THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH

Today was a bit of an odd day, with heavy feelings. It was like I was matching the weather.

I’ve been trying to avoid reading or thinking about psychology. That means I found myself in a forest contemplating the structure and function of the self anyway.

It started with a chat about staying away from that stuff, and about how it became too much. It was too much. But I think what happened in the last few months was unavoidable. I also think it went extremely badly. Like everything this year, it was too much, too fast, too intense.

I think it was unavoidable because when I reconnected a dissociated body part, I lost a major unconscious defense mechanism. One that had protected my conscious mind for almost my entire life. Now that conscious mind was exposed to decades-old sensations and images.

Defense mechanisms protect your conscious mind from fear above all else. Now that dissociation’s spell had been broken, my entire body reacted. Hyperarousal? Cute. My autonomic nervous system activated so intensely it whooshed right past that into extreme hypoarousal. I didn’t just freeze, I collapsed.

Now, the problem there is that the ANS doesn’t just settle down. And the conscious mind is still experiencing a whole bunch of fear. This is not a good place for the conscious mind. Things get weird. Existential crisis weird.

And I was set up to keep messing with defense mechanisms, activating the nervous system, and exposing the conscious mind to fear. All of the fear.

The first round of weird involved an identity crisis and a rewatch of Neon Genesis Evangelion. It settled down with the idea to rebel against the absurd and I started to explore the idea of self more broadly.

But I hadn’t properly healed from everything. So my sympathetic nervous system was still screaming. I knew things were still off, which is why I planned to start EMDR. And, that would have been a good idea, except…

…it’s also when the second round of weird started. With my nervous system still in hyperarousal, I was extremely vulnerable. In particular, I was vulnerable to triggers. And of course, on the night before my first EMDR session, my husband triggered me.

And I just… kept… getting… triggered. And it kept driving up hyperarousal. And that drove up symptoms and somatic distress. And made me even more vulnerable to everything. And then the negative self beliefs—a focus of EMDR—started adding to the assault. It was a loop.

And every single time I was triggered more defense mechanisms failed or were activated in maladaptive ways. Denial. Repression. Displacement. Intellectualisation. Regression. Avoidance. Isolation. Re-enactment.

And I re-lived everything with each trigger. There was no barrier between my past and my conscious mind. I was back in those rooms. I saw those people, those places. I felt those feelings.

Existential crisis? Around here we call that Tuesday. HA HA I KID I KID (humour is a defense mechanism). But technically it was called retraumatisation.

But the silver lining is that I noticed those defense mechanisms in action. I had to notice, especially when it’s destructive. Especially when my conscious mind seemed to have lost control.

So, that’s how the dominoes fell, and I was forced to confront all those things. To get on my psychology bullshit. To understand what the fuck had just happened with each trigger. To figure out why my self concept kept disintegrating. To work out how to stop having existential crises or behaving destructively.

It really REALLY was too much.

I haven’t fixed things like defense mechanisms. That’s not the point for now.

But I have more self-awareness. I understand more of how my past affects my present. I know where some defense mechanisms come from, and I know how those defense mechanisms look in action.

Before I can modify behaviour I need to pay attention to what’s important, inside and outside of me.

That’s right folks it’s salience orienting response time:

• Enjoyed bike torture this morning. I know, I know. “Enjoyed”.
• Kept up my laundry streak: 9 days!
• Had a bunch more time to myself than usual, which was… well… I kind of didn’t do much with it, but that’s fine.
• Discovered that I’ve actually stopped a bunch of co-dependent behaviours. This was something I meant to do at the start of the year, and it got forgotten because I collapsed. But it actually kind of came about as part of healing trauma anyway.
• did a psychology i am not a doctorb what no this is not a defense mechanism no you didn’t read intellectualisation up in that list
• I saw a bug