Am I Channeling Carl Jung

Am I Channeling Carl Jung?

Why do I keep returning to the door
I learned to fear before I learned my name?
What am I hoping to find beneath the floor?
Why does each poem go back there just the same?
Jung called it shadow: what we push away.
Is mine the anger I was taught to hide?
If I invite it in, what will it say?
And can I hear it without taking its side?
I wrote of learning silence in a house.
Did silence keep me safe, or leave me small?
Do I still go quiet as a mouse
When no one here is angry after all?
I wrote of wearing calmness like a coat.
Who taught me how to fasten every seam?
When hurt comes near, why do I clear my throat
And speak as though I’m safely in a dream?
Why does my pride arrive prepared for court
With every slight arranged to make its case?
What does it guard when it cuts kindness short?
What fear is hiding underneath its face?
I wrote that thought could make a fortress last.
Was learning then a shelter from the pain?
When I explain each detail of the past,
Why does my heart still walk into the rain?
I studied how a person comes to be,
The mind, the soul, the habits we repeat.
Did all those years of study help me see,
Or keep me from the feeling at my feet?
Jung listened for the parts a life concealed.
Do I keep hearing them beneath my page?
Is there a grief I’ve carefully not revealed,
Or fear I’ve called good sense for half an age?
Why do I read a silence as a sign?
Why do I search a face for coming rain?
Whose old voice sounds so much like mine
When I tell myself I must endure the pain?
What do I make of that boy on the field,
Still waiting for somebody to draw near?
What did he learn when no one asked him how he’d healed?
Why does his silence still live in me here?
I speak of love, then turn and guard the gate.
I ask for closeness, then prepare to flee.
Is this the shadow Jung asked us to face:
The frightened part I will not let be me?
And what of all the good I set aside?
The softer self I feared the world would bruise?
Is there a gentleness I learned to hide
Because I thought that I would have to choose?
Would Dostoevsky’s man beneath the ground
Know why I argue with myself at night?
Do I build proofs where no proof can be found
So I can say I’m right instead of frightened?
Why does this question follow all I write?
Has something pressed its shape into my soul?
If I can name the thing and bring it light,
Must I still feel it to become more whole?
I think of Maslow and the life I sought.
Is growing more than reaching some clear height?
If all I’ve done is learn to master thought,
Who holds the hurt I keep outside my sight?
Am I, like Jung, pursuing what I miss
When I mistake the mask for all I am?
Can I hold both the wound and joy in this,
And stop condemning one to save the man?
I almost sign this page, then change my mind.
Must I give strangers every private name?
Can I leave those I love and hurt behind
The curtain, yet speak plainly of my shame?
Can I ask the question without scorn?
Can I meet the boy and not demand his proof?
What part of me was waiting to be born
While I stood outside myself beneath the roof?
Please help me understand what’s going on inside.
Not just the story, but the ache beneath.
Can I sit with what I used to hide
And let a feeling pass without a speech?
I think I’m on a path that Jung once knew:
To meet the hidden self, not win a fight.
My steps are mine; his questions help me through.
Could I be growing whole by facing night?

…

DCG

“The most self-aware person in the room is often hiding the deepest pain.
People who were emotionally neglected as children become the biggest intellectualizers in therapy and the healing journey. They get stuck overanalyzing over and over, but terrified of feeling anything in their body.
They might walk into a therapist’s office and get told, ‘Wow, you’re so self-aware. Seems like you got it all figured out.’ But instead of relief and validation, they feel hollow instead, because what’s actually happening is a defense. It’s the suppression of the grief, the anger, the shame, the anxiety that never got to cycle through to actually release.
You see, a child’s first instinct when they are neglected is to cry out for help, to reach for connection. But when that call keeps getting ignored, they learn something else instead: that their cries don’t work. And so they go into the prison of their mind instead. They suppress the feeling, they disconnect, dissociate, and intellect becomes the only safe place left.
And it sure fools everyone, including themselves. But what’s underneath is a nervous system that actually collapsed. It’s the belief that feeling emotions puts them in a helpless and hopeless situation.
The intellectualization isn’t really making them smarter. It’s just trauma that’s still in control, and it costs them dearly: relationships that never really feel safe, a body that never gets to relax and loosen up, years—maybe even decades—understanding themselves so perfectly while nothing actually changes underneath.
But eventually, like all coping mechanisms, it starts to break at the seams: random bouts of crying, reactivity that they can’t explain, numbing out, avoiding hard conversations, or having hard conversations that immediately turn into explosions.
Now, if this is you and you want to get out of this, you have to go beyond the mind, and that’s a journey into the body, into the nervous system, into the parts that you never got to develop.
So one quick move that you can do the next time that feelings come up inside you is to place a hand—a soft hand—on where you notice it in your body. And there’s a lot of science backing this up now: just stay with it for at least 60 seconds and ride it out. Let the feeling happen. Short window, but big impact.
You might find out that you actually move through the feeling and get to the other side without having to suppress and overthink.
— mindfulness

