Tripping into your Identity - Part 4

Truth, Self-honesty, and Self-responsibility…Again

We’ve covered some of this already, but I think it’s important to reiterate just how necessary these things are to self-improvement and healing of any kind.

The sad truth is that these things are no longer valued or even understood by an overwhelming number of people in the ways they need to be in order to live meaningful and fulfilling lives. We have become a society that blames others for most, if not all of the problems we have laid upon ourselves and, in many cases, it has become fashionable and even virtuous to do so at literally every conceivable opportunity. We are a society that, for every problem we have created for ourselves, we will instead point to fifty perceived problems which we convince ourselves someone else has created, and that are outright preventing us from achieving what we want; creating tremendous resentment and helplessness within us. It is all too easy to find fault in someone or something else, and incredibly challenging to own up to our own mistakes and life choices.

Here’s a truth: We are all victims of many things, but those things can either define us and solidify our helplessness against them and our lives, or we can acknowledge that they happened, reclaim our agency, and move with passion and intent towards our goals. We can let others dictate what we do and how we feel, poisoning ourselves with helplessness, fear, resentment, and anger, or we can say, “NO, I decide what I can do and how I will live”.

If you want to identify as a powerless, helpless victim, then that is exactly how you will live. If you want to identify as the master of your own life, then you will become just that. There will never be a shortage of people and things that attempt to stand in your way, and you can either chose to stop and live under their control, real or perceived, or you can move right past them and achieve what you want for yourself.

Please understand that I do not at all condone doing whatever it is you feel like doing without any moral/ethical consideration of the impact on yourself and others. Instead, I wish to help you understand that taking control of your life is a crucial step towards achieving agency, and ridding yourself of helplessness and unnecessary suffering. It is often the case that what we believe we want for ourselves will end up causing us and/or others tremendous harm. To avoid this, a solid foundation of values is absolutely essential in learning to love, trust, and make good decisions for ourselves, as well as to move right past those who seek to convince us we cannot do something, or that we should accept a life of victimhood. We must develop our agency, but never at the expense of doing serious and unnecessary damage to ourselves or others, otherwise we are effectively taking one step forward, and two steps back, or worse…

If you cannot live in reality, be brutally honest with yourself, and take responsibility for your choices, then you are essentially just flailing down a random path without direction, with your eyes closed and your ears plugged – utterly incredulous to anything and everything you encounter and damage along the way. If it wasn’t obvious, that’s not going to work at all; that is a path to further helplessness and suffering. We cannot discover or navigate our paths if we live to validate our poor decisions, anger, helplessness, fear, resentment, ignorance, and cognitive dissonance. They will defeat us, and they will likely do so without us even noticing.

People who chronically exist in this state have an intuitive understanding that they are not in control of their lives, and so they seek to control others and/or to be controlled and directed by others, often without realizing it. They seek validation, power, safety, and security above all else, and they will take them by force, or will willingly give up their autonomy and freedoms to anyone or anything they perceive as being capable of granting these things to them.

Living in a state such as this, outside of the truth, is not living at all, it is merely surviving in chaos. Agency over your life cannot be stolen, and it cannot be granted to you by others; it must be generated by you.

The Pancake Rule

I’d like to briefly cover two things that, thanks to the increasing prominence of absurd, destructive, and irrational political theory and ideology, have gained popularity in recent years: Lived experience, and personal truth.

Simply put, any “personal” truth which ultimately conflicts with shared, objective reality is in total opposition to achieving and sustaining happiness and fulfillment. If it conflicts with reality, then the fact that it’s personal to you grants it no additional value or validity, period. That isn’t to say personal truth doesn’t exist, or that it never applies, rather, it must never be used to excuse a thought, feeling, or action that ultimately conflicts with or obfuscates reality.

Using the Pillars of Truth system, if you ping reality and return an error, then your personal truth must follow the same rules as any other pillar of truth which cannot adhere to reality – it must fall. A person’s personal truth is not sacred or reflective of reality by virtue of feeling real to them, nor is their lived experience, as much as they might desire otherwise. Personal truth and lived experience are fully subject to individual perception, and a person’s perception is unbelievably easy to corrupt, just ask your local narcissist and their victims!

