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No crisis? OH MY GOD, everybody panic!

Part of trying to exit freeze mode^[1] is an attempt to convince my deeper self that there is no danger, the predators are all in my mind, and that the coast is clear for us to relax, let our guard down, and get some real rest for a change.

But I don’t think my deeper self is really getting the message. When I write about it like this, and talk about “coming home” and the like, I can feel myself relaxing inside some, and for a little while after, I will feel somewhat better.

It never lasts, though. The moment I am not thinking about it, the old hypervigilant system takes over, puts the predators back in my head, and resumes acting like I am always barely surviving some kind of terrible catastrophe. .

The bunker mentality, as I have come to regard it.

I guess it is what is programmed into my body in mind as “normal” and therefore I will always return to “normal” even though that “normal” sucks.

This is the same issue faced by pretty much all mentally ill people. Someone really needs to research how to change your “normal” to something healthier.

It’s like our instinct to seek our proper habitat gets reprogrammed by trauma into making us only feel “right” in objectively terrible situations.

Why do people keep ending up in the same kind of terrible relationship? Because that’s what their sense of “normal” makes them seek, and it is perfectly capable of maneuvering you via seemingly arbitrary impulses, none of which trip your “oh no I am doing it again” alarms, into ending up in the same old place again.

And the kicker? That’s when you’ll relax, Because now everything is “normal” again.

That’s why I keep coming back to the phrase, “the new normal”. I’m the sort of person who wants to settle into some kind of stable position and then stay there.

But some stable positions suck. They are just plain not good enough. You can’t get what you need in order to be emotionally healthy there.

In fact, stability is their only virtue. And by itself, it’s a pretty lousy one.

“Yeah, this sucks, but at least it will never change!”

Yeah, I got a problem like that.

Ergo, to improve my position, I need to convince myself that somewhere out there, there is a “place where I belong”. A better place, where more of my needs are met, including the need to feel included in society instead of being stuck way way out on the fringes like I have been all my life.

And that’s not an easy sell. In order to get to that better place, I have to pull up stakes and sacrifice my current rotten kind of stability in order to go wandering off in search of a better place that might not even exist.

And worst of all, that means deliberately moving in the direction of a higher stimulation level. Exploring new worlds in search of home is inherently far, far more stimulating than remaining in the soothing low stim comfort of cozy, crummy stasis.

I have been seeking minimum stimulation on all but the intellectual level for so long that merely contemplating going out into that big ol’ world gives me palpitations.

So it all comes back to fear. It always comes back to fear.

Guess I need to learn to overcome that bullshit.

More after the break.

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It should not be this easy

Truly, this is an age of great and terrifying wonders.

You have to check out covers.ai! 

Literally, all you have to do is pick a song from your mp3 collection, pick a voice, and press go. And in five minutes or so, boom, you have a perfect cover of that song in that voice, neat as you please.

My mind is freaking BLOWN. I was originally looking for AI music generation from more of a composer’s POV, but stumbling upon this positively magical tool threadjacked that the fuck out of my mind in a hurry.

Here are Deadpool and Bart Simpson singing “In The Neighborhood” by Tom Waits.

The system has a problem with duets where one person has a high voice and the other has a normal voice.

You know, like every male/female duet ever.

So either the man can sound right and the woman sounds like a chain smoker that smokes actual chains, or you can have the woman sound right and the guy is singing in an almost sarcastic sounding falsetto.

Here are the Minions singing “Sailing Away: by Styx.

Yeah, I know, everybody is sick of the frigging Minions now.

But you have to admit, they sing surprisingly well. A bit weak on the strong passages, but they ARE only tiny little tube people, after all.

And here is my favorite one that I have done so far, it’s Homer and Marge Simpson singing one of my all time favorite love songs, “45 Years” by Stan Rogers.

Presented in link form, because for some reason it won’t let me embed.

https://youtu.be/kfQcGcViedY

It looks so old and sad in that form. Like it’s just sitting there naked on someone’s Geocities home page.

I can relate.

Anyhow, obviously, I have only scratched the surface of what can be done with this incredible tool. I am now on the hunt for the perfect combination of song and voice to make something either really touching or really fucking sarcastic.

It’s also occurred to me that I could use text to speech, or even my own voice, to record a track that I then get, say, Donald Trump to sing.

I think I will call the song “I Have Nothing But Contempt For You Republican Bitches”.

Might be a big hit. And you know it’s absolutely true.

Might start it with him saying. “Why did I run as a Republican? Because Republicans are stupid. They’re the dumbest people in the world. Fooling them was easier than taking candy from a baby, because the baby might fight back and at the very least the baby won’t still worship the ground you walk on. I’m telling you, these are stupid people!” Or something like that.

