Writings For today

I'm feeling it pretty strongly right now. I'm feeling this intense shamefulness.

I feel like my brother is causing it to me. I feel bullied. I feel unresponded to.

I sense in him this repetitive, wind up gizmo, working from some stereotypical foundation, taking hold in his mental stream, and leaving me to relate with what Louis Cozolino calls 'reflexive social language' - ways of being that my brother has obviously developed to relate with the people he interacts with. The "ways of being" are stereotyped in that they are accomplished in a relatively hypnotic trance-like state, whereby the 'personality' is constructed moment to moment in accord with some underlying pattern of activity.

In doing this, he loses sight of the meaning that his behavioral cues can induce in others. When I speak and I get a blank faced response, I feel exactly like the baby's described in the still-face paradigm. I feel helpless, and reactive, and needing, and I myself come to react with the same neediness that was programmed into me by my early life relations.

My implicit relational memory is riddled with negative expectations. Riddled, shaped as it is, and feeling inside as it does, because the face I interacted with was an unstable one. However much love was in her, in other parts of her existed dissociated shame, and thus an anger, aggressiveness, irritability, all made manifest in grimaces, disgust faces, and intense shifts in movement.

I can only infer from my present experience what my early life may have been like. My mother as I know her now is dissociative. Although not officially diagnosed, she is obviously a member of that category known as 'borderline personality disorder'. Intense sensitivity to any language that may intimate vulnerability (shame or anxiety states) is regulated by 'externalizing', i.e. getting upset, angry, irritable, or even bully another person. A person this "split", that is, unable to 'reconnect" at those moments when she gets aroused, is somehow present in me - as this "core shame" feeling. It's not anything other than a feeling which inhibits and suppresses ventral vagal activity. Perhaps, I wonder, that this wouldn't be such a problem for me if I didn't smoke so much weed - when I have ample experience providing me knowledge of how routinely harmful this practice is to myself.

It's tiring, and frightening. To feel this weak, and pathetic. The other day, yesterday, I felt strong. I was resilient in the face of multiple arguments with multiple people. I was handling myself very well, maintaining focus and affective attachment to the object of my interest. Today, I am experiencing the opposite of that. Not in the beginning - it started off well - but it has since fallen low when I started smoking weed. It was originally related to Charlie Sheen and his HIV and how depressing this subject matter - he and the kind of person he is - was to me; and as I smoked, I fell deeper into a depressive state, leading to a sudden "invitation" to hyper-focus on Jordans responses to me. Feeling this way, my place of focus was externalized as the "facial reaction". Enough emotional input was offloaded for this attentional tast. No big deal? Horrible. I'm lodged in a shitty state with seemingly no way out.

But how can I keep doing this? Have I not fallen low enough? Do I still think I can go as I'm going - knowing my current level of accomplishment, and still smoke weed? Can I afford those "1 times out of 5" where things go wrong, and I feel totally dysregulated, dysfunctional, and alone? This is a horrible addiction that is made all the more horrible by it's subtly. Is it that bad? It's "just" weed after all. But it's a drug. It's in the opioid family, with endorphins and oxytocin. Cannabinoids like THC narrow attentional focus by "diffusing" sensory feelings. We can move from thought to thought with a rapidity and narrow focus that can morph into the popular symptom of paranoia. Depending on the feeling state interacting with the general cannabinoid effect, a person can be creative, relaxed, and open, or severely obsessive, paranoid, and delusional.

I need to write to metabolize these feelings. This writing is for me, although I know others can read it - its for the makeup, the place it provides me. The sense of safety for me to write and access my words.

Sometimes, I too need to cry. I don't cry - I stand by others as they cry, but I've had trouble doing it, something that may be related to the "blunting" effects of SSRI's (and SNRI's), or maybe to my lack of affective interactions with others to provide the emotional 'grist' for a later cry. But right now, I do feel like crying. I feel unsafe. I feel exposed - weak, short, shameful, ugly. The only thing I can't say about myself - because saying it is so unquestionably untrue to me - is that I'm dumb. I have a feeling and sense of my self, deriving from my passion for reading, learning, growing, understanding, and connecting with an underlying meaning, that I am an intelligent mind who understands himself - despite failing in restraining myself, my mind is open to what it sees. No doubt this "skill" derives from my long traumatic history, supercharging, as it were, my brains norepinephrine systems, and the associated vigilance (self and other).

Life seems destined towards something. Trauma results in enhanced transcription in norepinephrine neurons. Increased receptor proteins between these cells leads to a greater awareness of the environment: both the external environment, and after dozens of rounds of complex mental simulations, the internal environment of ones thinking, feeling, and imagining. Norepinephrine now powers self-reflection systems. The increased awareness of self - of ones internal environment - provides a "stepping stone" onto the path to enlightenment. Essentially, enlightenment is what's left when one collapses, when ones body becomes formed to suffer - either with a sense of social annihilation, or the existential annihilation that comes with death, life forces a new organization upon the self-reflective organism, powered by the norepinephrine systems that were upregulated by traumatic experience. To survive, for us, now means to survive our own awareness of suffering. To somehow find a new organization, or way of perceiving, that allows a new, higher, more stable organization than the chaos of anxiety, shame, depression and dissociation. I can see, truly, that there is something incredibly powerful about compassion. The emotion can be directed outwards, as well as inwards. Inwards! The serotonin, oxytocin, endorphin, dopamine concoction that produces these incredible sensations stabilize negative states. They are an energy - a reality of a deeper connectivity - that is able to "rebind" what has been broken, neurally, and psychologically (which are yet somehow the same). You need to submerge yourself within it, to find the courage to move yourself - be yourself - for all to see.