In order to overcome yourself, you must go under, Nietzsche said.

That’s how I feel lately. Like I am struggling to overcome myself and become more mature, stable, and strong, but the only way to do that is to keep delving deep into myself and bringing up big pieces of internal gunk, and letting them dry in the sun.

This means I am always going down to where it is dark and cold and hostile to life. Perhaps that’s all cyclical depression is, when you get down to it. Your mind trying to heal itself. And your instinct is to fight the process, because it keeps taking you to a terrible and painful place.

Which is ironic, because your best strategy is actually to simply stop fighting your own redemption. Go limp and let it happen.

And stop picking at the wounds, which I suppose is what I do here.

It all boils down to that deep, deep mistrust of life, the universe, and everything. It is that mistrust which makes people controlling. You don’t trust the universe and feel like it is waiting for an opportunity to crush you, so the only things you can trust are things you can control and thus make sure never hurt you.

This might well result in the archetypal Type-A controlling personality. But it can also go in the opposite direction and create a person who has no faith in their ability to exert control over their life the way a Type-A does, and instead tried to retreat as deeply as possibly into things they can control.

This retreat can be extremely self-destructive, but it serves its purpose of filling the person’s mind with safe things and blotting out the rest of harsh, cold, treacherous reality. In that way, our “flight” response turns inward in order to find its desired “safe” state, when it can deactivate.

But they never quite get there, those people. It never fully deactivates. They never feel fully safe. The persistent feeling that the universe is out to get them prevents this.

In this delusional structure, the rule is “never let your guard down”. Because that’s when they GET you. To support this structure, all negative events are interpreted as personal failures of some sort. That way, the perception of being in control, in this case in the form of being able to prevent the negative experience from happening again, is preserved, but at a terrible cost to the self-worth of the individual.

The result is not unlike a police state : no matter what happens, the response is to tighten security and increase vigilance. Clearly, the problem is that we have too lenient. Defenses have been allowed to go slack. We must be yet harsher.

The idea that it is the vigilance and harshness that is causing the problem simply does not compute. It might be recognized as potentially true in the abstract, but the entire foundation of the individual’s psyche says the opposite, and that is not an easy setting to change.

There are the things we think, and the things we feel, and then there are the deep down superstitions that keep us from being whole. The idea that the moment you let you guard down, the universe will GET you is one of those superstitions.

I call it a superstition because it is clearly not rationally supportable. The concept that the universe has any sort of attitude or intentions towards you is an unsupportable anthropomorphization. The universe is not a living entity, and therefore can’t have any more of an opinion about you than a rock does.

Humans, being such a social species, tend to see intention and agency everywhere. But the truth is, the universe just plain doesn’t give a shit about you.

Not because it chooses not to. Because it never could.

Because this deep suspicion of the universe is not rational or logical, in theory, one could simply tell oneself it isn’t true, and free yourself from it.

If you were a robot. But we are human beings, and superstitions operate on a level considerably below the rational. Not only that, but the truly deep and dangerous ones distort the psyche to the point where it will at least feel like if they are altered in any way, everything will fall apart.

And perhaps that is at least partially true. If superstition is all that keeps some mental structures intact, removal of that superstition would cause those structures to fall apart.

But here’s the thing : those are the structures that are killing you. Them collapsing might well be the best thing that could ever happen to you. It could be the one thing that lets you finally relax enough to fully deactivate your adrenalized state, and that in turn means your body can go out of defense mode, where anxiety, anger, and terror are never very far away and the body slows down healing processes in order to have all its resources at the ready at all times.

And that would be when the true healing begins.

Perhaps the secret to doing that is to simply repeat “I am safe” to yourself until it feels true.

Of course, first, you have to feel it’s safe to do so….

I know in my own case, I never feel totally safe. As I type, I am as safe as any modern person can be. By all rational assessments, I am in absolutely no danger of any sort, not even emotional. The worse thing that could happen is that I read a news story that is sort of sad.

But deep, deep down, I am still that scared little animal that somehow never reaches home. The panic never ends.

The best I can hope for is to keep it down to a single brightly burning ember. That’s where it is now.

But that ember never goes out.

I am safe, I am safe, I am safe, I am safe.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.