Mental Simulation to Change Your Behavior, Part III

Mental Simulation Basics

Write down your exact aims.

If your aim is to settle for a loose connection with an emotionally unavailable man or a playboy you will be sharing with other women, and you have thought through your options and decided that's what you really want to do, then write that down. You will still need to change your behavioral patterns if you want to survive emotionally.

If you want to depend less on other people, write that down. If you want to become more extroverted, write that down. It's OK to have more than one aim.

Identify the personality traits or behaviors that stand in the way of you achieving your goals.

If you tend to put pressure on a guy in a relationship, if you tend to act needy or clingy, you are going to push the guy away. This is so, even if your guy is, in principle, emotionally available. So, you will need to change your co-dependent personality traits and behavioral patterns.

If your problem really is that you are too introverted to meet a good guy, then you'll need to change your introverted personality traits. What you'll need to change all depends on what your true goal is.

Once you have identified the personality traits and behaviors that stand in the way of your achieving your goals, identify the situations in which these personality traits or behavioral patterns become obstacles.

If you are too needy and dependent, this may show up as a tendency to check up on your guy constantly, texting him incessantly, continuously asking him to be with you or complaining about not seeing him enough.

You cannot change every unfortunate trait or behavioral pattern all at once. Pick one or two traits or behavioral patterns you want to change. Then focus on working on these.

Perhaps you are too introverted to meet new friends or men or too needy and clingy once you finally meet new people or too emotional to hide your destructive negative emotions. All of these traits of your personality are destructive. But you cannot change all of them at once. Decide which two specific features you really want to work on. Then work on them.

To be continued...