UMS. Let’s get at it

[Paul1131]

WIFE: She called me on her way home from work today, and she sounded happier than I’ve heard her in a very long time. Her voice was incredibly upbeat, and she told me that she had an “awesomely amazing” day. Several of her higher ups told her she was doing a great job, and someone else told her that everyone likes her and thinks she’s really nice. She says she’s having a much easier time picking up the job than she did on her last one, and she feels a lot less confusion, stress, and pressure.
Our relationship continues to get better too. Amazing progress here.

[Shannon]

I am very pleased to hear that things are getting better for you guys!

[Paul1131]

WIFE + Me: We had a long conversation when I woke up yesterday. She said that she was very happy with life right now. I actually felt comfortable voicing a few things that would make me happier about life. She was actually accommodating. She said that she was ok with me not being around a few evenings that I’d be taking a jui Jitsu class. That fulfills a need I have, I’ve always loved rough contact sports, and that’s something that I think will help me get back to feeling like “me”.
The big thing, I’m hesitant to talk about, but it’s huge so here goes.
I am not monogamous by nature. I made that very clear going in, and at first she said she was ok with that even though she is monogamous by nature. Once we got more committed, she reversed that on me. She didn’t outright order me, but she made it clear that she would be very hurt if I did it. I didn’t want to hurt her, so I just sucked it up and dealt with it. While resenting it. It wasn’t healthy.
Since we were talking, I brought that up as a thing I was dissatisfied with. I honestly wasn’t expecting it to go well. To my surprise, she actually said she was ok with it now, and said she would accommodate me in doing that. Her only fear was that I’d leave her for someone “younger and hotter”. I said that I wouldn’t, and that that never turns out well. Throughout the whole thing, I didn’t feel she was grudgingly conceding. She seemed to actually realize that that was part of who I am, I’d been nothing but honest about it from the start, and that I’d been repressing it for her.
I asked about it and she said with an actual smile “I’m in a better emotional place now.”.
These results with her are amazing.

[Paul1131]

ME: I think I’m not seeing much go on as far as focus on money right now because I’m focused on FRM doing it’s thing, and it’s made inroads onto levels that it couldn’t get to before. My mind is furiously scrambling for the reasons that I fear the things that I do. I think I’ve got three big ones that are holding me back from fully executing this and other programs, and being more successful in life in general. It’s not that

1. Fear of success (this makes absolutely no sense, but it’s quite common).

2. Fear of embarrassment. (This one at least makes sense)

3. Fear of inadequacy/failure. (Which causes me to be inadequate, and fail)

[Shannon]

It's not common, but not unheard of, for people to get themselves stuck in a perpetual feedback loop of afraid to succeed, and simultaneously afraid to fail.

I was afraid of failure for a while. Then I came across one of my favorite quotes:

No man ever became great, except through many and great mistakes. - William E. Gladstone

It's okay to fail, as long as you don't give up trying. The secret is, you can ONLY truly fail if you give up. Otherwise, all you have really done is learn one of the ways not to succeed, which narrows down your options and makes your next try more likely to succeed.

I'm curious why you are afraid of failure and success though, and embarassment as well.

[Paul1131]

It's not common, but not unheard of, for people to get themselves stuck in a perpetual feedback loop of afraid to succeed, and simultaneously afraid to fail.  

I was afraid of failure for a while.  Then I came across one of my favorite quotes:

No man ever became great, except through many and great mistakes. - William E. Gladstone

It's okay to fail, as long as you don't give up trying.  The secret is, you can ONLY truly fail if you give up.  Otherwise, all you have really done is learn one of the ways not to succeed, which narrows down your options and makes your next try more likely to succeed.

I'm curious why you are afraid of failure and success though, and embarassment as well.

As far as the fear of success goes, I’m curious too.  My mom may have hit the nail on the head when she told my dad that I was failing in school on purpose so that I didn’t outdo him.  (Dad lost a series of jobs and went from very successful to spending most of my life unemployed).  My mother was very good at hitting the nail right on the head so long as the truth she spoke hurt someone.  
My father’s favorite word was failure.  It was usually applied to himself, he thought of himself as a failure from the time he lost the first job and mom discarded him in the same month.  I idolized him though, so it makes some amount of sense.  Maybe I just got so much of my concept of how the world works and how I should be from him that one (or more) of those parts of me that’s stuck in time feels really threatened by anything that would cause me to think of myself as a success.  I’m not blaming my dad for any of this, he’s better now, but I have a feeling that my experiences with him between about ages six and twenty have a lot to do with anything that’s still getting in the way.  I think it’s a big source of subconscious self sabotage.  Matter of fact, I’ve had some pretty off the wall crap happen since I started using 5.5g subs and making inroads so I think I actually attracted circumstances to shut down what would otherwise have been a major success.  (That might actually be a good sign, the subs were working on the shallower levels so well that the fearful parts of the deeper levels had to bring out the big guns)
That’s closely related to my fear of failure.  I’m no longer afraid of any one failure.  They happen, and as you said they can get us closer to success.  What I’m afraid of is BEING a failure.  I’m afraid that no matter how hard I try or no matter how many tries I get, I still won’t accomplish anything I really set myself to.  That used to cause some wonderful behaviors like not trying so I don’t fail.  I think it’s also made it so I keep everything from falling all the way apart.  
I’m kind of stuck between the two yeah, good way of putting it.  They’ve been in kind of a stalemate for a long time.  
As to embarrassment, I don’t really have an answer.  It’s probably my most visceral fear.  In other words  it’s the most likely thing to make me want to run from a situation or freeze.  I don’t really know why.

