11-08-2019, 12:35 AM
ME: My subconscious has told me to blast it with eight loops again tonight and tomorrow so that’s what I’m doing.
It’s kind of odd. I haven’t thought much about my financial goals since this internal stuff started happening in a major way. Since I sensed that mountain range of fear on the horizon, the important thing has been getting through it, which is what I’m doing now. All resources seem to be dedicated to finishing the FRM process. I know they’re on the horizon, but the horizon isn’t visible right now. I have a feeling that I’m almost through this though.
There was another fear tendril coming off of that node that represents the bad parts of the relationship with my father. At least I THINK that’s where it started. Actually, I think this one has more than one source. Picture tendrils coming off of multiple nodes and kind of entwining together to form a bigger, nastier tendril.
This one resulted in a couple of not so fun things. First off, I have had difficulty standing up for myself. Especially against people I care about, but in general as well. This really played havoc on my life. It manifested as shyness that was almost pathological, an almost complete lack of assertiveness, social phobia, and fear of confrontation. Most of this was a lot more pronounced when I was younger, and I’ve managed to push through and improve on a lot of it externally. But it’s still there, or it was until recently and it has made my social and professional relationships more difficult. I was afraid to ask for what I wanted, speak up when I was being mistreated, and from about sixth grade through the end of high school , I even allowed myself to be verbally and physically abused. The odd thing there is that violence really didn’t scare me, I started studying the martial arts as a kid and was quite good at it. I just couldn’t cross the threshold even when I should have and was more than capable.
This one started with my Dad again. Remember that I loved my dad, but he was a raving ragaholic who was in a constant state of panic over the direction of both his and my life. And I mean a constant state of panic. Yeah, I didn’t realize this fully, but for a while there, his fight/flight/freeze system was kicked in almost all the time and for nothing. The reason being that after losing three jobs (and a big part of his self concept that was tied up in them) and the divorce. He was expecting another life destroying disaster to strike at any second. This lead him to spend years bouncing from rage to suicidal depression. Now, he thought he’d done everything right (Private School, college, military, MBA, low level executive at a major corporation) and still wound up being knocked as low as he could imagine being knocked. I can imagine what he thought when he saw me, who he desperately wanted to do better than him doing “everything wrong” as I started out in life.
The only solution he knew of was to be very hard on me and try to as he put it “control me to success” while only ever seeing me every other weekend and over the summer. I call it treating me like crap and screaming at me more than he talked to me. Experts would probably call it severe psychological abuse. Remember also that I blamed myself for his condition and held myself responsible for making everything turn out OK for him, and I was terrified that he was going to keel over dead or kill himself and it would be my fault. I felt a lot of guilt here even though A. It never happened, and B. I’m not the one who should be feeling guilty.
This caused me a conundrum. I was being attacked constantly. Being attacked makes me angry. The more it happens, and the more of a point the person attacking or criticizing me has, the angrier it makes me (actually that might be another issue I have to look into), However I was afraid of hurting the person who was attacking me, so I couldn’t fight back. The only option was to sit and take it, but I really had nothing to do with the resulting anger as a kid, so it got stuffed inside and I had to keep tight control over it. Throughout the years, I had to build a stronger and stronger wall around the ball of more and more highly compressed anger. Think of an auric shield, but built inside and around an anti matter bomb of white hot rage and you have the idea. At first it took an incredible act of will to stuff the anger down when it tried to rise up. I feel it in my lower chest and upper abdomen, and it tries to get up to my head and I stop it at around the mouth level by grinding my teeth. (That’s where that came from!) Not only could I not fight back, but I couldn’t stop visiting because it would have the same effect.
To make matters worse, I was a kid subjected to adult levels of stress and the containment field leaked. It showed itself as nervous tics, tightening of muscles, shaking, weird facial twitches and a weird habit that I’ve gotten into before, but I’ll explain again. I used to pound a stick on the ground, or pretty much any object on any surface. It kind of let me focus on my fantasy world, and I suppose provided some release of the anger energy. Unfortunately it came with weird movements, spontaneous vocalizations and generally made me look like a head case to anyone around me. Yeah, I got picked on a lot. Starting on the first day of school. It went downhill from there. At first I fought back, in fact I did until, I’m not sure when, The staff of the podunk school I went to didn’t know what to make of me, and frankly most of them weren’t very good at their jobs. They blamed me for getting picked on, and most of the time I got in trouble for whatever incident happened.
My mother wasn’t helpful here either. Whoever I had conflict with, she took their side. I was always wrong about everything, and she would always make sure I knew it. She was an alcoholic for the first part of my schooling which was bad, and a dry drunk (as opposed to a recovering alcoholic) during the rest, which was worse. She has issues with men and I think she was pissed at me from the beginning for coming out with external plumbing.
