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Nice Words Do Help, the Circumstance Smog Machine, and Core Beliefs

7 years ago3,711 words

It can be frustrating dealing with someone with depression, especially when attempts to 'make them happy' aren't magically and permanently effective. I do understand that. I've read the comments on the previous post, and want to respond in this post.

I wanted to respond sooner, and to all of them individually, but time and energy aren't something I have in abundance at the moment. I'm still trying to work on my dissertation, and it's a shambles... It's an unnecessarily complicated and esoteric study which none of my group seem to fully understand, so that's one point of frustration, but there's also been extreme cold weather that's led to classes being cancelled, the professors are on strike because of pay cuts, and my supervisors - who are supposed to have been guiding us via weekly meetings, but who we've never met with even once - are currently away in a completely different university in Scotland... so I've had a lot to be stressed about and distracted by.

Plus my brain tumour is in the centre of my mind (ha). I'm going to have another checkup about that tomorrow - the last was six months ago - and while it's likely I'll be told it's much the same as the other times and to come back in a few more months, there's also a chance that I'll be told that I'll need major, intrusive surgery that involves slicing through ∞ a rather important part of my brain ∞, followed by a year of recovery and cancer treatment and, well, my life is already terrible so I'm not exactly eager to be told I have to deal with that on top of it all.

It's strange though, and makes me think... All my life - at least until I came to study Psychology here at university - I've had a strange but extreme phobia of brains. My nightmares were full of them, and I thought that if I ever saw a real one, I'd have some kind of breakdown. I've since held a real human brain in my hand, and the phobia seems to have disappeared... but I still have a fear of gory bisection, where a person is sliced in two vertically such that their brain is cut in half. It's always been an utterly horrifying concept to me, moreso than any other, and it's largely because I wondered what would happen to consciousness if your brain produced it, and that brain was cut in two. Which side would 'you' end up in? It's interesting that cutting the corpus callosum can actually produce a condition called ∞ split brain ∞, where the hemispheres can't communicate and you get essentially ∞ two consciousnesses sharing a body ∞... I wonder what that's like. And I wonder whether my fear of brains - and of bisection in particular - served as some dark foreshadowing of my eventual fate. Life may be a story, after all, which we choose to enter into knowing the general twists and turns before we begin. I just wonder what, if anything, I was meant to learn from all of this.

Anyway, that's mostly off-topic. What I mostly wanted to talk about is how helping someone with depression can feel like a futile effort, which can lead to frustration or just giving up entirely when attempts to get them out of their funk don't produce some kind of permanent cure. It's like trying to help someone with a damaged spine up a flight of stairs, and they slowly take a couple of sluggish, stumbling steps upwards... only for their broken back to buckle and send them tumbling back down five stairs. If this just kept happening, there would of course be the urge to just give up and walk away - they'll never get up that staircase anyway, what's the point? - or to give them a hard, fierce push hoping that'll propel them up to the top (picture that; do you think it would work?).

One important thing that I want to say is that hearing nice things from people - even if they're just typed words from distant internet denizens - does help. I read the comments on the previous post a couple of nights ago (after putting it off for days out of fear due to old scars), and I felt like they actually lifted me out of my abyss at least a little bit. I smiled. So I wanted to thank people for that. I feel genuinely honoured that I've done things worthy of people caring about me as much as they seem to. It baffles me, but I really do appreciate it more than I say. I wish I expressed that more often. But then of course there are the ones who were less patient... but I won't go on about that here.

I do however want to expand on the idea that helping can seem futile if there are no apparent permanent results. If only helping someone once could indeed save them forever! But sadly it isn't like that. We can't have one shower and be forever clean. Depression is like this black mist that you're trapped in, obscuring the world and very much limiting what you're capable of perceiving. Fans (I like the wordplay here) can blow away this mist, clearing the air and presenting views that might not be seen otherwise, as well as just generally relieving the feeling of being darkly suffocated and drained. However, the mist is generated by the ugly machine that is Circumstance, chugging away day after day, on some of which it belches out these toxic clouds more thickly than others. Turning 30 and having all that other stuff I just mentioned to worry about put that machine into overdrive, and I took to this place to vent about it because it helps to have an outlet. I should probably post more often when I'm not feeling so trapped and consumed, because I'm aware my posts present a biased perspective.

Also, it's sort of odd watching yourself be talked about by other people. Tobias this, Tobias that... It's nice to be on people's minds and a driving force behind their thoughts and words like that, though it does remind me that I'm usually this elusive, aloof figure that's talked about rather than with or to. I don't like that things have turned out that way, and it wasn't really intentional. I do remember a comment that my lovely father left on this blog a while back, about how (as he understood it) I was trapped in my own world where I was the only inhabitant... I assume that was him projecting his own isolated experience onto me (he hasn't actually met me in almost two decades), but I wonder if there's some genetic basis to that kind of psychological fate. To seal myself away within myself, while others intermingle more fluently. I do feel I'm trapped in my own world, my own bubble, and it's... sad. It's not something I'd choose. But it's also not something easily changed.

