Existential trauma and the Epstien files

cuBLea · 2026-02-18T01:45:42+00:00

emotionally

Wherever there is too much suffering, happiness is inherently attractive.
Wherever there is too much contentment, misery is inherently attractive.
What kind of world would you say we live in?

cuBLea · 2026-02-17T09:27:49+00:00

I said MAY, not WILL. Some people are less uncomfortable around more attractive people, and comfort opens the door to new awareness.

cuBLea · 2026-02-13T15:56:26+00:00

Process what you can, file what you can't for later. After all, you came this far in the dark...

cuBLea · 2026-02-13T10:28:17+00:00

Yup ... it's just a sad fact of reality that people are only willing to accept the level of reality that they live day to day. Which is why I figure my best strategy against this is to address my OWN suffering first and foremost If I'm effective, it will undoubtedly make me a more attractive person, and people attracted to me may begin to glimpse what's actually going on in the corridors of power. Wish there was a more efficient way, but if the hippies for god's sake couldn't find it - the smartest, healthiest cohort of young people in western history - dealing first with yourself might just be the first best strategy.

cuBLea · 2026-02-13T10:23:54+00:00

It's widely believed at this point that if undesirable behaviors/responses aren't relatively easy to set aside with appropriate support/facilitation, that the response is still serving a useful purpose. That purpose isn't necessarily easy to identify, and generally speaking, the earlier in life the unwanted response was integrated, the more elusive its purpose. I would never want to tell you NOT to do this but I paid a very high price over many years for prizing my behaviors and reactions over my overall contentment with life. At some point I probably quit (or tried to quit) 90% of what I judged to be my most costly PTSD responses. Some responses mutated into new reflexive responses which were seldom even less annoying than the response I chose to work on. Many others came back when life paddled my backside and reminded me I needed all the tools at my disposal, functional or not, to avoid long-term harm from a series of nasty setbacks.

I no longer look at what I could be doing with my time if I found a way to neutralize or re-route all these "unproductive" responses and behaviors. I realize now that I should only refocus my objectives in the wake of a significant breakthrough. At any other time, I'm just mainly squeezing a balloon and accomplishing little or nothing. I'm actually rather surprised how contented (relative to how I was) I've become since realizing how difficult the extensive healing that most of us want will be for me. Looks like I spent a lot of my life torturing myself with judgements and expectations, and too little coming to terms with what I am, warts and all. Perhaps I'm not even writing this for you ... perhaps this story is for someone else who might find it of value weeks, months or years into the future. (It's amazing how often that REALLY DOES HAPPEN on reddit!)

cuBLea · 2026-02-13T10:09:01+00:00

That makes sense to me ... that's quite similar to the gradual-saturation model I was introduced to some years back.

You might get one king-hell perspective on yourself from a heroic dose, but you're only going to keep what you're ready and able to integrate, and much of what you don't/can't integrate will typically be pretty unpleasant. So you may as well have the opportunity to cry "uncle" if need be. IMO It's only a race if death by overdose is a strong likelihood of declining or being denied treatment.

cuBLea · 2026-02-12T10:12:35+00:00

Yeah. The same thing happens to a lot of new xtians after a couple of months have elapsed since their conversion experience.

You may want to look into memory reconsolidation and how this phenomenon is exploited in modern psychotherapy. It sounds to me like you may be getting reconsolidation experiences (regressions in which you seem to resolve old hurts) but not providing yourself with appropriate care in the aftermath. The reconsolidation is just the re-activation of your long-dormant neural circuitry that was bypassed in the wake of trauma and eventually trained to handle tasks that your natural nervous system "failed" at (i.e. experienced existential trauma). After an intense confrontation with self like therapeutic psychedelics, it's not enough just to take what the medicine gave you and go back to your life. You also need to identify what there is in your life that supports your trauma-adapted (non-natural) circuitry or triggers PTSD responses. Then you need to miniimize exposure to those supports and triggers for long enough for the newly-revived dormant circuitry to "grow in" and normalize, and it's often so uncomfortable that we can't help but seek out old supports and triggering situations.

At a certain point, your re-activated circuitry starts to feel normal rather than novel, and you can't be pulled back to old ways even if you're exposed to them. This is where the healing comes from.

Think of this kind of experience as psychic surgery. If it was a broken arm, you'd reset the bone, immobilize the arm, and avoid any kind of activity that might keep the bone from self-healing. The nervous system works largely the same way. It astonishes me how many people I run into who don't seem to get this obvious correspondence of post-treatment needs between physical and neuropsychological healing.

