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.

NVC is a great place to start. You can also look up tactics for negotiating mutual solutions. Anything that can improve your communication with or understanding of other people can also be applied to IFS. The difference with Parts is that, sharing the same body and life as them, you can be 100% confident of a mutual solution. There will never be a need for zero-sum solutions. This is the most fundamental and critical part of IFS, that there is no difference between "Parts" and "You". Your Parts will never have knowledge you don't (except perhaps in extreme cases of DID or some such). Everything inside you is you, every thought, word, and deed, no matter how hateful or demented, no matter how wonderful or surprising. (There is a highly fringe exception to this called Unattached Burdens, which is a Part that has no positive purpose in the system. However, these are overwhelmingly rare, and cannot be identified by the harm a Part causes, as regular Parts are capable of causing tremendous damage even with their ultimately positive intent.) It'll help to find your best in-road. For me, direct conversation with my Parts is where I'm strongest, and I can have a literal back-and-forth conversation with and between my Parts. Body-sensation is where I'm weakest; I can't find many Parts in my body, and its usually a waste of my time for me to try. You can also visualize your Parts, such as where the OP saw a tree rooted in his stomach, or focus on experiencing the Part's emotions or associated memories. I've seen someone draw their Parts to make abstract art. It depends on what you're good at, and as with anything, practice makes perfect. Familiarize yourself with the concept of "blending". Blending is when a Part takes over. It's usually characterized by ranting, uncontrolled emotional expression, unilateral behavior, and other similar signs. When you notice you're blending, that's a great time to get in touch with a clear Part. What I find useful here is to change "I" to "this Part". So, "I think everyone hates me", becomes, "This Part thinks everyone hates it." "I will never allow that to happen!", becomes, "This Part will never allow that to happen." This gives me enough distance from the Part to observe and communicate with it. Even with this trick, unblending can be frustratingly challenging even if you notice you're blended; all you can do is keep at it. A problem I occasionally run into is getting overwhelmed with Parts. Sometimes when I feel really chaotic and overwhelmed, it's because piles of Parts are trying to have their say all at the same time. In these cases, I try to identify and write down as many of the Parts as I can before trying to go any deeper with any of them. Just knowing that they've been seen can go a long way to calming a Part down. The last thing I'll say for now is to try to determine a Part's general age as you work with it. Parts believe they are still the age that they formed at, and will behave accordingly. This can be important, such as when I'm dealing with infant Parts who haven't developed fight/flight response yet. Infants can only fawn, attaching themselves even to people who harm them, with can lead to some very frustrating misunderstandings if its not accounted for. Keep in mind that the Parts are ultimately still you, so they're just deluding themselves to be the age they think they are. An important part of the work is showing them their real age. I hope this helps somewhat, although if you have specific questions I'd be glad to offer my thoughts.

Ironically, what I find to be most difficult and critical in practicing rationality is emotional awareness. Reason is a tool; emotion is the direction that tool is being applied. Well-practiced reason without emotional awareness will actually cause harm, because that faculty of reason will be used to come up with all kinds of reasonable-sounding excuses and justifications for behaviors that are ultimately being performed out of hate or fear or other negative emotions. So if you notice yourself behaving in a way that seems unreasonable, make a habit of clearly identifying the emotions driving that behavior. If you search "feelings inventory", you should find some helpful lists. One thing to be careful of is not to confuse judgements with emotions. For example, "betrayed" is a judgement. One way to tell is to notice that you can feel various ways about betrayal, whether it is hurt, angry, or confused. However, when you feel scared, that's what you're directly feeling. Hope this helps!

I recommend you to look into Internal Family Systems (IFS). It's a psychotherapy that very closely follows with the process you describe yourself as spontaneously going through. You forming the image of there being a tree representing your emotions anchored in your stomach would be the first step in a process called "unburdening", where emotions are visualized and associated with areas in the body or mind where they primarily reside. The next step would be to ask the tree if it is protecting/blocking/imprisoning/etc something, or if it is being protected/blocked/imprisoned/etc itself. If it is the former, it is what is called a Protector in IFS. If it is the latter, it is what is called an Exile. Exiles are parts of yourself that have been separated and blocked off from the rest of you, either for their safety or for yours. Protectors are parts of you who form to maintain that separation, a purpose for which they do not count the costs and may go to extreme and harmful lengths to achieve. If your tree is a Protector, you can ask what it is protecting. If it is reluctant, find out what capabilities and consideration it needs you to show it to let you pass. Forcing your way past a Protector without its acknowledgement can have extreme results, both psychological and somatic; I expect the dysfunction you describe where your body was moving in spasms was a result of doing just that. For that reason, if your tree is an Exile, you must find and communicate with its Protector before doing anything else with it. Once you are in communication with both Protector and Exile, you can begin the unburdening process. Generally the Exile unburdens first, since that removes the reason the Protector has to protect, but that's not a hard rule so long as you have the consent of your parts. In the case of the tree, you take care of it until it is ready to let go of its fearful emotions. When it's ready, you ask it how and where it wants to let its fear go. Methods for this are limited only by your imagination, but it's common to release it to the elements; letting the fear blow away in the wind, be consumed by fire, washed away in rain, etc. Imagine your tree going through this process, then ask what it wants to do next. It may change form, completely transform, or take on a totally new role. You can do this for any part you encounter. One hard rule for IFS is that there are no truly bad or evil parts of you. Even Protectors and Exiles who are actively ruining your body or harming others have a desperate purpose or pain which they are trying to express. Cooperation, consideration, and consent are needed when dealing with even the most outrageous parts of yourself, and killing or expunging any part of yourself is always a form of self-harm. If you are in communication with your parts but are having trouble, I recommend researching and applying Non-Violent Communication (NVC). It sounds as if you've made a lot of progress with your efforts and discovered much on your own, and I hope that with some research and/or guidance you can continue to build on that in a way that is reliable and consistently beneficial to you.

