Day 1 - 09/03/2026 - Intro
Hello, welcome to my blog.
This will be a blog about making things simple. Some things in life are genuinely difficult, and other things we make them difficult and get in our own way.
Maybe I have undiagnosed OCD, I am definitely neurodiverse. Why does there have to be so much ritual and pageantry before I do anything.
I can't do anything unless it's written down. I don't feel motivated to do anything unless it's associated with big sweeping emotions, unclosed loops must be closed immediately.
Each Day for a Week I will be asking - can I make this simpler (and simpler and simpler)? I think it will be really interesting. I think it could lead me out of my comfort zone, I think it might let me trust myself more, take initiative. Free up some brain space.
Let's see how it goes, I am excited.
Day 2 10/03/2026 - Looking from the outside in
Life doesn't know about all the problems in my head, life doesn't know that there's anything wrong. Maybe I should live from that point of view, maybe that will keep things simpler.
Nothing is complicated to life. When you live life from the outside in, the pacing and time of life isn't all messed up and back to front... the story you run in your head is different to the multiple stories running out there.
It's all about where you start from, what's your base, what's your backdrop. What do you use as a reference for everything else. I don't want to use my biased, constricted mind that jumps from 0 to 1000 in half a second. I may encounter it, but I don't need it as my base or my default.
The world out there is slow, big, neutral, and impersonal. It doesn't acknowledge conflicts because everything is on the same side, maybe there is only one side.
Life out there is the definition of simple, even when bad things happen. We respond, we encounter tough emotions, and most likely we move on.
The mind is the only place where things get complicated, where there must be something out of place, where there must be a story beneath the story, where we can't trust what's happening before our eyes, where the most likely story is not good enough.
Day 3, 11/03/2025 - There are two halves of the truth
I found that I was really stuck on a particular set of feelings, and it wasn't shifting at all; that wasn't going to help me keep things simple.
So... I did some self-administered EMDR therapy. You probably wanna go to a professional, those prices though!
I'm not going to talk about how it might have fixed my life etc etc, but how it related to this week's topic of keeping things simple.
EMDR works by employing both side of your brain to reprocess trauma in an adaptive way, to help with the stuckness.
You hold an image in your mind of the traumatic memory, or the current issue that is causing distress. The technique works by desensitising you to the memory or feeling.
What it felt like for me was reaching a hand back in time and providing more context from the future. It felt like a healthier dialogue between my two positions on an issue; one where the feelings were still very raw, and another that can see that currently, I am safe.
Heralding one traumatic memory or one distressing feeling as a good representation of reality is exhausting, distressing, and not simple actually. It requires a lot of mental resource to keep it going. The mechanism that keeps it going is sort of running on autopilot, a messed up nervous system with well embedded stories that keep the maladaptive stories running at the expense of your heart and mind.
Acknowledging that stories have two halves helped me to keep things simple.
If you're curious, here is the EMDR technique. There is a disclaimer at the beginning of the video. You can also download the video to avoid YouTube ads: https://youtu.be/Ljss_Ut5pxY?si=GXtWb8kGWE-8oCeh
Day 4 12/03/2025 - The Fixing Plane
Sometimes it's good to think of life as happening in different physical spaces. The fixing plane is a place where nothing happens, where problems are described but they are not real. Where people appear to be working on or working through something with nothing to show for it. I don't want to live there anymore, and I feel this will make my life more simple. The fixing plane is an abstraction from real life. I don't want to be there anymore.
Day 5, 13/03/2025 - Who's at the steering wheel??
I'm using voice to text for this because I'm lazy.
I think a lot of why I write this blog and what I'm trying to resolve and heal as I'm writing is CPTSD. I did an EMDR exercise that I linked on day 3. What EMDR is good for doing with distressing memories is gently bringing you back to the time of the memory, in order to provide a bit more context, a bit more space around the memory, a bit more of the temporal details. How this exercise or at least the version of EMDR in this video works is that it will in rounds, ask you over and over again What is the most distressing part of this memory?
I got to about round 3. of this exercise and 1 of the things that I still found distressing about the memory is that I was feeling all of this anger, all of this frustration, being undermined, being disrespected, my personhood disregarded... And I was just thinking where did those people expect all of those feelings to go? It's like they drummed up all of these very distressing feelings without any consideration of where they would go or what I would do with them or how I might process them; very reckless.
And this just got me thinking about an analogy of reckless driving. I promise this still links back to the topic of this blog about keeping things simple, but you just have to remain a bit open minded and stick with me through the process of describing this.
If you're put in a situation where your personhood is disregarded, you've been dominated by someone to the point where it's extremely distressing or anxiety inducing, at that point it's basically a hijack situation. Someone has managed to take control of the steering wheel that is your nervous system, your level of comfort. They've hijacked the car without any consideration of what that might cause to rise up in you, or where the car might end up. If this happens in an institution such as school or work or anywhere where you have to show up every single day, now it's a loop and your brain becomes conditioned.
Fast forward now to present day, there are (usually) no practical, actual reasons to feel unsafe now that you are driving your own car on your own terms. But because you were conditioned to feel like at risk of a potential hijack situation or to feel like you're in a current hijack situation, sometimes as you're driving along as normal, perfectly safe, you become activated and your mind enters that hijacked state.
