If It Hurts So Much, Why Do I Keep Doing It?

Are Painful Feelings Making Your Life Hell?

Do you often feel . . .

• so mad you’re afraid you’ll hurt someone you love?

• so anxious you worry about everything?

• so guilty you feel like you have hurt everyone you care about?

• so sad you no longer feel any joy or enthusiasm?

• so trapped in that state it feels unending—with no explanation for why you feel that way?

What if you could discover . . .

• why you feel that way so often?

• what you are doing that causes those troubling and debilitating emotions?

• what you can do differently to change those feelings and, instead, feel good about yourself and your life?

Have you ever had a moment that changed the way you see the world?

That’s what this book can do for you.

Our feelings about events arise so quickly, so spontaneously, we think they are caused by the situations we encounter. We think they are the natural, even inevitable, emotions that anyone would feel. But that’s not the case. Different people have different reactions to identical events.

Psychotherapist Bill Snow uses the simple example of waiting for a bus on a cold, dark, rainy night. The bus finally arrives but does not stop as we expect it to. Many people feel angry. But others feel anxious or guilty or sad. A few even feel glad or amused! Bill shows why different people have different feelings about this event.

This book explains why and how painful feelings become chronic and overwhelming in our lives. Using these ideas, we can change how we feel about ourselves and challenging situations. We can also change how we relate to other people.

With so many other self-help books out there . . . why pick this one?

During Bill’s thirty-plus years with hundreds of clients, he made several new and unique discoveries about why people get stuck in painful feelings. Among them:

• People turn to these feelings when all else fails as a sure-fire method of feeling good about themselves.

• People adopt a “life strategy” when they are toddlers. They believe this strategy will cause others to give them what they want. They then focus on this life strategy instead of identifying and pursuing things that will make them happy—even after they’ve become adults!

That sounds weird, right?

How can those possibly be true? How could getting mired in painful feelings lead to feeling good about oneself? And why would anyone stick with a life strategy they adopted as a toddler, especially when faced with evidence that the strategy is inept and doesn’t work?

Long before Bill became a psychotherapist, he encountered odd behavior among the people he knew.

For example, Bill worked in a small firm with deadlines on delivering projects. The owner often called a staff meeting scant hours before the deadline—and spent that time talking about famous people he knew. This was enormously frustrating to the staff. It delayed their ability to finish the project and meet the deadline. Bill wondered: Why did the owner behave counter to his own interests?

Another example is Mr. W, who often spent hours arguing with people. He even argued late into the night when he needed to go to work the next morning. However, sometimes he held one side of an issue, and sometimes the opposite side. Since his passion for debating didn’t seem to arise from deep convictions about the issue, why did he feel so strongly and argue so intensely?

Questions like these—as well as a desire to help others—led Bill to go back to school and earn a Master’s degree in Social Work. This enabled him to become a psychotherapist and pursue answers to those questions.

The answers he found are in this book. These ideas have helped countless clients—and they can help you too.

Why am I so sure these ideas can help you?

Because everyone adopts a life strategy. It’s a normal reaction to the situation that toddlers find themselves in. But as Bill describes in this book, this life strategy is inept. It not only doesn’t work, it cannot work.

Our life strategies are doomed from the get-go. They’re not an effective way of getting what we want in life. But we don’t realize that. We continue to believe that they can and do work, even when our best efforts result in disappointments and failure. We believe our life strategy works because sometimes we do get the reward. As a result, we get intermittent reinforcement, which is the most powerful kind of reinforcement that exists.

Our life strategies enable us to feel good about ourselves—even when “life sucks” due to either nasty circumstances or chronic feelings of anger, guilt, sadness, anxiety, or other troubling emotions. This way of feeling good about ourselves is something we need as strongly as our bodies need oxygen. Thus for this reason as well, we continue to embrace our life strategy.

But there’s hope—a way for change

Understanding why we adopted a life strategy and why it doesn’t work frees us. We stop feeling compelled to follow the strategy. It also frees us from the inevitable disappointments that arise from the strategy. We can instead focus on the one way in which it does work: feeling good about ourselves. We can also start learning methods that do work for getting what we want. We can also discover what kinds of things we truly enjoy.

The ideas in this book can—and will—change how you see yourself and the world around you

It’s like coming to know the world is round, not flat—or that the earth goes around the sun, not the other way around.

Now, on those cold, dark, rainy nights when that bus goes past and doesn’t stop, you’ll no longer feel the same old troubling feelings. Or if you do start having the old feelings, you can swiftly realize that oops, that’s my life strategy showing up and expecting the bus to stop.

Now, you won’t feel compelled to blindly follow your life strategy regardless of the circumstances or the cost. Instead, this book shows you ways of interacting with other people that can—and often do—lead to getting what you want with them and finding happiness in life.

Is that a guarantee?

That you will see yourself and the world differently? Yes.

That you’ll never feel a painful emotion again? No. Feeling bad will always be available as a method of feeling good about yourself—for the reasons Bill Snow describes in this book. What will change, as a result of understanding these ideas, is staying stuck in those bad feelings.

As the book’s title suggests, you don’t have to ‘keep doing it’. Bill traces our reactions back to the actual cause of those painful feelings when that bus goes past. Understanding this cause frees us to feel amused that oops, we’ve done it again. Because the life strategy itself doesn’t change—only our compulsion to follow it every waking moment of our lives.

Will these ideas solve all of your (psychological) problems?

They’ve been transformative for many of Bill’s clients, as well as many of his friends and family.

For myself (his daughter and now his publisher), the life strategy I adopted as a toddler (namely to be a helpful person) no longer controls my life. I now choose whom I help, how I help them, when I help them, and for how long I help them. Am I still a helpful person? Yes, that’s how my mind works. But I no longer feel compelled to help everyone.

As to whether these ideas can solve all of one’s psychological problems, maybe. It’s like the blind men and the elephant. Just as each of the men understood the area of the elephant that they touched (ear, tusk, nose, trunk, tail, etc), there’s a variety of approaches to healing psychological trauma, each of which works best with different aspects of the psyche.

For people struggling with painful feelings that have become chronic and debilitating, Bill’s ideas are transformative, yes. Will that be enough to heal all of your trauma? Possibly. Does understanding Bill’s ideas guarantee that you won’t ever need other approaches as well? No.

However, when that bus now passes you by, you won’t stay mired in feeling angry or guilty or anxious or sad—wondering and hoping for the next bus to come soon. Instead, freed from the old patterns, you’ll pull out your cell phone and call a friend or a taxi to come pick you up, or you’ll go buy an umbrella from a nearby convenience store—or in the worst case, just turn up your coat collar and begin the walk home.

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