B0038M1ADS EBOK (22 page)

The practice of this skill involves putting space where the dark arrow
is in the figure; i.e., monitor your physical sensations and feelings and
realize you don't have to act on them. It's okay that your body doesn't like
being penned in; that's normal for a warrior. It's okay to be frustrated and
angry at traffic. Accept your feelings, but don't think you have to immediately act on the basis of these feelings. It may be hard, but the skill here is
to accept and tolerate your emotions and develop patience.

Patience is a crucial skill in combat. You may have to wait out the
enemy for days, weeks, or months before you strike, and it's not that different back home. However, many warriors completely forget this skill
when they come home. They can't tolerate the stupid stuff people do, and
instead of remembering to practice this skill (for example, in a supermarket line), they explode at relatively minor things.

Patience can be excruciating, but sometimes you don't have any
other reasonable option. Maybe you can safely cut over the median strip
without hurting anyone or damaging your vehicle and escape the snarled
traffic, but it may not be possible. You may be stuck with the situation and
have to deal with it. But as a warrior, you have the skills to do this. You
may be cursing at yourself for not turning off earlier and taking a different route, but you obviously didn't have sufficient information at the
time to see things differently, so what's the point of beating yourself up
now? Again, the skill here is to be able to sit with your emotions and feelings and put space between them and your responses, to dial down the
frequency, intensity, and duration of your responses so they are appropriate for the situation. You don't have to immediately change situations
when you become uncomfortable. You can simply let your reactions and
emotions exist without acting on them; eventually, they will subside or
shift.

Here's another example: A friend of yours calls you up and tells you
to meet at a certain time and place, but doesn't show up and then doesn't
return your phone calls. This person has done this once or twice before.
It would be natural in this situation to feel angry and hurt. It would also
be natural to not like the fact that your friend didn't follow through on
what they said they were going to do, wasting your time. In response, you can feel slighted and immediately assume that your friend has purposely betrayed you, fly into a rage, and do something you later regret,
or you can have patience and weigh the options you consider possible
(dial down the "frequency, intensity, and duration" of your response).
The point is that there are usually options. You also may not know all the
facts. Perhaps your friend didn't show up because of an accident, or perhaps you've known that this is the way your friend is but haven't accepted
it, and keep expecting your friend to change. You don't have to respond
to your friend's behavior immediately. At this moment you may be angry
enough not to care if you destroy the friendship, but this feeling may shift
over time.

Here's a final example: You're sitting in a bar with some friends and
someone you don't know bumps into you, causes your drink to spill,
and then doesn't apologize. Although you think it might be an accident,
you can't be sure, because the person actually laughed a little as they
pushed by you. You may feel angry, disrespected, and insulted that this
individual wouldn't even acknowledge what they had done. So you've
gone from the event (the person bumping you) to feelings (angry, disrespected, insulted). For some warriors, there would be no gap between
their emotional response and further action. They would confront the
person without giving it a thought, and this could immediately lead to
a shouting match or fight. There might be a feeling of enjoyment in
doing this. But is it worth the potential consequences of getting in a
fight, such as possible injury, assault charges, and legal problems? Perhaps the person who bumped you was so drunk and out of it that they
didn't realize what they did. Perhaps they actually did it on purpose and
wanted to pick a fight. However, it may not be in your best interest to act
in this way, no matter how satisfying it might seem to be. One of the key
warrior skills is to know when it's necessary to fight and when a fight can
be avoided. This is the path of the Samurai. This is wisdom. If the other
person throws a punch or pulls a knife or gun on you, then all bets are
off, but until that point, it may be unnecessary or undesirable to respond
with force just because you were bumped and your drink got spilled. A
warrior has nothing to prove.

SKILL 4: LEARN TO MONITOR AND ELIMINATE "SHOULD"
AND RELATED WORDS OR PHRASES

In addition to paying attention to your feelings and emotions, another
skill to learn is to pay attention to how negative thoughts may be contributing to making you feel worse or behave in ways that are detrimental.
Often these happen automatically. Negative thoughts can lead directly to
behaviors and can cause unhealthy physiological changes in your body.
Emotions and thoughts are closely connected. In psychological terms, this
skill is drawn from "cognitive therapy."

The skill is monitoring when you say to yourself: "should," "should
have," "could have," "would have," "shouldn't have," "couldn't have,"
"wouldn't have," "what if," "if only," etc., and pick off each of these words
or phrases with a cleanly targeted sniper round every time they pop up.
These statements are ways we express regret, or punish, criticize, judge,
blame, or place unrealistic expectations on ourselves. They refer to things
in the past that can't be changed, but bother us enough to spend unreasonable amounts of energy on-sometimes a lifetime of energy.

