Our Back Door Thoughts and Actions

Exploring To What In Your Life Points To A Need to Embrace or Escape Life

Apr 17, 2025

∙ Paid

Life has a place in it where an unknown black hole lurks. In this hole, hopelessness and despair live. We fight acknowledging hopelessness and despair out of fear that these emotions will take over and create a reality that we will not be able to escape. Rather than lose ourselves in the black hole of negative emotion, we create a Back Door to keep ourselves from having to contain our deepest pain. This Back Door holds us back from everything we want in life. It captivates us in a paradox of suffering and fantasy.

Our Back Door is our default escape from the life we fear. Our Back Door is the place we imagine that we can be fulfilled, happy, connected. It is also the place we can be so disconnected from our lives that we don’t care about anything. Our Back Door is always an escape. It is preventing us from having to face the darker realities of our life all alone. We use Our Back Door as an excuse to not be present with what is. We use it to put our life on hold. Our Back Door is a potent source of discontent and dis ease.

Our Back Door can be over used. This is the case with all addictions. We seek to have a part of our life exist outside of the ordinary. It is ironic to me that so many people use addictions to feel “normal” when in actuality we are escaping ordinariness. This is the dead aspect of Our Back Door. We use addictions to submit to the life we believe we cannot possibly have by giving up. Through following any back door into negative self expression, we sabotage our experience of life. After all, it is easier to use Our Back Door to self sabotage than it is to surrender into our own death current in discover even greater aliveness.

Our Back Door can also prevent us from seeing our life as it is. By avoiding the positive side of what Our Back Door is trying to open us to, we are blinding ourselves to our positive growth. Utilizing Our Back Door to escape life negatively while engaging in stagnant fantasy without action creates a constant state of tension in life. We want something we cannot have. The way we react to this tension is to utilize our childhood coping mechanisms to try to get the universe to fulfill our desire without addressing the desire straight on.

Some aspects of Our Back Door may need to remain unfulfilled. There is, after all, a realist inside all of us that exists side by side with our longing self. We may recognize the impossibility of getting exactly what we want and learn how to embrace the energy of what we want instead of the physical manifestation. We may also even have to admit that we enjoy the tension of not receiving our desire. Negative pleasure is a pervasive source of shadow to Our Back Door. Even if we consider Our Back Door to never be something we will actually get to experience, the concept itself is an entry point into our unfulfilled life.

Personal Note: One version of My Own Back Door was always retiring to Europe when I’d reached that magical amount of money in my savings account or the age where I didn’t need to work any more. Deciding to pursue My Back Door decades before I expected, I can acknowledge the benefit of it. By pursuing my dream earlier, the platform of my own desires and dreams has completely changed. I find myself in an even stronger current of aliveness instead of enduring suffering to reach a socially accepted goal. Without exploring My Back Door, I would be in tension. Instead, I get to have new dreams and a life that suits me more than I could ever have imagined.

It is hard for me to recognize who I used to be. I followed a terrifying path of becoming unmade. Slowly I have become reformed through acknowledging and not denying the inherent usefulness of My Own Back Door. It has changed my outlook on being fulfilled in life. I understand the benefit of pursuing a dream and using the experience of my pursuit for unimagined transformation.

Our Back Door requires positive exploration to prevent it turning into the favored avenue of release - negative pleasure and self sabotage. Through positive exploration, we allow The Back Door to be a portal, carrying our old self into unknown possibility. Parts of us stay the same. Parts of us change. Through exploration of Our Back Door we can recognizing what it means about us and the life we want to live.

We cannot avoid discontent. When we let it get attached to Our Back Door and fight the discontent, sabotage awaits. The less malleable parts of ourself need to be approached in a self honest way. Our escape instinct is trying to tell us something crucial about ourself. It can even be toxic for the aspect of us that overuses Our Back Door, the aspect of us that avoids Our Back Door, and the aspect of us that believes the tension of Our Back Door is how we are meant to survive life.

Your Back Door

The facets of Your Back Door are distinct to your unmet needs and longed for desires. Your Back Door stems from unexperienced needs that you have not found appeasement for in your life. The object of the door itself and the sensation of the discontent that has you avoiding it, yearning for it, or using it are very personal. You have stored past experiences in your body. Some can be tolerated. Some cannot. You also have longings and desires in your body. Some of these can be tolerated. Some cannot. You have aspects of being alive that create hopelessness and despair. Your own combination of traumatic response to need that attaches itself to habitual longing is what creates the aspects of Your Own Personal Back Door.

Your Personal Back Door has facets that can be attainable, completely unattainable, or too attainable. The facets match your personality with your level of discontent. The level of how attainable Your Back Door is creates diverse dynamics. This is why an addict may have an over used Back Door, a dreamer may have a different kind of over used Back Door and a depressed person may have an under used Back Door. This is also why some people can hold their Back Door in their container and slowly approach it in life and others can’t stand having it be open, partially open, closed or partially closed.

All of us can tolerate specific life experiences without a Back Door. Other parts of us believe we require a Back Door to stay alive.

An Over Used Back Door

The part of you that seeks to escape life will have a tendency to overuse Your Back Door. The most obvious space to find overuse is in your addictions. With addictions, you actually need to learn how to redirect Your Back Door and tolerate life. Now anyone who reads my work understands that I do believe that you have all facets of reality inside you. Try not to skip this part of my writing if you feel like you aren’t an addict or you have dealt with your addiction. There is always more to learn about yourself. Any action steps you take to avoid reality are taken in service to escape life and take the pressure off of something you cannot stand to feel.

