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| <<<>>> |
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The Bad Friend in My Head |
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| Created by Decius at
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I've lived most of my life trying to pursue a better version of myself, more free than previously. Always the pursuit of this happy state involves purifying what I want from what is expected of me to follow an arrow that is both straight and directed at something, and both the direction and force are determined mostly by my desires.
It is relatively clear to me that any pursuit that deviates from this path, where intermediate goals and desires are resulted from chaotic and splintered needs will undoubtedly result in something that probably won't lead to happiness, or will do so in a very indirect and wasted manner.
For example, if my true desire is to confront my father for hitting me when I was a child, and my masked desire is to drink alcohol, perhaps after drinking sufficient alcohol I will have liver cancer which will push me to value myself more than others, and as a result of this come to a point where I am able to confront my father.
However, simply confronting my father would be a much more efficient way to go about achieving a greater sense of freedom and happiness.
The trick, of course, is finding your desires through the jungle that is the mind, full of fears and lies that both make it difficult to determine what is true and then pursue that truth. Often lies are sustained by our fear of confronting them, so when we ask ourselves what we really want it's not just a process of analysis - we have to almost always clench our fists and ready ourselves for an onslaught of terror which me must then weather.
Now, when we first start doing this, we use easy to witness projections that cause us to deviate from our purposed path. Accordingly, what we are looking for are things that make us unreasonably fearful and therefore force us away from what we might want to pursue. So, for example, if it is my desire to walk around naked in front of my partner, my fear in doing so would be related to her or his judgment of me relating to the size of my privates, hair, and obesity. To freely pursue my desire, I have to rid myself of all the unreasonable fears associated to the other person's reaction. Doing so is in itself a large process and worthy of discussion. However, that is not the purpose of this article.
Here, I am going past that. For, even though life is full of these unreasonable fears (which I define as follows: a fear that does not legitimately equate the repercussion of any one action. Fear is an instinctual emotion that is created to sustain survival - hence, any fear that exists in relation to any action where the repercussion does not threaten survival is unreasonable according to me) it seems there are another set of fears that exist within us that are of a different nature entirely.
It is difficult to initially even define these things as fears because really, when I use that word it does not really categorize it properly. A better definition might be "something we undoubtedly believe must be feared, so much so that we do not recognize it as a fear but rather an integral fact of life, similar to avoiding fire".
As you can see, from this definition, in our own heads, these "cause and effect", "consequence of action" concepts are not really fears, but rather aspects of reality. The are different from recognizable fears because these ones don't involve a choice, nor is any emotion created as a result of them recognized as separate from our own natural emotional responses.
Let's start with an example. Say a boy is punished whenever he looks at a girl, both physically and emotionally. Say this happens for twenty years of his life in living with an overbearing mother. Note that we're talking about extreme conditioning here where both the length and intensity of the conditioning are severe. This would distinguish itself from fearing asking a girl out because you've been rejected 20 times. In the latter example you would be able to readily separate your own desires from your fear of asking a girl out.
In the main example, however, it is conceivable and likely that this boy will have been affected in such a profound way that he does not ask himself whether he likes girls or not. His mind, and nervous system, would have an almost completely bridged reactionary system that would immediately react the same whenever a female's presence is near. To him, naturally, wanting a woman is something that most people engage in as a result of weakness. To him, his apprehension towards them is not only righteous, it is something difficult for him to maintain (for his sexual urges), and attempts to conform himself to this disgust because he believes it to be the right thing to do.
If he is an intelligent boy, he will generate a whole slew of very likely theories and concepts that both explain and justify his perspective. In fact, even if he is the most open minded and self-critical person on the planet, it will never occur to him to question his disgust towards women because he will perceive it as an absolutely natural part of his body and mind.
These heavily conditioned fears pose a large problem because even if we eventually do find out that they are arbitrary, our minds are so geared towards our prescribed reaction that even slowing ourselves down enough to emotionally ask ourselves whether we truly do want to make a different conclusion or decision is an excruciatingly difficult task.
These conditioned responses are so deeply rooted, in fact, that a female may find it hard to get wet during intimacy because she was raised as a harsh christian. That is to say that even if we mentally acknowledge that the conditioning is wrong, it goes so deep that even our bodily functions are in tune with them regardless of what our minds consciously want.
The most interesting and dangerous aspect of these conditioned responses is the fact that we, ourselves, do not recognize them as artificial and external processes. The response we get when the conditioned responses are triggered are so immediate, unquestionable and emotionally consistent that we undoubtedly learn to live with them, accepting them as our "natural" responses. They mimic what we perceive to be normal human responses involving happiness and sadness so well, in fact, that we could often need evidence to convince our own conscious minds that there is indeed a difference between those conditioned suggestions and our own internal desires and needs.
You can look at it as if some external entity has, through conditioning, implanted a part of them, a part of their voice, in your mind. You can literally visualize them standing in your brain. And because they are in your brain, the truth is, they are a part of you. However, they do form a separate motivation and logic, one that deviates from yourself and your own motives and desires. Yet, when these voices speak, you perceive them as yourself despite the fact that they probably create repression, negative feelings, and negative responses to you and the world around you.
Because you think they are a part of you, you will defend them, understand them, and empathize with them more than you will an outsider from an emotional stand-point. This is because they "are" a part of you.
But...
They are just external voices implanted in you as a result of conditioning. The mind conforms to forced conditioning as a method of survival. Hence, you will view this voice as someone or something that aided you in surviving when you were younger. If, for example, your mother beat you when you looked at girls, you trained yourself to not look at girls, and in essence created a mock version of your mother inside your head. As a result of doing so, your mother beat you less, and your survival was less threatened. It makes sense then to understandably view your mother's voice in your head as a god-sent savior, and make you petrified of losing it.
But...
