Dear calisister:

I want to repeat some of your sentences in the posts since my last post to you:

“I feel oh so alone. Just completely alone. And it won’t end… I just thought it would someday get better…I feel that every emotion I feel isn’t real… It all seems fake. Like this made up world. When the reality is just the horrible truth in front of me… How hard I try to be happy and have a better living… how much effort I put in… I am trying so hard. And yet… I feel exactly the same way I’ve felt for years and years… It always comes back to this horrible core feeling… I feel no desires. I feel so many desires… I anxiously have fun. But in my core I am so broken. So utterly broken. Unhappy. And lonely.

I’m doing things because I have to until my end arrives… I just have to survive until it’s time to go… What is the point… What about life is so amazing…It’s like I’m in a cursed game and can’t get out or to the next level… I do things so time will pass.

I just find myself angry at the puppy… my parents just basically dumped him on me… But I didn’t quite choose it… I am so angry at him right now… He is an added stressor in my life… I just feel stress. Not love.

My input: what a powerful share, very powerful, insightful, honest, real, amazing. And promising. What you shared, I felt very similar to what you expressed. And so, I am evidence that life can get better. And because I am twice your age, I have hope that your life will get better and will be lived better for decades earlier than mine.

To the content of your powerful share:

1. You didn’t choose your puppy. And so you are angry. Notice: it is not only your puppy that you didn’t choose, but this miserable subjective experience of your life for as long as you remember life. Your suffering is not your choice. Powerless, we do feel angry.

2. You started with stating how alone you feel, utterly alone. This is the experience of the child that you were, alone. This is that core feeling you mentioned. You keep feeling it no matter the circumstances. A child fears being alone. There is the origin of your anxiety, being alone. It is the same fear other very young animals have when they find themselves alone, having lost the mother they were following into the woods, exposed now to predators, and without a way to feed themselves. It is an instinctual fear.

3. For a child, when scared, time does seem endless. So you still fear that it won’t end.

4. You wrote that your emotions feel like they are not real, that It all seems fake. This is disassociation, started when you were a child, alone and scared. It is the same as the Freeze response to danger that other animals resort to when neither the Flight nor the Fight responses are available to them. The way they are able to just lie there as a predator approaches them is that nothing feels real to them, the danger doesn’t feel real, so they can lie there and not run.

5. You wrote that no matter how hard you try, you feel exactly the same way.. this horrible core feeling. This is because your alone experience of childhood, your instinctual fear then, in the context of endless time and no escape (no flight or fight options), that experience has been registered in your brain in the form of multiple neuropathways. Earning a PhD, for example, cannot undo those neuropathways, nor can earning any amount of money.

Only the slow, intentional process of healing can help you by interrupting these neuropathways with new thoughts, new understandings, new experiences. It is the adding of these new things to the old that is healing.

These thoughts and understandings that you need to continue to add to your existing neuropathways will change that core feeling of past and present. You will no longer feel alone. You will unearth those desires in a manageable way, in the future. Life will feel real. Your emotions will feel real and will help greatly to guide you well. And this is the point: with healing, life will be an amazing experience.

Only not now, not anytime soon.

Changing what we believe (thoughts held tight by the strong glue of emotion) takes time, help from another or from others, intent, enduring the distress that will come back again and again… and yet again throughout months and months of healing work.

You can continue to live as you do, to experience life as you have so far, to suffer greatly, that is, OR you can continue the healing process you started and suffer more throughout the process. First choice, your suffering will not end. Second choice, your suffering will gradually, over time, lessen and lessen until it is no more.

anita