NEUROTICISM: Understanding Our Attempts to SELF-REGULATE Around Unconscious Pain

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=kkfK3Ef2wYo

Highlights

Neurotic patterns of thinking and feeling that we might develop over the course of our lives are actually our best attempts at self-regulation when we don't have a clear understanding of what is happening for us unconsciously. (via)

The way that I think of neuroticism and neurotic behaviors or neurotic thought patterns is that it's our best attempt at self-regulation in the absence of a proper and accurate understanding of how our inner subjective world (largely our world of feelings and inner states) is connected to the world outside of us (so, the world of people people and objects) (via)

Neuroticism can be thought of as the mental and emotional pain that we experience, often in a very deep and very persistent way, when we're unable to resolve our problems directly or when we're unable to take ourselves out of painful emotional states directly because we don't have a clear idea of what in our external world those internal painful states are related to. (via)

Neurotic behavior patterns can be thought of as things that we do compulsively or things that we might think of as self-sabotage — so things like addictions, perfectionism, ruminating thoughts, compulsive behaviors, rigid patterns of thinking or behaving, obsessions, limerant thought patterns.
Essentially any part of our psychology where we are making a poor relation between our subjective inner world and the world of things and people outside of ourselves. (via)

the neurotic is ill because he is unconscious of his problems (via)

A neurosis is a secret you do not know you are keeping
So, this is when we have some want, some need, some desire, some emotion, some impulse — whatever it is — that lives in our body and it is being registered by our emotional system but that our conscious mind is not fully aware of (via)

If we do not learn the skills that we need to face the challenges of our lives directly, we develop fear and anxiety about the process of living — and a wide range of habits or thought patterns that are aimed at attempting to control and contain our experience of life rather than authentically and spontaneous engage with it. (via)

All neurosis are a substitute for legitimate suffering. (via)

The opposite of neuroticism can be thought of as an alignment with reality and the ability to self-regulate based on an accurate connection to reality. (via)

When we cure ourselves of neurosis, we will still will have a wide range of feelings and a lot of them will be unpleasant, but we'll be able to associate our feelings with the right things. (via)

Let's say as a child you didn't learn about assertiveness; you didn't learn that it is an absolutely crucial part of human relationships to be able to check in with yourself say no when you don't want to do something and design your life around the types of things that you authentically do want to do and the types of people that you authentically want to be around.
We can think of this concept of saying "no" and being assertive as an essential vitamin that we need, psychologically, in order to stay healthy. If you do not have this vitamin, you are going to start experiencing severe and recurrent consequences.
So, you might find that you are chronically doing things you don't like doing, or being around people you don't like being around, and you might find that you are chronically distressed by that. (via)

A neurosis can be thought of as whatever problem we get fixated on that is not the root problem that we are trying in vain to solve the pain of the root problem. (via)

I believe that a lot of problems in life that we do not face up to directly actually happened because we have a blind spot around the skill that we would need in order to face up to that problem directly
Example: if you never learned assertiveness as a skill, it's not not going to occur to you to be assertive in a situation when you need to be — that situation is not going to strike you as "now is the time to be assertive". (via)

My theory on why we often fail to face up to the problems in our life directly starts with our developmental blind spots:
At some point in our development, in some significant way, we fail to make an accurate connection between our internal state (so, what's going on for us in our subjective inner world) and our external environment (so, what our inner state is responding to in our environment), usually because the people that we are looking to to get information about that are not necessarily clear on it themselves, or they're not able to properly contextualize it for us.
Essentially: we either internalize something as normal when it is not normal, or we internalize something as not normal when it is normal. Both of these conditions are going to skew our perception of how our inner state is connected to our outer environment. (via)

Our bodies are still going to clock something as a threat, but our conscious minds are not necessarily going to clock it as a threat. (via)

If we have no idea why our body suddenly feels antsy or on edge or just off, we are going to assume that we are just having a random or crazy emotional reaction. (via)

you may falsely attribute any attempts at someone trying to get closer to you as someone trying to kind of find out that you are imperfect and punish you for it in some way (via)

You might be walking around your life, having all these kind of surface level relationships that you keep at arms length, thinking to yourself "I'm having healthy and normal relationships" while your body is clocking, constantly, the lack of intimacy and support that you need to stay healthy as a human.
So you might feel low-level feelings of depression, of a lack of satisfaction in your life, of anxiety, and not have any idea where those feelings are coming from because you have internalized something that is not normal (which is to live your life in isolation when it comes to intimacy) as normal. (via)

