Quote by TheByzantine : My engagement with mental illness has been an enigma. I have worked hard to understand shame, unworthiness, disconnect, cognitive distortions, negative chatter, fear, anger, vulnerability, resiliency, authenticity, forgiveness, etc., only to be told by professionals I did not understand the misadventures in my thought processes and may not have a personality capable of ever understanding.

My dilemma has been to put into motion steps that I believed would help me based on my perception, no matter how flawed. Doing something has always been the key for me, even when it left my therapist shaking his head.

Now, I am weary of the battle to understand. I accept I made many decisions that were less than ideal. Yet, to the surprise of many, I am still alive and still messing up. Even so, I have learned a bit along the way.

In your first paragraph the fact that a therapist may have stated that you may not have a personality capable of ever understanding is a statement on their inadequacy not yours. I am sure that when you first presented yourself to these therapists you were not at a point where you were truely ready to step back from your intellectual side and give in to
a reasoning you may have felt nothing but some kind of gimmic on their part. In other words, they apparently did not have an intellectual comeback for your obvious intellectual discontent with what you had experienced in your life thus far. You would have had to have someone that clearly understood your specific life experiences, like a mentor that had truely experienced a similarity of your past and what impact that had on you.

From what I know of you thus far, you have had a variety of life experiences that were very highly demanding on you. Your answer was to take the route of increasing your intellectual capacity to get beyond some of the most disappointing and twisted psychological experiences you had already faced. And in doing so believed that in spite of being disillusioned you would press forward and cut a path for any self reward you could find. And it doesn't mean that you proceeded on a clear conscious level of what that would entail. And that, my friend, is only revealed in hind sight.

As one reaches a point where the forward momentium is no longer psycholgically possible the review begins, and often because the opportunity to look back provides answers to all the questions that one did not truely see at the time, there are always regrets. But to be totally fair one must realize that review has the result and the actual experiences never had that.

Because the maze of efforts and all of the results are visible, if the end result is a view of all the things that one did not see, the unknown at the time, the inablitity to determine that at the time presents a great deal of anger. There will be an endless barage of questions like "Why did I never see that coming, Why, did I not know better, or I should have known better and the list can be very long.

The real truth was that you just never knew what was going to come next, no one ever does no matter how much you add any intellectual capacity to yourself. And the decisions that we all make are based upon an accumulation of life experiences up to each and every experience we have in life. And there are many variables that play into the decisions we made at the time of the presented events. And the list that is presented above is not always known during that process. And we must keep in mind, WE ARE WHAT WE KNOW.

On top of our own individual perceptions, there was no real way to truely understand the actions and true motivations of others that we came across in the process of making our efforts to proceed forward through our lives. And there can be a real anger that arises from that as well because hind site gives us a much better prospective about them as well. And then more questions come about our own lack of ability to see those different perceptions at the time. And that is because most of the time most people only see their own perceptions the clearest and almost always mistaken the perceptions of others. And the truth is, we are all unique and can often be self absorbed and truely do not see our own folly until hindsite takes place.

If you sit with a therapist during a period of great disenchantment of hindsight, there is little room for condolences and suggestions that will make any impact. The emotional state is not ready to express much more than sheer cynicism. Unfortunately this cynicism with all the negetive emotions vegetate in the brain and can lead to exhaution and discontent that prohibits one from having any desire to accept motivational thinking. And thus can lead to a prolonged period of depression.

It is only when one is finally able to turn into a more " humble" state that all the intelligence and disappointments of life can be finally addressed.
A conscious effort must be made to release the cynicism into this more "humbled state" where the release of the negetive self punishing emotions can be replaced with an acceptance and willingness to make a conscious effort to accept and proceed. And it is a slow process as the cynicism will return with even the slightest perceived failure.

All the intellectual capacity must be used to stay the course and in time can succumb to the constantly " humbling " process that allows for gradual acceptance and desire to release the past perceived failures and allow new positive events to take place. And that means that within even the slightest perceived failure a conscious effort must be made to control any cynicism to return. It takes TIME and PATIENCE and WILLINGNESS to LET GO. One must protect their personal integrity and not allow the negetive actions of others to make them question their humbleness and new search for strength in being productive. It must be a willingness to truely disengage from the cynicism the past has presented. As we cannot go back, we can only go forward and using our intellectual capacity to tanscend us to not only being humble but accepting ourselves and work on living life as it comes and being more humble about it and less cynical.

But you are not alone in this plight, it happens to many, I am in that many too. The frightened and vulnerable heart is within the humble heart. The cynicism is often the barrier we build to protect the heart. But it takes all the joy with it and it is very hard to overcome the cynicism.
One of the things that we all have to realize is we may continue to be disappointed with others.
It is how we allow that to affect us that has to change. Remaining humble requires just as much intellectual capacity as any other life task.

Open Eyes