I’ve now been in therapy for 3 months. I know that this is a short time for most of you, but it still feels like a milestone for me.

***I’m not sure if this needs a trigger warning, but just to be safe, I mention SU thoughts***

The main thing that drew me to therapy was existential angst. As long as I can remember, I’ve felt like I was lacking whatever core thing it is that makes other people human. I’ve never had a spark inside of me. Right now, all I do in my life is work. I don’t know what to do with myself when I have free time, and it puzzles me how other people seem to have so much that they want to do in life.

I also struggle a lot with the feeling that reality is all an illusion that “I” (not Bee, but the universe) have created in order to distract myself from the despair of forever. I think about the concept of infinity and it terrifies me. How can the universe have always existed? And yet how could it have ever not existed? I am scared all the time that the illusion is going to break, and that I’ll be back to eternity. I have nightmares where my T disintegrates in front of me, after scolding me for thinking that he was real.

I chose my T partly because he has a degree in theology. He was going to be a priest, but ended up becoming a T instead. In today’s session, I started telling him about some of the stuff I think about. I also confided in him about the voice that I hear in my head all the time, telling me to kill myself.

It was almost funny how quickly he changed from his usual “compassionate T” mode into “diagnostic T” mode. It was clear from some of his questions that he was going through checklists for schizophrenia, DID, etc. He eventually was reassured that I was OK (although he did mention maybe trying an anti-psychotic drug, which sounded much too serious to me), and we were able to start to talk about things.

We talked about the voice that I hear. It is definitely in my head, and I know it isn’t real, it comes from me but it is deep and authoritative, and not my normal interior voice. I can usually ignore it, but it never goes away. All it says is “kill yourself”, over and over. I know that what it means is that I would be better off ending the illusion of reality rather than living in fear of reality slipping away from me. My T asked what would happen if killing myself didn’t end the illusion. I think he was trying to get me to think of the possibility that reality is real and that killing myself really means killing myself, but I took his question more to mean what if there is nothing that I can do to end the illusion, and that is not something I want to consider.

My T talked for a while about the philosopher Heidegger and his book Being and Time, and then talked about how my learning more about how other people have dealt with these ideas could be good for me, which I agree with. He also talked about how I have never felt like I was a person. He said that it is a common feeling among traumatized children, especially when the trauma started when they were really young. This made me feel a little hopeful, that other people had felt like this as well, and I wanted to ask him if he thought I would eventually feel human, but I wasn’t ready to hear his answer.

I am really appreciating my T more and more. I struggle with feeling like if he cares about me, it is because I manipulated him into it, but a couple times in the last few weeks I have felt his care and haven’t felt bad about it. I love how gentle his voice is, and how safe I feel with him. I love that he is so open with the details of his own life, his own bad childhood. I feel so sad for little T sometimes.

I am his first client of the day on Fridays, and he told me that he makes himself go to bed early on Thursday nights so that he can get into the office before I do, because he never wants me to come to an empty office and feel abandoned. And when I offered to change the session time, he just smiled and said that the time was perfect.

Hi Nannabee,
I haven't had exactly the experiences you have in terms of the voices. I do have hyper-critical tapes that play (or used to play, they're not nearly as bad as they used to be) in my head, but there in my voice. However, the feelings you are struggling with, of not feeling real and not getting why other people want to do so much, but especially that feeling of not being able to know what reality is.

These feelings turned out to be wrapped up in several issues all of which went back to my childhood. My dad was an alchoholic and physically and sexually abusive. As far as I can figure out (I had no conscious memories until my 30s, but have had enough outside confirmation to trust what I have recovered) my dad abused me from the age of 4 - 11 when my parents divorced and dad pretty much disappeared from my life. My mom was not actively abusive but I think she herself was abused as a child and disassociated a lot, so she was very unavailable emotionally.

So the first issue of not feeling real stems from not having a steady, attuned other to reflect me back to myself so that I could both learn who I was and that I was real. My T explained to me many times in the beginning of our work that human beings cannot know themselves outside of relationship. It is in interacting with another human being that we learn who we are, what our needs are, and what we feel. It's a paradox at the heart of being human. We are each ultimately alone, but cannot know ourselves outside relationship. When your caregivers are abusive and/or neglectful, you are either not reflected at all (your needs aren't important enough to register with the other, led alone be reflected back) or you receive a distorted view of yourself (my dad worked really hard to convince me I was so unattractive that no one else would ever love me, which kept me close and handy to abuse.) So we can grow into adulthood with no idea of who we are. In many ways therapy for me was finally experiencing a safe, contained place with a trustworthy other who was focused and attuned enough to create the safe place in which I could learn who I was.

