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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 8 of 8. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by hyperfocus on May 27, 2011, at 12:57:01
It's like you spend your days running in a frenzy through long airless corridors, endlessly stopping in different rooms just to scrutinize all the horrors on display. All the good memories inside you get buried under the crushing memories of traumas you've suffered and your own inadequate responses to them. You see these things in this distorted mirror that magnifies every failing and imperfection to gigantic proportions. The worst part is at the end of another day of doing nothing but wearing yourself out screaming around in the labyrinth, you realize that you've completed a hundred circuits of the exact same path and are back right where you were at the start of the day. And even more crushing is the realization that you've been making these endless circuits in your mind for a heck of a lot of years. And you're going to do it again tomorrow.
I read something interesting a little while back: there's shame in the eyes of men and then shame in the eyes of God, or yourself. A lot of neuroses seem to center on a loss of control and/or shame. People with social phobia are terrified and haunted by the fact that they can't control other people looking at them and causing them to feel shame. We think if we don't meet eyes with anyone then they won't be able to see us, or if we stick our shirt in we won't be noticed as much as with it out, and all sorts of endless magical thinking and coping devices. But, as much as this black toxic thing call shame fills us up and poisons everything in us, something I think we all have to do is examine ourselves in our own eyes.
I can't control what people said and did to me and how I felt, but never in my life did I make evil my companion. I do not always try, deliberately, to hurt people. I never murdered or robbed or raped or betrayed anybody. I would never abuse or torture anybody or take advantage of someone weaker than myself. I'm not perfect but I try, everyday, to do the best I can in life according to what I believe. If I can help someone then I try to do it if it's within me. I try as best as I can not to harm anyone. Whatever little I have I am content with it - I don't envy or begrudge those with more. So what more can I do? Who's going to accuse me? Whose counsel should I take - who will be my judge?
Like I told fb, whether you're living in a $10 million mansion or scraping up loose change to buy generic Risperdal on the weekend, all any person can do in life is try to do the right thing. Each one of the 5 billion people on earth gets up in the morning and decides what path they will follow today. There's a verse from the Koran that goes like: Allah alone chooses who he rewards and who he punishes, who he gives to and who he takes from...Everything in this life is temporary. Money, power, fame, even feeling happy or even being in love. I see people who are investment bankers or managers at multinational corporations with their flashy cars and trophy wives, and yet as much as I've suffered at their hands over the course of 20+ years, I would not trade a second of my own life for theirs. Reading their oily self-serving comments on Facebook - I can't help but shake my head. Their whole life is an obscenity. I'd rather spend my entire life alone as a sick recluse than to chase after the worthless things these people crave, to be so black and empty and covetous and wicked inside.
It seems to me that the thing that is important and eternal is what you believe inside. Because what the universe gives and takes is not under our control. I can't control my genes or the development of my brain structures or how my family raised me or what school I went to and especially what others did to me. I can't even control, it seems, my own thoughts and feelings and how I appear to others or even how I treat others sometimes. But the thing that I can control is whether I try to do evil or whether I do good. Whether I believe in the right thing or the wrong thing. And it seems to me that this is the only important thing we should worry about. When we do things that go against our core beliefs we feel a great deal of guilt, or shame in our own eyes. To me this is very important and a very good thing and we should hold on to this because it serves as a terrific indicator of what we believe inside .
I had a really long list of what I wanted to do in life, and for a long, long time it bothered me that my anxiety and depression and dissociation made just writing something like this use up all the mental energy I had for the day. I'm not giving up on those things, but I'm starting to care less about stuff like that and starting to figure out how to live the right way and the things that are important and the things are not, regardless of my circumstances. I'm starting to care less about the things that the universe gives me and gives others. And every day I think I'm starting to care just a smidgen less about running around in the labyrinth. I'm not saying to stop fighting or even to let the anxiety and depression go, but I think it's extremely important not to lose sight about what the really important things are in life - the real things we should worry about.
