Been having that difficult sleep lately.
You know, waking up sleepy and disorineted and dizzy and all that. As usual, it’s a real drag, and kind of depressing.
Speaking of depressing, sorry about yesterday’s post. Especialll sorry if it worried you. Do not worry, I am fine, and I was never in any danger.
I just had to let all the negative thoughts out..
And that reminded me that I don’t want to keep suppressing the negative stuff., It needs an outlet. And yet, when I halt the nagative thought and replace it with a positive one, that is exactly what I am doing.
Besides, the thoughts come from real emotions and changing the thought doesn’t really change the emotion. The new thought shows up too late for that. I have already felt the emotion. Stifling it at that point is counterproductive.
Wow, am I having trouble staying focused on the blogging right now.
Anyhow,. my point is that cognitive capture and replace is not enough. It works in the short term in that it pushes back against the negative thoughts but in the long term it does little to change the underlying emotions that are the real problem.
So much for the purely cognitive approach. I’ve always thought that emotions are far stronger that mere thoughts anyhow and that we are, fundamentally. emotional creatures that can use logic and not the other way round.
Perhaps the real name of the game is redirection. Instead of blocking the negative emotion, redirect it into a less harmful form of expression.
Not sure what that would look like, but it sounds good in theory.
And like I have said before, I am not happy with any approach that pits my mind against itself. The war between the healthy part of my mind and the depressed is mostly just racking up casualties while resolving nothing.
Perhaps redirection is the wrong way of looking at it. That’s still a pretty strong intervention and a form of inner conflict.
Maybe I would be best off not resisting any of my thoughts or feelings. Just let them all flow through me. Above all, let nothing accumulate.
Sounds all Zen and great in theory but reality is not so pure.
There has to be some kind of middle path hidden amongst the weeds and bracken of my turbulent inner life. Something sane and balanced and efficient that balances all the emotional vectors to create some kind of inner sanctum from where I can progress to a greater state of spiritual and moral development without completely losing my mind.
Or perhaps that is still too Olympian. Maybe what I really want is to eschew detachment and do a deep dive into the dirty depths of my demented soul, digging through the debris and feeling all the suppressed and broken feelings that I can until I run out.
Funny how, despite all the calibrations and convolutions of psychological theory, it always comes back to Freudian analysis : digging out suppressed emotions and giving them expression in order to set them free.
I’mma go back bed nao. L8r sk8rs.
Post-Paragon meeting now.
Still no clue as to the solution for my waste disposal issue. Suppressing the negative thoughts doesn’t work. It doesn’t get rid of the badness, it just limits the effect.
And then all that nasty stuff accumuates in the tissues of my mind like I have a failed kidney until the psyche has to dump in a post like the one I wrote yesterday
And I’m not done. There’s still a lot of stuff in me that has to come out. I am not sure how I am going to accomplish that because I am not sure what all I have left to say.
But I am sure I will think of something. This nausea I feel cannot be denied. I feel a lot better than I did yesterday but I have a long ways to go before I am clean.
And I can be clean.
I have to keep telling myself that until I believe it.
Because normally. I think of myself as filth. And filth cannot be clean. I have felt like no cleanliness or purity or even wholesomeness could ever attach to me because I was the very thing those things are defined as lacking.
Again, this is common amongst adult survivors of sexual abuse. Being violated at such an early age (in my case, 4 years old) makes us feel like we are permanently soiled.
And that’s incredibly unfair, of course. Why should we feel bad when we aren’t the ones who did anything wrong? The abuser is the one who should feel like they are toxic. They are the ones who violated an innocent child just to get their rocks off.
It’s called masturbation, asshole. Google it.
The strange thing is that I find it hard to even be angry at my assailant. The crime is too big in my mind for that. My mind can’t wrap itself around this terrible trauma enough to get angry at it.
It’s like a bomb went off on my block and I am still in too much schock and too disoriented to even begin to think about who did it.
Seeing as it happened 40 years ago. I think I can say I won’t be getting there any time soon. That’s too bad, because it would probably do me a lot of good.
A large and important part of me died that summer day in 1977. Being able to get good and angry about it would go a long way to helping me recover from it.
And I could blame my father for leaving me alone and naked at that spa or I could blame the spa for not keeping an eye out for me or I could blame the pig ignorant times I grew up in where child sexual abuse was never talked about and so every victim felt like they were the only person this happened to and had absolutely no way to process the event at all. let alone tell an adult.
I could even blame the son of a bitch who actually did it.
But somehow, I just don’t have the energy.
I’m too busy trying to survive the damage for all that.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.