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General Correspondence ~ Peter with Correspondent No 5
Hi, I have had ‘a burning discontent with life’ for most of my life but I also have memories as a very young child where the world was a magical place. I have struggled for years with a deep underlying fear that has severely disabled me through clinical depression and anxiety. I wake up every morning in the most appalling state of terror and spend the remaining part of my day trying to deal with it. I know this fear stems from childhood experiences but I feel the primitive fear mechanism in me has been opened up for good and is now hard wired. I have ploughed back into past experience that caused these feeling of fear but I feel I only have an intellectual understanding of the causes while my emotional well being remains stuck. I am in a permanent state of anticipation as though waiting for something to happen. Intellectually I know there is nothing to fear. I watch my reactions to events but the physical fear makes it extremely difficult for me to be objective. The only clarity I ever experience is in taking ecstasy and because I feel very safe the world becomes a wonderful place. It reminds me of being a very young child where I looked on the world with such wonder and excitement. Years of social conditioning and a bad family life soon stripped away the wonder and replaced it with fear and inadequacy. I find it so hard to corner my thoughts and find out why I think and react a certain way. Even at times when I think I know why I react a certain way, I can’t seem to get past it. Over the past few weeks I have asked myself the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ and I find it extremely difficult to answer. I look to see what is wrong and all I see is fear and confusion. I have nothing holding me to the world I currently know and have looked for many ways out including spiritualism but they offered no relief. I have always questioned life for as long as I can remember and I was never happy with world that was taught to me. Because my fear is so great and my defences so weak I feel exposed and naked. I am more than willing to abandon everything I know, because everything I know is empty and meaningless. How can I even start to dismantle my social conditioning when I’m crippled in this constant state of fear and anxiety? I remember when I came across actualism it felt as though I was at a crossroad in my life. Given I had spent the first 33 years of my life being ‘normal’ and the next 17 years being ‘spiritual’ and I was neither happy nor harmless, it felt to me that actualism was simply the next thing to try. I have described myself as being comfortably numb at this stage in my life – sort of a tentative foot in each world by this stage of my withdrawal from my full-on spiritual years. The point is that I was what a psychiatrist would describe as ‘normal’ – i.e. not subject to any radical extremes of passion. I was not incapacitated by fear, aggression, nurture or desire – none of them proved to have an intractable hold over me. I do know from experience the overwhelming nature of the hormones that trigger and sustain the instinctual passions – I have known despair and dread, I have experienced the horrors of hell; I have felt the lust to kill, rape and obliterate. But these have been passing experiences and not a constant ongoing condition. As such, I have no personal experience with clinical depression so I cannot offer you any personal advice – not that I would, even if I did. The world is awash with people giving or selling advice, and although most of it is well meant, it often falls into the ‘blind leading the blind’ category. I do however know by observation that the actualism method has allowed some people to break free from entrenched patterns of chronic introversion, resentment and repressed anger that began early in life. But it is a tough business to break life-time habits and to do so one would most probably need to start from a position of being ‘reasonably normal’ and functionally coping. Just a note on ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ One of the major aims of running the question is to break with the past – not to continue rummaging through the dust-bin of past hurts, to not look for answers to long-past causes, ‘closure’ or whatever. The whole point of running the question is to keep checking up on yourself that you are not wasting your life right now – in this only moment you can ever experience being alive – and not to dwelling on past memories of something that may or may not have happened to a little boy a long time ago. From the little reading I have done on the subject of clinical depression it does seem that this action of breaking from the past and starting afresh is one of the main issues that is vital for a permanent cure. Many people who suffer from extreme mood swings, such as those associated with manic depression, even seem to spurn the idea of a permanent cure because they become identified with being a sufferer or being a highly sensitive and emotional person. The only suggestion I would make would be keep reading the AF web-site and if you become interested and want to give it a go, first do whatever you need to do to free yourself from the debilitating grip of fear and anxiety. * P.S. You may find Peter’s Text © The Actual Freedom Trust |