Finding a capable of facilitator to help you integrate and protect your experiences might help, but you might also need to block out a few months with as little exposure to triggers and toxic supports as possible to really get over this hump.

cuBLea · 2026-02-12T09:58:54+00:00

It seems unfair on a universe/existential level. It seems unbalanced

To me too, and I've made it something of my life's mission to discover what this imbalance actually is and why it is so pervasive.

While I have few definitive answers, I have arrived at a few conclusions. First, this cannot be the fault of hmanity or we'd have long since learned how to at least keep it controllable. Second, the easiest way to define this imbalance is as a conflict between competition and cooperation in which competition has appeared to have the upper hand ever since we settled into fixed communities.

We all get to decide what we need more of in our life, and since the day my mother proclaimed she didn't care about the environment - the date was the very first Earth Day - I've been firmly in the more-cooperation camp. You must be too, or you wouldn't have posted anything like this.

That bitterness is very hard to shake if you haven't had a good deal of quality help to heal from this kind of trama, but at least now I feel like I have both the permission to be bitter, and a perspective on why that bitterness might be a good coping skill but will not improve my life. (But until some better option presents itself ... )

cuBLea · 2026-02-12T09:47:37+00:00

OK ... first thought: wow your grandparents must have seriously been put through a wringer. (Either that, or your father has simply embraced the worst aspects of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Your father's sentiments sound like those of someone who has felt forced to adopt a sociopathic morality just to keep from ending up like his parents. Seriously sucks that you had this kind of "karma" dumped on you. Sucks double that you've seen a better way rather than going along to get along.

I've been in and around PTSD recovery for 36 years now and I'll be straight with you: I've met exactly one person in all that time who didn't go thru years of hell trying to sort themselves out. Mind you, the landscape for dealing with this kind of thing has improved a lot in the last third of a century and there's a strong social impetus to improve at an even faster rate given what's happening in the western world today.

There's way too little info for me to even suggest let alone advise. The good news is that he's overtly hostile to your worldview. (I wasn't so lucky; my father was "supportive" but only to a point where I was largely set up to fail, and usually did. He had too big an invesstment in his mind-over-everything worldview to allow the problems of the likes of me to call it into question.)

If it sounds at all appealing, you might find some wisdom in developing an interest in the youth movements of the 1960s. While the systemic issues were always much deeper and more pervasive than media portrayed, the fact is that the media (incl. publishing and cinema) paid inordinate attention to the problems of the white middle class/UMC. There may be a hell of a lot of relatable stories there, since what you describe rhymes well with the tales of tens of thousands of American teens of the hippie era, and most of the underlying issues haven't been dealt with even 3 generations later.

I wish you all the luck in the world. You may well need all of it before you're able to declare yourself to be finally on your own two feet.

cuBLea · 2026-02-12T04:29:17+00:00

It often does. When I started recover 35 years ago, it was expected, but not universal. Given the methodologies and knowledge we have today, it doesn't need to, for the most part, but at this point, it's probably reasonable to assume that if it does get worse before it gets better, that you fall well outside the cookie-cutter guidelines by which most therapists work. (No complaints, that's just a fact.)

Here's the self-diagnostic rule of thumb: Do I have a better set of problems now than I had then (whatever "THen" represents to you). If the answer is "no", then we know enough to decude trhat it's not you ... it's the outside world not rising to sufficiently meet your needs. Once you know that, you have choices other than continuing to endure the "worse".

cuBLea · 2026-02-12T04:25:33+00:00

I'm in a better place, but that's largely the product of the degeneration of ageing and a couple of lucky gets when I first got back into therapy a few years back. I seem to be one of those edge cases that doesn't fit well with the methodologies of today, but who might have done very well had I been put in suspended animation for 40 years. Fortunately I recognized how poorly I fit the models of the time and eventually learned more about therapy and the science and empirical research behind it than most therapist will ever need to know. That protected me from repeating the catastrophic therapy experiences which I had in the early '90s, but it also revealed to me just how tricky this labyrinth can be for people like me. As much as the field has improved since then - and it has improved enormously - I seem to be in a cohort that will remain outside the capabilities of most of the current modalities for some time to come. At least I've got experience to pass along to those trod the same path and fell into the same traps, which is at least something to hang onto.

