11-08-2019, 10:58 PM
ME: Tonight during my first loop, and before a little bit I went into a spontaneous anger fantasy state. The first few times I pushed it back down and let it dissipate like I started to be able to do on LTU. But it was persistent. My thoughts kept circling back to an issue and throwing me into that state with the tooth grinding anger. The last time I was actually able to catch the process, slow it down, and see what is really happening.
Here’s what it was. I was thinking about that lawsuit that the HOA filed on us (the first solution I thought of for that problem failed). I started playing scenarios in my head, and came up with my wife laying into me for something to do with the problem. I then reacted in my head by being very verbally and physically domineering in a way that I would never actually be to my wife. Mild adrenaline surge, grinding teeth ensue.
What actually happened there was that my thoughts touched on a subject that scares me and makes me feel powerless. That lawsuit could cause us real problems and I don’t have a solution yet. (Operative word yet) This time I noticed that I felt fear before the anger. I then thought up a scenario where I could turn the anger to fear, give it a target, and make myself (or some very ugly part of myself) feel powerful rather than powerless by dominating the target. Man, I’ve been doing this all my life, and never thought to look at what I was really doing.
Ok, I guess that I wasn’t as done with this as I thought I was because this whole incident brought up a number of things.
First, I’ve touched on this before, but it needs a further look. This problem and many, probably most of the problems I have in life come from me ignoring issues until they become huge crises that I can no longer ignore, or until it’s too late to do anything about them and I face major consequences for not doing what I should have been all along. I have ostrich syndrome, and I’ve plagued myself with it all my life.
The first sign of this was how I treated my grades in school. At the beginning of a semester, I would shirk the first couple of homework assignments figuring that it didn’t matter and I could make up for it later. Ok, this was the result of the “don’t try” thing I described earlier I think. After I’d done this for a while, I’d realize that there was a problem and things that I should be doing about it, but by that point I would be so afraid that I had gotten myself into a position that I couldn’t fix that I wouldn’t even get the facts on it to see how bad it really was. Even just starting to do my homework (I realized exactly none of what I’m describing at the time) it was enough of an acknowledgment that there was a problem that it scared me and I shied away from it. This pattern repeated itself in college but it was even worse. I would not go to a few classes, and not keep track of what I was supposed to do for a little while, and I had a very strong aversion to going back, and an even stronger one to asking the professor if they’d work with me. I told myself that I was too embarrassed and didn’t want to be judged, and that may have been true to an extent. That was covering a deeper fear though. The fear that I had already dug myself into a hole that I couldn’t get out of.
In truth, that fear usually struck me before it was actually true, and I could well have salvaged most of these situations if I had done some fairly easy things when I first got the big gelding feeling that I’d been neglecting them a little too long, but I told myself a series of two lies. First was “eh, it’s ok, I can let it go a little longer,” which prevented me from having to face it, and the second was “it’s too late now,”. While often times that was technically true, it was a lie in that it put it out of my hands and made it an inevitable thing that had pretty much already happened, and I could put out of my mind.
The same thing happened with this lawsuit. I knew that things in the yard needed to be fixed, but I was neglectful about fixing them. I knew that the &:$$ HOA was sending me letters, but I didn’t read them. I ignored it for as long as I could hoping it would go away but knowing that it wouldn’t.
Hell, I didn’t take a real look at all of the problems I’m describing here for the same reason. I figured that I might be more messed up than I wanted to admit, and there might not be anything I can do about it. That’s bull flop of course, I’m doing a hell of a lot better between the ears than a lot of people I know
That leads me to the other thing I got from that incident. The fear that put me into a state where I fantasied about abusing my wife was of not being able to do anything to solve a bad problem. The consequences of this going as bad as it possibly could are fairly bad, but not that bad, and they weren’t what was causing that sharp immediate fear. Also, the reaction says something. My mind immediately did what it needed to to make me feel powerful. That’s what all of those rage fantasies do, and some of them are pretty horrible. They’re all a reaction to fear of powerlessness.
That’s it. That’s the bottom of this node. Everything that I’ve been going digging through springs from a fear of being powerless. Perhaps better to say a fear of feeling powerless or that I am afraid that I am powerless since this transcends any particular situation where I might or might not be powerless.
