Reality Repair Rx
By Bill Cottringer


This is a good question: What is reality?

Reality = “Anything about the past, present or future you believe to be actual and true because it comes from trustworthy sources such as your physical senses, intuition, thinking, perceptions, scientific research, or higher authority.

The most difficult yet critical skill to learn that affects your perceived quality of life is Reality Repair RX —fixing ‘broken,’ incorrect realities you don’t like or don’t think are right and creating better and more correct ones. Below are some important ‘realities’ about Reality Repair RX:

1. The distinction between correct and incorrect realities is often blurred and highly debatable; however, this distinction can be greatly influenced by many factors that “distort” a reality and make it “less real.” Things that tend to do this include personal biases, time, not having enough information or having wrong information, and the ‘location’ from where you are doing the looking or listening. One of the best examples of all these things working together to make something less real was the belief in the world being flat rather than round. These things also worked together to form the belief that an epileptic seizure was a sign of being possessed by a demon.

2. Unfortunately, the main way we have to communicate about realities is very flawed. We use words to represent the likeness of objects and the distance between the two allows for much variation in interpretation and usually leads to more noise than music. And all we have to straighten out this miscommunication with is more words, which often makes things worse. More noise, less music. Try reaching absolute agreement with someone else on the meaning of things like love, honesty, value, quality, reality or even effective communication. Good luck! And that isn’t even touching upon the problem of non-verbal communication that doesn’t play by set rules. Although miscommunication is the norm, good communication does happen just enough to let us know it is a possibility and worthy of our best effort to achieve by using proper Reality repair RX.

3. There doesn’t really appear to be one superior way to judge the absolute truth and accuracy of any reality, or at least one we can all agree upon. At some point you have to make a leap of faith in being certain enough about what you know to be so and in the end after all is said and done, that always involves a highly personal, subjective interpretation. Maybe the more sources that the “truth” and correctness of a reality is verified against, the more certain we can be about it. At least this seems to be the case with moral questions. When an action is in agreement with the Golden Rule, a higher authority such as a religion’s ‘bible’ or government’s law, results in the greatest good for the greatest majority without any serious side effects, enables everyone in a win-win situation without win-lose disablement, isn’t it the right thing to do?

4. You can’t change any reality that you don’t understand completely and accurately. Take interpersonal differences and incompatibilities for example. They can be very annoying and interfere greatly with productive and satisfying relationships. Focusing on these differences just makes them worse and the bottom line is you are never going to be successful changing them to your liking, no matter how honorable your intentions or how strong your efforts are. That is one reality you can take to the bank! What needs to be understood clearly in these situations is that it is not the incompatibilities themselves that are the problem, but rather the possible incompatibility of approaches used by two people trying to resolve the conflicts these incompatibilities produce. This is one of those simple realities that we usually fail to notice, which when noticed, can have mega positive reality repair results.

5. There are a few tragic realities that can and should be changed, while most others just need to be understood and accepted without any major changes needed. Child abuse, unjustified oppression of someone’s freedom, animal cruelty, intentional assault, rape and murder, and disabling anything out of power abuse or meanness are a few of the things that are not acceptable. There is much wisdom in the saying, “it is not the things in life that bother us (unless they belong to the previous group), but our opinions about these things.” Getting the right perspective about a situation has a lot to do with knowing whether or not it needs to be accepted or changed. Then the challenge is to learn how to be effective in changing the reality for the better, which is always easier when it is better understood.

6. The universe speaks to us in two main voices—one of unconditional love and acceptance and one of encouragement to learn, grow and improve to be the best we can be. The order in which we approach people and situations with these two voices in our reality repair attempts, has a lot to do with the outcomes we get and the quality of life we have. The best order seems to concentrate on accepting first, and then focusing on improving/changing secondly. This is a very difficult lesson to learn because of our failure to notice that our self-importance and ability to control things is grossly over-rated.

7. There are three main approaches to changing realities and the first two don’t seem to be as effective over the long run as the third one. Never-the-less we usually end up trying both failures before we give into success. These approaches are: (a) passive acceptance of or denial of the negativity or incorrectness of a reality (b) aggressive attacking and controlling of something to change it (c) assertive exploration to create a compromise in seeing both sides of the coin into a whole, bigger picture. The creative search for the truth seems to involve going in one direction until you end up empty-handed, turning in the opposite direction to fill both hands, and then finding what you are really looking for somewhere in between the two extremes. Maybe this is life’s inherent reality repair process.

8. We all seem to be driven to see a bigger picture in life and the best way to accomplish a quicker, wider mental evolution is to stop the unproductive habit of excluding different perceptions and ideas carte blanch just because they are unfamiliar, and then start looking for ways to at least include part of the different perspective into a more accurate complete overall picture, like gradually adding the right pieces to the puzzle.

9. The choice between three basic perspectives of life seems to greatly flavor our ability to change realities and create new ones. According to our genetic contributions, upbringing and life experiences, we either lean towards being pessimistic (life is a 60-40 deal against us), realistic (life is a 50-50 deal) or optimistic (it can be a 100% for us). The optimistic approach seems to lead to more effective reality repair. Research has proven it also leads to better health and fewer physical problems, more happiness, better marriages, more money and longer lives. That makes a pretty convincing case, don’t you think?

10. There is no getting away from the powerful effect our concept of time has on the shape of reality. Sometime time alone can change our realities 360-degrees. The first day after the 9-11 tragedy I asked my psychology class if there was any positive outcomes to the event. Utter silence was the students’ collective answer. Then a month later there were seven positive outcomes mentioned. One of the quickest way to change a reality is to focus away from the fixed, mechanical nature of time and towards the fluid, psychological characteristic of time. A funny thing happens, you have more time to understand and fix broken realities.

11. Along with getting the voice order of things correct, it is also critical to have an understanding of the phenomenon that you have to survive and eventually thrive through failure to get to real success, in that precise sequence. So you will fail at trying to repair many realities before you learn the Reality Repair RX prescription outlined above. That is another reality you can take to the bank. Of course, the prescription is free, minus wasted time and effort discovering it!

William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security in Bellevue, WA. He is author of You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too, The Bow-Wow Secrets, and Do What Matters Most. Bill can be reached for questions or comments at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer.pssp.net