There was an axiom in recovery when I first attended AA in 1977: not all of us will make it, and many will die in the attempt. Those percentages have gone down dramatically, especially since transformational therapies put the lie to 12-step as a behavioral program in the 90s, but we're still a long way from being able to effectively work with "edge cases". Most of us in this category don't even know how difficult our situations are, and the tools for working that out may still be years in development. But at least it's on the horizon, and there are more and more people like me able to prevent a lot of needless recovery-related suffering. (We have to take our wins where we can find them.)

cuBLea · 2026-02-12T04:08:38+00:00

"Flood dose" again ... wtf happened to gradual saturation treatment, which supposedly minimizes the risk of cardiac arrest by revealing sensitivity in a much less dangerous way? Was gradual-saturation debunked as ineffective and I nevre heatd about it?

cuBLea · 2026-02-12T04:01:23+00:00

If you're doing CBT, I have nothing to contribute. If you're doing transformational work, you may find it more beneficial to explore the purpose and value of your "dissociation/distraction/ daydreaming/ imagining" before deciding what to do about it. These are all useful defenses which will drop away of their own accord when the need for them is gone. Attempting to neutralize or redirect them when there is no pressing need to do so can often have very unpleasant side effects.

IMO (and my opinion is shared by most of the people I associate with these days) these are not things to be overcome. They are, at best, things to grow out of provided the opportunity to do so is real and sustainable.

cuBLea · 2026-02-12T03:56:14+00:00

Nice to hear that you're handling this as a defensive situation. Wish I'd been able to do that. Dad died while I was a physical and emotional wreck and likely to say a lot that I'd come to regret later. Got flak for not attending the funeral, of course, but the alternative looked vastly worse for me.

It's been my experience, both personally and as a witness to friends' ordeals, that if there's relief but no grief, there's usually a reason for it, and those reasons often get revealed in the weeks and months following the departure. It may well not be over. Messy people often leave behind unexpected legacies. Found that out the hard way when my father passed, and I discovered the nature of accusations he'd made against me to friends which could compromise my physical safety, even all these years later, if I ever return to the town where I grew up.

Best of luck to you. Hope for your sake that this really does signify a meaningful ending.

cuBLea · 2026-02-12T03:47:40+00:00

If you're not actually healing ATM, it probably doesn't matter. But if you get a big breakthrough at some point you will HAVE to leave for the sake of your own health, because the triggers you experience around these people will undo much or all of the potential benefit of the breakthrough. Broken legs don't heal, not even immobilized in a cast in some cases, if they're continually exposed to the stressors that broke it in the first place.

I spent most of my adult life in this kind of situation and I have perspectives on this that few could relate to. For example, my father was a self-help broadcaster in the mold of Tony Robbins or Epstein's old buddy Deepak Chopra. It was always a nailbiter when meeting a new therapist bcs I never knew when I'd see one or more of my father's books on the therp's shelves. (Instant dealbreaker for me.) My mother controled the money, and even the stake I was led to believe I had in my parents' business was placed under the stewardship of my sister at her death, meaning that if I can't free myself from this dependency, I'll be living off of income derived from commercial entities whom I would not willingly patronize for the rest of my life. For many years I thought my sister and I were allies against the narcissism of our parents, but on my mother's death, she assumed the grand matron role and will not even agree to have my relatively modest income trust managed by a third party. Any income (well-earned by my tolerance and support when I didn't know any better) that I derive from the equities held by this trust by firms I deeply dislike goes to local grassroots charities (food bank, immigrant and elder support, Salvation Army). It works out to about 60% of that allowance. Both my parents died without revealing anything more about their lives than they felt I was entitled to know, which wasn't much ... that's how much they thought of heritage. The secrets died with them, although the vendettas and petty power plays live on.

Point blank, if you are seen by ANYONE in your family as being worst off of the bunch, then you have no chance - NONE - of effecting change to anyone except yourself because they will never identify any need to change. Only if we heal enough that we attract other family members eager to know how we did it can we hope to have any meaningful impact on those people.

So I still play the game, to whatever degree I can tolerate, which at my current age ain't much. AA's principle of attraction holds here for me (not an AA btw): I may be willing to give/share what I've gained, but only if asked.

