comic strip frames with ripples
Day 459: That Shitty Feeling
By the time I print a finished version of these notes, I hope that I will have made them more ordered, structured, easier to read, easy to understand, principally for me, but for those who read them also; I do not want to give the false impression that this organization is spontaneous, or that this was how it was to start, the form in which it came up in me; in fact I scribbled down different aspects as they came up, different dimensions of the thing, understandings, comments, notes, of the points involved from differing distances and perspectives; my written notes are quite a mess: full of little arrows and crossings out, and asterisks, and square brackets, where my notes were actually about something so completely different that they might be filed beneath the heading of ‘related but at the same time altogether different subjects.’ And so, for example, reading through these scribbled notes, I might now write and underline the heading: ‘This is where it started’, and then another heading: ‘Other things in parallel, or not in parallel at all to this.’ Or ‘Where I thought it came from.’ Or ‘My understanding of this, my analysis of this.’ Or, ‘How all of this has shaped my life,’ or ‘how I see this gets reflected in the world’… I mean understandings of ourselves, our feelings and emotions, our minds, and of our introspections have all such multiple dimensions, and as the understandings and the revelations surface they do not arrive in linear order, or create between themselves one single point. Over this paragraph itself, I might write: ‘How I supported myself by going through my scribbled sentences and paragraphs, writing headings.’
Often in the process of my writing, I write out and speak self-forgiveness statements: these are not separate from my explorations, or from the progress of my journey; without the tool of self-forgiveness, suppressions cannot simply open, because it is the un-forgiveness or judgement of the self that holds suppressions sealed in place, that holds them down; and while those judgements are in place they act as bonds of that illusion that we live, that we cannot see beyond. That is how a life can be lived without an inkling of a general self-deception. As in this example that I’d like to share, I came through my introspections with a new perspective of my life in which I clearly saw how many of my actions and decisions had been made in relation to a certain feeling in me, rather than in direct relation to myself or to the physical world of people, or to the physical itself.
It’s interesting how the most trivial seeming everyday event when opened up and looked into can reveal internal points of energy, infiltrating deep and far into the past: from examining the nature of a shitty feeling frequently present in my everyday experience I suddenly get an insight of the darker forces that I had hardly noticed, driving my unconscious landscape. As within so without: just as with the fake news of a controlling media, there comes a time in which one dares to question it; internally, the layers of excuses and justifications that accumulated into false realities come up for questioning as well, that acceptance of a stance of ‘happening to be the way I am.’
In the story that I’m sharing here, that instance of looking at a moment of ‘happening to be the way I am’ was in being confronted by a moment in which someone with whom I normally share a greeting, did not respond; and what this triggered in me was first of all a familiar shitty feeling, and then a familiar litany of questions, such as: What have I done; Have I done something wrong; Is it something that I’ve said or not said; something that I’ve done or not done; Have I upset them in some way; Has there been some gossip going round? By familiar what I mean is, this is not like something new to me; and that this is not a massive reaction that I must immediately look into; you could call it more a rather tired old reaction, definitely there, but in the background. And yet something that was new to me in that moment was the question of: Ok, but what is it that this point is anchored into? I mean this shitty feeling in me has obviously really nothing to do with this specific person; it is my everyday relationship with myself that keeps these points running around my mind, that keeps this shitty feeling fresh and new.
So that was like the break-through question: How was it that I came to create points in my mind in connection to ‘Hello’, and responses to Hello? And what exactly does this shitty feeling consist of? And immediately just in asking this I could see how much of all those questions coming up in me were like distractions from this feeling, were like seeking out somewhere in the outside world to land the blame.
Tracing back into my life the occurrence of this shitty feeling was not a difficult thing to do; to some extent it was always there with me, standing like a guard to my expression, but something that came up for me were memories of my early life at boarding school, in which I had mistakenly trusted in the advice of my father of ‘just do what others do and you’ll be alright,’ which I had then misconstrued into ‘give my trust to these others to define me’… this strategy blew up in my face, when as a group, my peers fell into a synchronized rejection of me – putting me in Coventry – meaning, not speaking to me; having given away the power to define me, I made the mistake of believing that this Coventry was a response to something about me that made me unacceptable – that shittiness that I felt inside myself I took to be the shittiness of who I was. That trust that I had foisted onto them had rebounded as a belief in the veracity of their consensual judgements, and since the judgements were hostile, I started to believe, and so trust also, that the inner shittiness of who I was was real.
