Lately, after reading Love Matters, and watching Crappy Childhood Fairy content the relationship between neurological issues and psychological issues has become clearer.
Basically it’s kind of like this: Trauma that happens to an established psychological self can be healed on a psychological level. Trauma that happens prior to or in the absence of a psychological self becomes neurological as the organism itself receives it as direct input.
Early developmental trauma or developmental issues due to bad parenting become neurological and can’t be reached by talk therapy.
The psychological self that arises out of the chaos of the organism’s various internal systems as a self-regulating intelligent equilibrium can not alter the architecture it spawns from. Rather, as an agent of the traumatized organism, it’s attempts to restore equilibrium are rooted in and reproduce the traumatic situation the organism has adapted to in a process of unconscious homeostasis – where you unconsciously fuck up and self-sabotage your own life to reproduce your trauma constellation.
This explains my frustration why after over a decade of hard work in therapy I’m still struggling to make friends, have good standing with colleagues, or even keep a job. You can’t resolve early developmental neurological issues with psychological therapy and techniques.
As a psychological self, I need to make peace with my neurological disability. I can’t establish deep interpersonal connections. My life will be like that. For years, I thought with enough therapy and work and determination I too would be able to join the community of social life of the fully functional and have fulfilling connections with friends, and make a family with a deep intimate reciprocal relationship – that all the disney shit I watched in my childhood would come true.
However, like a man born without limbs, I can only make peace with my neurological situation. I’m in mid-30’s and never had a long-term relationship, friendship, and don’t actually have any attachment bonds with anyone. I’m alone on this planet. And the neurological damage is done.
My therapist says I should keep going – there are new option:.
Psychedelic therapy may help create new phases of neuroplasticity and allow myself to establish a deep unconditional trust in life – that though impersonal – could help switch off the survival mode that engulfs my conscious self with extreme reactivity. So hopefully the intensity of that survival energy will no longer play itself out in interactions with others – that need to be more chill – and from that chilled place I can abide in and respond from presence.
Experiments with micro-doses of ketamine and MDMA with guided sessions have shown more predictable and integrated results vs Ibogaine and Ayahausca as the conscious ego as a construct isn’t wholly bypassed – but, rather is turned inwards – while under the influence – to unlock hidden gates within itself.
And, on the CPTSD side of things, there are methods where I can learn to emotionally regulate myself out of disintegrated/survival mode and make better choices from a more rational self-aware place. There are of number of hacks or work arounds for CPTSD that manage it as a chronic condition.
All these things offer new potential avenues to acknowledge and work on the neurological level. So my new priority now is get and keep a job that can finance weekly therapy (to keep my in a job and help emotionally regulate me via contact with an emotionally regulated person), psychedelic therapy sessions (which take the form of expensive week(s) long retreats in legal locations), and CPTSD coach to train me to manage my condition.
I’m moving from what my therapist generalized as epigenetic autism, and bending towards a self- diagnosis of CPTSD. Basically early developmental trauma shrunk areas of my brain and they simply never developed. Either I have to come to terms that I won’t be living this life as a neurotypical. My standards of happiness will have to change to match my difficulty forming human relationships.
Whatever the disorder is called, self-acceptance can end a lot of unnecessary suffering. So for now, I mourn the fading image of a mentally capable me standing a doorway of a home with his family. I must explore and accept reduced levels of social self actualization. So long as my psyche is stable, and clear, and no longer disintegrated or engulfed by survival mechanisms, then it should be good enough, at rest enough, and peaceful enough to abide as presence itself. Which is all I really want.