Category: Josh Feingold Blog

I am a pretty sensitive person.  Actually, very sensitive.  So sensitive in fact, that I can physically feel other people’s pain like it was happening to me – and I didn’t understand why until recently.

Turns out my boundaries needed securing.

Now, we have all kinds of boundaries.  Some boundaries allow us to differentiate between ourselves and external things, like other people.  And then there are other internal boundaries that allow us to differentiate between what we are thinking, feeling, and our emotions.

So here is what I was doing, and I bet many of you do it to, so I’ll tell you what I did and perhaps it can help you better define your own sense of self in the process, since in truth, like most of this self-help stuff once you recognize the issue everything else falls into place.

I was inadvertently merging other people’s feelings with my own.   The way it worked was that I projected myself unto the other person, then saw themselves as an extension of myself.  Of course, once they told me how they were feeling – I felt it too.

The cool thing about this realization is that now that I know it, I also know how to put a stop to this ridiculous behavior – at least, to choose when I WANT to use it – like at a movie.   View myself as a distinct person from and not allow myself to merge with the other through projection.

There is another internal boundary that needs strengthening as well, and that is the boundary between my feeling and emotions.   I need to be able to feel sorry for someone, and be empathetic, but not let it bleed over into my emotional state.  Of course, this just will take realization and practice, but as I mentioned, now that I know it is an issue, I think everything else will follow.  I’m off to secure by borders.

The following post is totally conjecture, but it seems to have worked for me, so maybe it will work for you too.

Physical pain is the body’s way of alerting you that something is wrong and you need to take action.  Emotional pain is the same.

Therefore, if you want to shorten the impact of emotional pain, the best way to do that is to take action in a similar manner to what you would do with physical pain.  Figure out what the problem is, and try to solve it.

So the first step in fixing your emotional pain is to identify what is wrong. It seems simple, but most people just live with the pain, and don’t take the time to concretely figure out what is really bothering them.

To do this, you’ll need to journal and brainstorm, so take out your pencil and paper, and ask yourself, why am I in pain.  What is the root cause of the pain?  What are all of the secondary causes of the pain?  What are the losses that I am afraid of?  What are my fears?  What are my concerns?  Put this list down on paper and then rank them in order of importance.

Once this exercise is complete, you have now taken your fears from an abstract fear to a concrete fear, and I think you will already find that the next day you will feel better since a lot of pain is just from the fear of the unknown and feeling that comes from being overwhelmed with a situation due to it being unknown.

If you take the exercise one step further, however, you can further impact your own personal pain, by actually taking each point and answering yourself about how bad each thing really is.  Some things of course will be really bad.  However, others, you will find aren’t that bad, or are rather manageable.  At that point, you can logically tell yourself, that the only thing you really need to worry about are the few points that you decided are really bad, which probably are just one or two things.

The neat thing about this exercise is that you have now gone from total emotional pain to one or two items that really are the essence of the pain – and that is a very manageable amount of things for you to deal with.

Now that you have your few items, you have two options, some things will be items that are in your control.  If they are, that’s great!  Put a plan in place to take care of things.  Then they are off your plate and don’t need to be worried about.  If they are not in your control, there is nothing you can do about it, so simply recognize that fact, and give yourself over to that fact.

As I mentioned, all of the above exercise is best done in a journal, since the whole idea of the exercise is to take ambiguous fears and turn them into concrete thoughts about what our real fear(s) really is that are causing us pain, and what we are going to do about them.  The journal allows us to concretely see the outcome.

I think you will find that by doing the above exercise, you can quickly help yourself overcome pain, and move forward productively with your life, with minimal disruption, and pain!

I have five reoccurring dreams.  Perhaps more, but as I think about it this morning, five came to mind.

In one I am lying in bed, and it is dark. A man is standing over me, but I can’t see his face, it is hazy.  I am scared but am paralyzed so I can’t do anything.

In another, I am flying.  Pushing myself off from rooftop to rooftop, flying around the neighborhood.  However, by the end of the dream, I push off but I can’t get myself to fly anymore.

And so on and so forth.