Say I’m taking a nighttime walk in a busy city, when I suddenly get impatient at a crosswalk and bolt across it, getting hit by a car in the process. My personal truth and lived experience of this moment, what lead up to it, and what resulted from it could be literally anything I want them to be. These things will be heavily influenced by my creativity, desires, past experiences, values, beliefs, and perceptions, no matter how corrupt, untruthful, or ridiculous they might be.

Who’s going to tell me my feelings regarding the experience are invalid? What if the conclusions I draw from it are that it is wildly unsafe to walk in any major city after 6pm, and that anyone who was involved in programming the light at that traffic stop to take so long is complicit in my accident and subsequent trauma? What if I was wearing sports attire of my favorite team, and decided that the person who hit me only did so because they are a fan of a rival team? Who could prove that wasn’t the case?

There is no shortage of things we can project and impose on the experience to escape the reality of what actually happened, and how we may have contributed to it happening. Can you begin to see what might happen to our ability to perceive and accept reality if we were to engage in this kind of thinking regularly?

The important question is, how do any of these beliefs – how does my personal truth and lived experience in this instance, help me navigate the world from here on out? They don’t, plain and simple; the exact opposite, in fact. These beliefs would only serve to further remove me from reality, and make navigating my path, and the world, that much more difficult. The only thing that could help me in this instance, would be to accept the reality of what happened and how I contributed, not to emotionally invest in the personal truth I wish to impose on the experience, which ultimately conflicts with reality.

Excessive emotional investment into a belief which doesn’t align with reality is a guaranteed path to severe cognitive dissonance and helplessness. The moment you decide to invest yourself into a lie is the moment you trade your agency for a commitment to sustaining delusion – all to achieve temporary and false fulfillment of your personal desire. It’s not a good deal, and it’s going to catch up with you eventually. Remember, reality never loses.

But what about truths that only apply to us as individuals, and don’t necessarily hold true for others? As far as I’m concerned, these are the only circumstances in which personal truth not only exists, but may actually be beneficial in moving forward in our lives. Here’s the catch though, a personal truth is only true if it doesn’t ultimately conflict with reality; if it lives up to our standards of truth, and creates order out of chaos. Of course, the difficulty lies in determining when we have achieved order, or when we have achieved chaos, as it can be difficult for many people to make this determination, especially when their desires and beliefs conflict with the outcome. Again, cognitive dissonance and ignorance are incredibly powerful, especially when other people support and feed them.

Here's a quick example of useful personal truth in action:

Say I want to lose some weight and I’ve come to find that eating pancakes every day seems to work best for me (yes, I know someone who did this successfully). So, as far as I’m concerned, eating pancakes every day is a good way to lose weight. That’s my personal truth because, well, it met my expectations and goals (order), it didn’t conflict with reality (it worked), and it is definitely not an all-encompassing truth for every person that pancakes are the best way to lose weight – it’s personal to me, for reasons that are specific to me.

However, the most important part to note here is that the underlying truth of reality is still present in this example, which means that, ultimately, a universal truth(reality) was still adhered to. In this case, that universal truth was that eating in moderation, with an appropriate calorie deficit, over time, resulted in weight loss. As it turns out, I lost weight because I only allowed myself a certain amount of pancakes each day, not because pancakes have some kind of magical weight loss property that only applies to me (if only).

So, in the end, my personal truth could only be true because it ultimately fell in line with reality! Even so, it was important and maybe even necessary for me to make the distinction that it was my personal truth to some degree, and not a truth that could apply to everyone, at least, on the surface. It was important because, despite my knowing that pancakes aren’t exactly the epitome of healthy eating, there were factors involved in the nutrition plan that made it workable for me as the unique individual I am; it filled up my space between steps. The pancake diet spoke to me, and so I followed it, and it worked. PERSONAL TRUTH.

This is why it is so important to communicate with and consider what we are saying to ourselves, even if we don’t always obey in the end. It’s not that we exist outside reality simply because we want to, it’s because the space between our steps on the path are all different, which can often take the form of what could reasonably be defined as a truth that is personal, and may only apply to us. In the pancake example, the step was something we would all have to adhere to in order to lose weight if we so desired: achieve a calorie deficit. However, the space leading up to that step was personal and specialized to fit the unique person I am, which may have been necessary in order to reach the step.

