Learn to Unlearn

In my life, I have focused not just on learning but also on unlearning. We all absorb bad patterns and habits and even knowledge at some point in our lives, and it’s important to be aware that this happens so that we can overcome it.

Many of the things we learned were never worth learning. Or they were only worth learning so that we could realize that they were wrong and stop doing them.

Here are a few things I have unlearned in my life:

1.     Sudden Anger and Impatience

In my teenage years, I was generally calm. Still, I recall that if I became upset about something, I would sometimes get suddenly angry and impatient, not handling the situation well. And some of this extreme impatience carried on into my twenties as well.

By my mid-twenties, I realized that this was terribly maladaptive and that this was not helping me grow, and my behavior would only drive people out of my life. I realized that my loved ones did not deserve this from me, and usually, they were the ones who had to suffer through it.

Most of the time, I was fine – but I was fairly easily pushed to my limits back then, and I would sort of blow up in anger, making minor situations into something much bigger than they needed to be.

I unlearned this quickly when I had the realization that my wife (who was my girlfriend at that time) did not deserve to deal with this and that she probably would not deal with it for long. Eventually, it seemed clear that she would leave if I could not manage my behavior appropriately.

Strangely, unlearning this was easier than I thought. I’m sure it was a challenge at first, but I feel that in a matter of months, I made a sizeable change in my behavior. I was no longer blowing up over trivial matters. Over the years, I was able to become a great example of patience rather than impatience. I do not get angry very easily at all anymore. In fact, I think it takes much more for me to become angry than it would for most people.

2.     Intense Shyness

Through much of my childhood and young adulthood, I feel that I was intensely shy. Although never diagnosed, I may have had social phobia / social anxiety disorder. Sometimes the thought of being around new people would make me very anxious. Inside, all I wanted to do was avoid being around new and unfamiliar people.

If I knew there would be a lot of people around at a gathering or party, I sometimes would feel physically unwell from the anxiety.

Even for the people I knew, if I didn’t know them very well, I often felt uncomfortable. And even for the people I was more familiar with, I sometimes felt anxious and uncertain about how to handle a social situation.

What helped me unlearn this intense shyness / social anxiety was realizing that there was no single right way to handle a social situation. I often felt that I had failed to properly socialize with people, which made me want to avoid these situations more and more. But when I realized there was no one right way to do things, it became easier.

Of course, it was also an important shift when I realized that I had a real problem. I was actually scared and overly worried about talking to someone new. This was an irrational fear that I could be rejected, misunderstood, that I would be disliked, or perhaps even made fun of if people thought my social skills were not good enough.

To unlearn my bad patterns, I began to make it a point to interact with as many people as I could. If I were invited to something, I would go even if I had to fight my own instincts to avoid it. I made an effort to speak to new people, although I’m sure many people would have easily spotted me as an extreme introvert. They probably could not have known that merely showing up to a place with people could take some effort from me.

In time, I found it easier to engage in conversations, let go a bit, and enjoy conversations with new people. I no longer had to analyze whether my social skills were good enough. I realized that the less I thought and worried about my social skills, the better things went.

Eventually, I lost most of the anxiety. I can still get a bit of anxiety if I meet a group of new people, but I think it is normal and mild. It is nothing like the outright fear that I used to have.

3.     Responding By Feeling Depressed or Hopeless

I’m not sure when I began feeling depressed if things would not go my way. It was probably connected to feeling like a failure socially. But in my late teens / early twenties, if I didn’t perform as well as I hoped on an assignment or test, I may get depressed about it. At some point, I may have gotten used to being in a depression, and I didn’t really work to get the things I wanted out of life. I accepted it for what it was, which is a horrible way to deal with it.

Then when I began graduate school and faced the biggest challenges of my life, I became deeply depressed. My natural response to challenges and obstacles was to feel depressed, and so it made sense that I would get deeply depressed then.

To overcome this took therapy and medication for a couple of years. Then I meditated to help keep control of my mind. I also decided always to take action to make things better rather than to allow my thinking to drift deeper and deeper into depressive loops.

I’m not sure that depression is always something that can be unlearned, as everyone is different. In my case, I was fortunate that through my own will to change, I was able to unlearn this habit. My habit had become that when something didn’t go my way, I got depressed. So it was critically important that I develop a better response to such challenges in my life.

