useful question

Questioning the Need to Justify Feelings

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Have you ever been aware you had to justify your or another’s feelings? In my life, I feel the need to search for and find what aids my life to continue. All life must serve the purpose of fulfilling this need. This results in an expectation of continuation.

When I’m serving my life, I experience what feels like one purpose: to fulfill my need to continue. Yet, that need creates discomfort, which motivates action. In that action, I experience two things: emotions and justification.

How Might Feelings Justify Needs that Justify Feelings?

My investment of feelings justifies the motivation. Perhaps the motivation inherent in feelings justifies them – self-referential. Thus, creating a self-justifying sense of purpose.

I’m unaware of a need until I experience sufficient discomfort to take action. At that point, my emotions justify it. From there onwards, all my actions serve the purpose of quieting the discomfort and so, fulfilling that need.

Achieving a goal gives me a sense of purpose. My need to be right justifies it.

There are few actual life-supporting requirements to continue living. Yet, my emotions convince me to desire more. My sense of reason attempts to interpret emotions to justify a goal. I interpret that sense as wants. At times, I’ve felt I was defending my actions for need-fulfillment, when I was justifying emotional wants as needs.

I’ve justified my emotions in every case to be right! I may not fully justify my actions. Yet, I have always, without question, defended my feelings, which justify my actions.

What if I questioned my feelings? For example, “Why do I feel this way?” and, “What do I need or want?” This can affect my behaviors and attitudes. When I question what I notice, I can focus on what motivates me to act. This offers me an opportunity for new understanding and may present me with new options.

Recognizing Justifications in My Accountability

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Sometimes justifications make accountability seem impossible for me to recognize. I’ve thought of accountability as some authority that subjects me and others to a power that intimidates and requires obedience. Yet,  I can learn to recognize my accountability even though I’m unaware of it now.

I am often unaware of my accountability in an experience until I become aware of it through my discomfort. This manifests as thoughts, feelings, and body stresses.

When I notice sensations like distress and discomfort, I look for a cause outside me. To confirm this awareness, I might hear these questions in my head:

  1. What has happened to me?
  2. How did this happen to me?
  3. Why did this happen to me?
  4. Who’s responsible? (Not me!)

The last thing I think or want to do is apply these questions to my accountability. These questions provoke a response to a cause someone other than me must account for. I may actively be avoiding the awareness that holds me accountable – denial. Thus, I turn questions outwards to defend against the discomfort that awareness of my accountability to my rightness presents me. By the time I’ve taken action, I’ve affixed blame and missed a vital conversation with my accountability.

Denials and Justifications

The effort I’ve put into denial has exacerbated my need to expend more effort in denial. I’ve invested in my failure of accountability because I was busy denying my defense of it. Thus, I can attribute the suffering I’ve endured in my life to my unaware accountability.

Unawareness of my denial has an addictive quality that sustains itself through repetition. In its unawareness, my accountability rewards the defenses of my beliefs with justification of them. Under the addictive influence of my unawareness, my accountability assumes authority for the beliefs my ignorance denies.

I need justifications for my beliefs. Justifications come from my accountability while hiding it. When I am unaware, I justify what I feel the need to defend. Coming from unawareness, my justification acts as a reward of authority to my beliefs. Justified, my beliefs assume an authority to act for my accountability. That authority validates itself through the repetition of the defenses serving those beliefs. Repetition manifests as patterns of defense that affect my understanding of an experience.

The more I recognize how convincing my belief patterns are, the more empowered I feel to challenge them. From that point of awareness, I can use my accountability to make changes.

How My Accountability Turns Things into Beliefs

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Is a rock “just a rock” until my accountability for its meaning turns it into “a thing of significance?”

My accountability manages my existence in terms of need fulfillment as authoritative, which cannot be experienced except through things. That which represents things is what makes accountability authoritative.

My senses acknowledge the authority of things by validating the properties expressed as their defense, with a twist. The twist is my addition of emotional and mental impressions to judge those things – based on my experiences with them. I create beliefs from this construct of sensory plus emotions and supportive thoughts.

Accountability Binds Me to My Beliefs

Because my experiences of things are bound together with emotional and mental judgments, I bind myself to them as beliefs. That binding is my defense of the belief – over which I have no choice but to obey. Thus, the authority of defense in belief of who I think I am.

Core beliefs bind me to their defense because I need them for my survival. I suffer when I resist serving these beliefs. To neutralize my suffering, I apply a thing that complements my need with fulfillment. Needs and their fulfillment are complements to each other.

Complements are things equal and opposite to each other that compete over authority for my attention. I must serve the authority of those complements by acknowledging the things that represent them. They manifest their conflict in my accountability that I experience as suffering.

When complements equally surrender to the authority of their counterpart, they become neutral. That neutrality is expressed in conflict resolution – change – as it is in need-fulfillment.

What Can I Do to Relieve My Suffering?

