TheCloud

"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).

Was it a fairly sudden level change for you to reach that state from roughly where I'm at, or was it a gradual cumulative thing?

Gradually over the last two months or so, I've awakened to a new level of being. Which makes it sound like a big deal, and it is huge to me personally, but what really changed is that I went from effectively never experiencing unconflicted happiness for over thirty years, to experiencing it every day in one form or another. More than that, there is a new confidence and resilience in me that if I do feel bad for some reason, the reason is just mechanical, so that if I fix the mechanics, I can go back to a baseline of being happy and excited for life. I am increasingly sensitive to the effects my actions and habits and choices have on my experience, whereas before I couldn't feel the effects of many of my detrimental choices against a background radiation of inner chaos. If I had to describe it in terms of spiral dynamics, which I am barely familiar with but seems popular on this forum, I would say I've just breached stage Yellow. To those who have reached this level and beyond, I ask; do you have any suggestions for me, such as advice that might matter to a person at my level that wouldn't have mattered at a lower level, or experience on how my perspective might be expanding from this point on? To those who aspire to this level and beyond, I offer my anecdotal experience. I have not currently reached a level of any kind of obvious cosmic consciousness or unity or any such thing. I still feel anxiety and resentment, even when I don't always have to. Reaching a new level did not make me smarter or more knowledgeable or even a better person, really, so the best I can promise is that I'll be selling no medicine I haven't taken myself.

Do you have any means of making small, basic, reliable improvements to your quality as a person? I use Internal Family Systems (IFS, though it's my own self-modified version) with NonViolent Communication (NVC). When in doubt, I can turn to these tools, and as long as I apply myself, I can reliably make an improvement. Not in months or years. In hours or days. It might be small, it's frequently only a millimeter of progress. I don't get to decide what direction the progress is in; wherever there is low-hanging fruit, wherever progress is easiest for me to make right now, that's where I make it. But it accumulates, steadily and irreversibly, supporting more and greater changes in me. When in doubt, endeavor to improve yourself in some small way. Heal a specific trauma, conquer a small fear, acknowledge a silly foible. Become friends with yourself. Make the cheapest, easiest progress you can make, but make it today. If you don't have the tools, find or make them. It exists, definitively, a tool or a process that can flexibly translate your efforts toward yourself directly into positive results, so long as you're not too picky about what those results are. If you have that ability and habit, I believe you will end up where you need to be. Edit: This can't be forced. The tool that can do this for you is one that is flexible and natural to you. Ask your body, ask your mind, ask your spirit. Negotiate with yourself for permission to do these things. Don't be a bully, be a friend.

Really?

You're only seeing him 4-6 times a year for the duration of a meal, so honestly, unless he's otherwise influencing your life, the stakes sound pretty low to me. It's crappy that he's manipulating you, but it sounds to me that his lies are more related to his personal mental health issues, rather than being efforts to scam or otherwise steal from you. I'm more worried about whether or not your dad is actually okay, because it sounds as if his personal life is a mess. That said, only you know what he's done for you and to you, what it's costing you to maintain contact, and what it would cost you to break it. Messing with relationship status quos generates confrontation and drama. Breaking off "bad" relationships sounds like the easy path, but it can actually be a lot of work, and might cause you more problems than it solves. If it's not costing you much, and your feelings about it aren't too terrible, you could maybe just tolerate the man in case he ever thinks of waking up and needs someone to care. Heck, it sounds like if you did the "grey rock" method (look it up), and left everything up to him, he might just end up mostly leaving you alone on his own.

Mental health is a shitty RPG. In a good RPG, levels and items gradually accumulate in roughly direct proportion to your efforts, rewarding you for playing the game. In healing your trauma, the first 80% of your efforts will only get you 20% of your visible results. If it were a game, people would quit and the company would go under, but quitting life isn't such a great idea and the company keeps on pumping out more games (people). I have a hypothesis that traumas become redundant over time. So lets say that before you began your mental health journey, you accumulated ten traumas reinforcing each other over on particular issue. Resolving the first eight results in minimal visible change to your behavior and experience of life; spread out over years, this minimal change looks like nothing. It's like climbing a wall; until you get near the top, all you can see is the same monotonous wall no matter how far you've climbed. But once you get your hands and eyes over the top, your progress will skyrocket. Is this a good analogy? I'm not sure; I haven't gotten over the wall yet. But I do feel like I've gotten my hands and eyes over the top, and my efforts really do seem to be bearing results, and it sure is a good feeling. So what should you do? Well, you should do whatever you think seems good for you, even if it doesn't have immediate or apparent benefits. Just because the wall you're looking at looks the same as it did ten years ago, doesn't mean that it is, nor does it mean that it's all you're ever going to see.

I had three thoughts from reading your posts. My first thought was that when you are physically exhausted and go to sleep and wake up physically exhausted, you are unwell. That is sickness. In the same way, if you respond to a negative emotion but that emotion persists, that is trauma. In the same way that sickness sometimes doesn't go away just by ignoring it, deep traumas also stick around until addressed. Your indifference is an emotion, and its persistence means trauma ( search "feelings inventory" to get some good lists of what counts as an emotion). As you already intimated, you're unlikely to get anywhere by dismissing it as an illusion. You need practical skills; a trauma resolution framework. I use Internal Family Systems (IFS) modified with Non-Violent Communication (NVC). It took me many years to find these tools, and they've assisted me immeasurably with incomparable consistency and reliability. You might have different tools. What matters is that you understand both that there really are tools that work, and that enlightenment is not a means of escaping from using them. Which leads me to my second thought. I'm sure you've heard the saying, "Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water." To me, that means that enlightenment can't be measured by a change in your daily tasks or outward experiences. The people in your world will remain unchanged. You will still have to maintain your body and your mind. There's no future version of you as a brilliant spiritual being, just the you that you are right now going on forever. Any expectations of future greatness transcending this immediate exact moment are delusional. My last thought is that what's bizarre is the idea that the realization of non-duality would lead one to be apart and separate from others, creating a duality. Could there be better indication of the failure of enlightenment than to recognize duality as an indication of non-duality?

I started doing IFS precisely to avoid having to find someone to help me. Not that there's anything wrong with therapy, it's just that my emotions don't work on a weekly schedule, so I need something that works when I need it. It sounds as if you have a passing familiarity with IFS Parts work already. How familiar are you, and what do you get hung up on when you're doing it?

There is a treatment called Internal Family Systems (IFS) that I find helpful for these kinds of issues. I won't bore you with the details, but it's a method that has enabled me to directly address my traumas almost as if they were separate people. I can literally converse with them, and although they aren't always cooperative, one of the fundamental tenets of the system is that there are no bad parts of ourselves, only parts who are misunderstood. Ideally, if you were to use IFS, you would be able to directly converse with the younger version of you who had that horrible experience, to console and empower him to adopt a new perspective on his suffering. It's work that requires a lot of patience and consideration for yourself, because it's not unlike working with truly uncooperative little children at times, but for me it yields consistent and reliable results.

Alan Watts "The Book (on the taboo against knowing who you are)". He literally wrote it as a book one would slip to someone entering adulthood.

@trenton How does your PTSD manifest? Is it like a panic attack, or reliving the trauma?