Regulation verse Dysregulation

Like night and day. You can not imagine a more viscerally and mentally different experience. Throughout my days I pass back and forth between regulation and dysregulation. Some days there's more regulation, while some days more dysreglation.

But this term doesn't mean much, does it? It sounds very general. What kind of experience does regulation and dysregulation describe? What sort of emotions are felts? What is the "affect" state in the body felt like? What is time experienced as? And how do you feel with change of pace? How does being worked upon by emotions feel like opposed to a dissociated hyperaware conscious state?

All these questions revolve about the issue of trauma. Dysregulation and regulation refer to mental responses to bodily viscera. If one feels bad, how does one handle it? If one is able to suppress negative feeling and focus awareness on something feel-good, then you are termed "regulated". If, conversely, you find yourself overwhelmed by visceral experience and unable to mentally handle these feelings, you are dysregulated. These are helpful terms for both clinician and client because they are general. 

Our emotions organize our thoughts. Our emotions have a mind of their own. Recent studies in interpersonal psychology has shown that human relationships regulate our emotional states. When people communicate, they have this innate drive to "co-regulate" with the other person. We do all sorts of things unconsciously to carry out these behaviors. In fact, the "social engagement system", as it is called by Stephen Porges, is able to carry out exquisitely nuanced shifts in response to external changes in communication. When two people are oriented toward "positive communication" i.e a state where both people are regulated, their nervous systems literally organize a sweet sounding melody between the two of them. Subtle changes induce responses that support effective social engagement.

What does this experience feel like, viscerally? Generally, a state of calmness. Your body feels light, muscles are relaxed and loose, voice carries bass, breathing is long and deep. These are often in the "background" of your awareness, even though it is the feeling state itself which facilitates connection to "thoughts of interest" to the self and ultimately positive social engagement.

The power of intersubjective field is infectious. When you're around people who are experiencing a laugh, it seems easier to physically feel it. As if their "energy" has begun to regulate my feelings, emotions and thoughts. I engage and communicate considering this behavior run of the mill, to mundane to take particularly seriously. But it is quite impressive beneath the surface.

Human emotionality operates in a very dynamic landscape. The directions are feeling "good" and feeling "bad". Innumerable subtypes exist within and between the directions. But there is always a general "thrust" either 'this way' or 'that way'. What is this thrust?

Of course, people can be dangerously disorganized people, bad people even, and still be emotionally "regulated" in some particular way. What is the hallmark of dysregulation? Dissociation. If you chronically dissociate, you exhibit a present inability to regulate emotional feelings. You are then a) chronically tense, or b) emotionally withdrawn. Dissociation is the mammalian response to painful experiences which can't be emotionally integrated; it both endangers consciousness - can drive it insane, but more importantly saps bodily energy. The dorsal tract of the vagus nerve regulates this autonomic metabolic response to severe levels of stress. If it goes too high, it initiates conscious withdrawal from the body by raising heart rate and releases endogenous opiates. This is the "numbness" feeling that dissociation causes. It distracts and demotivates consciousness from experiencing emotions.

When you're dissociated, the basic "thrust" of energy is towards conservation. Conversely, when you're embodied, in the emotional subjective present, you are living in the moment, in the flow of time. Consciousness is regulated by expansive feelings which enter and exit consciousness with little conscious input. Compared to a dissociated state, embodied awareness feels strange.

When you can't hear yourself think in a loud room, what do you do? You go to go to a quiet place. This is what dissociation feels like relative to a continuous flow of emotion. When you're embodied, all you "hear" is the "sound from without" i.e. the intense visceral feelings emotion produces. Dissociation conversely is like a quiet room. You feel your individuality more clearly, (albeit, it's deepest appearance in expression is pathologically repressed) you feel a heightened awareness of thoughts; you feel like your power of choice and deliberation, and your ability to become aware of all sorts of basic aspects of experience - the tone voice produces, changes in facial expression, etc in eery detail. I believe the pinpoint of deliberative self, the "thinker" is made extra aware of it's existence when you're dissociated. Without emotions to preoccupy you, become extra aware of yourself.

When were in the "flow" of things, were happy, relaxed, and at peace. Only when we resist the flow, only when we reject, resent, hate, do we experience the "tensions" of the world. If someone stays in this state long enough, or if he experiences a shock trauma, his body physically "contains" the undischarged, tense and dysregulated energy within it's neural network.

Insight

The experience of "toxic shame" is a gut cognitive reaction to unstable emotional feeling.

Some Mental Notes

-Amplitude of physiological rhythms (indicated by RSA indexes) reveals ANS stress activity. If amplitude is great, the organism experiences homeostasis. If amplitude is small and restricted, organism is having trouble experiencing homeostasis and is chronically stressed

- Ways to Combat Stress: Seek to experience i.e. emotionally integrate positive external events. Such stimuli heal the body. Physiological dysregulation is marked by low amplitude in physiological rhythms. This means poor responsivity to outside events. Any SNS activation is healing; it takes the body out of its shock/dissociation by releasing undischarged energy. SNS activation subserves homeostasis. Following emotional arousal, PNS tone is normalized.

Quotes from The Polyvagal Theory:

 pg. 115

"The two tiered model is hierarchical with priority given to the demands of the second tier. However, without the first tier functioning adequately and regulating homeostasis to maximize life support processes such as digestion, oxygenation, thermoregulation, and perfusion, there would be no "energy" resources available for second tier functions."

pg. 115-116

"Behavior is metabolically costly. For example, behaviors such as fight or flight responses often require massive and instantaneous increases in metabolic output.To successfully accomplish tasks of engagement and disengagement with the environment, the nervous system must divert energy resources from visceral homeostasis (e.g. smooth muscle) to observable behaviors (e.g striate muscle) that deal directly with the environment. The regulation of the vagal brake provides an index of this shift in resources. By instantaneously releasing the vagal brake, cardiac output increases to support the metabolic demands required by the behavior. Thus, the priority of the two tiered system subjugates the homeostatic needs in favor of the immediate environmental demands."

pg. 149

"Excessive sympathetic activity reflects a deviation from normal homeostatic autonomic function, which then elicits vagal activity to self-regulate and return the autonomic state to homeostasis. In individuals with high vagal tone and appropriate vagal regulation capacities, the autonomic nervous system has the capacity to react (i.e appropriate reactivity and expressivity) and to return rapidly to homeostasis (i.e. self regulation and self soothing)"

pg. 171

"Thus cortical regulation of the VVC [ventral vagal complex] requires the setting to be perceived as safe. The perception of safety, or at least, the lack of fight or flight responses, would provide a neurophysiological state in which cortical regulation of medullary nuclei could promote proximity and increase the probability of reproductive behaviors."

pg. 244

"It has been speculated that PTSD may be a consequence of triggering the unmyelinated vagus as a primitive defense system, often in inescapable contexts, when mobilization defensive strategies cannot be employed. In this state a lower brainstem system, more frequently employed by reptiles, is regulated peripheral physiology. This system reduces oxygenated blood flow to the brain and leads to fainting and experiences of dissociation. It is possible that a lower threshold to mobilize and a hypervigilance for danger might have potential survival consequences in this situation. Thus, from an adaptive perspective, the lower threshold to mobilize would protect the individual from recruiting this primitive shutdown circuit."

pg. 260

"In contrast, in a physiological state characterized by an engaged myelinated vagus, sympathetic and hypthalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity are dampened, and that physiological state is experienced as calm. Intrusive stimuli that previously would have triggered aggressive behaviors when the vagal activity is  withdrawn will now result in a dampened reaction. Accompanying this change in physiological state are options to further dampen reactivity through social interactions."

pg. 267

"For example, pro-social behaviors cue others that the environment is safe. Safe environments signal the individual to dispense with the hyper-vigilance required to detect danger and allows this precautionary strategy to be replaced with social interactions that further calm and lead to close proximity and physical contact."

Quotes from "The Healing power of Emotion"

 pg. 116

"The developmental achievement of a sense of self that is simultaneously fluid and robust depends on how well the capacity for affect regulation and affect competency hs been achieved. When these early patterns of interpersonal interaction are relatively successful, they create a stable foundation for relational affect regulation that is intonalized as nonverbal and unconscious. Thus, successful negotiation of interpersonal transactions at increasingly higher levels of self development and interpersonal maturity is made possible. (Bromberg, 2006, pg. 32)

pg.127

"In terms of regulation theory, defense mechanisms are forms of emotional regulation strategies for avoiding, minimizing, or converting affects that are too difficult to tolerate. treatment, especially of early forming secure psychopathologies, must attend not only to conscious dysregulated affects but also to the early forming defense that protects patients from consciously experiencing overwhelming painful negative affects - dissociation. This bottom-line defense thus represents the major counter-force to the emotional - motivational aspects of the change process in psychotherapy."

Useful Quotes

Studies have shown that throughout our lives, repeated new stimuli trigger genes to transcribe and translate new proteins that stimulate the growth of new synapses - pg 106, healing developmental trauma

Coming To

A part of me feels like I've just woken up from being dead for the past 12 years.