Life changes, and eventually you will grow taller than your mother. You will become financially and physically powerful enough to sustain your survival regardless of what she does.
Now...
What do we do with this conditioned response, this voice we've created in our heads that aided our survival, when it is certainly no longer needed? More importantly, what is going to happen to us in the real world with real people when we interact with them with this vestigial conditioned response that serves to both limit and guide our behavior in a way that is meant to sustain our survival, but does not do so (any longer) in any realistic or logical fashion?
What happens to the boy who believes looking at girls is disgusting when his mother dies but her voice remains in his head, telling him that he will "SUFFER" if and when he looks at girls. Such conditioning does not attach itself to the logical threat once it is experienced for an extended period of time. That is to say, initially the boy will look at the mother with disdain and may try to stop looking at girls knowing that she will react badly. But over time as he is punished over and over, it ceases to become something his mother is doing to him and then becomes "a condition of reality". That is, that to look at a girl causes him to "SUFFER", and that this is a condition of reality. He will then believe that since this is a condition of reality, it must therefore apply to all men, not just him.
Once his mother dies, and since this conditioned response is independent of her, he will still hold onto it in almost the exact same capacity, in essence, keeping her threats and abuses inside of him, keeping him in line. In his head, of course, it is simply him reacting to reality in the most appropriate way.
Then one day, a girl approaches him and triggers within him an emotional or physical response that is "natural" (for his own natural response can be severely repressed but never eliminated. In fact, if it could be eliminated, life may be a lot simpler for we would then become the products of our conditioning. Unfortunately, or fortunately, our natural responses and desires remain with us and peek out once in a while).
Since he has no mother to punish him, he may or may not initially question or become confused about what is going on - however he will definitely realize that the desires within him towards women are stronger than they were previously when his mother was alive. Instead of perceiving this as something indicating freedom, he will believe that it is weakness for because she is gone, the world outside is now challenging him and trying to bring out these bad feelings within him. He will probably then react with harsh aggressiveness targeted at these worldly triggers from the mental perspective of "now that my mother is gone, you think you can trick me into doing something that will be bad for me? How manipulative and awful of you!".
The awful truth, of course, is that he truly wants to be attracted to women, that he always did, and that what he believes to be his voice of love and reason, to be his guiding light to survival, to be, perhaps, the voice of morality, is in fact the voice of his mother, an unloving, controlling entity that pursued her fears and beliefs far more than what was best for her son.
You can look at it like a curse, but that sounds permanent and self-defeating. The beauty of being human is that we have both a subconscious and conscious mind, and although our subconscious mind guides our emotions, reactions and is very powerful, it is always at the mercy of conditioning. And we control conditioning through our conscious minds.
So, if we witness that there is a conditioned response within us that we believe to be our voice, our own personality, a natural part of us that is in actuality someone else's voice that was implanted in us through repeated negative conditioning, we have the power to wedge that process open and give our emotions the time to decide whether we will react in this way or that.
The process to do so, as with ridding oneself of any fears, depends on the fear and the reverse conditioning surrounding it but with these specific deep rooted conditioned responses, I've found that simply acknowledging their existence by visualizing the perpetrators face in our own brains is a good start. Even conversing with them is very helpful for it forces us to truly segregate ourselves from that conditioned response and look at it like it's an outsider.
Such things are always dangerous for we could try to do this to something that is actually a part of us. However, certain tricks can help identify bad conditioned and alien responses within us. For example, when you try to emotionally understand, for example, some truth about some situation but simply cannot (for example, wanting to be able to be attracted to women) and when you sit down and try to think about it almost consistently find that your subconscious distracts you from the thought at hand, this generally is the voice in your head trying to play tricks on you. It's telling you not to think about this, or question the conditioned response because it KNOWS it will cause you pain, for it always did in the past. But that condition of reality is now totally untrue, and you must, in essence, "face the fear" that your conditioned voice has, that you also have. Your voice will tell you that questioning this conditioned response will result in the same abuse you've suffered your whole life, for whenever you questioned it in the past, you were abused. Questioning it is in essence the same as going against it, for questioning anything results in the freedom to rebel against it. That freedom, whenever exercised with your abuser in the past, resulted in abuse to you. Hence, questioning it becomes as taboo as rebelling against it. If you sense that you have a reaction that prevents you from emotionally questioning a reaction, it is probably out of fear, and therefore, the result of negative conditioning.
There are various other tricks and tell-tale signs that a conditioned response is the culprit and it isn't a true natural reaction of yours, but the most consistent way to find and question these reactions is to discover reactions you have that are illogical, such as fearing being naked, fear of sexuality, fear of confrontation etc. None of these fears result in a threat to your survival, so you have been conditioned to fear them through abuse, and your natural reaction to the question of whether you wish to be naked or sexual is still buried within.
And, to tie everything together, finding those true desires buried within is I believe the only true way to reach freedom and happiness. |
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| Created by Decius at
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| Comments |
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This reminds me of the American conditioning that so many people go through. In America, we are told what to wear, what to say, what to drive, what to eat, what to do for fun, what music to listen to, what girls to find attractive, the list never ends.
If you ever stop fighting against the things that want to control you, government, parents, peers, schools, Then they take control of you, and you are no longer yourself. Even though I have been trying very hard to prevent those things from happening to me, I can't help but feel that there are things in me that I don't want. That is why I try to do what it is I do. One of the reasons anyway.
I wonder what things are inside me that I do not want there? To say that there is nothing, though that is the way i feel, feels like a lie, so I start to think otherwise. I relate to what you are saying because i have felt it myself for some time.
"What's inside is just a lie."
Watch the play Passing Strange. There is an entire act of the play dedicated to what you are saying here.
I do not look at this fight, to find the bad friends, with any negative feelings. To me, it sounds fun.
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