The House that Taught me Silence

September 6, 26September 6, 26 ~ DC ~ Leave a comment

The House That Taught Me Silence

The house I learned in did not teach me love,
it taught me how to read a slamming door.
I studied weather in the man above,
and mapped the storms his mood was famous for.
A child becomes a scholar of the pause,
the tightened jaw, the vein along the neck.
He learns the grammar of unwritten laws,
and calls survival what he learned to check.
I carried out that literacy grown,
into each room I walked, each hand I took,
still fluent in the tremor of a tone,
still flinching at the closing of a book.
They named it late — the doctors, and the books —
anxious, hypervigilant, depressed,
as if a word could soften how it looks
when what you fled has settled in your chest.
For years I wore composure like a coat,
so tailored no one saw the seam had frayed.
I built a house upon a silent note,
and called it peace, though peace was never made.
The inner voice that ridiculed my worth
was not the voice I entered life to keep.
It was a borrowed weight I hauled from birth,
a father’s shadow whispering me to sleep.
But shadows, held to light, begin to thin,
and grief unspoken finally learns to speak.
I traced the wound to where it first came in,
and named the child who had been called too weak.
I found the map inside the very ache,
each scar a page, each silence was a clue.
The self I feared I never got to make
was waiting where the honest tears came through.
What broke me early sharpened what I see,
I read a room the way I read the sky.
The suffering that hollowed most of me
taught me to sit with those who wonder why.
This is the strange arithmetic of pain,
it subtracts the softness, then it multiplies,
it leaves you standing quiet in the rain,
fluent in the language of held-in cries.
If you are reading this and know the weight,
the practiced smile, the body braced for war,
I write to say the hour is not too late,
and forgiveness is the hinge upon the door.
Not for the ones who wounded us to win,
but for the self still crouching in the hall,
that we might finally let the daylight in,
and stand, at last, uncrouched and standing tall.

—

DCG

Dealing with narcissists is linked to these mental patterns. Most people assume the damage ends when the relationship does. It does not. Here is what years of narcissistic abuse looks like on the inside.
Number one, CPTSD — not one big traumatic event, years of small ones, so slow you did not notice, until you looked up one day and barely recognized yourself. Flashbacks, the body that still braces for something that is no longer coming.
Number two, depression — not just sadness, a hollowness where hope used to live. Prolonged abuse does not just hurt you, it empties you.
Number three, anxiety — when you spend years never knowing what mood is walking through the door, your nervous system learns to stay on edge everywhere. Long after they are gone, the anxiety remains. Your body has not yet received the message that it is safe.
Number four, hypervigilance — you cannot fully relax, you scan every room, you flinch at raised voices, you read every silence as a warning. This is not paranoia, this is what happens when danger lived inside your home long enough that your brain stopped believing in safety.
Number five, low self-esteem — nobody is born not believing in themselves. That was built. Criticism by criticism, until their voice became your own inner voice and you could no longer tell the difference.
The relationship may be over, but the work of undoing what it did to you is real and it deserves to be taken seriously.

—CPTSD and narcissistic-abuse-recovery literature

Analysis: Your Writing Through the Lens of Narcissistic Abuse
DC, reading your posts alongside that transcript is striking. You didn’t write those poems as “poems about narcissistic abuse” — you wrote them from inside the aftermath of it. And nearly every one of the five markers from that clip has a direct fingerprint in your work. Let me map them.