I know sometimes we might "say" something like this, but we may not actually be experiencing that statement in a factual way; there is nothing existentially profound about the experience. I have been guilty of this in the past; language, in its very nature, is very easy to distort. But here, I do not exaggerate. Something trenchantly episodic is happening to me. Two things have happened, and they occurred almost simultaneously.

First, I went on a different drug. I began the new regiment a month ago, went down 75mg of Effexorto 37.5 mg, and have just recently come off the drug altogether. I also have gone on 10 mgs of Cipralex . And second, I have recently begun reading "Healing Developmental Trauma: how early trauma affects self-regulation, self image, and the capacity for relationship" which offers frankly astonishing clarity into the experiences of someone who has suffered developmental trauma. From the very beginning, the book captures the essence of developmental trauma by reflecting on its opposite: "This is a book about restoring connection. It is the experience of being in connection that fulfills the longing we have to feel fully alive". Fully Alive. Those two words feel like a distant memory to me. There was a time where every time I acted, I was fueled by some nebulous impulse to feel alive. Its a basic spark. And this spark facilitates connection. It is the docking bay for embodied experience.

I have begun to feel myself more fully - more intently - and it is a blend of the blissfully nostalgic, on the good side, and a slight terror, on the bad side. When I say terror, I mean it; It's a little astonishing - in a terrible way - to realize how far you are from normal human experiencing. I remember it. I have not forgotten it, thank God. But being back there, being able to maintain it for a few good days straight, it felt both liberating, and scary.

I have woken up to myself because I didn't even realize I was asleep. How many years did I spend wasting away, masturbating in front of a computer, playing video games, watching TV, or going to play Basketball. And how many times was this experienced with strain? With some baseline anxiety, always revolving around the FEAR of not being able to connect; not even realizing that the sense of inability derived from a serious emotional trauma, which had veritably stunned me from experiencing my own reality in an expansive and exciting way. HOW MANY YEARS!!!

I am angry about that loss. I am angry that I have experienced this. And yet, I am felicitously aware of my ability to transcend this problem. I don't know how else to describe it. A few strange things have happened in the past that may have primed me to this perspective, but skepticism aside, this awareness I have that awareness itself transcends all semantics, all emotions - that I can govern myself the way a King would his kingdom, it is a powerful sense; it doesn't seem to be affected by good or bad emotions, which is to say, even if I've had a few disheartening experiences, the "King" is there to offer comfort to his counselors (my mind...) keeping them from further hurting themselves by brooding over destructive matters.

When I think what I've had to go through to get to this moment, to get to an awareness that I have right now. It makes realize how much I have to be proud of. I always had this awareness in me. It was just concealed, clouded by the severities of external experiences; bullying, straining to speak, the myriad anxieties, fears, phobias...the 3 weeks where I didn't sleep and the horror that that brought into my life.

This awareness is the product of experience, but is also aided by the thousands of hours of reading I have done, consuming books in religion, philosophy, history, sciences, and psychology. I have a sophisticated worldview - and I try to say this with all modesty. I say it only with a sense of amazement at my own personal growth; and what I feel is intense compassion for myself - for what I have had to suffer for a dozen years.

I can barely speak of this without contemplating philosophical and theological questions. I wouldn't even be asking such questions - living in such a refined zone of mind - if it weren't for this life circumstance..... Is my compassion for my self sufficient? Or should I proceed further, and assume some ontological predicate for my experience of compassion for myself. Not all people go this deeply, but I can't quite help it. I feel gratitude. And because I feel it, I want to ask WHY I EXPERIENCE it. Of course, asking why does not mean why is begging to be asked. You either feel it is important, or you don't. And if you do, it does not necessarily add anything "more" to your spiritual status. It's a personal decision without moral urgency.

My philosophy has moved over the years from ultra Orthodox conservative, to a middle of the road attitude. It's been influenced partly by my readings of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Steven Pinkers "The Better Angels of our Nature" and other books I can't now recall. My earlier belief that homosexuality was abominable and deserved to be outlawed became replaced by a more liberal understanding, albeit, one sprinkled with subtly. Politically, and emotionally, I feel for homosexuals. My cousin is gay, and he is probably one of the kindest people that I know. However, I have this ongoing fascination with a metaphysics which posits physical reality as indicating ontological laws about reality. For example: man and woman represent cosmic opposites, counterpoles. Yin and Yang; God and earth; philosophically, we could reduce it to the non-deterministic and the deterministic. The semen of potentiality becoming a fixed reality. In any case, my view is closely related to Hal Harzogs concept of the "troubled middle". One part of me wants to entertain the option that God may exist and may indicate proper sexual behavior through patterns he projects into nature; while another, more practical part, can't allow that perspective to distract me from the real human harms that can come from holding so tightly to a perspective, which, in practicable historical terms, is no more viable to implement than Islamic Sharia law in the 2nd decade of the 21st century.

Relinquishing Control

Watching and listening to myself as I speak obscures the fact that I am strenuously "trying" to "control" the act itself.

My brother came home. I began speaking with him; I found myself letting myself 'follow' the initiating thought that then became voice; it felt embodied; it felt "fast", it felt enjoyable, but most of all, it felt liberating. It's as if I let the dog off it's leash - the prying and obsessive mind took a break from torturing itself with the thought of tension; it took a backseat. It calmed down, and said "you take the reign".

But what is the reign? What, or who, am I referring to? It's bizarre. Both are me. The side that anxiously intends and attends while speaking and the part that pursues it's thoughts without restraint. It's difficult to put it into words what the difference is, but Ill try. The former, aberrant state ruminates about the subject I want to talk about. I put myself in opposition to it, and in that opposition, I build tension. This tension conflates conscious awareness, causing my self to "intend" to speak, and then to "attend" to my speech, all the while anxiously flexing my vocal chords while I'm listening. The healthy and normal self simply avoids all this; I empty my mind - I try to keep it as free from those types of thoughts as possible. When I do speak, I deliberately remind myself to let the speech flow on it's own. This allows me to stay with the emotion - a feeling that cannot be cognized. Feeling and thinking are different states, and it's a paradox that we can think, cognize, and yet be fully "embodied" and feeling ourselves in the moment; its as if feeling were the medium that conceptual awareness passes through.

It feels incredibly good to feel this way, to loosen up my hold on speaking; to let the words pour out without my anxiety about "how i sound" even entering my flow of thought. Liberating. Peaceful. I feel better, sleep better, read better. The only thought I can think when I feel this way is..."Thank God".

So I saw the Psychitriast Today

My first ever psychiatrist appoint. 12 years too late, but better late than never, as they say!

We talked about my situation, my diagnosis of PTSD; he suggested (perhaps, due to some miscommunication) that my social difficulties reminded him of Asperger Syndrome. But, as I pointed out, Aspergers is developmental. I had a pretty normal social life up until age 12 - the age that my mother went through her 4 year long major depression. Once we got the Asperger suggestion aside, we got down to business.

He's got me going down from 75mg of Venlafaxine (effexor) to 37.5 mg; and with it, I'll be taking 10mg of Cipralex. My first ever SSRI.

Now I get to "enjoy" the transition period off a drug that carries with it a painful "discontinuation syndrome", to another drug with a reputation for also being difficult to get off of. Happy happy joy joy.  That's the bad news. The good news is, this drug may be able to help improve my mood, and I'm hoping for it. I'm orienting myself in as positive a way as I can. It'll begins with how we situate ourselves.

I will have to be very careful in the next few weeks regulating my thoughts to the tensions that getting off one medication and going on another might create. I am going to have to keep focused on the goal: to maintain an awareness of my body - my emotions.

Previous entries, particularly the one before the last (sloppily written) entry, have really helped orient me. But reading it is more difficult than it first appears. I can't simply "skim" it. I have to put myself into the words. This means meditating upon them, to get into the mind frame that caused me to make these distinctions. At first, I didn't quite appreciate this, but as I returned to the words, I realized that I needed to better focus myself. My present "incomprehension" is due to the current feeling I'm experiencing. I need to quiet any feelings, meditate on the words, and by doing so, will bring myself back into the proper perspective.

Revisiting the Past

Marijuana can really help bring into focus things you wouldn't usually think. Or perhaps, being stoned makes reality more subjectively significant? Whatever the case, I had an epiphany.

I called this post "revisiting the past" because thats where all my problems started. Last week, my therapist emailed me and suggested that I "think about the adolescent Mike and how unsafe he felt, and using your active imagination and visualization to connect with him and work to make him feel safe?". The insight that I had was already formed 4 or 5 days ago. My last entry really set the tone for this insight. Basically, the crux of my problem is my attitude. What do I mean by attitude? It mean many things. Attitudes are our subjective orientation in life. It creates what is and isn't possible for us. My earlier attitude basically said "I can't do it. I have to try to do it", this was the basic narrative repeated by my subconscious and conformed to consciously. In essence, I have been pretending. When I try to "aim" for a particular sound while I'm speaking, I'm pretending. What kind of preconscious orientation is that? Who thinks this way before they speak - and if they did think that way, wouldn't it be entirely logical for them to feel uncomfortable during the act of speech? To be acutely aware? To reenforce the underlying obsession with voice? I'm basically setting myself up. I create the internal conditions before I actually do it. I am superficializing what it means to be yourself.