To summarize: Personal truth can be real and valid, but is ultimately still subject to reality at its core. If your personal truth conflicts with reality, then it’s not actually a truth; it’s just something you want to be true.

Identifying things in your life that are getting in the way

If it wasn’t obvious, this part of the process will be different for everyone, but there are absolutely some things we can do to help us identify what is getting in the way of our success.

I don’t believe it would be beneficial for most people to attempt to rid themselves of every single little thing they perceive as getting in their way. Instead, we have a much greater chance at clearing our path of unnecessary obstacles by focusing on our most severe issues – the ones that are constantly and undeniably getting in the way. For most people, it will also become much easier to clean up the smaller obstacles once the larger ones have been identified and addressed.

So, how do we identify our biggest issues? I believe it is the case that most of our biggest issues will not clearly present themselves to us until we actually begin walking down our path towards happiness. When we’re standing still, it can be incredibly easy to imagine what is in our way and, sometimes, we may be correct. However, in order to verify our own obstacles, I believe it is necessary to actually run into them, repeatedly, as we move forward. After all, it’s much easier to observe a hurdle after it trips you up, instead of gazing at it from the starting line; creating unnecessary anxiety by imagining it could be anything, especially if it happens repeatedly.

Therapy, as well as journaling, will be very valuable to us during this process for a variety of reasons. Therapy is useful in that we can benefit from the observations, advice, and guidance of a trained professional. Think of your therapist as your track coach here – they are watching you run into the hurdles over and over, and that is where their focus is supposed to be. You, on the other hand, are focused on moving forward, and may need some assistance in identifying why you tripped in the first place, what it was you may have tripped over, and how you might avoid tripping over it next time. Sometimes we’re not even aware that we tripped, but a good therapist can blow the whistle and help to alert us that something has happened, as well as provide suggestions on how to try next time.

A word of caution, please do not substitute a good therapist for the advice and support of family and friends. While family and friends are a necessity to achieving happiness for so many reasons, they will, more often than not, seek to validate us or themselves instead of telling us what we may need to hear. The people in our lives want to feel useful and important to us, and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, most of them simply are not qualified to help us guide ourselves along our incredibly complex and unique paths.

It’s sort of like taking the advice of well-meaning spectators instead of your track coach. It might be extremely useful sometimes, but a good coach is trained for, invested in, and focused entirely on what you are trying to achieve. Consider the advice of both, but understand that your coach trained for this job, and they are fully invested in seeing you succeed. They will not always be correct, but they will provide you with invaluable information and focused support. They will, as a result of walking with you on your journey, know and understand certain things about you and your path that most people are unlikely to see.

Of course, not all therapists are created equal, and I would strongly disagree that any therapist is better than no therapist. There are plenty of therapists out there, especially within the last five to ten years, that will make things much, much worse for you, and I’ll cover some of the things to look out for in chapter 7.

As for journaling, this is how we will keep track of what gets in our way while we walk down our paths. Many of our thoughts and feelings feel so important and memorable to us when they occur that we convince ourselves we couldn’t possibly forget them. Well, we can, and we will, constantly - especially if we’re depressed and/or have dopamine and other physiological issues.

Not only will we forget many of them, but we will forget the impression and impact they left on us. We’ll forget the things they reminded us of; the things they made us think about, feel, and consider; the specific emotions we experienced when we first had them. These things are so unbelievably important to not only making progress on our paths, but to getting back on them when we inevitably stray; they are clues to our identities. Our journals contain these things, and allow us to reference them whenever we are feeling lost. Your journal is quite literally your own recipe for happiness; your own instruction manual for operating yourself properly.

While I’m sure many people can achieve happiness without the help of a journal or some other recording tool, I promise you that, for most people, it will be much more difficult.

Social Circle and Community - Avoiding Isolation

Truth bomb: Isolation feeds our fears and anxieties, disconnects us from the people who are important to us, strengthens our ignorance and cognitive dissonance, acclimates us to living in our minds, promotes a variety of unhealthy behaviors, cripples our communication skills, damages our relationship with ourselves and others, reduces our ability for self-love and self-care, suppresses our immune systems and other physiological functions, reduces our quality of sleep, promotes cognitive decline, and increases the risk of death from the majority of the leading causes of death, for everyone.