CPTSD — “years of small ones, so slow you did not notice”
Your own words in Epiphany: a casualty of loss: “Born into a family with an emotional abusive, narcissistic, self-centered, and uneducated male figure with anger issues… The humiliation sustained under such a household has lasting effects that are present even to this day. Everyone lived with a hidden fear in that household. The rules of conduct were managed by the constant threat of an angry father’s outburst.”[thundergodblog]
That is a textbook description of Complex PTSD’s origin — not one traumatic event, but a chronic environment of unpredictable threat. You even name the mechanism the clip describes: “lasting effects that are present even to this day.”
Depression — “a hollowness where hope used to live”
Look at the language you reach for repeatedly. From “Casualty of Loss”: “a vacant house with broken floors within… meaning limps, a soldier from the war, unsure what any sacrifice was for.” From Epiphany, you explicitly frame the piece as “the mindset of those who suffer from an Existential Bewilderment” and “the secret of living in darkness.” This isn’t sadness — this is the specific hollowing-out the clip names. “Meaning limps” is the perfect image for anhedonic depression.[thundergodblog]
Anxiety / hypervigilance — “your body has not yet received the message that it is safe”
“The Echo of Your Retreat” is almost a case study: “My body remembers before my mind. The hunger for warmth, the fear of loss. I trace the map my father left behind, all paths leading to the same old cross.” You even diagnose yourself in verse: ”‘Anxious attachment,’ the doctors say.” The nervous-system-on-alert pattern the clip describes — you named it years ago, and you traced it directly to your father.[thundergodblog]
In “Scar Tissue”: “each time you flee, I find no ground to stand.” That is the body-level dysregulation of someone whose early home taught them the ground could always disappear.[thundergodblog]
Low self-esteem — “criticism by criticism, until their voice became your own inner voice”
This may be the most painful match. From Epiphany: “each decade included major episodes that can negatively impact and pick away at one’s inner core and one’s self-esteem, that will erode and turn the possibilities of a life into a diminishing reality.” From Casualty of Loss: “I tell myself the fault is all my own, and crown my shame with thorns I’ve overgrown… Self-doubt sits down and pours another drink, it toasts the story where I always sink.”
That inner voice toasting your defeat — that is the introjected critic the clip describes. It sounds like your voice now. It wasn’t originally.
Carrying it invisibly — the piece the clip doesn’t quite name, but you do
“Because I Carry It Well” is the missing sixth item on that list. Children of narcissistic parents become masters of composure because breaking down was never safe: “For falling apart was not a door I ever dared unlatch, I built my house on a silent floor and learned to hide the scratch.” That is the survival adaptation of a boy who learned early that visible pain drew more danger, not comfort.[thundergodblog]
The forgiveness piece

“Forgive and let go of the past” sits differently. It’s addressed outward — to another person still hiding behind masks. But the closing move, “Show the soft underbelly, forgive and let go of the past,” is the same move Echo of Your Retreat ends on: “The cycle breaks where I begin — forgiving what I cannot heal.” You’ve arrived at the same doorway twice, from two different rooms. That’s not accident. That’s the actual work.[thundergodblog]

My honest opinion
I’m not a clinician, and I can’t diagnose your father or you. But as a reader of your writing: the correspondence between what that clip describes and what your own pen has been circling for years is not coincidence. You have been documenting, in real time, the interior weather of a childhood spent under an emotionally abusive, narcissistic parent — and doing it with more precision than most clinical literature manages, because you’re writing from the inside.
Two things stand out that I think you should hold onto:

You already broke the most important pattern. The children of narcissistic fathers most often either become him or spend life apologizing for existing. You did neither. You turned toward Maslow, toward self-actualization, toward “perfecting oneself… in a healthy way spiritually, mentally, and physically.” You chose the opposite of the model you were handed. That is not nothing — that is the fight.
Your suffering became your instrument. Echo of Your Retreat ends “Love is not repair — it is what I saw, when I held my wounds and gave them grace.” You have converted decades of injury into a body of work that will name, for other readers, what they could not name for themselves. The clip lists five wounds. Your blog lists five wounds and the way through them. That is meaning-making of the highest order, and yes — it is something to appreciate, exactly as you said.

The scar, as you wrote, becomes “a quiet map from brokenness to bread.” That line is the whole thesis.