The way to undo all this degenerate thinking is to ask the right question. For so long I have been asking "how do I speak"? Now, I am no longer asking. That is the answer to the ultimate "right question": the question posed by every moment that we live; what do I like? What do I find enjoyable? What do I believe in? These are the questions that precede normal emotional development. Everyone goes through it. It begins so early, that we never really notice that we are constantly oriented to life in this way. Emotions come to us, and our minds reply; something catches our awareness, and we engage the reality. There is a type of fishing to this behavior. We are quiet - in a parasympathetic nervous state - until a "fish" or object, catches our awareness. And then we throw out our line and go after that fish. We enter the flow of life. What is the flow of life? It is that endless torrent of emotions which fly in and out of us.

I am revisiting my past, revisiting the point where Mike didn't develop properly. When Mike retreated from the world, and from himself. And I am going to ask him: Why did you retreat? Why were you afraid?

Grown up Mike (i.e Me) will tell 13 year old Mike that feeling yourself feels good! It's ok to feel good emotions. Not just that, but you have as much right as anyone else to feel them - and to not care what anyone else has to think or say about it. 

I remember a time when I enjoyed the element of risk involved in socializing. That if someone didn't like me, I thought to myself, "who cares!" There was an element of rebellion in that. This "rebellion" seems to be at the heart of the developmental process. This is the process of individuation. From feeling comfortable and confident being "you". Feeling what you feel and saying what you want to say without any anxiety. There is a "I will be ME and if you don't like it you can go fuck yourself" quality to it all. It is arrogant, in a way. But it is a necessary arrogance. Or maybe "arrogance" is the wrong word? Or perhaps what I call "arrogance" another person would call "confidence"? It's funny. I used to abhor the way some theologians and philosophers described the usefulness of Satan's rebellion against God. But now I see it is an apposite metaphor referring to our own rebellion against the collective - from being 'subject' to the expectations of others. Perhaps, the evolution of the cosmos - both constitutively and historically - is the archetype for this development. From the universal core - which Kabbalah would call "Ein Sof" - comes Malkuth, the "kingdom", with it's multitudinous forms and differences. And historically, we go from the amorphous glob of the Big Bang, to the myriad worlds that spawned from it. 

Each of us reflects this process in history. Each of us are a segment in this process.

So I feel myself at that point in time, and understand where I went wrong. I will now go back into that self - emotionally - I am there right now - and renew the process of individuation. I need to "feel" myself, to be excited at the prospect of socializing, and to experience myself as not "pretending" but as authentically being the true Michael. Its surprising how powerful a rational assessment of any situation can help reduce feelings of anxiety, and bring you back into an awareness of your self and your emotions.
 

A Cognitive Description

This is what I'm thinking while I speak:

I situate myself to my speech in too focused and conscious a manner. An idea enters my mind; for most people, this idea enters instantaneously. There isn't a pause to preconceptualize before they actually do it. Rather, their focus seems to be on the the feeling to speak. The object of their thought is the obvious motivator, but it is the feeling which sets the perimeters of their attention.

When I speak, I immediately put myself into hyper-focus with the object of my thought. I find myself tensely involved with the thought: it stays in my mind too long, I'm thinking too deeply about it. There is no instantaneous sense of desire to speak-speak, which seems to occur simultaneously in a normally functioning mind.

When I do speak well, I find things happening more swiftly, less tensely; I feel pulled by the current of the moment. I am positively situated to the things I want to say: I do not consider a possible negative response from the person I'm speaking with. Rather, it feels like I'm just sharing myself and my current interest with another person.

This feels like a "system 1" type thinking. It is automatic - it isn't preceded by brooding, and then a hyper attention to the performance of my speaking. Rather, it's preceded by a simple attentiveness to my current interests. And the transition from these interests to speaking is not met or undermined by worries or concerns. The transition is smooth, swift, and natural.

As someone who has spent so many years understanding and constructing his reality around the tension he experiences while speaking, it can be startling how different my usual state is from these states. It's a mixture of amazement, encouragement, and utter horror. How can I be so removed from the normal human condition? But this is the effect trauma can have on the mind. It's slows things down; emotion implies motion. Trauma is the absence of forward motion feelings. Usual states are either a bland dullness, also called hypo-emotionality, or anxiety. Both these feelings hyper inflate conscious awareness, or "system 2" thinking.

A big part of my recovery involves my becoming more comfortable with this movement in living. Not having fears and obsessions interrupt my act of speaking feels like something is missing. It's bizarre. Familiarity breeds contempt they say. Not always. Oftentimes, familiarity breeds comfort, and well, familiarity. It's safe and easy living with what you know and are comfortable with. Going outside whats familiar, although good on one level (the joy of feeling good) can also strike you as "too good to be true". This "too good to be true" feeling is natural, obviously. It's a way of being that I'm not used to. I need to constantly remind myself to stay in this state, to embrace this state, and understand that living is supposed to happen in this state.

Some More Insights

My issue with my voice is imaginary - a creation of my tense body. What I do is, I feel tense, and begin to think tense. While I'm speaking, instead of just letting the process work on its own, I interfere, I maintain that sense of tension throughout the process of speaking.

Thoughts that make me anxious: "I'm not going to be able to get out of this situation. Sometimes, the tension sticks to me like glue. Will I ever get better? Will I ever achieve a level of comfort where  others can enjoy and seek my company?"

Thoughts which make me feel better: "practice makes [almost] perfect. I need to continue thinking positively about myself. This is the only possible way that I can promote relief, relaxation and restoration."

Sometimes, these two ideas battle inside my mind. My pessimistic side believes I am always going to project "some" level of tension beneath my voice. It'll be enough to turn people off from me. My positive, undoubtedly knowing better, knows that I have spoken plenty of times where I objectively didn't experience or afterwards notice any type of dis-ease. I notice I feel this way best when I am simply totally involved in the subject I'm speaking about. I'm not conscious of any issue of ease, or tension, or insecurity; There also isn't much of a sense of "trying". Trying itself is a paradoxical word. When I speak, obviously, I made an effort to speak. I "tried". But trying can also mean trying too hard, and this, I know, I do far too often. Trying to hard seems to be trying in a state of cognitive tension. Particularly a state that watches and observes itself as it tries to experience itself do well.

I bought a few books related to Yoga and trauma. I think feeling myself, feeling good, is the first and most necessary step towards healing. Any sympathetic nervous response, such as "hey, what are yuo doing!", which just bursts out of my mouth when I see someone going through my wallet, is first preceded by a state of cognitive ease. The ease sets up and allows a smooth transition to sympathetic arousal.

Yoga will just be one of many different tools that will help me feel more relaxed, less involved in tense apprehensive thought patterns "how will I say this", that usually occurs before I speak, thereby invoking the tension into my act of speech. 

A Summary of My Cognitive Toolkit

* The door to happiness opens outward; a quote by Soren Kierkegaard, but explored more deeply in the psychology and philosophy of Viktor Frankl. Frankl wrote: "for the true man, however, is not concerned about some condition in his soul but about objects in the world; he is primarily ordered and directed to them, and it is only the neurotic man who is no longer, as is the normal man, objectively oriented; rather he, the neurotic, is primarily interested in His own subjective condition."

* Depreciate the obsession. I got this idea from the book  "Overcoming obsessive thoughts" by
PhD's Christine Purdon and David Clark.

* Feeling yourself. This has been a topic of my recent posts. The psychologist Alan Fogel used the term "embodied self awareness" to differentiate it from the more "cerebral conceptual self awareness". I use it as a basic way to understand my problem, as the diagram below demonstrates. My aberrant thinking pathway relies on an overly conceptually self aware mind. When I'm feeling good, I find myself "propelled" by something other than a preconceptualization. I don't anticipate myself prior to the act. Instead, emotion - free and liberated - enters in and out of me without my noticing its sudden appearance. 

* Turn your mind to positive thoughts. This is the crux of UCLA professor of psychiatry Jeffrey Schwartz philosophy for dealing with obsessive thinking and behavior. 

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These are the 4 basic techniques I can rely on in coping with my problem. In addition to this, I can add some activities that promote embodied self awareness. They include:

* Working Out
* Basketball
* Yoga
* A healthy diet
* Healthy and consistent sleeping patterns

Then of course there is the necessary cognitive-behavioral techniques. I can't return to normal without actually DOING something different from what I currently do. Just thinking about this causes anxiety in me. Where will I begin? What if I feel tense and end up experiencing horrible public shame? Negotiating with these feelings is not easy, but I realize I have to deal with them and learn to control them. 

* Answering the phone when it rings. It amazes me how desensitized I have become to the sound of a ringing phone. Sometimes I literally do not hear it - it isn't just an avoidant response - that of course is the basis of my desensitization; but since I've learned not to respond to the sound of a ringing phone, sometimes my conscious mind literally treats it as an unimportant stimulus. 