Hmmmm. Maybe I should see if I can just do text to speech as Donald Trump.

It would be a lot easier.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s your weekly Therapy Thursday breakdown.

One of the biggest breakthroughs came, as is often the case, near the end of the session. It was the first time I had really put the case against my childhood all together in a single package, and it went something like this :

I spent my childhood ashamed of my existence without knowing why. The reason was that I was unplanned and my parents, and to a lesser extent my siblings, never forgave me for that. That’s why I learned to be invisible. To pretend I didn’t exist. I knew deep down that drawing any attention to my existence would end badly for me. It would make people angry and get me in trouble. So I certainly wasn’t allowed to have needs, let alone call attention to the fact that they were not being met, and as for getting anything that I wanted (outside of birthdays and Xmas) merely asking would have brought down the wrath of our lack of God upon my head.

So it’s no wonder I have such massive self worth issues despite all my gifts.

My parents hated my existence before I was even born.

I guess I should be glad that, despite her atheism, my mother does not believe in abortion, or I would have been flushed down Doctor Morganthaler’s drain.

Now I am not saying my family treated me like dirt. After all, dirt gets attention. I am saying they treated me as though I was less than dirt.

They treated me, in short, like I did not exist. And I played along.

Kids always play the role you write for them, even when they don’t know why. All they know is what makes people mad and what makes them happy.

And that becomes their world.

I can’t say it made my parents happy when I pretended not to exist. To be happy about it would have required acknowledging my existence and that would have defeated the entire purpose of punishing me for existing.

Like it was my idea to be born.

We also discussed my feeling that I have been stuck in a very long freeze response for all of my adult life. How, like I have said, the freeze response says “only in remaining unnoticed can you be safe!”.

Like I am being hunted by a saber toothed tiger.

Doc Costin correctly pointed out that the tiger in question was really my parents and their disapproval of my being alive and therefore their problem.

And yeah. The greatest fear in all children is abandonment, and I grew up feeling like if I pissed off my parents and/or siblings bad enough, they would get so fed up with me that they would leave me. Abandon me. Throw me to the wolves.

Not a realistic possibility, but you don’t know that as a kid.

Even before I went to school for the first time, I knew that I could only be safe if I stayed quiet and still and did nothing to attract attention to myself.

Exactly as if I was being hunted by a predator.

Turns out the bullies had nothing to do with it. My parents were the tiger all along.

More after the break.

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The tragedy of my childhood, latest edition

So there it all is, laid out as compactly and neatly as I currently can make it.

I think that, until now and until today, I was subconsciously blaming the bulk of my problems on the bullying I suffered in elementary school.

That way I could avoid facing the real problem, which is how I was treated even before elementary school, while distracting myself with relatively less important traumas.

But this, as far as I can tell, is the real deal. Well, that and being raped when I was 4.

Can’t forget about that. Though not for lack of trying.

But today we are talking about the chilly reception I got upon being born.

i can see now how nervous and scared I was when I was with the family back then. Cheerful too, in a brittle way, because it goes Fight, Flight, Freeze… and Fawn.

And that’s the real deep down dirty business of my soul : my trying to placate everyone and make them like me.

. This is when the sabertooth tiger finds your hiding spot and you respond by saying, “Here, kitty kitty. Nice kitty. Good kitty. ”

Clearly I learned this lesson well. I tried to be the nicest, easiest to get along with, funniest, cutest little disposable doormat you’ve ever begrudgingly barely tolerated.

And it really hurts to realize that. I have invested a fair bit of self worth in what a sweet and lovely guy I am, justifiably, and to realize that it all started from a desperate and ultimately doomed attempt to make my family love me cuts me to the quick.

I’ll get over it, I think. It’s a harsh blow but not a fatal one. However I got there, I am a genuinely nice, sweet, caring person, with a lot of love to give.

Plus, ya know, a fabulous treasure trove of talent and intellect. I don’t generally think of that as an interpersonal asset – if anything, the opposite – but I am told that there are people besides me who find that kind of thing attractive.

I guess I could live with being loved for my big, hard, throbbing brain. Just as long as I get the cuddles n’ loving I need.

Once more I imagine myself in a relationship with someone I essentially think of as a pet due to the huge difference in intellectual capacity.

I mean, what the hell. If they’re cute and they make me happy, I maybe could live with them not being the wittiest of conversationalists.

And I suppose there are worse models for a relationship. If I am happy because he makes me feel warm and loved and he’s happy because I make him feel safe and “owned”, I guess there’s nothing wrong with that.

But could I respect him? There is no love without respect.

Anyhow, what the hell was talking about?

Um… me good. Childhood bad. Need love.

The rest can come later.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.