Overcoming mePLUS mentality

[BD91]

Hey everybody,

 

I was watching "The Truth about Robin Williams" and the concept of mePLUS that Stef talks about really resonated with me.

 

I wanted to hear anybody's thoughts on that concept, and more to the point, how to overcome it. I guess I hadn't really realized it until watching that presentation, and became more active in my pursuit of self-knowledge in general, but that's something I've dealt with my entire life as far as I can remember.

 

I grew up in a, vaguely, single-parent household. What I mean by that is my parents relationship was screwed before I was even born, my dad had been cheating on my mom for quite a while (still is) but they stayed married "for the sake of the children" (pro-tip: don't do that.). My father is an OB-GYN, so he was usually not home because of a busy call/office schedule and when he was around he was typically too tired for any sort of real interaction with his kids.

 

As far as the interactions I DID have with my parents they were mostly negative and filled with a lot of shaming. I can remember when when my dad was home we were playing baseball in the yard, more specifically he would throw the ball and I'd hit it with the bat (didn't really have enough people around for a full game). One time I really clobbered that thing it went WAAAYYY out into the woods and, at first I was really proud, because you know, that's what the batter is supposed to do; but, my pride quickly diminished when my dad started chastising me along the lines of "GOD DAMN IT, WHY CAN'T YOU TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY! I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS NONSENSE" and then he stormed inside which destroyed any of the good feelings I had and then when I tried to talk to my mom about it she just said "well, you know, people in our family just aren't really athletes" and that was pretty much it. I can't remember any single moment of witnessing genuine expression between my parents, usually I was with one or the other and they would just say nasty things about the other. One time my mother actually hired a private detective to follow my dad around while we were all on a family vacation because she suspected he was cheating on her there as well. Long story short, pretty anytime I did anything my parents would berate or otherwise put me down by either criticizing what I had done, or shaming me by saying what I did was "embarrassing".

 

So, around 8th grade my performance in school really started to decline, I didn't know why and parent-teacher conferences yielded no insight; presumably because I didn't realized how f****ed my family was, and if the teachers noticed they didn't say anything, and obviously my parents weren't going to own up to any of their mistakes. I never had to repeat a grade, but I barely scraped by to graduation. And in college, I started out well but quickly declined into neglecting my classwork for the sake of self-medicating with alcohol and copious amounts of marijuana, and a brief stage of amphetamine abuse.

 

Now I've drifted a bit for the sake of background information so now we'll get back into mePLUS. I was the school band, I played the drums, and I was really really good. Not to brag, but I was far and away the best in percussion section. I had been taking lessons for a while and I enjoyed drumming because I got positive feedback from it. For the first time in my life I had approval, I was accepted, so because of this I just practiced all the time, I didn't really have a lot of friends and I was never bullied severely but I definitely wasn't the favorite of my peer group, and the friends I did have were in the band (wind ensemble, marching band, etc...) so I'd see them during rehearsal which accounted for most of my "social life" if you could really call it that.

 

So, fast forward to now, I'm living at home, my dad's house, which he had built literally less than 100 yards from my moms house, I'm unemployed, I can't form intimate relationships and date women and the friends I have now (few people still in the area I went to high school with) aren't the most intellectually stimulating and I don't know if they're the best people to have around, they're still prone to partying regularly (2+ times a week of heavy alcohol, marijuana, etc...) but I really don't want to become a complete recluse.

 

I always set these schedules of things I want to do, with the assumption that if I just do it, then I'll feel good and have success and everything will work out in the end. But, inevitably I fall off the wagon within a week, then get upset with myself for being lazy and repeat that cycle ad infinitum. Here's the mePLUS, it's like I believe that I can only be loved IF I do certain things first, the concept of unconditional self-love BEFORE even doing anything is just outside of my conception. I want to change that, but I really don't know how.

 

 

I've been learning to write code and I want to start a business selling software plug-ins that process audio signals (commonly referred to as VST, short for Virtual Studio Technology, or AudioUnit if you're using Mac), but businesses are about people; both the customers and the employees, and if I can't build a decent relationship with myself, how can I build a team of people who can trust me to lead a company? How can I become more social and open and form relationships, both friendly and more intimate?

