How to be a biological creature

    Reddit person: I thought I liked this girl, I tried to get her attention, I talked to her all the time. I did kind gestures but she mostly ignored me. After a while though she started giving me attention back and that's when I lost interest. What is wrong with me.

 

    Voltaic: Because you were interested in who you thought she was and weren't interested in who she actually was. Something about you being ignored fed into the fantasy and when she quit ignoring you, the fantasy was destroyed.

 

    Me: What Voltaic said can very well be true. I do want to add on to that because I experienced this myself a lot. Basically how are you in relationships in general? I used to have attachment issues which basically meant that I struggled to feel safe in connection with people. My internal signals would tell me “not safe” when I was trying to form friendships, esp with people I actually wanted to form friendships with. I could have a huge crush on someone, but when she reciprocated I felt that same internal feeling again > “no longer felt anything” and dumped her immediately. That caused me to act erratically in relationships.

Basically the solution if this is your situation, is to fix this internal sensory mismatch. You have to see the states that underlie your thoughts and recognize that they are a little jacked up. I would be overflowing with love one moment, and the next moment feel completely numb like a reptile. I would feel like I honestly didn’t care about anyone in my life. It scared me because I asked myself if I loved people in my life and I didn’t feel like I did. When I was a kid I used to have moments alone in my room where I felt like I had a demon inside, like I was turning into a werewolf. I would convulse animalistically and crawl around my room my muscles tensed up and ripping things (not a lot of things, something small and insignificant) or jumping up on things.

We are biological creatures. Our nervous system (this includes the branches throughout our whole body, up through the brain stem, up through the middle brain layer, up to the top of the brain aka the neo-cortex) all works together to create our experience. It’s like a scallion with the whites, the greens, and the light green part in between that you're never sure what to do with in cooking. Our nervous system works by learning, by habits. We can become habituated in a disorganized way due to things that occur in our development, and other reasons.

The best way we can change these habits is to become aware of the whole picture of what’s going on, thus developing an “observer mindset”. Then we can learn how to actually live in our bodies and how to organize our nervous systems toward what we want.

I used to be “neurotic” as frued would probably call it. I was definitely a neurotic type, and I still am the same person obviously. But what has changed is now I understand how to separate thoughts from reality, (after all they come from only the top layer of the nervous system), how to manage my state directly, and how to contextualize myself as a living being with biological constraints, needs, etc :)

Healthy thoughts are thoughts that are in line with reality. So even though I may feel no love for my family right now, my thoughts tell me that I experience state changes and reminds me that I have felt love in the past - and if they were actually all to disappear I would feel great distress. My thoughts also tell me what happened 5 mins, 10 mins, several hours ago, yesterday, etc. That allows me to orient my state in time.

My state tells me I currently have no feelings. However an hour ago I had many many feelings and felt very passionate about something. My sympathetic system was quite activated before. I also haven’t eaten very much and had a couple nights of poor sleep. I have also been on my own for a while and no one has touched me.

So I can deduce that everything is fine, and my state will improve when I take care of myself. Therefore I don’t need to worry or have worry thoughts. I dont have worry thoughts or self hating thoughts anymore, they just come in to alert me there is something in my state I’m not paying attention to. But they don’t stick.