The Dangers of Magical Thinking: Essay 2 for English 1C
Essay Assignment:
Looking at therapist and best-selling author Phil Stutz's notion of magical thinking and the demonic force that he calls Part X, write a 1,200-word essay that analyzes the manner in which Dexter Green from the short story “Winter Dreams” squanders his existence by obsessing over his all-consuming chimera Judy Jones.
Building Block One:
Write a paragraph about a time you sabotaged your life through magical thinking. Then write a paragraph in which you compare 3 features of this self-destructive path to 3 features of Dexter Green's.
Building Block Two:
Write your third paragraph, your thesis paragraph, which explains how magical thinking and Phil Stutz's notion of Part X can provide an effective framework to analyze Dexter Green's demise.
Phil Stutz Study Questions for Magical Thinking and Part X
- What is magical thinking?
- What is the difference between lower-channel and higher-channel functioning?
- What is Part X?
- What is the difference between sacred and profane time?
One. What is magical thinking and why is it so dangerous?
Magical thinking is the childish belief that we can escape reality and live in a world that is full of constant pleasure and absent of stress and anxiety. We can find this fake reality by making money and buying our own pleasure island that insulates us from pain, uncertainty, and the limitations of time.
One of the key features of magical thinking is the belief that immediate gratification will make us happy; however, after a brief hit of dopamine, we crash and start the process all over again, expecting a different result. Because we expect to be happy the next time we go through the same process that has failed us over and over, we are engaging in magical thinking, which of course is a form of insanity.
Believing that money will solve our problems is a huge part of magical thinking because popular and consumer culture encourage us to believe we can buy panaceas and find perfect love partners who will transform us and put us in a perfect world where everyone loves us, we never experience pain, and life is a constant source of fun and pleasure. With enough money, we can live like Pinocchio and his friends on Pleasure Island and never become donkeys.
In short, magical thinking promises us that we can buy our way to happiness and never experience stress or pain.
But ironically, the more we rely on magical thinking to escape stress and pain, the more stressful and painful our lives become.
Magical thinking is about living in a false reality bubble where immediate pleasures can protect us from life’s inevitable suffering. Inside this bubble, we squander our lives and lose our minds.
It’s hard to escape this bubble because most of society lives in it, creates ads and social influencers who sell it, and as a result, we don’t know the alternative.
But there is an alternative. It’s called reality.
Phil Stutz says the first step in sanity and happiness is accepting reality, which consists of 3 things:
- Life is pain and adversity. The irony is that when we accept that life is pain, life becomes less painful.
- Life is uncertain. We move forward in life because we have a purpose, but we don’t have guaranteed outcomes. In contrast, someone caught in the pleasure cycle of magical thinking does not move forward. Their life is certain in a bad way: They are sure to be stuck in their magical thinking bubble where they will squander their life.
- Life requires discipline and constant work. It’s impossible for us to love ourselves if we don’t have discipline and work hard because laziness is a sign that we don’t care about ourselves or others. Therefore, love is built on work. People who say they hunger for love but don’t want discipline are phony.
The alternative to reality is living inside the magical thinking bubble. This bubble says we can enter an insulated world full of trinkets and pleasures. But misery will follow because these external goodies wear off and you’re worse than before because you train yourself to “fixate on outer results” rather than build your inner self.
Magical Thinking Leads to Addiction
The inevitable result of magical thinking is addiction because magical thinking traps us in a misery cycle. It works like this: Instant gratification always wears off and results in disappointment and depression. In this state of depression, we become bitter; we feel like victims, we steep in self-pity and self-loathing, and we seek escape from these depressing feelings and demoralization by embarking upon yet another pleasure-misery cycle so that we repeat the same mistakes over and over. People who live inside the world of magical thinking never grow up and are forever miserable.
What I just described refers to the majority of people because culture teaches us that magical thinking is the true path when of course it is not.
