POST # 2
A person is motivated to change when the balance of what is acceptable swings way over to the side of quintessential unacceptability. I, like many others, knew full well for many years that something was wrong with my "picture" but try as I might I couldn't stop the inevitable slides into low self esteem accompanied by a mixed bag of intense anxiety, depression, and frustration.
I identified with Harry Haller - the hero in Steppenwolf (by Herman Hesse).
I wish I could reconcile the overlap of romanticism and intellectualism, nostalgia and cold cynicism, division and compulsion at work in my soul. I long to be objective; But how to be objective if the acquisition of knowledge is based on my subjective self selecting ‘facts’out of the flow of the raw data of experience to order reality? How can I ever hope to penetrate to the nature of reality when I feel so confused half the time? I find this problem becoming more and more central to me as I come closer to the essential facts of my life. I feel bound to a wheel that inevitably repeats itself and, though I wish to get off, I am unclear as to how to do it.
The wheel to which I felt bound had been aptly described by Spinoza who referred to this particular form of self tyranny as bondage. " The impotence of man to govern or restrain the emotions, I call bondage. For a man who is under their control is not his master, but is mastered by fortune, in whose power he is, so that he is often forced to the worse, although he sees the better before him."
I accurately perceived that the essence of my wheel was a selective, compulsive and impulsive reactivity that,once triggered forced me to act and then think about what I had done, rather than to have first thought and then acted. Given this pattern, I was unable to trust myself. Thus, I could easily be thrown off course by having certain ‘buttons’ of mine pushed, resulting in my instantly becoming red hot or ice cold. And though I could see the process beginning, I was powerless to stop it. And until it played itself out, I would be left wide open without adequate protection, hence vulnerable to my enemies. {Identification with the aggressor}
Then when I came to a state of near paralysis - feeling overwhelmed with an intensity of "negative and sickly feelings" I entered my psychoanalysis finally ready to come face to face with the truth of my divided and exhausted 'self'.
I wandered in the internal desert of my inner reality for years dragging myself along in external reality. I continued feeling this way despite two largely failed attempts to change my uncomfortable condition. I was right in pursuing treatment for my dis-ease. I was wrong in assuming that all helpers and all their theories are equally effective. What I needed was not to find a treatment that worked, but a treatment that worked best for me.
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