If I'm trying to confront the problem of having an intimate relationship, which is a very important life event, with my total blind spot around what an intimate relationship looks, like I'm going to really struggle to meet that challenge head on because I don't have the skills I need to confront it directly. (via)

Emotional blindspot development example:
You might hear your parents saying that they are "fine" or that "everything's great" when they are visibly not fine and everything is obviously not great.. but you might start associating a distressed parent with the feeling of being okay.
So then, as an adult, when someone asks you how you are — if you are in mild to moderate distress, you might consciously think "well, that's within the realm of okay; I am okay".
And then, if you're in that range of mild to moderate distress but you find yourself really struggling to cope with it, once again you're going to come back to that assumption that "I am crazy", "I have irrational emotions", and "something is wrong with me" because you don't have the emotional vocabulary to accurately understand what you're feeling and to what extent. (via)

If we don't know that part of intimacy is giving and receiving feedback in a supportive way, we we are still going to crave intimacy and we are going to reject it consciously when opportunities for developing it come along because we're going to misidentify it.
So we are still going to feel all of the pain of having the problems that we don't know we are having and we are going to need to find a way to self-regulate without knowing the true cause of our bad feelings.
So now we're going to be trying to self-regulate in a way that is going to be extremely hit or but when we hit it's going to be very tempting to grab whatever it was that helped us in that one instance and become very fixated on it. (via)

Anything we can find that helps us self-regulate in the absence of understanding where our pain is actually coming from, we are going to grasp on and we are going to use unless and until the medicine starts causing side effects. (via)

Until we start dealing with that underlying emotional disregulation, figuring out what it's connected to in our external environment, and dealing with that problem directly, we are going to forever be in this back and forth war with our coping mechanism because we're not seeing it as a coping mechanism. So we don't understand why we can't seem to stop doing it. Maybe it feels inexplicable and compulsive — that is a neurotic pattern of thinking. (via)

Your system might register anyone trying to get to know you in a deep way as someone attacking you, or trying to discover the ways in which you're not perfect. (via)

We do not cure our neurosis, our neurosis cure us.
When we switch our frame of thinking from "this neurotic thought pattern or this compulsive behavior is ruining my life" to "this compulsive thought pattern or behavior is giving me incredibly important information about what I need in order to feel whole", we can start working with those neurosis instead of against them. (via)

I want to encourage us to stop hating on our neurotic patterns of thinking and behaving and start welcoming them as messengers for parts of ourselves that we once had to exile or cut off that we now might be able to actually integrate in a way that makes our lives better. (via)

The better we get at understanding our pain, the less anxiety we are going to feel in response to it because we understand which principles are governing it, so we know that it's not going to last forever. (via)

In order to get to that a place of understanding our pain, paradoxically, the exact skill we need to start developing is the skill of existing inside of ambiguity. (via)

If we grow up in that secure environment, we learn to internalize that a bit of anxiety is often followed up by discovery that helps us to make meaningful sense of the world. We don't panic when that tinge of anxiety arrives, we don't have anxiety about our own anxiety.
We can sit in a place of ambiguity for a bit of time until we figure out what is going on because again we can rest assured that we will arrive at an understanding of what's going on and why we're feeling the way that we're feeling. (via)

Move away from a sequence of events that looks like:
1 - have a feeling that you find distressing then panic
2 - and then, because you're panicking, reach for the first possible explanation you can think of around why you might be feeling this feeling that you don't understand
3 - and then try to solve the problem based on the story you made up around it which, inevitably if you did not have the proper diagnosis, does not make the problem go away permanently.
So, then, in the future the feeling comes back up and then you go right back into that loop of panicking again. (via)

Step one when you have a neurotic thought pattern or a neurotic feeling or something that you're getting obsessed with or fixated on: can you stop and just figure out what the feeling that you're feeling is?
Not attaching it to a story; not trying to figure out why you're feeling that; just literally identifying the feeling in one word. Hate. Anger. Anxiety. Sadness. Whatever it is. Disgust. Fear. Panic.
Just recognizing the feeling — that's step one; isolating the feeling itself from the story that you have around the feeling. (via)