The physical effects of isolation have been likened to that of smoking close to a pack of cigarettes every day and are, in many ways, far worse. Put simply: Frequent and prolonged isolation kills our bodies and minds on a level that rivals the most dangerous risk factors we are aware of that lead to suffering and premature death. It’s bad. Very, very bad.

If you’re thinking to yourself, “I talk to my friends on social media, through phone/text, on video games, Discord, Zoom calls, etc., all the time, so I’m not isolated.” No. Just no. Please understand that those things, when regularly substituted for in-person communication, severely exacerbate the problem, not improve it. Those things do not provide meaningful and complete social connection, they simulate it. The evidence for this fact is, again, absolutely overwhelming, but that hasn’t stopped millions of people from convincing themselves that their social behaviors are perfectly fine, or even healthy and desirable.

The number and kinds of beneficial physiological processes that occur when interacting with a person in real life cannot begin to be replicated through indirect means; not even close. Human beings have evolved for millions of years to require frequent, in-person social interaction, and no amount of digital interaction can replace that requirement.

This doesn’t mean that each of us requires hundreds of friends and family to be happy. What it means is that we need to be in the presence of others on a regular basis. For most people, a close, tight-knit group of friends and family will be more than enough, even if it consists of just  a dozen or so people. For others, they may require that tens, or even hundreds of people exist within their social circle. Some people thrive off of maintaining close relationships with a few, and others require constant interaction with a large number of new and different people.

As with everything else in this book, what you require will ultimately be up to you, but please do not fool yourself into believing that you can get by all on your own, or even with one or two people in your circle. The fewer people we have in our circle, the more risk we run of producing negative feedback loops, and even worsening some of the effects of our isolation.

We need people in our lives we trust and respect, who can deservedly reflect the best version of ourselves back at us with confidence and meaning, and for whom we can do the same. We need people who differ in opinions and beliefs, and who can challenge what we think and feel about the world, and even ourselves. We need opportunities to express, consider, and understand the feelings and emotions that are only possible when communicating with another human being in person. We need people that inspire us, give us new ideas, make us feel good about ourselves and the world. Hell, we even need occasional interactions with people who get in our way, as we cannot develop our skills of overcoming them and other challenges unless we have opportunities to face them. We will encounter people like this no matter what, and we need to be equipped to deal with them. Conflict is unavoidable, and it is simply one of the many skills we all need to learn how to develop.

We need people in our lives, and there is no substitution for traditional, in-person communication and interaction, period.

The Importance of Practicing and Developing Self-love

Developing our self-love is one of the most important steps we will take along our journey, and its absence is one of the only things I believe all depressed people have in common. This isn’t to say depressed people are incapable of loving anything about themselves. Instead, it’s to say that the resentment developed by the thinking self, toward the feeling self, has removed a depressed person’s ability to sustain any consistent and meaningful love, empathy, or compassion for themselves. Their resentment has erected a barrier which prevents whatever self-love they possess from benefiting them in the ways which are required to live truly happy, meaningful, and fulfilling lives.

When I first entered therapy, I had a troubling, yet clarifying moment of realization that I conveyed to my therapist. I said, “I think my problem is that I could stand to become just a bit more delusional”. I said this because, at the time, I felt like I needed to lie to myself about certain things in order to feel good about myself, and I envied the seemingly effortless happiness that many “slightly less truth-obsessed and introspective” people seemed to be capable of. Despite the fact I was mostly joking when I said it, I knew there existed a very important truth somewhere in that statement. Unfortunately, it would be about ten years before I discovered how correct I turned out to be. However, it wasn’t that I needed to be more delusional, per se, it was that I needed to more often engage in thoughts and behaviors which, at the time, felt delusional to me. I needed to love myself, and I needed to believe I deserved it.

For example, I needed to actually physically and mentally tell myself that I love myself, and that I’m a fun, unique, thoughtful, and funny person who deserves love. Those things felt delusional to me because, despite the fact that I knew I was capable of being those things at times, I did not feel like they were accurate descriptors of the person I ultimately was. Instead, I felt that I was only allowed to feel those things about myself after demonstrably proving to myself that they were true. So, essentially, the evidence for those things was only evidence if it happened recently, and to such a strong degree that I could use it as undeniable proof. I was only as good as my most recent, undeniable successes, and I was constantly in a state of cleaning and making up for my failures.

