Tripping Into Your Identity - Part 1
A guide to overcoming anxiety, depression, and trauma with or without the help of psychedelics
Tripping Into Your Identity
Prologue:
Life has always been challenging, but our modern way of life has become so far removed from our ancestral history, and continues to change so rapidly, that one can hardly expect to know how to effectively navigate through it as if we were still living in the environments we evolved to thrive in. Purpose, agency, and love for oneself are exceedingly hard to come by, yet unequivocally necessary for achieving fulfillment and happiness. Unfortunately, we find ourselves faced with more obstacles to achieving these things than ever before. These are not simple times, and most of us are not living in ways which our bodies and minds have evolved to comprehend, manage, and thrive in.
We are living in a time which fosters utter helplessness and disconnection from ourselves and each other, and most of us are doing it willingly, often entirely unaware. As a result, mental illnesses of one kind or another are absolutely everywhere, manifesting in record-setting levels of depression, anxiety, trauma, fear, resentment, self-harm, and suicide. I once made a promise to myself that if I ever managed to figure out why I was so depressed, anxious, and miserable for so much of my life, as well as make significant progress in escaping these ailments, that I would have to write a book about it. What I didn’t expect was that, by the time I achieved this for myself, a majority of the population would be experiencing what I had spent most of my life trying to escape, and that it would be getting worse at an alarming rate.
This book is for anyone who struggles to understand their identity, as well as hold a consistently loving relationship with it, and to move forward with it to create lasting purpose, fulfillment, and joy in their lives. It is for those who tend to treat their friends better than themselves, and who struggle to understand why. It is for those who cannot achieve agency or purpose in their lives and, perhaps, don’t understand why this is necessary. Ultimately, this book is for anyone who has struggled to escape their mental suffering. I believe persistent feelings of helplessness, and the identity crises which result, are at the heart of the vast majority of people who suffer from depression, anxiety, and many associated mental conditions. By the end of this book, I’m confident you will understand why, as well as how to overcome them in your own, perfectly unique way.
Before we begin, I highly recommend using a journal as you read through this book and move towards your goals. This book differs from most self-help books in that step-by-step instruction is not offered in the conventional sense, and for good reason. The information contained in this book is intended to help you figure out how to find your own methods or, at the very least, your own version of other’s methods for improvement, as personalizing this process is the only truly effective and failsafe approach to self-improvement.
Journals are helpful in far too many ways to name, many of which won’t become apparent to you until you begin to use one. Writing your thoughts down is an incredibly effective method at clarifying critically important elements and experiences of your life and identity, as well as removing the confusion and helplessness that comes with constant overthinking. With some practice, journaling will prove invaluable to your ability to understand, accept, and improve yourself and your life.
I suggest making a quick note whenever you come across something in this book that resonates with, inspires, or motivates you. Write down how it made you feel, what it made you think of, how you might use it in your recovery plan, or really anything that comes to mind. If you can’t manage to write this much, then just write down the page number and come back to it at a later date. The goal is not to log everything, but to help yourself keep track of the things which are most likely to be useful to you as you pave and travel down your path of self-improvement. Remember, anything is better than nothing.
As you engage with the material and have psychedelic and/or therapeutic experiences of your own, write down the ones you feel are important, even if you don’t understand why. A quick note: Psychedelics are NOT required to use the contents of this book to improve your life - they are simply one of many valuable tools for achieving this.
Your journal will function as your own guide towards success, even if what you write feels pointless to you at the time of writing it. Your journal will also contain vitally important thoughts and feelings that will become immensely useful to you later in your journey. Trust me, you are going to want to be able to read over much of what you have experienced, as some of it will undoubtedly reveal invaluable things about your identity and your journey. If you use it regularly, your journal will become a literal instruction manual (written for you, by you) for achieving and sustaining excellent mental health. As much as we’d all like to, we can’t remember every potentially important moment in our lives on command. If it weren’t for my own journal, this book would not exist, and neither would my own success.
Please, get yourself a journal, and use it as often as you are capable. I recommend at least five minutes per day, five days per week, but more will likely serve you better. If that sounds like too much, then start at thirty seconds per day. Seriously, just write something - anything. The important part is that you attempt to get in the habit of journaling, not that you do it perfectly and for extended periods of time right off the bat. Like everything else I advocate in this book, journaling is a skill, and we all start at different levels of proficiency.
Okay, let’s get to it!
Chapter 1: Introduction
Who am I? In contemporary mental health terms, I’m a dissociative, dopamine-addicted codependent with ADHD and a long history of severe depression and anxiety - otherwise known as a millennial male in his thirties. More broadly, I’m an introspective, research and problem solving-obsessed creative with a lifelong commitment (compulsion?) to figuring out how and why things work the way they do. I’m also currently living depression free as a result of the advice and skills contained in this book!
I’m not a scientist, doctor, therapist, etc. I’m just a guy who spent almost his entire life obsessively studying mental and physical health so I could escape my own suffering. So why should you care what I have to say?
I’ll ask you another question: What does a doctor, scientist, therapist, etc., stand to lose by failing to improve the health of the people who take their advice?
What about the people taking their advice? Is it reasonable to suggest that those people stand to lose a lot more? Well, there’s your answer. Unlike those professionals, I am utterly incapable of living a meaningful, happy, and fulfilling life if I fail. It turns out that consequences produce significantly better motivation to get things right, and that is exactly what I’m focused on: Getting things right.
I care about what works; what produces the results myself and others need, and this book contains nothing except the absolute best and most effective solutions and wisdom I’ve come across in my over twenty-year journey of obsessively studying these topics.
A Brief History of my Depression and Anxiety
I suffered with depression and anxiety since the fourth grade, although I didn't fully realize and accept it until my early twenties. There were many years in which I knew something was wrong with me, but I simply didn't have the specific means, knowledge, support, or upbringing that would allow me to discover and accept exactly what it was until much later. It wasn't that I didn't have anyone to look to for help, it was that, like so many others, I didn't know that I needed help, or that whatever was wrong with me could be boiled down to something as “simple” as depression. I didn’t truly understand what depression was, I didn’t want to identify as a depressed person, and I didn’t want my family and friends to see me as a depressed person. It felt like a weakness; a vulnerability and victim status I would have to wear at all times, and that was deeply unsettling.
