Constructed self/image management

(Continued from Part 1, yesterday.)

The usefulness of this approach is such that I don’t want to pass over a few related matters without commenting.

Here’s what we just did: We looked at some components of my constructed self.

What Sociologist Erving Goffman in the 1950s meant by the term “image management” overlaps what I mean by the term “constructed self.”  (1)

It’s an amalgam of conclusions, decisions, positions, beliefs, and strategies that induce us to construct an image of ourselves, which we then use to sell to others and to shape or condition our behavior. It’s who I think I am, not who I am. It’s me, mired in illusion.

***

When triggered, I find myself automatic – on rails. And of course I’m justified in what I do. Over time I excuse and justify my behavior with my own righteous explanations and deny the charges others bring against me. In the end, as I said earlier, I get to be dead-right.

This is called the self-serving bias and most of us employ it.

The three states I have trouble with – disappointment, impatience, and frustration – are the same three my Father didn’t handle well. Since the pattern originally was my Father’s, and his Father’s, mine is an example of intergenerational transfer.

He’d become violent. And so I become apprehensive when I feel any of the three emotions (my wife used to call it my “scared-wolf look”). The obvious conclusion is that I’ve “become” my Father.

***

Once I know the full pattern, I can invoke the Divine Mother and Archangel Michael and the Law of Elimination to lift the false grids that make it up.

And I have and I did experience relief.

Anyone offput by my discussing archangels and universal laws might want to put the article down at this point. I’m not bound by the conventions of academia. I no longer try to squeeze a large world into the small box of empirical materialism.

Calling on the archangels and invoking the universal laws does seem to work. I’ve had wonderful demonstrations of archangelic intercession (this apartment, finances appearing from nowhere, etc.) as a result of invoking universal law. I’ve also  experienced higher-dimensional states  as a result (the states of abundance and mastery, confirmed by Archangel Michael). (2)

I’ve also regularly now asked Michael and the Mother to take away feeling states that were unpleasant or self-defeating – by the Laws of Change,  Transmutation, and Elimination. And each time it has worked.

Simple awareness will also dissolve the pattern over time.  But that route, I’ve come to see, is slower than invoking the universal laws.

The divine laws, if they don’t work instantaneously, don’t do so for a reason. If our request is in divine alignment (take this false grid from me. Show me which way to go), it should happen instantaneously. If it doesn’t happen after some time and after repeated attempts, our chosen course of action may not be in divine alignment.

Eliminating the pattern is usefully followed by asking Archangel Gabrielle to fill the space thus created with her golden elixir of joy.

The treatment is completed by forgiving everyone involved, including myself. That in itself is an art form that I’m just beginning to learn. But I can see its efficacy with Kathleen, who’s become balanced, and remained in that state for the last week or two, after apologizing to everyone in her life, person by person.

I’m taking one baby step at a time. First getting this behavior pattern, inside and out, and then eliminating it. Second, learning how to apologize and forgive.

Footnotes

(1)  “Image management” is a term Erving Goffman coined in Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.  “Constructed Self” ties in Berger’s notion of The Social Construction of Reality.

(2) “You’ve had a glimpse of this in the knowing of mastery and abundance and so you know it isn’t about money. It is about spiritual currency. And I say to you, ‘congratulations.’” (Archangel Michael in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, Aug. 2, 2017.)

I never knew either space (abundance or mastery) existed.

Experiencing them seemed to be a direct outcome of invoking the universal laws.