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In this short video, I introduce the concept of self-doubt, and talk about the origins of self-doubt, potential problems with it, and results when and if its resolved.

“I can hardly hear myself think”, is a phrase that is often spoken when we lose our ability to concentrate while we are in the presence of overbearing noise. I think that, when we are bombarded throughout our lives with the endless commotion of external “standards”, which have scant to do with producing excellence within us as much as it has to do with producing convenience for others, “standards” that not only contained unrealistic edicts to aim for unattainable heights, but often contradictory and ever changing whims that were impossible to follow, I think that when we are repeatedly left trapped in such paralyzing double binds of intolerable humiliation, we too not only lose our ability to concentrate on our thoughts, but also our ability to concentrate on our genuine needs and preferences. In low-nurturant familial and school environments that are hostile to what we want, we comply in order to survive. So, in order to prevent each day of our childhood from becoming a new nightmare, these voices become internalized and continue to drown out the melodies of our true feelings and desires well into adulthood to keep us safe. Hence, as adults, with our sense of self still mute, we often become completely paralyzed when we are faced with opportunities and choice. Questions of what success and failure means to us become incredibly difficult to answer. These protective alters have no sense of time, but they do respond when listened to. And overtime, with persistent awareness, curiosity, and negotiation, these protective voices can learn to heed their protective layer of dissonance and produce a fine harmony of trust among the Self once again. And once more we shall be free to ask, uninterrupted by an uproar of foreign expectations, “Am I doing everything I want at the level that I want to do it?” and in being able to finally hear whatever the answer is to that question, no longer will our identity remain unheard. And once we hear it, it will never remain unexpressed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Originally posted on medium in September. https://medium.com/@joelpatterson_52315/the-unheard-identity-uncovering-the-self-through-persistent-listening-bdcc284eb189 If you enjoy my work, I gladly accept bitcoin donations: 1ALYYHuvAUjjsXLHJRyCxGQ5E9rDoDVpx4

I'm very keen on getting your thoughts on the subject and/or about the video

This is a must listen. To the degree to which this is new information is, I think, the degree of the propaganda we were made to ingest. The following is a video series / lecture by Roslyn Rose about: treating parenting as a job, why there should be no adolescence, bringing your children with you wherever you go, why children need to live in reality, childhood self esteem, and more.

Hello I am new to the forum I have listened to a few podcasts and enjoyed them. I have a slightly unusal profile and I will talk, see where this goes. I am now a 21 year old male Michigan, USA. I now work as both an Emergency Medical Technician and a Firefighter. I have had several issues whilist growing up and many of them impair me now. The short version is: low self esteem to the point of an inferiority complex, small male member (yes I know what the average is and I know what micro penis is. I can look at pictures on the internet and most small ones there beat me.) I have body odor that I have yet been able to correct (I also wet the bed until 14 years old due to medical issue and my dad was a smoker so cigarette smoke gets added to the aroma), I have crooked, yellow and decaying teeth. I am 40 lbs overweight (slightly fatter than average), I do not like looking people in the eyes, I do not like attention (praise, anger, or even just looking) directed at me, I am lazy, depressed, I manipulate others in order to hide these things as best I can (I am surprised at how well I can do it), I don't tell people what I really think deep down. I was also molested and physically abused when younger (by peers, not by family) I have an okay relationship with my parents. They are christian and drug me to church every week and as I got older I started asking questions about it. They never gave me good answers or complete enough of an answer to be defined as a bad reply. I started lying about being sick or arrange to go to friend's houses to avoid church. They never hit me or yelled at me for not liking it or rejecting it. But they would always tell me they were doing me a favor by dragging me. My parents went to church but never read the bible at home, the most christian thing I see is my father pray before meals. My parents promoted freedom for their children but they gave too much. I feel I was neglected and thus these problems were never noticed or even addressed. My dad goes in one part of the house to be on his computer where he mostly amuses himself. My mother will clean the house, prepare food and go on her own computer on the second floor of the house. Throughout my childhood these two seem oddly distant for a married couple. They sleep together and I see them kiss. but for the amount of time they are both in one house they might only be together 25% of the time. The amount of time with children is even less and the amount of time they are both together with children is not even 10 minutes per day. This is not because they are busy. We still went on vacations and other normal family things but the day to day stuff seems really weird. I even have friends who have told me that my family is really weird. I think my friends are normal but I don't have a solid enough frame of reference. That is the short and concise list with no back story. I doubt I can ever have a girl friend (I can't embrace her because of body odor, I cannot kiss her because my jacked up teeth will stab her and my mouth has odor with odd taste no matter how much dental hygeine I practice).If I had a girl friend I have no idea how we would act, I have no exposure to a normal relationship. I see movies and I have my parents' model but I don't like either. Of course that means no sex because of male member. I have an extreme self persecusion and inferiority complex that makes interacting with others an internal struggle. I do not like eye contact but I will glance at faces once every few seonds around the eyes. I like to keep people 1 meter away from me or more, so they do not smell me. I consider others more important and I consider them "real people" while I would consider myself "broken". I am not a humble saint, this is artifical humbleness so that people are not bothered by my inequality. I am not able to function the same way in society someone who does not suffer from these problems can. I feel considering myself unequal or even a 3/5ths person is not far off, if someone were to label me as such I would not be offended. So these problems are not that rare but the combination is a little more unusual. This obviously causes depression but I somehow became a firefighter/emt with these issues. Everyone is very nice to me at my job, I do my best everyday and not once have I brought up any of this but I strongly suspect everyone thinks about it loudly. So I realize I left out a lot of details but this is the gist of it. Considering yourself not to be an equal person allows very odd personnnel devolopment and perception of issues. Societal trends or fashions have almost no impact on me. When I know I will probably never have children or a wife, I can take a very neutral look at things. So I guess I would say thank you for reading and tell me what you think or ask questions. If this is the wrong section then I apologize.

