How does one escape nihilistic biological determinism?
February 26, 2020 11:49 PM Subscribe
I think I've managed to internalize an extensive philosophy of biological determinism that undergirds a resistance to treatment. It's a particularly tenacious answer to nearly any question born of disappointment. While I've been wanting to seek help (which has proven very difficult where I live, when unemployed), I'm afraid it has inoculated me against any solution that isn't self-harm.
I've been progressively falling down this hole since my diagnosis (OCD and autism-spectrum) at 12. After a very precocious case of (professionally diagnosed) Peyronies, a couple potential [minor] concussions (if not at least whiplash), a small handful of abusive relationships, a year of unemployment, and most recently, a brand new diagnosis of BPD, I'm collapsing in on myself. I'd always had a pessimistic self-evaluation, but it's getting to the point where I can't find motivation to do anything, because I feel casted by my biology. It has come to be that I seldom feel like I possess agency, and that predestination through the effects of my various defects and deviancies leads to easily anticipated, unchanging negative results.
Over the past five years or so, I've poured over study after study, looking to quantify and explain the traits I dislike most in myself, from my effeminacy to my mediocre intelligence. Originally, it was an effort to find relief, to reduce my sense that these were personal failures. Now, I'm entrenched in a constellation of metrics that constitutes the etiologies of my failures. For example, I'll fret about my brain size; how my head shape has a lower possible volume because of its elongated shape, and subsequently how my smaller-than-average brain is the reason behind my underwhelming intellect, or how my 2d4d (a proxy measurement that has proven robust upon examination) indicates low testosterone exposure in the womb, and thus why I lack drive, am a coward, suffer from anxiety, etc. Of course, the latter proves an excellent platform for a lot of internalized misogyny, too. I'm also very frustrated with my appearance, which I believe to be the source of the social and romantic/sexual rejections I experience.
Moment-to-moment, I will erratically and obsessively recirculate these thoughts, and many other related ones, until night falls and the day is gone. All I do is think about how all possible given options for activity are precluded by my own inferiority. This paralysis is accompanied by an impotent rage, where I half-blame myself for all these innate flaws. I spend an inordinate amount of time focusing my anger at myself, including fits of verbal self-deprecation, sometimes in front of the few remaining social contacts I have. I can't move, I can't talk to people, I can't hold a job, I can't really go outside. All I do is cycle through panic attacks. It's difficult to imagine getting help, because my situation feels like a fixed state, endowed by specific inborn traits.
I've been progressively falling down this hole since my diagnosis (OCD and autism-spectrum) at 12. After a very precocious case of (professionally diagnosed) Peyronies, a couple potential [minor] concussions (if not at least whiplash), a small handful of abusive relationships, a year of unemployment, and most recently, a brand new diagnosis of BPD, I'm collapsing in on myself. I'd always had a pessimistic self-evaluation, but it's getting to the point where I can't find motivation to do anything, because I feel casted by my biology. It has come to be that I seldom feel like I possess agency, and that predestination through the effects of my various defects and deviancies leads to easily anticipated, unchanging negative results.
Over the past five years or so, I've poured over study after study, looking to quantify and explain the traits I dislike most in myself, from my effeminacy to my mediocre intelligence. Originally, it was an effort to find relief, to reduce my sense that these were personal failures. Now, I'm entrenched in a constellation of metrics that constitutes the etiologies of my failures. For example, I'll fret about my brain size; how my head shape has a lower possible volume because of its elongated shape, and subsequently how my smaller-than-average brain is the reason behind my underwhelming intellect, or how my 2d4d (a proxy measurement that has proven robust upon examination) indicates low testosterone exposure in the womb, and thus why I lack drive, am a coward, suffer from anxiety, etc. Of course, the latter proves an excellent platform for a lot of internalized misogyny, too. I'm also very frustrated with my appearance, which I believe to be the source of the social and romantic/sexual rejections I experience.
Moment-to-moment, I will erratically and obsessively recirculate these thoughts, and many other related ones, until night falls and the day is gone. All I do is think about how all possible given options for activity are precluded by my own inferiority. This paralysis is accompanied by an impotent rage, where I half-blame myself for all these innate flaws. I spend an inordinate amount of time focusing my anger at myself, including fits of verbal self-deprecation, sometimes in front of the few remaining social contacts I have. I can't move, I can't talk to people, I can't hold a job, I can't really go outside. All I do is cycle through panic attacks. It's difficult to imagine getting help, because my situation feels like a fixed state, endowed by specific inborn traits.
Cultivating a sense of the ridiculous and an appreciation for absurdity is also tremendously helpful.
My late father once described to ten-year-old me a cartoon he'd seen in some magazine somewhere sometime: a lugubrious-looking chap is lying in a bed under a wall clock that reads 2pm, and the caption reads "I must probe more deeply the reasons why I feel unwilling to get out of the bed".
We used to say "I must probe more deeply" to each other and laugh like drains whenever either of us spotted the other engaging in what appeared to be self-indulgent procrastination. It did nothing at all to break the procrastination habit for either of us, but it certainly helped both of us not get miserable about it.
posted by flabdablet at 1:10 AM on February 27, 2020 [14 favorites]
My late father once described to ten-year-old me a cartoon he'd seen in some magazine somewhere sometime: a lugubrious-looking chap is lying in a bed under a wall clock that reads 2pm, and the caption reads "I must probe more deeply the reasons why I feel unwilling to get out of the bed".
