TheCloud

Examine your contradictions; you think of yourself as incompetent, but you want others to think otherwise and accept you. If others thought of you the way you think of yourself, you would be rejected by them. One question is; are you right about how you are and how you deserve to be treated? How incompetent are you, and what sort of treatment is appropriate for such incompetence? Seek to be right in yourself first, then share that with others, rather than seeking an acceptance you don't (think you) deserve from others, then somehow hoping you will end up deserving it.

I hope that you are as kind to yourself as you can be, given how difficult such circumstances might make it. I admire how you still show such uncommon honesty and thoughtful consideration to others, regardless of your limitations in doing so. I have a friend who is a therapist, and she says that it surprised her how much her clients don't know about treating themselves well. So I'll say some basic things you can tell yourself, just in case you've never heard them before. "I deserve to seek physical and emotional safety. I deserve to establish boundaries that reinforce this safety. I deserve to seek out people I can trust whose company I enjoy. I deserve to seek comfort, love, and affection, and to avoid pain, hate, and cruelty. I deserve to be honest with myself. I deserve to resent and oppose injustice, including toward myself. I deserve to have ambitions different from what is expected of me. I deserve to feel my true emotions. I deserve to seek the good and avoid the bad. I deserve to seek to improve my situation in all aspects I care to consider. I deserve what joy comes to me. I deserve to be able to choose how to live my own life, with prime consideration for myself." I believe these can all be considered basic human rights. This is not an exhaustive list. She made an actual list, which I don't have in front of me and which is still being added to as she takes more clients. The point is that you did what you had to do to survive, both physically and psychologically. This included telling yourself lies, so that you wouldn't be punished for believing the truth or seeking to assert your basic human rights. Unjust things happen in reality; however, your right as a human is to seek what is good and avoid what is bad according to your best judgement, and that will never be changed by any injustice perpetrated upon you. Reality won't necessarily allow you to have all or any of the things on this list; however, your right to desire the good and seek it is inviolable. The cruelty, exploitation, and abuse you've been subjected to were unjustifiable, regardless of what the perpetrators might want to think to spare themselves the truth. So I hope you can believe that any freely given honesty, kindness, and consideration that comes to you is something you have a right to receive and enjoy, much more so than any abuse.

In Layman's terms, I separate out different parts of myself that appear to be actively disruptive in the moment. I formally recognize their existence, including emotions, intentions, history, and other associations. I then trace them back as far as I can to other parts of myself that have a formative relationship with the parts in question. For example, if I have a part who resents women, I might trace it back to another part who ruined my relationships with women, then back to a part who was really overwhelmed by some unrelated issue and sought comfort in women, and so on. If I put in the effort and get lucky, I can sometimes get back to the earliest possible part, although things get a little weird at that point and its rarely worth the effort relative to working with easier to access parts elsewhere. Formally, I do my own modified version of Internal Family Systems (IFS), relating to the various parts of myself using Non-Violent Communication (NVC) standards. I also examine my beliefs in a way that is probably similar to Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to discover and judge the intentions of the various involved parts. It's tedious and laborious, but when more organic healing methods are letting me down, this process delivers a result without fail, and it's rare that a day goes by where I don't do some amount of IFS.

That's really too bad that you lack even one close friend. Is it not something that concerns you?

Do you not have friends?

Part of my ongoing process for handling criticism is giving up on my various misconceptions that I either can control others or would at least be better off if I could. That's ultimately what avoiding criticism is, is controlling other people in such a way that criticisms can't come out, whether it's through perfectionism or defensive reactions or total avoidance. In the end, none of those strategies are enough to defeat the final and greatest critic that is myself, which means they fall fundamentally short in keeping me safe. Acknowledging over and over that every time I fall back onto those methods, I'm falling back onto a failing method, a failure that I am presently going to experience, is how I keep driving myself forward in transforming my controlling efforts into connecting efforts.

I don't doubt the intensity of witnessing absolute emptiness; I'm unsure about fetishizing it, though. In a way, there should be nothing more obvious or normal than witnessing our deepest and truest self. It's what we've been all the time, so there has to be something familiar about it.

"The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." My current understanding is shallow, but to me, its when I stopped to turn around and saw how it was the truth that was looking for me. Not that the whole truth is coming to me all at once or anything, but that it is looking for me and hoping to be discovered.

Think about your own experience with seeking Truth. Have you been rewarded for it? Has it made you popular, wealthy, secure, or even safe? If it has, I bet it's only after you've suffered and put a lot of effort into it. There is no obvious and immediate practical benefit to acknowledging that your family and community is brain-dead. Most people are likely taught, and learn well, to steer their minds away from such considerations, as they have been given good reason to fear the truth. Even worse, the farther down these diverted paths they tread, the more painful it becomes to change course. There's no dopamine in it for them to acknowledge that they've been living somebody else's lie, never mind that they may have become somebody else's lie when having children and influencing over others. Nevertheless, I believe that awakening is built into us from the foundation. I've read that having just one truly benevolent role model can change a child's life, even if everything else around them is a disaster. Society's somnambulation maintains itself through the active prevention, exclusion, and destruction of such singular counter-examples. But all they have on their side is inertia, which is powerful to be sure, but blindness and ignorance can't even save itself from itself. Problems caused by blind ignorance will only be made worse by more blind ignorance; problems caused by awakening will be solved by awakening further. Knowing how to fight ignorance and seek truth is a beginning to awakening, but it's not all there is to it. How do you rate your benevolence? Are you kind, considerate, thoughtful, and full of good will when you approach others? Many people are much more sensitive to this than whether something is true or false, and are much more amenable to well-intentioned ignorance rather than a self-centered realism. If you come to those others with a chip on your shoulder, they will recognize it for the burden it is and refuse to pick up their own. Eventually, truth and benevolence converge. The true pursuit of benevolence will eventually butt up against self-serving lies, so I suspect that anyone who pursues either truth or benevolence to the extreme will achieve both, and I believe that's where everybody can be met and understand each other.

