Here is today’s Game and what’s going on.
Here is what I discovered today in our Dadly Daily Declaration reading from Chapter 6 of Stop Doing That Shit by Gary John Bishop. The title of this chapter is “Establishing the Truth.”
Let’s dive into today’s highlights:
- Our past is the template upon which our entire future is based; therefore, it’s little wonder we live such lives of limitation and frustration.
- How would you describe how life has gone for you thus far? What are the milestones you’d point to? Whatever falls out of your mouth here is your established truth.
- Basically, you have a tale to tell like everyone else, a ready explanation of yourself, your life, and why you now do what you do. As you stumble your way through your daily life (and yes, it’s a stumble), you refer back to this “truth,” occasionally recollecting the tired and well-rehearsed lines to justify and explain yourself—and, every once in a while, to try to understand yourself.
- You blissfully explain your life away in the same way your parents would explain theirs and your grandparents would explain theirs. This method of explanation gets handed down from generation to generation in the everyday meanderings of conversation. The details differ, but the bullshit continues.
- What you have relied upon as the truth is nothing more than your personal experience of incidents and circumstances, except that in your case you have carried these experiences around, as if they were carved in stone, and fabricated a life out of them.
- You are a magic little sponge permeated with a myriad of established truths upon established truths. Is it any wonder many people have trouble getting free from their past?
- Your truth is NOT the truth to anyone but you, and if your truth does not light you up, it might be time for you to come up with another one. If this sentence infuriates you, that should give you a sense of how committed you have become to your own version of the past rather than confronting the life you’ve forged since those times and the future you are currently denying yourself.
- Take a look right now and start to deal with what you’ve done with your life. Look at your relationships with your family, with yourself, the way you relate to love and sex and your potential and partnerships. Your hang-ups, your triggers, your rages, and your disappointments. All of it based in, organized around, interwoven with what?
- Your established truth lives on through you. You perpetuate it. It’s all yours now. Once established, these truths of yours go deeper and reach further out and begin to take over your life, reaching all the way back from the past and crawling into your future like an existential shadow. You’re hooked on them. And I mean hooked.
- Who you have become is not a function of what happened back then but rather of the “truths” you picked out and held onto.
- Consider the idea that your entire life is nothing more than your personal experience of it. An angle. A way of looking at your life that became much more than just a simple viewpoint. It became an excuse for why you keep falling into the same destructive patterns. But it doesn’t have to be.
- You? You’re victimizing yourself into a truly forgettable life. Like most people, you’d rather explain your life than intervene in it.
- Your past is basically an explanation, something you came up with to explain why you are you. Period. An excuse. This shit has just got to end.
- Look, at some point, you just have to get sick of yourself and your justifications, but do it in such a way that you don’t become victim to yet another thing. This isn’t about despair, or guilt, or shame, or any other negative state; this is about finally taking total and complete ownership of your life. Dry your eyes, sit up in your chair, and finally set the record straight with yourself. Whatever truth you own doesn’t own you.
- You’re not any different from anyone else! You have all of this untapped potential, a greatness, a contribution to make to this life and to people, yet you spend your days explaining yourself away!
- You’re going to have to confront the idea that you are in fact not defined by your established truths and that they are nothing more than a shiny, easy-to-explain excuse for your life, just like your thrown-ness. They are your heavy, significant, and justified get-out-of-jail-free card.
- In short, the jig is up. You do not self-sabotage because of mommy issues or daddy issues or trust issues or confidence issues or anything else. You don’t even have issues! We did this before—you’re not a category! This isn’t about what was done to you or what has happened to you or where you are from or your genetic luck of the draw. You self-sabotage because of something else entirely.
Those gems lead us to today’s Dadly Daily Declaration:
What you’ve been pointing to as “truth”—every incident, every scene, every drama, joy, and upset from your childhood all the way through to five minutes ago—is little more than a perspective. It’s not the truth. It’s an angle from which you participated in the life you were thrown into. Everyone has one of those.
You’ve lived as if your “truth” is objective, like a solid, immovable object that is the way it is. But it’s not. And that’s why we argue—in politics, in relationships, in business, and in our families. Painfully trying to reconcile, to agree on a single truth, when the reality is that there is none. On one hand, you can never change the past, but on the other, you can choose to change how you see and explain it. Which in turn changes how you feel about it. Which then, in every sense of the word, changes the past for you. At the very least how it impacts you.
