It’s a serious problem; getting it all wrong. Not talking about a little bit wrong. I’m talking about being totally fucking wrong. Let me explain what I’m talking about. When a person is abused horribly in childhood, they lose their identity. They have to become something other than who they are, because who they really are isn’t cutting it. In order to survive, the psyche breaks. It becomes two things, and the true self goes into hiding. This is a well documented phenomenon, and doesn’t really need explained. If you don’t understand this concept you will need to do some reading.
It really is a terrible place to be, Who am I? It’s the rarest thing going for a human to actually know who they are.
There is a small book written by a famous guru from India, Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. The title? Who am I? I like to read the stuff of sages. Right or wrong, they cause one to actually think about what is really going on. I kept this book on my coffee table for many months, pondering life at a time when my life seemed to be the greatest it had ever been up to that point. I was living a lie though.
I didn’t know who I was at all. I definitely know more now, than then, but the inquiry persists. When that book was on my table I was perfecting my facades. Perfecting yet another persona. I knew what everyone else thought I was, but I had no idea who I was. I had almost full control over how others perceived me. It was a game I was playing. A skill I was perfecting.
I’ve had to be, what I needed to be. Since there was no safety in my life ever, I was only ever a reaction to that. Without a sense of safety it wasn’t safe to be me. The real “me” was scared to death and was buried quite deeply, and safely beneath a Fort Knox of defenses. So deep even I could not see it.
When I was a child being me caused beatings, abandonment, anger and neglect. In my story, I’ve had to be other than I am from the get. This means that never not once in my life have I felt safe. Note the important word: felt. By the time my childhood was over my body was stuck in hypervigilance. Hyper protection mode. I learned the world was violent and dangerous, and that I had to be prepared to defend myself at all times. Matter of fact, that decision wasn’t even up to me. My body did it for me. My body did what I could not.
I remember being in my mid twenties, sitting in a psychology class at the local community college, and the whole time I was plotting out all the courses of action I would take should shit go awry. If the building catches on fire, I’m going out this window. If this guy does something crazy, I’m going to beat his ass in such and such a way, and escape such and such a way. At all times I was calculating my proximal safety. And never ever was my safety ever actually in question. I remember judging everyone else too. While I’m sitting there calculating everyone’s thoughts, and motivations, they were thinking about cookies and TV shows. I was prepared, they were clueless.
What was I defending though? What was I protecting? My emotional body, my psyche, my physical self, my soul? The truth is my body no longer needed a reason. It was a permanent state of affairs. It was never up to me, and even if I had wanted to, I would not have been able to stop it from happening. Who was I? I was a perpetual preparer for disaster. Nothing was safe according to my body. I was in a perpetual calculating mode of existence. That was my normal. That was my life. I didn’t have another way of being. I didn’t know there was another way of being. I just knew I didn’t want to be like the TV watchers sitting all around me.
I recently read an article that resonated with me deeply. Synchronicity is an amazing phenom. It’s important that you read this article, linked at the bottom. It’s something that I’m sure will have a profound effect on anyone who was abused as a child. The science and study of abused people is drastically closing the gap. Soon it will not be a secret regarding how to answer the question; Who am I? The author says it better than I’ve ever heard anyone say it.
“Anytime someone told me to 'love myself' I felt so damn angry because those of us with complex trauma literally formed our 'self' as a being who has had to not love ourselves in order to stay connected with others around us. We learned instead to be connected to others' projections of us, demands, violations, perceptions. We learned to derail our social engagement system into being perfect, being good, being the caregiver, not feeling, not knowing, not needing....many of us have deep core wounds around the paradox of love: what we were taught by trauma and neglect to recognize as love and as safe, is actually unsafe, but our autonomic nervous system developed in these relationships and so we physiologically recognize abuse as love, as the most familiar, as what we are seeking and often, what we deserve, when we reach out for connection.”
That is some freeing shit right there.
In my own life, I’ve never experienced the feeling of love. Not real love. Only abused people will fall in love with an abused person, and abused people don’t know how to love. Even if it were to have happened to me, I would have had no idea. Just like safety. It’s totally happened for me. I know for a fact that there have been many times in my life where I was perfectly safe and sound, but my body did not acknowledge that. It has stayed hyper vigilant 24/7. As you can imagine this state of hypervigilance makes a personal relationship nearly impossible. Particularly if one is trying to be with people who do not have the complex trauma. The “normal” person becomes exhausted rapidly in the face of constant vigilance. They will break under the pressure.
So where does it go wrong? Everywhere.
My first real acknowledgement of getting it all wrong came in my early thirties. I came across a book called The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida. Let me tell you, do not be thrown off by the title. It should read the way of the Superior Human. If you take the time to read this book, which I promise will change your life, you will find in the introduction the explanation for the seeming sexist title. This book is for everyone. He centered it on a specific gender for the ease of writing out the thought. Not because it is for males only.
Anyways, this book made me realize that I wasn’t as fucked up as I had been thinking I was. It caused me to realize I had been living a lie. All my life I thought I was doomed to be with “crazy” women because of my mother. This belief only further fueled my hatred of that woman. My mind was creating stories to validate my hatred. It’s a well known phenomenon that us humans typically get with lovers who are like our parents. So there I was, purposefully staying single, because the only females who ever came my way; were “crazy”. I was refusing to play the game anymore. I couldn’t stand being reminded of my mother anymore via my own personal love relationships.
