I've been knee-deep in repressed memories and PTSD for about a year now. First there was a thing, then it turned out the thing happened a lot more than I remembered, and eventually it turned out the reason for the thing was not what I thought at all.
My whole world view has gone sideways. I haven't the faintest idea what I am anymore.
You look at your friends and you see the smart one, and the rich one, and the ladies' man. That isn't the whole of them, of course, but it helps you keep the people in the little boxes in your head so you have some idea how to react to them.
You keep yourself in a little box, too. When you think of yourself, you stick adjectives on you so you think you can understand how you'll react to things. Maybe it does not happen to everyone, or maybe they don't notice when it does, but sometimes the adjectives fall off.
Sometime it is not a big deal. You thought you were a decent singer, but then you heard yourself on tape and realized you are not. So you do not sing in public again.
But what happens when the your adjectives are all wrong?
It turns out that I did not spend my childhood saving the princess from the monster. The princess was a monster. I was not protecting her. I was bait. I was a nice distraction to keep the monster busy so he would not bother her.
So now all my adjectives are gone. I do not know what box I fit in. Worse, I do not know which box the other people put me in.
So I start over. But I am so old. And so tired.
I much prefer my old box. It was safe. Familiar.
I need to build my own box, but I have no idea how to begin.
So I sit, and hope the box will settle over me.
Or kill me.
1) chapel perilous.
2) go back to the Second Circuit (feel free to ask what that means if you haven't come across the Leary/RAW model yet), and understand that you are HERE, and you are NOW. Your understanding to your narrative may have changed, but you are that same you were prior to revelation.
3) you have found your map has nothing to do with your territory. That's ok. Happens all the time. In your case it's kind of all-at-once, but it's not unusual.
4) please, please, please consider submitting this to the Bitter Tea project.
I second the request to submit it to the Bitter Tea project!
Also, wanna tell you that I've been there, I had a pretty serious crisis about two years ago and went back in for therapy and then revised my life and am headed in a completely different direction. I was terrified because I felt like I had to dismantle myself and I was afraid that I would lose my identity, but instead what happened is that I put myself back together without the bad bricks and I'm the same me, but with better structural integrity.
I have no idea how old you are but I'm getting up there myself and having a renewed me and a new direction in life has been awesome... scary, but awesome, and thrilling, and validating!
If you have bad PTSD don't do too much delving without some kind of trained support. You need to do the delving, but don't do it alone.
I do have a therapist, which I think is how I managed to peel away enough layers to get to this point.
I'm just having a hard time being in the world right now. I'm vacillating between fearing that others can see I am not what I was and feeling they are laughing at me because I took so long to realize what everyone else seems to have already known.
It is all fresh wound stuff, and I will find my footing eventually. If only this life thing came with a user's manual.
Quote from: Jez on July 23, 2013, 09:17:23 PM
If only this life thing came with a user's manual.
Even if it did, most either wouldn't read it or take so long trying to figure it out as to make the manual pointless.
Manual would be outlawed by right-thinking Americans.
Well...our personality is a social construct.
...So, yeah, when this crap surfaces (surprise! guess what happened to YOU! ) It tends to turn our model of self painfully inside out.
...It's necessary though.
...Kind of like reincarnating when you're still alive, you know?
...or disemboweling yourself-I've also used that metaphor.
...Things I've learned?
A lot of the pain isn't current, it's canned? If that makes any sense.
Feeling your feelings to their depths is what allows them to change.
Grief is important. LOTS of grief.
...Someone pointed out to me today I am probably grieving the idea that someone was coming to save me.
The end of that hope.
...Nobody will ever come to save me.
We have to save ourselves, I think.
BTW...40's right? This stuff seems to come floating up in a very intense way between 35-45 a lot of the time.
Not sure why, probably strong enough not to self-destruct for the first time at that age...
My friend who was going through it at 28 succeeded in offing himself back in May. :(
But your mileage may vary.
I'm not really that old. I'm just 32. I have this unrealistic notion that everyone who is not me had their identities all sorted by the time puberty was over.
Quote from: Jez on July 24, 2013, 05:22:59 AM
I'm not really that old. I'm just 32. I have this unrealistic notion that everyone who is not me had their identities all sorted by the time puberty was over.
Not everyone, just a lot of them. I refer to those people as "the boring ones"
Well, for anyone with insight and some capacity for reflection, and a sprinkling of intellect beyond that of a mindless drone, it's a never-ending process.
Quote from: The Johnny on July 24, 2013, 08:33:07 AM
Well, for anyone with insight and some capacity for reflection, and a sprinkling of intellect beyond that of a mindless drone, it's a never-ending process.
This! More than once I've referred to my entire personality as a work in progress. I've found most people don't approach being human in this way, they change but its something that happens to them, gradually, over time. A result of external influence, rather than something they do.
There's a lot of dumb fucking memes around that seem to reinforce this. "Be yourself", "leopard can't change it's spots", etc... This is bullshit. The "you" that can't be changed is what Crowley referred to as "Hadit" - the infinitely small point. Everything else, the whole rest of the psyche, is fucking playdough.
Word of warning, tho, be careful. If you take it far enough, it's quite possible to turn yourself into the biggest asshole on the planet and that's my fucking job :argh!:
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on July 24, 2013, 09:07:19 AM
Quote from: The Johnny on July 24, 2013, 08:33:07 AM
Well, for anyone with insight and some capacity for reflection, and a sprinkling of intellect beyond that of a mindless drone, it's a never-ending process.