Step two when you have a neurotic tendency is to consciously identify it as a neurotic feeling.
What this does not mean is telling yourself that you're crazy.
I don't want to go telling myself "I am insane for feeling hatred because there's no reason for me to be feeling hatred", what I'm actually going to be doing here is the opposite of that. I'm going to be telling myself I feel hatred and I don't know why. I don't have a satisfactory logical explanation for why I feel this chronic overwhelming hatred towards myself. It's not really resolving when I'm trying to improve myself. The self-hate hatred persists or it changes form and just comes back in another area. So, it really seems like maybe I'm not making the right object relation between my internal state and my external world — if I were, the hate would be getting resolved through my actions, but it's not so I might be making the wrong object relation which qualifies it as a neurotic feeling. But the feeling itself is real, that part is very important. (via)

Step three of resolving neurotic tendencies is to deny ourselves the meaning making process temporarily.
So, putting it on hold. Deliberately telling ourselves "I am actually not allowed to try to figure out why I am feeling so much hate right now", "I am not allowed to make any story or any assumptions about this until I do step four". (via)

Step four of resolving neurotic tendencies is just being present with the emotion itself and getting to know it, getting familiar with it.
"What does the hate feel like in my body? Where does it show up? Can I point at the area of my body where I feel it the most strongly? How often am I feeling it? When did it start? What other feelings get triggered when I start feeling this feeling?"
So, all we're doing here is getting really familiar with the raw sensation of the feeling, not the story we have around it, but what it is like to experience that feeling in our bodies.
We might even want to draw pictures about what it's like this is a tactic I tend to use when I'm struggling to not create stories about something. If I were to sit down and just draw what it feels like to be experiencing this feeling, what would I draw? Would I draw an ocean that I feel like I'm drowning in? Would I draw a dark night that I feel like I can't see through? What is the raw sensation like of this thing?
This is the art of teaching ourselves how to be present with pain without trying to escape it — by understanding it and resolving it. There's nothing wrong with understanding and resolving our pain, and I want to make that clear, but if we have gotten used to ascribing our pain to the wrong things, we want to first unlearn learn the wrong things. Which requires us to go to the source of the pain or the uncomfortable feeling that we're trying to resolve and just get to know it. (via)

Step five of resolving neurotic tendencies is to just be present with whatever comes up and allow yourself to be surprised by the experience of your own pain, or your own joy, or whatever it is that you have repressed. It probably has qualities that you don't know about because you've been spending so much time fixating on whatever is going to take it away, or whatever is going to distract you from it, that you don't actually know everything that exists inside of it. (via)

This skill of being present with feelings without acting on them is likely a very new one for you, but you can probably already see how this is starting to put you in the position of being able to respond with intentionality to your feelings rather than simply reacting to them (via)

Step six of resolving neurotic tendencies is just being comfortable with living in a slightly messier and more ambiguous way for a while.
So, when we are used to living in a neurotic way, what it means is that we are avoiding ambiguity like the plague. Anytime we have a feeling that we don't know the cause of, we might jump to the first thing we can jump to to try to control that feeling, or get it to go away. And what we are training ourselves to do here is the direct opposite of that; it is to live with the question of "what is going on for me, and why am I feeling the things I'm feeling" for long periods of time, because the longer we keep those questions as kind of open cases in our awareness, the better we become at understanding the real underlying causes of our thoughts and our feelings and our compulsions and our neurotic habits. (via)

Very, very slowly we learn to just be present with our feelings as they come up, get to know them, get to sense into them, get to learn the different qualities of them — and then, over time, we construct new systems of meaning that are more accurate.
We're probably going to need help in this process, so we might seek out help from enlightened witnesses in the form of people like therapists or support workers who can help us make sense of ourselves because they have the emotional vocabulary that we are currently lacking. We might need to do a lot of reading, a lot of self-exploration, a lot of talking to friends, or trying out new social environments to notice what we feel in different environments, and to start getting attuned to the feeling of "yes, I like this; this feels like me" or "No, I don't like this, this doesn't feel like me".
Through that process, we start to learn our authentic preferences, our authentic wants, our authentic needs — and, ideally, life ends up surprising us a lot in that process. (via)

When we are no longer pushing our emotions away from us and avoiding situations that bring up feelings we don't want, numbing out from feelings we don't like, obsessively fixating on things that make us feel good, we're leaving space to actually get to know ourselves in a holistic way — and often we find out that we have a lot of traits, desires, quirks that we didn't know about.
And that is ultimately a pretty cool process, and where it leads us is to that place where we are able to more readily tolerate reality. (via)

When we are aware of who we are, what our needs are, what our values are, what our underlying drives and motivations and wants are — even really intense pain can be weathered and we can self-regulate through really challenging circumstances because we are deeply in touch with what matters to us which gives the pain in our life meaning. (via)