My consciousness and me

My consciousness is me in fact. If I have this image that there is my consciousness and there is me, then I am separating myself from consciousness. What a trick. ‘Me’, trying to convince myself that I need to get there. 

When I realize that my emotions, thoughts, body, and ‘constructs’ are also part of me then I can start to stop this crazy fight. 

This has something to do with letting go. Or with forgiveness. Or with love.

I can acknowledge that my thoughts, emotions, body, etc. are also part of me. I don’t have to feel disgusted about them and try to get rid of them, or be angry at them, or feel ashamed of them. They are part of me. And maybe those parts of me are suffering. It can be a better idea to see them and acknowledge them – and through this acknowledgment help them to run their course.

I can feel consciousness any time

It is this inner feeling or image that is described many times as a presence, a gentle energy field, as God, as space, as some subtle joy that is in us and around us.

It is not that hard to feel it. It is my emotions, thoughts, and other ‘constructs’ that occupy my attention and sometimes I forget that this consciousness is always there. 

The cause(s) of my depression

Depression is caused by a sense of loss. I define loss as something that I lost or something that I did not get but I find I should have. 

The cause of my depression is mainly unconscious. 

I find that this is because its roots are in childhood – they started happening in childhood. I could hardly get depressed at a more mature stage if I had not been hit by a sense of loss at a stage of my personal development at a very vulnerable state. Or from another point of view: I did not have the required level of consciousness (strong enough Self) to process my sadness and depression. Why does it matter? Because it can give a clue why it is so hard to process depression. (This article does not go into how depression forms.)

‘..something that I did not get but I should have.’

When I find that I should have gotten something but I didn’t, it will have the same effect as losing something. Many times it can be much harder to connect the dots in our solution-oriented world. It takes a higher level of abstraction and one example is when one understands that the cause is her depression is that she sees how unconscious and immature her family of origin may be. 

If this resonates with you then go deeper into finding out what you are missing in your life and in the world around you. Here is a possible route for you: Why don’t I fit in the world around me?

Cause-and-effect examples

• • • Example thought #1: “I would like to get that calming and deeply good feeling that I got as a child when my mother or father came to comfort me, and helped me to get out of my state of distress.”
    • Cause: His mother could not be there for him when he got into a state of distress and it happened many times (for example, she had to take care of his siblings, or had to go to work). He was not – at that age – at a level of maturity to be able to calm himself. 
    • Effect: His nervous system got into a state of shock numerous times and could not get out of it and as a result, this shock got imprinted in him and also manifested in physical illnesses. He also developed a sense of worthlessness that manifested in low self-esteem and he go into relationships where he can replay this sense of worthlessness.

• • • Example thought/belief #2: “People do not listen to me. I wanted a lot of attention from people around me and especially from people I trust because I wanted to tell about the great discoveries I made. But people just laughed.”
    • Cause: This person grew up in a shame-bound family. Her caretakers – instead of greeting her ‘need for greatness’, ridiculed her because they had problems with their own self-esteem.
    • Effect: She developed shame.

Addictions and depression

Addictions are ways to cope with something painful in our life. Coping mechanisms,  or tools if you will. At the time they formed they served their purpose.

Depression comes with continuous pain, many times very hard to find its roots, and usually, it starts to be with us from early childhood. Understandably many of us turn to some kind of coping mechanism. Some form of addiction. 

Cause-and-effect examples

Here are the above examples complemented with the relationship to addictions.

• • • Example thought #1: “I would like to get that calming and deeply good feeling that I got as a child when my mother or father came to comfort me, and helped me to get out of my state of distress.”
    • Cause: ..lack of mother’s availability..unable calm himself alone..
    • Effect: …nervous system in a continuous state of shock, physical illnesses, sense of worthlessness, low self-esteem, toxic relationships.
    • Addiction: He became dependent on his partner (and used her as a secure base), even if it is a toxic relationship, and became a chain smoker. 

• • • Example thought/belief #2: “People do not listen to me. I wanted a lot of attention from people around me and especially from people I trust because I wanted to tell about the great discoveries I made. But people just laughed.”
    • Cause: Shame-bound family. Ridiculing, and other types of direct and indirect shaming practices.
    • Effect: She developed shame.
    • Addiction: She became a workaholic and a fitness maniac (in an effort to show her greatness), and later, her social drinking turned into alcoholism.

What to do?

• Know that it is a grief process (The root cause is depression and as such, a sense of loss.). And know that you need to go through it. 
• You need to give up your addictions. Your grief process will hardly be able to finish if you don’t. 
• Expect some level of pain (worsening of your depression) as you are grieving the things that you lost or did not get but wanted. 
• If you have some serious addiction then seek professional help. 
• Expect a kind of relief on the other side that you could not imagine. 

