All Cognition is Social Cognition
I'm returning to expressing myself via longer-form media. Short form or image based social media tools limit me, to the point where it feels like small talk, and if you know me, you know I despise Small Talk! It's not rewarding to me, it literally offers little value other than playing into vapid social conventions (eventhough, some social convention is necessary), still small talk feels like vestiges of a time where you had to determine who was friend or foe. Maybe we're still there, with our social retribalization?
The last time I publicly posted was during the events of George Floyd in 2020, and much has happened in my own life since then.
The biggest shift has been a refocus on what I can control, on identifying my needs, mourning sunk costs, accepting change, and reprioritizing.
Locus of Control
"H.P grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
From the outside, 2019 - 2023 probably looked as though I was having a mental breakdown. Perfect assumption. In the absence of information, there is paranoia. What was really happening was as follows: I was not having a breakdown, I was having a breakup with my lowercase "self." The self that had been constructed by living in a chaotic and unsafe childhood. I assumed that I could work/income my way out of trauma/chaos/abuse/dysfunction/adversity... fill in the blank. 2019 and $2M of "Success" and there I was, fetal position confused about why I felt so dissatisfied, empty, and alone. And let me interrupt the fundamentalists in the fucking audience: no, the answer is not Jesus, you reductive ignorant pre-critical dumb dumbs.
Thanksgiving 2022 rolled around and I escaped to the bay area in Northern California to grab some dinner and get out of quarantined life. Reservations were made at a French Restaurant ahead of time, Credit card details were exchanged to ensure the reservation was secured, and arrived ahead of time in a prepaid uber to ensure an on-time arrival. I was attempting to control all of my bases to ensure a calm and healthy outcome to minimize my reactivity.
I felt ignored by the front of house (whether real or imagined is irrelevant), my amygdala was heightened and my rejection trauma circuit was in full motion. That event tipped the scale of what I was able to handle it was the proverbial straw that broke the damn camel's back. I went back to my hotel room that night and admitted I had a challenge that I needed to fix. I was not willing to live life trying to constantly mitigate feelings of rejection.
I had already been reading about therapy and mental health for a few years, and had even had 2 brief sprints of "therapy," when in reality, a dabble is not enough. For therapy to be effective, we must give up all aspects (and cognitive backdoor attempts) to control. We must begin with being honest with ourselves. If we didn't need help, guess what? We WOULD HAVE FUCKING FIGURED IT OUT BY NOW AND BY OURSELVES. WE don't have the ability or the knowledge to heal it on our own. The solution is to ASK FOR HELP. And that was/is my core issue. Asking for help is really scary because it means I am not perfect. And you bet I have trauma about needing to appear perfect and self-sufficient. My parents and this society made damn well sure about that.
Asking for help
I finally admitted I needed help and started working through the adverse childhood adversity effects in my life. I joined ACA (adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families). The resources show up when you need them. The help was there, but no one is there to force anyone into healing. We need to make a choice to ask for help. Problem is we've been asking people without arms for hugs! We learned to ask the wrong people for help., and when the help is offered, we also need to learn to receive it.
I also picked up a therapist (Brown Male) who is trained in addressing childhood trauma. So thankful for this guy's help. Maybe I'll share more sometime on the specific therapy modalities he uses with me, but damn, let me tell you this is life changing if taken seriously.
BTW, only in fucking LA can you be at a quiet coffee shop and hear 50 year old white men talking about Kanye, like they're homies with him. DURRRR DURR DURRRRR. It triggers me because I'm hard on a younger version of Josue that was exactly like that. Embarassing, but liberating to admit. What I needed was validation, and who I needed validation from was my own self! Josue is needy and I accept him and his needs because to have needs is normal and human! BAck to locus of control.
In a nutshell
Oprah had a great interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6In6cnxX28Y) where she talks about the impacts of adversity in childhood. It leads to all sorts of dysfunction in life, and IT GET'S WORST AS WE AGE!
The skills we learned to survive chaos stop working when we get older. The things that worked now become negatively impacting. So we need to update our circuits, we need to update our skills.
I survived by splitting my psyche, by hiding that I was a fundamentalist kid, or hiding my needs (hiding that I was afraid, or that I had broken bones and needed medical help for fear that my mother would be mad at me, or normalizing that I was a child laborer and not talking about this, or hiding the fact that I never took a dump at school from K-12 because the restrooms were reserved for cholos!).
The dysfunction survives through the rules of "Dont Talk, Dont Trust, Dont Feel." As the ACA program states, we are trying to reason out a painless solution, but in reality there is no healing without feeling. That is the core issue. We had to stop feeling to survive the insanity. Now it's time to reconnect with our body's information (feelings), and meet our needs. We Literally CANNOT get what we need if we're disconnected from our selves. Our bodies are asking for it, and we keep trying to drown it out.
Stop Drowning, and Start Breathing.