We used to say "I must probe more deeply" to each other and laugh like drains whenever either of us spotted the other engaging in what appeared to be self-indulgent procrastination. It did nothing at all to break the procrastination habit for either of us, but it certainly helped both of us not get miserable about it.
posted by flabdablet at 1:10 AM on February 27, 2020 [14 favorites]
Something else to consider: you say you've managed to inoculate yourself against any solution that isn't self-harm. I take it, then, that there are some self-harm options that you do currently use as solutions.
So, first thing about that: what does it mean to have that self-harm option? And is it the self-harm that makes it a solution, or is it the fact that it strikes you as an option? I'm tipping it will be the latter, but even if it's not: what is the nature of the self you're proposing to harm, and what exactly is it that harming that self actually solves?
Is the self-harm an expression of contempt for the physical body - that same body whose countless inadequacies you've been so relentlessly cataloguing? If so, what happens to the experience of contempt while the self-harm is going on? Is there some conceptual separation being maintained between that which is contemptuously harming the self and the self that it is contemptuously harming, or does an overwhelming flood of sensation from the act of self-harm simply serve to shut the contemptuous carping thought patterns down altogether, if only for a while?
If the latter, how much experimentation have you done with seeking similarly intense floods of sensation from activities that don't involve harm to your organism? What about experimentation into shutting down thought directly? How much work have you put into achieving that state through various forms of meditation or other totally internal activities? What psychoactive substances have you had experience with? If you have experimented with psychoactives, have those experiments been conducted according to best practice?
In other words: How do these self-harm solutions actually work and are there things you can learn and abstract from them that you could use to design some self-building solutions that work as well or better?
posted by flabdablet at 1:37 AM on February 27, 2020 [3 favorites]
So, first thing about that: what does it mean to have that self-harm option? And is it the self-harm that makes it a solution, or is it the fact that it strikes you as an option? I'm tipping it will be the latter, but even if it's not: what is the nature of the self you're proposing to harm, and what exactly is it that harming that self actually solves?
Is the self-harm an expression of contempt for the physical body - that same body whose countless inadequacies you've been so relentlessly cataloguing? If so, what happens to the experience of contempt while the self-harm is going on? Is there some conceptual separation being maintained between that which is contemptuously harming the self and the self that it is contemptuously harming, or does an overwhelming flood of sensation from the act of self-harm simply serve to shut the contemptuous carping thought patterns down altogether, if only for a while?
If the latter, how much experimentation have you done with seeking similarly intense floods of sensation from activities that don't involve harm to your organism? What about experimentation into shutting down thought directly? How much work have you put into achieving that state through various forms of meditation or other totally internal activities? What psychoactive substances have you had experience with? If you have experimented with psychoactives, have those experiments been conducted according to best practice?
In other words: How do these self-harm solutions actually work and are there things you can learn and abstract from them that you could use to design some self-building solutions that work as well or better?
posted by flabdablet at 1:37 AM on February 27, 2020 [3 favorites]
One final point and I'll shut up: I've met plenty of people with underwhelming intellects. Not one of them could possibly have posed this question as clearly and succinctly as you have.
posted by flabdablet at 1:46 AM on February 27, 2020 [18 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 1:46 AM on February 27, 2020 [18 favorites]
So, I grok, to an extent -- in my own way. I have different failings to obsess over and biological realities to ruminate on and disabling thought-nests to get tangled up in, but the paralyzing, spiraling effect is similar, down to the impulse to self-harm.
So here's me, taking a crack at this, both the healthy and the unhealthy ways that I have set up for myself a life where I generally do not want to hurt myself, where I am able to not hurt myself when the urge arises.
I am, for better or worse, a human being alive in the world, having a subjective experience of consciousness, inhabiting and being a body that I don't feel I have sufficient control over and many aspects of which are not of my choice or to my liking. I don't believe I am here for any pre-ordained reason or that there is a pattern or meaning to it. (If you do, cool, but I don't.) This is how things are. Firstly, and fundamentally, from this position, I have two options: Continue being that, or stop being that.
Being mortal means I'll stop eventually whether I want to or not, so I figure I might as well press on and see where the limit gets imposed on me. I'm curious.
Once that decision is made, the rest gets a lot easier. I get to go okay, so as long as I happen to be here, and be me, for no reason, with no immediate end in sight, what would I like to do? Not... what should I do, or what do other people want me to do, but what would I like to do? And not like to do?
What I have been doing for the past decade is shaping a day-to-day existence that minimizes the things I don't like, while maximizing the things I like, balancing the things that feel good now but will make me feel bad later with the things that feel bad now but will make me feel bad later. I know this sounds simple, but I really feel like a lot of people are not doing this. They are letting themselves get bogged down in prescriptions and proscriptions that come from outside of them, and spending so much time and effort on them that there's no space left to craft a day-to-day that's genuinely enjoyable at all. No one is to be blamed for this, but you don't have to do it, is my point.
You get to take every single one of those things and ask yourself what it is for, whether it has a purpose for you, and whether that purpose is worth chasing after.
For example, children. What are they for? I still don't know. I don't want them, so I don't have them. Homeownership? No thank you, the maintenance and troubles are not worth any benefit I would get, so I rent, and I keep my home minimal and simple to care for. Career ambitions? I understand this is for making money and status. I cannot imagine it being worth the anxiety and time spent, so I have a modest job that I am competent at and which minimally covers my existence. Fashion? No, I wear the same clothes every day, because I don't like shopping for them or choosing them when I get up in the morning. When I started doing this I got some comments, but those around me quickly adjusted. I keep all the things in my house close to the places where they are used, whether or not I think those places are normal or will be attractive to others, because it removes friction. I don't feel comfortable driving, so I live in a place where I can walk and take public transit where I need to go.
