Dear noname:

You wrote that you are quite disappointed in yourself for not seeing before what you see today more clearly. But there is always more to see, it is a never ending process. I didn’t see this myself, what I wrote to you in my Nov 29 post, even though I read through your threads time after time again, in the past. And today I will see something new about you. There is always more to see, more to understand. (Except when we get stuck in the wrong seeing, the wrong understanding).

You wrote today: “seeing a rush has definitely been a theme in my life. I fit the definition of a thrill seeker in most ways though I never considered myself to be an emotional thrill seeker.. my thrill seeking is mostly physically challenging and risky activities like skateboarding, mountain climbing.. I feel fully alive when I’m doing them… I feel terribly unmotivated.. I feel the sadness and despair fully.. This feeling of hopelessness leads to a lot of thoughts of death…staring into this lonely void”.

This is what I see today: the feeling of full (that is, intense, deeply felt) despair, hopelessness, and sadness, these lead some animals, like dogs, to find an isolated spot to die there. So you thinking about death while experiencing these emotions fully is natural.

Your solution to this full emotional experience of despair is to experience the opposite, fully alive, a 180 degrees switch. This solution has not worked for you because following feeling fully alive for very short period of times, you feel fully hopeless a whole lot of the time. You are stuck in a roller coaster ride of long-lasting terrible lows and short thrilling highs.

A solution that will work for you is the 90 degree change, and it must involve giving up those highs, that fully alive emotional experience. It will be very difficult for you to do, because you will be giving up the  only times you feel alive. .

It will take a re-training of your  brain, training your brain to avoid thrill seeking behaviors, enduring the lack of those fully alive highs, enduring the low for a long time while paying closer attention to the lesser joyful experiences of life and over time, finding contentment and pleasure in them. In regard to relationships, it will be something like this: you meet a woman in a coffee shop and have a conversation. You know that you will not be taking her home or going to her place. You know there will be no sex for at least a month, if you keep seeing her for that month. So there you are in the coffee shop, talking, drinking coffee or whatnot. So… well, no sex in the horizon, what is there to do.. you look at her, listen and notice that she has this very nice smile, you let it warm your heart a bit, and you smile back. You ask her a question and she is glad you asked, glad to be listened to. Then she asks you a question and you answer. You are not worried of saying the wrong thing because there is no prize (sex) at the end of the meeting or any time soon, might never be. So you find yourself comfortable talking, you get some pleasure out of it.

anita