Tripping into your Identity (Part 7- The End)
Chapter 11: Useful Tips – With or Without Psychedelics
Be your own used car salesman
How would you sell advice to a friend? What about yourself? Learning how to word and present these things to yourself so that they exist as something you must try to integrate is essential to staying on the path towards lasting happiness. Sometimes we need to word these things to ourselves in fun and exciting ways; ways that stand the best chance of resonating with us and providing that extra bit of motivation to stay on the path and succeed. The journey is supposed to be difficult, but it’s also supposed to be fun and exciting at times.
All of us are capable of suggesting things to ourselves in the voices of the people in our lives, but are we any good at suggesting things to ourselves in our own voice? Would you believe me if I told you it was a skill?
Start with something small; something that, although you might consider easy, is still a bit of a struggle to get yourself to do. Now imagine you’re a friend of yourself that knows you extremely well, how would you sell the suggestion to yourself? The goal here is not to immediately convince yourself (though that can definitely happen), instead, the goal is to simply make any kind of improvement on the manner in which we request something of ourselves. Maybe we need to be a little bit nicer, or appeal to one or more of our unique interests, or simply frame the suggestion in a way that highlights all the benefits instead of the things that make it difficult for us.
Keep trying it and, eventually, you will learn to more effectively “sell” things to yourself. If it feels silly and ridiculous at first, don’t worry, the things we say to ourselves always feel strange when we say them in ways we’re not used to hearing. As depressed people, we’re typically not used to hearing ourselves speak positively to ourselves, and so almost anything framed in a positive way may sound stupid and pointless. It will get easier, just keep trying!
Releasing control and letting go. Leaning into the discomfort
We’ve covered this a bit, so I’ll just do a quick reiteration on some of the key parts to remember.
People who are depressed tend to exert an overwhelmingly exhausting level of control over the things in their lives they believe they still have some control over – largely because exercising agency (control) is a natural response to experiencing frequent helplessness. What most of them don’t seem to realize is that exerting this kind of control is equivalent to surviving life instead of living it. When it comes to your engagement with life, trying to survive is exactly what drains and, eventually, kills you. Trying to live is the goal, and that requires removing the fear of “failure to survive”. It seems unnatural, as a depressed person, to imagine it’s even possible you won’t simply implode the moment you let go, but letting go is exactly what is required, and the feeling you experience when you manage to do it is euphoric, to say the least.
Imagine you are carrying 100 pounds of weight with you everywhere you go because you have convinced yourself that, if you drop it, your life is going to spiral out of control. Did it ever occur to you that your life might be spiraling out of control because you’re carrying 100 pounds of weight with you everywhere you go, and you have no energy left for anything else?
When we feel as if we have little or no control over most of the things in our lives, we place death grips on whatever it is we perceive as still having some control over (such as other people’s perceptions of us). It is precisely this death grip that drains us of the energy we need to regain some control over the things in our lives that will actually improve the quality of our lives.
Imagine you wake up one day to find yourself hanging from monkey bars, surrounded by thick fog, with no idea what lies below you. Each day, we choose to continue clinging to the bars where we’ve grown comfortable, because they are all that we know, and the only familiar thing within our grasp. Everything else feels terrifying and, the longer we hang, the more we convince ourselves that everything else is, in fact, terrifying. What we don’t realize is that clinging to those bars not only drains us of all our available energy, but we are also incapable of moving forward so long as we hang there. We are spending nearly all of our available energy on surviving in total stagnation.
What if we let go? What if, after letting go, we fall into a warm hot tub where some of our closest friends are hanging out and having fun (metaphorically, of course)? Would we have ever known it was even down there if we hadn’t let go?
I can tell you with absolute certainty that, after experiencing the excruciating pain of holding onto those monkey bars for years, there is nothing you could fall into that will feel worse. More often than not, the thing you fall into is going to feel amazing when compared to the pain of those bars. Try letting go occasionally, see what happens.
New ideas
Your creativity can be your worst enemy or your best friend. When we hang on the monkey bars (stand still), our creativity tends to imagine horrors in every direction we cannot see. When we move forward and improve our relationship with ourselves, our creativity seeks to help us and improve our lives, as well as the lives of others.
If you ever find yourself with an idea, I recommend paying it some respect by writing it down and treating it for what it is: a valuable gift given to you, by you. This is particularly true in the context of engaging in psychedelic therapy, as the ideas that fill the space between your steps are likely the only ideas that stand any chance at carrying you through that space towards happiness, and only you can create them.
Even if you come to find that one or more of your ideas failed to meet your expectations, they are still far from useless. Your ideas teach you something about yourself – they are messages from you, and no one knows you better than yourself. Whatever the result, I strongly suggest expressing gratitude towards yourself for any idea you have. Remember, your ideas (even the bad ones) are effectively yourself trying to love and help yourself! Would you criticize someone who gave you something in a genuine effort to demonstrate their love for you?
Finding your unique path, trusting it, and taking the steps.
Whether under the influence of psychedelics or not, it is absolutely crucial that we find our own unique paths, learn to trust in them, and demonstrate that trust by walking them. Our bodies know what path they want to take, the difficulty lies in comprehending the language they are using to direct us down that path. In the process of discovering this for yourself, I have a few tips.
Keep track of the things that feel right. They don’t guarantee truth, but they do guarantee eventual progress.
It will be incredibly useful for you to figure out how your brain best absorbs information while on your journey towards happiness. You can’t always read something, try it a few times, then just imagine that you’ve fully embraced and mastered it. You cannot expect to learn things in the same ways as others - you are not them - you are you, and you learn best in a certain way, just like everyone else. Maybe you require constant repetition, or emotional relevance, or visualization, or some combination, etc. Forget what works for anyone else and what you wish would work for you. Instead, accept what does work, pursue it, and be thankful to yourself for identifying and trusting in it. Once again, the first step is always the hardest, as it often looks like letting go of those monkey bars you’ve been hanging onto forever.
Your path will, without fail, present you with uncomfortable unknowns and unfamiliarity, but that’s a necessary part of the process, and of life, in general. Do not let the unknown paralyze you from continuing down your path.
Have you ever wondered why the most terrifying things in life are always associated with the unknown? The answer is because we have no ability to exercise agency over the unknown, and this utter helplessness is terrifying. Our brains are unbelievably adept at filling that unknown space with the worst things we can imagine, and they do this in order to prepare us for the worst possible scenario; they are making some kind of effort at agency. Why do you think the best horror movies never show the “monster” in bright, revealing light? They know your mind can produce something much more horrifying.
This attempt at filling in the unknown is nothing more than an effort to control our experiences. We convince ourselves that, if we prepare for the worst, then we’ll be ready for it if it happens. Since we know ourselves best, we have an ability to induce anxiety on a level far greater than what anyone else could ever achieve.
I can tell you from personal experience that it is very easy to become addicted to identifying and obsessing over both the things that are going poorly in our lives, as well as what might go poorly at any moment. What if we directed more of our focus towards what is going right, and what could go right? Maybe it would make taking that first step just a little bit easier?
Success Modeling
Despite the fact that I’ve rambled about finding the unique space between your steps for this entire book, there is still tremendous value to be found in observing the success of others. When we use success modeling, we are searching for steps that we may need to take on our own journeys, as well as for ideas regarding what some of our own space between steps might look like. It can even be the case that other people’s space between their own steps will wind up serving as one of our actual steps. The point of success modeling is to help us zoom in on our own space, as we often don’t realize that what appears to be one step for us may actually require several, each with their own unique space between them.