This low-maintenance, low-responsibility lifestyle stripped of the chaff also allows me to enjoy non-productivity, because I don't need to maintain things I don't want in the first place. Reading, eating, napping, drinking alcohol, watching television, I can do these things for pleasure, without guilt, and why wouldn't I? I'm here in this body and I'd like it to feel good. I only limit some of these things (food, alcohol) in order to make sure that I don't steal too much pleasure from near-future me. (Not being a parent also means I don't need to worry so much about far future me, though I do try not to be too cruel to that person, in case they wind up existing.)
Like most humans, I get pleasure from making art (in my case writing) and being useful to others, so I do those things as much as I can. (My job is one that allows me to be useful to others, which is important to my choice of occupation.) I have quite low social needs, most of which I meet through the internet and very occasional hobby group (writing) meetups. When I have the emotional bandwidth, I do things that are temporarily unpleasant as a pleasure-gift to future me (exercise, study).
I am not brilliant or talented or powerful (physically or otherwise.) My deeds will not be recorded in any history book. I am no beautiful, my image will not be extensively recorded. After I die, it will not be long before I am forgotten by everyone. This is not sad. My life is unremarkable to others, which doesn't matter, because I am the one living it every day, and as long as I am not actively harming others to the best of my ability, no one else's remarks on it are important.
I don't know if this helps, but it's just... how I've decided to approach things, to let myself be biological, to go with the flow of my human brain, to accept and embrace my world being small and unimportant and do my best to live well. I don't need to fret over what I am, or compare myself to others, because I am making my reality pleasant with the tools given to me.
My entire philosophy of an enjoyable life can be summed up by Bill and Ted: Be excellent to each other, and party on.
posted by gloriouslyincandescent at 2:17 AM on February 27, 2020 [19 favorites]
So here's me, taking a crack at this, both the healthy and the unhealthy ways that I have set up for myself a life where I generally do not want to hurt myself, where I am able to not hurt myself when the urge arises.
I am, for better or worse, a human being alive in the world, having a subjective experience of consciousness, inhabiting and being a body that I don't feel I have sufficient control over and many aspects of which are not of my choice or to my liking. I don't believe I am here for any pre-ordained reason or that there is a pattern or meaning to it. (If you do, cool, but I don't.) This is how things are. Firstly, and fundamentally, from this position, I have two options: Continue being that, or stop being that.
Being mortal means I'll stop eventually whether I want to or not, so I figure I might as well press on and see where the limit gets imposed on me. I'm curious.
Once that decision is made, the rest gets a lot easier. I get to go okay, so as long as I happen to be here, and be me, for no reason, with no immediate end in sight, what would I like to do? Not... what should I do, or what do other people want me to do, but what would I like to do? And not like to do?
What I have been doing for the past decade is shaping a day-to-day existence that minimizes the things I don't like, while maximizing the things I like, balancing the things that feel good now but will make me feel bad later with the things that feel bad now but will make me feel bad later. I know this sounds simple, but I really feel like a lot of people are not doing this. They are letting themselves get bogged down in prescriptions and proscriptions that come from outside of them, and spending so much time and effort on them that there's no space left to craft a day-to-day that's genuinely enjoyable at all. No one is to be blamed for this, but you don't have to do it, is my point.
You get to take every single one of those things and ask yourself what it is for, whether it has a purpose for you, and whether that purpose is worth chasing after.
For example, children. What are they for? I still don't know. I don't want them, so I don't have them. Homeownership? No thank you, the maintenance and troubles are not worth any benefit I would get, so I rent, and I keep my home minimal and simple to care for. Career ambitions? I understand this is for making money and status. I cannot imagine it being worth the anxiety and time spent, so I have a modest job that I am competent at and which minimally covers my existence. Fashion? No, I wear the same clothes every day, because I don't like shopping for them or choosing them when I get up in the morning. When I started doing this I got some comments, but those around me quickly adjusted. I keep all the things in my house close to the places where they are used, whether or not I think those places are normal or will be attractive to others, because it removes friction. I don't feel comfortable driving, so I live in a place where I can walk and take public transit where I need to go.
This low-maintenance, low-responsibility lifestyle stripped of the chaff also allows me to enjoy non-productivity, because I don't need to maintain things I don't want in the first place. Reading, eating, napping, drinking alcohol, watching television, I can do these things for pleasure, without guilt, and why wouldn't I? I'm here in this body and I'd like it to feel good. I only limit some of these things (food, alcohol) in order to make sure that I don't steal too much pleasure from near-future me. (Not being a parent also means I don't need to worry so much about far future me, though I do try not to be too cruel to that person, in case they wind up existing.)
Like most humans, I get pleasure from making art (in my case writing) and being useful to others, so I do those things as much as I can. (My job is one that allows me to be useful to others, which is important to my choice of occupation.) I have quite low social needs, most of which I meet through the internet and very occasional hobby group (writing) meetups. When I have the emotional bandwidth, I do things that are temporarily unpleasant as a pleasure-gift to future me (exercise, study).