Why does the situation with my dad so connect to a deeper fear of powerlessness, and why did it allow it to rise to the surface and create that knot of fears that branched off in so many directions? Because watching my father, who I did and do love deeply suffer, and waiting for him to Kill himself put me in a situation where I would do ANYTHING to change what I saw happening, and I could do absolutely posifrikinglutely NOTHING but wait for the axe to fall. This was extremely traumatic moment to moment and it lasted for years. I took responsibility for the situation which made it worse. That’s because I told myself that I HAD TO make the situation better and it was all my fault if I didn’t. Of course I couldn’t make it better I was a &:$$ 5-15 year old. This lead to the lie from which all of the other fears and lies I’ve been prattling on about spring. I am powerless. I extrapolated a sense of powerlessness In all situations off of that one situation because of when it happened, how long it lasted, and the gigantic emotional impact it had on me.
That one branched off to possibly every fear that I have that isn’t a primal self preservation instinct.
Oh yeah, that unhealthy blueprint I got from Dad, that included feeling powerless. Maybe that caused me to internalize it more.
The fear of feeling the powerlessness that I’ve been telling myself is my condition lead to:
- That fear of failure. Trying and failing proves me to be powerless.
-Fear of success. If I succeed, I break out of my blueprint, I face an unknown situation and that might leave me without power.
- Fear of responsibility. If I take on anything important, I won’t be able to handle it because I’m powerless. There will be major consequences for me and others if it’s anything important. This lead to a kind of general fear of getting my crap together. If I’m not too squared away, no one will expect me to take on too much responsibility.- My aversion to keeping my environment neat comes from this.
- Fear of being dominated, which causes me to fear people who could dominate me in any way. Since the base lie was that I was powerless, that included just about everyone. I managed to put a very hard shell over this one when I was a CO, but it was still present underneath and manifested itself outside of the work environment.
-A general habit of letting life happen to me rather than trying to make things happen. I thought myself powerless so why would I bother.
- All of the stuff that happened with my love life. I didn’t feel that I had the power to attract a woman, then when I did, and she left, it brought up my feelings of powerlessness through several layers of self lies.
- a lot more.
My life is definitely not where it could be because I accepted the statement “I am powerless” since I was a child
AND IT WAS A M@(-; :”&$)ing LIE. No one in my shoes would have had one lick of power to change that situation. It says nothing about the amount of power I have now.
Ok, I think that’s as far down as this one goes. I could be wrong, and I’m not sure that the fears are removed, but at least I know what was causing them in a way that makes sense now.
Sorry for the eye strain folks.
Here’s what it was. I was thinking about that lawsuit that the HOA filed on us (the first solution I thought of for that problem failed). I started playing scenarios in my head, and came up with my wife laying into me for something to do with the problem. I then reacted in my head by being very verbally and physically domineering in a way that I would never actually be to my wife. Mild adrenaline surge, grinding teeth ensue.
What actually happened there was that my thoughts touched on a subject that scares me and makes me feel powerless. That lawsuit could cause us real problems and I don’t have a solution yet. (Operative word yet) This time I noticed that I felt fear before the anger. I then thought up a scenario where I could turn the anger to fear, give it a target, and make myself (or some very ugly part of myself) feel powerful rather than powerless by dominating the target. Man, I’ve been doing this all my life, and never thought to look at what I was really doing.
Ok, I guess that I wasn’t as done with this as I thought I was because this whole incident brought up a number of things.
First, I’ve touched on this before, but it needs a further look. This problem and many, probably most of the problems I have in life come from me ignoring issues until they become huge crises that I can no longer ignore, or until it’s too late to do anything about them and I face major consequences for not doing what I should have been all along. I have ostrich syndrome, and I’ve plagued myself with it all my life.
The first sign of this was how I treated my grades in school. At the beginning of a semester, I would shirk the first couple of homework assignments figuring that it didn’t matter and I could make up for it later. Ok, this was the result of the “don’t try” thing I described earlier I think. After I’d done this for a while, I’d realize that there was a problem and things that I should be doing about it, but by that point I would be so afraid that I had gotten myself into a position that I couldn’t fix that I wouldn’t even get the facts on it to see how bad it really was. Even just starting to do my homework (I realized exactly none of what I’m describing at the time) it was enough of an acknowledgment that there was a problem that it scared me and I shied away from it. This pattern repeated itself in college but it was even worse. I would not go to a few classes, and not keep track of what I was supposed to do for a little while, and I had a very strong aversion to going back, and an even stronger one to asking the professor if they’d work with me. I told myself that I was too embarrassed and didn’t want to be judged, and that may have been true to an extent. That was covering a deeper fear though. The fear that I had already dug myself into a hole that I couldn’t get out of.
