Feels like I’m starting from scratch with everything. I’m racking my brain to put together anything in my life that just hasn’t been an extension of trying to survive and the chronic fear that comes with it. I got nothing.
But it’s ok. I’m past the point where I feel the need to sugarcoat my life. Sometimes yeah, it is that bad. It is that messy. And if you don’t step back and open yourself up to help you risk replaying out the same old tired shit throughout your life.
Trimmed down my drum sample library and built some ready to go drum kits for my MPC. A bunch of anxiety that came with it. I still have a lot of anxiety around music.
Final day before my 5 day break from the subs. When I return I’m adding paragon.
I’ve been going through a really rough time this week. Nothing drains me worse than just not wanting to be near people and then having to interact with them on a daily basis. I get so tired of having to mask all the time in social contexts.
I think what really bothers me the most is there isn’t a solution to this. The solution is self growth and taking care of myself, but in the moment there’s nothing I can really do. I’ve started giving myself more breaks at work, easing up on my relentless “you need to be more productive” whipping, and generally putting my needs first. But it’s still difficult.
The more Genesis helps me unpack the more I see how I’m not always giving myself an accurate portrayal of my environment around me. But at the same time there’s systemic issues that I don’t know how to navigate. So yes I have control over some things, but not all things. That’s what I’m battling with the most because I’m definitely not this fully autonomous powerful individual capable of navigating life. It’s more like I’m just trying to get by and not sink further into depression.
This is a good insight, mate!
Here’s why I’m so against the “wounded hero” narrative.
In western society strength is prized above all else. You deal with stuff in your life, pain, everlasting repercussions of someone else’s actions and people just like telling you you’re strong for overcoming it. Oh wow I’m a survivor. So that gets absorbed into the identity. Now you’ve got this “I’m strong” belief weighing on your self worth. What happens when you’re not strong? When you can’t go on? When the whole dig deep and pull yourself out of the hole shit doesn’t work? It gets turned inward and you throw more dirt on top of yourself. A better alternative is support, opening up, sharing, seeking help. Fierce independence is a misguided attempt at absolute control over relationships and situations.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t feel proud of what they’ve overcome. But society at large loves a good comeback story, triumphs, beating the odds. That shit is fantasy. It’s emotional masturbation. I’m not some movie, book, or tv character. I’m a human being with struggles that are simultaneously mundane, repetitive, and annoying to some people.
Life shouldn’t be about a quest to overcome hardships. That’s not a source of inspiration for me. Fuck that. It’s old and tired and ultimately plays off of people’s expectations of those who suffer from complex issues to just snap out of things. I’ve had enough hardship for 3 healthy well adjusted people, I’m not continuing this stupid narrative.
Good insights and wisdom, mate! 
A bit crude and rough around the edges. I’m going through some stuff right now but it’s definitely growth.
More stuff coming up on this sub break.
I’ve never talked about this but felt it was important. I don’t have a good relationship with my gender. Both in myself and others around me. Every time I ran a sub that hints at masculinity it throws me into serious recon.
This is a good thing for me to keep in mind. Do I want to build masculinity? I don’t even know.
Right now I don’t have a good representation of it in my head. Most of my life I haven’t fit into a traditional male role, still to this day I have this nagging feeling I’m doing something wrong.
The biggest problem is my childhood and what was anchored into my subconscious as the most prominent male influence in my life. My father. I’ve been dealing with a lot of unprocessed emotions around his treatment of me as a child. He wasn’t perfect and he had his demons, sometimes they’d come out. I was never beaten or anything outright terrible, but when his anger let loose it was like a tornado that ripped through my whole family. It sucked. I thought this was typical family dynamics for the longest time. It’s taken me a while to acknowledge that i didn’t leave childhood unscathed from this stuff.
So yeah that’s also why some of the out-alphaing behavior on this forum that pops up from time to time makes me want to take a hike from this place too. It’s all misplaced anger.
