Analyzing Thoughts

I'm having such wonderful insights into the nature of my morbid thoughts.

The morbid thought I refer to is the thought that obsesses over the sound of my voice.

What I find fascinating is how there appears to be two different parts to this puzzle: there's the bodily, affective arousal; and then there's this cognitive recognition. The recognition is a type of perception that senses into the bodily arousal; knowing it, and sensing that it represents something painful.

I am surviving, or allowing myself to function in the world, because I have been able to get rid of the cognitive recognition aspect, by focusing my mind on the bodily aspect of the total experience of self.

This difference is probably best encapsulated by what the psychologist Alan Fogels terms  subjective emotional present and conceptual self awareness. When I am finding myself in a traumatic state of altered perception - that state where I find something 'wrong' in the sound of my own voice; and indeed, become hypnotically entranced by it - I can feel intense shame for sounding off; for failing to connect; and even worse, for perpetuating my experience by unwittingly enacting desperate efforts to string myself free from it. It fails; I fail, and then a 'secondary shame' follows, whereby I experience my "weirdness" in the presence of an interlocutor; amidst this is a a general intense bodily heat;a growing tension in the throat region; and strong sensations of activity within my temples. In all likelihood, the strong sensations of heavy blood flow I feel in my temples is the hypothesized "little seizure" activity that accompanies reliving traumatic experience. Makes a lot of sense to me, as when these types of experiences happen, I do indeed have trouble discriminating sounds in human conversation, as well as an overall sense of diminished ability to hear; also tending to change in proportion to the intensity of the arousal. 

Somehow, the mind is able to 'sense into' the dynamic vitality forms of actuated experience. But it is combining different strands and different pieces of knowledge. I am using insights that have come from elsewhere; a sense of strangeness in the world - my own strangeness, or estrangement from others over the years. I discovered something deep in myself, in my suffering self, that was only discovered out of necessity: to survive, my mind needed to 'find' an equilibrium within me, or at least a possibility within a general ontological space. The world felt real not merely as a fact, but as a reality juxtaposed with nothingness: and that, the fear of nothingness, trumps all fears.

 I cried and cried - but to whom? To God. To the ontological "other" that is responsible for this sorry fate of mine. To suffer because...of what? Because my mother suffered and dealt with the consequences by externalizing it against her child? But before I was wise enough to appreciate that fact, I had only the feelings of emptiness and fear, and the desperate need for an other to help and save me from the feared doom.

Doom is the overwhelming sense that played a part in building this feeling within me. I could not have come to feel such compassion, to know such awareness, without having been "stunned" into vital alertness to my environment. The evolutionarily ancient "amydgular" system raises consciousness - spurs consciousness, which for humans, supercharges this thing we call "consciousness". Fear builds it; Fear gives us access to possible ways of thinking that would otherwise be hidden in sight. It is not merely a qualitative thing, but something intimately related to a change in quantitative arousal. It is such an odd thing the way quantity and quality relate.

I had a good day; spoke to my teacher. Spoke loudly and assertively. Was relaxed, and most importantly, was relaxed to my relaxedness.

This condition I live within forces me to embed awareness within the thoughts I have. Every thought now needs a thought which can "stabilize" the former. In being with my teacher, I am clearly replaying my relationship with my sister, whom I've developed a particular 'relational function' with, or sense of my self in relation with, that gives me the confidence to proceed.

I do not know what I would do without Ashley. She is so obviously valuable, on a purely unconscious/neurological level; and this is why I need to "build some bridges" towards others, so that this way I feel most relaxed with, based on a person I will perhaps never be as close with (my sister) unless perhaps with a future spouse. In any case, there is a complexity to this situation in that I still have to keep at it, that is, building up an autoregulative faculty that can maintain itself independent of a particular outside other.

I am also clearly sensitive, as we all are, to energy changes. Late at night. Tiring day; a psychologically significant experience - conversation with my teacher, a woman in her late 30's (i'm guessing) and experiencing myself as a positive object for another. I say "object", just to convey that there is a particular pleasure in knowing that you are being experienced by another person in a positive way, and not a negative one. I thought I had this as a child, but obviously I didn't; my mothers BPD undermined my psychological growth, leaving me adapted to a strange environment (the one she created) which in turn spawned worlds of distortion that ultimately culminated in my various traumas (13, 15, 16). Now, in this wonderful conversation with another person, I find myself being a different version of me; some I actually do recognize, as "me", or at least a version of me whom others can know as "mike", when I know all too well there also exists another mike, another part of me, which I naturally fear: could you handle it? Could you still like me if you knew that that part existed?

Such thoughts jump about in my mind because they pertain to the all important issue of being liked. If humans didn't have a genetically ingrained need to be liked, developmental trauma wouldn't exist. But it does; and it does exist, because sociality evolved as a way to maintain "shared intentionality" between conspecifics. Thus, the breakdown in sociality - or the attunement of the caregiver to the infants mind - leads to a series of adaptations, by which I mean, mind-boggling biological complexity at the genetic, organelle, and cytoplasmic level, whereby the world 'out there' becomes internally mapped "in here". Every aspect of the metabolic processing of conscious experience is in the brain, in neurons, represented by something in physical form (proteins, lipids, sugars).

Because of this reality, human infants are at the whim of their caregivers; their future of being the jock everyone likes or the loner who eats lunch in the washroom is perhaps best conceived as a 'phenotype' 'built up' out of a complex medley of opposing meanings, shaping, displacing, and 'designing' the contours of personality.

So this is me? The one who suffers? The one who feels like crying when his mind is so disordered? So lost? So involved in a thought, an obsession, with a feeling of absence.

The loss of self is very much a loss of agency. When I can't hear my self in my voice, I sense that it's due to something more basic: a feeling of effectancy. I do not speak, or hear my self in my voice, because I do not want to speak. I speak, but hear in my own background, a censure, a conviction, that what is there is "wrong" or "unlikable".

At perhaps the deepest level there is something, thank lord, far more banal: inertia. I live it out by feeling so "meh". The dissociative, hypoaroused sense of relatedness to experience yields half-hearted attempts; and it is in these attempts that the 'absence' is heard, and hence, sensed as an ontological 'thing".

There is no thing. Never was. The self gets caught up in these thoughts because it 'thingifies' itself. The self-focus, the turn to conceptual-self awareness, speaks to this reality: when the self is looked at an held as an object, experience becomes performative - a thing to "do" - as opposed to the far more basic reality of "being", whereby I feel my aliveness and connectedness to the world and reality: this, the more natural and true state of human functioning.

That the mind can weave its ongoing experience into a sense of being that is more relaxed, by being more aware of the dynamics of bodily experience, while simultaneously "tuning" ones out breaths with a sense of "peacefulness" and wellbeing. This, I must say, is pretty existentially incredible.