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Last night I replayed a conversation

for the eleventh time.

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I was trying to get it right.

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Not the conversation itself; that

was over and done with.

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But how I felt about it.

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I did not feel good.

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So I reviewed

(a) what I said,

(b) what I should have said,

(c) what I shouldn’t have said,

(d) what the other person said,

(e) what they really meant,

(f) what they might be thinking now.

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Each pass gave me a flicker of relief.

A sense that I was getting closer

to something.

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But the longer I stayed with it,

the crappier I felt.

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Which told me I was monkeytrapped.

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By now you’re probably familiar with

this analogy:

A banana is placed inside a jar with a

neck just wide enough for the monkey’s

paw to slip inside. The monkey grabs

the fruit, then finds its clenched fist is

too large to pull back out. It could free

itself easily; it just has to let go. But it

really really wants that banana. So it

hangs on. And it’s still hanging on when

the trappers come to collect it.

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That’s a literal monkeytrap.

I write about the psychological version:

any situation which tempts us to hang

on when we really should let go.

Any discomfort which pulls us to try

and control what can’t or shouldn’t

be controlled.

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Last night I was hooked by the promise

that if I just thought a bit longer,

analyzed more carefully, revisited

the conversation one more time, I’d

finally feel better — less tense, or

uncertain, or uneasy, or guilty, or

whatever the hell it was that I

was feeling.

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Relief seemed just one more attempt away.

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And then I noticed something new:

I’d been trapped by the smell of the

banana.

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It was the irresistable smell of relief

that kept me obsessing over that

conversation, long after I should

have realized that its promise of

relief was a lie.

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And lately this is something I’ve

come to see more and more clearly

in my work with clients:

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Monkeytraps trap us because they work.

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Just for a moment, they work. There’s

this tiny flicker of relief that comes

from replaying, analyzing, obsessing,

rechecking feelings, trying to think

our way into certainty.

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Just enough relief to answer the inner

voice whispering You need to fix this.

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So we set about trying to fix, and it

feels like we’re doing something,

clarifying something, moving toward

some kind of answer.

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That moment is the hook. Because

the flicker of relief is real.

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Then it fades. And we have to grab

for it again.

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And again.

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Psychologists call this negative

reinforcement. Negative refers to

removing something unpleasant,

reinforcement to encouraging the

behavior that removed it.

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Translation: Controlling behavior

relieves just enough discomfort to

lead us into more controlling behavior.

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It’s what makes controlling an addiction.

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So it’s the smell of the bait that leads

us to review the conversation one more

time, or read another person’s mind,

or ask others what they think, or

doubt our perceptions, or beat

ourselves up for mistakes, or …

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You know.

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Over time, this becomes less of a choice

and more of a reflex. The moment

something feels off we move automatically

into managing it, or trying to.

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Anyway. Last night all this flashed through

my mind pretty quickly, like a sudden

mental ZIP download.

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Followed by one of my favorite aphorisms:

Where you put you attention is what grows.

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So I took a deep breath, and suspended

the replay

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I felt around in my body.

Found a small tightness in my chest.

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It was the discomfort I had been

trying to fix.

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Now I just looked at it.

Just looked.

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I imagined it as a rubber band around

my heart.

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I took another breath.

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I kept looking.

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There was no dramatic shift, no

immediate relief or resolution.

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But the rubber band began to loosen.

Not all at once, and not completely.

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But I felt better.

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Not because I had figured anything

out.

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Because I’d stopped trying to.

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Bert and I recently began

publishing on Substack.

Come follow us.

https://substack.com/@stevehauptman

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