How often do I wake up, telling myself, "I'm gonna make today amazing and take my life beyond any limits I have experienced before?" Yeah... probably not as often as I would like.

I want to take this opportunity to come clean about something: my life just doesn't naturally inspire and energize me! Despite my generally positive attitude and belief in the "Great and Unending Possibilities" available in life, I am not always called forth by the universe's infinite potentiality. More often than not, I wake up in the world I call "Survival." This is the experience of life from the perspective of my most basic instincts, and it is imbued with varying levels of fear, angst, anxiety, frustration, blame, disappointment and an overall sense of disempowerment.  

Although the name of this blog entry subtly references the tag-line of my therapy consulting and coaching business, ("Moving Beyond Surviving... to Thriving (tm) ") it truly takes work and effort for me to practice what I teach, and even though it can be hard to admit sometimes, I often... well, I better just come right out and say it... Fail.

FAILURE.

DEFEAT.

LOSING THE GAME.

Just look at the above words, and notice what you associate them with. My first response to the potential threat of failure is to avoid it as much as possible. If the failure is unavoidable, I generally react with disappointment, frustration, or outright anger...survival world, here I come. In the second it takes to double-click my mouse, a failure brings my internal dialogue into full-blown rants that sound like, "What's the point of even trying?"  "Who really cares?" "I can't do anything right." and "I quit!" 

Don't our social experiences with failure, starting at a very young age, teach us to avoid the experience at all costs? But, the problem with the avoidance of failure is: as long as we are trying to cover up our failures of the past, we can't access the learning available to us as a result. We set ourselves up for no success in the present and future.

It's not as though this is new information. The paradox is, this is one of our society's great tenets, isn't it? Everybody knows the conventional wisdom is: our best learning occurs when we make mistakes.

So why, when "everyone knows it," do we keep doing something that doesn't work to produce the results we say we're after?

Well, what I am finding to be true for my own life, and in the lives of people with whom I consult, is that the human "Survival" mechanism that was designed to have us populate the planet and not get devoured by the lions, tigers and bears roaming it, has, to a large extent, overgrown its proper functionality. There certainly has been an important role "Survival" plays in our world. We obviously need our "Fight/Flight" response to keep ourselves from stepping out in front of an eighteen wheeler on an eight-lane highway. But we are so steeped in this insinct today — a time when most of the people in the modern, Western World have every last one of their survival needs met — that we are still calling upon its necessity though there is truly nothing threatening actual survival. 

Please don't interpret this as insensitive to the financial and social challenges facing real people in our country and world today. What with the economic situation over the last several years, there are certainly real reasons for people in developed nations to fear for their jobs, their ability to pay their mortgage or rent, and to feed their families. But these difficult circumstances notwithstanding, if we really take an honest look at our lives over the last hundred years and compare it to just about any other century in recorded human history, most of us would admit that we are better off than ever.

In reality, when hungry, most reading this could reliably locate food in under an hour; We have access to clean, untainted water within minutes of feeling thirsty; a place to sleep and a solid roof over our heads when it is time to lay them down. And if we lost our homes or jobs, then (at least at THIS moment in congressional history) there are still some social programs and non-profit organizations we could depend upon, to help  with these most basic of needs. If this wasn't the case in actual reality, then how would we even be reading this article? After all, the ability to access the internet is a privelege most Westerners likely take for granted, even in these trying financial times. And it certainly isn't one of our basic human survival needs...

When the survival instinct exceeds its proper function, I assert that human beings find themselves feeling trapped. We will spend a great deal of energy, time and resources, attempting to solve a problem in a way that is ultimately, ineffective. After all, failing to reach a goal or fearing that we will fail, can fool us into taking all kinds of actions that are not in alignment with those goals. We waste our efforts trying to "survive" something that is not an authentic threat to our survival, and do not put our energy into the actions we could take to move the failure into the past. This swirl of wasted energy can leave in its wake, a host of drama, pain, frustration, and ultimately, more failure. At this point, we may redouble our efforts using the same ineffective techniques, or swing in the other direction, and wave the white flag. Either way, we have spent so much of ourselves on the "failure," that we miss the lesson in it. This, my friends, keeps us trapped. For, what Swiss Psychologist and Psychiatrist, Carl Jung (1875 - 1961) wisely pointed out, "Whatever we resist, persists." Resisting our failures is the greatest predictor of having similar failures in the future. I recently saw a bumper sticker which captured this idea very simply. It read, "Make New Mistakes."

I don't know about you, but I don't react well to the idea that I am stuck in a trap. I want to experience freedom and power in my life. Don't you? But come on, let's just finally get straight with ourselves: When we are seething with anger about a relationship that isn't going well, or are paralyzed with fear about applying to that educational program, interviewing for the job of our dreams, or asking for a promotion, the main person we hurt in our lives, is ourselves. We cause our own disempowerment when we are not effective at

1.) recognizing the trap, and
2.) Taking the most efficient way out. 

So, what can we do when we find ourselves stuck in this trap of "Human Survival?" My experience as a Therapist, Life Coach, and in general, a Human Being, is that the first step to escaping is acknowledging that we are in it. We must see the trap for what it is: a distraction from the learning opportunity, and therefore, a resistance which will cause the persistence of the failure. We need to remind ourselves that failing to reach a goal is not the same thing as BEING a failure. In my next post, I will be offering some specific suggestions on how we can catch ourselves in the "Survival Trap," and provide a reliable roadmap which can quickly set us free!

Stay tuned. And please "like" this blog on facebook, and share it with all of your friends.