 

As far as I can tell, if I can't figure out a way to change these deeply rooted underlying mentalities then they're going to take everything that I care about and desire from me, more specifically disallow me from ever having it in the first place.

 

 

 

Any advice? I skipped over some of my history (dating experience, more specifics on interactions with my parents, etc..), but I feel I got the main point across. But if anybody has more questions, I'm happy to answer.

 

I'm at my wit's end here and I just don't know what to do.

[Kevin Beal]

Hi BD91! Welcome to the boards

 

First of all, I'm very sorry about the complete disregard for your feelings as a child. That's really sad, imagining you just wanting connection and having to navigate a bunch of selfishness on their part. That you couldn't just simply be yourself and have that be enough.

 

So, I just wanted to say that I'm not always taking my own advice and still succumb to this temptation to be me+, but I think that I know what can help.

 

I think the opposite state is to be fully self expressed, expressing disagreement, irritation, sadness, etc, as well as the thoughts and feelings which are emotionally safe. For a lot of people it feels so dangerous that they become numb to the reality that they feel sad or irritated, and then they become depressed when they pain of not expressing themselves becomes too much and all of a sudden they are swinging between numbness to irritation to numbness to sadness to numb again, usually until they can get some short term self esteem hit, probably from something that is not being self expressed: being me+.

 

I think the first step in that case is to develop a rich emotional vocabulary checking in with yourself and describing exactly what you're thinking and feeling. First, you get sadness, but then that becomes more sophisticated and you can tell the difference between disappointment, sorrow, hurt, longing, etc. Similarly anger becomes irritation, exasperation, annoyance, rage, loathing, etc. The better you can articulate your inner experience, I think the more you can be aware of it in order to best express it later.

 

The more you are aware and understand your inner experience, the better you can express yourself to people when you want to connect with them, or test the waters. Also, I think that it's easier to tell, that way, what it is that you need in any given moment. You can turn insecurity into an opportunity to connect, rather than the me+ strategies you've developed. Or if you don't trust the person and you can make a conscious decision to play that role, just not for the purposes of getting a short term self esteem boost for playing a role for somebody else you don't even trust.

 

Therapy helped a lot for me. I was unemployed when I started therapy, so I don't buy this excuse that people have that they don't go because they don't have a job. That's a very passive thing to tell yourself, I think. Not that you said that, but you did say a couple things which are like that. For example you said that you can't form intimate relationships, can't build a decent relationship with yourself, can't figure out how to improve in this area. And to that, I say bullshit. It's unsafe to do those things, they aren't impossible.

 

I think I understand the fear, but the first step is to acknowledge it. It's fucking scary to be vulnerable! Maybe that's a good place to start?

 

Please let me know if it was at all helpful.

[BD91]

Hey Kevin, thanks for the welcome, the sympathy, and the reply!

 

I agree with the idea that opposing state to me+ is one of openness, self expression, and honesty of both emotionally safe and emotionally "unsafe" thoughts, ideas, and feelings.

 

Your description of swinging like a pendulum between numb and sad makes a lot of sense, and I'd propose the addition of fear of negative consequence (shaming, punishment, social rejection, etc...) would be the gravity that keeps the whole operation in motion.

 

I'll definitely work on my emotional vocabulary, I'm familiar with the basic descriptions (happy, sad, angry); but, I have never really thought of the implications of adding a bit more finesse to the language I use to describe these feelings. I can absolutely relate to longing and disappointment and a sense of hopeless exasperation when I try to communicate feelings and receive support from my family.

 

I am currently looking into therapists in my area as I am well aware that it is an affordable and boundless investment in my self that I could benefit from enormously. Especially coupled with journal entries and meditation, both of which i have began to get into with the New Year so the sake of having a record of my self-knowledge and feelings and the meditation for keeping myself calm and in the moment and not dissociating from reality when negative feelings come up.

 

And yes your post was tremendously helpful and I appreciate the input greatly, thank you!

[Quadrewple]

So, around 8th grade my performance in school really started to decline, I didn't know why and parent-teacher conferences yielded no insight; presumably because I didn't realized how f****ed my family was, and if the teachers noticed they didn't say anything, and obviously my parents weren't going to own up to any of their mistakes. I never had to repeat a grade, but I barely scraped by to graduation. And in college, I started out well but quickly declined into neglecting my classwork for the sake of self-medicating with alcohol and copious amounts of marijuana, and a brief stage of amphetamine abuse.