I am not brilliant or talented or powerful (physically or otherwise.) My deeds will not be recorded in any history book. I am no beautiful, my image will not be extensively recorded. After I die, it will not be long before I am forgotten by everyone. This is not sad. My life is unremarkable to others, which doesn't matter, because I am the one living it every day, and as long as I am not actively harming others to the best of my ability, no one else's remarks on it are important.
I don't know if this helps, but it's just... how I've decided to approach things, to let myself be biological, to go with the flow of my human brain, to accept and embrace my world being small and unimportant and do my best to live well. I don't need to fret over what I am, or compare myself to others, because I am making my reality pleasant with the tools given to me.
My entire philosophy of an enjoyable life can be summed up by Bill and Ted: Be excellent to each other, and party on.
posted by gloriouslyincandescent at 2:17 AM on February 27, 2020 [19 favorites]
There is this idea called radical acceptance. It's the idea that you can accept beliefs as they are and then... Do whatever you want anyway.
This isn't to say what you believe is true or not true, but you believe it is so there you are. You could simple say OK., wake up, go get a coffee and try to do whatever . Learn a language. Play the piano. Drink coffee. Socialize. Get a job. It doesn't matter the point is that your beliefs don't actually have to dictate what you try don't try and how you engage with the world.
You can radically accept anxiety as a feeling and then socialize even if it feels awful. It won't kill you. It might be akward. It might raise your heartrate. But you will be fine.
You can radically accept that there is nothing you can do about your innate traits and chose to stop thinking about it to actively look for something else to do with your time.
There is way more to that idea than what I've said, but it's sometimes a useful framework when there are ruts you get stuck in.
posted by AlexiaSky at 2:22 AM on February 27, 2020 [4 favorites]
This isn't to say what you believe is true or not true, but you believe it is so there you are. You could simple say OK., wake up, go get a coffee and try to do whatever . Learn a language. Play the piano. Drink coffee. Socialize. Get a job. It doesn't matter the point is that your beliefs don't actually have to dictate what you try don't try and how you engage with the world.
You can radically accept anxiety as a feeling and then socialize even if it feels awful. It won't kill you. It might be akward. It might raise your heartrate. But you will be fine.
You can radically accept that there is nothing you can do about your innate traits and chose to stop thinking about it to actively look for something else to do with your time.
There is way more to that idea than what I've said, but it's sometimes a useful framework when there are ruts you get stuck in.
posted by AlexiaSky at 2:22 AM on February 27, 2020 [4 favorites]
Have you considered writing? Your cry of the heart reminds me of songs that deal with pain and try to make sense of it. Maybe you can "talk to people" with your written or sung words. What you said has moved this person who shares some of the same struggles; instead of going to sleep, I'm motivated to reach out to you with assurance that you are obviously very intelligent and have something to say that someone else wants to hear.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 2:50 AM on February 27, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by a humble nudibranch at 2:50 AM on February 27, 2020 [3 favorites]
Over the past five years or so, I've poured over study after study, looking to quantify and explain the traits I dislike most in myself, from my effeminacy to my mediocre intelligence.
If by mediocre intelligence you mean "not the smartest person on the plant," well, hey, not many of us are. FFS, you are obviously smart and articulate. As someone with ADHD who wrestles with a lack of motivation nearly every day, here is my secret to getting virtually anything done: I do it anyway. Not everything and not always on time, but I manage (thanks to medication + understanding that I am not my thoughts) to get a fair amount accomplished.
One of the things I have learned is that motivation is a kind of myth. You don't have to be motivated to leave the house, you just have to do it even if the idea is insufferable, annoying, or appalling. Neurotypical people do shit all the time that they don't want to do, partly (I understand) because their brains don't think of it as a monumental assault the way my brain does.
There is one universal activity that seems to be useful to all brains, typical or not, and that is physical activity. Start small. If you are physically capable of it, get out of bed, put on your clothes, leave your home, and go for a walk. Around the block (or down the street) is just fine. Walk for five minutes, that is plenty. Then go home and crawl back into bed. Do it again the next day. Try for six minutes. Rinse and repeat every day for three weeks. Note how you feel before you start and how you feel after you have done it for a few weeks. You will probably feel better.
Contrary to how we are taught, motivation often follows action rather than the other way around. It’s really hard to talk or think your way out of that jam. But if you force yourself to ignore your thoughts and feelings and simply take action, you give yourself the best chance of changing your thoughts and feelings. This is one reason exercise has been proven so effective at diminishing or even reversing mild depression. In other words, motivation is overrated.
all possible given options for activity are precluded by my own inferiority
That is classic black-and-white thinking (writes a classic, black-and-white thinker). Here is a link to some free cognitive behavioural therapy worksheets, since you have limited resources. I cannot promise they will help. But they might.
You are not your thoughts. We are all limited in a variety of ways. It sucks that some folks have much easier lives than you (and many of us) have. But that is the reality. We have to work with what we have. What are your strengths? You are literate, articulate, intelligent. You probably have other strengths as well. If you are able-bodied, consider volunteering to help people who are in even worse shape than you are. Just as exercise can help pull you out of your brain and into your body, volunteering can help right-size your perspective on your situation compared to that of some others.
Best of luck, OP. It often sucks to be atypical. I feel for you.
posted by Bella Donna at 4:28 AM on February 27, 2020 [9 favorites]
If by mediocre intelligence you mean "not the smartest person on the plant," well, hey, not many of us are. FFS, you are obviously smart and articulate. As someone with ADHD who wrestles with a lack of motivation nearly every day, here is my secret to getting virtually anything done: I do it anyway. Not everything and not always on time, but I manage (thanks to medication + understanding that I am not my thoughts) to get a fair amount accomplished.