Before answering the phone, if I'm not feeling particularly confident, and thus feeling apprehensive, I need to invoke one of the 4 cognitive tools. 

* Speaking outside the house. Being outside is being outside my comfort zone. Only within the protected confines of my house do I feel comfortable enough to raise my voice. So, I need to exercise, at least on 3 different occasion when I take my dog for a walk, my voice, instead of a whistle or slap on my pants when calling her over. This is a GRUELING exercise. The level of inhibition I always feel has become systemically hardwired into my brain and body. I feel like I need to engineer it each and every time I do it. It doesn't come without me putting up a fight for it. Still, these little exercises will eventually add up. My tolerance will increase to the point where calling my dog or will feel hackneyed, instead of something I need to be anxious about.

* Holding the door open for people; smiling at people; and RESPONDING to people when they ask me something. This is the big kahuna of mental blocks. But eventually I will build the skills and confidence to do this as well. 


On a philosophical note, I'm fascinated by the two paradoxical sides of normal awareness. When emotions "pass through us", we take it for granted what is actually happening. Perhaps only someone who has become so inhibited, so hypo-emotional, can recognize the contours and aspects of this behavior. 

On one side is Frankl's platitude that when we speak, were generally oriented towards some "object" of our thought. Whether that be something we want to say, or some person we want to talk to - were oriented towards our environments - and not ourselves. The paradoxical effect of this outward orientation is it's putting us into direct contact with our emotions - with our bodies. We are "in our bodies" as psychologists put it. This is a tantalizing truth that most people can hardly conceptualize, since they're so accustomed to this reality.

My Thinking In a Diagram

The Up's and Down's

My previous entry described my euphoric rise in confidence. This entry will describe a frustration. I went to Winners sat around 7:30 with my sister. I went there with the intention to buy a few shirts - within my budget of $86 dollars. Walking in, I felt like myself. On the drive there, I had been cracking jokes with my sister, feeling comfortable and at ease, so walking in felt as a natural continuation of that feeling. I felt at east - with myself - in this congenitally difficult environment.

A few minutes, I begin to find myself feeling "oppressed" by this environment. It's something that always happens: an environmental "oppressor" induces self suppression. Now that I'm in the "real world", can I let my voice be heard? Can I feel as comfortable here as I did in the car? Or would fear take the wheel and suppression kick into gear? I couldn't resist the temptation; I succumbed, and began lowering my voice and keeping an eye on myself. This is the beginning of what could be called a psychological reversal, where the effort dispensed in one direction is slowly stripped away. The feeling of threat led to a need to suppress which led to a stronger feeling of threat, heightened self observation and an increased sense of insecurity.

By the time we reached the counter (my sister had been casually taking her time making her selection....women...) I was feeling a little uncomfortable. As I've mentioned before, "feeling" confident in your body can be differentiated from feeling confident with your voice. I am able to maintain an outer, albeit, surly looking outside demeanor (it doesn't help that I have a mean looking face; plus, I didn't shave, which only added to the meanness). Perhaps unconsciously I maintain this state because it is easier for me: it both "wards" off predators (those I feel threatened by), and it is low energy. When the woman at the counter said "Hi, how's your day", I couldn't match the enthusiasm. I'm often riddled with hypo emotional arousal - what some psychologists call "dissociation" (despite the ambiguous undertones). When someone expresses this sort of emotion to me, I'm afraid to match it. What if I fail - what If some "psychological leakage" occurs? Instead of a bold, manly voice passing through, my "try hard" feeling might be noticed. That would be the ultimate embarrassment. I'm still shocked - at 27 years old - that I'm still fearing the feelings of social shame I felt at 13 years old.

By the time I came home, I found myself trying more. This "trying" was me becoming, once again, conceptually self involved in the natural flow of emotional arousal. This can't happen. it's a contradiction. The conceptual self awareness robs me of natural emotional arousal. This is what I fear might occur while I speak in public. When I came back to the car, this is the feeling I had retained: an acute awareness of my self deficiency. I felt weak and torpid.

I'm trying to feel the feeling and not run away with it. Then, to bolster myself with a sense of self compassion.

Social Validation

It's amazing what a little bit of social validation can do for your confidence.

I had an appointment today with my therapist Debbie. I set my tablet clock for 10:00 Am. As I suspected (wanted, but also feared) I was sleeping past 10 AM - wake up time. By the time that my suspicion made its way to the front of my mind, it was 10:30. I rushed into my brothers room, poked him in the shoulder hard and yelled "I'm gonna be late, get up!". Being a good brother, he understood, brushed his teeth, and we left.

When we got there, i was 10 minutes late. It was a good appointment. I went in there feeling sure of myself: I don't know why in particular. Why am I even asking this question, I sometimes think to myself? But, enough of that for now. By the end of the appointment, Debbie said this was the best she had ever seen me. I'm compelled to believe her - I felt good, I felt embodied, I was following the lead of my emotions and being "present" to the words that I spoke. Sometimes I have this habit of being "entrained", not to my emotions, as would be normal and healthy, but to some preconceptualization. Only Carl Rogers, as far as I know, has put this in words that make the most sense to me. I don't have the quote with me, but its in his book "on becoming a person".

Life is a process. It's something a part in me wants to rebel against. It seems to imply a loss of personal agency - that I am nothing more than a puppet of emotions flowing through me. But, try I'd like to think differently, happiness, comfort, peace of mind, goes along with living in the "flow" of life. It's when were FEELING - and not thinking - a completely different ontological category - that we feel most like ourselves.

Debbies affirmation that I was doing good has filled me with a confidence that I haven't felt in awhile. Just imagine: how much can I accomplish in the world when I have 1, 2, 3 infinitum experiences to build from.

A sociopath interrupted my cognitive development, but at 27, I'm trying to find my way back to where I left off.

Loneliness

It's hard to really describe the loneliness I often feel. I feel extremely fortunate to have parents who still help and care for me, who don't ask for money and are willing to tolerate my situation, with love and patience. I am also truly blessed to have my brother and sister still - both living at home; one will be turning 30 this year (shes an ECE), although she'll probably be gone in a year or two, and the other is 22 (a sous chef). I'm in the middle, 27, turning 28.

I acknowledge all this goodness around me. It helps, it's humbling. But here I am, an intelligent, relatively good looking, athletically built 27 year old guy; what do you think I want out of life? I'm reading "Faitheist" by Chris Stedman. In it, he recounts his early homosexual romances, the feelings he felt, the longings he saw realized; he spoke of that moment where all your energies from previous conversations and experiences with that special someone finally build up, and then, something in you just impels you spontaneously into action: into a love infused kiss.

I'm not sure what he described in that passage is love itself (he was 18), but in any case, I found myself growing envious; when I became aware of my envy, I searched the reason why, and began to grow depressed. "I'm going to be in this situation my entire life", I get to thinking. It is my worst fear. There's such a painful contrast between the present monotony and my future hopes. What lies in between is the hard work of self transformation. What it entails in practice - so much practice - is years and years of repetition. How much more before I meet that special someone? How long must I wait in this interminable stasis?

There's a particular girl who works at the library who has the prototypical look which attracts guys like me. Research has shown that blonde haired, milky skinned, blue eyed girls come off to guys (especially introverts like myself) as more empathetic. It's true! I can vouch for this. At first, I didn't really pay attention to her. When I moved to my new house I was eager to keep myself focused on a new way of being: to only think, or rather, feel myself. Not knowing exactly what I was doing (only recently have I delved into the somatosensory psychological literature) I still knew that it was working. I was allowing myself to feel myself in public; a liberty I haven't experienced very much of in my recent life.

She's taller than me. I'm 5'7, she's probably 5'8, maybe 5'8 1/2. Not that big a difference, although when I was reading "The Better Angels of Our Nature" by Steven Pinker, when he pointed out the influence of height on social success, it got me a bit demoralized. It took me awhile to get over this fact and learn to see myself in a different context. Eventually, one day, I guess after observing me, smiling at me, she came up to me to talk about how nice and considerate I am for putting the chair I put my feet on while I read, away, back in it's original position. At first, when she came up to me, I felt accosted. The PTSD kicked in: "holy fuck, go away!" one part of me felt like saying, while another part was like "Hehehehe, she's talking to me! and what she's talking about -  a basic common decency - is clearly being used as a pretext to talk with me!". But I could barely let out a word. My breath shortens so badly in those situations, and speaking, if it does come out, will sound higher, forced, contorted, and over all, uncomfortable and self conscious like. It IS ironic. I can embody myself physically: I can demonstrate through physical movement, confidence and ease.This is clearly what made me attractive to her: the way I carried myself. But there's a roadblock in my mind, a massive, gigantic, insecurity, that obstructs me from being in myself while I speak. So she spoke, and I think I may have heard a bit of nervousness in her voice, and I didn't respond. I simply nodded my head in agreement, as if to say "Ok, go away", or, if she's a little more perceptive "I'm so insecure, this is painful for me". I also felt a little guilt for contributing to her feelings of anxiety while she spoke.