"I should have been able to accomplish that goal" implies that if you
could have accomplished the goal, things would be different (and somehow
better). This diminishes you, sends you on a journey to the land of past
what-ifs, and most important, fails to recognize the innumerable reasons
why you were unable to accomplish the particular goal. Reasons like: more
pressing things that needed to be done; unexpected events happening in
your life; a lack of adequate instruction, training, or resources; an unsupportive family or upbringing; getting sick or injured; a family member get ting sick or injured; someone not doing what they said they would do;
financial difficulties; etc. The "should" statement above implies that I'm
to blame for the outcome-that it's somehow my "fault" that I failed to
accomplish the goal, and that somehow everything would be better if I
had. All of this is pure projection, pure illusion.

Statements like "I shouldn't have done that" or "If only I had done
that differently" express regret and blame. Even if these statements could
be true, so what? It doesn't change anything, and ignores the myriad reasons why you, an imperfect and complex biological mass of cells, did what
you did at that moment. Any more time spent in your thoughts going over
this will only make you feel worse.

Decision-making is a complex task that involves examining what we
feel, analyzing available information, and then acting on this basis. The
problem is that our feelings may be mixed and unclear, and the information is almost certainly incomplete. Additionally, subconscious processes
that aren't in our awareness may also affect the decision.

We can make decisions based on what we think will happen in the
future or how we think we'll feel in the future, which we obviously can't
know. We create stories to define who we are, and we attach some sort of
rationale to whatever decision we make. However, this is rarely, if ever, the
complete story. There are thousands of factors from our environment and
our self (consciously and subconsciously) acting upon us that we can't fully
comprehend, which contribute to the "decision" we think we ultimately
make. Decision-making is incredibly complex and can't be simplified into
any "should have" or "what if" statement.

This type of thinking goes on all the time as a result of combat. "If I
had turned off earlier, we wouldn't have been ambushed." "I should have
been able to tell that the road debris was an IED and stopped the vehicle
in time." In these examples, the warrior is blaming himself for something
that he most certainly had no power to change at that time. These statements express a belief that the warrior had the capacity at the time of the
event to make a different decision, or should have been able to predict
what was about to happen and avert it. It fails to take into consideration
the thousands of things going on in the environment at the moment these events happened. The warrior feels like he failed and is solely to blame for
any bad outcome. Holding onto and shouldering guilt and self-blame can
be a significant part of PTSD and depression.

"Should haves," "would haves," "could haves," "what ifs," etc., come up
all the time in daily life. When you experience reactions to stressful situations, one automatic response is to blame yourself in some way using one
of these statements. "I could have taken a different turn and then I would
have avoided this traffic jam." "I should be able to have better control over
my reactions." "I shouldn't have come to the mall today." "I shouldn't have
gone out with that person last night." "I should have taken the other job."
"I should have spoken up." "I shouldn't have gotten married." These statements simplify a situation that is very complex, and support the feeling/
idea that you had the power to make a different decision. These self-talk
statements provide an illusion of control. They presume that somehow you
could have had the same information that you have right now, and could
have made a different decision at that time in the past. This is obviously
a form of madness that only an organism with a massive cerebral cortex
could come up with.

The more you attack, diminish, or punish yourself with these types
of statements, the more depressed you're likely to become. Depression
can be tied to sleep problems, anxiety, and anger, which is why this is so
important. These self-talk statements affect behavior. The internal monologue of "shoulds" and "what-ifs," connected with emotional reactions, can
lead to behavior that relates to "shoulds" that have nothing to do with
what's going on now. Even if a "should have" or "shouldn't have" relates
to something that happened only a few seconds or minutes ago, that's still
something in the past that can't be changed. Acting on that is a recipe
for disaster. As a warrior, you know that you don't want to act based on a
"should" from a past event; in combat that would obviously be crazy. You
want to act based on what's happening in this moment right now.

This skill is meant to help you recognize every time you say one of
these "should" statements to yourself, and the degree to which you're punishing yourself with them. Think of these thoughts as pop-up targets and
take them out.

SKILL 5: NOTICE YOUR BREATHING

Breathing is the most natural of processes and the simplest route to training your body to be less revved up and more relaxed; it's also a great way to
put space between your physiological/ emotional reactions and behaviors.
Breathing serves to bring in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide and acids
that accumulate as a result of muscle exertion. The breath is naturally slow
and deep when we're relaxed or asleep, and increases when awake. Deep
slow breathing usually involves the diaphragm doing more of the work of
breathing than the chest, with air filling up the lower part of the lungs first.
The diaphragm is the large muscle located at the base of the lungs that
divides the chest from the abdomen. When we exercise, the rate of breathing increases, but generally remains deep to provide the oxygen necessary
to meet the increased demand. However, with high stress or anxiety, paradoxically, breathing may become very shallow, in addition to being rapid,
with muscles in the upper chest (and even neck muscles) doing more of
the work. Rapid and shallow breathing is one of the telltale signs of fear
and anxiety, and is called hyperventilation. Warriors often describe feeling
constricted in their upper chest or neck when they experience high anxiety or anger, which is accompanied by a rapid or pounding heartbeat.
Slowing the breath down, breathing deeper or lower, or simply becoming
aware of how you're breathing are important tools for controlling anxiety.