During this time, I unknowingly developed many disastrous habits which, to me, felt like a part of who I was and would always be – they felt authentic. The longer I struggled, the more convinced I became of this truth: I wasn’t like the other people in my life, and I was headed towards increasing levels of suffering and failure. No matter how hard I tried, I could not accomplish the things I wanted to achieve for myself, and had been told my whole life I was supposed to achieve.
I became accustomed to numbing, and addicted to addiction itself. Anything I could use to avoid feeling the torture of living would be hungrily consumed, often without care of the consequences, and sometimes even welcoming them. Oh, I’m sick? Perfect! Now I have a reason to fail, or at least not even try, I hope I get sick more often! Broken ankle? Now I won’t be hassled or looked down on for playing video games and not doing what is expected of me – I can finally rest and enjoy myself.
My world became one of not caring, because caring was excruciating, and most attempts to care resulted in total failure, and often disaster. Caring was an investment, and my investments almost always burned me. Nothing in my life was working the way it was supposed to, and I felt absolutely powerless to do anything about it. Despite this all-encompassing feeling, I knew deep down that I wasn’t supposed to feel this way all the time, and that I could, in fact, fix it, if only I knew how. Being that my primary motivation in life (and possibly the thing I am best at) has always been figuring things out, I eventually came to the conclusion that, if I could identify the problem, I could discover the solution.
So, what did I do? By the time I effectively dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen, I spent a significant chunk of the next fifteen years of my life, averaging around three hours per day, trying to figure out what was wrong with me and how I could fix it. I was not going to stop until I was happy. I tried almost everything I came across, including books, self-help programs, psychiatrists, therapists, life coaches, success modeling, meditation, supplements, exercise, nutrition, medication, etc.
Nothing even came close to working for me for more than a short period of time, but I refused to give up, as giving up would not only mean I failed to solve the puzzle of my suffering, but that I would willingly resign to a life of nothingness, or even no life at all. By the time I was twenty-three I was convinced I knew what was wrong with me (or at least where my issues were manifesting from), and I couldn’t ignore it or pretend it didn’t exist any longer. I came to accept that it was severe depression and anxiety, but I felt no closer to being able to actually do anything about it, despite how much I had learned on my way to this discovery.
It wasn’t that I saw no success, it was that the success was always fleeting, and seemed to require an unbelievable and unsustainable amount of effort in order to make any progress with. Since each success was followed closely by failure, it became increasingly difficult to stay hopeful and motivated in my journey. I reached a point in which even the prospect of a new method for overcoming my suffering was met with immediate criticism by myself, and a refusal to share it with others, as I was certain they would be thinking, “Oh look, Bryan figured out another new way to fail.”
While I had come to accept that I was severely depressed, I felt as if the solutions to overcoming the depression practically required that I not be depressed in the first place. How the hell was I supposed to keep a daily journal, exercise regularly, take my often-debilitating medications, eat only healthy food, practice mindfulness constantly, sustain a healthy social life, etc., all while being expected to live an adult life and assume the necessary responsibilities inherent in living said life? Aren’t those the kinds of things I never have the energy or motivation to do because I’m depressed? If I could do them, I wouldn’t need to do them…
Achieving anything close to the life I desired for myself felt infinitely out of my reach. It felt like, in order to heal myself, I needed to not only live life as if I wasn’t depressed, but that I needed to engage in constant treatment of the depression that made living life feel impossible. It felt like I needed to dedicate several hours of depression treatment to my every-day life, and still have energy to do all the things a person without depression has to do. I felt incapable of “working hard” on command, but that the only solution to my problem was to work harder than everyone else, in every endeavor, all the time.
Chapter 2: The Space Between Steps
Learning to Live as Yourself
Although it came much later than I would have wished, I eventually came to understand something critically important during my journey through depression: No one can teach you how to live as yourself. I am absolutely convinced that this a crucial missing piece to the puzzle of self-improvement. All of the books, videos, articles, and advice I have consumed over the years (thousands upon thousands of hours-worth) failed to emphasize one very important thing: What worked for one person will never work for another person in exactly the same way. That seems like such an obvious fact considering the countless unique variables of our identities and experiences, but the full meaning and implications of it simply weren’t evident to me until I was much older, and years into my psychedelic therapy venture.
This isn’t to say the information or advice I gathered from examples of others was useless – far from it. What this means is that you cannot truly and completely find yourself with someone else’s eyes. Each of us has our own, perfectly unique operating system that, at some point, responds only to itself. Adopting the tools, attitudes, treatments, and practices of others may ultimately result in progress, but that progress is always a result of the way in which we adapt these tools for use with ourselves. Achieving the goals will result in progress, but the secret lies in figuring out how your body and mind can actually move toward these goals.
Let’s use a simple example, as this truth is applicable across all forms of self-improvement and care. If someone were to ask me how to become physically fit, I would advise regular physical activity along with proper nutrition. Okay… what the hell does that mean? Despite both of these things being essential to achieving optimal physical fitness, no two people will ever walk down exactly the same path to arrive there. They may engage in nearly identical activities to reach their goals, but the things which motivate and sustain consistent and effective engagement in these activities are unique to each person.
For me, exercise looks like playing sports with friends, mountain biking, taking walks, finding excuses to move around slightly more than necessary, and doing some strength training a couple times per week for forty-five minutes or so, but it didn’t always look like this. Arriving at this “regular exercise” routine was a process entirely unique to me, and if I had followed someone else’s routine (which I have more times than I can count) my body and mind would have eventually rejected it. So, while “regular exercise” was an indisputable requirement to achieving my goal, the exact path to arriving there was unique to me, and is guaranteed to fail for literally every other person who has ever lived.
This may sound like an exaggeration to some, but I mean it in the most absolute and literal sense. Even if you manage to find two or more people who share the exact same routine, the things that lead to, sustain, and follow that routine will never line up perfectly. At some point, a critically important component to engaging with and sustaining the routine will differ from person to person, and that component will always reflect the unique attributes and qualities of an individual’s life and identity.
One of the primary reasons this understanding of how to best live as one’s self is lost on so many is because we are comparative, pattern-seeking, and success modeling creatures by default. We see that which others have and we do not, and we try to figure out what they did to arrive there (or we resent them, exhibit envy, or make excuses, which I’ll cover more later). There’s nothing inherently wrong with success modeling of this type and, in fact, I use it myself, constantly. We can learn much from the goals and strategies of others and gain inspiration for ourselves by observing them, but there will come a point in which we must say to ourselves, “Okay, I can see the destination and some of the steps along the way, now it’s time to figure out how the wholly unique person I am can navigate myself there”.
