Pay attention, because this might turn out to be my “lean in”.

I was conemplating my issues while urinating, and the phrase “eat the pain” popped into my head, along with a sense of what that meant.

It’s not quite sane. In fact, I am pretty sure that it comes from the same circuit that lets aa coyote chew its leg off in order to escape a trap, and that allows a harmless critter like a rabbit to suddenly turn savage and strike out with blind fury like they are possessed by a demon when cornered.

But the idea is basically that  through this act of metaphorical cannibalism, you both triumph over the inner enemy by defeating and devouring it, you also take the truths contained within those demons and that the demons were, in a sense, created to convey to you but got frozen in your inner vault for so long that they had to grow progressively more brutal and twisted just to stay alive.

Emotions are information, after all. We fall into inner conflict when the part of our minds that maintains our sense of reality – call it the truth center – battles the part of our mind that doesn’t want to feel negagive emotions or face to face unpleasant truths – we will call that the Inner Animal.

Or in my case, the Jagoff.

We’re all familiar with the concept of delusion and the ability for the human mind to fool itself, and this causes people with more intelligence than vision to declare that there is no such thing as truth or objective reality and it’s all one big delusion.

I hate those people.

Because if that were true, we would never have survived as a species. We wouldn’t even be able to communicate, let alone function. We would all be schizophenics, unable to distinguish between the inner world and outer reality. And no two people could ever see anything the same way (unless by blind chance) because there would be no objective reality for them both to see in the first place.

Clearly, then, there is a counteracting force, and that’s the force I have labeled the Truth Center. That’s the part of our mind responsible for constructing our sense of the reality of things, our consciousness, out of things like our sensory input, our memories, our associations, what we’re used to experiencing, and so forth and so on.

And this part of the mind might get suppressed, but it never gives up. It doesn’t understand the meaning of the term. If the Inner Animal halts a negative emotion or unwanted fact at the border, it doesn’t disappear.

It waits. And as it waits, the impulse that propels it – call it the truth engine – pushes it into a higher and higher state of agitation as it continues to be ignored.

Think of it as water pressure rising behind a boulder that is blocking a river.

And as that pressure builds, it changes the emotion/information packet. It becomes increasingly desperate to be expressed and its voice becomes more and more savage, primitive, and LOUD.

Still, by itself, it would never have much of an effect. But when suppressing the bad stuff becomes a deeply ingrained habit – when our emotional shutoff valve is being wildly abused – the blocked emotions build in number and strength till there is a massive army of them waiting at the border station, all wanting through at the same time.

And if the repression continues, the state has to spend more and more of its resources just to keep this growing mob at bay. As it does so, life on the other side of the border gets worse and worse because necessary resources can’t get through either.

And with both sides pushing as hard as they can, the mostly deadly form of pressure builds up – the tension of the conflict – and threatens the entire structure of the psyche if it is not resolved.

So unless the individual realizes (on some level) that they need to resolve the tension, eventually, their mind breaks down and they have, if they are lucky, just a ndeervous breakdown and nervous collapse, or if the problem is truly intractable, they will go crazy for reals and at that point, anything can happen.

The most obvious answer is to start letting emotions through. Even the negative ones. That requires changing the paranoid beliefs that have been used to justify this “no access” policy. Beliefs that are outdated, maladaptive, extremely painful, and that melt like a snowflake when subjected to even small amounts of the pure light of reason.

That’s what recovery is all about. Reducing that pressure at the border by letting some of the negative emotions through. Either one at a time, and with great caution, like in my case, or by just flinging the gate wide open and letting everything through all at once, and dealing with the consequences as they come.

KInd of like this:

I think I went long enough without posting that video that I can do it now.

My god, that song has deep spritiual meaning for me. I connect with it so deeply it’s scary. It’s like it was written by a part of myself far wiser than the rest.

And what do you know, it’s full of water imagery. Quelle surprise.

In case you haven’t’ figured it out yet, the “situation at the border” that I have described is a metaphor for depression. As the border suppression system deals with an incresingly large number of waiting emotions. it uses up more and more enery and makes the person involved more and more lethargic, unmotivated, and depressed as their inner world starves.

And if it gets bad enough, the pressure will be released explosively, and result in anything from a nervous breakdown to an unspeakable act that the person would never do when sane, to a suicide attempt, to a full on psychotic episode.

Luckily for me, I have therapy, and I have this blog,. Both give me a please where I can let those emotions in – slowly – and thereby reduce that terrible inner pressure.

It’s all about release, man. Your legal immigration policy.

Find yours or you will pay for it, one way or another.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.