Are You Colluding with Concern Trolls for Your Own Inertia?
You’re not stuck, limited, or talentless: you’re locked in a taboo, yet understandable fascination with your comfort zone.
Have you ever regretted sharing an unconventional idea with a parent, friend, or someone else? Maybe it was a business idea or a new way of life.
To your dismay, your beloved “concern troll” responds to your novel idea by listing the reasons why it won’t work and the risks of pursuing it. But don’t worry — and wink, wink — they’re only saying so because they care.
If their advice penetrates, you might doubt your intuitions, imagining you’re being conscientious by slowing down and thinking twice about this new venture.
But just suppose that your responses to the concern troll — self-doubt, anxiety, and other tensions — were hiding a deeper motive on your part.
What if you magnetized the troll in an intelligent, yet shadowy attempt to protect yourself against the transformation that would come if this venture were to be successful?
From the perspective of who you currently know yourself to be, success may actually feel scarier than simply giving up or failing at this new pursuit.
The Gushing Vortex Every Concern Troll Lures You Into
From what I’ve gathered, the term “concern troll” originated in internet discussion forums. It’s also an intriguing way to label those folks who love to trigger “it-won’t-work” thinking patterns when you announce you’re pursuing something novel and frightening.
When a concern troll disturbs you, it’s usually because they’ve activated a fear that already existed within, whether conscious or unconscious. Yet, of course, the troll is also typically voicing and projecting their own limits onto you.
Of course, whether you experience anxiety, fear, and self-doubt in response to their concerns depends on how you orient yourself to them. Do you see their concerns as direct glimpses into reality itself?
Or as pendulums that you can acknowledge and then step away from at will?
As described in Reality Transurfing by Vadim Zeland, pendulums are visions of reality created when groups of people focus their energies on an idea.
Pendulums come in all sorts of forms: political, financial, psychosocial, or familial, such as “It’s impossible to meet earnest, loyal friends anywhere except used bookstores in the pacific northwest,” or “You’re a member of our family, so don’t expect to accomplish much.”
The tricky thing about pendulums is their nature changes depending on how you relate to them.
If you take a pendulum seriously, it can dramatically influence the way you perceive your life — and as a result — the directions in which your fate unfolds.
But at the same time, with enough presence and awareness, a pendulum can also vanish a second after it’s noticed.
The trouble is that merely knowing something is a pendulum is rarely enough to destroy its emotional pull.
And even if you know your neighborhood concern troll is throwing a pendulum your way, some unconscious part of you might latch onto it because of the secret payoff it brings to you!
“The conscious mind worries about all this ‘bad stuff’ and thinks about how to avoid it, but that worry is secretly (shadowily) a kind of erotic caress, an obsessive dwelling with rapt fascination on the face of the very beloved failure and humiliation.” Carolyn Elliott
About Your Unconscious Commitment to Inertia
Riding the troll’s fear or self-doubt pendulum lets you remain within the comforting story that’s crafted your self-concept and the stories you’ve long told about your life.
Your current sense of self clings tightly to the paradigms it already knows. These paradigms are habitual modes of being that dictate how you spend your time, the trajectories you pursue, your choices in relationships, and more.
They usually didn’t begin with you but instead are inherited habits, beliefs, and opinions that guide your life.
When you engage in a pursuit that lifts you higher into new opportunities, your paradigm will deliver fear-based thoughts, exhaustion, and other types of resistance to ensure its own survival.
And in the case of your concern troll’s “You-Suck-and-Will-Fail” campaign, your paradigm might even deliver people to convince you of how bad and wrong you are if it senses that you’re trying EXTRA hard to get rid of it.
By issuing these blocks, your paradigm protects its own survival and continues to define your life and the opportunities it appears to hold.
So consciously, you’ll tell yourself, “Oh, that troll is right. They just want me to be safe and happy, and so I’ll take their advice and wait until [X,Y,Z] conditions are in place before I pursue this risky move.”
You convince yourself you’re being responsible, conscientious, or “realistic” when in actuality your paradigm has won: it’s succeeded in keeping your current sense of self and its comfort zone squarely in place.
I’m sorry, and you’re welcome: Why concern trolls look menacing but are usually harbingers of an upward spiral
This is good and bad news. Sure, your paradigms might be limiting, tricky, or even malevolent.
Yet when you frame self-doubt, fear, anxiety, and similar emotions as the form your smaller self takes to stay with the comforting known, you let go of enormous baggage: the assumption that your “negative” interpretations and emotions say something about who you are and your chances of being successful.
Really, they’re just internal alarm bells that say,
“A transformation is brewing, and we don’t yet know what that means!”
Like a nail-biting habit, you manufacture self-doubt and anxiety simply because Who-You-Think-You-Are wants to protect you against sensations and experiences it simply doesn’t know how to contextualize.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’….Actually, who are you not to be?” — Marianne Williamson
The Simple Barrier that Makes You Substantially Less Affected by Concern Trolling
In my experience, the mere knowledge that my paradigms are locking me in the comforting known is a massive pattern interrupt in itself.
But also — next time a concern troll throws an anxiety pendulum your way, become aware of the sensations it triggers in your body.
You can train yourself to use sensations like fear and self-doubt to your advantage by experimenting with the below exercise, originally described in Conscious Luck by Gay Hendricks and Carol Kline.
It goes like this:
Grab paper and pen.
Identify the story you’ve been telling yourself about your concern troll’s warnings.
Notice the disturbing emotions that story produces within you.
Next, briefly write down any memories you associate with that emotion. Do this on a mini timeline spanning from your early life to your more recent experiences.
When you’ve written 10 or so memories, start with the earliest on the timeline. Point to it with an index finger and say “That was then,” out loud.
Then touch your chest and say, “This is now.”
Do this for each memory, starting with the earliest memory and moving toward the most recent.
Pay carefully to the sensations in your body, and look for opportunities to surrender completely to them.
This exercise helps create a somatically felt distance between the fear-and-doubt-based patterns arising in your body and the stories you tell about your life and the fruits it bears.
If you’re someone (like me) who feels almost constantly in tune with your bodily sensations, you’ll likely feel a shift right away. If not, it will be worthwhile to make this a daily practice until you feel a shift.
The more you do this timeline exercise, its effects will compound, and you’ll automatically establish a distance from the emotions that seem to restrict your evolution.
Ever feel like you’re on the cusp of a massive life upgrade if only you could resolve a few lingering inner contradictions?
Read the articles below for perspectives on how to connect with the version of yourself who already knows precisely what to do to bring forth the creations and experiences you most want.