One of the things I have learned is that motivation is a kind of myth. You don't have to be motivated to leave the house, you just have to do it even if the idea is insufferable, annoying, or appalling. Neurotypical people do shit all the time that they don't want to do, partly (I understand) because their brains don't think of it as a monumental assault the way my brain does.
There is one universal activity that seems to be useful to all brains, typical or not, and that is physical activity. Start small. If you are physically capable of it, get out of bed, put on your clothes, leave your home, and go for a walk. Around the block (or down the street) is just fine. Walk for five minutes, that is plenty. Then go home and crawl back into bed. Do it again the next day. Try for six minutes. Rinse and repeat every day for three weeks. Note how you feel before you start and how you feel after you have done it for a few weeks. You will probably feel better.
Contrary to how we are taught, motivation often follows action rather than the other way around. It’s really hard to talk or think your way out of that jam. But if you force yourself to ignore your thoughts and feelings and simply take action, you give yourself the best chance of changing your thoughts and feelings. This is one reason exercise has been proven so effective at diminishing or even reversing mild depression. In other words, motivation is overrated.
all possible given options for activity are precluded by my own inferiority
That is classic black-and-white thinking (writes a classic, black-and-white thinker). Here is a link to some free cognitive behavioural therapy worksheets, since you have limited resources. I cannot promise they will help. But they might.
You are not your thoughts. We are all limited in a variety of ways. It sucks that some folks have much easier lives than you (and many of us) have. But that is the reality. We have to work with what we have. What are your strengths? You are literate, articulate, intelligent. You probably have other strengths as well. If you are able-bodied, consider volunteering to help people who are in even worse shape than you are. Just as exercise can help pull you out of your brain and into your body, volunteering can help right-size your perspective on your situation compared to that of some others.
Best of luck, OP. It often sucks to be atypical. I feel for you.
posted by Bella Donna at 4:28 AM on February 27, 2020 [9 favorites]
Do you use social media? It can be the absolute WORST, or it can be positive, I think it's mostly down to who or what you follow.
I wonder if it might help to follow some people who deal in radical body positivity, who don't fit the "conventional beauty" mould, who are neurodivergent, who are disability activists, gender nonbinary people, people of all kinds who do not fit whatever "ideal human" mould that society deigns current.
There's a reason why role models are important - it can help enormously to see people doing what you would like to be doing, who you can relate to on some level.
I use Instagram for this, and a good starting point might be ALOK, a radical, eloquent voice for diversity and inclusivity. You might look at his images and love them, or you might find them stirring up other strong emotions - that's ok. Strong emotions mean that you're connecting with it in some way, and probing that can be incredibly revelatory. Memail me if you would like any other recommendations!
posted by greenish at 5:21 AM on February 27, 2020 [1 favorite]
I wonder if it might help to follow some people who deal in radical body positivity, who don't fit the "conventional beauty" mould, who are neurodivergent, who are disability activists, gender nonbinary people, people of all kinds who do not fit whatever "ideal human" mould that society deigns current.
There's a reason why role models are important - it can help enormously to see people doing what you would like to be doing, who you can relate to on some level.
I use Instagram for this, and a good starting point might be ALOK, a radical, eloquent voice for diversity and inclusivity. You might look at his images and love them, or you might find them stirring up other strong emotions - that's ok. Strong emotions mean that you're connecting with it in some way, and probing that can be incredibly revelatory. Memail me if you would like any other recommendations!
posted by greenish at 5:21 AM on February 27, 2020 [1 favorite]
You are obviously highly aware of your issues. This is a good start. You also seem to have an inkling that you have constructed your own cage. You need to learn skills to take this cage apart again. I have a feeling finding a therapist that is targeted towards OCD might be a route.
You might also start by changing your reading habits, moving from the medical studies to philosophy, metaphysics. If you must intellectually obsess, you could at least move on from this extremely narcissistic bent towards thinking about the human condition and life itself more broadly. Take some of the burden off your personal shoulders.
posted by Balthamos at 7:01 AM on February 27, 2020 [3 favorites]
You might also start by changing your reading habits, moving from the medical studies to philosophy, metaphysics. If you must intellectually obsess, you could at least move on from this extremely narcissistic bent towards thinking about the human condition and life itself more broadly. Take some of the burden off your personal shoulders.
posted by Balthamos at 7:01 AM on February 27, 2020 [3 favorites]
My concrete suggestions based on my direct experience are
* Get hold of the book mindfulness in plain english, or practical zen: meditation and beyond
* Read book
* Follow the procedure for meditation given in book, without fail, for 100 days, working up to doing 25 minutes a day
The problem you describe having will probably generate some internal cognitive reaction against doing this.
You may be feeling it now as you read what I have written (this won't work, it's nonsense, yadda yadda words words).
Getting past this will require some leap of faith. For some people the only way to get enough "faith" to cross this "activation barrier" is to submit to the authority of another person for a bit. For others it is enough to make a commitment to ignore the thoughts at least for a bit, as an experiment.
I believe strongly that if you do this, you will come viscerally understand the helpful statements above that "you are not your thoughts", and this will help you properly orient yourself.
posted by larkery at 9:23 AM on February 27, 2020 [5 favorites]
* Get hold of the book mindfulness in plain english, or practical zen: meditation and beyond
* Read book
* Follow the procedure for meditation given in book, without fail, for 100 days, working up to doing 25 minutes a day
The problem you describe having will probably generate some internal cognitive reaction against doing this.