 

Now I've drifted a bit for the sake of background information so now we'll get back into mePLUS. I was the school band, I played the drums, and I was really really good. Not to brag, but I was far and away the best in percussion section. I had been taking lessons for a while and I enjoyed drumming because I got positive feedback from it. For the first time in my life I had approval, I was accepted, so because of this I just practiced all the time, I didn't really have a lot of friends and I was never bullied severely but I definitely wasn't the favorite of my peer group, and the friends I did have were in the band (wind ensemble, marching band, etc...) so I'd see them during rehearsal which accounted for most of my "social life" if you could really call it that.

 

So, fast forward to now, I'm living at home, my dad's house, which he had built literally less than 100 yards from my moms house, I'm unemployed, I can't form intimate relationships and date women and the friends I have now (few people still in the area I went to high school with) aren't the most intellectually stimulating and I don't know if they're the best people to have around, they're still prone to partying regularly (2+ times a week of heavy alcohol, marijuana, etc...) but I really don't want to become a complete recluse.

 

I always set these schedules of things I want to do, with the assumption that if I just do it, then I'll feel good and have success and everything will work out in the end. But, inevitably I fall off the wagon within a week, then get upset with myself for being lazy and repeat that cycle ad infinitum. Here's the mePLUS, it's like I believe that I can only be loved IF I do certain things first, the concept of unconditional self-love BEFORE even doing anything is just outside of my conception. I want to change that, but I really don't know how.

 

 

I've been learning to write code and I want to start a business selling software plug-ins that process audio signals (commonly referred to as VST, short for Virtual Studio Technology, or AudioUnit if you're using Mac), but businesses are about people; both the customers and the employees, and if I can't build a decent relationship with myself, how can I build a team of people who can trust me to lead a company? How can I become more social and open and form relationships, both friendly and more intimate?

 

 

Your situation has some huge similarities to mine.  The only praise I got from my parents was from my mom and it was almost solely for doing things she wanted me to do whether I wanted to do them or not.  For a child raised in this environment - you've spent so much time focusing on what other people want that your awareness of your own needs and ability to meet them is significantly damaged. 

 

My mother abandoned the family when I was 9 and my strategy of people pleasing significantly accelerated at age 11 and continued on until age 15 until I couldn't keep it up anymore.  Of course, I didn't have any support and at the time wasn't even consciously aware of what made me so different from the other kids, and so I wasn't able to change into a healthy person.  I instead isolated myself and went from being the extroverted people pleaser (constantly and usually successfully trying to make people laugh) to being a shell-shocked, unexpressive, and depressed person.  I was significantly abusing alcohol and weed at the time as it was the only way I knew how to feel any better.

 

The clinical term for MePLUS is porous ego boundaries, which means your identity has been damaged to the point where other people's needs and wants invade your identity and your identity is not strong enough to fight them off.  I could go on for days about stories I have where I've provided immense value to someone without getting anything back because of these porous ego boundaries I still struggle with.  Some of the most painful things from my past are the ridiculous amounts of missed opportunities which arose from my inability to put what I wanted over what other people wanted.  I wanted to be in West Side Story in 9th grade, but I was worried about what my "friends" would think.

 

Around 6 months ago I was also unemployed, and finally got a fast food job shortly after my call into the Sunday Show (Google - The Bad Philosophy Show, I am the last caller "Ambition is Social").  I was constantly trying to find some balance between being an extroverted people pleaser and being withdrawn and unexpressive, as those had been my primary social strategies until that point.  I think the only way I've been able to find a healthy way of interacting is by learning when appropriate times are to withdraw and say nothing and when the times are to be more extroverted and speak up.

 

For example:  A customer asks me "Do you have 12 packs of Corona"?  At one point I would have literally winced, outwardly pretending to deeply care that we didn't have that product, and apologizing.  Nowadays I wouldn't pretend that I care, I would simply inform them that we don't and let them know any other applicable information I do have, and I likely wouldn't apologize unless it was a regular customer whose favorite product we were out of.  And guess what has happened to my stress levels since that change.......... they have PLUMMETED.  That is just one small example of a situation that I handle completely differently now than I did just 6 months ago.