Edit: All that said, I’ve been executing everything since USLM1 pretty well. What I think happened is FRM got all the surface stuff cleared enough and moved to a deeper level that it hadn’t even engaged yet. I could kind of tell that the last couple of times I had a job interview. I didn’t feel any nervousness at all. I didn’t get either job, but that’s progress anyway. Now I think that we’re dealing with the level that’s causing me to sabotage myself in ways that I can’t detect directly. Oddly, my conscious mind is a lot more engaged with the process now.
The fears I mentioned are no longer on the surface. They don’t ever dominate my thought patterns. But they are still down in the deeper levels somewhere.

[Paul1131]

ME: WARNING MORE AUTOPSYCHOANALISIS AHEAD: Ok, Shannon asked why I fear embarrassment. Short answer. At this point it’s closely related to imposter syndrome.
Long answer. When I was a young kid, I was late to develop any kind of physical skills, I was VERY late to develop social skills, and I was funny looking, pretty seriously overweight and I had an odd self hypnosis behavior and a habit of spacing out (I mean really going somewhere else mentally) that lead to like mumbling to myself. In short, I was weird. I went to a very small town school in a very rural area. This was bad. I was picked on by just about everybody just about every day for the entire time I went to that school. It was brutal, and I was THE one, the bottom of the totem pole, the biggest target in my class. Unfortunately, in a small school like that, the social hierarchy is set in kindergarten. You can change all you want, but you’ll still be viewed and treated the same way you were no matter what you do. I became very sensitive to ANY attention because there was no such thing as good attention. If anyone so much as looked my direction, I felt embarrassed (fear) and not only the other kids, but the teachers found embarrassing me extremely amusing. This in and of itself would cause a severe fear of embarrassment. This went on from age five to age sixteen when mercifully, we moved. I had changed for the better without noticing.
I spent my last two and a half years of school somewhere else. It was a lot better. No one picked on me, I got some positive attention from girls. I did pretty well in school, and things started looking up. Unfortunately I took the self image and thought patterns with me. All of those “inner mes” were still there and feared embarrassment. In order to make the most of my fresh start, I successfully faked it till I made it, but I really feared that people would find out who I “really was”.
What was happening was that my inner six through sixteen year olds (oversimplification) passed on their messed up thought patterns to my inner seventeen year old and so on. (Got a pretty stark visual on this too, won’t share) The influence is still there though I’ve done a lot to mitigate it since then.

[Shannon]

Do you think FRM or UMS is affecting this issue with embarrassment?

[Paul1131]

Do you think FRM or UMS is affecting this issue with embarrassment?

Definitely.  Between USLM 1-3 LTU and UMS it’s effecting all of my fears.  I had been gradually improving on that one since my early twenties, but the improvement on this is another level.  At this point, it seems like my major fears have been driven deep underground.  They’re still there, but the effects are very subtle.

[Paul1131]

ME: I went to a jui Jitsu class for the first time in quite a while. I found a good gym very near me with a schedule that works with my weird work schedule. Class was awesome. My body was working a lot better than I was expecting it to at my age and with not doing much of this for a long time. I was also EXTREMELY focused. More so than I can remember ever being in a martial arts class, and I’ve been doing it since I was a little kid. I really needed to do something physical.
I also had a DMSI type effect. There was a very hot blonde there, she was also a beginner. She had a great, well everything, and she’s about fifteen years younger than me. She went out of her way to talk to me before class. I was a little slow on the uptake because, we’ll, I didn’t think a 9 or 10 like that would be interested. After class she came up to me again and talked for a few minutes. She was making constant eye contact and she touched the back of my triceps. A while ago, I’d have gotten really nervous as soon as I realized what was happening. This time, I just noted of it, said “holy Crap” in my head and went on like it was normal. When she walked away, she wiggles her butt in a way that was clearly deliberate. I will definitely need to pick up a groin protector...... for reasons.

[Paul1131]

WIFE: She called me when she got off work and said that she was “in her head” because a small project that she normally would have gotten was given to someone else. Her boss told the other person that it was because she was doing something else at the time. She hadn’t been. So my wife is now wondering if it’s because she is too slow, or if she does things wrong that she isn’t being told about. Most likely her boss just had a brain fart. One of those negative thinking feeling cycles that over thinkers are prone to. When some little thing happens that maybe might point to something negative happens and they don’t have all the answers.
This used to happen to me all the time so I feel for her. A year on things that have some version of FRM in them seems to have mostly gotten rid of that tendency. The good news is that she didn’t sound that freaked out, and she didn’t turn it into anger at me like she often would have.
She is definitely making progress, but there is still a ways to go.

[Shannon]

My suggestion is to have her directly clarify the situation with her boss, instead of allowing "what if" BS to get out of hand.

[Paul1131]

My suggestion is to have her directly clarify the situation with her boss, instead of allowing "what if" BS to get out of hand.

LoL, that’s her suggestion too.  She’s doing that tomorrow.

[Shannon]

My suggestion is to have her directly clarify the situation with her boss, instead of allowing "what if" BS to get out of hand.

LoL, that’s her suggestion too.  She’s doing that tomorrow.

It's a REALLY good sign that that was her suggestion.  It's also a really good thing that it was HER suggestion.