Have you found any form of psychotherapy useful, such as cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), or do you know of any other people with conditions similar to yours who have? I am particularly interested as to whether any have tried Internal Family Systems (IFS), as it is a therapy explicitly designed for managing internal conflicts between various parts of ourselves. Constructive conversation with one's self is actually encouraged by the process, so I am curious as to whether you have ever tried having a meaningful conversation with your voices after you realized they belonged to you?

My way of looking at it is that my being is comprehensive of the being of others. If someone else's nose smells something, and they tell me about it, hasn't their nose become a part of my sensory experience? If their brain thinks something and they write it down, when I read it, haven't their thoughts become a supplement to my own? There are obvious differences in the fidelity of signals, comparing communication of my nose directly to my brain, compared to someone else's nose routed through their mouth to my ears to my brain. However, a noisy signal is still a signal, meaning your brain is communicating with mine just as surely as my left brain is communicating with my right. The difference is merely semantic. So if I say that I am the only entity who exists, I'm not denying your conscious existence, I'm including it in my own.

How much effort are you willing to put in? As far as I know, there are no PTSD pills; the only reliable solution is a comprehensive effort to improve your total resilience as a person. This requires regular effort and attention, across a broad swath of your personal weaknesses, failings, abuses, and traumas. A therapist can help you, but if you really want to see results, you're going to need to dedicate your own efforts. It's not just brute force labor. There are various methods that can assist you, such as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). I personally favor Internal Family Systems (IFS) and Non-Violent Communication (NVC).

"Will to live" appears to be something slightly more complex for our species, perhaps being more of a transformation or confusion than a negation in the event of suicide and self-harming behaviors . I wish I could think of more to say on the matter, but I haven't come up with a more complete explanation of where our will to live comes from than the evolutionary inevitability that having life and seeking life are necessarily convergent principles.

This is merely a possibility, but it could be that the will to live is simply a mechanical, evolutionary phenomenon. We are each of us the result of a multi-billion year chain of organisms which, without exception, lived to reproduce. No exceptions for billions of years. That's plenty of time to weed out the organisms that fail to experience some minimum level of joy in living, at least among the organisms that can be said to have experiences. The fringe case of human suicide could be mentioned, but suicide on humanity's level should be a relatively new phenomenon, evolutionarily speaking. It may just not have been accounted for by selective pressures yet. Though, at the rate we humans are modifying our environment, evolution may not get that chance. In any case, perhaps the will to live resulted from nothing more than the fact that evolution fundamentally selects for life. I'm not prepared to argue this in court, but I think it's worth pondering.

I would argue that human cruelty, both to others and to themselves, comes from weakness that can be resolved with strength of inner consciousness. The first enemy that every weak, cruel person has is themselves; their outer cruelty and callousness is a direct reflection of a battle they are having inside against themselves. Cruel people make the mistake of trying to resolve their weakness with inner cruelty. They see that their inner self is weak, and instead of providing support, comfort, and aid, they instead viciously attack it with the misunderstanding that if they kill their weak self, only their strong self will remain. If they happen to see that their weak inner self is bleeding out, they callously leave it alone with the hope that it'll die, or at least stay quiet and out of the way. However, that's not how human psychology works. Everything a person finds when they look inside themselves IS themselves. Every inner agony is their own agony; inner weakness cannot be resolved with violence and cruelty. Strength comes from a unified self. Weakness comes from a fragmented self-hating self-harming self. The first and greatest ally a strong person has is themselves, both inside and out. I don't know about what kind of people you know and have around you, but I can tell you one thing for sure; the first and greatest cruelties that you are experiencing are self-perpetrated inside you. You may be unable to do much about your surroundings (although you could probably do more than you imagine if you improved the quality of your inner resources), but inside there is no one but you who decides whether the inner violence stops or continues.

I prefer coming from the perspective of a psychological model called Internal Family Systems (IFS), which has the basic assertion that we are not unified individuals, but rather a collective or family of coexisting systems. When a particular system with a particular responsibility gets overwhelmed by an external circumstance that it lacks the capacity to organically respond to, it forms a trauma which sort of buds off into a separate persistent unit (Part). This Part maintains the memory of that trauma, with another Part forming to remember whatever forced solution you arrived at for the time; in IFS, these are called Exiles and Protectors. These Parts then become persistent throughout your life, taking note of situations that resemble the original trauma and confronting or avoiding them according to the original forced solution. They are generally stagnant and inflexible, never learning or growing unless directly addressed and healed, either by accident or intention. If enough of these Parts form, and the traumas and/or responses are extreme enough, this manifests as mental illness, whether it be depression, anxiety, dissociation, addiction, etc. These Parts always have the intention to do good, but they tend to be completely myopic and ignore all kinds of collateral damage as long as they can achieve their principle objective of avoiding or assuaging their formative trauma. For example, if you have an Exile who feels depressed, its Protector may come in and pour you a drink or ten. You might end up an alcoholic with liver cirrhosis, but as long as you're too drunk to feel depressed, the Protector considers it a job well done. It's only when you go in there to the depressed Exile and resolve it that the Protector will start looking for other ways to behave. Anyway, that's my understanding of mental illness. Other than strictly physical issues, I believe its possible that IFS explains most psychological issues, possibly even including things like schizophrenia and sociopathy (though I wouldn't dare say that's a certainty).