When we become hijacked like this, we forget that we're driving our own car on our own terms; we are not present in our current reality, in our current situation, and it is very hard to keep things simple when your mind is functionally somewhere else. When we are triggered, it is like we are living the experiences again. Traumatic memories are processed differently. The feeling now when you're triggered are exactly the same as the feelings from the initial injury.
I think a big part of keeping things simple is trying to remain present. What is practically helping me with this is a mental exercise I'm doing, this seems to be working.
If I find myself triggered, I push aside for a moment the person or the thing that triggered the feeling, I tell myself to come back into the room, and I say to myself "there's no one else here". I then try and address the feelings 1 on 1; it's me and the feeling in this present moment, I would say this is keeping things simple.
I'm not thinking about the person or the situation that triggered them, I'm not thinking that I shouldn't have this feeling because of one story or another i.e. it's overreaction, etc. It's me and this feeling 1 on 1. Then I ask myself, "Now that it's just me and the feeling, what seems like something I could or should be doing now?"
In terms of keeping things simple, another thing the EMDR process helped with is being able to describe past events as a matter of fact, describe their effect on me or how they shaped beliefs, as a matter of fact.
It helps you confront the truth without the truth bowling you over, so I can easily say "this is something I experienced, and I can quite reasonably see why X Y Z belief feels true". It's like I can trace the origin of unhelpful beliefs, whereas previously these beliefs had no trail. They were just uncomfortable, and the only thing I knew or wanted to know about them is that they had to go immediately (not helpful).
When you can't or you don't trace back uncomfortable feelings to their source, you're activated without knowing the reason why. Your brain pushes you up against pinch points. These distressing sensitive spiky memories are similar to if you were pressed up against an actual physical spiky thing. There is an urgency to act, to remove yourself from the trigger or the source of the Pain.
But I think what EMDR helps to do, is rather than acting in an impulsive way and trying to get away from the source of the pain by any means possible, you create some distance between yourself and the source of the pain, in a more intentional way. If we're continuing the analogy further, it's like "oh this thing is pressing against me and it's sharp and spiky, but that's because I accidentally made a wrong turn into the room that's small and dark and spiky"; even though you went in by accident, you can come out on purpose.
Day 6, 14/03/2026 - Maybe Ego is Getting in the Way
I wrote a previous blog about how not having boundaries and letting everyone into all my rooms, was not good. Causing me harm. I think another thing that the EMDR exercise made me realise is that it's super easy for me to interpret people's actions as something about me.
I watched a TV show that explained how if you received inconsistent love and affection from a caregiver, this can lead to a lack of boundaries, letting every single person and all their actions and everything about them into all of the chambers and compartments of your identity and your life. It makes you indiscriminate with who you let in and how.
Related to internalising people's behaviour towards me, I watched a video that says that this is actually acting from a self-centred place, similar to people who play victim all the time; The difference is you're playing martyr all the time. Another thing I realised when I was doing the EMDR therapy is that the context of my initial emotional injury meant I was not left with much space, emotional capacity, etc to really process the feelings. Making people's behaviour mean something about who I was as a person, was my mind's best attempt at getting a reign on the situation.
So, what has this got to do with keeping things simple? I think it relates to the point that I made on Day 1 or 2 about seeing things from the outside in, rather than the inside out.
Making everybody's actions mean something about you personally is not a simple interpretation of the world, it actually requires multiple factors coming together in quite a complicated way. The simpler approach is to not make meaning about yourself out of people's behaviour. That's all I'll say for day 6.
Day 7, 15/03/2026 - Conclusion
What can I say for keeping things simple? The real world out there doesn't know anything but simple, or it doesn't hold a position on anything It comes across, and what's more simple than that?
I think what helps with keeping things simple is decentering your ego for sure. Like I said, looking at the world from the outside in rather than the inside out. Taking a more objective view of things. Your nervous system gets hijacked and this becomes harder to do, but it's about remembering how to come back into the room (of reality).
Thinking about how life is just driving along like a car, another car analogy whilst writing this blog.
And I wonder if maybe the urge to not take things how they are is kind of wanting to stop the car at every opportunity, which if you've been in a hijack situation I could definitely understand why you'd want to do that... but so many things are required to be brought together, often in a very complex way, for the worst case scenario to be something to worry about; for the situation as it is, to not be a reliable and stable enough (and safe enough) interpretation of reality.
I'm thinking about how EMDR therapy provides a trail for where my beliefs and behaviour come from, in the same way I am thinking about how everyone else's behaviour has a trail for where it comes from, and how the big grand scheme of reality doesn't hold a position on anyone's trail; What is a more simpler approach than that?
I'm thinking about what happens when I'm alone. If I trace my own trail, I don't associate positive things with being alone, but over these past 7 days I feel like I've been trying and succeeding at integrating these difficult and prickly feelings, rather than desperately trying to live a life without them.
See them for what they are, in a matter-of-fact way, with a matter-of-fact understanding of where they came from; this is a much simpler way to live than rejecting the feelings, or making maladaptive meaning out of what those feelings mean about me personally.
And as we are seeing things in a more matter of fact way, I'm realising that the meaning-making and the urge to act is actually extremely unhelpful. It positions the feelings as problems that need to be solved, the work of being with them 1 to1, in the room right now and thinking about what they might need, doesn't get to happen.
Just because it hurts doesn't mean you're not healing.
Anyways, that's enough writing for now. If you got this far, thank you. Good luck!
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