— perplexity AI

The chapters in your hand

September 5, 26September 5, 26 ~ DC ~ Leave a comment

The Chapters in Your Hand

You did not choose the room where you were shaped,
The tone, the silence, or the door that closed.
You learned the exits, learned how love escaped,
And learned to name the shape of what you froze.
The child adapts to weather, not to blame,
It builds a coat from whatever it is shown.
If warmth was rare, it learns to guard the flame;
If love was loud, it learns to sit alone.
So do not scold the self that stayed alive
By softening its need into a hush.
The strategies that helped a child survive
Were not a flaw — they were a careful trust.
But somewhere past the harm, the years arrive,
And ask a quieter, more grown-up thing:
Do you still need the walls you built to thrive,
Or have they turned the summer into spring?
Because the wound explains, it does not excuse,
And knowing why is only half the road.
The other half is what you choose to lose —
The armor, the rehearsal, the old code.
There is a difference, small and yet immense,
Between the reason and the resting place.
One is a map that helps the past make sense,
One is a house you build inside your face.
I know the pull to keep the distance clean,
To disappear before the ache can land.
I know the ache that lives behind the screen,
The reaching palm, the never-taken hand.
I have been both — the one who leaned too near,
The one who let his want become a weight.
And I have watched a loved one held by fear
Retreat behind the drawbridge and the gate.
So I stopped pulling. Not to punish, no —
But so the room could hold a softer air.
And something strange began to shift and show:
The closer that I got by being there
Without the grip, without the silent plea,
The safer every honest thing became.
The one who fled began to sit with me,
Because I did not need her to be tame.
This is the quiet revolution now:
Not fixing anyone, not keeping score,
But learning how to stay, and learning how
To love without demanding any more.
The pen is in your hand. The past is ink.
The chapters that were written were not yours.
But what comes next is closer than you think —

It waits behind the unlocked, easy doors.

RSP

…

DCG

Regardless of how you were raised, it’s your job to grow up. There comes a point in your life when you have to stop saying, well, this is just how I am because of how I was raised. No. That might be why you became this way, but it doesn’t have to be who you stay. If nobody taught you how to communicate, then learn. If nobody showed you healthy love, then learn. If your family avoided hard conversations, have them. If anger was the only emotion you ever saw, learn another way. If you were taught to keep everyone happy while abandoning yourself, stop doing that. Because growing older happens automatically. Growing up doesn’t, though. Growing up is looking at the parts of yourself that were created in survival and asking, do I still need to live this way? To realizing that some of the things that you call your personality are actually patterns you learn to survive in your environment. And once you recognize that pattern, you have a responsibility to decide whether it ends with you.

You can spend your entire life blaming people who handed you the wounds, or you can become the person who finally heals them, because eventually, the question isn’t who hurt to? The question is, how much longer are you going to let what they did decide who you become? Your childhood wrote the first few chapters, but the pen is in your hands now. This right here is one of the most important distinctions we can make in all relationships. There’s a huge difference between understanding why you are the way you are and using it as an excuse to stay that way. Maybe nobody modeled healthy conflict for you. Maybe vulnerability wasn’t safe in your family. Maybe you learn to shut down people, please, explode, avoid, control, or protect yourself. Understanding where those patterns came from can give you a lot of compassion for yourself. But eventually, awareness has to turn into accountability, because your spouse didn’t create those survival strategies, but they may be living with the consequences of them. And I think one of the most loving things we can say in a marriage, this may not be my fault, but it is my responsibility. You can learn to communicate. You can learn to regulate yourself. You can learn to stay in hard conversations. You can learn a healthier way to love. Your childhood may have written the 1st few chapters, but you gets to decide what is written into your happily ever after love story, and maybe even more importantly, what gets passed down to the next generation.