Last night I had dream number three, which I won’t share out of brevity (albiet, in a slightly different form) which made me think about these five dreams, and in particular of the two above that I haven’t dreamt in a long time.

That is when I realized that in reality, these two dreams stopped because they were no longer issues for me.  I’ll explain.

Dream number one, was as it seems.  One of being scared of taking risks due to not being able to protect myself and therefore needing external protection or “extra self”  to help me in life.  Well, that is something that I have been working on lately, and as it did, this dream dissipated.

Dream number two, was also as it seemed.  While I knew I was capable of flying, I also knew that I was being held back.  Well, I figured that out as well, through some deep introspection, and that dream stopped as well.

The upshot is that dreams, especially repetitive ones, are there to teach you a lesson, if you only listen carefully.  They come from the subconscious, and as such are a great way to know what your subconscious really thinks about things.  And these lessons are those that are important at your core and will help you find your center of balance quicker than any other method, so might just be a great starting point.

So pay attention to your dreams, and try to figure out what they really mean to you, which will provide you with a short cut to figuring out what is bothering you at a subconscious level.

P.S. Don’t ask someone else what your dreams mean since they don’t know you.  Only you know you, and you’ll feel a click when you really put the meaning behind the dream.

One of the most amazing discoveries that I had this past year were how many of my “key roles” I had outsourced to other people.

Here is how it seems to works.

As a child, we are vulnerable, and look to adults to “show us the way.”  The hope is that as we grow older, we internalize all of the “ways” that we are shown, but sometimes, if our adult role models themselves haven’t internalized their own roles we just internalize the externalization of roles, or in other case for whatever reason we simply don’t internalize all of our roles.

I hope that was clear.

So as we grow up, we don’t really internalize the roles ourselves, rather we find other people and outsource the role to them.

I’ll use myself as an example, but honestly, I have found that I outsourced about 4-6 roles, and perhaps there are more that I haven’t found out about yet.

One thing that I mentioned in a previous post was that I had issues trusting myself in certain scenarios. What I realized was this was really about needing outside validation of my decisions. So as a child, I had my father’s validation of things, and then when I was in school, I transferred the validation to my teachers, and then later when I got married I transferred the validation to my wife.  Only now that I am living alone, did I realize that I had “outsourced” this key internal source of living to others, and brought it back in house.  Of course, I guess I could have transferred it to my therapist, or back to my parents, or perhaps a good friend, but as part of my process, I was lucky enough to see that I had been outsourcing such a key role for all of these years and move back to a place of self-validation.

So the issue with outsourcing these key roles is that we are not living our own lives, rather others are living for us.  As we have discussed, only through not being dependent on others and self-living can we actually be our true selves, and be happy in this world, and understanding those roles that we are outsourcing to others is key.

So try to figure out what roles you are outsourcing due to fear, learned helplessness, people taking from you, or simply laziness, and take them back!  You’ll be glad you did.

I recently got rid of my television, and wanted to report back on my second week without TV.

Nights have been very different.  Much quieter.  Earlier bedtimes.  More talking with friends on the phone.  Journaling and reading.   Music.   Lots of music.

I’ve certainly been alone with my thoughts, which is both good and bad.    I’ve certainly been bored at times.  But I’m not really sitting mindlessly in front of the boob toob, and that’s pretty good.

I think I got lost for a while in television.  I felt kind of like those people in Orwell’s 1984 who were mesmerized and stuck in lala land.  Now that I am unaddicted by choice, I have to admit it is very hard.  The boredom is the worst part, but then when I think about balancing it against the time wasted watching TV a month ago its hard to justify going back to the other direction.

So I know many are thinking, moderation, Josh, moderation.  Well the problem is that TV sucks me (and a lot of us) in.  It’s a modern drug and just as addictive as alcohol.  I don’t know many people who self moderate TV well, and don’t really count myself as one of them, either.

I’m not going to advocate getting rid of your television.  But I will challenge you to take it downstairs and put it in storage for a month and see how it changes your life.  Changing our routine is good for us to at least identify those areas of our life that we might want to consider modifying.   A one month hiatus, isn’t going to impact you all that negatively, and you might just find that there are some real positives that come from it.  So try it, you might like it!