When I think back through the past 35 years through my experiences in recovery from substance abuse, then "codependency," then complex post-traumatic stress disorder, then non-substance (behavioral) addictions, and most recently from having been conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, socialized, habituated, and normalized in childhood to authoritarianism sufficiently extreme to induce me to join one minor and two major cults in my 20s... several repeated patterns stand out.
But none of them more than the common denominator under all of those psychopathologies: My mind did not know how to separate fact from installed fictions. Inside the box of its own conditioning, my mind could not see, hear or otherwise sense that it saw pretty much everything through a thick lens of "this or that," "all or nothing," "black or white," "right or wrong," "good or bad," "moral or evil" and other polarized, "binary thinking." My mind could not see, hear or sense what was in between any two polarities, let alone outside such spectrums. As was later explained to me by a prof at UC Davis named Charles T. Tart, my mind was stuck in a trance, a box, a mental frame, a cave, a cage, a trap.
The path of my recovery led through a number of 12 Step programs (including most significantly, Alcoholics Anonymous, Codependents Anonymous and Adult Children of Alcoholics & Dysfunctional Families) to a progression of post-graduate studies in the development and treatment of psychopathologies, formally completed 12 years ago. I had to digest the entire contents of several hundred books and several thousand peer-reviewed, journal-published research articles, as well as spend several thousand hours in direct observation of and communication with hundreds of other minds infected with -- as it turned out -- pretty much exactly the same binary thinking... regardless of whatever collection of diagnoses those minds had been given, often over the course of decades.
Once having studied (with a highlighter and a pen to make notes therein; not merely read) the books listed at the first of the two links at the end of this post, I found myself far better equipped to see, hear and sense what was at least between my mind's binary polarizations. And that proved to be a major source of relief and recovery. For a while.
Ultimately, however, I ran into this little fellow and began to understand that merely "de-polarizing" was not enough. I'd have to get off the spectrums of appraisal, interpretation, evaluation, judgment, assessment, analysis and attribution of meaning according to conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, socialized, extrenally installed, habituated, and normalized belief... and learn how to use my eyes to see, my ears to hear, and my body to feel what actually... is. And with that in mind, dig into another pile of books at the second of the links below.
I do not wish to be so presumptuous as to suggest that studying all the books on the two lists is either necessary or required to escape the prison cell of polarized, binary thinking that I have observed in virtually every person I have encountered who suffers from anxiety, depression or most other common mental & emotional difficulties. But I will say this:
Everyone I know who has done exactly that has shown significant symptom reduction. If interested, see...
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