I recommend starting by asking yourself: what is it that I actually want to achieve? Who do I want to be? If we don’t have a goal in mind, then we can’t hope to find a path towards it. Writing the goal down, as well as any steps you believe you may need to cross to get there, can be an incredibly useful tool for staying on your path, and eventually achieving your goals.
Next, how did someone who shares your goal achieve it? Keep in mind that you are not them, and that we are observing others in an attempt to gain inspiration, information, and insight, not to copy their exact methods. Even the exact same method used is going to look different for every person, even if it may not seem like it. Write down the things that appeal to you in some way, but do not make the mistake of convincing yourself that they are 100% necessary. Remember, you are unique, and both your space and steps may end up being unique to you in some way.
Lastly, you may find that your goals change as you take steps towards them, and that’s okay! We are all constantly changing as people, and it would not serve us to adhere to the plan if we find that our goals wind up differing from those whose success we have been modeling. We don’t owe them anything, we are doing this for ourselves.
Quick Self-Love Tips – Gratitude – Shame – Vulnerability and Authenticity
Practicing authenticity
What do you love to do, but love less, or even hate when other people are watching you? Have you ever tried practicing vulnerability and authenticity simply by pretending that other people are watching you while you do it? Try it sometime!
You know how our minds can cause us to feel the emotions of an experience simply by remembering a past one, or imagining a future one? Well, we can use the same mental process to make progress by introducing imaginary obstacles into our expressions of vulnerability and authenticity. By practicing this, we can actually build resilience to some of the things that may have otherwise negatively impacted our expressions of vulnerability and authenticity. Just keep in mind that the goal here is to strengthen ourselves, not to engage in negative creativity that may wind up making our expressions of vulnerability and authenticity more difficult. If you find yourself negatively ruminating, then it might be best for you to avoid this exercise until you improve your skills in mindfulness further.
Expectations of the self
Never confuse less good with bad. Our expectations of ourselves can turn on us at a moment’s notice, causing us to experience the feeling of failure and helplessness when we haven’t actually failed. While it’s true that we should absolutely raise our expectations of ourselves when we are ready, there will be plenty of times in which we find ourselves less capable than we expected. This must not be seen as an opportunity to criticize ourselves, but an opportunity to learn for next time. Performing worse than you expected is not the same as performing poorly, or doing nothing at all.
Having said that, we also want to avoid overly reducing our expectations of ourselves in an effort to avoid disappointment. The only appropriate time to lower our expectations is when we are convinced we are not ready for something, and that our fear was not the determining factor. It is typically much better to aim high and fall short than it is to purposefully aim low to reduce the chances of experiencing the pain of disappointment. Aiming low, relative to what we know we are capable of, will not help us improve; it will simply teach us to become complacent with mediocrity, and likely lead to stagnation.
When identifying a source of pain, we need to assign gratitude to it for having been identified, not frustration and stress at needing to address and correct it. Positive framing is key, even if it may sometimes feel like we’re lying to ourselves. We can always choose to focus on the negative, or on the positive, as both possibilities will always exist. The direction of your focus will have tremendous impact on your ability to make and sustain progress, and will influence the way you perceive and engage in things by default, in the future. Practice identifying and focusing on the negative, and that’s what you’ll become good at doing. Try practicing identifying and focusing on the positive, instead – even if it feels silly, delusional, stupid, etc.
Laughing at ourselves
It helps to allow yourself to laugh at yourself sometimes. The things you do to practically seek out pain, those can be funny, as can the voracity with which you occasionally find yourself seeking them. Humor is an unbelievably powerful tool when it comes to maintaining forward momentum and a positive mindset. Humor isolates experiences and beliefs of helplessness, unfamiliarity, confusion, pain, etc., and releases them through laughter. Humor gives us permission to convert the negatives into neutrality, or even positivity.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had a negatively creative thought, observed it, then laughed at it for how absurd and unnecessary it was – effectively removing the pain of the thought and resolidifying my place on my path. So long as you are in a good relationship with your feeling self, it will share in your laughter, not take offense to it. Try thinking of it as if you’re sharing a ridiculous thought with a close friend who can laugh with you, instead of an enemy who will criticize you or take offense.
Shame
While practicing self-love, try to focus on using shame as an alert instead of proof of our “badness”. Shame, when used as proof that we are bad, is antithetical to self-love. Doing something you believe to be bad does not automatically condemn your entire person to “badness”, and so there is no reason to integrate whatever shame we may feel as undeniable proof that we are bad. Instead, we should use our shame as a sign that we may have done something we should try to avoid doing again in the future.
Shame is a necessary emotion, but it does not necessitate that we convince ourselves we are bad whenever we feel it. There are plenty of reasons we can feel shame that have absolutely nothing to do with our moral standing or value as people. Have you ever felt shame after making a joke that no one laughed at? Maybe your joke just didn’t make sense, or was misinterpreted. Does that make you a bad person? Of course not, which is why shame is often a poor indicator of having done something we shouldn’t do. Like all emotions, acknowledge and accept it, but do not assume that it is evidence you have done something bad, or that you should follow it to whatever conclusion it appears to be directing you towards in the moment of feeling it.
Gratitude
Learning to practice and assign gratitude is like sitting down at a piano for the first time and simply playing every note until you land on the one that feels right. You can’t miss it when you hear it, and it’s always there for you to play, you just have to search for it. Do yourself a favor and search for it as often as possible. Once you get good at it, you will be amazed at the waves of euphoria you find yourself able to summon on command, as well as the incredibly positive impact it can have on your life. Gratitude is the most powerful shield against, and antidote to resentment, fear, self-loathing, etc., and the importance of practicing some form of it on a regular basis cannot be overstated. I strongly recommend that every single person find a way to incorporate gratitude practice into their lives.
Giving yourself the benefit of the doubt
Learn to be charitable with yourself, and give yourself the same benefit of the doubt you give to the people you love, or to a person you would love to develop a deeper connection with; someone you look up to. Again, it’s all about positive mindset. When we love or admire someone, we always make room to assume the best whenever possible; we want to validate our feelings towards them. With ourselves, the exact opposite is often true. Treat yourself like someone you love and admire, and give yourself the benefit of the doubt, even if you don’t truly feel like you believe or deserve it. Do it often enough and, I promise, you will eventually believe it, as well as come to understand why you deserve it.
Let yourself take on someone else momentarily so you can see what it feels like to be nice to them (you). This is a basic exercise in empathy. All we are doing is imagining that we are the people in our lives whom we treat in the ways we would like to more often treat ourselves. Who’s the person in your life that you have the least trouble treating well? Whenever you find yourself treating that person well, imagine that you are them, and try to feel what it might feel like to have yourself treat you in the same way.
Chapter 12: Progress, and Moving Forward Through Obstacles
Depression is not something we overcome and automatically leave behind forever – it is a constant effort with periods of peace, and periods of conflict.
Accept that even as you make progress (and perhaps, especially so) you are going to face plenty of new and familiar challenges. It is critical to understand that the things which drive us to unhappiness are often loudest once we begin to make progress and open ourselves up to difficult feelings, experiences, and habits. That is the time to congratulate yourself for making it this far, and for once again standing to face your toughest challengers. The goal is not to defeat them, but to learn how to “dance” with them better than before, if even a little. They want to dance with you, you just don’t know how to keep up with them yet. That is part of the process – dusting yourself off, getting up, and practicing until it feels good to dance with them. Your challenges will knock you down at times, but it is important to remember that they aren’t doing it to you on purpose, it is simply a natural result of the process, and your body wouldn’t have it any other way.