Unlearning my depressive habits was something that took years. My therapist at that time stated it perfectly to me once – she said: “You have spent a long time with certain issues, and it can take time to work your way out of them and to heal them.” Similarly, as with the prior examples, I feel that I am quite resilient at this point, and I do not fall into a depressive mood or state very easily.

What is Worth Unlearning in Your Life?

In revealing the above things I unlearned, I see that a common theme is I wanted my freedom. I was trapped by my anger, shyness, and depression. And in time, I was able to unlearn those behaviors and to live my life more freely. I didn’t need to respond to the world by withdrawing from it. Instead, I could participate in it and enjoy it.

Is there something in your life that is holding you back that you would like to unlearn? Often we focus on learning new things, but it is just as worthwhile to unlearn the bad habits and thought processes that are preventing us from leading the life we truly want to live.

Surely everyone’s problems and paths to overcome them will be different. But in my life, usually, I noticed that there was a big problem holding me back. Then I realized that this was important enough that I needed to work on it. There was a point where it was no longer a question – to meet my life goals and live the way I wanted to, I would need to dedicate myself to overcome certain issues. The particular steps you take from there may be different, but eventually, you will find your way to better if you are committed.

Controlling Our Emotions So They Don’t Control Us

I am sometimes surprised at how easy it is to manipulate a person. We all have a range of emotions, personalities, beliefs, desires, knowledge, understanding, and human connections. Yet, despite our complexities, is it really so difficult to manipulate us? If someone hacks or invades our emotional centers, can’t they then hijack our mind and body?

It’s quite easy to make someone angry if you think of it. This involves calling someone a name, badmouthing their mother or other family members, insulting their intelligence or skill, making offensive gestures, or referring to a person’s most deeply held beliefs as nonsense or idiocy. If you make someone angry, they tend to lose control, yelling loudly, becoming offensive in their own word use or gestures, perhaps even be willing to engage in a fight. They tend to get into a revengeful mindset – wanting to hurt the person hurting them.

Understand that to make someone angry is to poison them and those around them and make them do foolish things. So, if you anger someone, you have controlled them into taking actions against their own best interest. Of course, most people assume they are not being manipulated. Most people assume that the antagonist is legitimately being himself, and just by his own faulty character, he happens to be anger-inducing. Somehow, that belief probably makes us even angrier, thinking, how could someone be such an imbecile, so uncaring, so offensive?

Perhaps much of the time, the antagonist is legitimately himself. Still, other times maybe he enjoys gaining control over others, knowing that if he doesn’t like someone, he can make them angry and make them lose control, turning them into his puppets. As long as the antagonist maintains some control over himself, he will appear to be the better person, in the end, perhaps even coming out to be a hero if he helps to calm down the person he has angered or to stop the one he angered from causing too much trouble.

Anger is just one powerful emotion, but any other could be used just as well to shift someone into a different frame of mind where they cannot think clearly. Can you think clearly if you feel overwhelmingly sad, happy, jealous, embarrassed, hopeless, or scared? Don’t those emotions tend to put you on a one-track mind, where all you can think is of one thing? Generally, you will work toward alleviating that strong emotion to get yourself back to normal. Still, in doing so, you may be easily manipulated and controlled into taking a course of action that works against your best interests.

I recently heard of a scam where people are contacted by the FBI, only it is not truly the FBI, but just an imposter who wishes to trick the target into transferring money to them. These villains can trick many people because they scare them. To many people, it is one of the scariest things to be contacted by the FBI, to be told that you are wanted for crimes – even, of course, when you are fully innocent. We will do anything to alleviate the overwhelming emotion of fear, even if that means telling these people all of our private details or transferring money to them.

It isn’t until later that we realize none of it made sense. The caller didn’t know the target’s name but rather had to ask to confirm it. The caller didn’t know the target’s address, or social security number, or which bank he used, or anything at all about the caller, until the caller provided that information.

So why would the FBI call someone if they did not know who they were calling, nor anything about them? Of course, they would not.

We must be wary of someone who insists on putting us into extreme emotional states. Someone who constantly reminds us that we should be scared, worried, or sad should not easily be trusted. When taken to extremes, these emotional states do not help us work our way through problems or see clearly.

One of the greatest skills anyone can learn then is emotional control. We have to practice this. When someone is yelling and behaving in a threatening way, a part of us must recognize that this is a potential threat, but it does not help to cower in fear and panic.