I'm at a point in my development where I'm considering whether and how much the methods I've used to get to this point are still serving me, or if I'm just circling back on myself by continuing to use them. I'm thinking about Wittgenstein's Ladder, which is the proposition that the forms used to reach a higher state of consciousness will, upon reaching it, reveal themselves to be nonsense. So upon reaching a higher consciousness, one kicks away the ladder that they used to climb to that point. My query for the forum is; do you have any experience supporting or contradicting this? If you "kicked away the ladder", what was the ladder? Was it a difficult and/or gradual process of realizing and accepting the necessity, or was it a simple and sudden decision? I'm especially interested in real, lived experience.

Since you're focusing on relationships, and you clearly have some very difficult ones in your past and likely present, I recommend Non-Violent Communication (NVC) to you if you're not familiar. You may also find the Enneagram to be an interesting personality typology for advancing your understanding of both yourself and others, better than the MBTI in my opinion. Also, as always, don't neglect your relationship with yourself, as that is the one that is going to carry through to everything else. The effort and kindness and consideration you offer to others should come from first offering it to yourself, as that is how you can understand it from the inside rather than just acting. Also, I recommend Internal Family Systems (IFS) to everyone. If you're ever bored, check it out and see if it resonates; it's been absolutely critical for me.

I think you still better not give any children the middle finger. Jokes aside, it sounds as if you are intelligently exploring your healing options, but haven't quite landed on a method yet. What methods is your therapist trained in; CBT, IFS, EMDR, etc?

Perhaps consider resolving your feelings about male mind-reader Chad before exploring your options with yoga girl. If you bring Chad along in your head with you on your date and keep showing her how much better he is than you, of course its going to be weird. In fact, the more she respects you, the more she's going to consider what you imply with your actions and behaviors, so if you keep implying that Chad is better than you, she's going to take it seriously even if she doesn't care for Chad. Furthermore, she's likely uninterested in competing with Chad for space in your head. If Chad is so great, maybe you should be the one asking him out. That's perhaps hyperbolic, but I think it gets my point across. If I may offer further advice, the Chad in your head isn't going to leave you alone just because you give him the boot. The uncommon truth is that everyone in your head is your friend, regardless of how they seem to act or how you (mis)treat them. Chad is perhaps trying to advise you on how to be more Chad-like, under the assumption that the best way to be is to be like Chad. Resolve within yourself what kind of support if any you really want from this Chad ahead of time, then go on your date with yoga girl in your real best condition.

I've had similar thoughts myself. What keeps me grounded in these situations is understanding and remembering that what I'm doing for myself right now is what I would continue to do if I were to be sent back to redo the past, both good and bad. Being sent back wouldn't change that I continue to be flawed; the mistakes I made would change, but the fact of those mistakes would not. If I regret my flaws right now, I would continue to form regrets over my flaws even if I were sent back. What I'm doing right now will soon become my past; anything I could do to resolve those flaws after being sent back, I can do right now. My experience with dwelling on the past is that it can change things, just not things in the past. What I try to do by reflecting on the past is to relive it in a way where I figure out what truly did need to be done differently at the time for me not to have the regrets I do. Once I figure that out, I can use that to live my current life in a way that avoids forming more of those regrets. It's not a useless activity at all; on the contrary, failing to reflect on the past dooms you to repeat it. Your brain isn't trying to hurt you by bringing these things up; the reason you keep dwelling on those memories is because you haven't learned your lesson yet to do what truly needed to be done at the time to get it right. You're perhaps thinking that it would be simple and easy to redo things right if you could only go back, but that is not the case, because eventually you would somehow arrive at the mental state of regretting things that you have right now. It's only by resolving those regrets in your mind that you could truly go back and avoid repeating them.

All my life, I've had a tendency to experience headaches in response to any kind of stress, both physical and emotional. Since I started using IFS, I feel I've experienced a great reduction in the frequency of headache incidents. However, rather than being something that was solved simply and all at once with clear cause and effect, it has been a complex matter accomplished over time and involving numerous Parts mixed in with behavioral changes. It is my personal belief that practicing IFS has had manifold effect on the issue, soothing Parts directly related to the headaches, reducing my general psychological stress, and allowing for beneficial behavioral changes. More directly, I have had an activated Part cause a physical symptom. I was once woken up by bad heartburn. Normally, an antacid quickly resolves the matter, but that night I took tablet after tablet to no effect. The pain was enough that I couldn't sleep, and I was concerned that I had formed an ulcer, but I decided to check with my Parts. It was late so I didn't write anything down and can't remember the specifics, but after some quick emergency Parts work, I found the offending Parts and resolved them well enough that my heartburn went away, letting me get back to sleep. Such an incident has not repeated since.