Powerlessness, Control, Love, Letting Go

There seems to be a strong, unconscious, emotional response to losing control and/or becoming powerless. Horror movies often leverage this reaction; e.g., Jaws. Consciously, when I've "thought" about this, I think I've focused on the idea of death, the threat of death as the "cause" of my strong, fearful feelings which come up during horror movies. I.e., in horror, usually something/one is trying to kill some person/people.

There's much more to say here, but jumping the gun a little, my sense is that, when I watch horror, the emotional experience is about loss of control and powerlessness. Jacob talks also about the "illusion of control." I.e., that any sense we have of being "in control" or controlling things, this sense is not real, not true. In fact, there are so many things which we cannot control, that for all practical purposes, we have no control. At any moment, things _could_ go completely out of our control: heart attack, earthquake, car accident, etc. There _is_ a certain amount of predictability in our experience, and we rely on this in our everyday experience, to live and survive. But predictability and control are not at all the same thing (are they?).

At the same time, it's very common for people to try and maintain a sense of control. Maybe this is a survival tactic, a way to support ourselves in an existence which we cannot control, one which we know we will inevitably lose. This has the sense of a biological/genetic agency. I can also see a learned behavior, and here's how it looks to me:

• I am very young.
• I recognize that my parents give me rewards and attention (pseudo-love) when I perform in certain ways (ways they like).
• I recognize this pseudo-love as the best love I'm going to get. I have a deep need for it. In a very real sense, there are (often) times when it's the only thing that matters to me. At these times, if I don't get the pseudo-love, I experience the most abject terror; it feels as though I will perish without the pseudo-love.
• So, I learn to perform properly, so as to get the pseudo-love as often as possible, and as predictably as possible. Among others, I learn one useful strategy which helps me perform properly: I believe that I am in control of myself and my surroundings.
• I use this strategy, of believing that I am "in control," so often, that it becomes in implicit sense of my reality. It is also tightly linked to my (also implicit) need to perform properly so that I can obtain pseudo-love. I am at the same time, learning to treat myself and others the way I am being treated, so that I give myself pseudo-love when I "perform properly."
• Because all of this is linked together, if I sense that I am losing control (becoming powerless), I start to feel horrible/terrified. Not only am I failing to perform properly, but even worse, I'm losing the agency and context which _allows_ me to perform properly in the first place. I'm losing the most fundamental strategy which I use to get pseudo-love. As an adult, I am losing my deepest sense of self-love, self-worth . . . I am spiraling into utter shame, and (at least to some extent) my sense of who I am is collapsing.

Sleep and Fantasy

Usually when I stay up late, I am fantasizing. I am reading a book, watching a movie, playing a video game. I am taking myself into a different reality. Before I fantasize, I feel like I want to fantasize. I feel like I deserve it, "after a long day." Fantasizing is changing my reality into something which I like more, which feels better. Which implies that there's something about "real reality" that I really don't like. Perhaps, I don't like being me, being myself, because I feel that there's something wrong with me. In fact, I know that this is true. So, it's very nice for me to be in another reality. If I felt better about myself, I might not want to fantasize so much; and, if I fantasized at other times, I might not feel such a strong need to fantasize late at night. Late at night is a wonderful time for fantasy, because it already has fantastic, "otherworldly" qualities. It is the time when the "normal day" sleeps; so, it is conducive to fantasy, invites fantasy. The darkness hides normal work-a-day living.... It also seems that, in some ways, it's the only time left over to fantasize, especially when I have the "work first, then play" attitude.

Fantasy and imagination are also a wonderful thing, in and of themselves. They are an exploration of self, other, and context; i.e., everything. A way of inviting and testing ideas, feelings, experiences, especially those ideas which are "outside" reality. This an incredible force for innovation, evolution, growth. It feels wonderful (often, or at least it can: freeing, exciting, liberating, beautiful, etc.) It's a necessary, healthy aspect of being human, directly supports a release from human reality, suffering, bondage . . . . Religion as fantasy: of course.

And, I need to go to sleep earlier. In this case, I feel and think that the benefits of sleep outweigh the benefits of fantasy. That is very clear to me. I also want to support my effort to sleep earlier by encouraging my own self acceptance, love . . . and allowing myself to fantasize--recognizing the inherent validity as well as the goodness and raw pleasure which I get from being outside the real.

Self's View of the Self

I’ve been trying to understand this about me. There’s this idea I was talking about, where people develop a powerful, mostly-hidden-from-awareness, emotional sense that they are crap. I mean, really crap: fundamentally and seriously flawed beyond hope.

I’m sure that I have these things inside me, and that they’re frequently causing me a lot of trouble. At different times, they can invoke a variety of different senses of shame, self-doubt, depression, fear, etc. And, they’re self-referencing, feeding off themselves and each other, at times making for a serious tidal wave, maelstrom, of internal emotional turmoil, some of which gets so bad as to effect my consciousness mind and body, but most of which just roils below the surface, still affecting me, but in ways I don’t obviously recognize….

Something like this. It’s complicated, dynamic, and deeply emotional—so, it’s _very_ hard to understand with critical, conscious reason. It’s easier to feel, and easier to “understand” (sense) using an emotional sensitivity, an awareness, an openness.

Basics

I was very helpless and entirely dependent on my parents. More than anything, I feared being abandoned.

I believed that I was the center of the universe, that I caused everything which happened.

Despite their best intentions, my parents sometimes "abandoned" me.

These abandonment experiences were intensely traumatic, painful, horrible to me at that time.

Developmentally, congnitively, I couldn't understand what was happening; e.g., that my mother was busy or tired so that, even though I was hungry, she couldn't feed me right away.

From my perspective, I was torturing, terrorizing myself.

As a result, I came to _feel_ deeply that there was something inherently wrong with me.

That is: from my perspective, I was causing myself the worst imaginable trauma, and therefore, I felt I was deeply, inherently bad and wrong.

Because my mind was so young and undeveloped, this wasn't something I could understand in a cognitive sense, this was something I embodied as a felt sense of my reality.

Another way to say this: my experiences were experiences of feelings, not thoughts. They were emotional experiences, not cognitive experiences. My mind wasn't yet capable of cognition.

Because of this, my evolving memories of those experiences were "emotional memories".

Also, I internalized ways (coping strategies) to try and mitigate or avoid these experiences.

Here's the paradigm:

"I know there's something very wrong with me, but at least I can try to do things so that I won't get abandoned and feel so incredibly awful."

Feeling Wrong

What's that familiar feeling of the self? I'm just sitting here, doing this. What does that feel like? A lot of times, it doesn't seem to feel like anything. I have physical sensations, my upper back is hurting....

When I was very young, I felt like I was the center of the world, the center of the universe, the center of everything. I thought that everything that happened had something to do with me, that my mere presence affected everything that I perceived.

Because of this, whenever anything went wrong, I thought it was my fault. Of course, things often went wrong, and so I got the sense that I was very bad, fundamentally problematic. And, no one told me differently. In fact sometimes, people told me that I was a failure.

I didn't know exactly how I was bad, because it wasn't one thing or another that seemed to be my fault; it could've been anything. And so that general sense of wrongness within me grew. I couldn't think well enough to make sense of it...I was just too young, and my mind still hadn't developed much of an ability to reason.