This girl is sometimes on my mind, but I've been forced to rethink what it all means for me. 1) I may be idolizing what I want in life, and because she's a fairly attractive girl, with features that suggest empathy, kindness, patience, sensitivity, gentleness, I am taken in. I am besieged into thinking that "she is the one". 2) I know nothing about her. I don't know what er personality is like.

3) I am so lonely. I long to fall in love. I feel so much love in me all the time, especially at night. And I realize the apex, apogee, and highest expression of this feeling occurs in the context of another: the beloved. I don't just want to love another person, but I want her to love me. I hear so much about the powers of love, what it can accomplish, what it can effect in the personality of the other. On a neurochemical level, the experience of love is an explosive blend of dopamine (and oxytocin). The surge from that experience fills the body full of this highly invigorating neurochemical.

Some people are skeptical of psychics. Could it exist? On a theoretical level, it's hard to say, although there are some compelling theories out there for how it might work. But for me, what pulls me in the direction towards belief is an experience I had at 19. My mom comes home, and she calls me upstairs and sits me down at the table. She's full of this nervous excitement - she wants to tell me something. As if knowing how to get me nervous, she tells me "now don't get nervous" - which gets me nervous. "Gay, the woman who owns the chocolate store, well me, your dad and your brother just came back from her house. She's psychic you know and she said some things. We were talking and all of a sudden she stops, and says 'donna, your father is here' making a wagging motion of her hand towards me, as if in imitation of him". Gay then goes on to describe my grandfather, even making a movement - some hand gesture up against the face - which apparently was supposed to be something only he and my grandmother knew. Gay then goes on to make predictions for 2 of my mothers children. 1) something big will happen to your daughter, but don't worry, she'll be fine. She'll have children  2) your son will get better, but he will have something serious happen to him at 21 where he might commit suicide. Be gentle and patient with him, and he'll get through it fine. 3) Your son will meet a girl, blonde, who will help him.

So you can understand my temptation to see all blonde woman and see in them "my savior". I've done it with this girl. No matter how hard I try to be rational about it - and this part is the one making the decisions - there's still a very strong emotional part in me that groans: it's her! it's her!. Who refuses to chuck away the hope that I will meet a blonde girl who will help me. Who will love me - titillate the dopamine in my brain - helping work through the morass that is socializing.

As for the predictions. Something serious DID happen to my sister. And she got through it fine, despite the odds. I did go through something serious at 21 (2 years after the prediction was made; I hadn't even been conscious of it then, so this was some self fulled prophecy) - the kundalini yoga thing, didn't sleep for 21 days. Contemplated suicide a few times, but was too fearful to do it. Ohhh, nothing will ever match the intensity and fear I experienced during those 3 hellish weeks. No sleep - at ALL. Nerves ravaging my body. Electric shocks from my SNS keeping my mind on continuous alert: if sleep was near, an electric shock pounded its way into consciousness. A monstrously frightening shock - waking me with a jolt. I can remember my panic stricken face.. I've gone off track by mentioning this, but some experiences are just so high on the richter scale, so unusual, so intense, that it is hard not to stop and pay notice to them. The body can be a torture chamber: the nervous system can be an electric chair. And you, scared, for your life and your sanity, just want to be helped. Can you blame those people who turn to God? It seems to be the only rational response in such situations.

Parts of her predictions have more or less panned out. The gesture she made to my mom was recognized by my grandmother, causing her to get emotional. I personally believe that psychic phenomena is legitimate. That it is shortsighted, premature, and needlessly skeptical, to deny the universal ubiquity of this phenomena.

Cognitive Liberation

Here's a concept: cognitive liberation: the ability to give yourself up to the subjective emotional present.

Being in the subjective emotional present is a state of flow - albeit, not the type described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - but a type where you're just feeling yourself. In the flow state described by Csikszentmihalyi, you're completely involved in something else. In this flow state, you're involved with your self - with passing emotions, drives and feelings. This state could be described in terms of an absence of self consciousness. Self consciousness is holding yourself as an object of conceptual self awareness. In this state, you hold two things in mind at the same time: your particular feelings - and how you look experiencing those feelings. It's as if you try to give form to the flow of emotion; this is the state we sometimes succumb to when we meet someone new, during an interview, or while public speaking.

Cognitive Liberation is the inner first person awareness of a "giving up" to the flow of emotion. What your giving up - if you're an obsessive or compulsively insecure person - is your temptation, or your interest, in watching yourself in the action of speaking. This sense of cognitive liberation enables the person to give up his egoistic tendencies, the part which wants to experience itself in a socially meaningful context. Cognitive Liberation is like a religious liberation. Just as in the latter, the person gives himself up to "another": to God, and to the elusive motions of the self.

I experienced this feeling just now while speaking to my brother. I find the hardest thing of all is the ability to commit to an embodied state of mind. In order to commit, there must first be cognitive liberation.

Getting into a state of cognitive liberation is subtle - mindbogglingly subtle. It involves planning without your conscious mind being too involved in the planning. It's like farming; you till the soil, plant the seeds: and then go away. Nature will take it from here. You go on your way, back to your house, eat with your family. If you want, you can check up on it - a need if you want to keep everything in order (self regulation), but for the most part, you aren't there watching the plants grow and bear fruit. Similarly, you can only guide yourself, implant an idea into mind, and experience yourself go with the flow. The temptation to be avoided is to watch yourself go in the flow. That is a bottleneck to the flow of emotions; that is enforcing form on the flow - unwittingly guiding yourself toward the source of the temptation (in my case, my insecurity and fear of social; embarrassment).

Innate Temperament

I've always been an unusual person. Not personality wise - in quirks of character. Not socially, although nowadays it would seem that I had social problems growing up. My strangeness is not so much emotional, as it is vital. I have what appears to me to be an incredibly sensitive nervous system.

I'm 6 years old. I'm playing video games - I finish the level. I am so elated, so excited, that a simple "hoorah" or "yay", or a soft feeling of satisfaction, does not suffice. No, my enjoyment - or excitement, to be more precise - need's to be physically burned off. I need to get up, run around, jump up - touch the ceiling maybe, or run up and down the stairs - a quirk which my family members never tired of deriving amusement from.

Fast forward to 27, and I am still essentially the same. I seem to process positive stimuli in a very thorough manner. It just doesn't affect my attitude at any current moment, but it seeks release in some physical movement; it's not obsessively choreographed - it's just a big fat thump of energy that shoots into me, causing me to perform some extremely quick and hyper movement to burn it off.

If I'm playing NBA 2K13 ( a favorite of mine) and I manage to come back from a large deficit, I find myself unconsciously acting out my happiness - I'll smack the table in front of me in some awkward motion - tap, tap tap, bringing my arms back up to me before I lower them again to tap the table (my mom says I look like a bird trying to fly). It's strange, yes, and when I become aware of having done it I feel a little bit of shame and self consciousness afterwards. This might be the source and origin of my social issues.

When I was a kid, I played a lot of football and soccer at recess. Being much less self conscious then, the kids (friends/acquaintances) I played with thought my hyperness  was hilarious. They'd come to predict that I would jump up, run around, after something good happened. Later on in highschool, I remember being chastened by friends to stop rocking my legs back and forth. Being naturally anxious - or easily stimulated - I did this completely unconsciously. This caused me to become more aware of myself.

 An upshot of being hyper is basketball related. I played a lot of basketball growing up (and still play 2-3 times a week at the leisure center) and my "first step" - that first movement from a stationary or relaxed position - was always unusually faster than other peoples. My full speed was not that much greater than other peoples, and my quickness after that first explosion was also unspectacular. What set me apart and gave me an athletic advantage over my opponents was just how blisteringly fast I could go from zero to ten. This to me makes sense only in terms of my hypersensitive nervous system. My PFC issues commands to my motor cortex, which passes that information on to my muscles, with just a little more juice - adrenaline - than other people. This results in a millisecond advantage over my opponents.

I'm starting to come to terms with my hyperness. I'm shy because large groups over-stimulate me. I get happy so easily - and with such ease - because I'm quick to respond to happy stimuli. At the same time, if someones mean, or even implies something offensive in their gesturing, I pick it up with a cinch. I wish I didn't, but I do. So where to go from here?

I need to "stretch" my temperament enough to help me feel comfortable in large groups. Essentially, this is me using my neocortical faculties to regulate my limbic system. In ontological terms, It means being more attuned to my feeling states than conceptual states. I only get anxious when my over-anxious mind starts THINKING about my feelings in relation to it's environmental cues. When that happens, I 'leave' the feeling, and start ruminating ABOUT it; this crystallizes the feeling, freezing it in my minds awareness.

Exploring the Past

Being that I still struggle - and suffer - day in and day out with my confidence, self esteem, and ability to maintain an embodied self awareness, I can sometimes get caught up in moping over the past. I'll think to myself: I'm only here because of my mother.