You may be feeling it now as you read what I have written (this won't work, it's nonsense, yadda yadda words words).
Getting past this will require some leap of faith. For some people the only way to get enough "faith" to cross this "activation barrier" is to submit to the authority of another person for a bit. For others it is enough to make a commitment to ignore the thoughts at least for a bit, as an experiment.
I believe strongly that if you do this, you will come viscerally understand the helpful statements above that "you are not your thoughts", and this will help you properly orient yourself.
posted by larkery at 9:23 AM on February 27, 2020 [5 favorites]
I dunno. You aren't just the attributes you're made of. You're not brain size or intellect or courage or masculinity or head shape or motivational drive. You are what you do with those things. And even if you were just the attributes you're made of, there are so many different attributes that can be valuable in a person.
I volunteer with a theatre company where all the peformers are adults with learning disabilities. I'm pretty sure all of them are, if you were to be sat down and given some kind of standard test, intellectually less gifted than you (whatever that might mean), and lots of them also deal every day with a whole variety of physical and mental attributes that make life more challenging. But in a couple of months' time, they're going to be putting on a main-stage show at a huge professional theatre, with pro writers, actors, crew etc. They're going to make people laugh, and think, and I'm pretty sure, that they're also going to make people cry. Every week they show up to rehearsals and surprise and delight those of us that work with them with their kindness, humour, imagination, presence, and friendship.
They are living proof that your more obvious physical and intellectual building blocks are not the only things that determine your worth as a human being, or the joy and meaning you can bring to your own and others' lives. Even someone who is replete with the kind of attributes you call 'flaws' in yourself can walk up to me in rehearsal, give me a hug, and make my day.
Maybe you can reflect that, when you bring this kind of judgement down upon yourself, you're also condemning everyone in the world who doesn't have the standard cookie-cutter template of human attributes to also be seen as lesser beings. And you sound like a kind, thoughtful person, I bet you wouldn't for a second genuinely believe any of these guys were lesser human beings than anyone else. And neither are you.
But I think your question has two prongs - we can all say these things to you, and give examples, but the question is how do you make your brain believe them, and feel them?
The classic answer would be some kind of therapy - as someone mentions above, CBT sounds like it would be good for this. The things you think are categorically not true (your head size does not determine your intelligence; your intelligence does not determine your worth etc.) and so you need to try and challenge those thoughts, over and over again, until your brain starts to develop new beliefs that are more accurate and - critically - more healthy for you, and more useful to you.
To coin a metaphor, you need to cut a new path through the jungle that is your brain. You've spent so many years believing these untrue, painful things that those mental pathways are very well trodden. They're six-lane motorways through the jungle, that you just can't help driving on. You think these thoughts so much that they seem true. Why else would the road be so easy to get down, so obvious, if it weren't real?
But it's really only so well-established because you've used it so often, not because it's real. If you want to start believing other things, to take a different path through the jungle, that's tough. You're going to have to start out with a machete, repeatedly cutting down the trees to make a new path. And to start with, it's going to be hard going. You're going to have to keep going back, putting in the effort to cut back the regrowth on this path, doing your CBT exercises again and again, and enduring even when you think "This is ridiculous, I shouldn't be going this way, there's a massive motorway over there, it'd be easier just to go back that way". But eventually the new path takes hold, becomes easier to move down, takes you to new and more enjoyable places, and finally, after a certain amount of work, you hit the tipping point, where your first choice is to take the new path, not the old one.
Anyway. CBT is the machete that helps you cut that new path by challenging unhelpful thoughts and finding new ways to think about the world. It is absolutely something you can do yourself if you can't afford therapy. The classic recommendation here is the David Burns' book Feeling Good, particularly the Feeling Good Workbook if you want to do the work by yourself. Best of luck. You sound awesome.
posted by penguin pie at 9:29 AM on February 27, 2020 [6 favorites]
I volunteer with a theatre company where all the peformers are adults with learning disabilities. I'm pretty sure all of them are, if you were to be sat down and given some kind of standard test, intellectually less gifted than you (whatever that might mean), and lots of them also deal every day with a whole variety of physical and mental attributes that make life more challenging. But in a couple of months' time, they're going to be putting on a main-stage show at a huge professional theatre, with pro writers, actors, crew etc. They're going to make people laugh, and think, and I'm pretty sure, that they're also going to make people cry. Every week they show up to rehearsals and surprise and delight those of us that work with them with their kindness, humour, imagination, presence, and friendship.
They are living proof that your more obvious physical and intellectual building blocks are not the only things that determine your worth as a human being, or the joy and meaning you can bring to your own and others' lives. Even someone who is replete with the kind of attributes you call 'flaws' in yourself can walk up to me in rehearsal, give me a hug, and make my day.
Maybe you can reflect that, when you bring this kind of judgement down upon yourself, you're also condemning everyone in the world who doesn't have the standard cookie-cutter template of human attributes to also be seen as lesser beings. And you sound like a kind, thoughtful person, I bet you wouldn't for a second genuinely believe any of these guys were lesser human beings than anyone else. And neither are you.
But I think your question has two prongs - we can all say these things to you, and give examples, but the question is how do you make your brain believe them, and feel them?
The classic answer would be some kind of therapy - as someone mentions above, CBT sounds like it would be good for this. The things you think are categorically not true (your head size does not determine your intelligence; your intelligence does not determine your worth etc.) and so you need to try and challenge those thoughts, over and over again, until your brain starts to develop new beliefs that are more accurate and - critically - more healthy for you, and more useful to you.
