can’t-look-yet ("avoidance"):
There will be thousands of things that are hard to "look at." For any particular thing that you can’t look at, you won’t be able to look at it until you can. Your mind figures eventually figures out how to make it safe to look, and then you find yourself looking or you remember to look and you find that this time you can figure out how to do so.
Usually the way your mind figures out how to make it safe to look will be necessarily roundabout and indirect, in a way that you couldn’t have planned or directed in advance. So it goes.
Nevertheless, it can sometimes be helpful to make a list of the classes of things that are hard to look at, as a way to help your mind more quickly get it’s bearings. Below is a messy sample list of the kinds of things one might classify in one’s mind as "avoidy" or "attention-redirecty."
- Low-grade anxiety
- Horror
- Terror
- Metaphysical horror
- Horribleness
- Terribleness
- Pointlessness
- Meaninglessness
- Cold-water-Spray-bottle-kitten-shock-outrage-sick(-horror(-terror))
- (This-)can’t-be-happening-ness
- Hurt-by-others’-actions-ness
- hurt-by-others’-unhelpfulness
- Drama
- Melodrama
- Psychodrama
- Anything suppressed by the will that feels bad being unsuppressed
- Really-was-upset(-about-that)-ness
- Really/actually-was-really-bad(-at-the-time-it-was-happening)-ness
- Really-did-push-that-away-without-solving-it
- Really-did/do-want(ed)-that-ness
- Just-can’t-ness
- Just-can’t-go-on-ness
- Plaintive-desperation-ness
- Can’t believe that happened
- Can’t believe this is happening
- Remembered can’t believe this is happening
- Haste/imminence_pressure/rushing/corner-cutting/force-it-through-ing cf (judged_)too_slow(_ness)
- advancing, progressing, gaining, accumulating, accomplishing, achieving, making progress
- Wrongness/doing-the-wring-thing-ness/this-isn’t-working-ness/(judged_)too_slow(_ness)
- ?????doubt-in-method-ness
- Frantic-ness
- Desperation
- ...sacredness
- ...unforgiveableness
- ...unthinkableness
- should(-be)-X
- needs/has-to-be-X
- defending, resisting
- teeth-gritting, white-knuckling [will+redirection?...]
- blind/unresponsive-just-keep-going-ness [vs a better version...]
- Relief(!)—I.e. anything can get tagged as "redirectively bad"
- "perpetuators"/"slack grabbers"/"compulsive push-downs"
- Etc
- cf. the attention redirecting or aversive phenomenologies
- has to be uncrusty exposure vs copy or (re)duplication~ facilitation via correct application of do nothing
- [some repeats below here]
- Low-grade anxiety, panic, horribleness, fear, terror, terribleness, hopelessness, meaninglessness, surprise sudden soul-tap uninterpretable mortal physical peril terror even childhood nightmare/fantasy possibly extreme soul-gripping [perfect fear/intolerable/disgust experiential
Again this is a hard thing to do willfully, and one shouldn’t do it forcefully, but it can be helpful to keep in mind "(self-)cornering", as in "nothing left to do but look" and "surfing up the terribleness gradients", using experiential badness as a way to prioritize and navigate. Sometimes badness will come up that seems tangiential or in reaction to what you’re doing, but, in fact, it’s directly related, and in some sense should be prioritized.