by Keven Partridge
kevenpartridge (at) hotmail.com
I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that, at 48 years old, I have a Playstation gaming system. It began a year and a half ago when my girlfriend and I were looking for some way to enhance our limited repertoire of things to do together other than go for walks and talk. Although it never worked out as a couples’ thing for us – I did discover racing games.
I want to say that the game I bought is no arcade in-your-face-style game made for kids. It’s more a racing simulator. It’s made by using 900 parameters to measure every nuance of a cars’ actual performance. The data is then combined in a computer and the car you drive in the game is virtually the same as the real thing in terms of speed, balance, handling and so on.
Soon after getting into it, I found myself feeling guilty for playing. ‘Playing’ doesn’t make sense to a person so full of self-hate. I felt conflicted, like I didn’t deserve to play.
Since I couldn’t fully enjoy it, I decided to use the game itself as a tool to learn how to give myself permission to play – without feeling guilty for not ‘working on myself’ or doing something ‘productive’. In time, I was able to convince myself that I did deserve to have fun in my life, and that play has its place.
Unbeknownst to me, this was the beginning of using the game to uncover and change deep seeded limiting beliefs that had for so long been a part of my identity. When it merged with Rue’s Re-Imagine Your Life Program, I found myself traveling down an unexpected path that would help redefine how I came to see myself in the world.
*****
A new version of the game came out which featured online competitions against other players from around the world. After high school I gave up doing anything competitive. I was on the basketball team and every year I worked hard in preseason, became the starting guard by regular season, and by early mid-season I was sitting at the end of the bench hating myself. In hindsight I can see that on some level I knew I had the potential to be a good player, but I also somehow knew that I could not handle the attention a “star player” gets, so I always sabotaged myself and ended up on the bench.
Time trials are one of the features of online racing. I entered a competition in which you have 30 days to post your fastest time around the track. My early postings were promising so I kept at it, only to find the old self sabotaging and self-hating voices from my basketball days were still there and very much alive.
I was struck not only by the fact that the self-hating voices were still there after twenty years, but that they had the exact same tone, force, and effectiveness as when I was a teenager. But I was tired of being bullied by them; tired of living with that awful feeling that I knew I could do this well, but my beliefs and behavior guaranteed a poor performance or outright failure. I decided to use the time trial as a way to work specifically on the self-hate.
It was a brutal 30 days. Most of the time when I practiced, I beat myself up for every mistake I made – mistakes I performed with demoralizing consistency. This only served to reinforce why I felt I was worthless; why I should just give this up; why I should give it all up and end my life. I actually went there a number of times.
It literally seemed like a battle of life and death for me as the self-condemning voices were so powerful and oppressive. The more I challenged them, the louder and meaner they became. I’ve lived my life wanting to die.
But not only did I no longer want to want to die, I wanted to live who and what I am to the fullest.
At some point during the turbulence of the time trials, it dawned on me that I actually didn’t know how to practice to improve at something. ‘Process’ is not a part of perfectionism, and getting good at something is a process.
As the battle to break old patterns continued there were numerous times when I was ready to give up. But just when things seemed to be at their worst, I would improve upon my personal best time and move up in the rankings. Like a budding flower given one drop of rain at a time, I was given one drop of hope at a time which provided me the encouragement to continue.
But as I continued, so did the brutal cycle of trying something and failing and making myself pay for it with blasts of laser accurate self-defeating obscenities. In sheer frustration and desperation, I smashed my glasses and a few other things that month as I tried to prove to myself that I wasn’t as worthless and limited as my mind had always told me.
But I kept at it and in so doing I began to better understand how to work with the self-hate. I learned to not fight it or try to change it, but just to observe it. While I would originally become upset at a mistake or crash, I now saw these as the very opportunities to see how the self-hate worked.
It was uncomfortable to stay “in the pocket” of self hate and just feel it and observe it. But by doing so I gradually became less hooked by it, less identified with it. I began to see that it was its own pattern and had nothing to do with me. Although it was not silenced, it was no longer the dominant voice in my head.
The thirty days came to an end and I finished in the top 5% of the 7100 entrants from around the world. I’m not good at numbers so I had to tell myself that I beat 95% of those who entered. That I could understand. It was the highest achievement I had ever made.
More importantly however, the scoreboard read: Keven – 1, self-hate – a big goose egg. For the first time, I wasn’t defeated by my own thoughts.
*****
After this, I found another racing game that I seemed to have a better knack for. Feeling good about my top 5% finish, I began to enter the online competitions in the new game.
I fared very well: in seven events my average finish was in the top 1.5%. It took time and some convincing from friends to admit to myself that I might actually be pretty good. I had to consciously let the numbers sink in: better than 99%. Wow. The numbers alone forced me to learn to view myself differently.