In truth, that fear usually struck me before it was actually true, and I could well have salvaged most of these situations if I had done some fairly easy things when I first got the big gelding feeling that I’d been neglecting them a little too long, but I told myself a series of two lies. First was “eh, it’s ok, I can let it go a little longer,” which prevented me from having to face it, and the second was “it’s too late now,”. While often times that was technically true, it was a lie in that it put it out of my hands and made it an inevitable thing that had pretty much already happened, and I could put out of my mind.
The same thing happened with this lawsuit. I knew that things in the yard needed to be fixed, but I was neglectful about fixing them. I knew that the &:$$ HOA was sending me letters, but I didn’t read them. I ignored it for as long as I could hoping it would go away but knowing that it wouldn’t.
Hell, I didn’t take a real look at all of the problems I’m describing here for the same reason. I figured that I might be more messed up than I wanted to admit, and there might not be anything I can do about it. That’s bull flop of course, I’m doing a hell of a lot better between the ears than a lot of people I know
That leads me to the other thing I got from that incident. The fear that put me into a state where I fantasied about abusing my wife was of not being able to do anything to solve a bad problem. The consequences of this going as bad as it possibly could are fairly bad, but not that bad, and they weren’t what was causing that sharp immediate fear. Also, the reaction says something. My mind immediately did what it needed to to make me feel powerful. That’s what all of those rage fantasies do, and some of them are pretty horrible. They’re all a reaction to fear of powerlessness.
That’s it. That’s the bottom of this node. Everything that I’ve been going digging through springs from a fear of being powerless. Perhaps better to say a fear of feeling powerless or that I am afraid that I am powerless since this transcends any particular situation where I might or might not be powerless.
Why does the situation with my dad so connect to a deeper fear of powerlessness, and why did it allow it to rise to the surface and create that knot of fears that branched off in so many directions? Because watching my father, who I did and do love deeply suffer, and waiting for him to Kill himself put me in a situation where I would do ANYTHING to change what I saw happening, and I could do absolutely posifrikinglutely NOTHING but wait for the axe to fall. This was extremely traumatic moment to moment and it lasted for years. I took responsibility for the situation which made it worse. That’s because I told myself that I HAD TO make the situation better and it was all my fault if I didn’t. Of course I couldn’t make it better I was a &:$$ 5-15 year old. This lead to the lie from which all of the other fears and lies I’ve been prattling on about spring. I am powerless. I extrapolated a sense of powerlessness In all situations off of that one situation because of when it happened, how long it lasted, and the gigantic emotional impact it had on me.
That one branched off to possibly every fear that I have that isn’t a primal self preservation instinct.
Oh yeah, that unhealthy blueprint I got from Dad, that included feeling powerless. Maybe that caused me to internalize it more.
The fear of feeling the powerlessness that I’ve been telling myself is my condition lead to:
- That fear of failure. Trying and failing proves me to be powerless.
-Fear of success. If I succeed, I break out of my blueprint, I face an unknown situation and that might leave me without power.
- Fear of responsibility. If I take on anything important, I won’t be able to handle it because I’m powerless. There will be major consequences for me and others if it’s anything important. This lead to a kind of general fear of getting my crap together. If I’m not too squared away, no one will expect me to take on too much responsibility.- My aversion to keeping my environment neat comes from this.
- Fear of being dominated, which causes me to fear people who could dominate me in any way. Since the base lie was that I was powerless, that included just about everyone. I managed to put a very hard shell over this one when I was a CO, but it was still present underneath and manifested itself outside of the work environment.
-A general habit of letting life happen to me rather than trying to make things happen. I thought myself powerless so why would I bother.
- All of the stuff that happened with my love life. I didn’t feel that I had the power to attract a woman, then when I did, and she left, it brought up my feelings of powerlessness through several layers of self lies.
- a lot more.
My life is definitely not where it could be because I accepted the statement “I am powerless” since I was a child
AND IT WAS A M@(-; :”&$)ing LIE. No one in my shoes would have had one lick of power to change that situation. It says nothing about the amount of power I have now.
Ok, I think that’s as far down as this one goes. I could be wrong, and I’m not sure that the fears are removed, but at least I know what was causing them in a way that makes sense now.
Sorry for the eye strain folks.
