SonOfBob's Journal

Journals
21

That’s really impressive mate. You’re going through what most people would consider a seriously stressful time at home due to your relationship and yet you’re still managing to have EEs! Wow.

I’m actually experiencing a similar situation where my marriage is hanging on by a thread. I won’t pollute your journal with the details but I’m so thankful that I’ve been practising actualism - I genuinely don’t know how regular people cope with these types of situations. I can’t say I’ve been getting close to EEs, however I’ve spent the past year investigating relationship issues, so have addressed quite a few of the issues already and some emotions that would have festered are not affecting me as much. If it weren’t for that then I don’t know what state I’d be in now. I’m facing what is essentially my worst fears.

Much more investigation to do and I haven’t been immune to lots of the emotions but I’m finding myself able to nip some things in the bud at least.

Much love … or should I say much actual caring :grinning:

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22

Life throws up some serendipitous opportunities to explore our inner workings, right? No worries about polluting my journal, nothing precious here. I know what you mean…hard to remember what it was like being unaware of an alternative.

It has taken a long time to get to this point, over a decade. I have always found the dreads and fears I imagine to be worse than what actually occurs. Hope you ride out those fears ok with minimal suffering.

It sounds like you are being honest with yourself. It sounds like you know what you need to do.

Lol, you too bruv.

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23

Also, I would reiterate that communicating on the message boards and realisations gleaned from @geoffrey and @Srinath and other members of the group have all helped contribute help me see where I was going wrong or help unblock me.

I am not experiencing an EE every moment yet let alone any PCE’s, so plenty of work to do still.

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24

It’s funny because a few weeks ago I tried a kind of cosmic ordering I said “okay infinitude / universe, do what it takes to make me progress with actualism. I’ll release the reins and roll with it”

I’m beginning to think it’s delivering for me. And not in the way I expected!! It feels like I’m getting an actualism boot camp!

There have been some times of quite intense suffering, yesterday was particularly bad. But I’m beginning to realise that I need to start taking care of this body. Lack of sleep and stress is not doing me any favours, nor is it making it easier to deal with the situation, so I need to find a way to work through it and try and be happy.

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25

I find myself taking ownership of my own happiness/felicity/sincerity now rather than sort of wait to see if something is going to happen to help me, it is just another type of procrastination otherwise.

In what way is it helping. Can you elaborate please?

What I have gone back to is realising I don’t have to feel that way and can actively make a choice to be happy and ride out that feeling so to speak. It then seems to be habitual less and less or less intense, like I am not invested in the emotion or totally onboard with it any more, so it just happens without my giving special significance to it.

It took me awhile before I realised every panic attack, extremely bad day for anxiety, depression or low mood was followed by a day or long period of bad sleep. So I focused on improving sleep hygiene too whilst still on my meds at the time, and things improved a lot.

Now I am off my meds, having something to be worried about like conflict with my wife or the tense work meeting, it definitely impacts my sleep and subconscious including the nature of type of dreams I have. However, again experientially realising after each event that everything is fine, we can disagree, we can argue, the project can go to shit, and everything is still fine lol. There is a confidence starting to build up in the efficacy of the method.

I definitely recommend working on your sleep hygiene as good baseline for mental health.

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26

@FrankN sorry I forgot your question in @Kub933’s journal regarding the breakdown of what I meant regarding our identifiying stuff.

I meant like how we say chair, ceiling, door when identifying physical objects but then also for people based on their relationship to us such as brother, sister, friend, work colleague etc.

Then to ourselves we can… oh I was like that as a child, a teenager, a young adult or when older, we split ourselves up into different stories and timelines, like different versions of ourselves…I used to be like x, y, z.

In yourself you can make any form of identification. Me before some trauma, me before I got married, me before I moved out etc…

27

Thanks SonofBob, I was doing just that a couple of days ago and I caught myself doing it .
I am sure I do this all the time, so catching myself was kind of surprising and weird :sweat_smile:

28

No worries, same…I have only realised how much I do this quite recently. It is weird.

It is like I am creating reference points in my own personal timeline. You almost start the believe there were these distinct separate selves. Rather than just remembering stuff there is always so much emotion and narrative projected onto my memories too.

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29

Sorry for the delay SonOfBob! Been a crazy couple of weeks.

It’s put quite a lot of issues front and centre for me. It’s one thing imagining some of our worst fears but actually experiencing them play out gives a great opportunity for investigation. Don’t let a crisis go to waste, as they say. A real treasure trove etc.