The Space Between the Steps
We can infinitely zoom in on the steps which are most likely necessary in accomplishing anything, all the way to their most basic and fundamental components, but the space between the steps can never be perfectly replicated between individuals, and it is the space between the steps that must be discovered if we are to keep moving forward and make the most of our lives. The space between steps amounts to the inherent differences in all of us, in the pursuit of something we want, and those differences manifest from the perfectly unique peculiarities and experiences of your person; your identity.
No one else can perfectly replicate every single one of your traits, thoughts, and experiences (the sum of what makes you the unique person you are), and so no one else’s space between the steps can perfectly match your own. Only we can discover what that space looks like for us. The ultimate question is not, “How is that done?”, it is, “How can I do that?”. The mastery of the space between steps (a critical component to the mastery of your identity) must necessarily come from within, and can never be taught, borrowed, emulated, replicated, substituted, or arrived at without practice and development. This is a terrifying prospect to many people, often without them being explicitly aware of it, but it is critically important to the process of moving forward, knowing and loving yourself, healing, and eventually succeeding.
Throughout the course of this book, I will occasionally refer to attempted utilization of the space between steps as “Informed Personalization”. Informed Personalization is simply the process of educating yourself and improving your skills in pursuit of achieving a goal, then using what you have learned, along with your unique peculiarities, to personalize your process of taking the steps to achieve that goal as easily and quickly as possible. This process is intended to help you learn the invaluable skill of using your identity to your advantage in the pursuit of whatever it is you want.
This is what the process looks like summarized:
Set a long-term self-improvement goal (months to years), then a short-term one (weeks to months) that can carry you toward the long-term
Whether on your own, or with the help of someone knowledgeable in achieving the goal you’re aiming for, determine which steps you’re going to try taking to get there (the plan)
Start where you can NOW, and personalize the process to make it as easy, enjoyable, and sustainable as possible FOR YOU (your space between steps). Failure is inevitable, which means we will need to teach ourselves to respond to it as a positive and necessary part of the process (moving forward), instead of negative and undesirable.
Some ideas on how to personalize the process:
What are you good and bad at? Leverage your skills to help improve the ones that might need work.
What do you hate, and what do you enjoy? Again, leverage what you enjoy. If there’s something you hate, but need to do, it can help to use what you enjoy to develop your tolerance of what you don’t.
What are your idiosyncrasies? Use your unique peculiarities to your advantage by structuring your plan to include their use. If you’re detail-oriented, pick or create a plan that allows that trait to shine.
Be stubborn, but leave some room for experimentation. Don’t allow someone else to ultimately determine what can and cannot work for you. It is often better to go your own route, fail, then adjust where necessary, instead of following someone else’s path from the beginning, and being lost from the start.
What needs to be included in your plan for it to be sustainable? Sustainability is the key to success in any long-term self-improvement endeavor. We need to challenge ourselves, but not so much that we sabotage our chance at success, or revert back to suffering.
What are some of your past successes, and what is it about the way you approached them that helped you to succeed? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Self-educate (inform) yourself as you move forward and make progress
Use what you’re learning to make adjustments where they are needed, whether to the space between your steps, or the steps themselves. Keep what works, set aside what doesn’t (maybe try it again later). As you improve, you’ll will undoubtedly find that you have more and more viable options to choose from!
We will also be using highly effective habit-breaking and habit-development techniques to help us accomplish these steps, but we’ll cover that a bit later!
Whether they realize it or not, every single person who has ever succeeded in any endeavor has gone through this process to some degree. It is a natural feature of the human condition, as no two people are precisely the same and, regardless of what we are doing, some part of ourselves must be included. Those who succeed are simply effectively including themselves in the process, while those who fail tend to leave important parts of themselves behind.
As I mentioned, discovering and mastering your space between steps simply cannot be replicated or taught, period. It may share plenty of similarities with others who have found success, but the similarities are the easy part. The difficulty in this process comes when we find ourselves following the path we expect to work (usually because we believe it worked for others) only to find ourselves running headfirst into an inevitable wall. The wall can quite literally be anything, as its existence is solely the result of the indefinable discrepancy between your expectations of success, and the reality of your unique self. If you aren’t running into walls, then you’re not moving forward.
Just like with your space, your walls are unique to you as well. This is why truth and self-honesty are such critically important components to self-improvement, but we’ll get to that shortly.
The wall we will all run into is also a necessary part of the process because it forces us to stop and ask ourselves, “What got in the way, and how do I move past it?”. No one falls into the mastery, or even a basic understanding of their identity without encountering difficult obstacles, and to imagine this is possible is to deny your identity the necessary opportunity to inform you of how to understand, develop, accept, and live it. I believe the human condition is automatically on an upward trajectory from the moment of birth. It is our job to identify when something gets in its way, and to develop the skill of overcoming obstacles as they inevitably arise. No one is born with a mind which inherently seeks, yearns for, and engages in its own destruction.
Once we have identified what gets in the way, we gain the ability to zoom in a little further and operate within more of our own unique space. This space is often terrifying to contend with, as it is largely unknown and unfamiliar, but rarely even a fraction as difficult as we convince ourselves it will be. Identifying and traversing the space is a skill which cannot be taught. That skill is called living as yourself, and if you want to get good at it, you have to practice it in your own unique way.
This is the unfortunate pitfall of self-help advice in general. The skill you must necessarily develop is living as yourself, but the advice we often find has the unfortunate effect of encouraging us to develop the skills of living as someone else; someone who appears to have what we want. We imagine that adopting the qualities and actions of the identities of others, or forcing our identities into a desirable path designed by someone other than ourselves, will somehow result in healthy authenticity and success. I can promise you that this cannot and will never work. Your authenticity and identity necessarily demand that you practice the skill of knowing, developing, and accepting them on your own, and they will not tolerate the paths of others, no matter how much you desire them to, or how good it can temporarily feel to imagine this path will lead you to happiness. I’ll cover this in much greater detail later but, for now, let’s focus on discovering our own paths.
Okay, so how do we discover our own paths? How do we follow them? What direction should we be looking in? Where do we start? At this point you might be thinking, “Why should I listen to anything this guy says after he just ranted about how no one can teach you how to do these things?” Simple, I’m not here to teach you how to do them, I’m here to try and help you teach yourself. Psychedelics, as it turns out, can make this process much easier, and I’ll thoroughly explain why throughout the course of this book.