Well, David Deida perfectly explains that the most masculine males are attracted to the most feminine females. It’s a matter of polarity. So if you are like me, having been hypermasculinized, really feminine females seem like the craziest thing in the world. It amplifies the polarity. They are whimsical, emotional, they are not logical. They are the exact opposite of a really masculine man. We’ve all probably heard sexit jokes about nobody being able to figure out women. So it turns out, that even if I had been raised even remotely appropriately, I was still going to be falling in love with the “crazy” ones. All along I was blaming my mother. Blaming myself. Just happens to be that my mother is one of those females. You will probably have to read the book to get the full effect of what I’m saying.
It’s a polarity thing. Neutral people get with neutral people. Everyone has their own mix of masculine/feminine, and we are only drawn to our equal opposite. Alpha males cannot resist alpha females, even if it drives us crazy. That is precisely what attraction is.
So there I was. Beating the shit out of myself about how fucked up I was because of my mother and all along it was nothing more than my being an alpha male. Who am I? I’m a fucking alpha male. Abused or not, that was going to be the case. I can’t get back all those wasted years living a lie.
That example is far from the only lie I’ve lived. I just came to the realization this past couple of weeks that once again I got it all wrong. Completely wrong. You see, all my life I’ve had issues with money. No matter what I’ve tried, no matter how hard I’ve tried: I always fail to keep a job. I was chalking this up to narcissism. Chalking it up to my abuse. Doing the same thing I did as a child, believing everyone else, and stuffing my true self deep down.
Try to understand something about a narcissist. What this means is that all of one's energy is going into self protection. If you ever find yourself in the presence of a narcissist, it’s as simple as this; all their energy is protecting their true self, who is buried beneath it all. That person only seems selfish because they’re stuck. That person desperately needs love. Be aware, that person doesn’t even know they have a choice to be otherwise. The permanent state of hypervigilance requires all of one's energy. There’s no energy left over for anyone else. No energy for anything else. Nothing but self protection.
So any job I’ve ever had, whenever more than I could bear was placed on my shoulders, job is over. We all know in this culture that if you go to any kind of typical job whatsoever, one is being used. One is making the guy at the top more money than one is making for their self. Surely it makes sense, looking through the lens of narcissism, that I can’t afford that.
This story sounds good doesn’t it? Makes perfect sense doesn’t it? Well, it’s not true. It just sounded really good at the time. This is a story given to me by others. It’s really easy for people to pick on traumatized individuals. It’s easy to say, the reason they don’t fit in is because they were abused. The problem is, no one was born to fit into this culture.
Here it gets deep. I explained it to a friend recently like this. No one has parents who legitimately looked into their child’s true self, and then raised them accordingly. Everyone of us has been told from birth certain things about how we are supposed to be. The simplest example of this would be; boys are this way, and girls are this way: conform accordingly. This means, anyone raised “normal” or typical, has really just been indoctrinated at birth. Technically speaking they are split too.
One of my favorite thinkers worded it this way, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Jiddu Krishnamurti said this. We can all look at this culture and tell it’s whack. So why conform? Well, as children we don’t have a choice. As children we are unable to question. We simply absorb. So it stands, that here in America, every child is adjusted to a sick culture.
Being that we are the result of millions of years of evolution, and this culture has not taken that into account regarding raising and educating children; everyone has been split off from their true self. This means you. Even if you were never beat, never harmed, never neglected, even if a harsh word was never spoken your way; the culture got you.
For the person who suffered complex trauma, like me, it is a double whammy. Not only did the culture break my psyche, but then I had my psyche broken from the break. Instead of just tearign a piece of paper in half, my piece of paper got shredded. So the question of Who am I? has become profound.
Want to know something I’ve noticed in life? Anyone who I’ve ever met that was raised “appropriately” is asleep at the wheel. They never even grasp in the slightest way that their piece of paper has been torn into two pieces. They are half a person. Mystics consider these people dead already. It’s only the abused people who wake up to the bullshit of the culture. Think about that when it comes to the word indoctrination when I use it, and the techniques prescribed on how to raise children.
Can you see how difficult this task has become? Even raised appropriately, asking the question Who am I? Is going to be a serious challenge. One has to find that other piece of paper.
Back to the grip. Turns out my failures had nothing to do with narcissism. Turns out I am a truth seeker. Turns out a legit truth seeker cannot sustain energy when what is being done is not true. If it isn’t in line with my truth it is untenable. I’ve always known I was a truth seeker, but I never knew how that plays out in a person's life. I’ve never actually known another truth seeker.
A truth seeker cannot sustain living a lie. In other words, once it has been pointed out to me that I am living a lie, I change immediately. It is instant.
I smoked weed every day for over ten years. Someone pointed out to me that I was holding my wife back by doing this. I quit on the spot. If I say I love my wife, I cannot hold her back. It was an instant change. I cannot live a lie. I simply cannot do it.
So….If I take a job, and I’m being told one thing, and it turns out to be another: Done on the spot. Doesn’t matter who it is, or how much it means to them that I stay, or even if I will be homeless. I will literally be homeless before I will live a lie just to make money. Matter of fact this has happened to me many times.
Surely you can see all the external judgements this causes in this greedy culture. In this sexist greedy culture if as a male, one cannot provide, one can’t “man up” and go to work no matter what: one is a failure. There is a tremendous cultural pressure on a male to perform. As a truth seeker though, I cannot live a lie, and obviously it is a lie that a male must perform. Who made that rule? The same people who do not take into consideration of what it really is to be a human being. Think about this. Who decided this?
Using me as a guide, consider how much I’ve beat myself up saying something is wrong with me. That I’m fucked up. That I’m flawed because I can’t do what “everyone” else is doing. All my life I was believing others, instead of listening that small voice.
How much are you doing that? Simply because you don’t fit into that mold that culture stamps on everyone.
Hope you wake up soon. We need more people who know who they really are, that will be the only way the shit show stops.
