Never Underestimate the Value of Delusion

Never underestimate the necessity of self-delusion in the life of a seriously depression or suicide-prone person. Self-delusion may be the very thread by which a suicidal person’s life is hanging. Self-delusion can save lives, literally.

In retrospect and through repeating the experience, I have realized that I got into love relationships that were so bad for me that I could never speak to another person about them, because I could not trust anyone to not be cliché. I could not trust anyone to see the real situation for what it was, nor to appreciate the situation as I saw it. I could not trust anyone to respect my perspective. I could not trust anyone to not immediately react emotionally.

The world is full of clichés who think they are special, unique, independent-thinking, tough people who “won’t take no shit from no one.” When I would desperately search my social surroundings, in the thick of this misery I was in with the guy I loved, it seemed like every person on the face of the earth was some kind of walking machine that had been pre-programmed to respond to my story in exactly the same way as everyone else. It was discouraging and tiresome.

I was in absolute and utter desperation to talk to someone about the mess I was in, but the times I dared to attempt to trust someone, I was barely able to speak more than two sentences about my boyfriend before all final judgments were passed by my listener. This happened time and time again, until I finally just determined to keep everything to myself.

If there had been someone in my life who would have listened to me, without judgment and without putting in their own 2 cents-worth of cliché and predictable garbage—without even having listened to a fraction of the problem—my situation might very well have gone differently, better.

The Folly of the Reality-Pushers

People feel like they are really clever when they think they are calling you out on your self-delusion. They feel good about themselves when they try to slap you out of your perspective, even when your perspective is literally keeping you from killing yourself. What such egomaniacal individuals don’t understand or care about, is that their harshness, their trying to beat their perspective of reality into the depressive person, could result in that person killing himself. People who look at a suicidal person who may be involved in some form of self-delusion and feel pity or feel hostility towards that person for being in self-delusion are playing with fire if they try to shake him out of his self-delusion.

I am a master at self-delusion. I have lived in both self-delusion and dreams ever since the violent divorce of my parents—and many years before that I believe. I may be living in self-delusion even as I write this. But you know what? I need my self-delusion in order to live!

If a suicidal person is in delusion, there is probably a very good reason for it. For me, any time something happened to challenge my perspective on the relationship I was in, those were the moments that I came crashing down. It was those times I began planning my death, those times I would research successful means of suicide. Indeed, it was the reality of my own devastation that the reality-pushers were trying to push on me.

What reality-pushers don’t know, is that people like me have no ground to stand on beneath their feet. So in order to stay alive, we weave an imaginary ground out of whatever shadow of good presents itself in our life. When a reality-pusher comes along and sets about destroying that ground, because he thinks that we have to see life and reality from his perspective, even in cases when he knows virtually nothing about the situation, he could be effectively hammering a nail in the coffin.

As an avid self-delusionist, I have struggled ad nauseum to grace the reality-pushers with the dismal and devastating experience of the reality they push me into when they start poking holes in the imaginary ground I have woven beneath my feet.

If I could just make anyone standing in judgment of me feel what it feels like to be suicidal, desperate, depressed, devastatingly frightened and alone… If I could have traded my heart with them for a day to make them have an ounce of compassion for me, or to whack them off of their egotistical soap box, to stop calling me selfish and self-centered, to stop shaming me into discounting myself and my own heart yet again by telling me to think about how other people will feel if I kill myself – stop trying to steal from me my life-sustaining delusions…or, if nothing else, just to leave me alone with my fate…

if somebody loved me
i know i would not cling to You
so unrelentingly
as these, the writhing limbs of the cursed,
tighten their grip
constricting wrathfully ’round my ankles
dragging me off with them
to eternal hellfire and damnation.

if somebody loved me
i know i would not clutch so desperately
onto Your shoestrings
fraying threads
dangling me over this wailing bottomless pit
sucking me violently into its black hole of eternally lost souls.

if somebody loved me
i know i would not grasp so frantically at Your heels
in futile attempts to save myself
from the fright of my living death
as i sink into my inescapable oblivion
momentarily pulling You with me
down beneath the line of sanity.

if somebody loved me
i could release my bleeding fists
too severely rapt in anguish
freeing You
laying to rest at long last
my abused heart
in a healing
bed of love

if.

