This article is 2000 words long and will take about 5 to 6-minutes to read. It explains how most personal problems keep reoccurring again and again and again because most solutions only work on the symptom and not the root cause. By eliminating the cause the symptoms disappear. This article could have a deeply profound impact on you so relax, breathe easy and give yourself the luxury of focusing clearly on the message.

Self-Help Offers the Wrong Solution

As I grew up I knew that I thought, felt and behaved far differently from how I wanted to. I had heard the expressions that, “A leopard can’t change its spots” and “Like father, like son” and they filled me with dread. I refused to accept the idea that I would end up like my old man, or that I would have to live with behaviours for the rest of my life that I clearly gave me problems. As a result I had an easy attraction to anything that gave the promise that it could change my life and ensure that such outcomes would never occur.

I read a lot of historical biographies searching for the elements of character of famous people that I too had, or events in up-bringing that I too shared but the biographies dealt mostly with events. I wanted knowledge about how such people thought and interpreted the world and how they solved problems but such things lay outside the remit of common history books at that time.

I read books on philosophy to get some concept of the realm of philosophy and whether I could find within it some kind of discipline that I could follow to cure my problems but I found very little of practical use and nothing that could give me the certainty of understanding and hence problem solving that I sought.

I studied psychology books but found most of them surprisingly vague and none of them offered guaranteed results. I then got into study the books of the “success-gurus” and of self-development and improvement. Some of these books offered a lot of practical help – Stephen Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People” and Wayne Dyer’s “Your Erroneous Zones” in particular. Some of them gave some practical help but hopelessly confused the situation with other advice and methods that I simply found unworkable – in particular the works of Tony Robbins but also the myriad writers that followed in his footsteps and who spun-off similar messages.

The Real Problem

The problem with most self-development methods comes from the fact that they focus almost exclusively on the symptoms of problems and not on the causes of problems. I have never come across any text or teaching that has really gotten to the root cause of human motivation and the resultant products of emotions. I’ve read some stuff that came close but it still focused on dealing with the symptoms more effectively.

In my life, I discovered that when I developed the courage and good sense to tackle some of my most difficult problems that if I succeeded (due to changing my interpretation of events, my desires and expectations and developing competence in implementing solutions) then those problems vanished. I found that quite astounding when it first happened. I had long lived as a victim of bullies and it just seemed an ever present and oppressive part of my life and yet when I changed, and effectively dealt with the cause instead of the symptoms, I never encountered such problems again. I met with similar events and with similar people who attempted to conduct themselves as bullies but I interpreted things differently and acted differently and had no problem. The miraculous nature of such an occurrence caused me to consider deeply how I could enact this in other areas of my life. I had a hit and miss level of success. If I did well it happened because I discovered and worked upon the root cause. If I worked only on the symptoms then the problems generally came back. At the time I wasn’t aware of the distinction between the cause and symptom nature of these problems.

The Root Cause of Our Problems

The vast majority of self-help, self-development books and courses focus on relieving the symptoms and that relief occurs only temporarily. If you want to permanently solve your problems then you must go to the root cause. My fundamental principles run as follows:

We have a primary motivation of life that drives us to ensure that we do not end up ‘extinct as the least fit.’ Contrary to popular belief we do not seek to come out on top as suggested by the concept ‘survival of the fittest.’ Instead we mostly seek any level of survival that keeps us from ending up the least fit. The instinct to ensure that we do not end up the least fit drives us mercilessly and far more than any other instinct. We have as our primary motivation the ever present drive to deliver our physical needs. The solution to this perennial dilemma lies in developing the competence to deal with any problem in order to meet this requirement. We thus end up with desires as the impulses that drive us. We generate emotions as a consequence of the actions that we take in fulfilling our desires. If we successfully fulfil a desire then we feel satisfied. If we exceed it then we feel joyous and positive emotions. If we fail to fulfil a desire then we feel dissatisfied and we then feel painful and negative emotions.

Knowing this, we can come to a very clear understanding of the cause and effect of all human emotion. Emotions act as a guidance system to tell us whether we have fulfilled our desires or not and, according to the relative importance of the desire, emotions generate intensity of feeling in order to spur us to action. However, if we don’t understand their purpose and what generates them then we can easily become confused and immobilised – I know this well because I spent about thirty years in that condition.

A Different Perspective

When we know that our desires drive us and that failure to meet them causes us to feel awful then we can get three benefits. Firstly, we can get immediate relief from negative emotions. Instead of just feeling bad and sorry for ourselves we can interpret them as guidance to tell us that we have not met our desire and that we must learn from the experience.

Secondly, we can consider our desire and see if we really need it or whether we can change it to become easier to fulfil. In the past, many of our desires came from very primal needs to survive and our emotional guidance system helped us enormously and so well that it continues to this day in that role. Unlike the past though, in today’s developed societies our primal needs have become easier to fulfil. Now we seek higher levels of fulfilment and more and more we seek out more abstract desires which don’t have a basis in physical reality. These kind of desires, if uncontrolled and left to run wild, can devastate our ability to function as well-adjusted individuals. Instead many of us chase after impossible or improbable desires. Our emotional guidance system cannot tell the difference between a physical desire and an abstract desire. It simply comes into action according to the results that we generate. If we don’t know about this and don’t control it then we can easily ruin ourselves.