For an example of a pleasure-misery cycle, let us take social media. A person looking for love and status on social media thinks: “If only I had X amount of subs and likes, I’d be happy.” The goals are met, there is a brief state of euphoria, and then the person is back to the same baseline of misery and bitter entitlement. As a false remedy while living inside this magical thinking bubble, goals for higher subs and likes are established; the goals are met; there is brief satisfaction, then misery occurs again. The person has to keep ratcheting up the pleasure and the goals to become happy, but the goalposts keep changing so that happiness is forever out of reach. In clinical psychology, this phenomenon is called the hedonic treadmill, the idea that we acclimate to happiness so that we have to constantly turn up the intensity of the treadmill to the point that the treadmill becomes useless as a tool for our happiness.
Absolute Certainty
Another lie from magical thinking is the notion that you can’t make a decision unless you have absolute certainty. The fact of life is that we make decisions based on imperfect, changing, and uncertain data.
It is a magical belief to “get things right” and have absolute certainty to base any decision.
Let us focus on a college major. There is no certainty for choosing a major. You can do research, but shifting tides are beyond your control. However, you can follow your instincts, develop a work ethic, move forward with your life rather than live in a magical thinking bubble, and most likely, you will find success. Certainty won’t bring you success, but hard work and developing the toughness that comes from consistent work practice will indeed make you successful.
Another feature of magical thinking is that we can live life without loss. This is not true. Loss is inevitable; therefore, we have to tolerate loss. If I marry X, I don’t marry Y. If I do career X, then I don’t pursue career Y. If I live in city G, then I don’t live in city W. Knowing our limitations strengthens us spiritually.
Romantic Upgrades
Another feature of magical thinking is the stupid belief in the romantic upgrade. “I can always do better as I climb my station in life.” In this stupid magical thinking belief, we turn human beings into commodities whom we use for our selfish designs.
People Can Transform Us
Yet another lie based on magical thinking is to blame our current partner for our unhappiness and fantasize that some other partner will transform us into a happy person. In this regard, we are too cowardly and phony to put forth the honesty and the effort to change ourselves; we seek another person to do it for us, but no such person can perform such a task; however, there is a long line of magical thinkers waiting for “the right one” to transform them into a happy person.
People Are More Attractive From a Distance
One of the key features of magical thinking is that we often project our fantasies upon people who are at a distance, but once we’re with them, we are disappointed because human beings never match our fantasies.
The second reason we are disappointed is that love is a process and not an acquisition. But magical thinking has no interest in the process of hard work or growing up or moving forward. Magical thinking is about clinging to the fantasies of a small child. Just as small children believe that Santa Claus brings us presents and that storks bring us babies, adult children believe in Love Magic, the fantasy person who transforms us and protects us from the world of uncertainty, suffering, and hard work.
Why so many of us seek romantic partners who bring out our worst selves:
Because we seek a magical reality where there is no work, pain, or uncertainty, we seek romantic partners who aren’t good for us, those who help us achieve our fake, magical reality. Stutz writes: “We want to find in the other person the superhuman ability to change the nature of our lives.”
But no one can lift us from our misery and change us. We have to do two things: We have to accept that life is uncertain, painful, and requires constant work because those 3 things are reality. Secondly, we have to accept that we are not exempt from this reality. No partner can put us in a magic reality where everything is easy. Yet some people hop from one fantasy partner to another.
The Separate, Higher Entity That Bonds Partners
Stutz writes: “Good relationships are based on a higher bond.” They are not built on having “the right partner.” Rather, they are based on “a separate entity bigger than either of the individuals involved. It is a way of making the connection between them sacred.”
To build this bond, which transcends romance and passion, you need 3 things: initiative, sacrifice, and empathy.
An Elaboration of Magical Thinking
Stutz has an article titled “Magical Thinking and Addiction: Learning the Value of Reality.”
Stutz writes:
The modern person lives with a contradiction. We like to think of ourselves as realists—using the powers of science and logic, we pride ourselves on seeing the world as it really is. But when it comes to our own lives all this realism goes out the window. We become children who still believe in magic.
This belief in magic underlies all our addictions. Superficially, addictions—whether to taking drugs, making money, shopping, etc.—are driven by a desire for immediate gratification. But as an addiction deepens it becomes harder and harder to feel satisfied. We repeat the behavior over and over again but something is lacking in the experience.