No one develops a skill without challenges, and what we are doing here is developing skills. We cannot adapt, improve, and grow without constant challenge, and so we must learn to be grateful for opportunities to continue moving forward, instead of perceiving them as proof that we are victims of ourselves and others. We may be victims of a great many things, but we must never live as victims. Living as a victim will ensure that everything you think, feel, and do will be perceived through a lens of helplessness and hopelessness, and we are neither of these things. One can, and must accept having been victimized without embodying a perpetual state of victimhood. What is the result of accepting helplessness and hopelessness? Resentment, fear, despair, self-loathing, anxiety, depression, trauma, and identity disorders. Remember, agency is the path away from these things, and helplessness is the path towards them.
As you escape depression, you must be prepared to face many of the things that are traps for you; the things that only appear when you achieve vulnerability and open yourself up to more of the world; when you allow yourself to be disappointed and hurt. We must feel and embrace these feelings. Embracing them does not mean accepting that they are indicators of truth, only that they are valid and important; that they can teach us something important, and ultimately help us to become even stronger. They are guides, not dictators.
I believe depressed people must necessarily leave their depression as the best version of themselves. The journey and the struggle practically guarantee that the person delivered to the door of agency and purpose will arrive as a well-trained “life-liver”. Keep in mind though, that it is of the utmost importance to remember to continue believing this about yourself in order to manifest it. Allowing yourself to be convinced otherwise will reignite the schism between the thinking and feeling self, and we all know where that leads.
How can we know when we’ve actually left depression behind? What are some of the signs of leaving it?
Particularly when using psychedelics, it is possible to leave depression so rapidly that we can quite literally give ourselves whiplash, and even find ourselves in a state of mind that is so unfamiliar to us that it causes us to feel uncomfortable and even lost. Leaving depression will look different for everyone, but I believe there are a few reliable signs we can look for to help us understand whether or not we’ve actually left it.
The first is our window of enjoyment. When we’re depressed, the number of things that cause us to feel pleasure is significantly diminished, or even outright removed, in the worst cases. One clear sign of leaving depression is suddenly finding yourself pulled towards a variety of things you believe might actually feel good to engage in. Maybe it’s spending more time with the people in your life, doing something creative, playing games, helping others, or even getting some difficult work done.
Despite the discomfort and unfamiliarity we may feel in experiencing the expansion of our windows of enjoyment, it is important to understand that, much more likely than not, this expansion is proof of having achieved something incredible: defeating our depression or, at the very least, making significant progress towards defeating it. That’s not to say that it will be gone forever, but we would do well to celebrate what we have accomplished, and focus on the fact that we have undoubtedly accomplished something worth celebrating and congratulating ourselves for.
Another common sign of leaving depression is a noticeable increase in physical and/or mental energy. There are many reasons for this, but the restoration of your metabolic processes, and the return of proper functioning of your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are undoubtedly two of the largest components. Once these things begin to function they way they are supposed to, the perceived increase in your mental and physical energy can be absolutely massive; so much so that many people actually feel as if they’re on some kind of stimulant drug.
How might this increase in energy actually present itself to you, though? Maybe you wake up to find yourself, for the first time in a long time, actually desiring to get out of bed and do something, instead of staying in it for as long as you can convince yourself is acceptable. Maybe you get a text or phone call from someone and, instead of feeling burdened by it, you feel a desire to respond and engage. Maybe you feel motivated to workout and/or energetic after finishing one, instead of drained and thankful that it’s over.
The increase in energy can take on many forms, and it will likely look different for everyone. Just know that practically any increase in energy is very likely a sign that, just like the expansion of your enjoyment window, you have achieved something worth celebrating and being thankful to yourself for.
There are plenty of other signs of leaving depression, but the last one I will mention here is the increase in both your cognitive and emotional function and capacity. Did you know that depression and anxiety drastically reduce your ability to think and feel at maximum capacity? This fact is even reflected on things like IQ tests, in which it is quite possible for a person to score significantly lower than they are capable of scoring if they weren’t depressed and anxious. Depression and anxiety reserve a significant portion of your brain activity, preventing it from being used in the ways you would be capable of using it outside of depression and anxiety, and it can make an absolutely tremendous difference.
If you suddenly find yourself better able to solve problems, engage in positive creativity, remember facts and events, think critically, and feel things more strongly and completely then, once again, it is very likely you have achieved something worth celebrating and being thankful to yourself for. If you have experienced any of the signs I’ve listed (there are many others), then chances are you have made tremendous progress towards defeating your depression, even if you might not be out of its grips entirely, just yet.
What are some of the things that are likely to get in our way as we leave depression behind and move closer to our goals?
Fear and the Unknown
Let’s talk about fear for a moment. While fear is a critical component of navigating through life, it is also one of the most destructive things a person can experience. Left unchecked, fear will absolutely destroy everything beautiful and meaningful in our lives. It doesn’t matter what we’re afraid of - if we’re living in any state of fear, we can expect to experience the following:
Drastically decreased cognitive ability (memory, creativity, decision-making, processing speed, problem-solving, etc.)
Overwhelming resentment and negativity towards others and self
Inability to form and/or maintain healthy relationships
Enormous decrease in physical health (immune system, cardiovascular damage, gut issues, rapid weight gain/loss, decreased fertility, permanent damage to the nervous system, accelerated aging, and countless other things)
Total loss of emotional regulation and ability to develop emotional fortitude and proficiency
Impulsive and destructive behaviors towards self and others
Constant fatigue and countless mental illnesses
Inability to perceive reality objectively
Severe hormone dysregulation
Loss of empathy and compassion for yourself and others
A deep and unhealthy yearning for safety
A drastically increased propensity to experience trauma
A willingness to allow others to control and direct your life for you, including things which will induce helplessness, and destroy your agency and freedom
Drastically reduced ability to erect, maintain, and enforce boundaries
This list is far from comprehensive, but I promise you that, if you are experiencing prolonged fear on a day-to-day basis, for any reason at all, then you can expect to experience every single thing on this list without exception. It doesn’t matter if you believe you have every reason to feel afraid, your body and mind will still suffer the consequences. It is also important to remember that fear is not always obvious to us, and even severe fear can be elusive and easy to miss. Fear, once it has persisted within us for long enough, will effectively integrate into our very nervous systems and physiology – corrupting our identities from within. It can learn to drive us without us even recognizing we are being driven by it; it becomes part of our identities.
Fear is both a body and mind poison and, if you allow yourself to regularly experience it, there is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent yourself from integrating it into your nervous system and suffering the consequences. Living in fear is not living at all, it is surviving, and a person who is surviving can only exist in a constant state of survival. Do you want to live life as if you are constantly on the verge of death?
Luckily, psychedelics excel at helping us to shed the fear from our physiology, as do many of the other tools we’ve covered (mindfulness, journaling, exercise, nutrition, leaning into fear, breathing exercises, etc.)
There is only one thing that can meet or exceed the negative consequences of living in fear, and that thing is resentment.
Ideology, Beliefs, and Resentment
“Resentment is like taking poison, and waiting for the other person to die.” – Carrie Fisher
Can ideology (a system of ideas and beliefs) lead to depression and anxiety? Yes, absolutely, 100%, without question. In fact, there is significant evidence to suggest that several ideologies in circulation today are some of the leading causes of the drastic rise in depression, anxiety, trauma, and narcissism. As with fear, only our belief systems can support states of chronic resentment, and adherence to one or more ideologies is the only thing that can give birth to and sustain these systems of belief. The ways in which the things we believe impact our lives cannot be overstated.
