An excerpt from Order of Interbeing member Georg Lolos’ newly translated book, Don’t Cuddle with Your Thoughts: How to Escape the Spiral of Difficult Emotions
By Georg Lolos on
More than twenty years have passed since I went to Plum Village Monastery in France, where I lived for three years. Before I arrived there, I felt constantly overwhelmed by emotions such as loneliness and the fear of not being lovable.
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An excerpt from Order of Interbeing member Georg Lolos’ newly translated book, Don’t Cuddle with Your Thoughts: How to Escape the Spiral of Difficult Emotions
By Georg Lolos on
More than twenty years have passed since I went to Plum Village Monastery in France, where I lived for three years. Before I arrived there, I felt constantly overwhelmed by emotions such as loneliness and the fear of not being lovable. Nobody at home or at school taught me to deal with difficult emotional states. I was unable to cope with the disparaging voices in my head. During my stay, I learned through mindful self-care to observe my thoughts and feelings and to look after them. I learned to create distance between these painful states and was ultimately able to look at myself with love and acceptance, something which appeared nearly impossible before. When I left the monastery, I knew that I couldn’t lose this knowledge of inner self-care, and that I wanted to share it.
The Room of Inferiority
***
When I was four years old, my mother filed for divorce. She grew up in a Greek village and was married when she was 15 years old. My parents soon moved to Germany to be “guest workers,” and my mother realized some years later that she no longer wanted to live with her husband. However, because a separation for my father was not an option, he kidnapped both my brothers and went to Greece. I would only see both of them and my father 14 years later, once I was a grown man.
As a four-year-old boy I couldn’t understand the circumstances and concluded from the departure that I was not loveable enough for my father and both my brothers to stay. Over the years, my mind used this belief, this template, and transferred it to all kinds of situations in life. I regularly trained this childhood perspective of “I’m not loveable.”
The Room of Inferiority was for many years my main place of residence. This room is the basement of the Ego House because here you literally end up at rock bottom. Once I was in this room, I turned all kinds of situations into “I’m not lovable.” When I went to the bakery and the baker’s wife didn’t smile at me, the thought could occur. If a dog didn’t come to me to be pet, same thing. If I fell in love without my feelings being reciprocated immediately, of course I thought it. Even if a traffic light was red the thought could occur: “Here is proof that the universe doesn’t love you.”
How do you end up in the Room of Inferiority?
The Room of Inferiority is where the inner critic likes to reside. It is the voice that calls out to you to let you know that, once again, you didn’t do it well enough; that you’re wrong; that you don’t belong, and that you’re of no value. Once it has pulled you into this room, it walks around you the whole day and talks incessantly at you. Sometimes, it screams very loudly in your ear; sometimes it whispers softly from the background. At any rate, it’s always close by. In the atmosphere of this room, you feel unsure, fearful, alone, and full of self-doubt.
In the hopes of boosting your self-esteem, you’ll try to do everything well, right, and, ideally, perfectly. This is incredibly exhausting because in doing so you try to climb into the heads of your fellow human beings. You want to see things through their eyes and find out what they could expect from you. By doing so, you aren’t living your own truth, instead you’re always looking to see what the others want. You are in a permanent state of self-denial.
When I moved into the monastery and started practicing mindfulness, I realized how harshly my inner critic spoke to me all day long. Although this inner voice had accompanied me since my childhood, it was only through continual observation that it became clear to me just how powerful it was. Of course, I also heard criticism from it while I was in the monastery, this time about how I was practicing mindfulness. Regardless of whether I was not following my breathing for a bit (our ongoing task in the monastery to keep us in the here and now) or the rice burned while I was cooking it, the voice of the critic was always there to subtly reprimand me or completely tear me to pieces.
I called this voice “my tiny Gestapo man.” This term helped me gain some distance and no longer identify as strongly with this inner critic. Very often, humor helped to create distance. As soon as you can laugh at yourself, you’re no longer identifying with a state. Today, however, I wouldn’t use that term to label this thought energy. By using “tiny Gestapo man” a form of criticism is happening. The moment I define the voice, I condemn it and respond with the same energy it’s directing to me.
Today, I confront my mind, the inner voices, and thoughts with more calmness and from a greater distance. We have developed even the most critical voice in us out of confusion – as supposed protection. The inner critic should protect you from outer criticism as a sort of prevention; it criticizes you first before someone else can. However, what very few people understand is that the inner voice is much more painful. At some point, an outer critic stops talking, but the voice in you remains! It stays until you stop believing it, and your attention stops supplying it with energy.
Another common symptom when you find yourself in this state is the difficulty accepting compliments. Although you’re always making an effort to do everything well in order to quiet the inner critic, appreciation from outside comes as completely overwhelming for you. Although I craved encouragement like a dried sponge craves water, inside I was twisted in knots if someone praised me. It was like the struggle of two voices: the voice of the person who appreciated me and the critic in my head that insisted it can’t be true and was most likely just said out of courtesy. Even if a little of the praise reached me, it usually flowed through and out of me at warp speed. The thoughts that called out from the Room of Inferiority were always more credible.
That is why we often feel very alone in this state. Even if we receive praise and recognition, we believe that we actually don’t deserve it. Some even worry about being outed as an imposter.
A symptom that appears quite often in the Room of Inferiority is comparison. You compare yourself with others, their abilities, what they accomplish, what they own, or how they look. Thầy (this is what Thích Nhất Hạnh’s students call him) said to us repeatedly: “When we start comparing, we automatically suffer.” It’s practically a mathematical formula: comparison equals suffering.