What NOT to do

• Exit situations that you already identified that connect you to your depression. In other words: Remove yourself from old patterns as much as possible. 
• Stop hoping that it will vanish by itself.
• Don’t judge yourself. Know that grief is hard.
• Don’t give up. Restart when you fail. 

(As the subject is huge my only goal here is to give some food for thought, and I agree with anyone who would argue that there is a lot more to the above. )

A change happens in me when I deeply and clearly see the problem I have about myself and realize that it is not true.

Let’s do it through an example: Belly shame

Although I write about it through a specific example and through imagined happenings, please focus on the abstract behavior and mindset behind it (Though I find that the example may be very relevant to most of us). 

1 – I start facing it.

I sit down, close my eyes, and start focusing on my belly. I am feeling the curves, its big size, and the discomfort it is causing me. I am looking at myself from the outside with my imagination and what I see is an ugly, chubby person. I start to feel disgusted with myself. And I start to become depressed. 

I want to escape from the emotional pain and want to give up. I have my usual escapes: I pull back my belly, start to sit up straight, and put a relaxed smile on my face – ‘I am fit and beautiful, I am fit and beautiful…’. It works for one or two minutes and then my disgust and sadness are back. Probably this is the time I should go to the fridge… or head to the gym and start starving. Not that those worked. Nor the idea that I ignore the fact that I am fat and tell myself that I am still ok. 

There is no escape, I sit back in my pain of disgust. Maybe I can take it for one or two more minutes…No, but I cannot, I pass out. I cannot take it any longer. Let me just cry. You won. I am a failure. I admit I am fat.

(what happened: You could come closer to it. You had the courage this time to face it.)

2 – I am separating from it

I am genuinely facing my emotional pain and thoughts about my belly shame. Somewhere I read that the method to start processing my pains is to ‘revisit’ them and look at them consciously. Observe it while being in it. Good that this comes to my mind just at the right moment.

So I try to look at this situation from the outside, like an observer. Sort of like there is me and there is the situation. It is happening to me but I am not it.

Holy shit!! It is working to some degree. I am starting to feel some relief. And I am able to stay in it. What I experience is that I am still feeling those curves and how big my belly is, but I am basically just looking at it. I am not saying that it is physically pleasing but somehow the emotional pain is fading. 

(what happened: You have started to rewire yourself. On all levels.)

3 – Window of additional opportunity

In addition to the above, you may experience some other things. You may consciously realize that your beliefs changed (or even that you can decide how you want them to change.). And maybe not only in connection to the given issue.

If we take the above belly shame example: While you may not like the size of your belly, you are not shame-bound to it. And you may experience that you are now less shame-bound in other areas of your life also.

Notes

• Seek professional help or someone you trust if you feel unsafe! It is important!!! Someone who can hold you emotionally as you are doing your work. Tell that person what you are doing and what help you wish to receive.
• Don’t give up if it doesn’t work ‘soon’ enough. Trust me, you will find no one who did it ‘soon’ enough.
• Experience shows that although we all dream of a sudden and everlasting release, what happens to most of us is that we are going in and out until we fully process it and integrate it. 
• Although the above outlines a specific and consciously known issue, I find that it can work the same way for problems that we are not fully conscious of. 

This article is for the overthinker in you.

Do you know why we don’t remember the first couple of years of our life? It is because that part of the brain that stores memory is not active yet at that age.

Nevertheless, we do have body memory. For many of us – especially the ‘overthinkers and overdoers’, and for those of us programmed not to listen to our body – this fact can stay on a conceptual level. And that is a big miss. Almost like a different world.

Why do I mention trauma in relation to body memory? Because I want to make conscious that it is traumatic experiences that get registered in the body (be sudden and ‘big’, or long-lasting, ‘small’, and ‘subtle’ in nature.) And mostly, they are the real causes of long remaining physical issues. (As I mentioned above, this article is for the ‘overthinker’ in you – which I have been-, and my only goal is to trigger your consciousness (maybe the article finds you at the right time) to concentrate more on your body. But anyways, if you want to go deeper, I can recommend a great resource: The Body Keeps The Score )  

What worked with me

(In short: Learn what to let go.)

I have been a serious overthinker. It has become my habit that I wanted to find the cause-and-effect relationship behind all of my behavior. My general logic has been that if I could state clearly and honestly (i.e. it resonates) what was the cause behind a problem of mine then cool: I was almost there to solve it. While this habit of mine proves truly valuable in my life, it took some time for me to realize that there is a catch: It just simply wasn’t effective when working with my body (I mean things like yoga asanas, meditation, breathing, jogging, etc.).

It just simply did not work. Why? The way I started to put it was that those memories in my body are not conscious – in the sense that they are not connected to my thinking/memory-keeping mind. And more importantly maybe: I just don’t know. Luckily life is not as mechanical as our thoughts and our thinking mind. 