What’s missing, what we’re really looking for, is magic. Without realizing it, we want that momentary pleasure or excitement we feel to be a passageway into a whole new world—a world of ease. Unfortunately, it’s a world that doesn’t exist.
Reality requires us to face three things: pain, uncertainty, and the need for constant work. No one, no matter how famous or rich, is exempt from these requirements.
The easiest way to expose the weakness of magical thinking is to look at people who succeed. I once had a patient, a young actor, who was addicted to meeting and conquering women. None of them ever satisfied him—but rather than work on himself he kept going from one to the next. He told himself that, once he became a star, he’d be famous enough to finally find that one magical woman who would solve his problem and change his life.
That’s not exactly what happened. He did become a star and, unfortunately, it happened suddenly. He was not prepared. He began to date a woman who was as famous as he was. Within months he became dissatisfied with her; she demanded that he actually listen to what she said, interact with her friends, travel to meet her on location, etc. All this took work, as every relationship does. This wasn’t what he’d signed up for.
He went back to his old addictive mindset, started to look around, and was this close to breaking up with her. Then he had the strangest—and most educational—experience. He was at a newsstand (yes, we still have them in Los Angeles) looking at the covers of magazines that feature the air-brushed faces of beautiful young actresses. One face stood out from a distance and he stared at its beauty for a moment, fantasizing that he had to meet this one, she had the magic he needed.
He took a step closer to the magazine and got the shock of his life. The face he was looking at was his own girlfriend, the same woman he’d lost interest in. He was stunned at first. His next reaction was the thought of killing himself. He didn’t think he’d act on it but the thought disturbed him—he had no idea where it came from.
What had happened was that the girl on the cover was the symbol of the magical world he’d fantasized about for years. But she was at the same time a real human being with whom he’d become disillusioned. At that moment he realized his fantasies would never come true, that the magical woman he sought didn’t exist. He thought of suicide because, now that his child-like dream was shattered, there was no reason to live.
Luckily, he didn’t stay in that state for long. His illusion destroyed, he became willing to learn to exist in reality. That means more than accepting reality, it means being grateful for it. I taught him a tool called Grateful Flow, which connected him to something bigger than himself. For the first time, he had a real future.
Two. What is the difference between lower-channel and higher-channel functioning?
First, let’s define lower-channel functioning: It’s repeating our bad habits over and over and not learning from them.
Stutz describes a photographer rep who is successful in business but has chaos in his personal life. The rep had to change his bad habits: pot, overeating, “emotional dumping.” His habits threatened his health and drained him of his energy.
The man was overworked, exhausted, and overwhelmed by a life of chaos. He was ruled by his compulsions and his neediness. A big part of his problem is that he was overworked because he didn’t know how to say no to his clients. Stutz writes in his book Lessons for Living that the man’s “impulse to overserve his clients was a actually a desperate to attempt to win their love. Lower-channel functioning is a disaster.”
Why do people get trapped in lower-channel functioning? Because they want instant gratification.
Our impulses flow through the lower channel in “an impulsive burst” and we become blind because all we know is living in the lower channel where time is squandered.
Stutz says we have a destructive force inside us--he calls it Part X--that wants us to live in the lower channel where we become stagnant and die. Part X is a demon inside all of us. Part X wants us to live exclusively inside our lower channel. As Stutz writes: “Lower channel functioning is a disaster. When the pleasure is over, we’re left with nothing. Nonetheless, most of us find it impossible to stay out of the lower channel, even when we know the results will be harmful.”
Addictive behavior, bad habits, living through the cycles of euphoria followed by despair from magical thinking--all these things arise from Part X, the force inside of us that wants to keep us in the lower channel, away from life, isolated, and alone where we whither in a state of bitterness and despair.
What is the higher channel?
Stutz says there are rewards far greater than immediate gratification. We can find higher powers through good habits. These higher powers give us energy, hope, meaning, and connection to others. We achieve these higher powers by following the tools.
Rather than seek instant gratification, we must work on 3 relationships:
Relationship 1 is with our body. How we treat our body determines our relationship. We must think of our exercise, eating, sleeping, and other disciplines that affect our body.
Relationship 2 is with others. How we talk, respect, and collaborate with others defines our relationship with them.