But that I finished near the top 1 percentile often times meant that I was 56th out of 6000 or 221st out of 20,000. I often admired those at the top of the leaderboards and found the same names consistently in the top ten.
I found myself wanting to be there.
But I just assumed they had something I lacked. I was simply not ‘one of those’ people who accomplished such things. But then it dawned on me: I wasn’t even challenging this assumption. I began to wonder how this rumor in my head – that I could not master something – got started. Why was mastering something not even on my radar?
I thought, “Even though my times are good, why am I settling for these numbers? Why not the top ten? I mean, why not?” If I was going to re-imagine my life, going from 221st to the top 10 would be pretty convincing evidence that I could in fact change my life. I was desperate to change my life.
I asked myself: “What are my limits? What ARE limits? I’m just settling for 58th because it’s better than 99 percent of the world-wide entrants and the best I’ve ever done in anything. But what about the top ten? Why shouldn’t my name be in there? What is this barrier and where did it come from?”
There was one person competing who was in a league of his own; he held the most records and there were usually significant margins between his 1st place times and the runner up. He seemed untouchable. I was so determined to see if I could change my life that I decided to write him asking for tips. I would not have invested in myself like this in the past and so the act of writing him was a breakthrough in itself. It felt empowering. Any answer would just be a bonus. As it turned out, he was very gracious in his response and gave me a number of useful tips that helped improve my skills and times.
I entered the next competition, aiming for the top ten. As I reached the ranking that I would have otherwise settled for, I began to experience difficulties concentrating and a loss of coordination. I seemed physically unable to do better.
As I stayed with this sense of limitation, I noticed that what characterized it was the fact that I wasn’t in my body. This wasn’t news; I was rarely in my body. It was just the first time I could see in a tangible way how it directly limited something I was doing. The exercise of racing brought to the forefront an issue that had always been a frustration to me.
I got some support around this and did some EFT to see if I could begin to incarnate myself more. I saw that events in my childhood and the years of mental illness I endured as an adult made me feel unsafe to be in my body. Although I had always fought this tendency to fly out and would get angry about it, I learned there was a positive intention around it: I was protecting myself from what I experienced.
When I saw going out of my body as a strategy of self-preservation, I was no longer in conflict with it. It was clear I needed to do something to survive the terror and it saved me and thus I now could appreciate it.
But it had served its purpose and now was a limitation for me. I had to do a lot of work to welcome myself back to myself and to make that part of me feel safe. In time I reconnected with myself in a way that I had not known before. It felt like a homecoming and many tears were shed, both for the appreciation of reconnecting with myself, and for the grief for having to stand on the sidelines all my life in order to be safe.
As the days went by, I felt more settled within myself. It was such a relief and I cherished every moment that I felt my full presence. Forty-eight years and I finally felt safe enough to be here. I also found a new capacity to care for myself such that leaving the body was less a necessity.
When I returned to racing, my times became faster with noticeably less effort. I climbed the leaderboards. Sharing my excitement with my girlfriend, she observed; “Now you know what it’s like to race while being in your body”. It was a revelation and an entirely new experience. I felt alive, present, in control. I could maneuver this thing I inhabited as if I belonged here. Oh wait, I do!
As I continued the competition, I seemed to have reached my limit at 26th place. Even though it was better than previous runs for me, no matter how I tried, I couldn’t break my time. I got frustrated, I broke things, I cried, I hated myself, I wanted to give up. I unplugged all my equipment and threw it in the closet. I even destroyed and trashed the game itself.
I WANTED OUT!! OUT OF THE ANGUISH OF THIS OLD STORY!!! IT’S NOT ABOUT RACING, IT’S ABOUT MY LIFE AND IT HURTS AND I’M TIRED. I NEED LIFE AND BREATH AND FREEDOM. I NEED ME! I NEED PROOF THAT I CAN CHANGE MY LIFE.
I had a moment of clarity.
I stopped and tapped. I tapped to my Self and in my heart. I wanted to hear its voice.
Something inside me felt scared; being in the top10 meant being visible. It meant being much less limited – “much bigger than I was accustomed to” as Rue said. It meant being “one of them” who succeed or whose dreams come true and all that. I wasn’t ready for it.
Too big a step.
Kaizen. (Taking “ridiculously small steps” toward a goal so you don’t set off your inner saboteurs.)
Tapping.
I tapped until there was no longer resistance to being seen.
I repurchased the game and tried again.
I shot easily from 26th to 12th.
I inched towards visibility.
