For years I tried to understand why people did the things they did and why I did the things I did. It seems that I and everyone else in the world often find ourselves going against the very things that we say, believe, and know that we want.

Ultimately it’s not nearly as complicated as we have made it! Prov. 16:26 says, The person who labors, labors for himself. For his hungry mouth drives him on. Although this passage is talking about physical labor, the principles carry over to all areas of life. Just as our hunger for sustenance drives to physical labor our hunger for the basic emotional needs drives our other endeavors.

Man is wired for happiness, fulfillment, safety, peace, and mostly, love. Nothing drives our behavior more than the need to feel loved, i.e. valuable, precious, and a sense of high esteem. In fact, the two root motivators of all behavior and emotion are love or fear. In any given situation the degree to which we experience love we will not be afraid and the degree to which we feel fear we cannot experience love. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear. (1 John 4:18, NKJV)

So we do everything we do to feel the types of feelings we experience when we are loved and to avoid the types of feelings we experience when we are afraid. Someone has reduced this to pain and pleasure. We do everything we do to move toward pleasure and avoid pain. Well, sort of…

We actually move toward our anticipation of pleasure and away from our anticipation of pain! The problem is, what I perceive as pain may not really be my source of pain and what I perceive as pleasure could be where all my pain comes from. For example, most people put off the tasks they do not like doing until last, preferring to do the easy things first. Why? Because the difficult tasks are perceived as a source of pain.

Here’s what usually happens to the person working this strategy: When we put the hard tasks last several negative things can begin to occur. Because we have subconsciously labeled the task as painful we keep finding reasons to put it off. The delay, especially if it is an important task, starts creating feelings of stress or anxiety.  We tend to identify the negative feelings with the task rather than the postponing of the task. In our attempt to avoid pain we actually create it.

Then there’s the 80/20 rule: 80% of your results (income) come from 20% of your labor. The thing we are putting off is often one of the more important things that we do. It could be causing negative financial ramifications. This task and all these negative feelings could be resolved by simply giving this task a monetary value. When it becomes valuable our emotions will change. Plus, by doing the job we dread first, we have all the other work we enjoy motivating us to get finished so we can get on to what we enjoy.

People who are uncomfortable discussing their feelings will withhold meaningful communication from their spouse. Since they are usually drawn to those who need to talk about feelings (yes, opposites do attract) they feel pressured from their spouse to talk, so they shut down. Because all people need to talk, they simply find someone else to talk to, someone who is not as threatening. Very quickly they come to perceive their spouse as their source of pain and the other person as their source of pleasure. An affair is usually not very far away. Oh, by the way, an affair that could cost them their home, their children, their income, the loss of most of their close friends, and untold amounts of emotional stress and guilt… MASSIVE PAIN!

Then there all those life scripts you wrote on your heart when you were a child, all the things you did to survive in your family’s emotion system. Your life script is the main source of all illogical behavior. It is behavior based on beliefs that, as a child, kept you safe, made you feel loved, or provided survival for you. It is those very beliefs that we developed from the illogical immature rationale of a child that have morphed into an adult version of why we do what we do, even though it may not be working for us!

At the time we developed these beliefs they worked, but that was based on the dynamics of our childhood environment. However, we are no longer that child and we are no longer in that environment. Yet, we are still doing the same things, running the same mental programs, expecting to get what we want and need from our efforts, and it just rarely happens. We perceive and anticipate pleasure but keep getting pain.

The conscious mind serves to justify, rationalize, and convince us that our beliefs are sane, rational, and helpful. It’s called homeostasis: the attempt to keep everything orderly and in balance. We even convince ourselves that we chose these beliefs as adults. But nothing could be farther from the truth. We chose them as children and they probably worked to some degree, but we can now choose new beliefs and get a much more desirable and predictable outcome.

You are going to spend your life trying to get the things you need: love, safety, acceptance, and self worth. Learn to do what works. Join me on Friday evenings for my latest series: What to Do When You’ve Done It All and Nothing Seems to Work! If you can’t get there at 7:40pm, CST, it is posted to my site www.impactministries.com for viewing from Saturday noon until Wednesday morning!