 

In order to make that change, I had to be highly vigilant about examining my physiology when interacting with other people and highly vigilant about examining my thoughts when interacting with other people.  For example, why would I wince or screw up my facial expression when I have to tell a customer something they don't want to hear?  Obviously, I care very little whether or not we sell their particular product as it doesn't really affect me.  But because of my porous ego boundaries, I would pretend to care to a degree which was disproportional to the severity of the situation.  I know for a fact this happened with me as an early child - my parents explained to me arbitrary and completely trivial things I would be punished for.  Even though I didn't see the things I was being punished for as wrong, I had to pretend I did in order to keep them from abusing me further.  There's nothing more dangerous than being powerless in a situation where a sadist wants you to be afraid and not showing them the fear they want to see.  This meant screwing up my facial expressions, shallowing my breathing, adopting a fearful tone of voice - essentially turning my body into a receptacle for expressing fear.  They set me up for a life of being a slave to abusers and manipulators.

 

I believe (with solid reasons I think) that you cannot change your thoughts without also changing your physiology.  It's hard to express how difficult this process is - it means in the beginning you have to live every moment without going on autopilot - constant awareness of your physical movements and mindstate. MePLUS is a state of constant fear, and when you start to resist your brain's addiction to fear, it literally feels like you are going to die because in 99.9% of human history, you grew up in fear and that prepared you for your short life of fear.  The idea of living in fear and then living in peace is almost foreign to our DNA, and so you are in a sense facing death every time you don't allow yourself to be triggered into a fearful reaction.  Not that it really matters when you're fighting through this process, but fighting that fear turns you into an incredible and rare badass worthy of the highest praise (as is everyone who overcomes abuse and neglect).

 

My own experience was that paying close attention to my thoughts helped a bit, but it really wasn't until I started paying close attention to my physiology that I started making real progress.  I find that if I simply put my awareness on my own body most situations, negative thoughts more or less cease to be a problem.  I think this is the case because I experienced severe physical abuse which happened far more often than verbal abuse growing up and so my physical integrity was trampled on to such a degree that most of my negative thoughts arose out of my physical pain and the hijacking of my nervous system to please sadistic monsters, as well as neglect.  I think this led to my negative thoughts being less specific than with people who were mostly verbally abused, and thus the physical side of things was what I needed to focus on most to become less fearful.  Perhaps this was not the case for you, but it's something to consider when looking at how you approach solving this problem.

 

"I always set these schedules of things I want to do, with the assumption that if I just do it, then I'll feel good and have success and everything will work out in the end. But, inevitably I fall off the wagon within a week, then get upset with myself for being lazy and repeat that cycle ad infinitum."

 

All too familiar stuff you're saying here.  I believe that with Robin Williams, he spent his life achieving great success in something which he was great at as a result of his trauma (pleasing crowds).  If you waste your precious energy and time on things without knowing the psychological reasons why you're doing them, even if you succeed, you have failed.  I am a notorious procrastinator and a musician and I have been very hard on myself for procrastinating.  There was even an amazing opportunity to work with one of my musical idols (APlus from Hieroglyphics) last November which I didn't take full advantage of. 

 

In my head I was thinking "Well isn't this why I put so many hours into my music?  Didn't I want to work with one of the greats?  Why do I feel so unmotivated to work on tracks for him?"  It turns my justifications for spending so much time on music were completely false and ex-post facto justifications for not handling other areas of my life - i.e. working on healing my own trauma and becoming a healthy adult.  So I was procrastinating on something (music) which itself was a procrastination for actually becoming happy.  I don't know how much this applies to your procrastination - I will only advise that you are very careful and rigorously honest about the reasons why you want to achieve the things you want to achieve.  In an alternative universe I would have been working 10 hours a day to send him some great music, and not focusing on getting my stress under control.  Maybe that trajectory in a long enough time-span would lead to me becoming an icon in hiphop, but it would all be all for nothing because it was all just a way to postpone dealing with my psychological issues.  No level of success would be enough to erase the inner pain from my childhood.  If this is the same dynamic behind your procrastination, then the only difference between you and I and Robin Williams is that we didn't spend 40+ years investing in something for tragically bad reasons....some speculation that may be of use to you.

 

Congratulations on everything you've done thus far!  I'd love to chat with you sometime - add me on Skype: Username is Karahashianders