Understanding Yourself With the McInnis Method

Two people hear the same criticism. One shrugs it off by dinner. One is still turning it over three days later.

Same event. Different organization.

Not everything you do is healthy. Everything makes sense.

Panic isn't random. Anger isn't a character flaw. Avoidance isn't laziness.

Look closely enough and the reaction usually turns out to be a solution built for a problem that was real once.

A girl learns that asking her mother for help usually ends with criticism.

So she adapts: figure it out yourself.

It works. She needs less from her mother.

Twenty years later, she is overwhelmed at work and her coworker offers to help.

"I've got it," she says.

Same adaptation. Different reality.

The mind is solving yesterday's problem.

Her mother is not there anymore, but the rule never got updated.

"I know why I do it."

Good. Then why are you still doing it?

Understanding an adaptation is not the same as reorganizing it.

Knowing where a pattern came from rarely stops it the next time you are standing in the moment that activates it.

Making sense is where the work starts, not where it ends.

People say things about themselves as if they were settled facts.

"I'm the responsible one."

"I'm easygoing."

"I don't ask for help."

"I just don't trust people."

Each one sounds permanent.

Reconstructed, each one may have a start date: something happened, it felt dangerous, a protection got built, and eventually the protection got mistaken for personality.

A permanent description becomes much more interesting once you can ask when it started and what problem it was solving.

You cannot tell your partner that you're angry.

But when an airline cancels your flight and offers you one two days later, you have no trouble telling the agent that won't work.

Same capacity. Different conditions.

The boundary is not missing.

It is available where protection does not believe it is dangerous.

That changes the question.

Instead of asking, "Why can't I do this?"

We can ask, "Where can I already do it, and what's different there?"

Curiosity approaches a person with a question.

Projection answers the question before it is asked.

"I know why she did that" may be accurate.

It may also be a guess wearing the clothes of a fact.

The work is catching the moment you stop asking and start assuming.

Protection does not only organize behavior.

It organizes attention.

Someone organized around rejection may notice criticism immediately and overlook ten signs of acceptance.

Someone organized around danger may hear a small change in another person's tone and miss everything that suggests the relationship is safe.

What catches your attention first is information.

So is what you keep missing.

The teenager who slams his door instead of answering the question.

The manager who stays late every night because nobody else can do it right.

The husband who says "whatever you want" to every decision.

Different lives. Same question:

What problem is this solving?

Once you learn to look for the sequence, behavior becomes less mysterious.

Not because action is magic.

Because understanding the old rule doesn't test it.

Insight can tell you the rule no longer applies.

Doing something the old rule would not have allowed is how the rule gets tested against reality.

You do not wait until it feels completely safe.

You take one real step.

Then you see what actually happens.