Relationship 3 is how we accept and love ourselves through discipline. The undisciplined person is incapable of self-love. His laziness is proof of his disregard for his own wellbeing. Discipline, creativity, and structure are evidence of true self-love.
Changing Your Habits
Stutz writes that to get out of the lower channel of addiction, make yourself useful and be of service: “Your purpose is to be of service to the world. . . . Service is the most direct way to open the higher channel.”
In addition to being useful, change your habits, Stutz writes, “We are an addicted society. Immediate gratification is our religion.” Stutz observes: “Talking about self-control is weak. The only way to really help ourselves is to change our own habits.”
Consistency
Stutz writes: The higher self is like a musical instrument: If you don’t practice regularly, it is useless. Daily living presents us with three opportunities to build up this alive knowledge.”
Renouncing Immediate Gratification
With every act of renouncing pleasure, you “are building up a higher force inside.”
Bad Habits to Good Habits--Dynamic Inversion
Stutz says that each time you restrain your impulses, you close off the lower channel. “A dynamic inversion occurs--when you curb the impulse you invert its energy, holding it inside yourself. This energy gets transformed and then emerges in a more powerful form through the higher channel. This path has the power to create. . . . When you function out of the higher channel, higher forces help you move toward your goals.”
We must learn that every act of restraint puts more higher forces in the piggy bank. The energy of the higher channel gives you courage, creativity, and a sense of purpose.
When you live in the higher channel, the lower channel becomes less strong and less tempting.
Three. What is Part X?
- Part X is a demonic force inside all of us.
- Part X is a virus that can and will destroy you if you don’t destroy it first.
- Part X is “absolutely determined to keep you from experiencing a fact of reality--everything is always moving.”
- Part X hates change.
- Part X wants to be special and live outside of normal rules of change. You cannot overcome the system and be the guy “who did it himself.” You can’t overcome the negative universe on your own. The force of change does not “deprive you of your chance for specialness.”
- Negative emotions can be so dramatic that they consume you and “drown out any experience of the real world.” Part X shatters reality with your help because you join forces with Part X in order to stop from moving forward with your life.
You counter the demon with gratitude.
Part X is a “real actor” with the following 4 characteristics:
- Part X keeps you stagnant in a state of comfort and familiarity.
- Part X creates the false promise of the magical reward: Get this or that and be happy.
- Part X feeds the paranoid delusion that the whole world is against you and persuades you to believe that life is unfair.
- Part X creates anxious energy that makes you act on impulse. It presents things you must do or cannot resist even when they’re not good for you.
- Stutz concludes by saying Part X invents problems that we don’t have and creates solutions that only make those problems worse.
Four. What is the difference between sacred and profane time?
In his book Lessons for Living, the chapter titled “Freedom or Commitment? Stutz chronicles a man he knew with an obsession to retire on a desert island and be isolated from civilization. This man became Stutz’s patient and he said he had to reach this goal on his fortieth birthday. Then he would live a long life of freedom.
However, Stutz says this patient knew nothing about real freedom. Growing up in poverty, the man believed that freedom was unlimited choices with schools, friends, careers, lovers, etc. Stutz writes, “He grew up a dreamer, lost in his own fantasies. He couldn’t make plans or keep appointments. Decisions paralyzed him.”
Being unreliable, selfish, and narcissistic in his devotion to a perverse definition of freedom, this man had no friends.
Defining freedom as the ability to do whatever he wanted, he had no friends and alienated people in social and business circles.
Stutz told him that real freedom means growing up and growing up means commitment to things, making tough choices, and accepting life’s limitations.
Sounding a lot like the comedian Bill Maher who is always criticizing married people with kids, the patient fought back: “I won’t let life take my freedom away! I won’t fall into the trap of adulthood!”
The patient’s answer was to disappear on an island and live forever in paradise without the world’s demands.
Stutz says the patient’s dream was close to becoming a reality as the patient’s business was growing. At 37, his patient was poised to disappear on an island, but then he fell in love.
Falling in love was a radical departure for a man who constantly kept 3 girlfriends in his girlfriend rotation. Think about that: The guy had a girlfriend rotation.
But now the man found a woman he wanted to marry, to raise children with, and to support. “His worst fear had come true--he was trapped.”