In the middle of the next run, my split time showed me at well within the top ten. But I freaked out. I became extremely nervous and self-conscious. The palms of my hands began to sweat and I had trouble gripping the wheel. I went out of my body. Something in me was still not ready and I remember actually wanting to bail. I lost my concentration and I crashed.
I stopped and tapped to calm down, then to address the part of me that wasn’t ready to be visible or to succeed. Then I tapped until I felt no blockage in finishing in the top ten. However, I got burned out on this track. It was the longest and most difficult of the game. I began a new time trial.
I rose on the leaderboard rapidly and within a week reached a solid 6th place – 6th out of 6500 people from 7 countries. I don’t know what percentile that is. I think it’s in the “I’ve just changed my life” percentile. My first top ten. OMG!
Next I returned to the previous time trial in which I freaked out. After a few practice runs, I leapt from 12th to 4th. For the first time, my name was on the top five leaderboard. Only the elite get here. They have a separate list for the top five. “OMG, that’s not me!!!” shouts my old story. There had been nearly 4000 entrants.
Now I’m happy. I did it; a top 10, then a top 5. How great is that?
But there is something in that last tournament that lingers. After my fourth place run, I ran it again and my split time showed me at 2nd place before crashing. I decide to go for it but I can’t even get close to my current best time of 4th. What’s wrong? I keep crashing; I’m not in my body at all. It’s all falling apart and the self-hate seems as strong as ever.
I stopped and tapped… I asked myself a question that Rue had put to me: What was the positive intention behind the self-hate? This was a radical question. I had been in conflict with myself for as long as I can remember.
I tapped some more and the thought hit me that my self-hate was in fact trying to sabotage me, but it was doing so to protect me from making a fool of myself and thus having others reject me.
Tapping some more, I remembered my mother. When I was a child, I often times sensed her embarrassment at my behavior when I was happy. There was something about the free self-expression of being happy that seemed to make her uncomfortable. If it was in public or in front of guests, she would get this disapproving look on her face and say to them in an exasperated tone something like, “Well, you know, kids!” followed by some nonverbal communication to me that hurt more than any words ever could.
This taught me that being happy or putting myself out there in an authentic way risked having her withhold her love and reject me. I sensed that I also came to the conclusion by these episodes that if I was in fact not perfect, I would be rejected. Any mistake might cost me her love and approval.
It was suggested to me to talk to my self-hate and be open to the possibility that it’s really my ally and that it was trying to help me. But where it once kept me safe, it now held me prisoner.
I felt into the ‘self-hate,’ remembered my mother, and said something like, “Okay, I see that you were helping me then and I appreciate it. But now I feel imprisoned by you. Wouldn’t your job be easier and more enjoyable if you were my ally and supported me in what I do? Wouldn’t that be better?”
Although it may sound weird, as soon as I spoke those words I got an affirmative ‘yes’ as if it had been waiting for orders by me all along. I felt empowered, and most of all no longer alone. I realized that I never had an external ally, no one to encourage me on, tell me I can do it. I never had anyone in my corner to tell me that I was doing great, who believed in me.
I thought about my ancestry and realized that in fact no one had that, and thus it had never been passed down. Although this inner ally thing was new to me and seemed a little weird, the experience felt true and I was now eager to try it out on the racing. But not so fast….
As I continued with the time trial aiming for second place, I was still having difficulty focusing and my coordination was still off. I tapped and it came up that I hadn’t fully acknowledged my top 5 finish. I just moved on trying for better. I found it important to acknowledge and celebrate my achievement, to really own it. When I did so, I felt more at peace inside and more relaxed.
However there was still more to be cleared. It surfaced that I wasn’t ready for it. Being in the top 10 was one thing – being second, one place behind the fastest guy in the world meant a new level of visibility, a new level of mastery to acknowledge, a new area that I never believed possible to move into.
I just couldn’t envision it.
Then I thought; I need to be able to see it. If I can’t see my name at the top of a Playstation game, how can I see my name on a book in Barnes and Noble across the country?
I tapped on accepting mastery as a possibility.
I got second place.
*****
After this I had a small avalanche of accomplishments in the game: more top 10’s and top 5’s. Then a new person showed up “on the track” and began, one by one, picking off the records of the guy I contacted for tips. It never occurred to me that he was beatable. Somehow just knowing this enabled me to beat him for the first time. I came in second after the new player.
While I still struggled on certain tracks, I was getting used to seeing my name near the top.
Finally the ultimate breakthrough: I set a world record. My name was now at the top.
*****
I felt like I saved my life. This had nothing to do with racing or competing. It had to do with learning how to not defeat myself, and, more importantly, to take my place in the world.
It had to with knowing I belonged here.
Thank you, Rue.