Back in the ancient days of Fig Hunter - or even before that, with my first community site built around a silly fake religion - I'd eagerly eat up every post by every member, I'd look forward to feedback, I'd take part in discussions and I took pride in replying to as many of my messages as I could. I miss that. I wish I could still be like that. But years of psychological scarring from trolls and critics have led to defensive behaviours, avoidance, and... well. That's not easily changed either.

Which leads me to the idea of core beliefs, which I've been wanting to write about in more depth for a long time, but it's one of the many things I've never got around to. It's interesting googling the term; I see pages for both ∞ CBT ∞ and ∞ soulwork ∞. Hmm. The former is more worth looking at if you want to understand this a bit more, but the other one amuses me (partly because of the url).

Essentially, the term core beliefs is used to refer to, well, beliefs that we have about ourselves (or others or the world), at the core. These can be things like feeling that we're defective, or unlovable. They're generally maintained by selectively paying attention to evidence that supports them while ignoring evidence that refutes them... like all beliefs.

Beliefs are tricky things though, because they're very difficult to change by will. Here's something for you to do right now: believe in Zeus. Go on. Believe, truly believe, with absolute conviction and without a shred of doubt, that the god Zeus genuinely exists. Have you done it? Do you believe in Zeus now, truly? Your life will change a lot now, knowing that Zeus is real. Right? Or how about this: Believe that there's a giant pink elephant sitting right in the middle of your room. Just believe it. I know you can do it. Go on. Do you believe it yet? No? Why not?

It's one thing to think something, to have a thought or idea, but beliefs aren't really something that are subject to direct manipulation. Someone who believes that they're unlovable trying to believe that they're desirable is like an atheist trying to believe in God. Perhaps there are some feeble thoughts in there that they might be able to latch onto to pull themselves in that direction, but the evidence in favour of the belief that they already have - that nobody wants them, that there isn't a divine being - was strong enough to convince them of that 'truth' in the first place, so obviously it's not easily displaced. Perhaps you'd find it impossible to believe that there's a pink elephant in the room because you can't hear anything, or smell anything, and you can see straight through to the other side of the room. But the inverse is true, too. If a peachy pachyderm's pendulous proboscis was trumpeting softly near your ears as it damply caressed the nape of your neck, you might find it equally difficult to believe that there wasn't a pink elephant in the room. So it is with core beliefs. We believe what the evidence convinces us to believe, and find it all but impossible to believe otherwise.

I have many maladaptive core beliefs that shape the narrative of my life, and keep me firmly in the pit I'm in. The tricky thing is that they're all based on a multitude of experiences, without anything much - or at all - to refute them.

A common one among many people is the feeling of 'worthlessness'; I've seen many people online talk about how they're a 'piece of bottom-chocolate' (though usually they use a different word there), and it's always seemed tragic and frustrating to me how they'd be led to believe such a thing. I don't personally believe I'm worthless, nor do I hate myself (I do engage in self-loathing, but it's due to guilt; it could be said that I sometimes hate my 'social self', the insecure Me who others have to suffer, but the 'Inner Me' doesn't receive such hatred from me). Unlike many of those people, who might wish to be something they're not - more outgoing, or more 'normal', for example; they might wish to be 'one of the cool kids' - I'm content to be the sort of person that I am. The frustration comes from feeling that I'm a square peg in a world of round holes; that other people aren't on the same page as me, that I'm blue in a world of reds, and purples trying to be red. A little lamb in a world of armoured wolves. That I'd have to be something I don't want to be in order to fit in. This is supported by a lifetime of uncomfortable looks from people I've tried to interact with, or frustration within myself at having to interact with them in a way that doesn't exactly light me up inside. I don't think I'm better or worse than other people, just different... and I've been longing for belonging for so long without finding my place or my people. There's only so long you can do that before you feel that it's futile, it seems. The best way to counter this would be to find people I truly connect with, and on the very rare occasions that I have, the maladaptive belief transforms for a while, leaves me alone. Then they go on to reject me, leading to the next part...

I believe that I'm 'unlovable', not because I'm not 'special', but because I am 'special'. I mean this mostly in the romantic or sexual sense. The list of traits a woman would look for in a partner, and the list of traits I'd use to describe myself, don't really overlap. I don't mean this as an "all women want arseholes!!" kind of thing. Women are generally predisposed to want men who are capable of protecting and providing, biologically speaking; they want a partner who they can rely on to help raise their children. We're driven by animal urges, deep down; the biological drive to achieve the best genes to mate with so then we can ensure the survival of our own genes in the next generation. Certain traits become communicators of gene quality, and the assessment of these happens on a mostly unconscious level. What people say they want doesn't need to be really related to what they actually choose. It's interesting comparing this to the split brain effect. From the Wikipedia article I linked to earlier:



There's a load of stuff like that in psychology. It seems that the stories we tell about our decisions are often completely unrelated to the reasons the brain made those decisions in the first place. We do something, don't fully understand why, and come up with an explanation that we think makes sense. In that split brain example, each hemisphere selects a different pair of image and word, but only one hemisphere can actually use language. Since the language hemisphere has no direct access to the machinations of the other hemisphere, all it can do is try to come up with a probable reason for its body's behaviour. I imagine the explanation doesn't feel like a struggle; it probably arrives freely in the mind and feels like it fits with the action. Partner selection - and love and lust and attraction and all that - are rooted in fairly quantifiable preferences that tend to be the same across individuals and which make sense biologically. There's idiosyncrasy, as with everything, but there's a reason why Confident Cory, the Most Popular Guy In School, is likely to elicit bashful giggles from most girls, while Hogbelch the Glue-Eating Hunchback is going to get different kinds of giggles, if any attention at all.

