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“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

Hello again! So I finally got to sit down and have a chat with the "Man Hopper" I mentioned in this original topic, and by golly am I surprised at how it turned out. From the very first week I grew frustrated about her, I wanted to have this conversation for the sake of philosophically winning over her lack of reasoning (which would ironically be anti-philosophy I think). Like I intended for it to be my way of defriending her very harshly and officially, but over time I started to think of it as an opportunity to grow. A chance to have an open and honest discussion about what's been going on between us and seperately. When I thought there was only a 20% chance of our friendship growing, I didn't expect it to be the outcome I received. Anyways, I want to keep this as short as possible, so I want to briefly touch on the things I've learned and how VALUABLE AND GREAT REAL-TIME RELATING REALLY IS!!! RTR was my main weapon in this and that prevented me from being a judgemental, over bearing disapprover like this woman's parents. Which is of course the stem of her dysfunction. Her parents are very hard to please, she feels unlovable, so it's pretty obvious that she can only seek love through these men she gets into relationships with. That much is simple, and so is the next point, but just wasn't an easy idea for her to ever realize. Her lack of self worth derives from her parents, yes, because they are over protective and disapprove of everything she does. When I would judge her about her romantic choices, I just became another parent and she was honest with me for once saying that it frustrated her when I got into lecture mode about--well just about anything that had to do loving your self first. She knew that intellectually...but it's something she didn't really take into full account until today. For you see, I told her that I felt like she lead me on. I opened up about how when she first broke up with her previous boyfriend, that there was a week or so where I felt like I wanted to tell her that I MIGHT like her, and that we should spend more time together to see if our friendship can be anything more. I held back on doing so because I didn't want to enable her man hopping habit, but she enacted it anyway with the guy she's with now, and for me that stung. Even though I wanted to spark that with her only out of convenience and proximity...it still hurt. Then she told me that if there was a time in the future where she fully loved her self (so glad she was on the right track during this!) because she doesn't right now, and we were both single and we were still friends, she would give us a shot. Because on her side of things, she admitted that she was also attracted to me during that period but felt unworthy of me because of my philosophical insight. She felt like she could never add up to my level headedness, and I admitted that I could never add up to her sexual experience. It was just a very mutually levelling experience to see what we feared in each other and why we wanted so desparately to keep our friendship strictly platonic. We both resisted the change for our own reasons. For her it was lack of worth being with someone of my emotional intelligence, which she was right about because I KNOW myself enough to know that I would feel insecure to be in a relationship with someone with that habit. I would have to constantly be trying to please her to ensure she doesn't find a fall back guy. For me it was my fear of not being sexually sufficient enough for her (since I've never had sex, but she's had plenty) and of course of the innate jealousy that I have. I'm more mature about it now, but it doesn't make it go away. ANYWAYS I broke my promise and made this very long. I just wanted to share the basics of what happened. There is so much more about it that I can't even verbalize right now because I am just so greatful and happy how understanding we were to each other. And of course how awesome RTRing really was! So like I said, it was no longer about letting her go as a friend harshly, but she suggested that I take my time to digest this all, do my own thing, and contact her again when I'm ready. She knew exactly what I needed when I couldn't even state my own preference at the end of the conversation. I am just really happy that I know my input made an impact on her for once. Thanks for reading and feel free to add your input or ask me anything else about it.