Thirdly, we can understand that if we cannot currently meet our desires and cannot, or will not, change them then the only option available to us becomes the development of our competencies so that we can deliver our desires. For this reason we seek growth and control in our lives. We aspire to improve ourselves, not normally to become the fittest, but to ensure survival. If possible we want to dominate our problems and hence develop levels of competency that allow us to solve our problems very easily. When we have such ability we automatically end up with robust confidence, contentment and a stress free life. We involuntarily admire confident people and feel repulsed by desperate people. Confident people have the great competence to both survive and thrive and desperate people lack that competence.

Survival Instincts – The Ultimate Motivation

The instinct to do anything to avoid ending up the weakest not only drives our motivations to improve and develop competence but it also drives our motivation to cover up for deficiencies. This has a crucial role to play in our understanding of the world and of society. You may have noticed that a lot of people spend a lot of time defending their ego as they attempt to cover up the possibility of them ending up the weakest. You may have noticed that a lot of social etiquette goes into denying the truth about other people and their levels of competencies. So painful do we find it to admit that we might lie on the verge of ending up the least fit that as humans we end up weaving all manner of deceit and intricacies to avoid showing inadequacies or else to avoid provoking the wrath of other people with inadequacies.

Most mental maladjustment comes from denial of the truth of oneself. Many of the problems in society also come from denying the truth about our circumstances and our actions. This deceit either drives many of us into a form of madness and mad behaviour as we attempt to reconcile the difference between our desired, verbally described and abstract world and the real world, seen and experienced by our senses.

Most self-development principles never go this far into understanding the root cause of all of our personal problems. They end up treating the symptoms and succeed momentarily only for those same symptoms to pop again and again and again because the root cause has not changed. Most self-development simply tells you to do the opposite of what you end up with now. Feel unhappy? Then act happy, do things that made you happy in the past, do new things that you think will make you happy. Feeling lethargic? Then jump up and down, think positive thoughts and just do it! These things can only have a very short-term effect. If the desires remain impossible to fulfil, either out of their too fanciful nature or else out of the personal inability in the moment to fulfil the necessary requirements, then no amount of effort to alleviate the symptoms will cause lasting change and benefit.

Releasing Yourself from Immobilisation

As soon as you know that you feel bad because you have unrealistic or currently unattainable desires and that your emotions simply guide you to identify this then you create immediate relief from a mass of debilitating thoughts, feelings and consequent, often undesirable, actions. You feel this on a tremendously fundamental level and it has such a powerful effect that you might find yourself surprised at how quickly you shrug off the immobilising and painful effects of negative emotions that might have devastated you previously.

As soon as you know that the solution lies in changing your desires or developing your competencies then you immediately create a clear and certain vision of what you can do to improve your situation and bring further relief from negative feelings.

You end up feeling more and more detached from feeling bad about yourself and beating up on yourself. You quickly defuse negative emotions and your resultant responsive and often destructive behaviours. You then get clear about the problem and how you personally can solve it using whatever you have at hand right now or else by accepting and entering into the requirement to develop your competencies or else to live a life that avoids that particular issue (generally by removing the root cause desire). You end up quickly accepting events in reality and quickly adjusting to them. You take on a more matter-of-fact attitude and just focus on solving problems and, because you no longer find yourself overwhelmed and debilitated by negative emotions, you do so in a cheerful state. You do this because, once you have adjusted to your reality then no matter how bad it gets or how long it takes, acting with a cheerful attitude becomes the wise way to get things done. You may have heard tell of old and wise sages who had a childlike attitude of good humour. This attitude represents the best way to face our problems. Those problems exist in reality and feeling sour will only serve to thwart you and feeling overly positive will only serve to disappoint you. A childlike acceptance of reality and experimenting playfully (or to playing experimentally – much the same thing) gets things done in the most effective manner.

Focus on the Cause not the Symptom

Give up attempting to manipulate your symptoms and instead get to the root cause. You will find this very easy to do as long as you accept that you might currently have a lot of personal incompetence. That might hurt and you have probably denied this factor for year after year. In fact your denial has probably made a lack of competency even worse. That does not mean that you have absolute incompetence. Please take a more accurate view and recognise that you don’t currently have the competence to fulfil all of your desires. This lies at the heart of why you feel bad. It does not mean that you ‘are’ bad. It just means that you have more growing and learning to do. The sooner you accept that, the quicker and better you can get on with living a productive and, literally, very fulfilling life. You already have lots and lots of competence to do many, many things. Anything in your life that has simply become ‘another event’ that you don’t fret about rather than a problem has become that way because you developed the excess of competency needed to solve that difficulty virtually each and every time. You can transfer those abilities to the other problems in your life.