I trust you to always apply your own judgments to things, so I won’t type a lot of caveats.
The issues you describe here (and in general) feel so emblematic of High Sensitivity.
I subscribe to this podcast, Emotional Badass with Nikki Eisenhauer. I always appreciate her insight and presence.
The most recent episode, a brief one, is called The Unsung Heroes: A Tribute to Highly Sensitive Men.
Here’s the link in case it’s helpful:
Thanks. This is the second resource I’ve run across this past week that’s been a stepping stone to growth. I’ll definitely give this a listen.
No doubt about it I’m hsp. It’s been tough because I feel I’ve been impacted more by things. Trying to explain that to people though is tough. Who am I kidding, trying to explain it to myself has been tough. I still hold myself to a standard that physiologically speaking is impossible for me.
No doubt about it. It’s a process, and a freaking project.
But at least it’s good to have a useful direction to work on and some slightly more self-compassionate principles to work by.
This one (i.e., the sensitivity concept), I have to say, makes a big difference for me.
Still banging away at everything with therapy.
With the digging from Genesis A LOT has come up.
Here’s what I still have to learn. All my life I’ve tried to manage my emotions. Tucking them away, doing deep dissection on them, intense theories, etc. But what did I not do? Just feel them. On top of that it’s not just about my own emotions as they point towards myself, but the emotions i feel towards others. Mind blown. Seriously some people will be like “duh that’s how emotions work” not this guy. There’s an entire world of unexplored feelings inside me because they automatically get suppressed and sorted between acceptable and unacceptable emotions. Let me tell you the list of acceptable emotions is very very small.
My therapist said I’m making really good progress with everything. The whole journey has been really surreal. Going from being numb to feeling stuff I didn’t know I was feeling.
Man my endless dives into self help and other healing modalities looking for a shortcut to healing was just the worst case of spiritual bypassing. Everything has clicked for me. I understand now you cannot do this self growth and change if you’re disconnected from your emotional processing system. The problem is it’s very very easy to think you are connected. It can be even more painful to live life devoid of the inner intuitive tools individuals who are raised in a healthy environment get. It’s like not being privy to some insider knowledge that helps you succeed in life. Except you don’t even know that’s what you’re missing for a large portion of your life.
Had a dream last night I was at some weird music conference. Where a bunch of a&r were sitting around a table looking for new talent. A bunch of the music I heard from others felt the same, generic, playing it safe. They were getting signed. I thought about playing mine but then said no because I felt it didn’t fit in anywhere. Don’t even have confidence in my music in my dreams.
I think I’m still finding my voice through my music. I don’t know what to say or how to say it. In a lot of ways it’s a mirror image of my complete lack of understanding of my emotions. I know occasionally something leaks out that sounds good, but more of that gets shoved back in the box and then I try too hard to write stuff I’m not feeling.
There’s definitely a divide between what I feel like writing deep down vs what I think I should.
I’m worried that a lot of the therapy stuff I’m engaging in is just flavor of the month psychology. Like the self esteem movement. Years down the road someone writing yet another article on a therapeutic technique or ideology that did more harm than good.
On the other hand this pretty much just aligns with my own emotional self neglect. Dismiss what I’m feeling, doubt, and suppress. Vs acknowledge, trust, and engage.
I very often can’t be there for myself. I can only give myself the support with whatever capacity I have.
I had a pretty big setback recently and I’m stuck in that place of being afraid nothing will ever change and all the painful times of my past where I’ve struggled without any help.
Even now posting this I find myself not wanting to stray into the negative. To just keep up with the positivity Genesis gave me for a bit. But that’s been my problem in life. I hoard the positive and fear the negative. It’s not even really negative, it’s just things I invalidate that I experience.
My life very frequently feels like a nightmare I can’t wake up from. I sat with a bunch of it last night before bed. Found myself thinking, why are you upset? You’re not poor, youre not in danger, people are in far worse circumstances than you get over it. But it’s that pattern of thinking that just keeps everything locked up and controlling my life from behind the scenes.