But that’s a huge problem…  We cannot always have the proof we wish we could have in order to assert our own value. We have bad days, and we have good days. We make good decisions, and we make disastrous ones. If we allow our faults and mistakes to define us entirely, then we cannot possibly love ourselves. It’s interesting that so many of us have no issue with allowing our faults to define us, but are so totally averse to allowing our qualities to even make an appearance.

Imagine if we treated other people this way. What if every single person in our lives was nothing more than a collection of their faults and mistakes? Wouldn’t we just hate, fear, and resent everyone? Why are we so charitable with our perceptions of other people, especially people we want to like, and so impossibly hard on ourselves? Shouldn’t we want to like ourselves at least as much, if not more than others? What if we directed the charitable bias we have towards others at ourselves instead?

It’s so much easier to remember the bad things, especially when we live in our heads, in constant fear and doubt. Remembering and focusing on the bad things is a form of protection and control; survival, and it makes factoring in and remembering the good things feel delusional, uncomfortable, and unnatural. “We can’t be that good, can we? Just look at this most recent failure, and you’ll see…”. If we see ourselves as bad, then it’s much easier to avoid disappointing ourselves and others when we try to be good, and experience the pain of failing to perfectly meet our, or other people’s expectations. We are, once again, trying to survive, instead of trying to live. We are attempting to exert control over both our own, and other people’s perceptions of us.

“If I accept that I’m bad, then it won’t hurt as much each time I fail, and prove my badness to myself and others. If I believe I’m good, then the pain and invalidation I experience when I fail will be too much to handle.”

When a person continually fails to meet their own expectations of themselves, they will, instead, attempt to control other people’s perceptions of them. This is a profoundly exhausting and helplessness-inducing thing to do, as attempting to manage the perceptions of others is simply not reliable, sustainable, or healthy. Try as you might, no amount of management of other people’s perceptions will bring you happiness, peace, fulfillment, etc. It’s not only a waste of time, it will invariably make things much worse.

Depressed and anxious people are always attempting to exert control over their experiences, as the thing they want to avoid more than anything else is additional pain and suffering. When we’re chronically depressed, we become so acclimated to doing this that we often don’t even realize we’re doing it anymore, it just feels like a natural and authentic part of who we are. These attempts at control manifest in countless ways in depressed people, including purposeful destruction of their appearance and health, purposeful displays of depraved, dangerous, and unhealthy behaviors, criticism and resentment toward others, affinity for impulsivity, recruitment of others to share in their suffering, etc.

If we want to learn how to love ourselves, then we must learn to let go of the control we are constantly exerting, lean into the fear of the unknown, and practice becoming friends with ourselves. We need to let go of what we mistakenly believe we can control with force: how we are perceived by ourselves and others. By letting go of this attempt at control, we remove all of the weight and stress that hanging on burdens us with, and we reclaim all the energy we were using to hang on.

What many depressed people don’t realize is that exerting constant control is absolutely exhausting, both mentally and physically. We are the ones who have to suffer as a result of our desperation to hold onto control, as the unhealthy manner in which we exert control disconnects us from what we need to feel and experience (the unfamiliar) but won’t allow ourselves to. Would you want to be friends with someone who was controlling everything you do? Well, your feeling self does not want that either, it wants to be free to develop an understanding of who it is, to be that thing, and to be loved even if it can’t be exactly what you or others want it to be. So long as we feverishly grasp for control, we cannot know what it is to freely be ourselves.

What is Self-Love, and how do we Achieve it for Ourselves?

Self-love is self-explanatory and simple, but hardly an easy thing to achieve, and there is no shortage of things that can get in the way of achieving it. Self-love is exactly the same kind of love you have for others, just directed inwards. It’s being compassionate and charitable towards yourself, feeling a deep connection, being kind, empathetic, understanding, honest, trusting, grateful, proud, and anything else you would grant to a person in your life whom you love. Self-love is desiring the best for yourself, believing you deserve it, and making it happen.