But the situation was not trapping him. His perverse notion of freedom was the real prison. Freedom is not life without demands, commitments, and stress.
Stutz writes: “Paradoxically, nothing creates more stress than the desire to avoid stress. The man was far from free.”
Now because of the man’s magical thinking about freedom, he did not have the gratitude to embrace a woman who loved him and to act on that love.
The man found himself in a state of panic and existential crisis. In the words of Stutz: “He couldn’t begin living until he understood this truth--life is demanding. But if you meet life’s demands, you get priceless rewards. You can create. You can have a sense of purpose. You can have deep relationships. You can feel passion. The illusion that we can avoid the demands of life keeps these joys out of reach. Real freedom is the freedom of illusion.”
Stutz asks the question: “Why is life so demanding?” His answer is that life is not meaningless and nihilistic; rather, “Life is a higher force that moves with purpose. You may reach the point where you don’t need to work for money. But to feel alive, you need some type of forward motion. Without it, you lose touch with life and fall into a meaningless existence.” You become dead inside.
Stutz writes: “As humans, we can only really live when we connect to higher life forces.”
If we live in an isolated world of magical thinking and disappear into our illusions, a desert island so to speak, we sever the connection between us and the life force because we have denied our true nature--which is to live a life of purpose and to engage with the messy world with all of its stress and agony.
To drive home this point, Stutz uses an analogy: “If a fish could fly, that doesn’t mean it’s free, it just wouldn’t be a fish. A fish is free when it can swim in the direction of its choice.”
The patient was looking for the false freedom of an island away from the pulse of life. He thought having unlimited options would make him free. He thought unlimited possessions would make him free.
He was a prisoner of his illusions in a state of death and depression.
The Failure of Unlimited Options and Possessions
In this chapter, Stutz reaches his most important point: “No amount of possessions or options can free us from the ultimate human limitation--time. Our supply is constantly running out. While trying to keep every choice open, we are wasting this most precious resources. Always waiting for something better to come along, we are paralyzed like a deer caught in headlights. That’s hardly freedom. Inner freedom is the ability to move forward now. To do this you have to close off options. Time makes life demanding. You must choose because you don’t have forever.”
We are afraid to accept time’s limitations and limited choices because “each time you close a door, you suffer a little death.”
Stutz argues that we need to see our limitations, not as death, but as an opportunity for gaining the life force through commitment, focus, discipline. Hyperfocus on our real life purpose is the answer, not the illusion of unlimited choices. The “little deaths” you suffer from making choices to commit “add up to more life.”
To understand the power of limitation, we must understand the mythical quality of the Father and Father Time.
Father Time holds a giant hourglass. He symbolizes our fate, our death, and our helplessness.
Father Time is a patriarchal figure, the authority of the Father. This authority demands performance, discipline, morality, and structure. Many people with an unconscious rebellion toward their own fathers rebel against authority by embracing the magical thinking notion of freedom--disappearing somewhere that has no rules, no limits, and offers nothing but pleasure while repelling stress and pain. The flight from the Father is a fool’s errand that will result in chaos and death.
Stutz argues that “All materialism is ultimately an attempt to avoid the Father.” We say to ourselves, “I can buy freedom from life’s rules. I can buy things that are so amazing I will achieve immortality and will not be bound by the laws that govern other mere mortals.”
We run away from Father Time at our own peril.
Father Time “is a threatening figure only when you resist him. When you submit to him, you get to share in his powers.”
This spiritual truth is embraced when we realize that the Father is our ally in a better life because another name for Father Time or the Father is Discipline.
Stutz writes: “Every time you submit to the discipline of committing to one choice, you deepen your relationship to the Father. You are practicing the power of limitation.” This is real freedom.
Father Time represents our limited time and helplessness. This could be a watch video (138). We seek an island to escape Father Time. We seek materialism to repel Father Time. Or Stutz simply refers to him as the Father. When you resist the Father, you fear him. When you submit to the Father, you share in his powers (138). Stutz observes that Chris and Abraham and Isaac are mythical stories that attest to this principle.
You must practice the power of limitation. You submit to the discipline of one choice.
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