My Spiritual Poisons

I can relate to a lot of what you’re feeling.

“Hating myself” makes me think “trauma.” Did you experience any abuse, neglect, or abandonment (including emotional abandonment) while growing up? Or perhaps intense fear or painful rejection? A book that helped me enormously in understanding and beginning to process and heal from the trauma of my early life was “Healing the Shame That Binds You” by John Bradshaw. I recommend it if you feel like you may be carrying around old trauma. Working with your trauma is heavy and exhausting, though, and healing is a process. I’m feeling drawn to start looking at my own stuff again as well. I’ve started reading another book that I saw recommended in another thread on this site. It’s “Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving” by Pete Walker. I’m not far enough into it yet to say if it’s helpful for me, but it has a ton of 5 star reviews on Amazon and I feel good about it. The author lists the most common features of CPTSD as emotional flashbacks (without a visual component), toxic shame, self-abandonment, a vicious inner critic, and social anxiety. Also, you mentioned letting go of the past, which is valid, but I just heard someone say in an interview something like, “Your trauma isn’t in the past, it’s in your nervous system in the present,” and this is also an important point.

I agree that a messy environment can be a reflection and a perpetuator of internal chaos. I tend to feel so much lighter after I’ve cleaned and organized, and only realize in retrospect how much the mess was subtly inducing stress.

You are very fortunate to have the recognition at your young age that our suffering results from our own thoughts. Some people never see this, and they go their whole lives blaming and resenting other people and circumstances. But because you recognize this, you have at your fingertips a great power and a great opportunity to change your life.

I don’t know if we can necessarily “control” our thoughts. For example, if I told you to stop thinking completely for the next two minutes, or to think only of green jellybeans and nothing else, I think you’d notice how little control we actually have. But we can influence our thoughts and direct our attention. It’s kind of like breathing. When we’re not consciously aware of our breathing, it just happens by itself…and maybe our breath is very shallow, which is less supportive of our well-being. When we place our attention on our breath, we can breathe more deeply and do all kinds of breathing exercises. But we can’t stop breathing, and as soon as we place our attention elsewhere, our breathing returns to autopilot. Likewise, most of our thoughts are autopilot thoughts. They simply arise. The trouble is that we identify with them, we claim them as “my thoughts,” and we believe them. Another NoFap member shared this great quote with me a few days ago, from St. Paisios of Mount Athos: “Thoughts are like airplanes flying in the air. If you ignore them, there is no problem. If you pay attention to them, you create an airport inside your head and permit them to land!” And hey, the airplane analogy fits right in with the idea of “autopilot thoughts.” I’m gonna remember that.

Meditative practices can help us to train our attention muscles so we become more aware of our unhelpful thoughts and more able to direct our attention toward helpful thoughts or states and keep it there longer.

You’ve had two more important recognitions. One, that a relationship will not bestow upon you a happiness that is not already within you. They say, “Wherever you go, there you are,” and it’s also true that whomever you’re with, there you are. And two, that in spite of this, you don’t have to be perfectly happy before you enter a relationship. Relationships help us to learn and grow, even when they don’t work out. In my own case, I knew that a relationship couldn’t bring me true happiness and fulfillment. And yet, I was very lonely and desperate for connection. I couldn’t shake this longing and I secretly hoped that a relationship WOULD fulfill me. Now I have been in a relationship for the past four and a half months. My partner and I have a wonderful connection that brings us both a lot of joy, and the loneliness and desperation are gone. But all my old feelings of emptiness, unhappiness, fear, and unfulfillment are still here as well. A less mature version of me might have projected this sense of lack onto my partner and our relationship and convinced myself that a more exciting relationship with a more perfect partner would make me truly happy. But fortunately I know better these days. My relationship has been a blessing, but it hasn’t been a cure. I have to keep doing my inner work.

And I, too, struggle with indulging in pleasures and feeling like I need to give them up in order to be my best self.

My impression is that you are very perceptive and you have a lot of potential. But let me caution you. I’ve written multiple journal entries similar to this post of yours over the years. And my progress has been slow, because I never fully committed to following through. I don’t want you to delay your happiness as much as I’ve delayed mine. The self-awareness is wonderful but more is required. The passionate moments of wanting to change are helpful but they don’t sustain you. You have to REALLY want it…every day, with everything you’ve got. You have to value and desire self-love, presence, peace, and discipline more than any pleasure or comfort. If you don’t want to drag this thing out, you have to be willing to let everything else go.

But it's also not simply a matter of willpower. Looking back over the past decade of my life, if there's one thing that has held me back and kept me stuck more than anything else, it's unresolved trauma. Carrying unresolved trauma through life is like carrying heavy chains. And you're trying to get up a tall flight of stairs, and you're thinking, "Gee, I just don't have the willpower to get up these stairs, I guess I'm lazy and I frickin suck." But it's not about that. You need to take off the chains first.

Another issue I notice in myself is that my attention has been very scattered. For example, I’ll start reading a book that’s actually helpful and that I enjoy (such as a book about lovingkindness meditation), but I’ll only read half and then move on to something else that’s caught my attention. Or I’ll read the whole book but I won’t put it into practice, I’ll just move on, as if reading alone can change my life. It can’t. And the lack of focus means I’m not really getting anywhere. It’s healthy to be well-rounded in your interests and habits, but it seems to me that if I don’t want to be spinning my wheels for another decade I need to cultivate the power of the mind to focus and concentrate, and I need to direct that focus onto the one thing that’s most urgent. And that one thing, in my case, is probably healing the trauma that’s keeping me small and stuck, because I can’t thrive anywhere else until that block is removed. Maybe that’s good advice for you as well.

I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’, but that’s my take. I wish you the very best, and I'm happy to discuss these ideas further if you want to. Have courage and remember that you’re never alone.

 

According to Walker's book, numbing is a characteristic of the "freeze" trauma type, while "needing to become the ultimate person and move at a hundred miles a minute" is a characteristic of the "flight" trauma type. And flight-freeze hybrid types, he says, "are prone to becoming porn addicts." I'm not diagnosing you, just putting it out there as something to explore if you're interested. Best of luck with your goal.

 

That's the one I'm reading for the first time right now, “Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving” by Pete Walker.