When I suffer from belief in lack of a thing I need, application of a complement to the need neutralizes the suffering. That neutralizing interaction represents success to which things I apply authority. How do I get out from under this system of belief and defense that keeps me stuck in my current condition of suffering?

As I neutralize those things I believe have authority over me, I experience freedom from suffering. What if it’s not a matter of belief but a matter of allegiance? After all, nothing has authority over me until I give it my allegiance. The question then becomes, “To what authority do I owe my allegiance?” And then, “Why have I given my allegiance to that authority (thing)?”

This is how my accountability turns things I perceive into things I believe. And what I can do about that — like ask a question!

How Values Affect My Need for Them

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In my bubble of limited awareness, I need values. What gives me value? A sense of wholeness. Because I perceive myself in a world of separateness, where I am incomplete, I must make myself complete. I must find a solution to the problem of incompleteness.

The first time I perceived a need, I assigned a value to that which satisfied it. By assigning value to what completes me, my need bridges I to not I. For example, me to my environment.

I perceive myself in relation to my environment in terms of need and the value of its fulfillment. This is based on a sense of fulfillment of incomplete me from my environment – not me.

I validate my needs by knowing how to fulfill them. My sense of need determines the value I place on its fulfillment. For example, my sense of thirst determines the value I place on the quenching of the thirst. Satisfaction of a need validates it. Thus, the value of the quenching validates the value of the thirst.

The satisfaction equation is:

value of need – value of its satisfaction = 0

What happens when I apply subjective judgment to the equation? That is, as I apply values based on my judgments and biases, I might tip the scales of the equation. Thus, I turn an objective equation of satisfaction into a subjective assumption I must defend, “I am right.”

Defense of my rightness applies to the values I assign to my need as well as their satisfaction. I’ll be forever seeking and never finding . Yet connected by purpose that includes validating that which the other depends on to exist. I will never feel satisfied because I can’t satisfy the equation.

Do I have a need for values that validate and defend my basic assumption, “I am right,” rather than satisfy the satisfaction equation? That is, I would rather be right than satisfied. This defense of rightness sets me up for dissatisfaction!

Defense of this need keeps it in force as a law I must defend.

Beyond Values

My defense of the value I place on a need affects my need for it. Self-validating defense has never led to an increase in awareness. It has, however, strengthened confirmation bias. An over-blown defense of a need closes down awareness to serve that need clearly.

Defense validates the value and the value validates its defense. Stuck in this loop, I’m continually defending myself against adaptation. Resisting evolution, I may be putting myself on the extinction list.

The question that challenges confirmation bias is, “Could I be wrong about this?” – with its assumed affirmative answer, “Yes! I could be wrong about this!” This opens potential.

When I feel I’m in need, I might ask two simple questions to check my defense of the value I’ve applied to a need:

  1. What do I actually need right now?
  2. How much do I actually need it?

The solution to the problem of incompleteness is NOT in its answer – it may be in its question.

How do I Find My Way Out of the Justification Wasteland?

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I’ve created a justification wasteland. How? Because I have a problem-solving mind, I continually engage in searching for and finding solutions to problems I perceive. I’m used to it in my bubble of limited awareness! Thus I’ve defended my understanding of problem-solving with justification.

Why would I feel the need to justify my present with my past? Perhaps I know my problem-solving mind is limited to my reliance on insufficient present evidence. It doesn’t like uncertainty.

Fortunately, there’s a solution to the insufficient evidence problem. A biased memory can add confidence to that current evidence and thus boost trust in the present perception. Therefore, confidence makes evidence appear more convincing than it should.

When I isolate one event from others, I avoid biased memories influencing my present perceptions. Biased memory applied to the current situation changes the current situation. As I question only the evidence in the present event, isolating my perceptions to the moment they occur, I can ask relevant questions. Relevant questions and well-thought-out answers result in learning, awareness, and problems resolved.

For example, “Why am I defending this perception?”, “What is my investment?”, and “Who do I think I am at that moment?” A relevant question will lead to an increase in awareness of self. This follows Apollo’s aphorism to “know thyself.”

Does Justification Tax the Mind with Irrelevance?

Justification is a defensive mechanism that seeks to keep certain emotions, thoughts, concepts or impulses from conscious awareness.

What if justification is the result of applying irrelevant answers to irrelevant situations? What does this mean to a problem-solving mind? Justification presents a solution that diverts attention away from the original problem.

As I invest in defense of the distraction, my mind goes to work in solving the wrong problem. This accomplishes nothing toward solving the original problem, which is, “I don’t know myself.”

That wander into irrelevance is a kind of a wasteland away from relevant resources. This keeps my mind busy trying to solve a problem that isn’t the problem.

What Can I Do to Find My Way Out of the Wasteland?

I can tell you how to stay – just use the same strategy to get out that got you in! You can’t justify yourself out of the justification wasteland!

If I continue to see my life as a problem to be solved, I’ll most likely stay in the wasteland. I must think differently! When I find that different way, my mind will recognize it as relief from the justification tax it has been paying.