So if you think you are going to rescue anyone from their self-delusion, you’d better make sure that you give them a soft and solid landing to fall onto when you cut the cord, because you don’t know to what extent their delusion is keeping them sane and alive.

The Mother of All Relationships

Diary entry 12

(Diary entries are intended to be read in order)

Psychotherapy – a very slow, but helpful process

In therapy and healing, explanation and understanding for your feelings and behaviors are gradually unfolded to you, and week by week, not all at once. All my young life, I was 110% certain I was a “basket case” (as my father used to say) specifically as a result of a megalomaniacal, emotionally abusive and manipulative father. It is only to my surprise that I have been finding out through my reiki and my psychotherapy, I estimate, that roughly 95% of my own dysfunction in love relationships has been passed to me from maternal neglect, and not paternal psychosis.

The realization which was revealed to me, that the primary source of the most severe, profound and enduring damage to my psyche that had been brought upon me as a baby, a child and then a teenager was actually my mother’s neglect and not my father’s psychosis, was a little uncomfortable. My relationship with my mother had become pretty good, relatively speaking. Today it is better than it has ever been in my life.

Despite the relatively good (= peaceful, ≠ close) relationship I have with my mother nowadays, with diminishing frequency, thankfully, there are still moments when her worry for her money rises to the surface and I once again am transported back to the old, awful feelings of feeling worthless and disposable, of being #10 on her 10-item list of priorities.

It must be said at this point in my story, that this tension is caused by the fact that, since I had intended to kill myself last April, 2008 (read story), a promise I then made not to do so required that I return to the country of my childhood, where my mother still lived, and that I be financially supported by family (primarily my mother, secondarily my brother—both of whom are quite wealthy) and also undergo intensive therapy. Naturally, in such a mental state, I also quit my job of ten years.

That is to say, that because my mother and step-father do not want me to live with them, my mother has been paying my rent all of this time, and paid my food for a year, while I have been looking for a job for over a year now and continuing to see a psychologist, also at my mother’s expense.

It is in this context that my mother’s worry about her money now and then surfaces and I have a relapse into my “dark place.” In fact, I have noticed that it is ultimately her worry and caring about money and her long-standing emotional detachment from me and my life, her “unworry” and uncaring about me, which used to trigger in me the desperate solution to kill myself, since I felt incapable of sustaining my life on earth just by myself in the state I was in, and I felt I was a great, and sometimes resented, burden to family members.

This feeling of being a resented burden to family was perpetuated, if not also partially created, by my mother’s (seemingly unfounded) financial concerns, as well as some personality issues, by which she avoided becoming emotionally close to anyone, including me, and perpetuated even more profoundly by the far more harsh words and authoritarian, critical and uninformed judgments habitually passed on me by my brother.

I find myself ever-pressured by both family members to go in life directions and do things that would make me utterly miserable in my life, usually a direction opposite to the one I am trying to go–and on occasion, I find I do things, take certain steps or develop plans (and begin to carry them out) that I know they will think are good and smart, just to make them happy with me, so I can have something to tell them, to distract them or buy time to find my own solution and get out of my dependency on and obligation to them.

Due to our opposite personalities, the impossibility of them ever understanding me or ceasing to pressure me and badly judge me, I let them talk at me, “suggesting” to me all kinds of things I should do with my life, things totally unsuited to me that prove they have no idea who I am. I keep my opinions and plans to myself, giving them as little information about what I’m doing, planning or thinking as possible, in order to minimize the damage their responses will have on my emotional state and on my mind, which is both fragile and vulnerable, especially to family.

Last winter, on the occasion of another episode of my mother’s “money-worry,” my usual solution of suicide was reduced to thoughts of merely getting evicted onto the street, and probably an eventual death as a result.

These solutions of mine always seem to involve 200% rejection of family—first their rejection of me in some form, then my subsequent rejection of them and, lastly, of myself. I begin to think things like “She can keep her precious money, I don’t need her or her money!” And this goes hand-in-hand with the acceptance that I will die, or go to live on the street, simply because I don’t know how to live; I haven’t the self-confidence or the emotional and mental foundation necessary to get or hold a job and I am literally not able to survive in this world. All I want at times like that is that she keep her money and I stop burdening her with my life, while simultaneously not having the slightest care for what happens to me as a result. I thereby free myself from her resentment of me needing her support, or the horrible experience of feeling her hesitancy at helping me. If the decision is not clear-cut for her, then I take away the option to help me entirely. I might die, but at least I will die free of any feeling of guilt.