She got depressed at age 40, withdrew from her children, withdrew from her parental duties, and because of her, I too got depressed. I was 13 years old and needed a strong and stable household. It was bad enough I lacked a father figure in my life - my own Dad was similarly withdrawn, occupied with my mom, and consumed with his work - but in addition to that, my own mother began going out everyday. Come the school year, grade 8, for some odd reason I feel especially insecure this time around. Before it was just nerves, shyness, but beneath all that was a anticipation for the new school year. This year was different. The social problems began to accrue towards the end of grade 7. And this is also the time when my dad was demoted, and my mothers depression began. At this point, there were no dramatic suicide attempts, just your run of the mill arguments between mom and dad, withdrawal from her children, little or no positive conversation and encouragement that there used to be when I was younger. All of a sudden home life changed. It was a sadder, angrier, more irritable place. And my mom, unbeknownst to her at the time, was planting the seeds for a life long insecurity in her son.

My troubles at the end of grade 7 loomed in my mind before grade 8. I remember distinctly: I didn't go out as often as I did the summer before, and my mom reminded me. The year before, everyday, I'd be outside playing road hockey with street kids, or playing basketball with my friend Ryan at my house - or his house - or baseball, soccer, or quite often, tennis at the tennis courts. We had developed quite a rivalry. We'd also play doubles when Adam, John, Matt or others who came around. I may have been a shy kid, but I was a kid who was socially capable: I liked socializing and enjoyed playing sports, roaming the forests, and more or less, having fun. But, I wont deny, I was a sensitive kid as well.

By the time grade 8 came around my mother's depression had been growing worse. I don't recall much interaction between her and I. I remember many arguments between my parents, many nights where she slept at her friend Sylvanas apartment in downtown Toronto. Our home life was marred by this avoidance: my mom sleeping at her friends house and my dad wanting her to come home. Sometimes I'd come, but most of the time I'd be left at home. Already at this point the home problems were adding to my depression, low self esteem and increased insecurity in socializing. My brother conversely, more naturally sociable, and also younger, spared the social complexities of grade 8 - a transition to early adulthood - was effected in a different way (after watching my mother attempt suicide on a number of occasions, he developed a stutter).

My mother's actions - her disregard of her parental duties - provided the basic environmental impetus that got my biology all off kilter. More bluntly put: her depression caused my depression. It's been 13 years since her depression days. But for me, life hasnt changed. At 27, I am still feeling the effects of the ruthless emotional abuse I experienced at the hands of a bully. I realize that there were two factors involved: home life, and the presence of this bully. But I know I would have handled this kid much differently if I had been spared the emotional complexities happening in my homelife. Life became confusing for me. I became scared, anxious, and increasingly uncertain about things. All this stress no doubt contributed to my stunted growth (4'7 at 14 - 5'7 now) which in turn supplied fodder for the bully (his entire program was based around my being "a midget", and I'm sure aspects of my personality irked him too)

I suffered greatly during that year. I couldn't even finish school - be confirmed with my classmates, or attend graduation ceremonies. Something I could and did do during my earlier years, 1st communion, class pictures - something I did with no small measure of alacrity, I saw myself dreading.

Then, in grade 10, after attempting to mold my personality into someone else in grade 9, that same bully entered highschool. Terror struck my heart. I had actually hung around him in grade 9 - he was a friend of one of my friends. Towards the end of grade 9, I found people asking questions about my past, and more or less changing their demeanor towards me. Being easily riled up - I amped up my efforts. I tried even harder to "fit in". But even then, I think I did a decent job being myself, holding down the fort of my true self. But then grade 9 withered away, and on the way to grade 10, my difficulties returned, coinciding with the reappearance of Adam Mcdonald. Tall, lanky, blonde haired, pierced, sociopathic looking, with a monotone voice, he seemed to embody the notion of "I don't give a shit what you think". He thought he was badass, too cool for school. His opinions were razor sharp, acerbic and vitriolic. He spoke with a sarcastic hint to his speech - as if his effort to talk with you should be something taken as a favor. Even to this day, when I say sociopathic, I am being quite literal: he possessed all those basic criteria needed to qualify for social personal disorder. He seemed to be beyond the pale when it came to empathy. If he didn't do something, it was because he restrained himself on a cognitive level. Not because he felt guilt, or shame, or sorry, but because he didn't want to get in trouble.

His relentless bullying, his repursuit of his victim from his elementary school days, was truly sadistic. When you think about it, PTSD caused from bullying is not a thing to be taken lightly. It is horrific what a bully can do to the personality of his victim. Any life condition - in my case, trouble at home - happened to coincide with the presence of a sociopath. Sociopathic children would more easily be held at bay if teachers and students took bullying more seriously. But back in '98, things didn't happen that way. My teacher was indolent to the extreme. A part of me wants to blame him for preferring to let the bully hurt me than to jeopardize his carefree and interactive relationship with his students. He could have, for example, suggested expulsion of Adam Mcdonald for the effects his bullying was having on one of his students (refusing to speak or lift my head from the desk should have wrung alarm bells), but no - he didn't entertain that notion. He was far too "fun" a teacher to take initiative against a problematic student. Instead, he tolerated the abuse of the bullier, which in effect enabled the suffering experienced by his victim. If he were reading this today, I would say to Mr. Kelly: you should have taken your duties as a teacher more seriously.

But, perhaps, he was just a symptom of a dysfunctional school system that under emphasized the psycho-social responsibilities of teachers - to inform children, to encourage children, to treat other kids with respect and empathy. I truly believe that this is the only moral direction we can go. It is inexcusable that someone like me - subject to unfortunate life circumstances - should have suffered so bad in school, that till this day, I am unfit for the social world. I am still re-experiencing the feelings first felt at 13 years old, despite my intellectual and spiritual maturity, I still feel like a scared little kid inside.

At a certain point in time, I remember just giving up. Not being able to process these emotions within me anymore. I was fighting for my breath after grade 8 and into grade 9. After falling again in grade 10, I began experiencing this shakiness in my voice when I spoke. I was conceptualizing myself as I spoke - observing myself to make sure I acted carefully - rightly, that I didn't make any social mistakes. I was so stricken by my social difficulties in the earlier two years that I was taking excessively self conscious measures to deal with the mechanics of socializing. By 16, after spending the summer playing basketball at a basketball camp and convincing myself of my coolness, of my new found identification with black culture, I returned to my old school after my parents moved to a different house in the same district. This year, I might as well describe as my most deluded point in my life. I changed the style of my voice - shaved my head and fancied that I could pass for a mulatto person - and pretended that I was on course to become the next Vince Carter. I just had to get through highschool. Then, I'd be playing D1 college ball on scholarship down south. A "free education" - that was the cool thing, something emphasized by the basketball instructor. Even though my real dream was merely the story - the glory - that goes along with a kid working towards becoming a professional sports star.

Throughout that year, I struggled off and on in my social relationships. Unlike the years prior, this time I made extra effort to feel cool. By being so "tuned in" on my self, I made sure that I never spoke without the appropriate accent - that I said cool things, mentioned basketball, and other things designed to make me look good in the eyes of others. Eventually, the effect wore off, and I became annoying to people. I made the junior basketball team, only to be seated on the bench for most of the games. The one game I played in, I got an elbow to the nose and broke it..

Everyday I Woke up at 6AM, and played basketball for 1-2 hours before school started in the high school gymnasium. The gym teachers themselves began to grow irritated with me playing in "their" gym without special permission. Some kids, if they're charismatic enough, can get that imprimatur. But me, being shy, reclusive, and tongue tied when spoken to, this gave a bad effect on the teachers, and eventually even they would prevent me from entering the gym.

Just remembering those days, at 16, is painful for me. I was so depressed with my life. I also grew more and more paranoid and anxious about increasingly silly things. The relationships I still had began to falter at this point. By the end of that year, I had no friends left, and I once again withdrew from the world.

I began to worry about killing myself. Being accustomed to anxious thoughts now and again, I remember feeling overwhelmed by the intensity and frequency of these emotions. I began to obsess over talking - how to do it. By obsessing so greatly, I began to conceptualize myself as I spoke. But since this was from a feeling of insecurity, of fear of social disapproval, it was tinged with a strain, with a forcefulness that could be easily heard - consciously, or unconsciously - by the person I was talking with. Also at this time, I began to worry about suicide. I would go to bed and disturbed and morbid thoughts would percolate in my head. One second it was a disease - I had it, Aids! Next second, it was suicide, my wrists became rashy, and I would take it as some sort of command from some nefarious source to cut my wrists. I would worry about taking the subway, because I had heard of someone who recently jumped in front of one. Having heard it - and feeling a pit in my stomach, I began to grow afraid that I too would - or could - jump in front of a subway. I would have the worse anxiety attacks when I had to ride the subway. These thoughts just weighed on me and oppressed me throughout that year. By the end of it all, we had moved again, this time way up north to Barrie, Ontario. My life had taken on a sordid consistency - my days were now filled with anguish about my voice. My ability to relate with my brother was weakening, and my sister having gone off to college 2 years earlier had only strengthened my feelings of seclusion and depression.

Since then, since 18, it has been the same thing day in and day out. At around 19, I began to grow interested in reading - something I never really did before. At 20, I was absorbed in spiritual subjects. By 21, I had a horrible experience with Kundalini yoga that left me sleepless for 21 days. A pivotal point in my life. By 23, I was learning Hebrew and studying Judaism. 24, I began spending a lot of time at the library reading. Now, at 27, soon to be 28, I spend my days at the library - a two minute walk from my house. I read 20-30 books a month, from neuroscience, to psychology, to political science, to computer science, to philosophy, biology, novels, reading scientific journals. All of this for self improvement - an investment in my future.

