Or, as I am beginning to think of it, my entourage.
As you all remember from Wednesday’s blog, I have been delving into this concept of my having this psychological crowd inside me that can get agitated and end up taking up so much of my consciousness that I end up feeling stupid and scared and confused.
This is the root of my social anxiety. When I am safe in my tiny little world, the crowd stays quiet. But when I get nervous, they overwhelm me and I end up all freaked out… and if that happens in a social situation, I end up lost in a situation I just can’t handle because the noises in my head are just SO FUCKING LOUD.
Ahem. When I brought all this up with my therapist this morning, he suggested that what I do with this information is to make a list of the various elements in my mental crowd and see just what is going on out there.
A classic cognitive therapy exercise… I approve.
At first, though, I didn’t think I could do it, because for me, this crowd of mine is a new concept and I hadn’t gotten to where I felt I could differentiate it yet. It’s just a big amorphous blob that expands and contracts and makes me feel like I could lose touch with reality at any second as it blot out my inner sun.
But after thinking about it for a little while, I decided that I could at least point out some of the major elements that I know must be in there. There’s no need for it to be an exhaustive list. Any amount of focus will help in the process of thinning out that crowd and bringing me closer to the inner peace that I seek and the real connection to others and to the world that will let me finally stop treading water and come ashore for good.
In general, what is in there is unresolved emotions of all shapes and kinds. Turns out that when I push something out of my mind because I don’t want to deal with it, it just joins the crowd, and I get a little further away from others and from reality, and as a consequence, I end up feeling less real.
More specifically, however, let’s go around the party and see who all have showed up.
Well, there’s Anger. Wow, is there Anger. A lot of bad things have happened to me in my life, and I have spent a lot of time isolated and alone. But I never got angry about that at the time. It never even occurred to me that I might be able to change the way things were. I was too busy just making it through every day. Funny how depression makes survival a full time job.
But as it turns out, things that should have made you angry at the time do not disappear just because they didn’t. You can’t just dodge your anger and the pain that caused it and never have to deal with it. It just joins the crowd of other unresolved feelings that you have been putting off, and provides that crowd with its energy and agitation.
Fear is there too, of course. A lot of anxiety that I couldn’t handle at the time, and so it just ended up becoming this corona of crap that I have been imprisoned by, and protected by, for over twenty years. There is so much of life that I just cannot handle with all this crap taking up space in my capacious cranium weighing me down, and so the world can be a pretty scary place for me. And so Fear goes into the mix.
There’s a lot of Sex in there too. I have more or less ignored my sexuality for my entire life. Occasionally I masturbate, mostly just to keep the pressure down, and that is as far as I ever take it. The vast majority of all the wants and desires and lusts and passions that make up a fully expressed human sexuality lie, like an iceberg, out of sight. All that energy and drive sidelined and ignored, never pursued. That has to add a lot of raw heat energy and steam pressure to the crowd.
There’s some people there too, of course. It’s not all amorphous forces. My sister Catherine is there, criticizing me when I was far too young to handle it and telling me I was useless. The other siblings are there too, shouting conflicting instructions at me and making me freeze in place in total confusion. My parents are in there, but that is probably true of everyone. Percy McGougan, despised middle school teacher, is in there too, that petty little tyrant. Lenny McAusland, primary bully of my childhood, is in there, taking great delight in stomping on my head as I lay on the ground.
In fact, let’s move into places. There are places in that outer realm of mine too, including nearly all of Parkside Elementary School, but especially the southmost boys’ bathrooms where I got trapped in a stall, the entire playground, the fields and the gym where I utterly failed at gym, and of course, the decorative planter I hid in.
And oh look, there’s the Chinese restaurant where my parents told me they were withdrawing funding from my university education and brought my entire world to a screeching halt.
And finally, there’s the spa creatively called The Spa where my father molested me and taught me to take my mind away when things got bad (which is a really great way to deal with reality), and ripped the hole in my soul through which all the other miseries and pains of my life got in.
So yeah. I have some idea what makes up this field of frozen debris that surrounds me. It’s the usual stuff. I have just stopped pretending it’s invisible and finally realized just what it is all doing to me.
And for me.
And some day, I will make it all…. stop.
See you tomorrow, folks!