That was where I began to hide myself away, and try to keep my mouth shut, never speak again, and stuff like that. Even sometime later when it was explained to me that what had happened was that I’d been put in Coventry, it did not change that for me with groups of peers there was now a risk, an element of danger, of possible betrayal. That it was possible for a group to synchronize in breaking someone down was a new dimension in my world, as well as what I had established in myself which was that experience of shittiness as apparently a reminder of who I am, that I then went on to making patterns with: of fearing it and reacting to it and avoiding it and running away from it.
Running away from your feelings seems possible when they are attributed to the actions and behaviors of others, and when they accumulate in relationships: then, just going somewhere else seems like an escape: here is where the devices of self manipulation, excuse and justification gradually weave their stories, imaginary worlds like comic strips, from out of which and from within which that shitty feeling seems to only be a constant nagging in the background; here is where the option of drugs can act like a salve to change the feeling into something positive; and so here is where in service to that shitty feeling and to the fear of the experience of it, it accumulates into what might seem like an addiction, where the blame of others is then focused onto blame of chemicals.
Looking through the chapters of my life I was appalled to see how many situations I had just ran from, when in every case that experience I feared I carried with me, not seeing it, because it seemed so intimately part of me, not seeing it because my self manipulation was so well practiced, not seeing how that guardian that stood beside my self expression had been placed by me for my own protection, so as not to experience that shittiness of me.
When I asked myself what kind of stories did I tell myself through my life about what happened, what was my excuse? And what I saw was that the ‘shock of broken trust’ had formed the fake news headline, or ‘betrayal’; the shocking badness of it all, that I had given something precious away that now was ‘shattered’ and ’broken’; in which I was the innocent, the victim, and this betrayal was to be seen as something done unto me – so that for my comfort, blame could be established from it – and that shitty feeling could be viewed as my justified response to that.
And yet beneath this story that I chose to live, what lay there within me was my awareness that I had given my responsibility for me defining me, to someone else, in trusting them. So beneath the story of the shock of broken trust and of betrayal was that shitty feeling that all of it was down to me, that I had given my trust in me to someone else – as a manipulation really – and also in a way, a self betrayal, this was the point beneath it all that I dared not see directly.
It was interesting for me to look into the backchat statement that came up in me in various forms in my reactions to such situations:- What have I done? Because looking into that sentence and the way I asked it in myself, how I couched the question, it was as if in the tone of it I was asking the world for an answer, as if in preparation to defend myself, the question posed as if in a protest of innocence. There are so many ways of habitually asking such a thing, or of internally re-iterating it, without ever really seeing the words for what they are – and crucially – of seeing how such a question could support me. I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to use these words without consideration of my own support but instead to use them to support my separation from myself.
Here is an opening for me in which I can make a start in changing what I have imprinted into me: as and when this backchat comes up in me, I recognize it as a question that can really in fact support me. As and when that shitty feeling comes along, I can stop and breathe and realise that yes this shitty feeling has been here in me – by my permission, by my instigation – and so obviously I have the power to let it go – I do not any longer accept the belief that this shitty feeling is who I am, there is infinitely more to me than this – and letting go of this belief, I let go also of the trust that I held in it. I do not have the expectation that now as if by magic I have through all of this eradicated this shitty feeling from the threshold of my expression, of my saying of Hello, of my speaking words into the world from within myself, from my writing of those words, and yet I have given to me the means to work with it. A shitty feeling in itself is just a feeling when the power has been removed from it.
Various recent recordings on Eqafe have been of much support for me in exploring into this; the perspectives outlined in them embrace fields far wider and deeper than what I have outlined within this post, but if any of what I’ve written here rings a bell then do please take a listen:
Life Reviews:
Sharing Trust vs Entrusting Yourself Part 1
Sharing Trust vs Entrusting Yourself Part 2
Quantum Mind Self Awareness:
Sharing Responsibility vs Abdicating Responsibility
Practicing Responsibility Sharing
Adam's Journey Into Life 