My greatest hope is to be out of this situation by age 30. To be in school by 31, to be married by 35, to have kids by 40. These are hopes I can't deny myself - I want them so deeply, at the core of my being. But, as of now, I know I have a mountain to climb. I have things to do - situations to conquer. I hope and pray it goes well.

The Baby Inside

When I ask my mom: what was I like as a baby? She responds: "you were such a happy baby! the littlest things would make you happy. Always laughing, always playful"

So what happened? Generally speaking, a newborn human being exhibits it's genetic repertoire early on it's life. For me, I clearly connected easily with a feeling of happiness. So what happened?

Well, as I understand it, the environmental stressor of having a mom that was frequently angry, critical, or to use a popular colloquialism, bitchy, I suspect her general attitude made me a lot more tentative and needy.

But, nevertheless, I feel good hearing that I was a happy baby. For as long as I can remember, I have known myself to be easy to please. Even today, people who comment on my situation will tell me: I don't know how you can live like that, to be alone everyday, with your own thoughts, and not lose your mind". I guess I am fortunate to have this streak in me which allows me to find contentment easier than in others.

I want to get back in touch with that baby in me. That baby who smiled and laughed - the one I see in the picture in the family room with a wide smile on his face, eyes glowing. Where was the shyness? I don't see it. My mom described my easiness as wonderful, compared to my sister and brother. This baby is still deep within me - within primal neurological structures. My innate ability to feel happy, to enjoy the little things, to get easily excited and revved when any positive stimulus occurs - I want that back, I want to find it again and feel it grow within me.

I need to find my inner baby.

How to train the brain

These are before and after photos of my bed. The before state is unmade, while the after state is made. Here's the story: having been homebound for 12 or so years, I have become accustomed to an extremely easy lifestyle, and, being accustomed to easiness, I have become rather lazy when it comes to making my bed. On average, I'd say I make it 4 times out of 10 (mostly to please my mother). So whats the point of this? The before state is like my current mind. Disordered, sloppy. The After state is ordered. But that's not the point either. Rather, the point is more philosophical. If I can coerce myself to make my bed everyday, even though emotionally, I really don't feel up to it, then I can coerce myself to maintain the type of focus and attention necessary to make changes in my thinking - and in my brain.

All sorts of little activities like this can serve as symbols. Some emotional part - in the limbic system, for example, prompts you to engage in a certain activity or inactivity. Whether that be making my bed, or biting my nails. Speaking of nail biting, brace yourself:

This is me peeling, biting and otherwise disfiguring my thumb nail on my right hand. I've decided it would be for me to apply the same logic to bed making to stopping my nail biting. With the former, it's something I'm not doing - and so I'm challenging my laziness. Here, it's something I am doing - peeling off layers of nail because it gives me some sort of weird satisfaction (without causing bleeding. Once bleeding occurs, I wince and complain "Oh why did I do that!").

My problem is maintaining a state of embodied self awareness. As described in that earlier entry, embodied self awareness is experiencing life in the subjective emotional present. Usually, life for me - at least when talking becomes relevant - involves conceptual self awareness. A normal person when they get ready to speak engages the feelings they're having at the moment. This is embodiment. I on the other hand observe myself as I speak - this is conceptualizing myself as I attempt to engage my feelings. Since you can't do both things at once, Its actually just me ruminating on some perceived malady while I try to sound normal. Life in this mode, you can imagine, can be extremely isolating, painful, etc. Living this way for many years, being dissociated from your own true emotions on things for this length of time, can make the experience of embodied self awareness feel absurd. In a way - it is! Psychologists rightly point out that embodied self awareness - engagement with your emotions - is inherently chaotic, unpredictable, uncontrollable. You can't "put" yourself in that state. You can only create the conditions to enter that state without your meddling conceptual self awareness interfering.

I know how to enter these states. I experience them now and again. Embodied self awareness can be: embodied physically, in how you feel in your body, and embodied vocally, in how you feel in your voice. I've become fairly good at feeling good in my body. I go to the library everyday to pass the hours, reading, and most of all, exposing myself to other people. I've learned to stay in my body when someone comes near me - if they look at me, I more or less am learning to train myself not to be on "high alert" about it. There's no reason to. People look. Oddly enough. Sometimes when I've found myself more securely in this state, if someone looks at me and smiles, I smile back! This may seem absolutely banal to most people, but for me, for someone who conceptualizes and watches himself, who anticipates the formation of feelings and anxiously observes his facial and bodily activity, to just spontaneously shoot a smile back at the person who smiles at me, in the subjective emotional presence, frankly, it felt like somebody else (and not in a bad way).

Episodes like the above encourage me. I have to dampen down my level of alertness. The PTSD has me looking this way and that in a very conceptualized state of mind, and only recently have I become aware of it, and understood it in a sort of evolutionary psychological sort of way. If I raise my hand towards my dog - she'll quiver and cower and her tail will snap between her legs; her ears will fall back, her eyes will widen and her muscles will tense. She's in a state of high alert (of course, I don't ever hit my dog - she's the runt of her litter, she, like her owners, is an anxious little thing). I see this state in myself. In the subjective emotional present, things are slowed down, consciousness is more focused in one area, while blanking out everything else around you. In an alert state, my mind is cued to my environment. Any change engenders a corresponding change in my state of mind. I need to withdraw from this habit, feel myself, my body, my breathing, and most of all, my emotions.

Training the brain will be a life long activity for me. I'm still 27, young, intelligent and physically able. My bed will be get made and my fingers will be left alone - such activities will hopefully train my limbic system who the boss is - the dorsolateral PFC!

The mind is a strange thing

Sometimes the most banal things can be the most interesting. Take for example your normal state of consciousness. If you developed normally, you will be used to something psychologists call embodied self awareness, which is different from conceptual self awareness.

Being felt "IN" the body is body oriented. You could use an arrow like this one <----- to describe this vector. Yet, simultaneously, the mind is absorbed in a thought "out there". The minds absorption is a thought would be the opposite direction ----> this way.

To put it another way. Some philosophers, like Soren Kiekegaard, as well as the psychologist Viktor Frankl, made much of the fact that human beings are only happy when they are "outside" themselves. Kierkagaard famously said "The door to happiness opens outward". The outward direction is to objects that lie beyond the self. When were thinking about ourselves, happiness typically eludes us. So, when our attention is oriented to external things, such as another person, a purpose, an external activity, paradoxically, this external orientation puts us into our closest contact with our actual feelings.

Modern psychologists distinguish between attention that is oriented towards thoughts (conceptual self awareness) and attention which is oriented towards feelings (embodied self awareness). These are two fundamentally different states. Even the nervous system processes these two functions differently. If I'm "feeling" my body, such as the pain in my toe, the nociceptor sends its signals up the dorsal horn pathway in the spinal chord. When it comes to the brain, it's processed by regions in the brain stem, cerebellum, amygdala, etc, and in the PFC(prefrontal cortex), by the ventromedial and orbitofrontal parts. When your THINKING about the pain in your toe, as opposed to feeling it, the nociceptors send the signals up the ventral horn of the spinal chord, which goes up to the brain to be processed by the dorsolateral and dorsomedial parts of the PFC.

So again, there is a definite "embodied" component to this mode of being. But simultaneously, the "self" is completely immersed in the object of it's attention. These are to halves which make up the whole of embodied self awareness. There also appears to be a symmetry. Just as embodiment entails absorption in something else, worrying about some thought ABOUT yourself, such as finances, health, etc, takes you OUT of your body. When the thought is on yourself, the mind is outside the body. When the thought is on something outside the self, the mind is in the body.

It's a funny state of affairs.

Understand The Mind

If anything valuable can come of this blog, it's in it's documentation of the way the mind interprets facts of it's reality. Each interpretation has some relative value in that they convey a sense of the pain of the experience, and through that pain, explains it's reality.

The correct understanding is less complex, yet it's the hardest one to stomach. In my earlier blog, I mentioned the need to integrate the impersonal and personal dimensions in understanding my problem. To start with the impersonal: the impersonal is best understood as energy. Since all things can be converted into an energetic intensity, the obsession is best addressed as a dynamism. The energy of my reality is low. There's very little drive; obsession with one particular idea; I am constantly resonating with a particular feeling. Before I speak, there's a definite feeling of "holding myself back". What I imagine as a concern with my voice, is a clever deception of the mind. The real issue is fear: fear with speaking without worrying what others might think. My minds defence response believes "thinking" about the issue will help me, because evolutionarily speaking, reflection upon problems facilitates survival. Unfortunately, this mechanism works both ways: to enable survival, or, to induce neurosis.

A normal state of consciousness - when one feels that he can speak without worrying what others might think - is generally speaking, in a state of relaxation. This claim of course has its variables. I think only in a general sense that this assumption applies.