This is very similar for me. My sleep goes to shit because my subconscious has this underlying tension to deal with. There’s been times I’ve gone to sleep happy but woke up in the middle of night having had a weird dream then can’t get back to sleep for hours. Then there’s the knock on effect to everything else when we aren’t well rested.

My aim is similar to yours - try to feel good to whatever degree possible despite all the shit that’s going down. Completely failing at times but some small successes to build on :slight_smile:

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30

This recent disruption to felicity towards the latter half of last year…I started to roll back and investigate the causes of what disrupted my happiness.

Again noticing the struggle with multiple stressful events at a given time as always. Work pressure, maritial pressure, rising cost of living, rising interest rates exacerbating debts, kids were all ill at same time and the longest illnesses they have had. My eldest daughter still being investigated for issues, plus newly formally diagnosed asthma.

However, there has been this recent realisation and experientially so that it clicked that I will never be special. Like a deep core to my being realisation that I am not going to be/become special. So much of my internal narrative has been this drive to be special, to be rewarded to reach some level of specialness and success. I know now that being free is not the same as my drive for being special. I can see at times I have hijacked the method to try and contribute to being special.

It has really hurt. Like it seemed to cause extended feelings of sadness, sorrow that seemed to get exacerbated over the Christmas period too. A core part of my belief system I guess, starting to fracture.

I realised that I can’t escape conflict, to be free means having it work in the marketplace, exposed to friends, family, colleagues and strangers who may or may not seek conflict with me. I truly can’t predict and control the reactions and behaviours of others. Big family fall outs over new year only cemented this…so cliched. Still remains an area I don’t cope too well in.

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31

I have this habit of making these weird rules for myself.

Like I am not allowed to post on here until I have read everybody’s messages.

Why does that matter? I can see I am scared to have missed a conversation, repeat something already mentioned or said, some need to be unique and thoughtful. An undercurrent of performance anxiety for interacting in forums.

So, many of the rules in my life are just defence mechanisms, trying to protect myself from psychological harm.

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32

And ironically the ‘defense’ takes the form of harming oneself :grin:

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33

The funny thing as well is that I prefer if you were to post whenever as there’s more to read haha so the rule in a sense can miss its target. I’ve done that so many times, following all these rules that I thought were there to kinda mould myself around others, when the others didn’t even care for these things, then I realise it’s all in my head and for no reason.

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34

Haha big lol I realise I am actually answering my own question here, posted a couple of days ago. To find that it is safe to step out of those boundaries, they are all in my head - Journal de Henry - #745 by Kub933

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35

I am only on Henry Journal message #517…I don’t like reading things out of order either lol!

36

You post was super helpful for me @son_of_bob btw so maybe you should post more :wink: OK so this is how I can see it now, there is SonofBob who lives in a self centred world of his own making, that world contains various rules and boundaries which he feels and believes to be genuine. Inside this world is also his beliefs about other people, about what they think, feel, how they operate etc. This construct is his reality, of course he is bound to work within the rules of this reality, tip toeing around all these precious truths, he has to otherwise his very safety is at risk - apparently.

Then there is Kub933 who equally lives in an illusory world of his own making, believing it to be genuine.

Now SonofBob acts in a certain way, which apparently transgresses the rules of his world, based on the ruleset he believes Kub933 should respond according to X. What actually happens though is that Kub933 does not actually live in SonofBob’s world and neither does he give 2 shits about the rules of his world, they are not a ‘thing’ for him and of course vice versa.

This happens both in the positive and negative, as in sometimes I may act in a way that I believe to be correct only to be under attack for transgressing a rule, whilst at the same time I may act in a way I believe will bring me scorn only to find that the other person does not give a shit :laughing:.

Of course both of those realities are like these constantly shifting structures, as identities we try our best to ‘align’, by feeling each other out, constantly adjusting the beliefs and rulesets etc But we find that it just does not work, the outcome of all this we all know well… Feeling confused, alone, angry at others, not appreciated, insecure, anxious, failed expectations etc.

So this is what I was writing about in Henry’s journal, how do I step out of these boundaries when they are apparently there to keep me safe and what’s more they apparently show something genuine.