Despite the fact this book is intended to teach you how to use psychedelics to help you achieve the life you want for yourself, psychedelics are far from all that is necessary in achieving said life. Once again, it’s important to understand that psychedelics are not at all required to achieve the things discussed in this book – they are simply valuable tools to help us get there, when used properly.
There are many ways in which psychedelics can help us, perhaps most notably because they force us to confront and communicate with our identities, in a sense. It is important to understand though, that psychedelics cannot allow us to circumvent certain fundamental components of successfully navigating life; components which I argue are necessary for all paths towards success. Without a solid understanding of and practice with using these fundamentals to guide us, the chances of achieving our goals is drastically diminished, if not outright eliminated.
So, while we will spend plenty of time learning about and engaging with psychedelics later on in this book, I think it is important to first cover all the bases. To begin, let’s define exactly what depression, trauma, and anxiety are, how they get in the way, what causes them, what can make them worse, and how to overcome them.
Chapter 3: The Fundamentals and Results of Mental Suffering
The Thinking and Feeling Selves, and the Identity Crisis of Depression and Anxiety
In my countless hours of research, I’ve yet to come across a simple definition that can apply to every person suffering from chronic depression and anxiety. Although it took me a very long time, I managed to land on one that has yet to fail in accurately identifying the source of all depression, trauma, and anxiety. That source is helplessness, and this holds true for all animals capable of experiencing depression, trauma, and anxiety.
Before elaborating on this conclusion, how I came to it, why I am so confident it’s correct, and what the implications of it are, I believe it will be useful to briefly define a couple terms, as well as cover some important facts about the functions of, and relationship between the “thinking” and “feeling” components of the human experience. These are important to understand for reasons which will become apparent throughout the course of this book.
Helplessness:
Inability to take action against experiences – the feeling of having no, or limited control.
Agency:
The opposite of helplessness; the ability to take action and exercise some level of control over your experiences and life, or to accept that which you cannot control.
Although depression, trauma, and anxiety in humans ultimately come from the same source (helplessness), we are unique in how we experience them, as well as how they impact us.
We have something no other animal has: A well-developed ability to notice, conceptualize, evaluate, critique, and communicate with ourselves at a high level. In other words, we have a “Thinking Self” which exists in a constant relationship with our “Feeling Self”. This means that, unlike other animals, we are capable of observing our own suffering, contemplating it, coming to conclusions about it, and even learning to resent ourselves and others for it.
If you’ve ever asked yourself something like, “Why do I keep doing this?”, then you’re already intimately aware of what it’s like to use your thinking self to question, consider, and observe your feeling self. There are many important implications of this fact, one of which being that, If our depression persists for long enough, we are guaranteed to develop an identity disorder as a result. We’ll come back to this in a moment.
The “Thinking” and “Feeling” Selves
Generally speaking, the “feeling self” is concerned with things like your nervous system, the right side of the brain, the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the gut. The feeling self is exactly what it sounds like (what you feel), but there’s a bit more to it than that.
Instinct, desire, emotions and, of course, what you physically feel, are all experiences of the feeling self. In many ways, your feeling self is the core of your identity; it is the part of you that largely operates in the world without your specific and purposeful instruction. It’s the part of you that dominated the experiences of your life in infancy; the part of you that “reacts” to experiences before your conscious mind has time to catch up. If someone pops out from behind a corner and startles you, it is your feeling self generating the reaction. Similarly, the automated feeling of apprehension you develop while approaching a corner, if you’ve been startled one too many times, is also part of your feeling self!
The thinking self, on the other hand, is more concerned with the left side of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, and other parts of the cerebrum. The thinking self is what you’re currently using to read this book, to consider what’s in it, to decide what you’re going to do when you’ve finished, etc. It also happens to be the part of you that separates you from a purely instinctual animal.
Of course, these are gross oversimplifications that leave out a large number of contributing systems and incredibly complex interactions, but they can help to distinguish between our more automated, instinctual, and emotional functions versus our purposeful, logical, and contemplative ones.
It should be noted that many of these systems are far from perfectly understood, and there are certainly disagreements regarding their functions and relationships with one another. Despite the inevitable disagreements, many of humanity’s findings on these systems corroborate strongly across multiple disciplines which seek to understand the experience and function of human life, and there are an incalculable number of ways to learn about and understand them. I have chosen to simplify them into the thinking and feeling selves because I believe these monikers are satisfactory for understanding their functions and relationships with each other as they pertain to the subject matter discussed in this book, and the experiences of human life tend to comfortably fall within one or both of these generalized “selves”.
Okay, so what does this have to do with depression, anxiety, and trauma?
Let’s start with anxiety, as it is undoubtedly the most commonly shared experience of the three.
Anxiety:
Cause: Momentary feelings of helplessness in the feeling self.
Anxiety is a type of creativity, and creativity is a process the brain engages in to achieve agency (the opposite of, and “antidote” to helplessness) over some element of our existence in the world. Whether it’s problem-solving, innovation, pursuing curiosity, brainstorming, creating art, etc. Creativity is simply an attempt to understand something about the world or ourselves, and exercise our agency over it; it is one of the ways we contribute to, develop our relationship with, express our interpretations of, and come to understand reality.
Creativity is triggered when we instinctually or purposefully see a potential benefit of exercising it. Anxiety is negative creativity exercised in a misguided attempt to achieve agency over difficult past or future experiences of helplessness. We are either worried about something that has already happened, or something that might happen, and we attempt to prepare ourselves for the worst possible implications of these experiences. We are attempting to experience a sense of control (agency) over the things which have caused, or may cause us pain, and we do this by using our negative creativity to simulate potential experiences. We convince ourselves that if we can imagine the pain, then we’ll be ready for it when it comes. Unfortunately, we have no ability to achieve present agency (short of acceptance) over past or future experiences and so, by attempting to achieve it, we experience helplessness, instead.
Of course, it’s not necessarily true that you can’t do anything about whatever it is you feel helpless toward, but your body isn’t always going to factor this truth in before it starts freaking out and causing you to feel powerless and anxious. In many cases, the damage is done long before we are able to consider whether or not it was necessary.
Trauma:
Cause: Experience of severe helplessness which becomes deeply, and improperly integrated into the feeling self.
