Awakening to the Cause of My External Reality
Diary entry 8
(Diary entries are intended to be read in order)
With my new-found healing treasure, I began reiking myself for everything I could think of, starting with my most prominent issues and sources of continued and most poignant suffering, including my ingrained behavioral patterns or deep-seated, self-destroying emotions and thoughts which had become states of existence for me since childhood. My experience in psychoanalyzing myself and my continued visits to my psychologist enabled me to understand and articulate angles of my issues which, in turn, enabled me to target certain multi-faceted, self-destroying attitudes, beliefs or past experiences in my reiki.
My Living Death
The greatest and most firmly ingrained and most devastating state I had been imbued with was a state which had grown in me from my youngest formative years, my toddler years, prospering and transforming, like a viral bacteria in its ideal reproductive environment, into increasingly invincible strains, as I became more and more laden and buried down day by day beneath the traumas and neglect that came to constitute my childhood, and then my adolescence. By the age of 20, this state had taken the outward form of ever-present suicidal depression.
Over the years, I observed that this state was limitless in its degrees of intensity and in the situations and aspects of situations in which I would feel it rearing its ugly head within me. I came to view the two extreme degrees of this state as two separate images. When I was at my best, this state felt to me as a hole deep in the core of my being, manifesting most often in mornings, as recently as this past winter, when I would wake up alone in my bed, no matter what the weather, what the country, what the city, what the situation, and, before thoughts of the day ahead would begin to fill my mind, deep in the pit of my soul, I would feel this hole; a hint of doom, despair and futility, which I could perpetually find at the very nucleus of my being. It brought worry and fear to my heart and mind. On the best days, I would get up feeling the hole and then begin my day and the hole would be covered over with daily concerns and activities. On my worst or more sensitive days, it brought me to endless cascades of tears.
At its worst, this state was my living death. By my definition, “living death” could be said to be like being slowly and painfully tortured every day to within inches of death, just close enough to death, that you may wake up the next morning, barely functional, to again be tortured to within inches of death, day, after day, after day, after day.
My living death found its expression in me regularly in my poems, but, in time, more and more it was expressed in plans of suicide, in suicidal depression, in floods of tears, set off by God-knows-what, or by nothing external at all, consumed in fear, in despair and loneliness, the intensity and depths of which you simply cannot imagine.
My living death consumed me with fear and despair each time I would love a man—fear that he would abandon me, or pull away from me. I would feel the slightest hint of discontent in his voice, or in his email, or in his behavior and feel and fear him pulling away from me, and I would feel that shakey, precarious floor I had finally almost found my footing on being pulled out from under my feet again. Again, I would be alone and insane with desperation, in tears, falling again, losing my grasp on something safe, something stable, over and over and over again.
This, fear, however, did not solely surface in love with men, but in all aspects of my life. From as far back as I can remember, I have been afraid for my safety, for my very survival, especially and above all the survival of my heart—it did not begin with men. Nothing in life had ever been stable or safe. My heart and mind were in pieces long before I was a teenager in love, but I had no idea there was something amiss.
This state, which I believe took root in me as an emotion of profound loneliness and desperate fear from a very young age, at first in absence of a mother and in absence of any source of even a small fraction of safety from the violent emotions and neglect of the family around me, found a permanent home in the core of my child-soul. It had become the roots from which I grew. I had no idea of the nature or vastness of this state, much less its power over all my life, but I became mildly aware of it in my 20’s when I was seeing a psychologist, who, according to society, is somehow supposed to fix my broken heart and mind, uproot the weeds that had been so deeply planted, which had now solidified and over-grown in my child-heart, or enable me to uproot them myself.
This state, from its cozy hiding place, wedged deeply in my subconscious, was the thing which was most profoundly sabotaging my efforts to survive, let alone succeed, in this world. Everything from finding a job, from having a loving relationship and friends to … finding a home … I can’t even begin to express on how many levels this devastating state was influencing my life and every effort I made at finding a peaceful, happy existence.
Realizing the Damage and its Extent
It took me decades to come to a sufficient understanding of the true nature of my plight and of my internal reality—that I had been formed from a tender age within a state of doom and fear and how this formation came to pass. I went through several misguided beliefs concerning this state of doom. Throughout my 20’s, when, as I mentioned, I was able to begin to perceive this state, or “hole,” I believed I had been created by God with a melancholy soul, because, even in the best situation I could imagine, I felt this melancholy, this hole, was so profound in me, that it was actually part of my eternal soul. At a later point, I believed this hole was the result of my medical condition, PKU, and the fact that, as a result of this condition, I had too much phenylalanine in my blood, which is a cause of depression and other psychological conditions (some of which I do suffer and have suffered from) and which is known to reduce serotonin in the brain, which is the chemical cause of the feeling of happiness.
Over the years, being perpetually misunderstood and looked down upon by the “emotional elite,” as I called “happy people,” I have endeavored in vain at least to be understood, since there was no compassion or help to be had from anyone, by describing this particular state in such a way that “the happy people” might be a little kinder or more understanding, at least that they might stop reacting in ways that made me feel worse about myself and about my life than I already did. This was a Sisyphean undertaking, however. Even a willing person, and few were willing, could fathom the experience of my living death, but my best attempt to date can be found in the poem If.
During the years I had to live with family, the years during which I was being formed in this state of doom, I would escape the outward hell by withdrawing into my mind, dreaming of love, of a special husband who I could love and take care of, someone who would love me, who knew me on a profound, spiritual level that no one else was capable of. I had daydreams of perhaps forming my own little family of love with him, never having to speak to anyone from my biological family ever again. My father further punished and chastised me for my escapist tendencies and most interactions with family members were of a negative nature and only served to make me even more determined to escape those people and that wretched reality once and for all.
Outsiders said I was a dreamer and that I lived in my own world. True, but their observations were useless; not one person ever endeavored to understand or to help me deal with the real world. I was on my own, as in my living death, left up to my own undeveloped and inadequate devices to survive alone in this world.
Life After the Family
Once freed of the destructive familial environment, at age 20, the axe of despair fell upon me with a vengeance. When you are in the fire, your body reacts involuntarily in such a way as to protect you from feeling the full force of the pain, but once you are out of the fire, God help you; the pain of having been in the fire floods every cell in your body and the sensations of excruciating agony sweep over and through your body like a salt-sea wave on raw, burned flesh. This applies on the physical level, and I have observed the same phenomenon on the psychological level, with the brain providing defense mechanisms to dull the impact of the psychological devastation of the immediate situation. You cannot heal while you are in the midst of the fire that is burning you. Once out of the fires of your familial hell, your body and all of your senses awaken to the reality that it was living in hellfire and now it must suffer the aftermath in an environment that will only coat you with more salt and not offer you any first aid–or such was my experience. Once I was out of my “familial hellfire,” I fell into suicidal depression within a few months, and remained there until a few months ago, 21 years, roughly.
In more recent years, however, due to observation of myself as I was suffering through relationships, and due to my own self-psychoanalytical abilities, it dawned on me that this hole/living death seemed to be directly related to my mother. By January of 2009, however, thanks to sessions with the psychologist that I had begun seeing in New York City in the summer of 2008, I had become quite familiar with the cause of this hole/living death; it was all about neglect, the lack of a mother, lack of love, lack of security, lack of being cared for as a very young child and right up until…
And this realization paved the way for my grandest reiki healing experience – the next milestone on my healing path.
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Tags: depression, recovery, suicide