The change started to happen when I stopped wanting to conceptualize, verbally describe, or ‘understand’ my aches, cramps, and all those kinds of things in my body. I changed from trying to make them conscious through my old ways of doing it, to just simply looking at them. It was such a good feeling for me that I could let myself stop doing something that actually never resulted in anything useful ( perhaps other than the realization that it was not useful…)

The story would not be complete if I did not mention this: Ok, I stopped trying to find causes all the time as my main tool, but I also did this: I kept in mind that they are traumas and I started to look at them as ‘beings in their own right’. I am not sure if this is the best way to put it but what I am trying to say is that somehow this developed in me: They are with me, part of me, they exist – but they are not me. 

For an overthinker, as I have been, it was a huge change. It helped me to start to think less and let things happen more naturally. 

I have had a hard time admitting that despite the amount of energy I put into developing myself, I did not seem to make lasting progress. There were times when I felt I was making real progress but I “fell back”. And there have been parts of my life where I found I simply could not make any progress and was just “going circles” without meaningful results. I had the chance to talk about this honestly with like-minded people and kept hearing pretty much the same: “I don’t know why my self-development doesn’t seem to progress.”

In this article, I do not want to talk about the probably understandable frustration that comes when we all want more progress. But rather the painful fact that it is possible that we cannot make progress for a long time. And why it may be.

The below are two just ideas. I do not suggest by any measure that they are universally true for everyone. Please treat them as such.

Idea #1: Trauma

Trauma keeps us blocked. And we keep going back to it, bumping into it. Until the trauma is released, the ‘block’ will stay there. 

(Even if we are truly aware of what our trauma is, we may not be able to release it for a very very long time. We are afraid to face it, we may need to fully understand it, work on it a lot, ask for help, go through it. I am not talking about this situation in this article. There is progress here, there is work being done – even if we argued that one doesn’t put enough work into it, doesn’t take it serious.)

But trauma can be tricky in a number of ways, to say the least: 

You are not aware that you are traumatized

“It is hard to understand the evidence if I don’t know what crime has been committed.” So simply put, you are not applying the right approach. I appreciate that there could be a lot of depth to discuss here, but this article is not an in-depth discussion about trauma.

You are not able to phrase your trauma or have a “twist” in your thinking

So you are aware that you are traumatized but you can only phrase it in a vague and shady way. This is very common. (I would argue that this is probably common with childhood trauma from which we usually do not have a clear memory. So what happens is that you have a hard time knowing what you need to work on exactly to make the next step in your self-development.

About the “twist” in your thinking note: As a result of trauma it is common that we form a mindset (logic if you will) that is not real – it was an “answer” back when the traumatic event(s) happened, but in fact it does not resemble reality.  (Again, just a high-level description of what may be blocking you from connecting the dots about something.)

Idea #2: Disorganized attachment style

Have you ever heard of attachment styles? There are four patterns of attachment (Ambivalent, Avoidant, Disorganized, Secure), and the Disorganized Attachment Style is very common. It brings a level of confusion, disorientation, lack of clarity into our life. I personally think that a disorganized way of relating to the world around is a major obstacle to progress. I know it sounds overly simplified but this is how I put it for myself: “How do I know if I am doing the right thing if I am disorganized?”. 

(If you want to read more about Attachment Theory, here is a good article: “What is Attachment Theory?“)

(I would like to highlight again that the above are only ideas or food for thought to find why someone may not be progressing with their self-development.)

The strength of phrasing my problems in a short and basic way is about deeply understanding my own self.

There is zero greatness to this post, no big revelations. It’s just that the subject is important, and there is a chance you will become more effective with your inner work. 

The method

Phrasing it

It sounds obvious, but you have to phrase it to name it. Otherwise, you run the risk of just endlessly ‘walking in a mist’. This is much more important than it looks, because it is so easy to be unconscious when we are in a conflict, a great deal of anxiety, or stress. Tell yourself to phrase your problem when it appears.

Why basic?

When you are basic it is a sign that you have gone deep. Your Self is basic. In the best way possible.

Why short?

Your true self hardly phrases thoughts and emotions in 30-word sentences. When your phrasing is short enough, it usually means that you have cooked it well.

Resonate

Go with what resonates with you. Your thought about your problem is only yours; no one else needs to understand it. And no one else needs to resonate with it. What matters is that it is true to you.

Change it as your understanding develops

It is a very good sign if you change it. It means that you are deepening your understanding. And you may change it back to a previous one; and that is all okay too.  

Have discipline

Phrasing your problems in a short and basic way will actually help in having discipline. It is less energy up front, and gives enough punch to get to the next step. 

An example

“Why don’t I get what I want?”

• It is short.
• It is basic.
• (It does resonate with me. There is much more to it for me than what meets the eye.)