suffering

I am an addict. To marijuana.

Marijuana feels nice. I can't explain why that is - it just is - a stubborn annoying fact of reality.

But living with complex developmental trauma is so complicated. I was addicted to this blasted drug before I understood what it meant, psychoanalytically, that I was ding to myself.

The weed is dissociating me from any strong investment in my experience. I act, but I have this strange sense that something isn't right. My body feels too numb. I feel psychically "split", acting and wanting to act, but not liking what I'm experiencing as I act. I begin to 'hyper-focus', my mind becomes singularly focused - an ability that becomes enhanced by the dissociative, "momentary" cognition of a weed high - on the bad, on whats wrong, oftentimes is being enhanced by my brother.

In a very real way, my poor brother and I have been living within a sadomasochistic relationship, each moving from abuser to abused, I forcing him to do what I want - basically subverting his subjectivity and sense of agency - and he, stubborn, frustrated, and  lockjawed in dissociation, just looks at me blankly, until I demand in a more harsher tone that he tell me what I want to hear.

Our relationship was scaffolded by my mothers relationship with me and him. No one here is to blame. Blame means nothing when every human being passes through a stage of developmental passivity, taking in what the environment gives you: every one of us is the "imprint" of the environment around us.

I felt my mother favored him. Loved him more. Liked him more. This is what happens, at my young age - 5 years and 7 months at his birth - that I detested him and his entrance into the world. Why so much hate? My mother, a conflicted, quiet, sometimes depressed, sometimes anxious, irritable and angry woman, brought me inside her emotional reality. She was disturbed, and till this day retains much of her disturbances. She was hurt in ways far greater than me, yet she was also "made" differently, at a different time, a different family/group of people, and these elements come together to "make" you what you are.

But evidently, how I am and how I experience myself is nothing more than my interpretation of her emotional reality. I am needy; fearful, anxious, depressive and angry at different times. All these affects are things she feels from time to time; but she cannot "know it", self consciously, conceptually and theoretically, as an important and useful piece of knowledge. For whatever reason, I have come to know these things in myself, uniquely mine, yet originating in a pattern borne from her, and to a lesser extent, my father.

Jordan came in, to the rescue, a beautiful, healthy, and heavy baby boy. He eventually developed into quite a splendid human adult phenotype. Clear skin. Wavy hair. 5'9. Really, a good looking kid. And gregarious, always curious to know from the people around him. I always resented seeing this in him, because I knew it wasn't something I could find inside me. Hatred grows from these types of experiences.

I tried so hard to keep him down, but his natural resilience made him a naturally skilled dissociater. He dissociated in the "normative" sense of being good at not feeling bad emotions. His "self regulation", made easy by his genetic-epigeneitic milieu, gave him a natural likeability. A sincerity in his speech. The base, or speech, I suppose has a keeness to it that could make someone, usually girls, to find it 'cute'.

I was forced to experience again and again in our relationship his obdurate unwillingness to know what he was experiencing.And for good reason! Evolutionarily speaking, Jordan is a "successful reproducer" - he can adapt himself to different contexts with ease. But with me, he held a steady quietness for long periods as I vented my anxieties to him, about what was wrong, in our relationship. Besides that, there were the innumerable fights. Most, if not all of them instigated by me.

Today, when I relate with him, particularly potent at those times where I've been smoking weed for a few days straight, I dissociate, and I experience this horribly unresponsive, at ease, yet easily defensive face, and body posture, and I find myself being "sucked" into that past traumatic wormhole, a literal vector of relational traumata, in which I experience again and again the painful feeling of not being recognized nicely by the other person.

I wonder where that neediness originated. Oh yes, my mother. So great, mysterious, and yet arbitrary it all is, who gives birth to us, where and at what time. It all follows like a canal, cute little baby morphs into cute yet shy 5 year old who morphs into socially awkward 16 year old who morphs into self-educated 29 year old. All of the past, the cute innocence of needing recognition of my infancy, to the social awkwardness of my 16-29 year old self. I say -29, because I have not yet quite outgrown that. Healing requires quite an intense, conscious "midwifing" of negative experiences, finding the compassion within you to reorganize, find help, and build yourself again through positive interaction. And don't be afraid to bare yourself: let your needs be seen, unload them, so that the other can recognize its similarity to their own experience.

I trust I don't live in a crazy world, and that human beings can be willing to conquer the fears which cripple us. But that can only be done through understanding the social origin of these very personal experiences of shame and self-hatred. In short, the challenges that face us our interpersonal: how do we handle the "effects" of our actions on the world? By paying attention. When something goes wrong - when it's recognized, do not dissociate it and pretend like you didn't have the initial perception. Getting better at being good means knowing the effects your having and desiring to engender a positive effect. If the desire is there, good. But most people don't really have the desire there. It's there, as they say, as a "Self-state": it's only you at those moments when you feel compassion, kindness, empathy, or that you've done something morally upright. At other times you firmly identify with other emotions/self-states, and don't realize how completely out-of-line you are with your stated, self conscious values.