This might sound like non-practical, non-medical advice, but I mean who's to say what knowledge and wisdom is more important? Every day the sun rises and sets, the tides comes in and out, atoms split apart and fuse together somewhere else. Science has shown that everything in the universe is founded on laws and equilibrium. Why should humans be any different? Maybe somewhere a tally is being kept of all these things we do in our life, on the same pad that keeps a tally of how much matter and energy and time and information that exists in the universe now. It's not impossible, surely. It's not impossible that at some point somewhere the equilibrium must be restored somehow.
Posted by Phillipa on May 27, 2011, at 13:22:35
In reply to Anxiety and Depression are a hell of a combo, posted by hyperfocus on May 27, 2011, at 12:57:01
Excellent. Phillipa
Posted by SLS on May 27, 2011, at 13:25:17
In reply to Anxiety and Depression are a hell of a combo, posted by hyperfocus on May 27, 2011, at 12:57:01
The Universe is never at equilibrium. That's what entropy is all about. Open systems can maintain an equilibrium, but at the cost of the encompassing closed system. There is no free lunch.
- Scott
Posted by hyperfocus on May 27, 2011, at 13:56:04
In reply to Re: Anxiety and Depression are a hell of a combo » hyperfocus, posted by SLS on May 27, 2011, at 13:25:17
>The Universe is never at equilibrium. That's what entropy is all about. Open systems can maintain an equilibrium, but at the cost of the encompassing closed system.
I recall reading somewhere that the evolution of life violates thermodynamic principles - something about generating more information than you start with. There are people like Roger Penrose who believe that consciousness is a quantum phenomenon and can't be explained for a number of reasons by classical physics.>There is no free lunch.
I'd say it depends on where you want to eat. Which would you choose - happiness or wisdom?
Posted by hyperfocus on May 27, 2011, at 13:56:32
In reply to Re: Anxiety and Depression are a hell of a combo » hyperfocus, posted by Phillipa on May 27, 2011, at 13:22:35
Thanks Phillipa.
Posted by sleepygirl2 on May 27, 2011, at 16:40:38
In reply to Re: Anxiety and Depression are a hell of a combo » SLS, posted by hyperfocus on May 27, 2011, at 13:56:04
And so it might be with you :-) .....
Evolving in spite of what has been dealt to you.
I wish you peace, freedom from shame. Shame is a tough burden.
Posted by torrid on May 27, 2011, at 18:42:38
In reply to Anxiety and Depression are a hell of a combo, posted by hyperfocus on May 27, 2011, at 12:57:01
while reading your first paragragh I felt like I was the author, I call it chasing my tail. I never stand idle yet nothing every gets done, I live in fear of all the mistakes I've made coming back to remind me again what I failed to do right. getting the mail is always a panic, my forgotten mistake always seem to be in the mail. it's like a bomb went off in my life and I'm runnig around trying to catch the pieses before they hit the ground, or when you lean back in your chair and that monent that you realized that you lost your balance and are falling backward and remain stuck in that moment, never getting the relief of hitting the ground. after the first paragraph I no longer felt like the author.
Posted by floatingbridge on May 28, 2011, at 4:26:01
In reply to Anxiety and Depression are a hell of a combo, posted by hyperfocus on May 27, 2011, at 12:57:01
What if wisedom was a subset of happiness?
When I am deeply mired, I pray things like this:*
May I be free from danger.
May I know safety.
May I have mental happiness.
May I have physical happiness.
May I be free from shame
May I have ease of well-being.*Sharon Salzberg
It's corny, but I wish it for you. I say phrases like this before bed. In your thirst for goodness, you are really already beyond shame. You can be in the labrynth and held in the lap of love all at once.
Your posts make a posotive difference in my life. I can't be alone in that feeling. And you write so beautifully and full of fire. Maybe there are some good plans for you that you overlooked when you made your list. Don't think I am ignorant of regret. Deep regret. But I know flowers and all sorts of useful, beautiful
plants grow from sh*t and dirt.Blessings from the great spaghetti monster :)
Do you know Yeats's Crazy Jane poems?
This is the end of the thread.
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