“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

If you do not do this, you will not improve even if you have the operation. Now, I am not saying that the operation may not temporarily help. But without changing your attitude, it will not help to any degree that will compensate you. But the decision, you see...

Now. Often, you use sound as a barrier. Also, you use monologs, and set up a barrier of sound to protect yourself from other people. And you do not realize that you do this. You erect barriers like walls—so that someone wanting to communicate with you cannot get through, cannot find a “hole” in your conversation to reach you. And the more nervous you are, the more frantically you erect this barrier of sound. You use sound as a barrier, therefore, and when you become doubly threatened, then you do not hear the sounds that come from without, but retreat from them. The entire “gestalt of sound” is therefore highly important to you in your “mechanism of survival”. You have used it to protect yourself, either erecting sound yourself to protect you from communications coming from without, or, when this fails, by refusing—refusing to hear. You must, therefore, ask yourself where this charged attitude toward sound originated, and why you use it in such a way. And I will give you some clues.

Now. To some extent you punish him for his past attitudes by not appearing as attractively as you could. You think: “It serves him right! What does he expect?” At the same time, you are afraid that if you do appear as attractively as you can, that you will be hurt again by him, and you are unwilling to take the chance.

You overeat, to compensate for the other joys that you do not allow yourself. If you began to paint for an hour a day, you would not need to eat so much. When you bring food and drink with you, you do two things. You bring along your own “security blanket”, for one thing. You also show that you are insecure and frightened outside of the home environment, and must bring nourishment from there along with you. Now the joy that you experience when you are painting will be yours, and not desert you whether you stay in your house or go to someone else’s. You will not have to worry about “carting it along” with you. As you probably suspect, the overeating is the one great indulgence that you allow yourself, and even then you surround it with all kinds of taboos. It is not the fact that you overeat, and that you are desperately frightened because you overeat—because of your sister’s history. You do not overeat simply any food, but you surround eating itself with taboos, so that it must be “pure food,” “good food,” to your way of thinking. And there are foods that you will eat and foods that you will not eat, and you project moral implications upon the foods. Some foods are “good,” to your way of thinking, and some foods are “bad.” To you this does not necessarily or alone mean they are good for the body or bad for the body, but in themselves you give them moral characteristics as you would people. So that beneath the whole attitude is the idea: “This is an evil food,” and be shunned as you would shun an evil person, within that framework of thought.

One small point. You have been punishing yourself quite often in the way in which you approach the medical experience. The idea of an operation, on the one hand, frightens you. On the other hand, you feel it is “just punishment for these ears of mine that will not work.” The same applied to the mouth. In that case, again, the attitudes cause your reaction.

(Long Pause.) I think that you can. The delay, in any case, will not hurt you, in that particular area. And without changing your attitude, the operation will not help. Do you follow me?