Ideology is often associated with economic and political theory, but it absolutely can and frequently does exist outside of those spheres. Ideology is simply a system of ideas, ideals, and beliefs, as well as the study of their origin and nature. All of us live in at least partial adherence to one or more ideologies, as our belief systems guide us through life and shape our perceptions of our experiences. I won’t name any specific ideologies here, but I believe it is important to keep ideology in mind, as the impact it has on us can be absolutely devastating to our physical and mental health.
In recent years, reality-mocking ideologies of criticism, victimhood, tribalism, resentment, and identity manipulation and obsession have absolutely exploded in popularity, and have caused damage to individuals and society on a level rarely seen in all of human history. This is hardly surprising, as those who consistently and eagerly engage with and embrace these things are all but guaranteed to experience profound misery and helplessness. Perhaps the most tragic and shocking result of this explosion of popularity is the overwhelming amount of narcissism, fear, and resentment it has produced, as well as total ignorance of, and even welcoming of said resentment, fear, and narcissism, as if they were virtues; a sign of living a good and meaningful life.
There are, again, too many reasons to mention here for why this is occurring, and since this book isn’t primarily sociological, anthropological, or political in nature, I don’t believe it would best serve its purpose for me to dive into them. Instead, I am going to provide you with some information about resentment, as well as some signs that one or more of your ideologies may be fostering it, and insidiously and surreptitiously causing you untold suffering as a result.
Resentment is the feeling we experience when we are bitterly angry, and convinced that we have been unfairly victimized in some way, typically repeatedly, over time. There is no shortage of things which can cause resentment, but many of them will cause it solely as a result of the corruption of one or more of our belief systems and the effects they have on our perceptions of and relationship with reality and the people who take part in it.
Like fear, resentment is a mind poison that, if left unchecked, will destroy every single thing that makes life worth living. When we live in resentment, we are literally incapable of expressing compassion or empathy for those whom we have decided are to blame for our resentment (ourselves included), and we utterly dehumanize those we perceive as being responsible. Our resentment is effectively a commitment to a campaign of revenge and an application of what we often mistakenly perceive to be “justice”, whether truly deserved or not.
When we thoroughly resent someone, we lose the ability to both see and treat them like human beings, which means we also lose the ability to fairly and objectively determine a just course of action. When we resent groups of people, we default to tribalism, which is an ancient, evolutionary line of defense for protecting oneself and the people in our tribe whom we believe to be in danger; the groups we believe are being victimized. Tribalism is an evolutionary protective measure for surviving life during exceedingly difficult times, not for living and prospering in it.
Unfortunately, the depreciation of the value of self-honesty, self-responsibility, and individuality all but guarantee the birth of chronic resentment and extreme levels of narcissism and tribalism. We grow accustomed to and exceptionally comfortable with blaming others for more and more of our problems, seeking external validation for our beliefs and actions and, as a result, fostering our resentment. When our first response to a difficult experience is to point the finger of blame at anyone other than ourselves, we are willingly abandoning our agency and putting it in the hands of those whom we have chosen to blame; of our perceived enemies - whether we realize it or not. In doing so, we commit to a life of self-induced helplessness in which we only live to survive, and our window of resentment expands to accommodate anyone and everything which we can convince ourselves had any part in causing us, or those in our tribe, pain.
Imagine you carry a metaphorical “bucket of reasons for my resentment” around with you everywhere you go. Now imagine your system of beliefs (your ideology) encourages you to eagerly and self-assuredly place all discomfort into the bucket, without question or even minimal scrutiny. Every time you encounter something undesirable, whether in your life or the life of someone belonging to your “tribe”, you simply toss it into the bucket as evidence of your and/or their victimhood and resentment. As you move through life perceiving all discomfort as evidence of you and your tribe’s victimhood (throwing all of it in the bucket where you have been convinced it belongs), what happens to the bucket? Well, the bucket grows heavier with each passing day, making its presence increasingly impossible to avoid, and self-validating its perceived necessity in your life as well as your excessive use of it. Meanwhile, the bucket continues dragging you down into increasing states of misery, all of which must necessarily be blamed on anyone other than yourself (thrown into the bucket, because that’s where everything goes…).
A person who continues carrying and adding to this bucket for long enough will come to experience discomfort, helplessness, and resentment throughout the day, perhaps every day of their lives, as well as a grossly distorted representation of reality, as their reality has been corrupted by the enormous weight and presence of the bucket. Where does that discomfort and resentment go? Into the bucket, of course!
The bucket is feeding on life and perpetuating itself, and the continued filling of it validates its perceived necessity, and increasingly defines the experience of reality for the person carrying it. Eventually, nearly everything must be thrown into the bucket, as such a person has become incapable of providing reason for their increasingly negative experiences in any other manner, and the notion of having their massive emotional investment invalidated becomes utterly intolerable; their cognitive dissonance gains full control of their lives. The bucket becomes so real and ever present to them that even things which have no business being added to it are done so with a narcissistic righteousness. The bucket becomes all they know, and so they cherish it while it enslaves them.
I can tell you right now, if you refuse to take responsibility for both your successes and failures, then you are guaranteed to live a life that is ultimately guided by the people whom you have decided are at fault, and you will find yourself spending most of your time hating, fearing, resenting, and trying to punish them for the perceived injustices, instead of working on yourself. This quest will never, and can never end. You have granted your perceived enemies power over you, and you will not get it back until you take it back by accepting responsibility and committing to accepting what are often extremely painful, but absolutely necessary truths about yourself and reality. If you cannot do this, your resentment will grow rapidly, and you will come to hate and fear a great many things that have absolutely nothing to do with your successes or failures.
The longer you allow it to go on, the more convinced you will become of the truth of your beliefs, as experiencing an invalidation of the massive levels of resentment and other negative emotion you have invested will cause your cognitive dissonance to go into survival overdrive, and you will quite literally lose your ability to perceive and exist in harmony with objective reality. Since accepting the truth (allowing your beliefs to die) would be too painful, and even traumatic, your brain will do whatever it can to hide it from you, and so you will continue to live in a grotesque mockery of reality for the sake of preserving your survival. No one wants to accept they are the victims of their own beliefs, anger, fear, and resentment and, the stronger they become, the more difficult it is to accept. Remember, the more emotional investment we place into our Pillars of Truth, the harder they become to let go of, even when unequivocally necessary.
Don’t believe me? Has anyone ever tried to talk you out of being afraid of something? Why is it so hard being talked out of our fears, or being told that perhaps they are unnecessary? Because, if they end up being correct, we experience profound shame and vulnerability. We inherently recognize the absolute poison that is fear, and having someone point out to us that we have been poisoning ourselves, when we didn’t realize it, can be deeply shameful. We don’t want to see how obvious it was because of what that might say about us, and because of how painful it may be to admit to and change, nor do we want to admit to our fear in the first place. We are quite literally trapped by our own beliefs and emotions.
If you subscribe to ideologies that primarily seek to achieve harmony by criticizing and destroying anything and everything that could be perceived as preventing people from achieving happiness (this is possible with literally anything), then you will allow those things to do just that, and you will experience it as if it were real and true. You will overdevelop the skill of blaming everything other than yourself for all of your negative experiences, and eventually live a life governed by fear, anger, and resentment. We all feel compelled to engage in the things we are familiar with and skilled at, even if they are destroying our lives.
This is not at all to say that there does not exist things which can make achieving a happy, purposeful, and fulfilling life far more difficult than it should be. Those things undeniably exist, and they always will in some capacity. The problem occurs when we start automatically allocating everything that could conceivably be perceived as getting in our way, into the camps of external blame (into our convenient buckets). Far more often than not, we grant those perceived injustices power over us because it’s far easier to blame others than it is to blame ourselves. If we live lives governed by the pursuit of blame, then we will find reasons to validate it, whether they truly exist or not, and whether they are deserving of blame or not. When this happens, our resentment and fear will be perpetually fed and encouraged. If we live life as hammers, then everything becomes a nail, even when all the nails have gone.