When someone speaks, it reflects a part, or the totality of the self. The emotions "in between" are what Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz would attribute to "the brain". The mind decides to speak, and, the brain responds. In a similar fashion, the "self" decides to speak, and the ego - the sense of "I" which reflects upon the meaning of it's action  - either sanctions the feeling or jettisons it. In short, self consciousness can only be "secure" if the ego feels its ok, nay, deserved, for it to be experiencing these feelings. and to be perceived by others as confident.

These are the two sides of the coin: the need to emphasize high energy states, where a feeling "erupts" into consciousness, and the mind FREELY lets the energy flow through, without interfering. The second side of the coin is to emphasize my RIGHT as a human being to see myself in positive terms. There is no reason why I should be condemned to a life of low self esteem, obsession, anxiety, fear and depression.

So I know the B's and C's. The question is, how do I move from A? How do I move through this maelstrom of negative feeling, which makes the sheer thought of speaking without feeling myself as insecure, almost impossible. As explained before, the energy is an abstract way to describe all things. In terms of my particular obsession with my voice, the energy would be the vehicle, while the content of the thought, would be the passenger. By emphasizing the passenger, or focusing on the thought-content, I distract myself from the source of the malady, the very vehicle which brings the thought-content into perception.

 So it would seem the way to get around this is to emphasize the energy. The energy is best thought of as energy, and not emotion. Emotion is in itself a quasi personal term. As an emotion, it applies an individual experiencing it. Whereas with the idea of energy, the sense of"feeling" it, or giving yourself up to it, allows it to bring you into action without another thought preempting it's expression. This is a wondrous feeling, both because when it happens I realize that it is authentic, and that for a nice change, I actually feel like me. At the same time, I get startled, almost dismayed, by the sheer distance between my usual thinking - and feeling - and the sense of awareness involved in speaking without worrying i.e. acting according to the natural goals and interests of the self.

I understand it more clearly than I ever have. This is the most rarefied understanding of my situation that I've perceived. It really does require a phenomenal power of will; to maintain that awareness at home with family; and then, when it's been normalized enough, to take the risk of speaking with others: on the phone, first, and then in society.

The Difficulty of Inertia

I'm always dealing with a feeling of inertia. I don't know from where it comes from, or what it means. Is it depression? And yet it's not a very overpowering one. I've felt depressed before, but this feeling isn't quite depression. It's rather the absence of drive: something motivating me into activity.

In an earlier post, I mentioned my need to open myself outward to the world of objects. And yet, I feel critically involved in my own world. All I seem to feel is the inertia, so much so, I think I would be either mute, or arm-twisted into speech by my moribund tendency to stress my voice during speech. My speech has literally become that intermixed with the tendency to stress. Also - and this is of the greatest salience - my tendency to stress as I speak is really just a symptom of my tendency to watch myself as I speak. Somehow, in my head, I began to experience speech as something which occurs while watching yourself. It is infuriatingly sticky - I only have flashes now and again of what a normal approach to speech is actually like.

What a normal approach feels like: It feels spontaneous. I think, and then an instant later, almost simultaneously it seems, speech emerges from my mouth. Consciously, I am hyper-focused (or "in" the words I speak) on the subject matter, while ignoring, or only tacitly receiving an impression, how I spoke. I may say "Hey Ash!" to my sister. In my mind, there was the simple recognition that my sister had come home. Instantaneously, without hesitation - without the presence of any other thought in my mind - MICHAEL speaks. The words emanate from a core too mysterious to be watched, it seems.

I know this is a genuine state. I know it is not "beyond" my capacity. I am not forever estranged from feelings of confidence, and from the ease of living without worrying. But as it stands, I fear I need more than what I have. I daily struggle. I find it exceedingly difficult to enter speech without preempting myself. Its as if the obsession stands ready like a bodyguard, or a sentry, at the door of my mind. I try to ready myself: think THIS way, and by saying that to myself, I simultaneously seem to confirm the presence of the problem. My mind is STILL IN THAT MODE. I want desperately to live in the world of objects, but it seems such a perception is underlined by an attitude - a perception of reality conducive to ones overall state of self.

So it seems to be double tiered: I need to focus outward onto the world of objects. That needs to be the flux of my attention. Secondly: I need to feel secure as me. Partadoxically, the first need is impersonal; by stressing the mode in which reality is experienced and understood, I enter a confident state of mind; my voice emerges strong, natural, in short, it feels and sounds like me. On the other hand, one should be able to understand himself as an "I", as an individual. If someone looks at me, I should be able to endure their stares without fretting over possible reasons. The former state - the outward focus into the world of objects - is a symptom of someone who is secure in their body, and secure in their self image, which is the latter state.

Sometimes, I don't know which to emphasize, or where to begin. I feel as if the "be in the world" of objects is the right way to go about it, but then I discover that my insecurity can get the better of me. Its used to feeling scared, in this or that situation. My brain has little compartments of memory dedicated to just these situations, evoking just these responses. So sometimes I'll try to buttress my self esteem: you can do it Mike! You know you love yourself, you care for your well being, you want to get better! But then when I act, I am unwittingly involving my insecurities in my speech. In short, I am self conscious while speaking.

Obviously, I understand that I am seriously over-thinking all this. I know my understanding is complex, and probably quite accurate in its conception of the relationship between personal and impersonal forces; but still, people cannot and should not think this deeply about things. It dissolves the process of living into truncated facts. It forgets the flowness of things; the naturalness of every moment. I want to wholistically connect with the world, but i am stuck in my thoughts, feelings, and neuroses.

I of course can never lose hope. I believe that I will get out of this. I need, and want to believe.

The power of the Allusive Thought

Allusive thinking, as the name suggests, is not quite conceptual thinking, but a type of tacit thinking which engenders a particular state of consciousness. It'll be easier to explain what I mean by this idea by showing what it is NOT. Devising theories, or explicit techniques to handle my obsession, is the opposite of allusive thinking. For example, I have emphasized the importance of energy dynamics, positivity, self-interpretation, bass, self transcendence, and a plethora of other ideas as cues to put me into a desired state of mind. While these ideas can work sometimes, they often exhaust themselves, possibly reifying into mental structures which hyper-emphasize the underlying problem. Thus, the more I 'rely' upon such ideas, the more the underlying idea which those techniques seek to upend become emphasized. Research by David A Clark and Christine Purdon in their book 'overcoming obsessive thoughts' has shown that the most effective treatment for OCD (without recourse to drugs) is to lessen the importance of the obsession. In short, explicit mental techniques dont seem to be very helpful.

The trick with allusive thinking is its calm and non-reactive approach. Instead of scurrying through my mind searching for that mental panacea, allusive thinking concentrates on that state of mind amenable to recovery. I call this approach allusive because its far more quiet and unassuming than the other approach. Here, the mind decides to remain calm, eschews avoidance tactics, and with an iron will insists on a particular viewpoint, all it seems with the power of a whisper.

The allusive thinking technique exercises an attention that recedes to the subconscious level while the conscious mind actively engages other thoughts. But if a deviation might occur, instinctively the unconscious precursor quietly slides to the conscious forefront and adjusts perspective.
 
The magic of this technique is its prowess in allowing my mind to be occupied with an external thought without the prying insecurity of "how I sound" while monitoring my progress. In general, whenever I act the same neural process is repeated: I speak in a state of self observation, cued to the sound of my voice, and my voice is 'stressed', which is to say, being tensed by the larynx, causing the sound which emerges to lack the bass and naturalness of confidence. This process is a feedback loop. The poor self esteem engenders the same conscious experience during speech, which in turn reenforces low self esteem. In essence, we are we imagine ourselves to be; we are continuously influenced by our own self observations.

This technique seems to momentarily extricate myself from the tense or "traumatized" state of watching myself as I speak. Whenever I speak, I am "intercepted", it seems, by the inveterate urge to 'prepare' myself for speech. This is the initial urge to watch myself - to monitor how I will do. Instead of taking speech as a matter of fact thing, something which necessarily follows an idea which entrances the mind and results in speech, I have become inured to speaking with the intention to hear myself, with the corollary, attending to the act of speech itself. You can only imagine the degree of frustration this can cause, since it upsets the single most enjoyable aspect of human experience: communication. My ability to make friends, meet a woman, have a social life, all of this has been decimated by the presence of this insecurity. I am haunted by the thought. My fear is no longer of social situations per se, as it is my fear of my lack of control over my fear.

Two things need to be worked upon: my sense of self i.e. my sense of self worth, and the tendency to self observation during speech, in effect diffusing my attention from the thing spoken about to an insecurity about my ability to discuss the thing spoken about. This is the personal and impersonal dimensions of my problem. In order for me to sustain a state of self awareness (or transcendence of self during speech) I need to be aware that I am worthy and deserving of this experience, and the concomitant impression it may have on others.. At the same time, I need to retrain my mind to speaking without watching myself as I speak. This is what I am attempting to do with this allusive thinking approach.

With allusive thinking, I emphasize a state of self transcendence without being too adamant about it. Guiding myself through little pokes here and there, but remaining sufficiently quiet enough for my conscious mind not to get caught up in self observation.