Purposeful destruction of my psyche, through transgression

Jude Miller3 hours ago (edited)LINKED COMMENT

I went through a similar thing in my early 20s. I grew up in an exceptionally Catholic household, and even thought I'd become a priest throughout high school. Over the past 5 years many of my beliefs have completely flipped. I still believe in goodness, virtue, and the need for mysticism, ritual, and sacrament (or something like it), but I reclaimed those things only after a period of disavowing nearly all of them. My emotional memory of the time before is nearly non-existent.

What's tough is seeing the people you knew before who stay the same, and realizing how little you have left in common with them. It's a challenge to keep in touch with them without falling back into old patterns, or trying to force them into new ones.

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Jennifer Armstrong1 minute ago

+Jude Miller When Rhodesia was destroyed I was 12, and that is when people began going their separate ways. I lost touch with people around that time. When I saw them again on Facebook, as they regrouped at the age of 40, I found that they had remained very conservative. However, conservatism for me was not an option. It was already corroding me from within. I had to be absolutely disciplined and determined with myself to reclaim my emotiional capacity, as I had been beaten down so much that I had developed schizoid features. I was unable to understand what people wanted from me emotionally, and I had become terrified of articulating my real feelings about loss of home and country because I had been beaten down for expressing them. (I was also beaten up emotionally for expressing bewilderment at my current state of affairs as a barely adjusted migrant -- my father did that). I really had to take strong measures to reintegrate my emotions with the reast of my mind, as the two aspects of myself had gone their separate ways after migration. Of course this was terrifying, as I had learned to associate emotion with severe psychological beatings. I ended up writing my memoir. All of the writing I have done has been with the purpose of breaking open my mind to experience more emotion. Vindictive people attacked me along the way, implying that this self-focus was narcissistic, when instead it was life-saving. To stay in situations where I could not properly experience my emotions would have been very damaging. You end up the victim of people's social schemes and workplace politics, because wothout access to your own emotional intuition you can't really see what is going on around you either. I had already been beaten up to the point of losing my physical health. I simply had to come to my own rescue. And actually I had no friends who could help me -- none at all.

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