The additional trouble at school and home lead me to have to suppress my reactions at school like I did with my dad. It was a kind of gradual process, but the finishing touches came at the end of eighth grade. For reasons that I explain above, they put me in a school for the “behaviorally handicapped”. Now this is a euphemism for dumping ground for really bad kids. I was the only one there without a juvenile record, and I was just there for bad grades.
I wasn’t in this Hellhole very long, but it made an impression. It was a closely monitored but uncontrolled environment. By that I mean staff was watching your every move, but had no effective way of controlling the kids that didn’t care about getting out of there, and there were some kids in there who were genuinely scary.
The only way out was to be perfect. All the time. For at least a year. In a war zone where the other people were trying to make you fail. I did it though. It required me to stuff down everything, not just anger and robotically go through my day.
I think that that’s the point where not letting any strong emotion or passion rise to the surface really became a strong unconscious reflex. That’s where I just stopped engaging when mistreated. I had to suppress myself so totally that I developed some really strong inhibitions that were really hard to break.
That ebbed a bit and faded into the back of my mind as time went by, but ever since then, I’ve always felt very awkward asserting myself, asking for anything, or reacting to hostility. (The exception to this is when I have official authority).
The reflex to shove down the anger, fear, and all other negative emotions has harmed me in a lot of ways. Not the least of which is I have had difficulty using conscious manifestation techniques. They require me to access a strong passionate emotional state, which I have a hard time doing on command because they seem to fowl on the same reflexive block that I instinctively use to stop the negative stuff from rising from that ball.
Ok, this explains the rage fantasies that rise up unbidden too. I don’t know if understanding will stop them, but it’s good to know the reason.
Also, the behavior school episode explains my fear of criticism, at least part of it. Whenever I am criticized, I get angry (internally, I repress all that remember) way beyond what you’d expect. For instance, my boss called earlier, and I didn’t answer the phone correctly. He mentioned it, and I felt a surge of anger. It’s really no big deal, and I like the guy, so no real threat whatsoever. I feel the anger because I feel threatened by any suggestion that I’m not perfect especially in the work environment. That’s because I spent that time in that place where any imperfection could lead to me spending another year in that hellhole. I’d internalized that and kept it as a part of my worldview all these years.
It’s kind of odd. I haven’t thought much about my financial goals since this internal stuff started happening in a major way. Since I sensed that mountain range of fear on the horizon, the important thing has been getting through it, which is what I’m doing now. All resources seem to be dedicated to finishing the FRM process. I know they’re on the horizon, but the horizon isn’t visible right now. I have a feeling that I’m almost through this though.
There was another fear tendril coming off of that node that represents the bad parts of the relationship with my father. At least I THINK that’s where it started. Actually, I think this one has more than one source. Picture tendrils coming off of multiple nodes and kind of entwining together to form a bigger, nastier tendril.
This one resulted in a couple of not so fun things. First off, I have had difficulty standing up for myself. Especially against people I care about, but in general as well. This really played havoc on my life. It manifested as shyness that was almost pathological, an almost complete lack of assertiveness, social phobia, and fear of confrontation. Most of this was a lot more pronounced when I was younger, and I’ve managed to push through and improve on a lot of it externally. But it’s still there, or it was until recently and it has made my social and professional relationships more difficult. I was afraid to ask for what I wanted, speak up when I was being mistreated, and from about sixth grade through the end of high school , I even allowed myself to be verbally and physically abused. The odd thing there is that violence really didn’t scare me, I started studying the martial arts as a kid and was quite good at it. I just couldn’t cross the threshold even when I should have and was more than capable.
This one started with my Dad again. Remember that I loved my dad, but he was a raving ragaholic who was in a constant state of panic over the direction of both his and my life. And I mean a constant state of panic. Yeah, I didn’t realize this fully, but for a while there, his fight/flight/freeze system was kicked in almost all the time and for nothing. The reason being that after losing three jobs (and a big part of his self concept that was tied up in them) and the divorce. He was expecting another life destroying disaster to strike at any second. This lead him to spend years bouncing from rage to suicidal depression. Now, he thought he’d done everything right (Private School, college, military, MBA, low level executive at a major corporation) and still wound up being knocked as low as he could imagine being knocked. I can imagine what he thought when he saw me, who he desperately wanted to do better than him doing “everything wrong” as I started out in life.