To be stuck with this stuff for most my life and have to deal with the ignorance of people I’ll encounter that don’t fucking get it. I could understand not knowing and trying to understand, but the condescending attitudes that I’m somehow doing something wrong or worse than everyone else is what gets me. I’ve gotten that shit all my life. I’m sick of people like that. And don’t get me started on the people that think therapy is some magic fix, where you go in for a few months, get everything sorted, so you can be a “productive” member of society. I hate how systemic issues are also pushed onto the people, as if it’s our fault we can’t thrive in this toxic cesspool.
If I have to condense everything down, I feel like I don’t have any power in my life. No matter what I do or how hard I try things improve a little bit but I just feel like a slave. It eats away at me every day. It’s not money, it’s not my job, it’s none of these obvious bs answers people throw out all the time. It’s the emotional damage I never recovered from and society just loves sticking it’s filthy fucking fingers in the wound constantly.
Something about you that’s very striking and that’s kind of hiding in plain sight in this subtle, slippery way (because you don’t emphasize or acknowledge it), is that you have this extremely strong emotional confidence. You really trust yourself, your intuitions, and your judgments. You often express this trust in the form of skeptical statements or professions of doubt, and so it’s easy to miss at first.
But it’s actually extremely strong and confident.
It’s kind of funny actually.
It’s true. I always have a backdoor escape to how I feel and the emotions I deal with. It’s like not fully commiting to myself. It can be really conflicting
I wouldn’t be surprised if its because of the strength and power of the emotional knowing that you feel the need to have a backdoor escape in the first place.
But that’s just a theory.
Yeah I have to have a think about that one. I don’t quite understand it.
This sub maaaaaaaaaan. Genesis has me feeling like I was turned inside out. And now I have to be like “no it’s not all disgusting, it’s just you”.
I really don’t have words for what I’m going through right now.
I have a tendency to run at the first sign of internal conflict. So last night when I listened to Genesis instead of my usual short loops, I let it play without a limit. I got to about 10 minutes before I felt like I couldn’t handle anymore.
I have a theory. In the moment of listening there are chances to open up deeper areas of your consciousness to influence. It’s like a gathering of parts inside you. Each listen can serve as a sort of unification to more easily communicate between each part. It’s temporary, but it’s good to take advantage of.
As I was listening I noticed this pattern. 30 seconds, a sort of swirling feeling like going up on a rollercoaster. 1 min and 30s, emotions start to arise, usually I turned it off at this point because I told myself it was overexposure for me personally. 2mins, relaxation sets in and the former emotional conflict isn’t as strong. 3 minutes, more emotions coming up. This continues until about 7 minutes. This sort of wave like feeling of things emerging and subsiding. After 7 minutes the calm returns, get a little tired, feels like I’m reaching the end of what I can process in that short span of time. So I sort of nodded off/entered more of a hypnagogic state until 10 minutes where I felt that sort of feeling where you listen to a song too many times and it starts to sound weird. In producer terms ear fatigue, you know it’s the same song you’ve been working on but it’s not conjuring up the same feelings/perception.
I’ll see if this bites me in the ass. But I’ve been suspecting for a bit now that I need more exposure, not less. Not sure how to describe it but I have to hit a threshold so internally parts are on board with each other and nobody is lagging behind. It’s not linear how the subs reaches deeper parts of the mind, so this might vary listening to listening.
To me this would explain why I do so poorly on micro loops. It’s influencing the easily influenced, but leaving behind the more challenging parts. So there’s a stronger push pull dynamic that results in recon.
All theory of course. I could be completely wrong. Hope the masterclass touches on some of these concepts a bit. I think s dynamic approach to listening time makes the most sense for me personally. Within limits, I have to be careful not to cut off exposure because of fear which is what I did in the past.