The cognitive part is crucial if you're going to be experimenting with
things an it sounds like you're willing to which is great. It makes
the difference between a real learning experience and a bad one that
gets chalked up as one more piece of proof that you... you fill in the
blank. You have to be able to eliminate those "automatic negative
thoughts" that can plague you because they'll keep you from learning
anything, not to mention that they're pretty much responsible for any
bad feelings.

You have to be like a scientist, where everyone else becomes a subject
in your experiment. You're just testing out different ideas to see
what happens, but you're not attached to any particular result. It's
nothing personal. You have to step back and look at each situation as
if it wasn't even you interacting. You're just an impartial observer.

You use whatever feedback you're getting to determine what to do next.
You don't want to overthink things, but you do want to continue to
make adjustments based on what you're seeing. If you're consistently
getting results that you can't explain, like at your work, maybe you
can get one of the nicer ones to give you a clue, like hey, what's the
deal with people here?

There's something called awareness. What I'm referring to there might
not be quite what you'd think of when you hear that word. Your mind
has to filter out most of what's in your enviroment. It can't possibly
take it all in and process it all. It works kind of like this. Say
you're not into cars. Someone you know buys a car that you don't
remember having seen before. But after that, every time you're on the
road, you see them all over the place. You just never noticed them
before because you don't look at cars that way.

That kind of awareness applies to everyday interactions with other
people. You may be doing things that you're not aware of and others
might be sending you signals that you're not aware of. Reality goes
through so many filters and interpretations in our brain before it
really registers with us that it's often not even reality by that
time. This is necessary for your brain to cope with the massive
amounts of information coming at us. The thing is, most people have
these operating on automatic and they're not aware of them so they
don't get to choose how reality appears to them.

My favorite author, Ken Wilber said it all when he said that awareness
is, in and of itself, curative. Awareness will ultimately force you to
think and act according to your own best interests at all times. You
can't have an addiction if you're completely aware of how it's not in
your best interest. So addiction is basically a lack of awareness. If
you're addicted to something, you might know at some level that it's
harmful, but you're still being influcenced by conflicting signals
from your unconscious, which of course, you're not aware of because if
they were, they wouldn't be unconscious.

The best way to gain awareness is to maintain this objective,
scientific point of view. Over time, you'll be able to take these bits
of awareness that you gain into into social situations themselves and
use it to learn in real time. By real time, I mean you're able to make
these adjustments spontaneously in the moment. Right now, you probably
have too many non-constructive thoughts going on in your head and so
you have to process most of this stuff after the fact.

If you're anything like me, this is probably also a big part of why
you find it hard to keep a conversation going. Rather than reacting to
what could be available to you in the moment, you can't avoid filling
your head with thoughts of yourself and the situation that have
nothing to do with the conversation or the here and now. I used to be
totally unaware of these. When my therapist explained that this was
what was happening, I just had to take his word for it.

I thought that I wasn't able to think in those situations, like I was
slow or something, but it was more like I was blocking the relevant
information from becoming conscious. Not that I don't still do this.
But I do have an awareness about it now where I can catch myself in
many of the less stressful, everyday situations. The next step is to
prevent this other thinking entirely. It all takes time.

The best way to accelerate your awareness though, to start to break
through some of the things that are keeping you from moving forward,
is meditation. Like I said, the cognitive is essential. If there's
negativity in the picture, that has to change first and you can't just
will it to go away. You have to correct it. Therapy is probably the
best way to get you moving forward in that direction. For this kind of
thing though, it's probably not enough. Personally, I learned to like
reading - psychology, self improvement, spiritual development, etc. I
can recommend books if you want.

Then, like I mentioned, there's meditation. Just by itself, it will
create awareness about how you're going about different things in your
life and how they're serving you. By doing this, it will also serve to
accelerate any other efforts in that direction. It will give you the
ability to be an impartial observer to your own experience.

Studies have been done that reveal differences in the way an
established meditator's brain works. There's more synchronization
between the right and left hemispheres and the wavelenghts are
different. There are more of the slower, deeper waves that you produce
when you're relaxed or even asleep. That corresponds with an increase
in seritonin, which is responsible for a lot of things, one of which
is your sense of well-being. Seritonin is what most anti-depressants
work to increase. It's also has alot to do with the high that comes
from from the drug ecstasy. But instead of harming you, it causes your
brain to continually re-orgainize itself at higher levels in response
to the stimulus that meditation creates.

Normally, it takes between 5 and 20 years just to learn how to
meditate effectively, but there's a technology that will stimulate
your brain to create these slower, deeper waves that produce
meditative states. If you were to close your eyes, if you could let
all thoughts just slip by without reacting to any of them, you'd
slowly drift into a meditative state unless maybe you were tired and
then you'd just go to sleep. Some interesting things can happen when
you clear your mind. You've probably never experienced this before
except very briefly when you're drifting off to sleep. But you have to
wake up right at that moment, or you'll never know it happened. And
it's usually a very vague sense.

It's too bad that most people never get to experience meditation.
That's what I thought as soon as I tried this technology. It's usually
accompanied by an incredible endorphin rush. Endorphins are your
body's reward system. You feel them after you exercise and sometimes
lisening to music, but especially during sex.

I could go on and on, but it's just a CD that you listen to with
headphones. You can read all about it at http://www.centerpointe.com.
Like any sales letter, it's a little overblown, but it's definately
worth many times the $100 they charge. I've been doing it for three
years and it's very gradual, but I'm very happy with the results and
my therapist was amazed by my progress. It's been a year and 1/2 since
I've seen him. My progress has actually been based on very little
social contact. I worked all the time trying to get a business going
for the first two years, and in that time the last of my unmarried
friends got hooked up, so I'm sort of a loner these days. But it
doesn't get me down and I've never been more sure about beating this
thing.

I hope everyone who reads this message will take advantage of this. I
feel like it's my duty to tell other people about it. The world would
be a very different place if even 10% of the population used this.
Either way, hopefully my message itself was helpful to you.

Best of luck,
Laurence