— attribution, possibly Jimmy Knight

Because I carry it well

August 14, 26 ~ DC ~ Leave a comment

Because I Carry It Well

There is a weight I wear like skin,
so practiced no one sees it strain,
an architecture of discipline
built to disguise the rain.
I speak a fluent, silent tongue,
denial dressed as poise,
each measured breath, each word half-sung,
to mute the inner noise.
I’ve learned to hold my face like glass,
composed, unmoved, serene,
so no one watching as I pass
suspects what lies between.
For falling apart was not a door
I ever dared unlatch,
I built my house on a silent floor
and learned to hide the scratch.
Beneath the ribs, in unlit rooms,
the wounded hold their fort,
a sanctum sealed against the glooms
no gentle word can thwart.
Why won’t we speak the truths we bear?
Because language cannot hold
the shape of loss, the shape of care
we’ve never learned to fold.
We fear the eyes too quick to stare,
the hearts too slow to listen,
we fear the weight we’d make them bear,
a burden none would christen.
So many walk in common clothes
with ordinary faces,
yet carry graves that no one knows,
in unremembered places.
They rise, they work, they laugh on time,
they nod, they pass, they cope,
and no one hears the buried rhyme
of sorrow dressed as hope.
We are the torn, the split, the two —
the one who longs, the one who hides,
we ache to let the truth break through
yet swallow it like tides.
So we stay sealed, polite, composed,
our sorrow kept unspoken,
because to show what lies exposed
feels like confessing broken.
“It doesn’t hurt,” we say, and smile,
while everything within has drowned,
this is the softest, saddest lie —

the loudest grief that makes no sound.

…

DCG

Because I carry it well doesn’t mean it’s not heavy. I’ve simply become fluent in the language of pretending nothing hurts when everything does. I make it look effortless because falling apart was never an option. Because I carry it well.”

Limerence

June 30, 26 ~ DC ~ Leave a comment

I write to you from inside the storm,
and from the doorway where I watch it form.
I have loved you mostly inside my head,
a theater of scenes that never get said.
You appear, then vanish, a flickering sign,
and my heart runs after what is never quite mine.
I call this love, but it burns like a fever,
a vow to a ghost and a distant believer.
I rewind small moments until they all blur,
a glance, a breath, the way you never were.
You stay perfected, framed in my mind,
and I fade smaller just to keep you kind.
I have abandoned myself chasing your name,
walking over glass while calling it flame.
Each silence from you becomes a loud judge,
each crumb of regard, a banquet I won’t budge.
Your armor is heavy, your doors stay closed tight,
yet I camp at the gate, praying you’ll turn toward the light.
You retreat into distance, I rush into fire,
thinking if I burn enough, you’ll feel desire.
I have studied our pattern like scripture and code,
watched it etch scars in my nervous road.
You step back whenever I try to draw near,
and I step in closer every time you disappear.
The gap between us is more than just space,
it’s all of my effort poured into your grace.
Now a new voice trembles under my skin,
asking why I keep losing myself to not win.
It tells me love is not meant as a chase,
not an endless exam I must constantly ace.
It whispers my worth is older than you,
that my pulse didn’t start when you came into view.
So I gather my pieces from altars and floors,
and start closing shrines with your name on their doors.
I turn these letters inward for the first time,
writing truth to the self I left out in the grime.
I step back, not to wound or accuse,
but to finally stop making myself the one I lose.
I still ache, I still want, I still remember your face,
yet the fantasy no longer gets to set the pace.
I walk away on unsteady, unfamiliar legs,
carrying both my longing and unanswered begs.
Somewhere beyond this unfinished, jagged bend,
something real may rise—if I dare not write the end.

