Shannon's Journal Discussion Thread, Vol. 5

[Shannon]

But still, which I suppose is what you mean with "everything falls into place" - when AM guides you to become your highest value by your own standards - many of those things overlap with what women find highly valuable? It's "only" that your frame of reference come from within yourself rather than being triggered by something outside yourself. 

Again... AM6 aims at causing you to achieve your highest potential.  Your value, be it to yourself or others, results from that.  And as I said above, everything falls into place because that does result in you becoming high value for others, including women.  AM6 is not concerned with women at all (outside the SM lead in, which really is just mixing the last stages of AM with the first stages of SM; AM itself is about you, achieving your potential, making yourself the best man you can be in the self respect/self esteem/self direction/self validation/self leadership, etc. directions).  

By the way regarding FRM - I had big problems with AM, more than most - and I have been reflecting much on why. I think that my biggest fear - of letting go of fear - was that my sense of self was hidden behind fear - and if I would let go of fear - I wouldn't be able to control my behavior so my sense of self wasn't in danger of being challenged - as this challenging would be impossible as I wouldn't had anything to put against this challenge - which felt like I would die (I'm still not sure if this death would be impossible - you need to have some sense of self to be able to let go of fear otherwise it's nothing there...) - thus I think the extreme resistance that let to suicidal thoughts. 

It just hit me so I thought I would share it with you as I read you are working on it again. The logic is probably not fully complete but it's that far I understand it myself at this point.

I think it goes a little more like this.  Your current identity is based on fear.  Without that fear, and it's limitations, you wouldn't feel safe.  If you let go of that control, you would still be in control - it just wouldn't be the fearful part of you doing the controlling.  It would be another part, a part which had outgrown the fear.  But because the fearful part knew that if it wasn't controlling your choices you would be at risk of doing and/or experiencing what it was afraid of, it resisted the instructions and shut you down the only way it knew how.  Most likely, it was convinced you would die as a result of the changes that AM was trying to make and the resulting freedom from fear and the choices and actions you would take, and its only way of stopping you was to threaten suicide.  After all, if the alternative is still death, what's to lose?

The fact is, that fearful part of you doesn't die when I succeed in getting you to do what the script is asking you to do; it simply stops being afraid.  But the nature of fear is, as you stated, that there is often a fear of being without fear, because the perception is that "fear keeps me safe".  In reality, logic keeps you just as safe, and fear is really only useful for keeping you safe before you develop enough understanding to use that logic.  After that, it's only useful for limiting you in irrational ways.

AM6 doesn't have a FRM.  It has my earliest attempts at dealing with fear in the method I was using before FRM, which was an effort at "healing and clearing" the fears and their causes.  That would specifically be EHPRA v1.