Another of these episodes occurred again this past week, as she brought to my attention the fact that she is worried about her money, even in spite of the fact that I now have several fortuitous and promising leads on jobs, and I have been getting an increasing amount of work as a freelance translator now from my former employer. This time, instead of turning to thoughts of suicide, I thought more and more certainly that I will tell her to stop paying my rent, stop giving me her money, starting now.

I could make it through December without her money. And I would either succeed in earning money, or, if not, I could at least escape this room I stay in and escape this entire situation, and, best of all, be free, again, of family. However, I feel fairly confident that I will be earning some money by the end of December. Nonetheless, I think I would be willing to take the risk. The more time passes, the better freedom from family looks–eventually it will become priceless.

I managed quite well to ignore my mother’s money-worry when I got her email this week, but today, as I was explaining the situation to my roommate, I felt the full force of her concern for her money.

I felt bad again and feeling bad is almost becoming a foreign experience to me. I didn’t like it. I set about writing down my feelings and thoughts around the situation:

As always, my mother is pressuring me to do things that will keep me down and perpetually dependent in life – she just wants to ensure that she is not the one I am dependent on. And no amount of positive developments will give her any hope or respite from the fate it seems she has already doomed me to in her own mind.

As I was letting out all of my thoughts and feelings onto paper, I had remembered words fromAbraham-Hicks, video clips of whom I have been watching a lot in the last few weeks, who said that you don’t need to delve into the past for your life to work for you—all you need to do is heal yourself in the now, address the now, cause yourself to feel good right now. This gave me the idea to reiki my present feelings and thoughts, which I did.

Feeling quite bad and emotional, I set my intention for my reiki at that moment to be to “heal all the thoughts and feelings I am having right now, and remove and heal the cause and source of all of these thoughts and feelings.” Then I began to reiki myself.

I recorded the time of the start of reiki at 10:28. I felt the reiki coursing through me. By 10:30, another teaching of Abraham came to my mind. Abraham says that when you are faced with a challenging relationship, think of all of the positive aspects of the person you have the relationship with and write them down, and associate the person only with those aspects.

As I continued to reiki, I immediately wrote this down and thought of two items about my mother for this list immediately. I was able to add some more items. As I continued reikiing, I began to feel some things: the heavy weight of my pain was lifted from my heart as I felt the reiki coursing through me, and a dark cloud, like a frown, was cleared from my mind and I felt lightened, I also began to feel great love for this miracle, reiki, and wondered how I ever lived without it, and I answered myself: “Miserably!”

And this all transpired in the course of nine minutes.

The Finnish autumn is setting in again, and with it, the usual feeling of emotional desolation, fear, loneliness and despair come creeping inside me morning by morning, more intensely with each passing day. What is it about the dark morning chill that seems to torment me with my solitude and fill me with emptiness? What is it about the Nordic autumn that leads my thoughts to the edge of dying and overwhelms my once love-filled heart with a desperate fear that all society, all family, all humanity has left me behind and forgotten me?

I wake up alone in my bed morning after morning, like every day of every season, but only with the onset of autumn does the full reality of my alienation and estrangement in this world come crashing down on me, filling me with ever-increasing despair and loneliness, replacing my hopes and sense of meaning with a desperate sense of futility and abandonment.

The dawn comes later and later, the darkness extends ever-farther into the day, ever-so-gradually snuffing out the light of life…and the chill in the air…how do these things bear with them these tragic emotions and place them into my heart? And why am I always alone? Why always excluded on the outskirts of lives?

This time last year, I sunk into a deep depression for weeks. I cried profoundly, every day, I don’t even know why, there was no logic. I could not control my tears and, of course, being alone, there is never a need to even try.

This year I am so much better. My depression was so severe last autumn, and my inexplicable crying so frequent and intense that it drove me right into the arms of my fiancé, at least in my imagination. Still now, I am only in his arms in my imagination, but at least we are close in heart and in mind. That is the only thing that keeps me from falling apart again. Still, I am left with an intense loneliness, a yearning to be with him that is tearing at me more and more each autumn day, and the fear growing in me of the autumn’s foreboding of a cold, dark and wintry death.

10.10.2005 Finland