The more emotionally and cognitively compromised we become (which is exactly what happens when we blame everyone other than ourselves, and live in fear and resentment), the more things we will blame for our unhappiness, even if it’s of our own doing. These things feed each other in an endless cycle, and the only way to break it is to take self-responsibility and reclaim our power and agency over that which we previously blamed for stripping us of them. This experience will almost certainly be deeply painful, but the alternative is guaranteed to be far worse. Remember, if you cannot love and take care of yourself first and foremost; if you cannot pursue achieving self-responsibility and honesty, then you are opening yourself up to be taken advantage of, and you are far less likely to be of use to the people you love and wish to help, except to be taken advantage of in some way, even if it may seem harmless.
Short of total, physical and mental enslavement, no one can stand in the way of your happiness unless you allow them to. If you come to understand and embrace this truth, you will become unstoppable.
Trauma and Trauma Resilience
I’m sorry to say that much of the psychiatric and social science community have not only failed when it comes to understanding and treating trauma in recent years but, in many cases, they have contributed to its spread and severity. Trauma has become a household name and, like the pharmaceutical companies before them, many of the people in a position to make a difference have decided to focus on treating the symptoms instead of the cause.
In other circles, trauma has been obscenely romanticized to the point of serving as social capital for those claiming to suffer from it. It’s almost as if a group of leading psychiatrists and psychologists got together and decided that all trauma is pervasive and ineradicable, instead of what it often is: a result of learned emotional incontinence and/or mismanagement, accepting helplessness, and avoiding challenge and discomfort.
Please understand that I am not claiming trauma does not, or should never occur; not at all. Trauma is very real, and there are countless ways of experiencing it so that no amount of emotional fortitude and resilience could prevent it. This is especially the case for children, as children often have no means of possessing the kind of agency and emotional fortitude that would be required to turn a traumatic event into something less severe.
There is, however, a cold hard truth about trauma that few people seem willing to admit to or even consider, apparently in an effort to preserve people’s feelings, validate their pain, and keep them “safe”: Trauma can absolutely manifest solely as a result of unnecessary emotional incontinence and mismanagement. Why is it that what is considered traumatic for one person may be enjoyable, or even life-affirming for another? There are many reasons, some of which we have no control over, but we would be doing a tremendous disservice to ourselves and each other if we were unwilling to accept that this is often the case because, instead of building resilience to trauma by developing agency, we attach virtue to our helplessness, and romanticize and coddle it. We imagine that the people suffering from trauma could not have possibly had any fault in experiencing it; they are purely helpless victims of severe mistreatment and/or pain. It’s almost as if we would rather protect their feelings than address the core of the problem and, to me, that is a very tragic idea, especially considering that their feelings will ultimately pay a far worse price.
What if, when I was a child, my parents constantly told me that going outside was extremely dangerous because of kidnappers, stray dogs, flocks of angry birds, or a million other things that may or may never pose any real threat to me? What if they insist that my life is in severe danger every time I set foot outdoors alone? Would I be sufficiently primed to experience unnecessary trauma? Would I be prepared to experience helplessness, or agency?
Now, what if I went to therapy as I got older and, instead of helping me to integrate feelings of agency, safety, confidence, and freedom with going outside – changing my detrimental, overly-cautious, and nonsensical beliefs, and building resilience to trauma - my therapist simply told me that I’m a victim of trauma; that it’s an ineradicable part of my identity, and then proceeded to encourage me to simply work on things that might alleviate the symptoms it produces?
What if we spent time discussing other things that might traumatize me, and that I should avoid, instead of strengthening myself so that the window of things which could potentially traumatize me shrinks? What if I began to associate trauma with positivity because no one would ever dare to suggest that I had any part in producing or sustaining it, and their responses are always filled with compassion, empathy, and other forms of positivity and validation that I yearn for? Trauma, after all, can serve as an excellent excuse for failure, whether deserving or not.
What if I go on to make most of my friends by trauma bonding with them; coming to view my trauma as a tool for belonging and acquiring some of the things I want from life? What if I come to understand that my traumas grant me protection from difficult self-honesty, self-responsibility, criticism, or anything else I could claim as “too-difficult-to-deal-with” as a result of my trauma?
What if, in a moment of clarity, I considered that, perhaps, something I’m doing is unnecessarily priming me for trauma? At this point in my life, would I be able to accept that potential truth without mentally imploding? After all, trauma has become a core part of my identity now, as well as a tool I’ve become quite good at using to acquire certain things I want from life. Make lemonade with lemons, right?
I must reiterate, I am not claiming this is the case with all trauma, not in the least. As I stated, trauma is real, and there is often nothing we can do to escape experiencing it. The point I am trying to make is that we absolutely have the power to narrow the window of things which could potentially traumatize us, not that we can avoid trauma altogether. If we cannot build resilience to trauma, then the window of things which can traumatize us will grow forever, and we will become slaves to it. When we experience chronic trauma for long enough, it increasingly corrupts more and more of our nervous systems and identities, and we become hypersensitive to it, which makes us more likely to experience it in the future; forever building on itself and keeping us in a worsening state of helplessness, fear, resentment, and survival.
It is also the case that people will use whatever tools they have available to them to acquire the things they want from life. If a person’s life is defined by trauma, then they will come to rely on that trauma in some way in order to move through life, as that is the skill they’ve been developing, and likely the most effective tool available to them. As I stated earlier, all of us tend to engage in the things we’re good at and familiar with, even if those things are absolutely terrible for us, and this includes experiencing and using trauma.
There are many ways to build resilience to trauma, some of which I’ve covered in this book. If you can learn to seek agency over helplessness, live instead of survive, improve your relationship with yourself, achieve self-honesty and adhere to truth/reality, focus on love and positivity instead of fear and resentment, and understand that you are a powerful person capable of overcoming any obstacles, then you will build tremendous resilience to trauma, as well as countless tools to deal with and overcome the traumas which cannot be avoided. Do not accept the idea that all of your traumas are unavoidable - they are not, and you are capable of both fortifying yourself against them, as well as changing the emotional impact they had and continue to have on you.
Remember, a reliance on safety will not help you; it will increase your likelihood of experiencing helplessness and trauma. Do not seek for safety. Instead, seek to develop agency against that which threatens your sense of safety.
Anxiety and Catastrophizing
Anxiety is not something we can ever expect to fully eradicate from our lives, so please do not make the mistake of believing that, after leaving depression behind, you will forever be free of any anxiety. Like trauma, anxiety is something that there is occasionally nothing we can do to prevent entirely, but we can absolutely reduce the window of things that cause it, the symptoms it produces, and the impact it has on our lives. One of the best ways to do this is to learn how to identify when we are engaging in something called catastrophizing – a particularly sinister form of negative creativity.
Catastrophizing is simply a negatively creative exercise in imagining the most potentially catastrophic outcomes of any given scenario. As I’ve mentioned in previous chapters, engaging in this kind of negative creativity is a form of control, as we convince ourselves that we will be better equipped to handle a situation if we can imagine every possible outcome before it happens. If it wasn’t obvious, this not only doesn’t work, but it’s incredibly draining, and it tends to make things much worse.
When we catastrophize, much more often than not, we are forcing ourselves to live through a very difficult simulation of an event that will never occur, which means we gain nothing from it, and lose plenty. It’s a lose-lose situation of self-induced helplessness. Catastrophize often enough, and your fearful and negative experience of life will snowball, and continuously validate your mind’s desire to catastrophize more often, and more severely. Remember, when we tell ourselves something often enough, good or bad, we begin to manifest it in some way.