There's this idea I've been mulling over recently around the way that people respond to verbally abusive, trollish or overtly irrational people, and how it's often the case that people (myself included) will try and calmly and compassionately explain what is so wrong with what that person is saying. I often picture myself as a separate person and watch myself get into conversations with not so nice people, and what I think I've realized is that if I had a friend or a lover (or someone I was very fond of) getting into an argument where the other person started resorting to insulting, passive aggressive or otherwise offensive behavior that I would want to come in and say something to the effect of "who the hell do you think you are talking to [my friend] that way?" I think that everyone can relate to that. (The rest of this post is assuming you do). But for some reason many people do not hold themselves in the same regard, or do not act in the same way when it is themselves in that situation. We take the abuse and try and hold ourselves above it, try not to take it personally etc. I'm starting to think that actually this is a terrible thing we do to ourselves. Why would we expose ourselves to more abuse than the people we care about? Why would we not protect ourselves in the same way we would protect others? Unless of course that we do not care about ourselves that much. If we can hold others accountable for harming us, then why would we not hold ourselves equally accountable for doing the same thing? And so there is this sort of "let's be nice to abusive people" or some kind of NVC or other similar nonsense where the person doing the work is taking the abuse without expressing (righteous) anger. I'm starting to see that as a kind of terribly abusive, self destructive thing. This describes way too many peacemaker childhoods for me to believe that it is somehow going to change as soon as you are an adult. What does the youngest sibling do to avoid family conflict? He / she tries to make everyone agree on some level about something. It usually doesn't matter what that something is, the agreement is the important part. And if the parents hold much more power (as they naturally do) then that something is going to be much more in their favor, regardless of what is true and right. It's that thing that bad therapists do where a couple is fighting and the girlfriend is being abusive about some conflict they are having and the solution the therapist comes up with is to get the boyfriend to sympathize with her and that neglecting to take the trash out causes her "real" pain that he ought sympathize with... There is a kind of terrible superficiality in being nice to abusive people that I would desperately like to stop. The phrase that goes something like: "I understand that when I use a bold font face that it causes you to feel great distress and I really don't want you to feel distress, but there are reasons that I use the bold font face that I would like you to understand" A person who attacks you for using a bold font does not deserve your compassion and to talk to them as if they are a reasonable person is to misunderstand them on a very fundamental level. The only reasons that I've ever heard for why I should respond to people in this way come in two varieties: 1. If they are so unreasonable that they must be suffering in some way on the inside and thus deserve our compassion or 2. being compassionate to abusive people makes them much more receptive to your ideas. I'll first address the second. I do not doubt at all that this does result in some short term gains. (Only the most insane person would respond to a non aggressive person with rage). But I would argue that is not going to have a lasting effect on them. I can't count the number of times where I had argued a case with sensitivity and compassion where the person left saying something like "yea, there is something to what you are saying for sure" and then the next time I see them it's like nothing ever happened. They will put forward their position like our conversation had never taken place. I would argue that words don't mean shit if your actions aren't consistent with them. So when you are saying that if you support the threat of violence against me for smoking herb, and I emotionally connect only on the level that we are talking about our favorite flavor of ice cream or something, then that is not going to be (or come across) as authentic. That person is going to behave as if it were a flavor of icecream kind of conversation, and as they should, you trained them to! The fact that hitting your children is abusive has certain implications. Implications of cowardice, abuse, pettiness and conformism. Those are serious implications and pretending that they aren't there doesn't make them go away. And the first excuse for this niceness to abuse is equally as absurd. We absolutely do not owe petty vindictive people our compassion simply because they must suffer on the inside in order to behave that way. People make the decisions that they do. It's a toxic brand of determinism that excuses them on such a ridiculously flimsy basis. You absolutely and completely insult them by making it out like they had no control in the situation. Certainly that is not helpful to them. There is a certain amount of ignorance that I can totally excuse and sympathize with, but that's very rare actually. The overwhelming case seems to be that people act as if they do not believe a single word of what they are saying. For instance a person who believes in god is not praying for that god to grow back their amputated limb. A subjectivist isn't saying "I feel silly saying this, but I think that you are wrong, and I have no certainty at all that the basis of my objection has anything to do with truth". A determinist doesn't try and use a particular configuration of words to program your mind into accepting their conclusions, they argue their position. You get the point. Likewise the people who react with hostility, passive aggression, wanton irrationality know (at least on some level) that they are full of shit. Their suffering is to a significant degree self inflicted. The consequences of this may be severe. The first thing is of course that it's a continuation of past abuses, reproducing that peacemaker defense we developed responding to petty parents, teachers etc. We lock ourselves deeper into this self abuse and raise complacent children with low self worth. The other problem is that it makes compassion into a virtue rather than a natural bi-product of the actions that elicit it, making anger, annoyance, irritation into lesser experiences that only get in the way of this (ostensibly) mature and enlightened compassion. The emotional response becomes a pretense, insincere, unreal, toxic. Maybe it's the case that being nice is a good tactic, but I think it's important to be absolutely certain that it's not just a way of denying yourself (or somebody else) your honest experience. You may be doing far more harm than good. Anyway, what do you think?