To coin a metaphor, you need to cut a new path through the jungle that is your brain. You've spent so many years believing these untrue, painful things that those mental pathways are very well trodden. They're six-lane motorways through the jungle, that you just can't help driving on. You think these thoughts so much that they seem true. Why else would the road be so easy to get down, so obvious, if it weren't real?
But it's really only so well-established because you've used it so often, not because it's real. If you want to start believing other things, to take a different path through the jungle, that's tough. You're going to have to start out with a machete, repeatedly cutting down the trees to make a new path. And to start with, it's going to be hard going. You're going to have to keep going back, putting in the effort to cut back the regrowth on this path, doing your CBT exercises again and again, and enduring even when you think "This is ridiculous, I shouldn't be going this way, there's a massive motorway over there, it'd be easier just to go back that way". But eventually the new path takes hold, becomes easier to move down, takes you to new and more enjoyable places, and finally, after a certain amount of work, you hit the tipping point, where your first choice is to take the new path, not the old one.
Anyway. CBT is the machete that helps you cut that new path by challenging unhelpful thoughts and finding new ways to think about the world. It is absolutely something you can do yourself if you can't afford therapy. The classic recommendation here is the David Burns' book Feeling Good, particularly the Feeling Good Workbook if you want to do the work by yourself. Best of luck. You sound awesome.
posted by penguin pie at 9:29 AM on February 27, 2020 [6 favorites]
Also... everybody needs help with something. With many things. We all have imperfections. Nobody is smart enough, brave enough, beautiful enough, [whatever] enough to glide through life without help from anyone else. The list of things we need help with is different for everyone, but we all have things.
These guys who are putting on a play? They can do it because they have a company support team to help them read their scripts, and remember when to go on, and chill when they melt down, and get them snacks when they're overtired, and make sure they get home safe at the end of the night. They're achieving what they are because they were lucky and/or open enough to find a bunch of people who would help fill the gaps in their own abilities so that their own strong points are free to shine.
Everyone, everywhere, is doing that to a greater or lesser extent - building their lives around what they've got, and getting help with the rest. It takes many forms - anxious people find jobs where other people deal with the stress; folk go home and offload the emotions that are too much for them on their spouse; friends build up their self-esteem by hanging out with people who like them; people who aren't models take care with their appearance or just take note that they look average like everyone else.
We are all imperfect - you're not unique. You just need to look for people who can help.
posted by penguin pie at 9:55 AM on February 27, 2020 [2 favorites]
These guys who are putting on a play? They can do it because they have a company support team to help them read their scripts, and remember when to go on, and chill when they melt down, and get them snacks when they're overtired, and make sure they get home safe at the end of the night. They're achieving what they are because they were lucky and/or open enough to find a bunch of people who would help fill the gaps in their own abilities so that their own strong points are free to shine.
Everyone, everywhere, is doing that to a greater or lesser extent - building their lives around what they've got, and getting help with the rest. It takes many forms - anxious people find jobs where other people deal with the stress; folk go home and offload the emotions that are too much for them on their spouse; friends build up their self-esteem by hanging out with people who like them; people who aren't models take care with their appearance or just take note that they look average like everyone else.
We are all imperfect - you're not unique. You just need to look for people who can help.
posted by penguin pie at 9:55 AM on February 27, 2020 [2 favorites]
I love flabdablet's answer. He's right. And here's a book that can really help you do what he or she is telling you to do
Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Steven C. Hayes
I had some bad mental habits and this book helped a lot!
posted by crapples at 5:50 PM on February 27, 2020 [2 favorites]
Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Steven C. Hayes
I had some bad mental habits and this book helped a lot!
posted by crapples at 5:50 PM on February 27, 2020 [2 favorites]
a particularly tenacious answer to nearly any question born of disappointment
Nearly any question born of disappointment can certainly be answered with "because I am deficient in ways that mean I don't deserve that", but as you've been engaged in finding out for some while now, that answer is fractally applicable to the point of inducing both rage and paralysis.
It also depends on an entire underpinning of tacit assumptions that are questionable at best and flat-out false at worst.
Any belief that the reason you don't get X is because you don't deserve X rests on a fundamental assumption that the world is just. But it isn't. The world is what it is, it's not all about any of us, and there is no Great Parent whose concern is to ensure that each of us is treated fairly. If there is to be fairness and justice in our world, that's a project we need to participate in both individually and collectively.
It follows that any purported explanation for unsatisfactory experiences that rests on some notion of inherent deficiency is simply not fit for purpose. It's not an explanation, it's a Just So story. Waste no further time on spinning variations on it to tell yourself.
The reason I cannot leap tall buildings in a single bound is not that I fail at being Superman; it's that I have yet to organize access to the requisite quantity of bungee cords and scaffolding.
posted by flabdablet at 6:00 PM on February 27, 2020 [7 favorites]
Nearly any question born of disappointment can certainly be answered with "because I am deficient in ways that mean I don't deserve that", but as you've been engaged in finding out for some while now, that answer is fractally applicable to the point of inducing both rage and paralysis.
It also depends on an entire underpinning of tacit assumptions that are questionable at best and flat-out false at worst.
Any belief that the reason you don't get X is because you don't deserve X rests on a fundamental assumption that the world is just. But it isn't. The world is what it is, it's not all about any of us, and there is no Great Parent whose concern is to ensure that each of us is treated fairly. If there is to be fairness and justice in our world, that's a project we need to participate in both individually and collectively.