Trauma is a moment, or series of moments in which we experience a perception of severe and overwhelming helplessness. When the body experiences particularly debilitating helplessness, it attempts to automatically protect us by integrating what it perceives as exceptionally threatening elements of the experience into the feeling self (nervous system, emotional brain, etc.), so as to automatically protect us from similar threats in the future. If the body is helpless to exercise agency against the threat itself, then it will, instead, exercise agency against your experience of the threat.
Trauma is a messy, incomplete, and maladaptive integration of exceedingly painful experiences into the self. This “messiness” occurs as a result of the desperation of the mind and body to “help” us survive what is otherwise felt as a profoundly helpless, and potentially life-threatening experience.
Depression:
Cause: Persistent and repeated (chronic) helplessness integrated into the feeling self.
Depression is a function of your perceived inability to effectuate your needs and desires in day-to-day life. It is a survival adaptation which occurs when persistent and/or severe helplessness become integrated into the feeling self, and corrupt large chunks of our identity and ability to exercise agency in every-day life.
Unlike trauma and anxiety, depression is a sustained, often ever-present experience of helplessness. The severity of depression depends on the extent to which our identity and lives have been corrupted by the helplessness, and how severe and often that helplessness is felt.
If your body and mind feel severely and/or persistently helpless in their ability to produce and acquire your needs and desires; the things you want from your life, then they will adapt to a low-energy state of metabolic dysfunction and defeat. We are, after all, adaptation machines. Depression, like trauma, is a maladaptive, physiological survival response, and a body which has adapted to helplessness has no reason to operate at full capacity. The body makes every attempt to avoid waste and, when energy against an experience repeatedly proves wasteful, the body will simply stop, or reduce its ability to provide it.
Despite what many believe, depression is a very real psychological AND physiological condition. Don’t believe me? For the science-literate, here’s a woefully incomplete list of physiological changes which have been conclusively demonstrated to occur in people suffering from severe depression:
Decreased number of mitochondria
Decreased mitochondrial health
Reduction in ATP signaling, production, and efficiency
Severely reduced brain activity/energy
Dorsal Vagal Complex dysregulation (permanent fight, flight, or freeze state)
Severe endocrine disruption (too many examples to list)
Physical damage to the nervous system, and cooperating systems
Drastic changes in brain wave frequency
The adaptation to a state of depression is often accompanied by varying degrees of numbness (dorsal vagal freeze and/or metabolic dysfunction), as the body becomes incapable of tolerating further suffering, particularly the severity of suffering experienced while the nervous system is functioning normally (without having been corrupted by depression). Essentially, the nervous system decides that the only way to survive is to shut down its ability to feel and exist in any normal capacity.
When an animal feels helpless against its suffering for long enough, its nervous system becomes trained to accept defeat. This is a survival mechanism in which the nervous system has come to understand that nothing it does appears to have any impact on reducing the suffering experienced, and so, depending on the severity of the suffering, it shuts down or changes certain parts of itself. Instead of operating normally and “living” alongside the animal, it enters a low-energy state of survival.
Although depression, trauma, and anxiety in humans ultimately come from the same source (helplessness), we are unique in how we experience them, as well as how they impact us. If our depression persists for long enough, we are guaranteed to eventually develop an identity disorder, as a result.
Depression, in humans, produces a schism within the self; a fear of embracing and living alongside the fundamental components of our identities which we have come to resent and blame for our suffering. Depression is, in essence, a helplessness-induced, metabolically downregulated identity disorder. A chronically depressed person’s relationship with themselves is an abusive and/or neglectful one, and this abuse can go entirely unnoticed or be outright ignored by the person experiencing depression, just as it can in any other abusive relationship.
This identity disorder occurs because, once we have experienced and considered our helplessness for long enough, our thinking and feeling selves disconnect from and enter into an abusive relationship with each other. While the specific catalysts for this disconnect can vary from person to person, the eventual result is the same. If we are given enough time to observe, consider, and come to conclusions about our suffering and helplessness, we begin to resent, and eventually enter into a war with ourselves; with the identity we have come to blame for our suffering.
How Did I Come to This Conclusion, and Why am I Confident it’s Correct?
This conclusion is the result of tens of thousands of hours of research, observation, discussion, etc. The truth is, I couldn’t begin to detail the road leading up to it if I tried. In many ways, it was simply a matter of trial and error; of endless digging through studies, stories, articles, experiences, discussions, etc., until I finally landed on something that “fit”.
With that said, there were at least a few key moments which lead to the discovery of this conclusion.
During my research, I noticed that every single depressed person I had ever spoken with, listened to, read about, or observed, had at least a few very important things in common, myself included.
All of them felt at odds with themselves (resentful, afraid, abusive, neglectful of their feeling selves; elements of their identities), and engaged in self-destructive behaviors
All of them felt helpless in their ability to achieve certain things they wanted in life
All of them frequently operated in low-energy states of lethargy, apathy, numbness, etc.
Of course, this list isn’t comprehensive, but it was enough to set me on the right track.
Ultimately though, it was the patterns shared by both the catalysts which frequently resulted in depression, as well as the treatments which relieved people from it, that lead to my conclusion.
Why are some things able to cause depression so reliably?
Why do some people seem unaffected by these things?
Why does EVERY theory for the cause of depression seem to have some level of truth behind it?
Why do certain treatments work for some people, and not for other people?
Why do some treatments have a higher success rate than others?
Why has depression increased so much in recent years?
Why is depression practically unheard of in small, and simple communities?
Why is depression so high in certain groups of people?
If my conclusion couldn’t neatly account for every single one of these questions (and countless others), patterns, observations, etc., then it was of no use to me. Luckily, the theory of helplessness manages to perfectly account for ALL of these things.
Why are some things able to cause depression so reliably; things like trauma, poor nutrition, poor physical health, grief, abusive relationships, failure, etc.?
Because the more likely an experience or condition is to produce feelings of helplessness, the more people it will impact. Certain life experiences will induce helplessness in nearly every person who experiences them (death of a loved one, life-threatening experience, severe physical injuries, etc.), while others may only affect specific kinds of people.
Why do some people seem unaffected by these things?
Because helplessness is often a relative experience. What may be considered a traumatic experience for one person, can be experienced as benign, by another. Remember, it’s your body’s PERCEPTION of helplessness that matters.