Recently, I stopped at a gas station to fill my tank. While I was pulling into the gas station, I got an uneasy feeling, as four men were partly blocking the entrance. One of them begrudgingly moved out of the way to let me in. There was a huge truck to one side blocking the view to the street – it crossed my mind that this may be on purpose, to obstruct the view so no one could see what these men were doing, but I ignored that idea. Some gas pumps were out of order, and the one closest to the street was in use, so I pulled up to the one next to these four men. They were standing, appearing to do nothing. This struck me as a bit strange since we were at a gas station, but I reminded myself that they were not doing anything, so there was no problem.

As I parked my car at the gas terminal, I noticed that one of the men had his eyes on me. He was the biggest of the group and only about 10 feet away from me. I stepped out of the car and in front of my door, and suddenly the man had one arm fully behind his back in an awkward manner – he was not stretching, nor was he just quickly pulling out some cigarettes. His hand was back there purposefully as if he were holding something. He was smiling at me, inching forward very slowly, as if he didn’t want me to notice he was getting closer. He complimented my nice-looking car, and I said Thanks, man.

He continued to inch closer and closer, with his arm still behind his back. I was outwardly as casual as possible, while at this point, every red flag had been raised in my mind. I realized that my life was possibly in danger. On top of all these red flags, the man was smiling with a sort of grimace that did not seem right at all to me.

Somehow, through years of working on my emotions, not allowing them to go out of control, and always keeping my composure, I had been able to be fully calm at this moment where I realized I was in trouble. I had never been so sure in all my life that something bad was about to happen to me. The man was almost within arm’s reach now. In a flash, I had realized that the big truck blocking the view was not a coincidence. The four men clustered, doing “nothing” was not a coincidence. This man’s arm awkwardly behind his back could not be a coincidence. I believe he wanted to threaten me with a weapon.

He was almost within arm’s reach.

I quickly yet casually stepped behind my car door (with it between the man and me) and into my car. I imagined that from his perspective, he might have assumed I just forgot my wallet or something in my car. Of course, I was ready to leave. I put my keys in the ignition and got out of there as quickly as I could.

The first lesson here is I should have trusted my intuition earlier. I knew something was not right immediately when I saw these four men doing nothing, and then the big truck blocking the view from the street and the many “out of order” pumps were other signals. The man with the hand behind his back staring at me was another signal. I waited until the last possible moment when he was almost within arm’s reach, and that was a mistake, but luckily nothing happened to me.

Emotional control is critical. If I had gotten too scared, I might have entered into the animalistic “fight or flight” response. As humans, we should remember that the options are actually endless, not binary. But if I had frozen there, obviously, this would have been a mistake. If he had me scared and frozen, that was probably the perfect victim he was looking for. He could have taken all my money, my phone, and the car, in that case. If I had panicked and run on foot, they might have been ready to stop me. Even though I got back in the car, if I was too scared, not thinking clearly, I may have forgotten to lock the car, I may have dropped the keys or struggled to get them into the ignition properly, giving them enough time to open my door and force me out.

It was of utmost importance that I remain calm and composed.

Luckily I did.

Just because the environment is moving us toward an emotion does not mean was must let those emotions run out of control. Something in the environment may press our Anger button, or Fear button, or Embarrassed button, but we can rewire ourselves not always to need to respond with the same thinking patterns, and certainly to not always need to respond with the same behaviors and actions.

You can imagine emotional triggers as passing through you, not happening to you. This means if someone insults you, it goes through you. You do not need to take it in and respond to it. Similarly, if someone near you fears many events: diseases, wars, financial troubles, you do not necessarily need to let this affect you. You can imagine those feelings passing through you, not needing to get entangled with your emotional self. The words and the fears of this person are just going through you. You are not adding energy to it by taking it seriously. You may even empathize with this person over their fears and try to help, but you are not required to take in their negative energy even then.

Sometimes I have thoughts such as this:

This anger (or fear, sadness, etc.) is not helping me see clearly and behave rightly. I must let this feeling go so that I can move on. When I move on, I will be able to see clearly and behave rightly once again.

When you feel the emotions start to run out of control, think the above thought (or read it aloud). Then talk to a loved one. Practice taking deep breaths. Go for a walk or jog. Watch a stand-up comedy or a comedy film. These are the things that help me. Maybe they will help you too. And of course, if you have a problem with an individual, consider talking it through with them after you have calmed down a bit.