy D., waking up from the noise of Charlie's family planning efforts in
Timmy's closet, now feels that all the hopes that he would disappear was in
vain, and the feeling of fear starts creeping into Timmy's mind that
Charlie would be there dancing in the closet whenever the door would be
opened.
For brevity's sake, I have to shorten this story here. Suffice to say that
after a while Charlie got divorced from the beautiful housemouse after she
found out that he was fooling around with her
equally beautiful sister who had been baby-sitting her 29 beautiful
children. Charlie had to give up the mansion and even had to leave most of
the fur in there because his new place, across
the hallway in the oak bathroom cabinett did not accommodate that much
furniture.
Timmy D.'s Health Insurance officer finally approved a shrink to treat
Timmy's phobia of opening any kind of doors and Timmy eventually moved to
California because it never rains in California, all doors are open for a
talent like Timmy, and there shouldn't be too many mice down there with all
these rattlesnakes crawling around.
Now, this abbreviated and sad but true story has a pattern that can be
traced in many other situation in life. It's the pattern of the 'Terrible
Triangle' of non-confront, hope, and fear.
It all starts with a situation that a person is not willing or able to
accept. In our example, a mouse in the closet.
Instead of acting on it, the person may choose to not confront the
situation. As a pseudo-handling the person creates hope in its mind that
the situation will handle itself over time.
This 'hope' is an emotion that the person is carrying around at all times
and in 'present time'. This may come as a surprise because 'hope' is often
thought of a solution in the future.
But the 'feeling of hope' happens in present time and blocks the person
from looking at the non-confrontable things which it is now pushing into
the past. It prevents the person also from acting whether immediately or in
the future.
At the same time, fear arises that the non-confronted situation may arise
in the future despite the hope. This now creates an implicite postulate
that it will happen, sooner or later.
At the same time the original condition remains unchanged or even grows
while the person is 'waiting' in a hypnotized and paralyzed state of mind
without taking action:
[Image]
The observation of a downward spiral in the presence of hope prompted
Hubbard to the buzz-wording 'Hope - the word of skid row'.
On top, 'Fear' closes the circle which really is more like a triangle.
Fear can be described as the consideration that 'hope' didn't work out and
something else will happen instead (see '1' in above picture.) Fear thus
acts as a postulate that the condition that is being feared will realize in
the future.
Hidden underneath the fear there is always a piece of hope that something
non-confrontable will change or not occur (cp. '2'). For practical
purposes this means that any fear can be alleviated by finding and
resolving the matching 'hope'.
Thus, underneath hope lures something that the person cannot confront
('3').
(Again, for practical purposes fear can be diminuished by raising the level
of confront.)
All this forms a classic triad which can be modelled as a triangle.
Everytime one side, whether non-confront, hope, or fear, changes, two other
sides are changing, too.
Looking at the forces in play, a self-reenforcing structure with
push- and pull vectors becomes visible:
* 1&5: An increasing non-confront, requires more 'hope' to balance, a
force increasing 'hope', and results in a higher fear factor.
* 2&3 Hope leaves the non-confronted thing unchanged, allowing it to
grow, a force increasing 'non-confront'. An increasing 'hope' raises
the stakes and with it the fear of failure, pushing fear to greater
heights.
* 4&6 An increasing fear results in an even higher non-confront of the
original item and requires more hope to cope with.
The slightest increase in any of the three sides of the triangle will
result in an increase of the other sides.
Now, fortunately it also works the other way around: if confront is
increased, fear will be diminuished and there is not much need for hope
anymore. In any case, all three sides would have to be eliminated in order
to prevent that the triangle resurrects itself from the ashes of one or
more remaining sides.
Unfortunately, by that time there may be already entities attached to
either side of the triangle. This entity may have cloned itself may persist
in time independently of the original triangle.
Which means that there are two tasks at hand:
* resolving the original triangle, and
* resolving split-off circuits
Different philosophies use different approaches to get a handle on this.
One technique will be briefly summarized here because it demonstrates the
triangle model, the ancient (and still widely used) method of 'complete
surrender':
in this 'techniques', whichever way it is being brought about, the person
gives up all resistance to the condition that was rejected, in our example,
the mouse in the closet.
Now that the condition itself has become accepted, the triangle can be
entered again and resolved or weakened.
This will usually require a considerable amount of courage to override the
fear and the non-confront. It will also require a great amount of trust
because the person has to give up any and all 'hope' mechanisms and put
their trust solely into the process (or into a God-like entity that has
been associated with the process in its beginning).
This process can indeed break the vicious 'cycle' of the terrible triangle
in many cases.
'Modern' technologies, especially NLP and Transformational Processing, have
an arsenal of weapons to work on that triangle. Weapons that work a lot
smoother and more predictable than 'complete surrender'.
It should not go unnoticed that hope is a central piece for many
personalities with which they may uncritically identify. 'Taking away their
hopes' may be a threatening proposal to them and it raises the ethical
question to which degree the 'Terrible Triangle' should be resolved with
the help of a facilitator.
The viewpoint that it is more important to know and understand the
mechanisms of creation of aberrations rather than the undoing of already
created ones is a premise of Gotamo (the 'Buddha'). This view is comparable
to preventive healing rather than fixing symptoms.
In any case, there certainly would be hard times ahead for the likes of
Charlie Churchmouse III. Jr. if more people would do something about
their fears instead of hoping that one day these fears would go away (huuh,
what a nice self-reflexivity!)...
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Copyleft � 1998 by Maximilian J. Sandor, Ph.D.