To shift a Back Door out of sabotage, there has to be an ability to create a container in your own body for the feelings that you escape in your habitual way by opening the door as a release valve.

Most of the time we DO something with what we want to avoid.

While there are obvious addictions such as sex, drugs, food, media and alcohol; there are also less obvious addictions like exercise, self help, cleansing, and spiritual escape. We engage in addictions because we are unable to contain a reaction we are having to life. We do not know how to let what we are feeling move through us. We escape into Our Back Door to give ourselves the illusion that we are doing something about the parts of life we cannot accept, tolerate, or contain.

The cardinal steps of self transformation need to be implemented in the case of Back Door overuse. We need to become aware of what exactly has us seeking a way out of our life. We need to find the unconscious, not just the obvious place inside us that is acting out. We need to understand what exactly we are unable to tolerate or contain. We cannot seek the general. We need to seek the specific.

Then we need to learn how to allow whatever we are avoiding to be present in ourself without imploding or exploding. We need to learn how to tolerate the discomfort of a feeling that is luring us into release. This is how a container is created. Compassionate tolerance of a sensation happening inside us builds through curiosity and breath. The hardest part for so many of us is to not over-mentalize what we are feeling and simply learn to tolerate it. It really is that simple. At the same time, tolerating life in a way that transforms Our Back Door is never easy.

An Under Used Back Door

We all have an “If only” story we tell ourselves that keeps us from feeling fulfilled and present in the life we live.What’s your “If only” thought process about your life? Do you need to be richer? Have a partner? Have more friends? Live in a different place? Change jobs? Change partners? Change families? Become someone new?

While Your Over Used Back Door requires a container to be transformed, Your Under Used Back Door requires exploration. You have to somehow manage to pay attention to your “If only” thoughts while not getting too fixated on them as being 100% valid. The development of a conscious exploration of all the facets of Your Under Used Back Door is much more complicated than any familiar escape found through Your Over Used Back Door.

The habits you develop to escape are easier to attach to and need to do something about, especially when those habits are detrimental to your health. Your Under Used Back Door on the other hand can just seem like a comfortable place to stagnate and not change - the place where you dream but do not fulfill.

Many of us feel that we have to compromise to be alive. We believe that we do not deserve something we want or that what we want is impossible. We make ourselves small to avoid disappointment. We compromise our desires to convince ourselves that our life can never be what we want. Yet there is some core aspect of any dream that is attached to the reason we are alive. We need to explore this to have a thriving and fulfilling life.

It is easier to dream about how you can have the life you want than to face changing your life to get what you want.

It is so much easier to want than to fulfill, to desire instead of change, to stagnate instead of transform. With any Under Used Back Door, fantasy is a simpler solution to us than facing reality. We escape what we cannot understand.

Similar to redirecting an Over Used Back Door, exploring an Under Used Back Door requires awareness and specificity. Without getting specific, some aspect of your life is still being avoided…and is open to sabotage. You need to know what it is that you do not know how to embrace about life itself.

You can use your story about your upbringing as a center point for exploration. Ultimately this is the place where the greatest work can be done because it is the source of all of your insecurities. What exactly is it that you do not know how to take in? You can utilize the themes of your desires and fantasies to sense the general nature of the answer to this question. Going further involves trying to learn what your blind spot is towards life. This is going to be around what you feel incapable of creating or undeserving of experiencing.

By getting incredibly specific in your exploration, you can start to tolerate the sensation of a black hole inside you and learn how to fill it through what life is bringing towards you. Let Your Under Used Back Door become an opening through which you can begin to metabolize what you never expect to feel.

Searching For The Middle Ground

For every one of us, there is something we needed in childhood that we never got. Attention, love, safety, security, connection, community, understanding (the list goes on and on). When there is a complete and utter deficit of experience in our adult bodies, we do not know how to contain the pain of the unmet deficit with the experience we desire as an adult. This is why the Back Door exists.

It is easier to imagine something magically happening to us than addressing our complete vulnerability by admitting we have no idea how to make it happen.

Here’s what is really important to realize about Your Back Door. It’s some sort of discontent that has either followed you around for your entire adult life or it has been with you for as long as you remember. Your Back Door is not temporary. It is a symptom of a greater disconnection you feel towards life - something that you never received in childhood and therefore want but do not know how to have.

An aspect of Your Back Door is of course going to be a focus on a surface type of band aid that doesn’t address your deepest self and the hurt you have lived through. Be aware here, because this is where you will twist Your Back Door into sabotage. You may overly focus on money because actually addressing not feeling secure is too painful or vulnerable.You may fantasize about an old friend or meeting a mysterious new friend rather than address the lack of connection or love you feel in the relationships you do have. Your Back Door partially doesn’t get explored because it is attached to a hopelessness and despair that does not fundamentally understand what you actually want. There’s a blind spot in you.

Your Back Door is not something that you know how to have, yet it is something you long for immensely. You live a half life because you do not know how to make what you want happen tou you. Your Back Door is not a temporary type of solvable problem. It’s not something that you just need to work harder at or do more of create a solution to it. Your Back Door is created from a complete deficit in your upbringing that has followed you around everywhere you go. When you try to fix your Back Door, it doesn’t work. You are trapped by it and also inspired by it. It’s a paradigm of desire and lack of fulfillment with a foundation of emptiness.

In the case of desire and fantasy, only through building awareness around Your Back Door can you learn how to face what your deficit is without the addictive dynamic of escape versus fantasy. Only you can make changes to create what you desire.

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