What You Do Isn't Who You Are

One thing that occurred to me: your sense of yourself seems really tied up with how other people at work treat you. I think I’m basically the same way, and more generally, I really take it hard if I get the sense that _anyone_ doesn’t like or respect me.

To look at this from a psychological/developmental perspective, in my case, I learned at a very young age that I would get what I needed by making other people like me. Both my mom and dad were very responsive to my “performance”, and their love was conditional (not always, but often enough): I felt that they loved me (most, best) when I did things they liked. And again, I was, by design, extremely self-centered, so that, when they didn’t “love” me, I _felt_ it was my fault.

Through these processes, and over time, I ended up with this: if someone doesn’t “like” what I do, I am (feel at the deepest levels) “wrong” (bad, flawed, horrible, fucked up, shit, etc.). In “real life” now, this means that when my boss criticizes my work, I feel incredibly bad, I lose track of myself, I “panic”, I freak out. My boss did nothing wrong at all. I’m doing this to myself, again, through no fault of my own.

What you do isn’t who you are.
What people think of you and say about you has nothing to do with who you are. It _might_ have something to do with what you’ve done. It definitely has to do with them and their own internal reactions, processes, stuff.

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.

Opportunity

I've been thinking about the value of present awareness. I.e., is there something especially or inherently good about being aware of the present moment? In particular, Jacob seems to suggest "value" in an awareness of my own experience; generally speaking, awareness of my feelings at any given moment. (Also recognizing how impossible it is to maintain this kind of awareness "all the time".) I'm at work, and I was giving some attention to my current feelings about working, and I did just get a strong sense of the value in this: how nice it is for me to give myself this kind of attention.

Moreover, I felt a sense of perspective on the work I've been doing with awareness and emotion: that even though trouble and pain started me working on these things, I'm actually very lucky to be working on them at all. If it weren't for me and my anxiety, and all the trouble I've had with it, I may well have never had the opportunity to work on these larger issues, never given myself the time and chance to do this work.

This notion of opportunity arising from strife is hackneyed, but the feeling is genuine, and a very nice one at that.

Back to awareness and presence: the idea that humans can have some engagement with their experiences which doesn't involve craving or aversion, but simply an awareness of the experience as an end in itself. This awareness has it's own rewards, and is free from the "danger" (pain) inherent (?) in either wanting or not wanting something to happen or turn out a certain way. There does seem to be some inherent problem (trouble, discomfort, pain) in craving and aversion; it also seems that there are other potential positive aspects (joy, thrill, ?).

Sensitivity, Over-Stimulation, Fear

I heard somewhere that ~%20 of a given population of creatures (mammals? animals? insects??) are relatively "more sensitive" than the rest of the population. I guess some have suggested that this is (somehow) some kind of evolutionary/genetic adaptation of a population; that having a certain percentage sensitive members in a population is a survival adaptation. Canary in the coal mine sort of thing. Ataraxia might be the opposite of this.

If a given person were generally "more sensitive" (over-sensitive, hypersensitive), then heshe would probably be more prone to a number of maladies; e.g., anxiety and panic attack. I wonder if hypersensitivity would also make a person more perceptive in at least some ways; this seems to be the general idea. Also, I wonder if this would have anything to do with intelligence . . . I tend to think of intelligence and perception (perspicuity?) as being linked. 007.

Been thinking about the relationship between anxiety and stimulation, stimulation in general. The notion that over-stimulation is a definition for anxiety. A stimulation could be just about any experience, where some experiences are more stimulating than others. So, sitting quietly, with a quiet mind, alone in a quiet, comfortable room would not be very stimulating at all; whereas, free running through the downtown of a busy city with a group of friends while playing hand-held video games and listening to an ipod would be very stimulating. Thinking really hard could be stimulating. Anyhow, I've noticed that if I reduce the stimulating events in my life, my general level of stress and anxiety seems to go down. This makes sense, but I'm surprised at how, in some way, almost everything I do has some "stimulation value". It also seems as though my threshold for stimulation is lower than it used to be, so that I'm more easily over-stimulated.

As an aspect of anxiety, fear seems ever present. A few things I might have noticed about anxiety and fear:

• There are really two fears: the fear "coming from" the anxiety, and the fear of the anxiety. The second can easily "feedback" into the first, so that the fear of the anxiety can make me more anxious (which makes me more afraid...).
• The fear which comes from the anxiety itself, or the "original fear" is also fear of something, but the fear is coming from somewhere deep in my psyche, something seeded there a long time ago. This would be a subconscious (below the radar or consciousness) reaction, a learned response to a similar type of situation or experience which my mind/body are supplying to "take care of the situation" without my having to work through it again. This is something I'm doing all the time, unconsciously.

Semblance of Sibilance

"I can tell you without a semblance of sibilance
That siblings are ambivalent.

And ambivalence is sent to menace us
Like canyons are meant to finish us.

My brother and sister don't care,
But still they want a share."

song lyrics by Drakkar Sauna

Had a bad, bad dream last night. Woke up yelling "No!" at the top of my lungs. As far back in the dream as I can remember, I was watching a movie which starred a co-worker friend of mine, "Hank". Hank was in a warzone somewhere, maybe in Asia, and things were very dangerous for him; he wasn't a soldier, or at least he wasn't wearing fatigues, but he was involved in something to do with the war, and the city he was staying in was being shelled. In the dream, he was in his apartment, and was trying to call his wife back home; in fact, he had gotten through to her. The dream somehow made it very clear that the relationship between the two of them had been strained, and they were both anxious about it, but unable to bridge the widening divide between them. I can't recall their conversation exactly, only that they were both getting more and more tense, and yet still unable to communicate this. Hank, especially, was becoming visibly agitated, and the music score of the movie kept becoming louder, more shrill, and disturbing. Eventually, Hank got off the phone, but then he had to smuggle something out of his apartment; I don't remember what it was, but he carried it beneath his shirt, kindof hunched over. He was trying to get somewhere with it, maybe to a plane to get out of the city for good; he may have been trying to get back home to his wife, finally.

At some point, I became Hank. I think I was still in the Asian city, but ended up in "my" apartment (some random apartment) with my partner/girlfriend Amanda. My friend James was there too, but he was not exactly James, and partly another friend of mine (can't recall whom). I was already feeling anxious, but then "James" started messing with me, trying to freak me out . . . kindof scaring me and waving his hands all around. I became more anxious, and started panicking, having a real anxiety attack. And in the dream, I was thinking: no, no, no, not this again, I thought I was done with this. The attack kept scaling, getting very unpleasant and intense, at which point I think I was vocalizing and shortly woke up.

Emotion, Connection, Growth

Emotion wraps the connections between one human and anything else (including him/herself). To connect is to feel: what else is connection? (I don't know). Emotion and connection distinguish us humans from other things that we understand; they are defining qualities of humanity. Without connection and emotion, we would be very much more like machines, or perhaps more like insects....

Moreover, giving attention to emotion and connection manifests growth in humans. I mean: if we pay attention to our emotions, especially as they pertain to our connections with things (including ourselves), we will grow. Growth implies a positive change.

I think connection is a subset of emotion, but maybe not; maybe, all emotions involve connection; maybe emotion and connection are the same thing?

If all thoughts have an emotional aspect, are all thoughts connections?

Beliefs

I have been thinking lately that my opinions (maybe even all of my thoughts (and feelings?)) in some way stem from my deepest beliefs. Another way to think of this would be: if I trace back the logic or rationalizations which appears to support my thoughts and opinions, the trace back will lead me to some basic beliefs; i.e., all of my thoughts and opinions are just extensions of some very deeply held beliefs. These beliefs are like fundemental mathematical definitions, like the definition of a "point" in geometry: without these definitions, nothing else follows, _and_ they are merely definitions: there is nothing inherently true or false about them, they are what they are, they are essentially "made-up"; even if they seem to somehow "follow" from something else (e.g. sensory perception or "reality"), this is a tautology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic)

So, imagine I have some beliefs like this, and imagine that I'm right: that essentially _everything_ I think or feel(?) is in some way an extension of these basic definitions. And, at the same time, it's true that I have an obvious and strong sense of contempt (a feeling of contempt) for "beliefs"; e.g. religious beliefs . . . the word "belief" seems to be tainted and inherently flawed, implying (explicitly) something irrational, something devoid of contemplation, foolish, bullet-headed.

I was thinking that maybe I hold a contempt for my own deepest beliefs, beliefs which must be there; beliefs which are, in some ways, the foundations of my entire self, perhaps the most important, or at least most quintessential, things which make me, me. All of this ultimately creating within me a strong contempt for the deepest parts of my self.

Among other thoughts, this has made me think:

• At least religious beliefs are easily detected and straightforward.
• This is all a good explanation of why two equally smart people can have such widely varying opinions.
• Wouldn't it be interesting if we could all realize and admit to each other that what we think is really what we believe (i.e., that there is no truth, only belief).
• Maybe I'm really full of shit with all of this: if we can at least assume that much of sensation is "true" (as opposed to believed), we have an extensive truth-basis for our opinions (i.e., everything we sense).
• Even then, there's something to this; a lot of what we think we know to be true must stem from our beliefs as opposed to any real verifiable truth. How to distinguish (internally) between these two types of opinions?

Effort, Concentration, and Mindfulness

I've been thinking and talking about these things lately because of a meditation class I've been taking, and this has led to what seems to me like an odd realization. My friend Ben and I were talking about the differences between these three notions; how they are different and how they affect one another. In particular, Ben was struggling with this sense that mindfulness wasn't something he could "make happen," that it just seems to appear for no particular reason. This lead to me thinking about the real causes for effort and concentration, and it struck me that, in fact, they are no different: though we may decide to concentrate on something, the ultimate trigger for this decision seems to come out of nowhere, or more aptly maybe, from sensation and memory. For example, if I decide to concentrate enough to write this blog entry, it's only because, at some point in the past, I "decided" that I wanted to write this blog entry. And how did I even get the choice to make this decision? Presumably, at some point before that, I recalled that I _could_ write this blog entry. In this case, I got an email because of a comment someone left on this blog, I read the email (sensation) and thought (remembered), "Oh, I could write a blog entry today...."

With respect to mindfulness, it strikes me that most people simply don't have sense triggers or memories which lead to a choice of mindfulness, whereas, say, concentration is a much more common response to life (for all sorts of reasons, I suppose). But also, it seems as though the kinds of things which trigger concentration are not fundamentally different from those which trigger mindfulness. In this sense, I'm more convinced that a person can purposely develop mindfulness, and I'm glad about that.

The odd realization, though, has to do with the roles which sensation and memory seem to play in life. It gives me the feeling of being continually knocked along by my mind in a way that has little to do with free will. It seems fine that I would be reacting to my senses, so I suppose it's more the issue of memory that feels curious, the feeling that old things in the mind are constantly bubbling up, apparently uncontrollably, sometimes very subtly, and pushing or casting me off in various directions.