Here we are
And here we are. It’s day two and I feel obligated to write something so as not to feel the shame of abandoning my new pet project after just one day. But once again, my head is so full that I don’t know which thoughts are valuable and which ones are just background noise. I never have a lack of thoughts or inspiration, I have an overabundance that is so overhwelming that it paralyzes me into doing, or writing, nothing.
Table Of Content
When I write, the words just come out of my fingers as they pop into my head. I often have to try my very best not to delete everything I write because of my own instant judgement. The second I start reading back, I start criticizing heavily and very few writings make the cut. This relentless inner critic is always on, also when I’m not writing. It has very strong opinions on the way I walk, the way I talk, the way I dress, the way I eat and even the way I breathe. I think it just really enjoys the critique, as it desperately grasps at straws to find something, no matter how small. I mean, how bad can my breathing be? I’m still here, right?
It’s kind of funny when you’re aware of it. This weird little voice in your head constantly berating what is in the end part of the same organism as itself. It makes no sense whatsoever. But it starts being less fun when it goes from being actively observed to being in the background. Because for me, and I feel for many people with many kinds of mental illness, this voice is always there even when we don’t notice it. It creates a constant feeling of dread, inferiority and anxiety that hovers over life as a dark raincloud, either ready to ruin your day or actively doing so.
The voice that's not a voice
The voice isn’t an actual voice for me. My therapist would love it if it was, and he’d probably jizz his pants if it were my dad’s or something. Easy pickings! But it’s not my dad, or my mom, or that high school bully. It’s just a thing in my head. It’s not audible, it has no voice, it’s just there and for some reason I have granted it way too much authority. On many a day, I let it decide what I do (or more often: Don’t do), what I eat, what I wear, what I say and most importantly: what I feel. It makes me hide inside while I actually long to be outdoors. It makes me wear clothes that I hope others will approve of and it makes me silent in almost any social situation in fear of saying the wrong thing.
I don’t really know why I gave it this authority. It just kind of happened someday, apparently. It asked to take charge and I let it. Recently, on a pretty interesting episode of one of my favorite podcasts, they did a sort of exercise where you try to embody this voice and speak to it. Being at work at the time, I felt it was just slighty too embarassing to actually do it, but the idea has definitely stayed with me since. It kind of made me realize how much power I have given to this inner critic and how maybe I can learn to let go of it somewhat.
Because most of AvPD comes down to this, doesn’t it? Our critic is just way more intense than most. I think every human has it in some degree (as they’ll very gladly remind you of when you tell them about your disorder), but ours is turned way up. Like waaay up. It has become merciless and brutal and it tells us to not bother with anything; to avoid life, as that is the only way for our worthless asses to get out of otherwise certain humiliation and failure. I think this level of critique is hard to grasp for most people and it is why a lot of regular methods that work for anxiety and other self-image issues don’t tend to work for AvPD.
Letting go
How do we let go of this voice? How do we silence it? Is that even possible? The aforementioned podcast suggests literally talking to it like it’s a person, or a demon or whatever you want it to be, and asking it to give the reigns back to you. It sounds kind of crazy and way too easy to work, and it probably is. The cynic in me tells me it’s probably just a thing this dude made up to sell his book, and it just might be.
But the idea is interesting. And even though it won’t work for me because I cannot actively visualize things (I’ll go deeper into my aphantasia in another post), it has grasped me ever since I first heard it and I will try to dive deeper into this for my personal healing eventually.
Because there would be immense worth in any exercise that can even somewhat silence or degrade the weight of these thoughts, right? I’m not delusional enough to think I’ll ever have a mind free of inner criticism, but the immense weight of it is crushing right now… What if we can take some of that off?
Schema therapy
Look man, I’m just rambling into the void again. But I also feel like I’m onto something. For the past two months, I’ve been doing group schema therapy. Scheme therapy is relatively unknown compared to things like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, although the two are related. It is based on learning to be aware of the way your mind works in terms of a few dozen schemas and modes. I’ll do a whole seperate post once I’m deeper into the therapy (I’m not even halfway through), but I’ll try to do a quick summary.
Schemas are sort of like patterns of thoughts, beliefs and feelings that you default into. You can have one or many, but most people have a few that stand out. Mine are mostly “social isolation” and “inferiority”, but there are traces of many more. The way you cope with these schemas are divided into “avoidance”, “surrender” or “compensation”. Obviously, someone with AvPD will almost always opt for avoidance, perhaps mixed in with some surrender. The way you cope with your schemas then sets off a “mode”. Modes are things like “vulnerable child”, meaning you feel like exactly that: a vulnerable little kid that is incapable of changing his situation. Or the “angry protector”, using anger to keep people and triggers at a distance.
Obviously our minds are more complex than can be summed up in a few dozen of these. They often mix into fun little cocktails of misery. But it certainly is an interesting way to look at yourself, and the more I get into it, the more I start picking out these schemas and modes in my day to day life. I am walking outside and my inferiority or social isolation schema kicks in, causing me to avoid and rushing back home. There, triggered into a “detached protector” mode, I try to soothe myself in unhealthy ways (bad food, hiding in tech, masturbation).
Awareness
No matter how you want to look at it, it all comes down to awareness. Being aware of our inner critic, our schemas or whatever way you choose to look at it. It’s taking our minds off of autopilot and sitting back down in the drivers seat. Hey, that thought you just had, the one you had a thousand times this week… Where did it come from? Why is it there? How true is it and how much weight should we attach to it? Should it influence your actions or feelings? Or is it perhaps something that is no longer of use? In that case, you can throw it out, at least for now. It’ll return surely, but it has lost a tiny bit of it’s power just by being observed and objectively studied.
Many ways are presented to do this, but none are as easy as the writers of their books will have you think. In the end, these patterns (no matter if you want to call them schemas or demons or anything else) are ingrained for years and years. And no matter how bad we want them to, it will take quite a lot of hard work to rewire them into something more constructive. That’s just the harsh reality of mental illness. You can’t just let it sit and hope it gets better, you have to keep trying, every single day. I know it’s tiring, trust me. I’m fucking tired every single day, but I can feel it working. It’s slow, but it’s working. The awareness is growing and the patterns are crumbling away brick by brick, slowly being replaced by strong, healthy beliefs.
Way too deep
Look man, I’m diving way too deep. This was supposed to be a quick rambling and it turned into more than that. I just have so much pent up writing. I’ve been silencing myself for literally twenty years and it just comes oozing out of my fingers right now. I think that alone proves that my life is changing and that I’m slowly returning to where I should be: happy, thriving and writing. I cannot wait to dive deeper into these topics and many, many more as this blog takes shape. I literally don’t care if nobody reads this, it’s so cathartic to just write again.
Until we speak again, non-existant reader, I leave you with a song.
Let it set you free
'Cause there's a rhythm in the way that we've been moving
Yeah, there's a darkness over there, but we ain't going.
[…] this voice, something we talked about earlier, might help a lot. I still don’t really know how to do that, unfortunately. I wanted to do […]