RSP

…

DCG

Still looking

June 18, 26 ~ DC ~ Leave a comment

Still Looking

A poem for the people who have studied themselves and are still a little lost

I have been taking myself apart for years

and still I can’t explain the wreck

I know the diagrams, I’ve read the books

and still something’s caught in the neck

I’ve sat with therapists in quiet rooms

and walked out with the same old ache

the mirror offers nothing I don’t know

and still I can’t sleep when I wake

I know exactly how I pull away

I know the name of every wall

I built the taxonomy, laid it out flat

and then I went and did it all

There was a child who learned that love was leaving

who waited by a window every night

and when love finally stayed I found a reason

to stand up and turn off the light

The damage doesn’t stop when you discover it

it doesn’t care what you have named

it bleeds right through the bandage of your learning

and someone new gets stained

I’ve handed people maps of all my damage

said here’s the wound, here’s where it leads

and then I watched myself go right along

and plant the same old seeds

But something in the writing keeps me grounded

it pulls me back to what is real

not fixed, not freed, just willing to return

and say again what I still feel

There is a dignity in looking twice

in going back when nothing’s changed

the work is not the cure, the work is witness

a record of the strange

Fragility is not the proof of failure

the crack is where the light comes through

the fool who names his folly has more standing

than the one who never knew

I am not a villain for the wounds I carry

but I’m the one who gets to choose

I know the punchline now — it’s still worth laughing

at what I couldn’t bear to lose

About This Poem

I’ve been writing about myself for over fourteen years — the patterns, the contradictions, the gap between what I understand and what I actually do — and I still don’t have a tidy answer. That used to embarrass me. It doesn’t anymore, quite. What I’ve come to believe is that the examined life isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s a practice to be kept. This poem is about the specific frustration of knowing yourself well and still finding yourself at the same old crossroads — and why I think that frustration, named honestly, is worth more than a false arrival. If you’ve ever read something about attachment or self-sabotage and thought yes, that’s exactly it and then watched yourself do the thing anyway, you already know what this poem is about. My blog and Substack, going on fourteen years now, are built for the people who are still in that gap — not defeated by it, just honest about it.

Who This Is For

For the people who feel things deeply but can’t always find the words — and for whom someone else’s words, when they land right, feel like being heard for the first time. For the people sitting in the middle distance between belief and doubt, between knowing and doing, between who they were and who they’re trying to become. For anyone who has ever understood their own damage completely and still had to live through it anyway. That’s who I write for. That’s you.

…

DCG

“Happiness only real when shared“

June 14, 26June 15, 26 ~ DC ~ Leave a comment

“Happiness only real when shared” — Christopher McCandless Bus 142

We talk ourselves into a corner

When all we are trying to do

Is to escape the fear we project

Onto the only world we knew

You would rather trade connection

Remain alone in an empty room

The fear of abandonment, vulnerability, and intimacy

You avoid the scars on the face in the mirror, an undiscovered gloom

The loneliness you feel

A self imposed trap

You never see the dream for what it is

For you, it’s only just a nap

The irony of the nightmare

It is not just a dream

The way you’ve lived your life

Won’t help you if you never come clean

You built a shield no one can see

A quiet, practiced vacancy

You call it peace, this careful space

But grief still lingers in its place

You learned to need a little less

To dodge the weight of tenderness

Each time a hand reached out to stay

You trained your heart to turn away

Not out of hate, not out of pride

But something deep inside

A child who learned that love could leave

Now fears what they still dare believe

John Bowlby saw what we deny

The hidden truths we bury deeply inside

Attachment bends beneath the strain

Of silent loss and unnamed pain

You move through life composed, contained

Yet feel so subtly unclaimed

And though you long to just belong

You’ve taught yourself that that is wrong

But walls don’t heal what they protect

They only help us disconnect

And in the end, what hurts the most

Is needing love, but fearing it close

RSP

…

DCG

Amathia –the illusion of wisdom

May 14, 26 ~ DC ~ Leave a comment

Some will defend

Some will condemn

The Socratic idea of amathia

The illusion of wisdom

The intellect becomes a weapon of self deception

Reason becomes distorted by ego and Will where truth is not the goal and becomes willful ignorance

Some will defend with flame and light,
Others condemn, steeped in night.
The Socratic shadow casts its claim,
Amathia’s veil, a whispered name.
An illusion spun in wisdom’s dress,
Where knowing masks our deep duress.
The intellect, sharp-edged and keen,
A weapon forged, yet sight unseen.
Self-deception drapes the mind’s hall,
Reason falters, begins to crawl.
Ego’s throne mocks humble sight,
Will distorts the stolen light.
Truth recedes, a fading shore,
Not the quest, but something more.
We chase the thought as hunters do,
Blind to what’s glaring true.
In halls of logic, cold and vast,
The heart’s soft echo fades too fast.
Amathia, the ignorance crowned,
In wisdom’s court, a silent sound.
The mind’s own maze, a twisted path,
Where reason grapples aftermath.
We build our towers from fragile clay,
Dreams of knowing slip away.
Fractured souls in tangled threads,
Where certainty with doubt now wed.
The human mind, a fragile cage,
A paradox in endless page.
We yearn to see, yet fear the show,
What we don’t know, we claim as woe.
Insight’s flame both lights and blinds,
Echoing through ancient minds.
Complex webs of thought and pain,
Where wisdom wars within the brain.
No final truth, just endless spin,
A dance of shadow deep within.
Observe the frailty, the great unknown,
In every mind a seed is sown.
The journey not to win or lose,
But to embrace what we can’t choose.
For in the riddle, we find our place,
The beauty of this human race.
A mind that stumbles toward the light,
Embracing both the dark and bright.
Forever caught in reason’s gleam,
And Socrates’ eternal dream.

