Caveat : Some of what I talk about today is pretty well traveled territory, so this might not contain any of my (of course) brilliant flashes of psychological insight.

I will, however, be talking about them as they apply to me. And trust me. I am a very unique person. Overwhelmingly so. So unique that I’m not really compatible with the standard models of reality.

But that’s a topic for another day.

Today, I am going to talk about the control/blame spiral that some of us depressives get into. It happens when we blame ourselves for everything that has gone wrong in our lives, even if they were completely beyond our control, because taking the game gives is a feeling of control over the problem.

After all, if it’s all my fault, then in theory, I could prevent it in the future. Right?

But that’s not what it really is about. That healthy system of regret and improvement gets hijacked (just like everything else) by the depression and used by our inner prosecutors as further evidence it can use to condemn us.

It’s at this point, however, that a curious dichotomy emerges : the same depressive who takes the blame for everything believes themselves to be responsible for nothing.

This is an obvious logical non starter. But this isn’t about logic. It’s about the mind of the depressive trying to interpret its very unbalanced chemical state. Therefore, the same person who blames themselves for all the pain in the world will be the same person who will earnestly details how badly they have been screwed by fate by things totally beyond their control, and have a large cast of characters to blame for their woes.

That’s the sort of thing that happens when you have a head full of bad chemicals.

I’ve wandered away from talking about myself again, haven’t I? Damn you, intellectualization, you’ve foiled me again!

What all this means in my life is that right now, I can’t be sure what I should “own” as being my responsibility and what I should shrugs off as beyond my control.

It’s a complex equation to solve. One of the only good things about blaming yourself for everything is that it makes the paperwork extremely easy.

I wanted to make a funny flowchart to explain how this works, but I gave up because none of the solutions actually work. They basically just say “Use a drawing program!”.

Um,. no, the whoile point of my looking for a tool for this task is that I don’t want to have to align everything by hand and figure out how to make the text align with the symbol and all that.

I want a program that does that for me. And not one where I have to sign up to the website in order to try it.

I have no idea if it’s worth the effort yet. Let me try it first to figure out if it’s what I need, THEN maybe I will sign up.

Ahem. Back to the topic at hand

Basically, the flowchart would have started off with a box that says “Is it your fault?”. If you choose “yes”, it says “Then it’s your fault. ” And if you choose “no”, it would lead to “better safe than sorry” then to “it’s your fault”.

Such a simple idea, yet frustratingly hard to implement.

I guess it’s one of those things over which I have no control.

Oooh, what a segue!

I know that I have some serious trust/blame/control issues. It would be hard to avoid them given my brutalized and isolated childhood. On a deep level, I only trust what I can control. The unknown and the unpredictable terrify me. I automatically assume that if something is left up to fate, horrible things will happen.

This is a highly counter-adaptive position to take in life.

furthermore, the thought of true intimacy with someone – where the walls come down and our true selves are revealed – scares me even more than the unpredictable. Like a lot of survivors of sexual abuse, I feel like I am more or less a sack of shit that sometimes manages to fool people into loving him, and that if anyone was exposed to my true self, they would run away screaming.

Then die from my toxicity.

Having the badness inside me spill out into the world to shame me is one of my worst fears of all time. Then people would know how horrible I am and nobody would want to have anything to do with me and the world would know what a disgusting poisonous person I am and I would die from the shame.

I trust the Freudian aspects of this do not need to be spelled out.

I know all of this talk of my own horribleness is irrational. And I know that other people who know me don’t see me the way I do. I have all the evidence I could ever need that my toxic view of myself makes no sense at all.

And yet, part of me clings to my toxicity. Maybe it”s because it’s all I have known for such a long time that to let go of it would leave me in the existential void without any kind of identity to hold me together.

And maybe it’s because some part of me views this powerful poison as my last line of defense. If all else fails, deploy the poison, like a an octopus squirting its ink, and then escape while everyone chokes on it.

Then I will be safe from being reached.

Maybe that’s what all us sexual abuse survivors do. Build a fortress around ourselves with dozens of protective layers so that nobody can ever get to you again.

And then you sit, and wait to be rescued from yourself by a theoretical somone who can make is through all your defenses and still have the will to live.

Then, maybe, you can love that person.

But then again…. maybe not.

I will walk to you nice people again tomorrow.