Why does EVERY theory for the cause of depression seem to have some validity behind it?
Because ALL of the theories are correct. That is, any proposed cause of depression which is capable of inducing helplessness to at least one person, can rightfully be considered a cause of depression. Metabolic health, addiction, trauma, chemical imbalances, factors from childhood, etc. They ALL fit, and they can all produce helplessness.
Why do certain treatments work for some people, and not for others?
Because although agency is ALWAYS the antidote to helplessness, relief from depression is ultimately unique for each person. That is, a person’s ability to leave their depression behind depends on whether or not their chosen treatment plan appeals to their unique helplessness and agency. If a course of treatment cannot correct a person’s unique experience of helplessness by replacing it with a unique experience of agency, then the treatment will fail to work.
Why do some treatments have a higher success rate than others?
Just like how certain things are more likely to result in depression for most people, the same is true regarding treatments. The more likely a treatment plan is to result in the development of agency precisely where it is uniquely needed, the more likely that treatment will prove successful. As it turns out, certain treatments are better at producing this outcome, for a larger number of people, than others. Increasing activity levels and improving nutrition are excellent examples of this.
Why has depression increased so much in recent years?
Because we are living in a time which produces and exacerbates record levels of helplessness. Modernity has become a poison that few are properly inoculated against. Poor nutrition, identity confusion, neglect, resentment, manipulation, and abuse, lack of exercise, lack of purpose, excess screen time and social media, dopamine/adrenal dysregulation, addictions everywhere(gaming, porn, drugs, alcohol, etc.), obsession with safety, ideological zealotry and resentment (Wokeness), fear and isolation (Covid), and countless other things which are all but guaranteed to produce massive amounts of helplessness in the average person.
Why is depression practically unheard of in small, and simple communities?
Because simplicity of life choices and experiences is strongly correlated with one’s ability to achieve agency. The more complex a civilization and culture are, the more opportunities there are to experience helplessness. Mo money, mo problems.
Why is depression so high in certain groups of people, and so low in others?
Because, for many different reasons (some of which are listed above), certain groups of people are more or less vulnerable to experiencing helplessness. Depression is very high in the following groups (and others). Using what you know about these groups, as well as the information discussed thus far, can you guess why?
Victims of trauma and abuse
Video game, porn, drug, and alcohol addicts
The trans/queer community
Political and ideological zealots
Obese people
People who live in big cities
How about the groups depression is very low in?
Small communities
Physically fit/healthy people
People who severely limit things like screen time, social media, gaming, porn, etc.
People with jobs that require simple, manual labor (the closer you are to the results of your work, the more agency you experience while performing it)
People with financial security
Ultimately, I found ALL of my questions answered by this theory of helplessness and agency. Not only that, but it’s the only theory I’ve ever come across that can be used to induce, or cure depression with a 100% success rate. Every. Single. Person. suffering from depression I have ever observed, spoken with, read about, or listened to, seems to fall into this theory of helplessness - typically in more than one way. Likewise, every person who has ever escaped it did so by reducing helplessness, and increasing agency/acceptance, myself included.
The Implications of this Theory on Identity
It is a constant and exhausting effort to maintain the image you believe you should have and often want of yourself, instead of the truth of who and what you are. The inevitable pain that results from refusing to acknowledge, develop, accept, cooperate, communicate with, heal, and love yourself, eventually forces you to seek some kind of dissociation from existence and from yourself. This often takes the form of extremely unhealthy behaviors, as living through your own self-torture (often without even realizing that is what is occurring) is simply too difficult. It’s important to remember that many things can cause us to feel persistently helpless, but the internal schism and identity crisis of the thinking and feeling selves will eventually manifest as a result.
Your feeling self - the instinctual, emotional, intuitive, and largely automatic version of yourself - is the part of you that is inherently seeking an upward trajectory towards fulfillment, happiness, and success. The thinking self; the purposeful, information-retrieving, logical, and contemplative version of yourself, is the part that questions, conceptualizes, and considers the world, as well as the feeling self it shares existence with. It is largely responsible for both feeding and reinforcing the more automated functions of the feeling self, among other things. Both the thinking and feeling selves have tremendous influence on each other, but it is important to understand that their mode of influence differs significantly. The extent to, and ways in which they are used also varies enormously on a person-to-person basis.
Your feeling self will always “hear” what your thinking self is saying to it (whether out loud or in your head), but the reverse is not true by default. The feeling self is communicating with the thinking self just as often, if not more so, but many of us have no idea how to listen to and understand what is being communicated. Worse, many of us have gotten very good at ignoring it (numbing) or manipulating what we believe it to be communicating because of how hard it can be to deal with and accept, particularly once we have come to resent it. That is typically how the disconnect manifests, or is made worse.
Our bodies can scream at us to make a change and move forward, or they can eloquently and calmy inform us of where to move. The difference lies primarily in how well you understand the language your feeling self is using, how often you are willing to listen to it, and the quality of relationship you have with it.
Try thinking of it as the difference between communicating with an infant and an adult. A thoroughly disconnected feeling self struggles to sound like anything other than a crying infant, and that is exactly what our feeling selves become if we consistently fail to communicate with, listen to, and accept what they are communicating. They literally become stuck – unable to grow with and follow the rest of us - becoming increasingly unhappy and resentful as a result. They are surviving, because they have determined that a low-energy state of survival is what we need.
Why does this happen? Well, it’s different for everyone. Some people never learned how to liberate themselves from helpless situations, and gain agency over their lives when things become difficult. Some people are victims of trauma or abuse (forced, severe helplessness). Some of us were never taught how to be friends with ourselves, or how to recognize the value and importance, or even the possibility that “being friends with ourselves” is necessary or possible. Some people simply accept the disconnect and plow forward, eventually growing into a functioning, though thoroughly incomplete version of themselves. Whatever the reasons for failing to notice and/or repair the helplessness and eventual disconnect, the result is likely to lead to something many of us are all-too-familiar with.
Addiction
Addiction is the vent we breathe through while under the suffocating weight of pain.
We’ve already established that when we cannot listen to, understand, accept, and gain agency over our helplessness, it will inevitably produce depression and an eventual identity disorder. Once this happens, we often consequentially develop our skills of avoiding, misunderstanding, and suppressing whatever forms of suffering we experience any relief from by doing so; we develop our own personal set of “painkillers”. Ultimately, this will increase the severity of our internal schism, or even creates one where it did not previously exist.