The second thing that I know affected me in this area was that my emotional needs, and expressing them led at best to my being abandoned and at the worst punished. So I learned to hate my needs and avoid my emotions because it was too dangerous to do otherwise. I shoved my feelings away for a very long time. But the problem is that our feelings are what give meaning to life, it is when we feel that we know we are alive and when we shut down the feelings, then life recedes a certain distance.

I also was using an enormous amount of internal energy and space to hold those feelings at bay, so that there wasn't a lot left over to do other things. The deadness and hollow feeling was because I was so depleted by denying my own needs and feelings (all without being conscious of doing so,btw). One of the best parts about healing was that as I allowed myself to feel, and cleared out all the unprocessed memories and feelings of the trauma, energy was freed up. I have experienced more creativity in the last three years, then in the other 47 of my life.

I don't know if any of this will ring true for you as it's very based in my experience, but I do believe as you heal, you can also heal the feelings of emptiness and unreality.

Oh one more thing, I knew I left something out. Because a traumatized child is often overwhelmed and has no one helping them learn to cope or understand, their own emotions can literally feel life threatening and must be shut away often by disassociation which means that you go away and in a deep existential sense, you cease to exist. Because of this dynamic, a very common feeling among survivors is the fear of annihilation because once they were actually threatened with it. I used to call it the black abyss. I hit a point in my healing where it disappeared. Hope some of this may help.

AG

Nannabee hi. I’m sorry I can’t really relate to what you’re going through – the sense that everything is an illusion and that reality is this terrifying concept of infinity (something I try and imagine – infinity that is – and my mind baulks at a certain point.) I’m sort of the opposite, that everything is just SO real and existed before me and will continue to exist after me and in the moments when I stop and think about that, I feel strangely freed, everything becomes ‘good’ even if just briefly.

But your post touched me and I wanted to write just to say I’m sorry you are feeling like this and especially about that voice in your head. I’m glad you are starting to feel your T’s caring – in time that may become the connection to reality you need that will give your existence meaning and undo the voice telling you to kill yourself

If you’re thinking of dipping into the writings of the existential philosophers, be warned they can be pretty depressing! Well I found them so. But an interesting book that in some ways parallels what you are describing is ‘Nausea’ by Sartre (whose philosophy grew out of the ideas of Heidegger and Husserl – amongst others). It’s a short novel but deals with the sorts of issues you are talking about in your post.

Hugs to you (((((((( Nannabee )))))))

LL

Hi Nannabee

Hugs.

I can relate to some of your post too. Like AG described, a detachment from my feelings gave me a sense of not being as real or as valid as other people for years. I haven't worked through the specifics of those feelings to know exactly where they came from but through therapy and through interactions with others, I do feel now that my experiences are as valid as anyone else's.

When I was reading your post, the book that came to my mind is The Divided Self by R D Laing. He explains, through using case studies, how people can come to feel split in various ways because of their early experiences and upbringing. I'm not saying that I think you have a serious mental illness - but, as AG says in such a clear and down to earth way, our early experiences shape how we think about ourselves.

quote:

I also struggle a lot with the feeling that reality is all an illusion that “I” (not Bee, but the universe) have created in order to distract myself from the despair of forever. I think about the concept of infinity and it terrifies me. How can the universe have always existed? And yet how could it have ever not existed? I am scared all the time that the illusion is going to break, and that I’ll be back to eternity. I have nightmares where my T disintegrates in front of me, after scolding me for thinking that he was real

These are really interesting spiritual questions. It's difficult for me to put this into words but I believe there is an "infinite" part of all of us that will continue when this embodied manifestation stops. And that part has come from "eternity" and will go back to "eternity". In fact in a sense, it's already there. Quantum physics is beginning to show that energy can be in more than one place at a time. I believe that the energy within us is within us and yet everywhere. Now, if we're very attached to our earthly manifestation (as most people are) then it can be quite scary to think about losing it.

So, when you say that you feel that you have created this illusion, then in a way that makes sense, because in a way we all have - but it's not our earthly manifestation or ego that has created it, no, that's where God complexes come from.

Also, "reality" is an interesting concept because there isn't one reality that we all share. We all look at the world through our own eyes based upon our own experiences, which is why projection happens so frequently.

I don't know if this is helping at all. Quite clearly I am not an existential philosopher!! Spiritual paths are different for everyone and so I am loathe to recommend one path over another but perhaps you could start looking for something that speaks to you. If you're drawn to it, then explore it to see if it gives you some answers. If not try something else. I think when you find a path that works for you then it might take away some of the fear and anxiety you feel.

My approach to growth is twofold and I feel a lot of internal conflict between spiritual and psychological approaches. Your T sounds like he could be a good combination for you.

Sorry if this is too much about what I believe and it doesn't chime with you. That's absolutely fine. I didn't want to read and not post but then once I started, I found it really difficult to say what I wanted to in a concise way. I might come back and edit this later.