The only solution he knew of was to be very hard on me and try to as he put it “control me to success” while only ever seeing me every other weekend and over the summer. I call it treating me like crap and screaming at me more than he talked to me. Experts would probably call it severe psychological abuse. Remember also that I blamed myself for his condition and held myself responsible for making everything turn out OK for him, and I was terrified that he was going to keel over dead or kill himself and it would be my fault. I felt a lot of guilt here even though A. It never happened, and B. I’m not the one who should be feeling guilty.
This caused me a conundrum. I was being attacked constantly. Being attacked makes me angry. The more it happens, and the more of a point the person attacking or criticizing me has, the angrier it makes me (actually that might be another issue I have to look into), However I was afraid of hurting the person who was attacking me, so I couldn’t fight back. The only option was to sit and take it, but I really had nothing to do with the resulting anger as a kid, so it got stuffed inside and I had to keep tight control over it. Throughout the years, I had to build a stronger and stronger wall around the ball of more and more highly compressed anger. Think of an auric shield, but built inside and around an anti matter bomb of white hot rage and you have the idea. At first it took an incredible act of will to stuff the anger down when it tried to rise up. I feel it in my lower chest and upper abdomen, and it tries to get up to my head and I stop it at around the mouth level by grinding my teeth. (That’s where that came from!) Not only could I not fight back, but I couldn’t stop visiting because it would have the same effect.
To make matters worse, I was a kid subjected to adult levels of stress and the containment field leaked. It showed itself as nervous tics, tightening of muscles, shaking, weird facial twitches and a weird habit that I’ve gotten into before, but I’ll explain again. I used to pound a stick on the ground, or pretty much any object on any surface. It kind of let me focus on my fantasy world, and I suppose provided some release of the anger energy. Unfortunately it came with weird movements, spontaneous vocalizations and generally made me look like a head case to anyone around me. Yeah, I got picked on a lot. Starting on the first day of school. It went downhill from there. At first I fought back, in fact I did until, I’m not sure when, The staff of the podunk school I went to didn’t know what to make of me, and frankly most of them weren’t very good at their jobs. They blamed me for getting picked on, and most of the time I got in trouble for whatever incident happened.
My mother wasn’t helpful here either. Whoever I had conflict with, she took their side. I was always wrong about everything, and she would always make sure I knew it. She was an alcoholic for the first part of my schooling which was bad, and a dry drunk (as opposed to a recovering alcoholic) during the rest, which was worse. She has issues with men and I think she was pissed at me from the beginning for coming out with external plumbing.
The additional trouble at school and home lead me to have to suppress my reactions at school like I did with my dad. It was a kind of gradual process, but the finishing touches came at the end of eighth grade. For reasons that I explain above, they put me in a school for the “behaviorally handicapped”. Now this is a euphemism for dumping ground for really bad kids. I was the only one there without a juvenile record, and I was just there for bad grades.
I wasn’t in this Hellhole very long, but it made an impression. It was a closely monitored but uncontrolled environment. By that I mean staff was watching your every move, but had no effective way of controlling the kids that didn’t care about getting out of there, and there were some kids in there who were genuinely scary.
The only way out was to be perfect. All the time. For at least a year. In a war zone where the other people were trying to make you fail. I did it though. It required me to stuff down everything, not just anger and robotically go through my day.
I think that that’s the point where not letting any strong emotion or passion rise to the surface really became a strong unconscious reflex. That’s where I just stopped engaging when mistreated. I had to suppress myself so totally that I developed some really strong inhibitions that were really hard to break.
That ebbed a bit and faded into the back of my mind as time went by, but ever since then, I’ve always felt very awkward asserting myself, asking for anything, or reacting to hostility. (The exception to this is when I have official authority).
The reflex to shove down the anger, fear, and all other negative emotions has harmed me in a lot of ways. Not the least of which is I have had difficulty using conscious manifestation techniques. They require me to access a strong passionate emotional state, which I have a hard time doing on command because they seem to fowl on the same reflexive block that I instinctively use to stop the negative stuff from rising from that ball.
Ok, this explains the rage fantasies that rise up unbidden too. I don’t know if understanding will stop them, but it’s good to know the reason.
Also, the behavior school episode explains my fear of criticism, at least part of it. Whenever I am criticized, I get angry (internally, I repress all that remember) way beyond what you’d expect. For instance, my boss called earlier, and I didn’t answer the phone correctly. He mentioned it, and I felt a surge of anger. It’s really no big deal, and I like the guy, so no real threat whatsoever. I feel the anger because I feel threatened by any suggestion that I’m not perfect especially in the work environment. That’s because I spent that time in that place where any imperfection could lead to me spending another year in that hellhole. I’d internalized that and kept it as a part of my worldview all these years.