Luckily, there exists a very helpful exercise in avoiding this thought pattern, and it’s unsurprisingly called, “decatastrophizing”. As you go through the steps, write down all of your answers. With some practice, this exercise can be done without needing to write everything down.
What are you worried about?
In all honesty, how likely is it that your worry will come true? Give examples of past experiences, or other evidence, to support your answer.
If your worry does come true, what’s the absolute worst that could happen?
If your worry does come true, what’s most likely to happen?
If your worry comes true, what are the chances you’ll be okay…
In one week?
In one month?
In one year?
If your worry doesn’t come true, what might you have lost by worrying about it in the first place?
If your worry doesn’t come true, what are the positive things that could happen instead?
I should mention that there are a lot of different versions of this exercise, and this is simply the one I found most useful for myself. The point of the exercise is to have your thoughts and feelings in front of you so that you can better understand them. When we’re purely in our heads, it becomes much more difficult to recognize some of the flaws in our thinking and feeling, how we may be hurting ourselves, and the extent to which we’re engaging in negativity over positivity.
Identifying with Mental Illness
Are you a depressed person, or are you a person who is experiencing depression? Do you see the difference? Your brain does, and it will be influenced by how you choose to frame it for yourself. A depressed person could be seen as someone who will always be depressed because that is who and what they are (their identity), while a person experiencing depression is free to move beyond whatever constraints may or may not actually exist. These terms are not all-constraining, but they absolutely can make a difference to us.
Identifying with depression (or any mental illness, for that matter) as a core and eradicable part of your identity practically guarantees your submission to it, and is not at all the same as accepting it as something you are temporarily experiencing. If holding on to that label is part of your survival and core identity, then you will do whatever it takes to keep it, including remain in it when you might otherwise rise above it. We need to avoid this self-fulfilling state of being, and learn to provide our identities with space to both understand and become who they are.
Our bodies do not want us to identify with whatever it is we believe we feel like identifying as at any given moment, they want us to identify as what we truly are, and not rush to figure out what that is. Despite what many people will tell us, our desires are not necessarily overtly and evidently representative of our identities (sometimes the exact opposite) and, as I’ve mentioned many times at this point, we stand little to no chance of knowing our identities when we are chronically drowning in suffering and at odds with ourselves. Our desires can and will provide us with information about our identities, but they are rarely simple and clear cut, especially for people who do not have a good relationship with themselves.
Our desires and perceptions of ourself and others are easily influenced by a tremendous number of things that have absolutely nothing to do with our identities, including by people who have no business telling us who we are. Discovering your identity is not as simple as asking yourself what you want to be, then declaring the immediate answer to be true and perfectly representative of who and what you are, and always will be. I promise you that attempting this shortcut will worsen the schism, or even create one where it did not previously exist. This would be like asking a friend whether or not they enjoy Batman movies, then proclaiming them to be vigilante, superhero crime fighters if they say yes, and dastardly villains if they say no. Identities are very complex, and the information they provide us is rarely as clearly indicative as we desire it to be.
Understanding who your authentic self is requires that you first have something approaching a good and trusting relationship with it, and you cannot build a good relationship with it if you forcibly and prematurely constrain it to an identity before you have put in the time and effort of truly understanding it. Do you find yourself succeeding in your efforts to fully understand people you have bad or no relationships with? Of course not, and it will not work for yourself either. We don’t want to know the people we have bad relationships with, and we cannot know people we have no relationship with. Your identity does not want to be a slave to whichever desire you feel at any given moment, it wants you to first love and learn to understand it, then account for the great number of things it is expressing, including a wide range of desires, beliefs, values, feelings, proclivities, etc., over time.
Understanding your authentic self requires time, a commitment to understanding and accepting truth/reality, self-honesty, vulnerability, self-love, and many other things we learn as we develop as people. Parts of our identities change over time, and parts of them remain as they are for the duration of our lives. All of these things factor into who we ultimately are, and attempting to rush to some all-encompassing “identity finish line” will not help us to achieve happiness, it will drastically worsen the disconnect inside ourselves.
External Influence and Validation
Much like driving a car, the most difficult part of navigating and staying out of depression is often dealing with other people. For me, it can be difficult to expose my authentic self and feel accepted because of how perceptive and creatively destructive I can be. I have no shortage of negatively creative ideas regarding what people may or may not be thinking or feeling about me.
We cannot ever hope to control what other people say, do, think, feel, etc. We must learn to live with people without allowing them to ultimately determine our identities and value. Remember, some parts of our identities are necessarily negotiations, but that does not mean the reality of your identity will necessarily be determined solely by the consensus of others. We can use their input to help us get a more complete and honest picture of reality, but they cannot determine it for us with perfect accuracy.
Beware of allowing other people to determine your value, as it is all-too-easy to fall into this trap at a moment’s notice without even realizing it, even for a fully self-actualized person who has a loving relationship with themselves. This is simply part of being human, as we must emotionally invest in others at times, and one of the consequences of that investment is caring about what they say, do, think, feel, etc. Over time, we will learn to care about these things without allowing them to corrupt our relationship with ourselves.
Romantic Relationships
Relationships are very, very tricky for someone who has experience with depression, anxiety, trauma, loving themselves, etc. This section could fill several books all on its own, and so I’m going to simply provide you with what I believe to be a few of the most important things to consider when entering into or maintaining a relationship either during, or following depression.
Relationships require skilled use of both boundary setting and enforcement
When we become emotionally invested in someone, it can become much more difficult to both set and enforce our boundaries with that person. We love them, and we want to welcome them into our space. We also want to refrain from hurting them, and we want them to feel comfortable expressing their authentic selves. The problem is that all of these things require strong boundaries to achieve, as well as immediate action if they are crossed.
I am not suggesting you avoid romantic relationships altogether, but it is vitally important to remember to take care of yourself first.
Relationships can be traps for people who are better and/or more familiar and comfortable with taking care of other people than they are themselves
This can be a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people, and I was absolutely guilty of it myself for many years. If I couldn’t achieve happiness for myself, then perhaps I could help someone else achieve it, and gain some sense of self-worth and value that way. This can be a very dangerous trap for anyone who has experienced difficulties with their self-love and self-worth, especially if they have learned to gain that value by taking care of others.
In fact, it is often a sign of self-love issues when a person defaults to taking care of other people before themselves, and insists on imposing themselves into the lives of others. This is typically a form of desperation for proving one’s own value, but it cannot ever truly achieve that. It is not our job to take care of the people in our lives who are capable of caring for themselves. We can support them and help them to reach their full potential, but that is not at all the same as taking care of them, and they are ultimately responsible for their own successes and failures; they are responsible for their own lives.
For those of us who are very good at taking care of others, and who often enjoy it immensely, we need to be especially cautious with over-investing ourselves. There is nothing wrong with offering help, but if you offer it at the expense of yourself, then you will drain yourself of that which is required to offer help worth offering and accepting in the first place; your support will be incomplete and decidedly less valuable. Not only that, but over investment of ourselves into the lives of others effectively means that we hold our value hostage to the choices and outcomes of the lives of others, which we have no ultimate control over. Lastly, we stand to do the people we care about serious harm when we impose our care onto them in cases which they are fully capable of caring for themselves. When we do this, we often rob them of their ability and opportunity to develop their own agency, and themselves.
Beware of waiting for your partner to do what you need them to do
We all have needs, and for those of us who are not accustomed to feeling okay with our needs and putting ourselves first, we often convince ourselves that we don’t actually have or need them. One of the most common manifestations of this scenario is when we find ourselves in love with someone who cannot meet our needs and who, for whatever reason, we find ourselves willing to wait for them to meet them.