Suffering makes you aware by truly forcing you to thinking in a new way. Fortunately for me, I have relational psychoanalysis, interpersonal neurobiology, enactive cognitive science and other ways to "scaffold" my understanding of how to think. But it is mainly the influence of suffering, of feeling and knowing fear and shame, that I somehow find a part in me that is loving; sometimes projected outwards as a call to God; other times related inwardly as an inner capacity, borne from the strain of the suffering on my body's survival.

So why I am the way I am, is a mystery to me. It has given life deep existential meaning, made more meaningful my mere consciousness of it. It's not just me, but all of us, our species, the process of life, in an expanding universe; the culture and technologies we develop, predictions for the future, hopes for the future, the potential for spiritual development, at the same time as we develop our material technologies.

This perception "scaffolds" my experience at those moments when I feel "above" the petty power politics of everyday socializing. I can be myself without feeling the force of the "object". My brain 'contains' various experiences, different selves, and their actions are determined by emotional valence. Which emotions cause what? How do I make myself more able to tolerate negative experiences?

How do I get myself away from marijuana? Do I not wait up for Jordan when he comes home? Not call him? These are habits and desires which form strongly in me at around 5 or 6 pm. The rest of the day seems monotonous vis-a-vis the notion of Jordan coming home, smoking weed, with around a 50/50 chance of a negative high, and the negative self-states that come with that. I think that's what I'll need o do. I can perhaps tolerate getting high on Mondays. But not anymore. I must, MUST, must, go to bed before he comes home. When home, hang out with him soberly, both literally and figuratively, and disengage at the right time to go to bed. You're going to school anyways very soon. You need to prepare yourself - enjoy your summer, spend more time meditating, read, play basketball, read, hang out with the family and then a little more reading, than bed. That's a good, productive day.

Still Searching

I need to understand why things like this keep happening. I shouldn't smoke weed, yet I do it. The glory and blissful like feeling with another - the want - supersedes my wiser, better self. I can have so much fun articulating ideas like these, yet enacting them, controlling the dynamics of experience, intervening at proper times, changing the flow of experience so that you don't allow yourself to fall into certain basins of attraction - this stuffs hard, difficult to tolerate: the instinct, deep within your chest, is to dissociate the pain of not getting what you want.

I can't remember how it began. I know the weed was making me paranoid and feeling negative. An "absence" in me, noticed peripherally at first, periodically 'jutted' into my attention. Talking about philosophical matters made me more self-consciousness. Each iteration, or effort to explain a feeling I was having, lead to this overbearing self consciousness, felt in the action itself, impinging on a more natural focus on what I was talking about. Feeling that, reading the effect on Jordan, silenced any strong or resilient part in me, and drew me to deeper into psychic entrainment with a negative self-state.

When we left, went to get his car clean, I was sitting in the car, thinking, worrying, feeling a 'weight' upon me - the weighing paranoia of "hearing a voice", a paranoia from a more paranoid time in my past - I didn't know that he was noticing "micro-scratches" from the brush he used to clean it. He came back in, I spoke, he didn't respond in a way that I liked. Every repetition of this effort - the intention I had to speak, and the perceived effect I seemed to be having, left marks on my physiology, an increased heat in my forehead, a feeling of compression, or perhaps decomprehension: is the blood rushing in, or away, from my frontal lobe? My attention and quality of consciousness would seem to indicate a reduction in orbitofrontal control. I gave up, psychically, and I remember the few iterations where it happened: I remember internalizing a feeling, and not having the "oomph" to contain and defuse it. It was a feeling that consciously said "I give up", and so every action became increasingly lifeless, self-conscious, guarded, tense, and rushed. This anxiety "scaffolded" what was allowed to come through in my action. My perception "knew it", WAS IT, and I have the simultaneous shame of having another person partake in this quality of experience, engendered by me and "put" into you.

No wonder people hate shame. Shame-Hate might in fact be psychical twins - neurological actions that become neurally 'linked' by inherent properties in social and emotion relations. A human can't help but naturally hate shame. On the other hand, there is another part of you: a part that can be so quiet that your stubborn intention is to dilute it's presence. Love, compassion, acceptance, tolerance. The blissful feeling, lightness and ease of patient acceptance of what is. Anger, in it's stubborness and arrogance, is symptomatic of a mind overwhelmed by shame and defends against it through projecting on an external object. Through externalizing, it displaces and thus distorts the influence of unconscious processes in social relations. Ignorance of processes like these is the root cause of pain and suffering human society.

There a comes a point in every self-conscious human beings life when he honestly addresses what he feels: his fears, his deep, naked, vulnerability before the facts of life. He looks at it, acknowledges what he sees, but instead of identifying, and thus inevitably enacting what he feels, he instead chooses - exercises a capacity that no other creature possesses: affirmation, in an action, in a choice, he decides to love himself, forgive himself, calm himself, and make new promises, and commitments, to a newer understanding. My perceptions have the dimensions of a sphere. I can see so far - I cannot see what lies beyond the horizon. The curvature of perception, like that of the earth, inhibits knowledge of what lies beyond. But we know, always, that what lies beyond is different than what is here. In the next perception, we can know, breathe, and cool the fires in our belly's. Life feels better. Your mind feels stronger. You can trust yourself to be yourself. Not as performance. Not for anyone, but for you, because you feel it, and you should defend what you feel: to be, and to let yourself to be, is the core processes at the root of "selfhood".