omaha

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my therapist recently introduced me to a new concept of behavioral reinforcement therapy that i find quite ridiculous

the gist is that you analyze a social situation together, identify thoughts and emotions running through your poor limbic system at that moment, position yourself on a behavioral graph that corresponds to your outward impact on others, compare the actual outcome to the desired one and then re-formulate potential assumptions that drove you to behave the way you did in an effort to work on overriding said behavior. so far, so good

one of my major issues is mostly feeling nothing except for what you would generally call negative emotions such as shame, extreme anger or a profound sadness. i push those away, the collateral damage being those good emotions i would indeed like to access to experience satisfaction and overall happiness. the assumption is that you can’t have one without the other, so taking myself seriously and verbalizing negative feelings when appropriate in a constructive manner is a thing we work on to perhaps slowly pry open pandora’s box. it’s not going so well for reasons that are well beyond the scope of this post

one thing, however, has stuck with me for weeks now, and it’s perhaps the most ridiculous apart from all the roleplay stuff. once you start to assess your behavior during a critical moment, i.e. a turn in conversation that warrants your anger or frustration, and you notice that you would now like to respond in a way that’s in line with your therapy goals, you then need to act on that impulse. and doing that is actually quite difficult, so the people behind all of this have come up with an interesting concept to motivate yourself with: the battle-cry

a battle-cry can be a phrase or a word that you say to yourself in your head to push you out of your shell and into action. one you might be using already without knowing it is “ugh, fuck it” before forcing yourself to do something you really don’t want to be doing. it’s hard to put into words how strange and out-of-place it feels to be prompted to come up with a couple of these on the spot. it was particularly difficult for me to even take it seriously. the concept seemed like fantasy, some weird shit nerds and losers might do because they’re too weak to rely on their “god-given” capabilities as humans, evoking images of warcraft characters in my head. i wrote down “loktar ogar”, mostly to just be done with it, hoping that it would never be mentioned again

something strange has happened since, though. a couple of weeks back, i watched a compilation of peyton manning highlights, recorded when he was a quarterback for the denver broncos during their one good season. football quarterbacks frequently use something called a “cadence”, a team-internal call that potentially signals last minute adjustments to agreed-upon plays before they begin but in reality, it could mean almost anything, hence the confusingness of it all. mister manning aka “the sheriff” is well known for shouting “omaha” prior to the snap. i thought this was pretty cool, so in my mind, i stashed it away as a potential battle-cry, just in case i was asked again

these days, a pressing personal issue is staying in situations that i don’t want to be in for too long, e.g. an evening in a bar with drunk people droning on about boring shit while i’m practically lying in my chair, having mentally checked out an hour ago. in those moments, i think that by leaving, i rob myself of potentially interesting events that have yet to unfold, but in reality, it mostly just puts me in a bad mood that’s hard to recover from and has actively emotionally hurt me in one particular case when a girl i was high-key crushing on went home with another guy. whenever i feel that i’m ignoring what i actually want (leaving), the voice of peyton manning reverberates through my skull. “omaha”, it shouts. “it’s time to take yourself seriously and do something, bud, because this feels awful”. while i’m having trouble acting on it immediately - i could after all indeed be tricking myself to get out of situations early that would be difficult to deal with in the moment but perhaps end up rewarding - it has turned out to be a really good warning system and therefore something concrete i can latch onto when learning how to navigate stuff

doing the right thing for yourself often seems obvious, but you’re sometimes working against years and years of harmful reinforcement. every little bit to take more control and maybe lead a healthier lifestyle in the not-so-distant future is important and helpful, even if it might seem stupid. i guess it’s fair to say that the egg on my face is well deserved

I’m a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence - Sylvia Plath