Our needs cannot be put on hold forever, and we will sometimes be faced with the difficult decision of either continuing to live for our partners, or return to living for ourselves. Love for someone important to us is a hard thing to lose, but it is much harder and more catastrophic to lose it for ourselves. If we lose it for ourselves, then we drastically reduce our ability to give it to anyone else, which includes the person we are in the relationship with, as well as people who may actually be able to meet our needs, and can both accept and return our love in the ways we deserve.
Ask yourself, would you rather re-experience what it felt like to stop loving someone in your life for what was likely a very good reason, or would you rather re-experience the worst of your depression and resort to hating yourself, possibly forever? What about the people in your life who love you? Do you think they’d rather you stop loving yourself, or a person who can’t meet your needs?
Just remember, when we love ourselves and commit to holding onto and fostering that love, we will attract people who do the same, and we give ourselves the best possible chance at developing a meaningful relationship – one that meets our needs, and makes us feel good for loving ourselves, as well as the other person.
Relationships can prevent the development of your individual identity and, instead, develop one that depends on your existence in a relationship
When we overly invest ourselves and begin to depend on a relationship before our own identities and self-worth are sufficiently developed, then we effectively freeze the development of our independent identities. This effect tends to snowball on itself, as leaving our identities behind encourages us to increasingly identify with the relationship, instead of with ourselves. When we identify with our relationship, we place most or even all of our value into the condition of the relationship, and the other person in it. We begin to give the relationship the kind of personal and emotional investment and care that would normally be reserved for ourselves. As a result, our own happiness, fulfillment, purpose, and even survival become dependent on the relationship, and on the happiness and success of our partner.
This is why so many people search for new relationships as soon as their current one ends – further condemning their own identities to remain frozen. They are deeply uncomfortable with identifying and existing with themselves, and eagerly seek to reclaim the identity they are familiar with: The one that requires existence in a relationship. The only identity they have developed is one of co-existence, and so it becomes difficult to exist without it.
Of course, it is absolutely not the case that entering into a relationship guarantees this process. This problem seems to primarily occur in people who enter into relationships before their identities are sufficiently developed (typically young and/or depressed people), in people who cannot maintain their boundaries, or in people who find themselves in a relationship with a narcissist (sometimes all three).This isn’t to say these people must avoid relationships at all costs, just that they will likely have to put forth significant effort to ensure the integrity of their boundaries, as well as the continued development of their independent identities.
Lack of self-responsibility, self-honesty, and adherence to truth
Are you sick of me talking about self-responsibility, self-honesty, and truth yet? The fact of the matter is that these things are so critical to both achieving and maintaining fulfillment, purpose, and happiness that I doubt there is a single living person (aside from socio and psychopaths) who can manage it without adhering to them. Lying to ourselves and others can trick our identities by offering them a sense of reprieve from what may have otherwise been a difficult experience, but the delusions we create as a result will always catch up with us eventually.
Experiencing something that you perceive as less painful than an alternative is not the same as experiencing something truly good for you and your identity, though it may feel like it in the moment. Nor does the experience of the less painful thing confer any truth regarding the positive development of your identity, again, even if it might temporarily feel like it. Getting what we want is not the same as getting what we need, even if the pleasure, fulfillment, and sense of truth we experience can feel the same for a time.
Have you ever been in serious chronic pain, taken a prescription painkiller, and felt the euphoria of your pain level dropping from a 9 to a 5? The sense of pleasure we experience as a result of the temporary reduction of pain can, in our minds, convince us that we have taken a positive step towards healing, even if what we’ve done turns out to be the exact opposite in the long run. It is exactly this promise of euphoria and reprieve from pain that so often results in addiction and the development of bad habits which eventually make things far worse for us.
There are practically an infinite number of “painkillers” we can use to reduce the symptoms of our physical and mental wounds, and our brains tend to feel so thankful for these reductions that they mistakenly convince us we have made a healthy choice for ourselves. If we want to address the root cause of our pain and eliminate it at the source, then we need to look beyond the pleasure of temporarily reducing it; beyond the surface symptoms. The only way to do this is to strictly adhere to truth and reality, especially in the face of desires and experiences which promise to offer us immediate and permanent relief. Particularly with wounds of the mind, there is no such thing.
The moments that test our commitment to truth will never stop, and our skills in using it will depend on our ability to stay committed, even after we have escaped depression. Remember that we must be willing to point the finger of blame at ourselves before we point it at others. We may not always find ourselves at fault, but we must be willing to search. Of course, it’s important to keep in mind that we are not looking for reasons to beat ourselves up either – we are looking for opportunities to grow. We can blame ourselves and be compassionate at the same time, which is exactly what will be required of us to grow as people and sustain that which we desire from life.
Addiction after Depression
We’ve already covered addiction some, but what can it look like after we’ve left our depression behind? As I mentioned before, leaving depression has the welcoming effect of expanding our window of enjoyment which, in turn, can actually leave us with a larger list of things which could potentially become addictions for us. Perhaps that framing is a bit on the negative side, but it is important to keep in mind as we learn to navigate life outside of depression.
I would argue the best mindset to maintain when confronted with opportunities for addiction is one of balance. There will always be things we wish to spend large amounts of time doing, and I believe the key to observing whether or not you are falling out of balance with yourself and how you spend your time is to practice self-honesty and ask yourself, “Am I doing this because it’s pleasurable, healthy, and fulfilling, or because it’s covering up something I don’t want to feel?” If we cannot, with confidence, agree with ourselves that we’re engaging because it brings us joy and moves us forward in life, and not because we’re trying to cover up pain, then we would do well to consider reducing the amount of time we spend engaging, or even stop altogether. Easier said than done, but we must accept that sometimes this will be necessary.
Similarly, if we find ourselves only able to enjoy something by consistently engaging in an addiction (typically mind-altering substances) before engaging in the thing itself, then that is a clear sign we are avoiding or trying to cover up something.
I believe the feeling of boredom is also a great indicator of whether or not we choose to do something because it enriches our lives, or because it hides our pain. Especially for the dopamine-addicted, the experience of boredom can be excruciating, and often has us scrambling to find anything that can fill the void. My suggestion is to learn to sit with boredom on a regular basis as, once we become accustomed to it and it causes less pain, our minds are far more likely to come up with healthy and fulfilling activities to engage in, instead of the nearest activity that can alleviate the boredom. As we sit with our boredom, the window of things which could alleviate that boredom will grow over time, and eventually encompass a range of things which are actually healthy for us to engage in.
With that in mind, I must once again warn you of the dangers of convenience. Convenience can be, and often is the enemy of motivation, creativity, growth, and fulfillment. Achieving pleasure is not always supposed to be effortless and, when we get used to it being effortless, our bodies demand that it stays that way, or we pay a physical and emotional price.
Ever since I was a kid, boredom has been one of the most intolerable feelings I’ve been capable of experiencing. Since leaving my depression, nothing has come even close to dragging me back into the pit of depression as often as boredom has. Especially for those who have lots of experience with depression, and have difficulties staying out of their heads, boredom can be incredibly difficult to deal with, and addiction is easily within reach if we can’t learn to manage it. I like to try and equate my boredom with the calm before the creative storm.
It’s funny, because no matter how many times I seem to prove to myself that sitting with my boredom for a bit, before choosing something to engage with, will give me the best chance at living the life I want for myself, it’s still a very difficult thing to integrate and remember for me, both physically and emotionally. I’m far from having discovered the entirety of my space between steps, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that sitting with boredom before choosing something to engage in does work, and I can’t remember a single time it hasn’t, for me.
