Drawn to Life

I am in the process of both literally and figuratively drawing myself back to life, as I emerge from a nine year depression and begin healing life-long untreated traumas and early conditioning. In addition to being diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) in my twenties I operate on the outskirts of the autism spectrum and suffer from untreated cPTSD and major depressive disorder that got worse as I got older and resulted in me becoming totally isolated and cut off from human contact. 

It is my deep belief that most mental illness is a result of early childhood developmental trauma, which I define as anything that distorts a child's perception of itself as anything but basically good and lovable. For me, mental illnesses are really just names for a set of symptoms that arise as a result of various disrupted developmental processes and untreated trauma.

A child can be traumatized even while being raised by well-meaning parents, because it has such a simplistic way of interpreting information. Typically, healthy parents will help guide the child in processing and working through them and regulating their nervous system so they don't carry around the activated trauma state into adulthood. The outlook, however, is more grim for those who are raised by addicts and people with untreated mental illnesses and traumas themselves, where trauma after trauma gets piled on without anyone helping to process it. Almost everyone is bound to experience something scary by the time they are 8 years old. But what makes something emerge as a mental illness later or dysfunctional behavior later resides in how it was dealt with immediately afterward, as much as the baseline nervous system stability at the time of the event.

I spent the greater part of two decades trying to address my issues by taking responsibility for everything that was going on in my life and understanding how reality was impacted by my perception. And at 35, I thought I had a grip on things. I thought I had finally figured out how not to go off the handle in work environments, how not to have nervous breakdowns in public and wind up in hospitals after a break-up, how to basically seem "normal."

But it was all surface level.

Sure, I created some new beliefs and ideals that helped me maintain stability. I grew some resilience through sheer acts of will that helped develop confidence and social skills. I even became an expert at finding the silver lining in every situation. But it was all mental, and overall the deepest wounds of the heart hadn't healed and I still found myself in ridiculously abusive situations (when "I should know better!"), bordering on poverty (when "I have a Harvard degree!"), and eventually, as of a couple years ago, just fading away into the oblivion of an unlived life, completely isolated and out of sync with the things I really loved.

​My belief is that it was all due to a low level of self-worth I carried around in me, deep in my cells, despite intellectually knowing better, despite reading so many self-help books, despite subscribing to all these lofty ideals of "anything is possible" and  "we are all worthy of our dreams."

It is only this past year that I have actually started to do the work of real healing - which no one really tells you how to do. They just tell you to love yourself more. But how do you even do that? They tell you to meditate, but what if meditation uncovers such painful traumas that it sends you into a psychosis? No one tells you about that. No on tells you that your problem isn't your mind, but in your body's ability to regulate stress. It IS possible to change - but it must be with the right team of healers who actually know about healing trauma (and at the same time humble enough to know they don't know everything) - to really uncover the deep set beliefs embedded in our nervous system and underlying our experiences of life, and release them and replace them with the truth of being lovable - the truth that people with healthy self-esteem naturally embody - the truth that everyone deserves to feel. (And by the way the healing processes it doesn't have to be expensive like many in the self help world will lead you to believe).

I started this process of uncovering and releasing deep stored beliefs in December of 2020, and started making real headway this summer around the time I started a 100 Epic Day challenge where I committed to creating and playing with art every day (with the intention of become a person that was healed). And for the first time in my life, I see progress - real progress - in getting outside the mental prison I've been in since as long as I can remember.  Breaking free seems to have very little to do with any kind of mental process, or brute force behavioral changes, and everything to do with getting present enough to access the core wounding memories in the safety of loving professionals - professionals that don't tune out the second your 50 minute-hour is over, and really hold a space of love and compassion.  So far drawing, rather than writing, is what helps the most in processing, because it gets me out of my head more.  ​​