I believe this kind of avoidance and suppression of pain is the primary source of sustainment for all addiction. This is not to say that only depressed and anxious people can become addicts, just that the addictions cannot be indefinitely sustained unless they sufficiently obscure something we do not wish to feel. Eventually, the pleasure we used to find when engaging in our addiction will be replaced with a relief (often mistaken for pleasure) from a pain we are escaping.
Addiction is simply something that you have identified as a temporary solution to the pain or discomfort you are experiencing that “works” well enough so that you feel as if you have no choice but to continue utilizing it. It is simply a mode of relief that speaks a language you understand. Anything that dampens or hides the pain can result in addiction, and the better it works for you, the more likely you are to become addicted to using it.
Of course, it is also true that people who aren’t depressed can become addicts of one thing or another but, as with people suffering from depression, that addiction is also the result of compulsively engaging in any activity that stimulates us in ways we perceive as more pleasurable than living without them. It is worth noting that, if engaged in often enough, practically any activity can become addicting to us, and even cause us to experience feelings of persistent helplessness, which will eventually produce a schism between our thinking and feeling selves. Is it a surprise that an activity which persistently disconnects us from our identities would cause feelings of helplessness and resentment, and eventually result in depression?
People suffering from depression are more likely to engage in these behaviors, but they aren’t the only ones who do so. In today’s world, there is an overwhelming plethora of extremely effective pain-avoidance activities, many of which can be accessed by almost anyone, at any time, in any place. Few things could be more dangerous to a disconnected mind (or a healthy one experiencing momentary discomfort or easily accessible pleasure, for that matter), especially since these things only serve to further disconnect us from ourselves and each other, despite the supposed intent of connection, in many cases.
Remember the infant example? Addiction is hearing the infant (yourself) crying and, instead of moving towards it to listen and understand, we repeatedly use something to move further away until the “noise” becomes tolerable. Our feeling selves do not like this – not one bit, whether we can hear it or not. Eventually, we begin to ignore, resent, and dislike ourselves, and the schism worsens – producing increasing amounts of debilitating helplessness, anxiety and other issues.
Anxiety and Fear – Wasting Energy on Negative Creativity
Considering the widespread presence of anxiety disorders (and their diagnosis) and fear in today’s society, I think it would be useful to explore these things a bit further before moving on.
Say I’m preparing to give a presentation during a meeting with my colleagues. Engaging in negative creativity could be something as simple as overly considering all of the things that could possibly go wrong before, during, and after my presentation. Maybe someone will laugh at me, criticize my work, reveal my incompetence in front of my coworkers, etc. By engaging in negative creativity, I am using actual time, brain power, and energy to cause emotional pain to myself in a misguided attempt to manage my helplessness (real or imaginary) by preparing for any potentially disastrous outcome, no matter how unlikely they may be. In this moment, I have convinced myself that, if I simulate the emotional experience of disaster, it won’t be as painful when it inevitably happens. I use painful examples from my past as well as potential examples from my future in order to validate and support the negative creativity.
Anxiety is fueled by fear, and fear, in this case, is the result of over-thinking and negative creativity – existing inside your mind, either in the past or future, instead of existing in the present. You are either troubled by something that has happened, or something you believe might happen, and your control over the situation feels limited or non-existent. Do it frequently and for long enough, and you will actually become “better” at it; better at producing unnecessary suffering in an attempt to experience a sense of control.
Your body learns to produce and live in fear at an alarming rate, as that is the skill you have inadvertently been developing and convincing your body is necessary. Any activity you spend consistent time engaging in will result in a development of your skill in that activity, including producing your own anxiety. Your body knows the fear is uncomfortable and undesirable, but it also believes that retreating into your mind offers at least some kind of control and protection for you – it is trying to survive, instead of live.
Remember, the thinking self is exceptionally good at informing the feeling self. Unlike with communication from the feeling self to the thinking self, the feeling self has no choice but to listen to what our thinking selves are communicating; it’s “ears” are always open. If we inform the feeling self often enough with worries of danger, a loss of control, helplessness, etc., then these things will eventually integrate into our very nervous systems, and become automated parts of our identities. The more often we do this, the more convinced we become of the necessity for it, and the harder it becomes to undo within ourselves. In this sense, helplessness, and the eventual identity disorder it creates, can quite literally be learned and exacerbated by ourselves.
Your body wants to become adept at the things it believes you require, and if it believes you require “living” in a state of anxiety-ridden survival, then it will develop the skill of doing so. Fear poisons the mind and forcibly separates it from itself, and the damage that fear can do to our bodies and minds cannot be overstated. Fear, and the danger of persistently living in severe states of it, is something we’ll be covering in a later chapter but, for now, let’s discuss the balance between thinking and feeling.
The Balance Between Thinking and Feeling
When we experience discomfort, we always do something about it, but it is often the case that the forms of control we attempt to exercise in moments of distress are exactly what exacerbate the problem and create further, unnecessary discomfort. Our bodies are always attempting to protect us from harm but, unfortunately, they aren’t always good at it. Not only that, but the obstacles of modernity have presented challenges to our minds and bodies which have never existed in the entire history of humanity. We are simply not well equipped to deal with them.
If we attempt to think away all of our feelings, then we are effectively avoiding them and creating more anxiety and pain. This doesn’t mean that thinking has no place in emotional management, but it cannot accomplish the job on its own. This is especially the case when our styles of thinking adapt to avoid additional pain at all costs – a common trait in depressed and anxious people.
Understanding pain and the realities that cause it is a crucial part of relieving ourselves of pain. When we make an effort to understand something, we are attempting to remove the unknown nature of that thing and, as a result, we can eliminate much of the fear that previously existed in that unknown space.
A quick example: Say I’m afraid of taking psychedelics to improve my life… More than likely, a good chunk of this fear exists due to not having a sufficient understanding of how the drugs work, why they may be safe, how they can help, what the experience will feel like, etc. A person who has overdeveloped their skill of inducing their own anxiety will fill in these blanks with things that terrify them in an effort to exert control and prepare for the worst; an effort to avoid absolute pain. However, when we educate ourselves and come to understand some of these things, we effectively shine light on the unknown space we were previously concerned about and much, if not all of the fear, is removed. In this process, we are reducing the number of things our feeling selves could potentially exercise negative creativity towards, making it easier for us to trust in what we know, and avoid imagining more of what we don’t.
