Introduction
Today’s post will be a summary of the past few days. I have tried to develop the coping skills that I mentioned in the previous post. I’ve had some success, and a lot of times where I was not successful.
I am going to use this post as a way to process everything and hopefully make a slight pivot/regroup and try to improve a little bit more.
Reflections
So, as mentioned in my previous post, I am trying to address the problem of fixation. I mentioned that I felt like fixation/rumination lead to many of the other issues I struggle with, which is why I wanted to focus on that first.
One of the more curious things that has happened was my inability to stop fixating. What do I mean by that? Well, I found that while I was able to stop fixating on my previous relationship and the pain I was feeling, even if for a brief period of time, my brain immediately filled the gap with fixating on something else.
It seemed to me that I was unable to stop my brain from ruminating. I decided to just try to find some audio specifically designed to help calm individuals with ADHD. I found one and started listening to it.
It took several minutes, but gradually my thoughts started to slow. I had to focus on my breathing (similar to mindfulness practices) to continue to slow my thoughts. However, even with that, I still could not get my thoughts to completely slow.
The process that finally stopped my thoughts fully was focusing on intentionally noticing all of the details of my surroundings. Taking note of the exact color of the cars in front of me.
Noticing the exact way the smoke from the diesel trucks in front of me curled in the wind. Noticing the beauty of the sun striking the clouds after the thunderstorm had just rolled through.
Those three practices were able, for the first time in years, to completely turn down the volume of my inner thoughts. For the first time, I found peace, for however brief it was.
It felt nothing like I thought it would. I expected happiness, or joy. Rather, it was the absence of intense emotions. My emotions weren’t gone; the amplitude was just smaller. I was still forlorn and ashamed, but for the first time, the emotions were not at the wheel… I was.
It began to occur to me that given my brain’s struggle to stop fixating, even on things that weren’t something to fixate on, it was trying to mask something.
There is something that my brain, more accurately described as my inner child, is running from. Something that deeply hurt it that my conscious mind does not yet have access to. All of those times that my ex-girlfriend had asked me to stop fixating on something, it wasn’t that I didn’t love her or that I didn’t care about how she felt.
Almost everything that she had asked me to stop fixating on, to some extent or another, triggered the fear of uncertainty in me. Something that I don’t think I ever actually expressed to her. I just fixated to the point that she was begging me through tears to stop.
My brain was never afraid of her, or the things that she asked me not to fixate on. It was afraid of whatever demon resides behind the shroud of rumination. An iron veil, that until now, I had never equipped myself with the tools to lift.
Even as I am writing this, I am feeling scared. Which, the app I am using to teach me how to describe my emotions in specific terms defines as: “Perceiving threat or danger, whether physical or psychological.”
And the physical sensations in my body are tense. Similar to the feeling that you would feel when you put your hands up to protect your face when someone is intending to physically harm you. There is something deep in there where my inner child was harmed.
And given the physical sensations I feel in my body, I am worried that I was physically harmed as a young child, before I knew what emotions were, or even remotely how to process them. So, my brain developed whatever coping mechanisms it could find to protect itself from harm.
Rumination, one of the unhealthy coping mechanisms, is not the coping mechanisms that protects me from perceived danger directly, rather, it tries to drown out the fear. The terror tied to uncertainty. It tried to turn up the volume of one thing, to drown out the volume of another.
When I reflect on these situations with my ex-girlfriend, where I pushed her to the point of tears, I have found the coping mechanism that my brain used to protect me from harm.
One of the most confusing things to me about these situations was that I would have uncontrollable anxiety until the point where I made her cry and she isolated herself to cope. Please don’t get me wrong here, I loved this woman more than life itself and still do. I never wanted to make her cry.
But it wasn’t until I forced a crack to appear in our relationship that the anxiety stopped. And the most confusing part was that once I did that, I felt… relief.
I could not understand why I felt relief when I drove away someone I cared about. Until now. When uncertainty was present, I felt scared.
My inner child perceived that uncertainty as whatever is under that iron veil coming out and did the only thing it knew how to do at the time which was to drive away the person or thing that my inner child felt invited that uncertainty back into my life.
My ex-girlfriend never ever intended to do that. In fact, she was the most caring person I have ever met. And she was the one who equipped me with the basic set of tools that I am using to try to analyze what is driving the behaviors that broke our relationship.
She mentioned to me a few times that I changed after I died. During the week that I died I had a brief personality shift that made her parents fearful that I might harm her. So, they told her she couldn’t go out on dates with me anymore.
Which hurt, because being with her and her family was the first time I felt like I had a family that loved me. She loved me. For just me. No other reason than she just loved me. Dates with her were a joy. I felt so happy. Her family was welcoming and inviting. And I loved the movie nights and long conversations.
And since whether or not I would get to be a part of her life depended on my ability to sort out my emotions and treat her with compassion and kindness, my brain fell into those old coping mechanisms. Not because I didn’t want to treat her with compassion and kindness.
It fell into those mechanisms (and kicked them into overdrive) because she was the first and only person who had ever made that inner child feel safe. And now whether or not that inner child would ever get to see his safety again was… uncertain.
And so my inner child did what it had the tools to do which was drive away the situation that introduced the uncertainty. Or in other words, be so emotionally ignorant of how the person who had been in my corner since day one, that she walked away. She had to to protect her own mental wellbeing.