My final piece of advice for addressing addiction is to pay attention to what your yearning for it might indicate. If you find yourself craving activities that do not carry you toward your goals in life, then that may be a sign you need to revisit some of your space and/or steps. When I’m feeling this way, I like to go back to what I know works for me: psychedelics, and all the tools and skills contained in this book. Stick with what works!
Psychedelics aren’t just great for leaving depression, they can be great for staying out of it as well, while also serving to reinforce what we learned and felt as we left our depression. I don’t require their use often, but they rarely, if ever fail to help get me back on track. Just remember, psychedelics are not for avoiding pain either, and it is entirely possible to become addicted to them, just like anything else, in an attempt to escape what we are feeling.
Familiarity with and Longing for Pain
The cravings to return to pain are still with me, and I’ve been living without severe depression for several years now. The pain always makes thinking and decision making more difficult and confusing, which can leave us feeling lost, and searching for any sign of familiarity, including the pain that used to define our lives. Sometimes, familiarity with the painful is less uncomfortable than moving forward toward the unknown. The longer we have lived with the pain, the more often we are likely to seek it out when we find ourselves momentarily not knowing what to do.
Do not mistake this “longing” for pain as evidence that you are depressed again, or that your progress amounted to nothing. This is a natural part of life, and our bodies are trying to tell us something valuable when it happens. In these moments, we can either resort to what we used to do and put ourselves at risk of actually slipping back into suffering, or we can engage with all the new tools and skills we have developed for dealing with difficult moments. If nothing seems to work, then I have two suggestions for you.
Read through your journal. Your journal is your recipe for happiness, as it should include the thoughts, feelings, experiences, ideas, activities, etc. that you used to escape depression. Similarly, you can always use this book to help remind you of what may have worked the first time around.
If that doesn’t work, then it might be time for you to try something new. Have the gall to believe that you may just have something powerful and unique to offer to yourself, and maybe even other people. Why do you think I wrote this book?
What are some of the things we can do to ensure we stay on our path and move forward?
Keep yourself busy with things that, in some way, contribute to the development of one or more of your depression-fighting skills. We don’t need to spend all our time working on our depression, at least not purposefully. The trick is to find the activities that naturally contribute to this process without excessive additional effort on your part.
If my goal is to add 6 inches to my vertical jump, I’m not going to setup a 10-foot bar in my yard and just run at it like a madman until I get what I want, because that’s not likely to work for me, and it’s not likely to contribute to keeping depression at bay; it doesn’t fit the space between my steps. It might be the best method for someone else, but my best version of developing that skill belongs to me, and me only.
My version of developing that skill in a way which serves me beyond simply adding inches to my vertical jump might take on multiple forms. I could add a fun new leg exercise to my workout, I could spend more time playing basketball, I could watch a YouTube video that inspires me to try something new, etc. The point is, there are lots of ways to learn something new and develop a skill which also serves to keep us moving forward, and if you want to move forward, then the best place to start is typically with something that already comes naturally to you or holds your interest in some way.
Things that naturally hold our interest are tremendous advantages for us when it comes to developing new skills and achieving sustainability. If your body isn’t on board to some degree, it’s much harder to learn, and you are more likely to feel that you simply aren’t capable. Find things that are fun and rewarding, but that also present challenge and regular opportunities to improve the things about yourself you wish to improve. Remember, challenges that are fun are much easier to overcome.
Do things throughout the day that make you feel powerful, even, and especially if they feel silly. Also, give “feeling” to what you do, allow yourself to truly feel the effects that an activity has on you, and even encourage the build and release. That feeling is just more of you trying to come out. Don’t be embarrassed by, ashamed, or afraid of it!
It is so easy to accidentally and unknowingly stop practicing self-love and instead revert to trying to prove that we’re worth it, or searching for proof from others. Be wary of this trap, as these things can often look and feel very similar, especially when other people are involved.
Make sure you place some effort into discovering new means of feeling good things about yourself. It’s easy to become complacent once you have escaped some of your pain, and this complacency is a big contributor to relapse. Do not allow yourself to sit comfortably in your new, less painful space. You need to keep moving and practicing what works, or that space will become populated with the same pain you left behind.
Attempt to avoid going back to comfortable and familiar things just because you feel better. Some of those things are not serving you – the opposite even. For me, this is a particularly dangerous and ever-present trap. When you are so depressed that almost nothing is enjoyable, then you make progress out of that depression, it can suddenly be the case that some things give the allure of enjoyment when, in reality, they may simply be less painful than other things. So, of course, we find ourselves drawn to those things – eager to consume them and bask in the enjoyment. Unfortunately, many of those things are exactly what helped put us into depression in the first place.
Remember the painkiller example from earlier? Imagine taking a painkiller when you’re in extreme pain, suddenly finding yourself in less pain, and mistaking the euphoria of your reduction in pain for a total and healthy removal of it, instead of what it is: a temporary decrease in pain which will ultimately cause us more harm than good if we continue to rely on it. It would be all-too-easy to seek out moments like this instead of moments that are truly healthy, fulfilling, and pleasurable.
The further we find ourselves away from depression, the more things will start to fall into our window of enjoyment. Do not make the mistake of avoiding whatever pain still remains by selecting from what is now a much larger pool of pain-avoidance activities. Enjoyment should most often be in the pursuit of bettering ourselves and moving forward, not finding a new location to stand still in.
Punctuate your progress with something special. The point is to emotionally anchor what you have experienced and begun integrating. This is essentially just celebrating in a language your feeling self understands – it needs to be included in the celebration.
When you stop using your brain power to survive, it reallocates itself back to where it belongs - drastically increasing your cognitive abilities, and countless other things. Just remember that improvement of these things can also mean new challenges. Do not fear them, lean into them and know that you will come out better, just like you did before.
The End, but not really
If it wasn’t obvious by now, there is no end to pursuing happiness, and you would do well to understand the time to be happy is never “as soon as”, it is now, always. This isn’t to say that one can expect to feel happy at every moment of every day, rather, I want you to try to understand that both happiness and depression can be just a few steps away from anywhere you find yourself. I’ve had days where I was convinced I was back in the pit of depression, only to find myself what felt like miles away from it the next day. The progress you make will stick with you forever, even if it occasionally becomes difficult to feel and access.
I’ll leave you with an entry from my journal that I wrote on the very day I discovered and truly felt love for myself for the first time in decades.
“I look at the Bryan inside, and he no longer looks like a quiet, defeated, scared little kid who can’t figure out why I hated him, or why everything hurt so much all the time and for so long. He looks alive and complete now, as if he’s been embraced and accepted by exactly what he was searching for the entire time. He’s not standing still anymore either, he’s moving and growing FAST, with an ear-to-ear smile and a clear determination to achieve, love, and be loved more each day. More than anything, he’s eager to show me all he’s been doing while he awaited my love and acceptance.”
One last thing:
A book (or anything, for that matter) can make little sense and be frustrating on one experience consuming it, and life-changing the next. It all depends on our perceptions and what we’re ready to hear. I did my best to write this book in a way that makes it as easy to reread as possible. If anything in this book spoke to you, but you ultimately found that it could not help you where you are currently, I strongly suggest reading, or even skimming through it again at a later date. I have done this with several books, and some of them ended up being life-changing for me on the second or third readthrough. Whichever manner you choose to pursue happiness, I wish you the best of luck, and I encourage you to remember that you are worth loving and you deserve happiness, unless you like pineapple on your pizza, in which case you can kindly go fuck yourself.