Understanding the unknown requires thinking, but it also requires feeling. If we think our way out of every problem, we are effectively telling our feeling selves, “I got this, just sit over there and keep quiet while I handle it”. The feeling self must join you in tackling whatever pain you may be experiencing, as it is an ineradicable part of ourselves that cannot be left behind, and will not tolerate it when we try. It must be allowed to feel many of the things that it has recognized as needing feeling.
Take the example of fearing using psychedelics to improve our lives; we can think away much of the fear by coming to understand certain things about the process, but some of that fear can only be eliminated after we enter and feel the experience for ourselves, as there are certain things about any experience that cannot be prepared for by thinking and, in many cases, will be made worse by attempting to overthink (over prepare into more fear and anxiety).
As with thinking though, we cannot hope to purely feel things out either. When we address pain only by feeling it out, we often over-validate much of what we feel, including that which we don’t intellectually understand and don’t necessarily need to feel, and we come to believe that our feelings are synonymous with truth – that our intuition and gut reactions are the only guides we need in navigating through life, and that they can never be wrong or incomplete.
Consider, once again, the fear of whether or not using psychedelics is safe. We can easily allow our fear to convince us that the perceived danger is real, that any attempt at intellectual understanding is both useless and invalidating of our cherished feelings, and that perhaps we’re not even sufficiently terrified - priming us for a potentially traumatic experience. If we allow it, we can use our feelings as validation of our own helplessness, even if we are not, in fact, helpless at all. Our feelings are critically important, but they are not perfect guides, and they need exercising and development just like the rest of us; they need the help and support of our thinking selves, and vice versa.
The feeling self can just as easily mislead us as our thinking self and, when we fail to question and evaluate it with compassion, it can prime us to experience trauma instead of the benign or even enjoyable event that could have been experienced, instead. Given the right set of conditions, a person could manifest a trauma response several times per day, every single day of their lives, largely because they have come to equate what they feel with unequivocal truth. Their overly-validated feelings forcibly drag them to the conclusion that everything in life is terrifying and dangerous, and they see no reason to question this conclusion, as reason plays little or no part in the balance or creation of their experience. It goes without saying that this is definitely not desirable, which means that we cannot simply let our feelings construct our experiences or realities all on their own, nor can we allow our thinking selves to become subservient to our feeling selves.
It is natural for us to seek validation for what we feel and to avoid that which seems to invalidate our feelings. While all feelings are valid in that they are real and exist for a reason, they are not all perfectly necessary or reliable, all of the time.
What if we were to lash out in a violent rage any time someone made an insignificant criticism of us? I’m not implying those feelings would be invalid, or that they don’t reveal something important about ourselves that we should pay attention to and address. Instead, it’s that we do not absolutely require them to address the situation, in the moment, in a healthy manner, and it would not benefit us to simply acknowledge them and say, “Hey, they’re valid, so they must be correct and necessary, and I see no reason to make an effort to change them in the future.” Each of us requires our own unique balance of thinking and feeling in order to grow in a complete sense. We need to think it out, and feel it out, otherwise we leave some element of pain and fear trapped within us.
What do I mean by “grow in a complete sense”? Maturity, wisdom, and the discovery, development, and acceptance our identities, as well as moving closer to self-actualization and healthy authenticity, require constant utilization and improvement of our skills with both thinking and feeling. As situations arise, we balance how much of each is required to arrive at a wise decision for action; a decision that both our thinking and feeling selves can agree is the correct path forward. Whenever we find ourselves arriving at decisions that both our thinking and feeling selves agree on, our entire person grows in a complete sense, and we get increasingly better at it the more we engage in it. If our thinking or feeling selves are left out of the equation, underutilized, criticized, ignored, etc., then we leave one or more parts of ourselves behind while the other parts move forward; we grow incompletely and imbalanced. It’s sort of like training to become an Olympic sprinter by developing strength in only one of our legs, and ignoring the other – it’s not going to work out.
Perhaps you’re thinking, “But plenty of people seem to lead happy and fulfilling lives, and I never hear them talk about any of this stuff.” You’re absolutely right, and there’s a very good reason for that. When a person’s values, habits, and physical health are all in good standing, the chances of that person naturally developing a healthy relationship with themselves is extremely high. A person does not need to understand that this is occurring for it to occur, they simply need to engage in consistently healthy living, and it will very likely occur naturally.
Most of these systems operate very well by default. It is only when obstacles repeatedly trip us up that the systems begin to fall out of balance and require deliberate evaluation and correction from us. As I stated at the beginning of this book, we are living in a time so far removed from our evolutionary history, that it’s no wonder we find ourselves bombarded with constant obstacles which require special attention and care in order to overcome and live with. For most people, the days of “natural” living are long gone, and it shows.
The Unavoidable Price of Depression and Anxiety
After exploring a little bit about depression and anxiety, let’s summarize how they get in the way.
Depression and anxiety get in the way of connecting with ourselves and, as a result, authentically connecting with everything. Depression and anxiety are like a poison that slowly seeps into every single thing we think, feel, and do. Which means they have the power to corrupt us completely if we allow them to. The longer we allow them to corrupt us, the more likely their influence will be found throughout our entire beings, and the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what has been corrupted, and what is still “pure”. Given enough time, the poison of depression and anxiety will find its way into every single aspect of our lives, and we become agents of them, instead of agents of our best selves. When this happens, the very core of our identities (our authenticity) can be corrupted.
Whether we realize it or not, depression and anxiety prevent us from living with healthy authenticity, as vulnerable and authentic living is precisely what depressed and anxious people are most afraid of. Vulnerability requires that we subject ourselves to potential feelings of helplessness and, as we’ve discussed, helplessness is the reason for our suffering in the first place. Our bodies understand this, and so they develop an increasing aversion to any actions which may cause us to feel vulnerable.
Depression forces us to become accustomed to surviving life through avoidance and ignorance of that which feels too difficult. Unfortunately, depression can make almost everything feel too difficult. For reasons that will become apparent as you make your way through this book, our authentic identities cannot be fully understood or mastered while we are in deep and long-lasting states of anxiety, depression, and suffering, and it is absolutely imperative that you acknowledge and accept this fact as you make your way towards the goal of identity mastery and healthy authenticity. There is no easy path to self-actualization, and I strongly recommend against attempts to utilize what might be perceived as an easy path. I can promise you there is no such thing.