Anyway, my own feelings of being undesirable come from the fact that I've just not been wanted by the opposite sex in the real world before. I've had one girlfriend, who I met online and who seemed to love me more than I deserved before she realised what a mistake that was, and one friend here at university who also realised it was a bad idea to know someone like me and cut me out like a tumour, which still haunts me every day. Obviously the evidence here is very much in favour of the negative core belief that I already have, and there's little to add to the other side of the scales to counter the weight of those swirling, snarling black holes. It's true that people online have liked me, in some sense... but they're almost always male, which, really sadly, isn't the same thing. It's hard to know what to do about this one.

Another thing is the idea that we should care less about what others feel, that we shouldn't tie our happiness to the approval of others. To a degree, this is true, and it's wise to say it... but to extend it to life as a whole seems delusional to me. The fact is, we're a social species, and we need a sense of acceptance or belonging in order to be mentally well. We need connections. To achieve them, we need to care enough about how others feel to sufficiently impress them, to win - and keep - their approval. This can go into overdrive when coupled with things social anxiety or a feeling of undesirability - so you really want to impress people but feel incapable of it - and in such cases it'd be best if it were toned down (but it's not easily changed because it's rooted in beliefs and brain wiring). Being content within oneself isn't enough to access certain pleasures. You can't hug yourself, cuddle with yourself, have sex with yourself, sit around chatting with yourself, get intriguing other perspectives from yourself. Going for walks alone can feel nice if it's a choice, an option freely chosen, but suffocating if it's your only option. You could say - rather tritely, I think - that accepting yourself means that others will be drawn to you, and perhaps there's some truth in that too. But I just know that we need other people, and to 'get' other people you need to care about what they think. I'd hate to be the sort of person who was so selfish that my bonds with others didn't deeply matter. I'm sure sociopaths, bereft of empathy, do quite well too since they don't have to worry themselves over hurting people. I wouldn't want to be one of them either.

I have a core belief that sex is important to feel fulfilled, which is a tricky one because it's rooted in basic biological needs and a lifetime of cultural conditioning. Almost everything in our culture is about mating. It's weird that we have this obsessive-repulsion attitude towards it; most songs are about love (usually of the lustful, desirous kind), and we spend much mental time and energy assessing whether we'd want to jump in bed with others of our preferred sex, but 'private parts' are secrets to be hidden, and even minor sexual missteps can ruin a person's reputation and career. People define so much of their life based on which shape of genitals they would prefer to play with; sexual and even gender identity are essentially rooted in sex. They have crises about whether or not they're 'gay' or 'bi', so important it is who they would or wouldn't slurp bodily fluids out of the crevasses of (I know how sex works and how to make it sound enticing) People have their value determined by the amount of sex they get; young men in particular are told by the world that their value is tightly tied to how often they get 'laid'. Some people might be able to get by without sex, if it's a choice. Not everyone has a strong libido; some people don't even have the urge for sex. But like with everything, it's possible to be content with things only if they're a choice. Rape is awful because it's something forced upon you; you don't have a choice about whether you experience that or not. Celibacy when you want sex isn't worlds apart from that. It's not a choice either; it's a horrible smorgasbord of unpleasant physiological and psychological feelings - directed towards yourself, others, and the world - that are inflicted upon you without you wanting them, just more slowly, over more time. Being raped can make a person feel disgusted, broken, traumatised. But what about if nobody wants you at all, and the very idea of bonding with you in such a way is met with disgust? But I imagine it sounds wrong to compare the two. To compare violating assault with a failure to woo. Rape victims deserve our sympathy, and rightly so. But those who must go without the sex they want are losers, the butt of jokes. An acceptable target, for they only have themselves to blame for being so pathetic. Or so culture says. Hmm.

There's more I could say about all this, but I didn't really have the time to write what I've already written, but I did anyway. I also feel like I'm just rambling rather than keeping to any point; I'm not sure what I'm getting at by describing all that. I suppose the most important point I wanted to make is that I am grateful for the support I get, I don't like that I'm so aloof since that was never my intention, I'm definitely plagued by maladaptive core beliefs but they're not easy (at all) to change, and moods are like weather: sometimes they're worse than other times. Being trapped in a storm doesn't mean that storm will be eternal. Some days it's sunny. Some days you get struck by lightning. My Circumstance machine is quite active at vomiting out those black clouds at the moment, but I'm really, genuinely grateful of the supportive words that people do offer and I don't want to suggest that they're without value.

Anyway, I wish I could write assignments as quickly as I write these posts! And I have to go to the hospital tomorrow to learn about my fate, so I'm not looking forward to that...