One of the biggest hurdles of self-love is that, unlike our relationship with others, we are privilege to every single one of our own thoughts and actions. We see all of our mistakes, all of our faults, our wrongdoings, etc., and we focus on them for reasons that vary from person to person. If we allow ourselves to, we can spend most of our time focusing on and reinforcing these things. Remember how neural pathways work? Use the neural pathways of self-criticism often enough, and they strengthen. Meanwhile, the pathways of self-love deteriorate.

We are our own toughest critics, and when we are sufficiently beaten down by ourselves, even the tiniest of external criticisms can feel incredibly painful and damning – constantly pushing us over the edge and confirming our own worst feelings of ourselves. When we don’t trust or love ourselves, we are much more likely to depend on other people’s word for who and what we are, and even rest our sense of existence on their validation or invalidation. We lose the ability to validate ourselves, and generate value internally. When this happens, we will often even allow others to direct us into the identity they believe best suits us, as we have willingly denied ourselves of the agency to do it for ourselves; we are lost. Like with all things, if we practice hating ourselves, we will get very good at it, feel comfortable with it, and even prefer it to the unknown (loving ourselves).

What many people lose sight of though, is that we aren’t just privilege to all of the things we see as being negative in ourselves – we’re also privilege to all the good things! This is such an easy thing to forget and to fail to utilize for someone who has thoroughly beaten themselves down, but it’s exactly what we need to pick ourselves back up and move forward. When we spend all of our time focusing on what we’ve done wrong, whether truly wrong or incorrectly perceived as such, we leave no time or energy to love the things about ourselves that we do right. Remember how everything in this book is a skill? Well, learning to love yourself is a skill too, and if you’re out of practice, then you aren’t likely to be very good at it. It’s not just something you find one day and hold onto forever - it requires practice and consistent use.

In my case, I became addicted to, and skilled at beating myself up; looking at my life and figuring out what pain to escape instead of looking at my life and loving what’s good about it, or what could be good about it. I lost the ability to practice gratitude for the moments I wasn’t seeking to escape, and I didn’t know how to love myself for it, or learn to recognize when it was happening.

So, how do we practice self-love? It might be getting old at this point, but it looks different for everyone. I can’t describe what your space between steps looks like, but I can give you some ideas and steps to aim for.

What are some of the things you love about yourself?

Write it down, repeat it to yourself in your mind, out loud, in front of a mirror, etc. This will be more difficult for some than others, but the goal here is not to create a giant list, it’s to start with anything you can think of. Maybe you love your sense of humor, or your intelligence, or that you’re good at a particular thing, or that you never forget to brush your teeth… It really doesn’t matter, if you love it about yourself and it aligns with reality, then write it down and repeat it to yourself every single day, no matter how ridiculous or insignificant it might sound. If you can’t find anything you love about yourself, then try starting with something you like or, at the very least, don’t hate about yourself. Remember, everyone’s starting line is different.

Please refrain from comparing yourself with others during this process, as it will almost certainly do more harm than good. With time, you will start to integrate, feel, and believe what you are saying about yourself in a way which you previously did not. Just like we convinced ourselves that we weren’t worthy of self-love by repeating negative things to ourselves and allowing others to confirm it, we will eventually convince ourselves that we are worthy of love by repeating and focusing on the positive things. After a while, it becomes natural and even easy to do so, and others will both pick up on and validate it along with us.

What are the things that make you feel powerful, grateful, loved, valuable, unstoppable, etc.? What is your concert moment? What switches you on? What are some things about yourself that you are embarrassed or ashamed to enjoy, or admit you enjoy? These are the things which chip away at your helplessness and resentment toward yourself, and develop your agency and self-love.

Make any effort to commit to loving these things and practicing gratitude for them, then take any step towards pursuing them; any step at all. See them for what they are: a gift given to you by someone you care about and love (yourself), and who cares for, loves, and wants the best for you, whether you realize it or not. The gift can only be for you, as no other person is capable of receiving it. If you don’t open it, it cannot exist, nor can it be shared. Open it, love it, be grateful it was given to you by yourself, and share it with the world without fear or reservation. This will take practice and time, but psychedelics can absolutely help speed the process up and make it more enjoyable.