“It shouldn’t be this way.” I think that’s the core of suffering – the brain’s conviction that something has gone terribly wrong. I was supposed to have relationships. Friends. I was supposed to be likable, admirable, respectable, decent. I was supposed to be a good person. I was supposed to have a decent, meaningful career, and a family, and a partner. That’s how it’s supposed to go.
But that’s not who I turned out to be. Instead I’m a neurotic, unlikable deviant. I’m socially awkward, depressing to be around, morally twisted. And it’s not that I consciously chose to be any of these things. But I am what I am. And what I am should not exist.
Except I shouldn’t kill myself. Because death is existentially terrifying, and I must do all I can to cling to life for as long as possible.
So I’ve trapped myself in this state of suffering. This sad, empty little existence, where no one who’s not closely related to me wants anything to do with me. And I’m doing this to myself, and I can’t stop. I can’t stop the sadness leaking out of me. Because it wasn’t supposed to be this way, and it’s fundamentally unacceptable. My mind is constantly screaming at itself. Because we’ve got to do something about this. We’ve got to fix it. This is intolerable. But at the deepest level, there’s nothing to do. There’s no fixing it. I am what I am. And what I am sucks.
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I may be wrong, but thinking of how things are supposed to or should be seems inclined to create fear and pain. My therapist got me on that last year, eliminating should, reframing it. The fact is that whatever it is, it isn’t. It isn’t automatically up to you for everything to happen. You make the best of what you’ve got, and no one else can judge because no one else has the same challenges.
Regret is only useful when it helps produce better results. When it involves self hatred, self doubt, blame, if it doesn’t lead to something good what’s the point? How are you better off?
IDK, I have this peculiar thing where I don’t particularly care what is true, or morally correct, I care about getting the best results I can.
https://www.therapynowsf.com/blog/should-statements-reframe-the-way-you-think#:~:text=A%20%E2%80%9Cshould%20statement%E2%80%9D%20is%20a,perception%20that%20can%20be%20unhealthy.
Sure…
What I’m doing above is trying to put words to feelings & experiences that are very hard to put into words. I don’t actually sit around with my inner monologue purposefully thinking “I should be a better person.” Rather it’s that I feel a kind of suffering when I encounter evidence of my own shortcomings, and this is me trying to explain that. I find it more helpful than just drowning in those feelings. The feeling of “I should be better” is not actually a conscious thought. It’s this far more nebulous sense of sadness that arises in particular circumstances.
I feel like I encounter this confusion a lot with much of the language around CBT. Very little of my negative experience actually seems to result from the specific words my conscious brain is telling itself. Rather it’s the other way round – the “mental words” have their basis in explaining the negative feelings. Example: I spent much of today with a part of me screaming “just fucking kill yourself”. But this was a response to overwhelming feelings of self-hatred and shame that resulted from social interactions that felt beyond my control and didn’t go as I’d hoped. The situation came first, then the emotion, and lastly my brain attached some words to it as a way to try and rationalize the feeling.
But maybe other people just operate differently, I don’t know. As far as I know CBT is as effective as as any other kind of therapy, so it must really help some people. It’s just never fitted with how I experience reality.
I can understand that, some things only work for some people. CBT is really the closest to computer programming, in which the way I understand the world is compatible because I’ve long thought of thought itself as code, and my emotional and awareness portion more as the operating system. And then what other people say to me is the oft faulty network connection… that’s always been my weakest point.
Yeah, I’m not sure about that one. I suppose if the brain is the hardware, then it generates thought (among many other functions). Do computers generate code, or do they just run it? I guess you could say the brain is like a computer that can alter it’s own programming?
But I tend to view conscious thought (inner monologue) more as an output of the brain, rather than the code that dictates how it runs. I think in this analogy the code would be the actual structure of the brain and the neurochemical flows within it. That’s what’s actually determining how the machine functions. Conscious thought might be more like something shown on a computer monitor – it’s part of what the code does, but not the code itself.
*nerdery hat firmly on* well actually that’s one of the coolest things about most programming languages; the code that a programmer enters is usually higher level, meaning easier to understand, Java and Python are actually pretty close to English (though they can parse functions/translate any language if taught)…. sticking with Java (because I don’t even want to get into what Python is), once you’ve written up your code, you pass it through the compiler
The compiler turns higher level code into machine code, that is code that can be interpreted by the hardware, and it does all kinds of things on the machine code level that the programmer doesn’t think of, like multithreading operations
I think of it as our conscious thought is probably higher level code, we can read it. but the unconscious mind runs on machine language; modifying it takes quite a bit of tinkering. That’s what metacognitive therapy does, teaches you to tap the subconscious mind
Which leads to my favorite psychology misconception; that we only use 10% of our brains. It’s a half truth, very little of the actual workings of the mind are open to our awake brain, but there are tons of important things that are hard wired into the mechanism of the nervous system.
Yes, the frontal lobe which processes most conscious thought is a marvel of biology, but the part behind it is at least as interesting, the further towards the spinal column the older that part of the brain is… back to the rodents we evolved from of course. I can’t remember what level of proof it was on, but I like the idea that higher level functions developed in mammals to interpret more sophisticated senses.
*more nerdlery* because at the time of the emergence of early mammals, most non mammals were active during the day. Mammals actually had to be nocturnal early on because it was too hot during the day. That nocturnal environment is one of the reasons early rodents developed such a keen sense of smell, which arose to the original model of higher brain function…..
I guess that would be like the computers they used to crack the enigma code in WW2, where apes have roughly the equivalent of a commodore 64…… and humans vary from the average smart phone to a basic workstation, which is now capable of interpreting petabytes of data an hour, stunning.
I don’t think most people realize the potential of that low end though. An average smart phone has 10X the processing power in 1% of the space it was in when I started working on computers…… god I’m old…. 35… it doesn’t always seem old to be fair.
I think what I was reaching for is that an inner monologue, words in your head or “self-talk” is probably not actually that crucial to how the brain functions. I think at most it might be a kind of feedback mechanism – like a sort of error report, if you want to stick with the computer analogy. But a lot of people (possibly a majority) don’t even have an inner monologue – so they’d only be able to tell themselves a “should” by talking aloud to themselves or writing something down.
The point being is that the language itself isn’t the actual issue. It’s the unconscious assumptions/calculations/code/predictions that sometimes produce particular language that are the issue.
I’m sorry that things haven’t turned out the way you wanted them to. It’s real hard to have all these hopes for the future and what you want to be and have them not go as planned. I understand that painful, screaming feeling that this wasn’t how things were supposed to be. I know you don’t think you can be “fixed”, but maybe it’s possible that things will get better. I’m a pessimist myself so it’s hard to believe that for myself too, but who knows. Anyways, I’m sorry that you’re in pain right now and I hope things will get better for you.
Thanks man, I appreciate it.