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. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.