“You never hear about truly
self-actualized people, like Buddha or Christ telling people they’re stupid
losers. It goes against the nature of enlightenment.”
--Martha Beck
My friend tells me she has poor self-esteem and poor
self-confidence.
There’s a lot of that going around.
Yet, this friend sews professional-quality clothing
for her Granddaughter, and the cutest doll clothes you could ever hope to find.
I wish my craft would come out half as good.
Why or why or why oh, do people put themselves down?
We could go into lengthy discussions as to WHY. I have addressed that before, about how the
brain works, and how fear gets scrambled into the mix.
I was astounded when I read in Martha Beck’s book Finding
Your Own North Star, that she uses the body as a guide to feelings. It’s like
muscle testing, where a second person tests the strength of let’s say an arm.
If there is a blockage, the arm goes weak. If the energy is flowing strong the
muscle is strong. (Simplistic answer, I know, but it works. I believe it is electrical-chemical,
like getting a kink in your wiring.)
Surf the body and see where tension has settled. Ask that part what is troubling it. (I need to
learn more about this.)
Carlos Castaneda said it succinctly:
“We
either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of
work is the same.”
In Marie Forleo’s book, Everything is Figureoutable,
I read that it is estimated that 350 million people around the world suffer
from depression.
And from my limited experience, depressed people are
often on antidepressants. Yet, they are still depressed.
What's wrong with this picture?
In cases of depression, I’ve heard that when people go
off their medications, they often become suicidal. And then there are side
effects. People will endure numbness, foggy-headedness, upset stomachs, I don’t
know what all to avoid the pain their FEELINGS are causing. Wow. It gets
tricky.
I’m into this subject because my friend took so many
of those fabulous anti-depressant pills that she landed in the hospital, and was
labeled as suicidal.
And they are adjusting her medications, because, truthfully,
they don’t know what else to do.
‘It’s a chemical imbalance,” she says. Did the
doctors say it? If so, what is the
chemical that is imbalanced?
There’s no test for that imbalance, so they throw in
an antidepressant. Whatever in the hell that is.
Maybe it is an imbalance, but which came first, the
trauma that caused the chemical imbalance, for a chemical imbalance that causes
the depression?
The imbalance isn’t fixed, it’s masked.
I learned a lot when I was studying the horse’s brain.
In traumatized horses, their corpus callosum, the bridge between the two hemispheres
of the brain is noticeably smaller. Horses are prey animals, in other words
they know they taste good, and they are flight or flight animals, which means
they run in the face of danger. If they are thwarted from that instinct, their cortisol,
the stress hormone, runs high. The result is the bridge between the two
hemispheres actually shrinks, or didn’t grow properly in the first place. That
left them with limited communication between the two sides of the brain.
Do people have this? Is it fixable?
I don’t know. Except I know that people come back from
horrendous things to live happy lives. Maybe there’s a happy hormone that
washes away sadness.
I finished reading PTSD, Time to Heal by Kathy
O'Brian, the Book on Post Traumatic Syndrome I mentioned in an
earlier post. The book has moved on to
the person for whom it was intended, but I will tell you what I learned.
Write it Out!
Yep, I’ve said it
before and I’ll say it again. Writing one’s feelings is a way to stop the
endless cycling that is the mind’s playground. O’Brian verified this.
Talking about it
initially is important, that is to identify the problem. It is owning up to the
trouble, it is being willing to shine a light on it, to stop being ashamed or
embarrassed, and to allow oneself to feel again.
There are two aspects
to this, probably more than two, but two I’ll address: One is the person doesn’t
feel. The other is they feel too much.
When a person has shut
down, they need to be taught to feel again. You’ve heard of people injuring themselves
such as burning themselves with cigarettes in an effort to feel. They need to
remember.
The other is that horrible
cyclic remembering.
Oh, I just thought of a
third, that is compartmentalizing the problem, shutting it off into a little
place where it is forgotten by the conscious mind. It is a denial that whatever
trauma that is troubling them never happened. So, why are they mentally unhinged?
Their body remembers.
Talk therapy doesn’t
work for people who are out of touch with their feelings. When the therapist
asks, “What are you feeling?” They, truthfully, don’t know. The trick is to get
them to feel again.
Talk therapy is often
non-effectual, too, in persons with Post Traumatic Syndrome, for talking about
it serves to cement the injury in place. You know, keep talking about it and it
reinforces that injury all over again.
Here’s where writing
comes in.
Kathy O'Brien healed
her own PTSD by writing about it. And her trauma was too severe to even tell
it. She found a great guy who became her husband, and he knew what to do. She
would ask him. “Have I told you this before?”
“No,” he would say,
“and you’re not going to tell me now,” and he would hand her a tablet and a
pen.
You have heard me
mention that with writing you put a period at the end of the sentence. The mind
doesn’t know about periods. It’s like the energizer bunny, it just keeps going
and going.
Who wants to keep
writing the same old thing over and over?
Boring.
Studies have shown that
writing notes by hand helps you learn, understand and retain more information
than typing.
Writing by hand forces
the brain to slow down and allows the expression of ideas to come more clearly
and deeply.
“Putting pen to paper is a mystical way to
access your most profound truths.” –Marie Forleo
Remember, your pages
are for your eyes only. Maybe you’ll want to share them later on, but not
initially. Tell your truth. Be as angry, hurt, whatever, you need to be.
Perhaps we aren’t broken at all, but more like our car
at the car wash where you inadvertently got your wheels stuck on that frame that
was intended to aim you in the right direction. If you had gone into the track alongside
that frame, you would be pulled along while the machine washed your car as you
sat there watching the pretty colored bubbles on your windshield.
Either we’re forgotten or have been trained out of the
whole concept of going with the flow.
I remember the teacher Abraham saying, “Nothing you
ever wanted is upstream.”
But we think we must work hard and struggle and paddle
vigorously instead of letting our boats, to use Abraham’s analogy, glide with
the current. Struggle is, after all, rewarded.
You know about that current of life. It’s the place
where even if you are working hard, it feels good, things are working out, and even
if they’re not, you know they will, and you’re happy.
That’s going with the flow.