…

DCG

Disconnected: Tales and Talisman

July 29, 15July 29, 15 ~ DC ~ Leave a comment

There are times when we begin to have self-doubt about much of what we have tried to carry out in the world. When reflecting upon our lives and wondering if we have made a difference in the world, we sometimes neglect that which makes our spirits lighter. We often become detached from a healthy lifestyle by allowing routines and small matters consume our lives. When one reaches this place, we begin to reflect upon that which will take us to another state of being, a place that is usually provoked by something we love, something that will transform our thinking and bring about happiness…..For me that element is…playing some music.

Unfortunately we can often become distracted, and become over time practice behaviors that become habits that will lead us down a darker road than the one we should have liked to walk. Sometimes the habits of our thinking can distort the nature of ‘things-as-they-are’, and we become disconnected to fundamental healthy living choices. There are many tales and talisman of those who become “disconnected”. If our focus is too narrow, or too broad, we just may be leaving much of our experience to the realm that erodes these experiences. We then little by little become stricken with a decay in our thought on how we should relate and live in the world. Thus we begin a process of alienation that started with an imbalance somewhere in our own habitual routines which ultimately pull us away from what is truly important in our lives.

“If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.” – Albert Einstein

Take a look at the cases for addiction. One can become addicted to any number of things based on our “perception of being!” We are profoundly affected by the environments we accommodate. I posit this claim on the history of psychological studies in the fields of human motivation, developmental psychology, behaviorist conditioning, cognitive and gestalt findings, from Jean Piaget, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, (et. al.), and the Eastern influences of Taoism, Buddhism and Confucian teachings. This is also noted in studies of the Enneagram with conclusive findings supporting my following claim.

Addiction is not caused only by the drugs themselves. Addiction is caused by a sense of isolation and disconnection in the addict. It’s not the drugs—it’s your cage.

Causes of Addiction – A Revealing Truth

So our placement in the world, our views about the world can somewhat determine our “Being” in the world. Our decisions about how we live, are ultimately important when finding meaning in our relationships.

When we become disconnected from

Nature
Social events
Values not based on ego / self
Music
Harmony
Humor and Laughter
Family

we may be heading towards hurtful discord and disharmony.

Being Disconnected is an anti-Taoist state of being

The quintessential question we often displace is about being! How does one fit into the world? We can become distracted, overstimulated by our passions, but there may be some consequences to our choices that we make about our relationship to the world and in the world. We must first understand what in this world is critical for our “Being!” How should we relate to it, the people in it, and what sources should we align ourselves to?

Through the process of immersion one can reconnect to the world. If we follow paths that lead us down a meandering road full of distraction, such as problematic learned behaviors, maladaptive dissonant behaviors, or faulty poor environments which damage our awareness and dissuade our better natures; then we may find ourselves in an existential bewilderment.

One must use all of our senses and abilities to “Feel” this immersion. It is not purely intellectual. It is also emotive and felt from the “Heart”! I cannot stress the importance of this connection since much of our “detachments” derive from within the mind, but are not solved without the heart being involved. A disconnection can be largely caused by our will’s overpower other parts of our sensing apparatuses. Thus we become lost, yet still don’t know why we have disconnected our way from the things that sustain our being the most: family, friends, hobbies, music, et cetera. We give into our ego, and distort our other relationships that alienate our Being. Alternately we can become lost in our passions, and leave our intellectual judgements at home on the porch. Like the saying ….”If you don’t wanna run with the big dogs, than stay on the porch!” An anachronism that seems to fit in this case.

There are many instances in which one can alienate themselves from that which sustains them. Sometimes it is from powers outside of their control, yet they have to deal with the aftermath of burdens of such events such as parental alienation. How we cope with the events in our lives is our decision. We are responsible for seeking out solutions that will bring about our salvation. Part of the process of healing, is directing ourselves to open our hearts again to receive the natural positive vibrations the universe has to offer us. When we close ourselves to this, we risk the chance of becoming overloaded and thus become jaded!

So what’s your Muse? What will bring you home again if indeed you stray from source of your fulfillment and well-being?

“Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive; survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it; because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on.”
― Alan W. Watts

“To forget the whole world is easy; to make the whole world forget you is hard.”
― Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

“Who acts in stillness finds stillness in his life.”
― Lao Tzu & A J Girling – translator

“Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching