Dear Lloyd:

At 17, March last year,  ten months ago, you wrote: “I know I will probably be a practically different person a month from now- just like I was a month ago”.

You then wrote about your “urgent duty to try and heal the wounds of the world”, this “borderline obsession.. with mass suffering” that caused you to lose your passion for music. You lost sleep over it one night, consumed by thoughts, “and suddenly.. it feels like everything’s falling apart and I’m losing the will to even live because the world feels so hostile.. a world so corrupt, so greedy, so angry, so miserable, so unequal, so alienated from what makes it beautiful”,  and the struggle is completely hopeless”.

I asked you on that thread to share about your suffering in your individual life, and you answered: “Indeed like everyone I experienced my share of suffering as a child that has followed me like a shadow to this day”, you mentioned wounds and a baggage (“my wounds.. the baggage I carry”), but you didn’t give any details about the nature of your wounds and baggage.

Ten months later, January 2020, you posted a new thread regarding a different concern: your family’s mortality: “I spend most of my interaction with my mother contemplating how this could be the last interaction.. so worried all the time”.

You clearly read and practiced Buddhist principles, resolved some issues using Buddhist principles (other issues in my life.. are now largely resolved mostly by Buddhism!”), and tried to use those to ease your worries: “I can’t settle in a Middle Way between clinging and apathy (a compromising being non-attachment) because both extremes stress me out so much.

My thoughts this Tuesday morning:

You wrote in March last year that you will “probably be a practically different person a month from now”. I say we people remain amazingly the same throughout our lives because our brains are formed by a certain age, and all the most powerful neuropathways (what we learned about ourselves and about life) were formed and set in our first/ early second decade of life. We live the rest of our years and decades with that same formed brain.

New learning is of course possible at any age. The difficulty in practicing and being helped (and helping others) using new learning, such as learning principles of Buddhism, is in unlearning what we already learned early in life.

This is what you learned earlier in life about the word: “so hostile.. corrupt.. greedy.. angry.. miserable.. unequal.. alienated”- not in these exact words, a child doesn’t have this vocabulary. This vocabulary is added on later in life, as you read books and such. As the child that you were there were feelings more than words. You wrote it yourself: “the world feels so hostile”.

You suffered some injuries, the wounds you referred to, and it hurt. And you got scared of feeling that much hurt. Not wanting to feel that hurt again. Next, you want to feel better, to make sure you will not experience that early, personal hurt again, so your problem-solving brain attached that fear to famine ten months ago, and more recently, it attached that fear to mortality.

But your personal fear is attached to what caused it in your individual life. Your wounds were not hunger/ famine wounds I imagine. For a child, not being seen or heard, not being noticed for a long, long time is wound enough, it feels bad enough for the child to not want to feel that badly again.

If you want, we can have a conversation about these things, including the principles of clinging, non-attachment and middle way as they apply to feeling better and healing.

anita

Dear Floyd:

I am not aware of any personal messaging option here.

anita

Dear Lloyd:

I want to check my understanding with you so that I don’t  type away based on a possible misunderstanding. I will keep this post on one specific issue only, the mortality of your parents (title of your thread).

My position (restated here): fear of death is in all of us, everyone is anxious about death, our own, our parents’, everyone we care about. No human is free from this anxiety. But when a child grows up in a family where he doesn’t feel safe, a family where there is aggression or severe emotional neglect, the child fear grows and intensifies, and it latches on to this or that topic (ex., mortality) and obsess about it to extremes (“My obsessive- compulsive tendencies, for as long as I can remember, robbed me of ay sleep most nights until I was a teenager and filled my days with dread”).

Your position:  your fear and extent of your fear regarding your parents’ mortality is about the objective issue alone, that is, of mortality, and has nothing to do with your subjective experiences as a child.

Do I understand correctly?

anita

Dear Lloyd:

You wrote yesterday:  “Due to depressive moods and intense self-hatred I’ve experienced since childhood, I was suicidal since primary school”. Any idea what brought about that intense self hatred during primary school?

anita

Dear Lloyd:

“The bullying stopped in reality, but continued in my mind far beyond that time”- bullying gets recorded in the brain, the words and the emotions involved: shame and hurt and anger. And when the bullying stops, the recording gets replayed again and again.

This is how the brain works.

When your father told you that nobody likes you, it doesn’t sound so bad now, does it, it doesn’t read like severe bullying, like that which you experienced at school. It doesn’t sound like it now. But for a boy, his father is god. If you don’t remember now seeing your father as god, it is because you forgot.

Young children naturally view their care taker/ parent as god.

So when god says something, the child listens. And believes.

Fast forward, you are now a grown (very young) man, you remember he said: nobody likes you! You see a man in your mind’s eye saying this, your father at the time, long ago.

Back then, it was a boy hearing these words from god.

See/ hear the difference?

anita

Dear Lloyd:

There is more in your recent post than what I will be responding to now. I want to respond to the rest later, probably tomorrow morning my time.

“I suppose the answer is to reason with myself and get into my head that my father is not God, that I do not need to base my perception of reality around how my parents spoke of me”-

– if only it was that easy. When your father spoke to you the way he did, it is not only his words, as in pieces of dry information, that were recorded in your brain. Also recorded was the emotion behind his words, the tone of his voice, the expressions on his face,  plus how you felt then, shame, if that’s what you felt, hurt, anger, whatever it was that you felt at the time.

All of that was recorded, and replayed later. The emotions you felt then, these are often replayed without the words, just the shame, hurt, anger, and so forth.

And it is not only one incident that is recorded, but many, and if the many were similar, or felt similar, then the emotions recorded before were reinforced.

Can’t delete all that with logic. If that was possible, oh, if only it was possible I would have saved so much of my life from misery.

What can be done? I will be glad to share that with you when I am back.

You are welcome to post more and I will be back to you in about fifteen hours.

anita