I just got home from a lovely weekend at the beach with my friends, and am feeling happy still, so it is a bit easier to look at things with perspective. I read over my original post again, and I wasn’t really all that clear about the reality/illusion stuff, was I? I do want to clarify, but I am well aware of how “out there” this all sounds, and I might feel too uncomfortable having it up here and have to take it down.

So, I am a mathematician, which is much less about numbers than most people imagine and much more about proving stuff about things that don’t actually exist. When I am thinking about math, I feel like my mind leaves my body and flows outwards, and I am able to envision these imaginary math concepts and see connections. Anyway, at some point, I started really feeling the concept of forever. And for me, who can’t even deal with one weekend of free time, imagining my consciousness existing forever was a terrifying concept.

About 5 years ago, it began to get harder to bring my mind back into my body, and when my mind was gone, what I saw was that all that really exists is one Being (who I think of as the universe). And this Being has always existed and will always exist, and the Being is full of despair, and doesn’t know why it exists. (And not only did I see this as reality, I also felt as if I was this Being, and I felt the despair that it feels.) And so to distract from the anguish of its existence, the Being created the world. Each of us is a tiny part of the Being, so we are all connected and dying really just means that our little bit of consciousness gets reabsorbed into the Being. So I feel like “I” am both Bee, and the Being, and that all of “reality” is really just a construct that I/the Being am using to distract myself. And I am really terrified at the thought of always existing.

And writing this out has actually helped me a lot. I have been thinking that I am special, and that killing myself would end the illusion and all that would exist again would be the Being. But I am just one tiny piece of the Being, and so killing myself wouldn’t end the illusion at all.

AG- So much of what you have written makes sense. I too was abused, physically by my older brother and sexually by my father, starting when I was a baby. My mom knew about the abuse, but did nothing to protect me. I’m in my mid-thirties now, and up until I started therapy I really felt like I hadn’t been affected by the abuse.

quote:

The deadness and hollow feeling was because I was so depleted by denying my own needs and feelings (all without being conscious of doing so,btw). One of the best parts about healing was that as I allowed myself to feel, and cleared out all the unprocessed memories and feelings of the trauma, energy was freed up. I have experienced more creativity in the last three years, then in the other 47 of my life.

As far as I can remember, I have never wanted anything. I can remember my mom asking me what I wanted for my 8th birthday, and not being able to think of a single thing. I’ve never had my own interests. Looking back, every hobby or activity I’ve done has been someone else’s that I latched onto. I just have no idea of who I am. Your experience gives me hope that I will have my own desires at some point.

quote:

I’m sort of the opposite, that everything is just SO real and existed before me and will continue to exist after me and in the moments when I stop and think about that, I feel strangely freed, everything becomes ‘good’ even if just briefly.

That sounds like an amazing feeling, LL! Thanks for responding even if you don’t relate. I’m so used to the voice in my head, it is more like my constant companion now and not as scary. But when it first started I couldn’t tune it out the way I can now and it made me feel really crazy. After the voice started, I gave myself a year to do everything I could to feel better and then I was going to kill myself. About a week after making that decision, my house got hit by lightning and burned down. I lost a lot of sentimental things which hurt a lot, but in the next year, I was so occupied with rebuilding that I hardly even noticed the voice. So I consider the fire to be one of the best things that happened to me. I will definitely check out that Sartre novel. I started reading some Heidegger, and am feeling a little lost.

tygr- I really appreciate you sharing your philosophy with me. I totally get how hard it can be to find the words to explain something like this. I think one of the things that is most helpful for me is hearing how other people experience the world and how they think of existence, because it is so hard for me to see other explanations other than what I have come up with. The whole reason I started therapy was because of a dream I had where I was in therapy, and I was explaining my view of reality to the therapist, and he took it all in and was about to tell me what his own beliefs were when I woke up, and I was so disappointed that I didn’t get to hear his answer.

As far as when you were feeling you are somehow "special"- the answer to that is that you quite simply are!
You are unique and unrepeatable, and also, "the most important one." - cause Love itself relates to all of us as "the most important and special one." And that will be forever!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: blackbird,

Nannabee,

I am glad that you found something to relate to in what I said. And I do want to encourage you that there is healing and a better way to be.You are meant to live and live fully.

(((Beebs))) Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I so needed to hear that this morning.

Aglet

blackbird- I saw your long post before you deleted it and I am so sorry I wasn't able to respond to it then. I've been staying away anything that could trigger me after a scary experience I had last week (which I am going to post about in the closed forum), and thinking about this stuff can definitely be triggering for me. I want to say that I really appreciated your post, and it made me think a lot about some of my beliefs.

-Bee

I'm very glad bee, that you didn't read if it was triggering material. I needed to delete since I trigger myself by posting about stuff like that! I'm sorry I had to take it down..

go gently now, and stay safe...

hugs,

Beebs