So it seems I am one step forward here towards a resolution. Because seeing how messy this set up is, the only sensible option, the only option that can work is to step out. Of course when I step out, the other is still working according to their rules, but at least 1 person is no longer blind. The current set up that seems ‘safe’ is both of us are blind lol, and not only blind but forever separated from each other, existing in the worlds of our own making - with their particular and always shifting rule sets. Feeling that there is some overarching whole where all these beliefs and values can come together and work seamlessly, but of course no such thing ever comes. We are all just knocking around in the darkness, and I am afraid I will become a bull in a china shop by stepping out lol, right now there is a horde of blind bulls knocking around the shop already, getting pissed off because that blind guy just hit into me! :laughing:

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37

Interestingly, all my rules are really self centred, even before exposure to AF I had sort of given up on humanity as this lost cause and have zero expectation on others, or more precisely I default to a position where I expect them to be terrible human beings. It is like everyone in my world is automatically a dick until they have proven otherwise lol. I have no rules about you but a ton of rules about my actions and conduct. Which I think is like an overarching defence mechanism as well. Probably why I don’t have many friends or people in my life either lol.

In my world view, I am already expecting you to break any rules I have as regards civil conduct for example, in my mind I defaulted to everyone here is a threat or enemy. Overtime, some of you I have softened to maybe, others I am still guarded of…

I agree, feeling each other out and testing the waters. For me it is a lot about trying to see some prediction and pattern to somebody’s behaviour, understand what triggers them, offends them, what they don’t like talking about. People who I find unpredictable in their reactions, I tend to totally avoid, I really don’t like such people.

I know what you mean, it is interesting these things playing out on the individual level as well to see such things form and play out on the group and social structure level too.

Indeed, I had long abandoned such hope even when in the thralls of the human condition when blind to the alternatives, maybe why so much of my life was escapism in the form of imagination and learning, a different way to disassociate from the horrible disconnect I felt with other people. I never really felt a sense of belonging.

What is interesting is to see my own rules/beliefs perpetuate my own incremental displeasure and stress. Stressing myself out over arbitrary rules.

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38

I could see that belief was arbitrary, as regards big beliefs like “to believe in an after life”, “a soul” or “God”. I didn’t see that these rules and codes I put on myself were really beliefs disguised as rules and just as arbitrary as big beliefs.

Another blind spot.

From what I gather most rules either act as some mechanism to protect myself or to try and achieve some form of exceptionalism.

39

I also spend a lot of time feeling bad when I don’t adhere to those rules, and then later when I really look closely at them they don’t make sense for the situation I was trying to apply them to

Additionally, when I do live by some rules, I then signal as much as I can to others that I’m doing that, so they know how good I’m being. But all it is is a performance of moral rules, just the same as how everyone else is operating.

40

D’oh! Is it just some engrained habit we have? See what rules I can apply to this situation or any situation. I can see AF being mistaken for some rules to apply without actually understanding the intent. A hollow code of conduct to follow that totally misses the mark.

I had a parent that would punish you for mistakes but never reward you for successes. I think because of this my rules lean mean towards protection and avoiding criticism, confrontation, conflict, a mistake, failure, embarrassment and the like. People who signal positively to me, I always treat with this cynical disparaging way I have noticed. Like I can’t take any form of positive reinforcement. It is quite frustrating, because there is never any rewarding feeling of job well done when you have this type of mentality. It is a really negative attitude to have, it has taken me a long time to begin to break it apart. I can see that I have applied this type of attitude to my AF practice at times and hence ended up just berating myself for perceived failings.

When I was 18, I was really obsessed with Friedrich Nietzsche and his famous quote really struck a chord with me.

‘There is no such thing as a moral phenomenon, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.’

I sort of freed myself from absolute moral rules, though I did not free myself from that ability to not want to be perceived as bad or immoral. So, I didn’t really care about the moral itself, as in no guilt or shame, but wanted to cynically control the perception of my self image. This still is in action in me today, I have mentioned it before somewhere I am sure, like I am my own spin doctor trying to control the narrative of how I am perceived by others. Maybe another reason I don’t like large groups of people or big teams at work because I find it too hard to try and control the situation and my how I am perceived by others, too many plates to spin.

I was saying that the majority of rules I create are either protective or a form of self promotion I would say there are others that have been passed on to me by my parents, siblings and friends. Brainwashed rules in a way, or those co-opted for mutually beneficial reasons.

From my parents, this ultimate rule about not having debt. Is such a strong negative feeling in me, maybe it is the closest I can relate to religious people who have shame lol.

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