This! More than once I've referred to my entire personality as a work in progress. I've found most people don't approach being human in this way, they change but its something that happens to them, gradually, over time. A result of external influence, rather than something they do.
There's a lot of dumb fucking memes around that seem to reinforce this. "Be yourself", "leopard can't change it's spots", etc... This is bullshit. The "you" that can't be changed is what Crowley referred to as "Hadit" - the infinitely small point. Everything else, the whole rest of the psyche, is fucking playdough.
Word of warning, tho, be careful. If you take it far enough, it's quite possible to turn yourself into the biggest asshole on the planet and that's my fucking job :argh!:
(http://snarkysnatch.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/asshole-badge.jpg?w=430)
Spot on, both of you...though I'd add that it;s not easy to change ingrained habits...well, at first.
There's also potential to cause hilarious amounts of damage. Imagine you're not working with a head but a car. What happens to engine performance and ride comfort if you connect the fuel line to the battery terminals?
Out of the box, the human mind is a fucked up mish-mash of circuitry but it kinda works. Sometimes things that seem like obvious improvements will have a cascade effect on areas that don't even seem related and cause anything from strange side-effects to total meltdown.
So have fun but be careful. Having a professional on-call is probably a good idea.
Quote from: hylierandom, A.D.D. on July 24, 2013, 12:18:00 AM
...Nobody will ever come to save me.
We have to save ourselves, I think.
i second that - we can be helped but we have to save ourselves. And exactly this:
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on July 24, 2013, 09:07:19 AM
Quote from: The Johnny on July 24, 2013, 08:33:07 AM
Well, for anyone with insight and some capacity for reflection, and a sprinkling of intellect beyond that of a mindless drone, it's a never-ending process.
This! More than once I've referred to my entire personality as a work in progress. I've found most people don't approach being human in this way, they change but its something that happens to them, gradually, over time. A result of external influence, rather than something they do.
There's a lot of dumb fucking memes around that seem to reinforce this. "Be yourself", "leopard can't change it's spots", etc... This is bullshit. The "you" that can't be changed is what Crowley referred to as "Hadit" - the infinitely small point. Everything else, the whole rest of the psyche, is fucking playdough.
Word of warning, tho, be careful. If you take it far enough, it's quite possible to turn yourself into the biggest asshole on the planet and that's my fucking job :argh!:
i have the impression, or i like to have the impression, that pd has helped to save me when i needed. or did it confirm what i thought i have to do to save me? Laugh at myself, and don't take the world so seriously.
Then again, i haven't had any serious traumas, so what do i know. i still have lots of missing memories and missing periods in my life. was that just a boring time or am i in for some not so fun time? i'll find out i guess. or not.
All the best for you Jez, and i'm sorry i haven't got good advice to give, but this internet "i hear you"..
You've all been very helpful. I realize I have a rare opportunity to decide who I am while shredding the baggage of who I was.
This board has been really instrumental for me in restructuring my self and new direction. If I ever give a TED talk, I'm gonna give a shoutout to PeeDee. Maybe we need a gang sign.
From something i coincidentally re-read today:
There is in our reflection an anomalous alliance, but unavoidable, between the question for the singular characteristics, the self-world of every man and the enigma of the force that binds us to others and the world. That question for identity adquires a lot of faces; memory, augury, sleepiness and wishes, the conscience of one's own thoughts and the weirdness of inclinations that we suppose a foreign origin, the nostalgy of the own body, forever lost and which identity seems to speak of territories that surpass the margins of our perspective.
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The question for the identity comes sometimes from the uncommon aspiration to model oneself: be it according to other figures, other profiles, other destinies, or the impulses of a story that is overimplied, inscribed in the margins of a memory disseminated in body and language.
But inevitably, the interrogation for identity confronts the impossibility to pry unto oneself to comprehend everything, and condemns it to stay in an uncertain periphery of the consciousness of self, shaken by the contradictions between exaltation and fright, in the phantom of oneself. Our figure is offered to our own sight, as if it was ripped from the daily silence and the necessary profile of multiple masks, heterogeneous, discordant and conjuncted with the ones we invest in and give form to our physonomies. Not less disconcerting is the image of ourselves that reveals obliquely the attachment to the world, others, to objects; it is not less opaque what is insinuated of our own identity the passions and deliriums with which we poblate the apparent indifference of our daily lives, the apparent naturality of our rituals. From those questions without answers the unmeasurables masks of the others do not escape. The permanent abandonment and reiteration of faces that transit from a will of absence to the exaltation of the grotesque.
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Reflecting and acting over oneself seems inherent to the confrontation of man with its own image, with its own finitude, with the always present regimen of decay and stolen impulses of a body condemned to experience of its own impossibility, of the caducity of body and passion, of the limits of remembering and the restrictions of the imagination of the future, of the getting-losts-in-time. The certainty of identity is condemned to oscilate between the daily testimony of the conflict between necessity of inteligibility of oneself and the others and the eclipse and fatigue of capacity. The tantrums of the perception of oneself, of others, the environment, conjugate with the sensation of pleasure that comes from a moment of aprehension of the sense, that comes from the view of the subject over itself. Non withstanding, the reflection over itself, lacks a a proper history, of a origin or a recognizable horizon. Reflection, thinking about the world, has been also intrinsically to think about itself; acting over the world has been since the first instant to act simultaneously over oneself and, like an equivocal game and tortured of truncated analogies and misleading images, acting over oneself and over the categories and figures of the own identity has been a stubborn and sometimes unconfessed way to act over the world.
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The history of the tensions that give form to the figure of the own identity extend way beyond that of any will and power of the memory.