The Mother Tool: Build Resilience & Let Go of False Hope
It’s human nature to hope for a magical someone or something that will relieve you of the effort it takes to create happiness for yourself. Part X takes advantage of this human laziness. It takes whatever you consciously hope for—a good relationship, successful children, or a lucrative career—and converts it into an unconscious hope for magic. Then, when you don’t get what you’d hoped for, Part X floods you with a crushing sense of hopelessness.
There’s a name for this magical wish: false hope. You’re not aware of your false hopes; they’re buried in your unconscious like a hidden virus. You only discover them when you get whatever you were consciously hoping for and end up feeling let down and demoralized.
A ONE-WAY TICKET TO MISERY
Therapists see these outsized reactions all the time. An entrepreneur earns millions of dollars, yet nine months later he feels like everything he’s doing is meaningless. A student graduates from a top school with high honors and within a short time feels directionless. A woman with fertility problems goes from doctor to doctor until she finally gets pregnant, but after the birth she lapses into postpartum depression. What all these people have in common is that they unconsciously hoped for a one-way ticket to happiness and instead ended up with a one-way ticket to misery.
When you fall into a hole, one of the first things it affects is your attitude about the future. You become certain you’ll never get what you want.
The kind of misery you suffer when your false hopes are crushed is unique. It isn’t just sadness or disappointment, it’s an all-pervading darkness that smothers every part of your life, a deep hole that feels impossible to climb out of.
You’ve felt this way at some point in your life. Everyone has. But strangely, we tend to forget how bad it was once we recover from it. Part X does that intentionally: if it can erase your memory of past holes, you’re more likely to fall into future ones.
When you fall into a hole, one of the first things it affects is your attitude about the future. You become certain you’ll never get what you want. This isn’t an accident. By shutting down all hope for the future, Part X can destroy your drive to do anything in the present. You may let the mail (or email) pile up unopened or stop returning phone calls and emails. Your response to things might just be, “Why bother?”
THE PRICE: DEMORALIZATION KILLS
Like an opportunistic infection, this “Why bother?” attitude infects everything. Problems go unsolved. It becomes difficult to recognize opportunities that come your way, let alone pursue them energetically. If you’re convinced your future is bleak, then nothing you do in the present is going to amount to anything anyway, so why bother doing it?
With no sense of purpose, you exist, but you’re not truly alive.
In extreme cases, this kind of pessimism, unchecked, can prove fatal. Over forty thousand people take their own lives each year in the United States alone. Part X has convinced them that the despair they’re feeling has no remedy—death seems like the only escape.
In less extreme cases, Part X is satisfied with what we call a “living death.” Convinced you have no future, you might be able to get out of bed and go to work, but you’re going through the motions. You can’t be as creative or productive as you’d like to be. If this persists, you start to feel worthless. Eventually, it’s even a struggle to get yourself to do the things that would normally give you pleasure. With no sense of purpose, you exist, but you’re not truly alive.
But demoralization does more than destroy you from the inside. It also takes a tremendous toll on your relationships with family and friends. Many people who fall into this hole tend to withdraw, cutting themselves off because they don’t want to be a “burden.” This deprives them of the love, encouragement, and perspective that other people can provide.
Others quickly alienate sources of support because all they talk about is how hopeless they feel, without doing anything about it. Either way, Part X wins by isolating them—destroying their relationships and increasing their sense of despair.
THE SOLUTION
How can you fight this isolation and despair? The Mother Tool offers you the unconditional love and support you need to keep yourself in a positive state. It lifts you out of hopelessness and trains you to be resilient in the face of inevitable challenges.
Use it in your own life to build resilience.
