By the time we are 13 years of age, we have our lifelong survival habit tactics pretty much in place. Yes, we will modify them marginally as necessity dictates, but for the most part, we will use those tactics when our survival is an issue, in any way. As children, we usually don’t have an effective filter in place and so we absorb whatever we experience without analysis. It is usually when we are adults that we can look back and see how dysfunctional our families were and how erroneous the information we received was. If you have never questioned your emotional responses as an adult, you will be quite surprised to see that the people you were around the most, between the ages of 1 and 13, are the people you are emulating in your life. Those people, in effect, showed you, by example, how to get what you want and survive in optimum. Tactics that we started using in childhood can cause us very serious problems as adults. These long-standing automatic responses, stimulated by emotion, are the very most devastating when they are about over-indulgence and substance abuse, such as food, alcohol, drugs or sexual stimulation urges.
It will be of the greatest benefit if you can develop mental tools and techniques that give a moment to think. In the midst of craving, longing and habit-pattern indulging, being able to pause the program, long enough to evaluate if that is something we still want to engage in, is the key to improving many aspects of our life conditions. One of those tactics is ‘rubbing your palms together’, while looking at the hands making the motion. When we have urges for inappropriate actions, initiating that moment to think, by rubbing the palms together, can be a powerful tool for improvement and growth. Getting into the habit of using it will require effort, but the results are well worth it.