My pseudo-academic writing muscles are tired tonight, so I will go back to talking about myself.

One of the things that I have realized about my haunted head fairly recently is that entire negative events, or even sequences of events, can happen in the blink of an eye in here.

I can be completely alone when I do something mildly dumb (or even just sub-optimal) and my mind processes it almost exactly as if I had done said dumb thing in public, everyone had laughed at me, and I had slunk away in utter humiliation, all in the amount of time it takes a camera flash to go off.

My mind is very efficient at producing self-loathing.

It’s like I have this inner antagonist whose mortal enemy is my self-esteem. Silently, it waits for the slightest opportunity to strike like lightning and crush me. Things which would not even appear on a normal person’s self-esteem radar are brutal trauma to me even when there is nobody else there to see them, and it all happens so fast and so regularly that I am barely even conscious of it at all.

And there is nothing I can do to stop it, at least, not directly. By the time I am conscious of it, it has already happened. It is clearly not something which can be prevented by a simple, ferocious act of will. No matter how many times I scream “NO!” or “WRONG!” at this feeling in my head, it keeps coming back. Clearly adding energy to the system doesn’t work, or at least, doesn’t work on more than a superficial level.

It’s just not that easy. And wrestling with yourself rarely accomplished anything.

I am better off trying to figure out where this eyeblink assassin comes from, and where it might go.

Fundamentally, I think all of this kind of self-loathing springs from a corrupted self-defense mechanism. In response to trauma, the mind tries to figure out how to keep such things from happening in the future, and seeing as most human trauma in modern life comes from other humans, we attempt to model our tormentors in our head (humans are great at creating models of other humans in our heads) and it is these models that become our inner antagonists.

What causes these models to escape the bonds of their assigned role and become worse than the problem they were supposed to solve? I think it is the power of the emotions involved. Like with PTSD, certain emotionally traumatically experiences make so strong an impression on our minds and our memories that they become uncontrollable and overwhelm the mental muscles we would usually use to contain their effect, and suddenly the tail is wagging the dog. The mental model goes from being a tool for self-defense to a source of constant self-offense.

No wonder depression is associated with a lack of sense of safety. The depressed person is not safe within their own mind. No matter what they do to control the outside world, in their minds, they are still locked in the dark with a madman.

The question is now : what do we do about this inner assassin? Direct engagement doesn’t work. It is you and you are it… it is a part of you. Attack it, and you attack yourself. And while you can have some success burning out some of its tendrils with anger and will and concentration, sooner or later you will find it is embedded far too deeply for you to simply excise it. It is wrapped too tight around your most vital organs.

The only alternative is to make peace with it somehow. As demented and destructive as it has become, it is, in its own sick and twisted way, still trying to protect you, and if you can convince it that the coast is clear and the danger is gone now, it might well relax and disappear on its own.

This requires no self-delusion. You just have to keep reminding yourself that you are safe now. Whatever has traumatized you is long gone, even if it doesn’t always feel that way, and you are safe now. Repeat it like a mantra. You are in no danger.

The harder part is dealing with the trauma that caused this internal enemy to form in the first place. This is essentially what classical psychotherapy does. By getting back to the root of the problem, and releasing the emotion your demons were born to contain and protect you from, you can unplug these dark intruders from their power supply, and then they fade away.

I know how tempting it is to see this in black and white, battle of good versus evil terms and wants to just rip the heart out of these demons. And to a certain extent, that is perfectly healthy and in fact highly beneficial. Turning your latent rage on the real enemy, the enemy within, can be the solution for the problem of how to find the motivation to make the necessary changes in your life in order to be happy.

Rage is a great motivator. It can be just the energy source you need to fuel your recovery.

But like I have said, that only goes so far. You can battle your demons all you want, but at some point you are going to have to sit down and talk with them and listen to their concerns if you want to get anywhere.

So forget all my talk of assassins, tormentors, and other villains. Fight the battles you have to fight, the ones you have been putting off for far too long. Let those tensions resolve themselves.

But after the battle is over and the two sides have fought to exhaustion, try to make peace. Try to understand why the forces of self-destruction exist and how you can convince them that they are no longer needed.

Only then will you know true peace.

Notice how I starts off in the first person person then drifted to the second person infinitive?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.