a place to process

Everyone is welcome to interact

As of now I post a lot about schizoid pd and reblog posts about all kinds of mental health, personality disorders etc, I sometimes post vents or journal here. I'm trying and so far semi-failing at recovery and creating a more solid sense of identity. The focus of this blog might suddenly change in future. I'll likely not be consistent.

The only things I want to share about myself right now are that that I really love Jonathan Hultén's music and I'm fascinated by how all of our minds work to protect us, and how very different "disorders" use the same structures in different ways and am hungry to understand it better. I like psychological and existential themes in media, anything that digs into unpleasant realities to get down to the pure origins it, horror that rouses empathy and reveals beauty.

Instead of

(self/body) < > other

the situation is

self < > (body-other)

The self, therefore, is precluded from having a direct relationship with real things and real people. When this has happened in patients, one is witness to the struggle which ensues to preserve the self's own sense of its own realness, aliveness, and identity. In the first scheme, one has a benign circle. The reality of the world and of the self are mutually potentiated by the direct relationship between self and other.

In Figure 2, there is a vicious circle. Every element in this diagram comes to be experienced as more and more unreal and dead. Love is precluded and dread takes its place. The final effect is an overall experience of everything having come to a stop. Nothing moves; nothing is alive; everything is dead, including the self. The self by its detachment is precluded from a full experience of realness and aliveness. What one might call a creative relationship with the other, in which there is mutual enrichment of the self and the other (benign circle), is impossible, and an interaction is substituted which may seem to operate efficiently and smoothly for a while but which has no 'life' in it (sterile relationship). There is a quasi-it-it interaction instead of an I-thou relationship. This interaction is a dead process.

I treasure honesty with myself, as my only living connection in the world, value it above everything, and I identify with it, yet I saw clearly recently that I reflexively hide much more than I thought I did from others. Even when I try for honesty, I obscure everything I can. I couldn't stand that hypocrisy. I don't care about lying to others as much as I should, I'm more upset that I've not been honest with myself about it.

Anyway, the point is I thought this valuing of honesty was something I chose independently, I at least had that reliable fact in my mind, something of my own. Come to find, when reading The Divided Self today for something unrelated, that having inner honesty as an ideal above everything and everyone else is a schizoid feature.

:/

I identify with it, I think it, I express it shallowly sometimes, and yet in the next moment, if someone real speaks to me I still go and lie without a thought and automatically do everything to make them lose interest, because in the moment I genuinely believe they are a threat, holding my breath til it's over, I don't want to be near them for more than a few moments. I could be feeling like I'm dying and still not make a sound because I wouldn't want them to know, I just can't fathom help or safety coming from another human being. I've only experienced it as a gift I give myself by getting away from everyone. Logically I know it's not the truth, I know safety can be found between people, but my entire being feels the opposite. Yet I've been lying to myself, my actions not matching my thoughts, just because I want connection when it has the distance of being just a concept. The truth is I don't want to connect when there's a real chance in front of me, but I want to be able to, and I need to stop confusing the two if I want any progress in feeling more alive. My first instinct in any situation is never to connect, it's to shield anything I can from them, to maintain distance. And then I lament to myself that I never feel safe, that I'm never relaxed, when I keep assuming no one is safe and treating them as such, so I disqualify any possible proof of safety before I've even tried.