Life didn’t unfold itself the way most of people I meet seem to have experienced it. While I was talking to colleagues at lunch, I found out that most of them had friends, while I was still afraid of being lost somewhere having just hurt my knee or something, barefoot and helpless, phone without a percent of charge left, holding up an umbrella into the wind under a flickering lantern, wondering why that garden fence just doesn’t even have a doorbell. Being able to enjoy time alone, I didn’t ask for more than feeling safe where conversation mattered.
This got me thinking about my past. My habits when I’m in my childhood rooms, discussing with and helping my parents, made it worse and let me believe that it could even be their fault. Through all of my school years, I was thinking that the other kids were ahead of me. Recently however, I’m not quite sure any more. Now I’m more thinking of this like: I got elflock-stricken in an outstanding fairy-tale scene by feelings which were much taller than me.
Much more grown-up in some fields, yet easily getting stuck in other areas where my mind was pulling me away in fear of a mishap.
The kind of one-person pet projects.
Making lists of weather measurements.
Counting soccer scores.
Fully logical brain.
Self-taught HTML.
Tired, yet always pushing forward.
Looking at dirty pavement tiles, hardly ever ahead.
Counting syllables in poetry, not being able to grasp a meaning which could fill pages as expected.
Knowing better what the trees did than what the other school kids were doing.
Thinking of song lyrics as if they already had a meaning… and in my mind, when there was music, everything was fine, however, in real life, I couldn’t get over myself and find out if it’s for real, until I started forgetting what it could ever have meant…
Getting to a similar road junction on different wheels, I decrypted part of the story on my own. That much steamrolled by that one little mishap of mine, I had fallen back into considering talking wasn’t safe whenever a situation looked as if it mattered.
Every next mishap, or incomplete answer of mine, out of an extra portion of stressful impact, had made it even worse. Silently assuming I was always the unlucky fellow. Doomed to find most everything new not just exciting, but also difficult. Doomed to assume success as meant to be usual for them could not be mine anyway. Selling myself short to remain safe from disappointment.
Recently, I got to a point where I refused to just keep walking on. Stress had buried itself inside my own body so deeply in a place where even showing up without speaking could feel like a burden, speaking in situations that mattered felt like a weight I’d never carry long enough, and in the best parts of life, masking and restraint would feel like betrayal. To sum up, I considered myself broken.
So, having spent a while trying to get better on my own after some medical clarification to find out everything was okay, which I could hardly believe at first, I decided to call a hypnotherapist to find the missing jigsaw pieces.
Let me say it with a metaphor. You cannot cure an apple tree by polishing each of the apples (= masking at daily events). Taking care of the conditions and supplements (= obeying an extra set of rules to work around repeating issues) is a large effort if we ignore the short and thin roots (= reveal and cure).
Note: I’m not a healer myself, this post is not a health advice, it’s like talking to someone who knows a prescribed medicine before you get it, to feel safe. A free offer to better understand the complexity of a human brain, especially a child’s one who had just been bullied, and how a few experiences can act as lessons of their own, transforming us so that our brains become arbiters playing by different rules…
I came quite far „on my own“ (with good tools friends built, for a few bucks).
The pressure to understand everything at first? Learned at school. A missing piece of information was a running ladder of knowledge.
The urge to chip something in on a conversation? Same.
The feeling I can’t quite persuade people? Giving up after trying many times, succeeding after verbal fighting, whereas on the sunny side of life, I just whistle or drop a hint, or find the right words, serving a decision as a first step we can easily try.
Or the long-time need of knowing every detail first? Family patterns out of habit did not shed light on change and spontaneous adapting as an option.
There was that part involving my body which left though, and which I wasn’t able to fix.
First, let’s shake off a few myths:
I didn’t float up in the air. Some might feel as if doing so. From the outside, I was sitting, taking a nap in a chair without a head rest.
I didn’t lose my hearing or body reflexes. It’s just a different kind of sleep, it’s deep but it’s not dropping you off like a prep for a surgery. (For example, at some point, I had to scratch an itch.)
You may hear a few words and see some slow pictures, but it’s not a Hollywood movie telling you everything that verbosely.
You can decide if you step in or out both at the situations you memorized and from the session if something in real life suddenly requires it. (Phone in flight mode or focus setting, of course.)
But don’t stand up just that way, tell them what you need. It doesn’t feel as easy as getting up when the alarm clock rings.
I’d say: don’t take the car afterwords, afford a taxi or go by train — or you can do it via a zoom call from home.
I had two sessions, one only letting me know how it works, where I was too nervous to fall that deeply.
During the second session, the task and question raised was:
Let go of the stressor deeply inside of me.
Catch an explanation if you can.
Then let it disconnect and settle down in a better way.
We addressed question 2 by letting me time-travel on slowly turning wheels — it’s always the subconscious’ own pace, not trying to rush over it! (Amazingly enough, I instantly knew how to surrender into it, I guess it’s because of some meditation experience and the depth of thinking about myself I already had.)
Each moment brought back should be taken as an invite to either go into the situation or to brain-walk (or rather: cross-fade) on to the next one.
My mind made up a few images, some of which I experienced as slightly darker than normal, which I connect to the related feelings.