It follows that any purported explanation for unsatisfactory experiences that rests on some notion of inherent deficiency is simply not fit for purpose. It's not an explanation, it's a Just So story. Waste no further time on spinning variations on it to tell yourself.
The reason I cannot leap tall buildings in a single bound is not that I fail at being Superman; it's that I have yet to organize access to the requisite quantity of bungee cords and scaffolding.
posted by flabdablet at 6:00 PM on February 27, 2020 [7 favorites]
Flagged as fantastic, flabdablet. (Apologies if this is a derail. I just find that analogy super helpful. Hope the OP does as well.)
posted by Bella Donna at 12:56 AM on February 28, 2020
posted by Bella Donna at 12:56 AM on February 28, 2020
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You are not your thoughts; your thoughts are something you do. Your consciousness is not a thing with object persistence, comparable in essence to a kind of hard particle being bounced and bashed about willy nilly in the pinball machine of life; it's more like an ongoing musical performance that the actual you is actively engaged in performing while ever you're not asleep.
Most but not all of the activity that forms your thoughts is going on in your brain. Some of it is chemistry that's influenced both by the rest of you and your environment. But if you look at it honestly, I expect you're going to have to admit that 99% of what you do, thought-wise, is perform habits. And there is nothing wrong with that. I'm the same way. It's been called the human condition, but I think it's more likely to be the prevailing condition of any structure with any degree of consciousness.
I'll fret about my brain size
Fretting is a habit.
my head shape has a lower possible volume because of its elongated shape, and subsequently how my smaller-than-average brain is the reason behind my underwhelming intellect, or how my 2d4d (a proxy measurement that has proven robust upon examination) indicates low testosterone exposure in the womb, and thus why I lack drive, am a coward, suffer from anxiety, etc. ... also very frustrated with my appearance, which I believe to be the source of the social and romantic/sexual rejections I experience
Telling ourselves Just So stories in an attempt to make sense of how the world (including ourselves) works is a habit.
Moment-to-moment, I will erratically and obsessively recirculate these thoughts, and many other related ones, until night falls and the day is gone.
Habit.
All I do is think about how all possible given options for activity are precluded by my own inferiority.
Habit.
I spend an inordinate amount of time focusing my anger at myself, including fits of verbal self-deprecation, sometimes in front of the few remaining social contacts I have.
Habit.
my situation feels like a fixed state, endowed by specific inborn traits.
That's kind of the nature of habit. Until you do the work required to build new habits, the old ones will just recur forever. "Fixed state" is an overstatement and an oversimplification, though; you're positing a spherical habit-ball of uniform density where you'd be better advised to be considering a dynamic, functioning human body and all the messy and unmanageable complexity that goes along with that. Continuing to describe yourself in these artificially over-constrained terms does save most of that work, but if it's keeping you in a state of misery, it seems to me like a bit more work might well be just the ticket.
And I'm not talking about further scholastic research work, because all you've been using that for is to prop up your existing underlying assumptions about yourself and you've been going in way too hard on the confirmation bias thing. No, I'm talking about physical, experimental, exploratory work, where you get yourself out of your head and out into the world around you and go and look at things you have not been habitually been engaging with for some while. Look at trees. No, really look. Look from far. Look from near. Touch them. Smell them. Listen to them. Marvel at the uniqueness of every single one. Look at water. Look at swans. Look at the way bricks have been put together to make buildings. Intensively examine everything you can find that isn't people, so as to minimize the number of times you'll end up falling back on the habit of comparing yourself unfavourably with others.
There's a pretty good physical analogue that might be of use to you: allowing your self-analysis to run uninterrupted along purely habitual lines is the mental equivalent of spending all day slumping in an easy chair with some mindless soapie on the TV. And while that's certainly easier than getting up and moving about, it's terrible for your health.
Because here's the thing: the main thing that's currently making you miserable is not your brain size, and not your appearance, and not your prenatal testosterone levels, and not any of the stuff you're habitually recirculating. The main thing that's currently making you miserable is the habitual act of recirculating these thoughts. The problem is the anxious rumination itself, not the stuff the anxious rumination is about.
So there are some things you can choose to remind yourself of whenever you notice that you've been doing the easy-mode thought loop dance again for the last few minutes. Remind yourself that the world you occupy is not all about you. Remind yourself that the very brain you habitually describe as inadequate is not in a jar, it's in a human body, and that bodily health and mental health are intimately and irreducibly connected and that refusing to move or go outside is deleterious to both.
So just say: fuck it. Be stupid. Be ugly. Be inadequate. Then go inflict your ugly stupid inadequate self on the outside world for the duration of a good hard walk that will leave you physically well worked. As long as you're not engaged in a deliberate attempt to frighten the people you encounter, then anybody else who has a problem with the way you look? That's their problem, not yours. Just maintaining basic courtesy is all you need to do for them.
What you need to be doing is systematically exploring behaviours that are not currently habitual for you, to curate by direct experiment a selection of activities that leave you feeling better during and after than you felt before you started them; then repeating those behaviours often enough that they become habitual.
Because when it comes right down to it, yes, we are biological. This is what we are. This is how it is. And the only real question, having accepted that this is the case, is not so much what we're going to do about that as what we're going to do with that.
Get out of the house and go do something with that.
posted by flabdablet at 12:56 AM on February 27, 2020 [53 favorites]