AM 5.0 Journal

[JCasterlin]

Day 17 Stage 1 - I've been feeling & probably acting very beta at work the last few days even though I'm having my best month so far. I've always been moderately paranoid that I was in trouble for something ever since I was a kid. I grew up with a very emotionally & physically abusive step father who had no problem demonstrating how much he obviously hated me. I was even blamed for being a bad influence on my step siblings. Having that pounded in to me literally & figuratively probably had more to do with the anxiety I've always felt. That's part of why I was so happy when I read that OGSF is in AM6. What happened to me when I was a kid made it so I freeze up at any sign of confrontation.
I'm fairly certain I will be do multiple runs of AM6

This is interesting. My experiences are similar to yours although there are differences. Do you find that the sub is helping you deal with these things?

Oh it's definitely helping. I think a lot of what's coming to the surface is so I can resolve it & move on. As I move through the stages I can see all of that being a non issue going forward. One of the points in the list I posted in the discussion section that I'm looking so forward to is when the lame shit that people do no longer really fazes me. Not exactly what Shannon describes it is but you get my point. I'm so done with letting the trivial immature things that people do bother me or have me thinking " WTF " half of the day .
I was telling my wife a few days ago how when you start working on your own emotional health & maturity that you begin to realize how not necessarily toxic although that's there with some folks such as my mother , but how ridiculously self absorbed & immature people can be. There's a huge difference between self absorbed & focusing on yourself. When I say self absorbed I'm referring to a scary level of narcissism.
I was reading somewhere on the forum yesterday how during the 2nd stage he developed the " I don't care" attitude. I love reading other guys experience with AM6

yea don't worry too much about the beta behavior, you still have quite a ways to go but you'll see an improvement. Strange enough, the maturity improvement programming in AM6 has made me start to look at people more as children, even ones older than myself. I laugh at 99.9% of what people do and how they think these days, especially "Men".

I'm learning to be patient. I know what you mean about seeing people as children. I see the way the folks at my job that are significantly younger than me & I ask myself if I was like that at their age? Probably. What's bad is seeing people who are either quite a bit older than me or people in leadership roles who's response to a lot if not almost everything, is disturbingly immature