I figured this out too late. I still love her. I’m not certain if she still loves me, or if she will even invite me into her life again after the damage I have done. But I know for certain, that if I don’t break down that iron veil, and face whatever it is that is hiding behind it, no one who loves me will ever be able to stay.
I will never be happy, because I will only continue to drive everyone who loves me away, because they have to leave to protect themselves. My worst fear is dying alone. I used to feel like I felt that was because I did not know how to be alone. But now I know that I felt that way because my inner child saw the pattern and effects of my behavior long before I did.
It knew that I would die alone if I never addressed the issues I have discussed in this article. I don’t want to die alone. And if I have the privilege of my ex-girlfriend comes back into my life, or I meet someone who cares and loved me life she did, I don’t want to do this again. I don’t want to hurt someone who showed nothing but pure love again.
Steps Moving Forward
While this article has been extremely difficult to write, and at the moment I am feeling ashamed, lost, and vulnerable, I still find it pertinent to refine my plan to address these unhealthy coping mechanisms that my inner child has, and reframe the thoughts and coping mechanisms to heathy coping mechanisms.
So, I have discussed several patterns I have noticed, and I am going to list a few different coping mechanisms and strategies to build those automatic “autopilot habits”.
- The Irrational Fear of Uncertainty: This fear drives most of my core behaviors, if not all of them. It will take time to break down that iron veil, but I can’t keep waiting on it to fall before I address the things I struggle with.
- Trigger: The trigger for this behavior is uncertainty. The feeling of “not knowing”. The first thing I need to do is recognize when this fear has been triggered. The primary indicator of this trigger being activated is anxiety, rapidly racing thoughts, and analysis paralysis.
- Interrupting Habit: The racing thoughts are extremely difficult to break. If I cannot interrupt the thoughts, the result will be very similar to a runaway diesel engine. Rapidly spinning up until I self-destruct. There are a few habits I will use to try and interrupt these thoughts.
- Turn Down the Volume: As mentioned earlier, when I am at work/driving, something that helps me is using calming audio, mindfulness, and external awareness.
I first need to assign a label to the trigger. I need to say “I am feeling [anxious/scared/worried/etc.]”. Calling out the feeling helps externalize the feeling, making it easier to break the thought loop.
I then need to turn on a calming audio (have it saved for easy access), begin a mindfulness breathing exercise, and then focus on my external awareness. Notice every detail that I can, take note of what I see, what I hear, lean heavily into my senses. - Find External Awareness: this habit is for when I am at home, the weather is okay, and I can go to my coping spots. The first step will always be to assign a label to the emotion and call it out verbally.
There are two coping spots that I have, one is a local park, and the other is a secret spot I have outside of town that has personal meaning to me. I need to go to these spots and practice external awareness in nature.
These spots are located outside of the bustle of the city and serve as a spot of serenity. The goal here is to utilize the external awareness tool mentioned previously and lean heavily into the senses. This will externalize the emotions and bring me into the present. - Distract My Mind: again, this will be the same process of assigning a label to the emotion. The coping skill this time is distraction. I need to break the thought loop by shifting the focus to an external stimulus.
There are a few activities I can do. The activities have a few requirements that must be met. Firstly, they must be emotionally neutral. Second, they must be low effort/low mental load. Lastly, they must have a time limit.- Develop a simple HTML website: I have been developing simple HTML pages for a long time. Most of the code required I know from memory. I will set a 30-minute timer while I complete this coping mechanism.
- Play City Skylines II: City Skylines II is a game that is enjoyable to play by myself. Obviously, being a video game, I will set a time limit to prevent mental overload. Timer will be set for 15 minutes before returning back to my schedule.
- Read a Book: Both fiction and nonfiction books are easy for me to get lost in. It takes me quite a bit of effort to get myself to sit down and read them but once I do my brain gets lost in the book. I will set a 30-minute time limit for this one.
- Mindfulness Meditation: mindfulness mediation is often a simple breathing exercise that calms the mind. It is something that takes quite a bit of practice and patience to fully quiet your mind. However, this coupled with one of the calming audio tracks is a good thing to practice.
- Turn Down the Volume: As mentioned earlier, when I am at work/driving, something that helps me is using calming audio, mindfulness, and external awareness.
- Reflect and Review: After I have used my new coping mechanisms, I need to document the results. I have a journal, and I will document the results of the coping skill. The first step of this documentation process is to do an emotional check-in on my emotion app.
I will log the emotion I felt before the coping mechanism, and the emotion I felt after. I will also log things such as blood sugar, caffeine intake, water intake, hours of sleep, etc. These metrics are essential to document, because they show patterns that lead to these triggers.
While they do not address the root fear that drives my behavior, they do show patterns that make me more vulnerable to the strong emotions that are associated with the unhealthy coping mechanisms being triggered.
By doing this, over time I will begin to know what patterns lead to the emotional vulnerability and low ability to cope healthily, and I will be able to start working to prevent the factors that lead to the behaviors that I am trying to change.
Conclusion
I still have a long way to go before I am where I want to be. But this is the first time that I have made it this far in the process of taking the wheel back from my emotions. It is honestly scary. I don’t know if I can do it. That scares me. I don’t know what my brain is running from. That scares me.
I am walking through the forest in pure darkness. I cannot see ahead of me, but I can see my next step. I can just put one foot in front of the other. It doesn’t matter how dark the night is, the sun always rises in the morning.
I will leave this article with a quote:
“Every storm runs out of rain”
– Maya Angelou