Last night. Whoa. Dude. I don’t want to talk about it.
I am realizing that clinical dissociation, even in the sense of numbing and resistance to affect and emotional modulation, really does constitute a splitting of sorts.
They have renamed Multiple Personality Disorder Dissociative Identity Disorder. People like this have “alters” which pop out when certain environmental criteria apply.
But for a person who has been dissociated for a long time, popping IN to spontaneous affect feels like an intrusion of some sort. I built for myself a dusty room, which allowed in a bit of sun sometimes, even if it was mostly covered in shadows, and some other part of me is trying to open the door.
Right now, this is my core internal conflict. I’m not depressed, or hyperanxious. I’m trying to reconcile two disparate parts of myself which do not trust one another. This is hard.
And I think “I wish I could trust a “professional”, but you really can’t. They are, in bulk, people only slightly smarter than the average intellectually, often inferior in terms of emotional intelligence, and given to cant, recitation, dogma, and largely meaningless rituals.
Then I think to a book I wrote about maybe five years ago, “Spiritual Emergencies”, by Stan Grof, where he collected papers about, among other things, Shamanic Emergence. Psychologically, that is what I am going through. There is no easy path. There is no one to guide me.
But surely this is not a unique human experience?
All spiritual traditions depend, I think, on people like me sticking to our paths, carrying on, and gathering wisdom through excruciating difficulty. I really think this is true. A true spiritual path is a type of warfare. It requires the same tenacity, willingness to look death in the eye, and the same adaptability and result focus. On the nights where I don’t think I am going to die, I usually feel like I am going insane.
But here I am!!!! Motherfucker: here I am. It hasn’t killed me yet, and all signs are positive. Again, there are things I could write about, but am choosing not to.