These images don’t jump up as slides in a PowerPoint show or HD TV screens, far from it! They can resemble faint photos, paintings of old memories, or drawings with a few details to make you realize what they want to tell you.
I refused to get into every situation and just let my mind wander and thereby gather it all, as time is energy and I already knew quite a few chapters of my life by their title pictures. The time an image needed to form was enough for my logical brain to add a recap.
Let’s watch my film!
I attached a cable behind my left ear, under a cap.
Just kidding.
Of course, not. It’s like with lucid dreams.
But we have pixabay, free image generators and The GIMP, so that I can almost show you what I saw.
Ordinary childhood pictures, no adult content or abuse as that never happened! It’s nobody’s fault except from my restraint, spoiled by a stupid coincidence, all in all. I’ll provide some explanation later on.
I’ll also explain what my sub-brain didn’t show me, where it skipped over a whole summer full of events or similar — but they’re missing as my brain did a query, let me do some SQL-like art:
Select id_image, tokens from memories join (images, sound, quotes, identifying patterns) WHERE (body condition or emotions) * relevance_weight > threshold… {possibly 7 pages, twisted, quirky 🙃} Sort by time asc;
Sort by time. Yes. The oldest scene came first. My day brain and my dreams are usually far from being that linear.
Well, let’s go!
What I saw:
That wordless scene on a mountain, where I didn’t get over myself and try to talk to them until they had to go before we did. Where boring music made it end before it began. It? ?!?!
Then a few crossed lines followed, cross-fading into a few branches raised to build a campfire, almost not burning any more, already getting dark, rainy days of September ahead: this clearly reminded me of a campfire on a few-days school trip packed full of funny activities to then separate girls from boys for a minor biological reason. 🥸 Boys, you stay right here and have fun. Girls? Bedroom time. For me: not exactly a can-I-borrow-your-Walkman time. Silence, too dark to read, not knowing words to… anything.
Next: a row of circles in a completely foggy grey darkness which made me feel afraid of something dangerous like warfare material, it just didn’t make any sense, apart from the fact that boys had fun drawing aeroplanes and making noise probably coming from action games or TV — Jugoslavia fell apart, kids came here; news had been full of pictures of that war in Europe, perhaps that’s why… I was protected but still knew it.
Soon though, the picture clarified into a row of decorative roof tiles I was sure it belonged to a Greek restaurant where I had been listening to the music (including that Steinwolke song an intro of which I added to the storyboard, I guess it’s got the right vibe) and looking at the decoration patterns instead of faces of people I already knew. (Last week‘s post, foot of the mountain? Yup.)
Next, a garden fence (skipped here): a garden aside of a birthday party where I almost didn’t talk at all, still not knowing how to start a conversation. 🥸 It never occurred in any of our lessons, that’s quite rude, isn’t it? 😁 Thankfully, those lessons came elsewhere, much later.
Last: a long drive to a square tunnel I identified as coming back home knowing we wouldn’t travel any time soon again. 🧳🕸️
Then the coach was like: Is there anything else, subconscious? Blank nothingness
Are we done with it, then nod please.
I nodded, but as slowly as if my head was a small boat tied to a pier in the Channel or something!
Then she was like: Now we move on to the future.
Figure some scene in near future and how you feel at ease there.
I took a stroll to some scenes of work and free time, placed myself in different rooms, trying to attach a good feeling. Details are kept off-stage, of course.
So, is it true, subconscious, she’ll be ready to find a workaround when things go bananas? answer: yes.
Summarizing:
I was served the few situations directly connected to the inward conflict.
It was all about ending chances, people gone, refusal of me starting a conversation as a child, situations which reminded me of back then but let me miss it.
Supervisors or other coercive roles and their rules did the best to cut the nice things short until my body did that thing as well… without ever wanting to: it was my fault, as initially I was too introverted.
That’s why being on a vacation was such a big thing. (Packing a suitcase was, too, btw., related to the knowing-every-detail-first part of my brain.)
That’s why coming home after some ordinary and boring Ascension holidays hurt as if my best pet had just died or something (I never had one, so how will I know…)
That’s why spending three days on a workshop with people around doing some half boring small talk sometimes made me feel like coming home into a cold place after a long sunny stay.
That’s why most of times I even withdrew myself from anything that only even looked like a chance… until I … now I can say, understood where intuition and fortune pull me through.
That’s what explains my quirks… and those of some whom I met, more and more, too… now that I know, it’s okay, I can almost laugh about it. Now that my subconscious and I can walk the same track.
Nobody’s fault.
The negative events left out:
a summer vacation between the ones I mentioned, where many things went wrong, badly organized: undismayed as my parents did best keeping me safe, buying bottled water for example. (It was in Germany…)
Thunderstorms with falling trees, or dirty bathrooms, taxing gym lessons: nada. Nothing to do with it.
Arguing in the family much later on, these things contributed to how I feel in difficult conversations it but the session topic was different.
Happiness and successful moments left out:
Other birthday parties where I played along happily with them.
Good marks and Christmas gifts
Other vacations where I discussed the whole night with my father…
These were put aside as they don’t explain the bug as we developers like to say.
Wow, this was so insightful. You described your experience with so much detail, I felt like I was there with you
Not shorter!! But amazing as always! Wow!!!