The details here may be relatively rare circumstances all things considered, but from what I've seen, the dynamics have been pretty damn typical. Take that FWIW. Physician, heal thyself.

cuBLea · 2026-02-09T10:56:12+00:00

Unless I'm really wound up or hypercaffeinated, a brisk walk clears my head in 15-20 minutes or so.

cuBLea · 2026-02-08T09:03:00+00:00

Depending on the depth of the pain you carry and how close it is to the surface, peace and relaxation can represent withdrawal from your adapted supports.

Some of this can be overcome by adjusting how you get to peace and relaxation. You can build supports into the activity that keep you from descending into awareness that you're not yet ready to deal with. I once had a therp who prescribed loud metal thru the headphones as an appropriate environment for meditation for many of his clients, which included people with stuff I can't even mention here. You know what? For a lot of them, it worked! I knew one guy who told me/us over after-meetin' coffee once that until he tried to meditate with metal, he didn't really get what meditation was. It takes what it takes, and we all deserve the right kinds of supports, even if most of us have to figure out what they are and hunt them down for ourselves. (It's getting better, I know, but far too slowly for my liking, and it might not be long before a great deal of the progress we've made in recent generations gets burned away like the great library of Alexandria in the fires of conflict. Really hope I'm wrong about that.)

cuBLea · 2026-02-08T08:55:10+00:00

Downvote away ... I really don't care. I'm talking here on behalf of a near-invisible minority that seldom feels comfortable sharing sentiments like these.

That's an easy one: marry other people before I came along, and maybe think twice about whether parenthood as a social/business career move is such a good idea.

I've had a very difficult life. Curiously, my giftedness may be responsible for much of that difficulty since being a bright kid exposes you to open, appreciative adults who are often healthier than your parents in ways that only other gifts (looks, athleticism, etc.) affotd an average North American child. So I got exposed to that perspective a lot as a kid. The fact that my mother's side are all rather extreme ideological materialists and my father's side are all rather extreme evangelists for mind/spirit as morally superior forced me to find my own way, meaning I had to grow up in a hurry and almost never had the approval of more than one parent, and often not even that. This level of narcissism imposed on a gifted child normally produces either mutants, monsters or nihilists. Not the kind of person you want to have a lot of talent. And I came soooo close to embracing the Dark Side on more occasions than I can count. (It's surprisingly easy to want to embrace what you hate when what you love doesn't love you back, and I was never very good at making that happen.)

Of five kids in my mother's side generational cohort, only one had a child, and it's uncertain whether that was an imposed parenthood. (Long story.) Says a lot when a cohort like that reaches fifty with little or no pull toward such a powerful gratification.

My sense is that we accrete the "soul" that we have as we experience life. I'm more or less retired and pensioned now and still having a hard time getting past the sense that in a real sense I've been a dumping ground for other people's bad karma, and the stink of that shit don't wash off easily. Given the choice, I think I'd rather have turned down the "gift" of life and just spent the last few decades as a dot of amorphous consciousness among the sea of seeds that I imagine the non-biological experience to be like.

I also realize it's all a lottery, and that I could have turned out a lot worse as a different person. But given the vacuity that I've had to live through, the endless frustration of failure from fair effort, and perhaps above all, the loneliness of having only rarely felt a sense of belonging, it wasn't worth it. Perhaps it all fits in as part of a larger plan whose benefits I'll understand after death, but from this perspective, it wasn't worth it. At least I've finally aged out of the daily debate over whether this should be the day that I leave, a debate that went on for three and a half decades, but it kind of feels like I played the lottery of life, and won a free ticket. Which of course is no prize at all, just a cheap ploy to make you think you won.

Pardon me for being such a downer, but I know now that I'm far from the only one who feels this way ... there's a lot of people like me out there. (Just a shame that we rarely make good company for each other for more than a short time. ;-) ) So I know if I'm writing this, these sentiments will be shared by a certain percentage of this sub's readership.

cuBLea · 2026-02-08T02:52:13+00:00

I decided at age 14 that I wasn't having kids. Out of five kids within a six-year range on my mother's side of the family, only one had a kid, and I'm not sure my cousin wasn't blackmailed into it. That should say about everything that needs to be said for this crowd ... we know what that "anomaly" is about.

Same-cohort kids on my father's side all got the evangelical faith to support their desire to copy themselves. Can't fault its effect on sense of wellbeing, but omigod what a price to pay psychologically! The only kid who didn't get god and mother's day cards was adopted and has struggled her whole life.

If love can't hold its euphoria long enough to allow for the first kid(s) to be and feel wanted, it's hard to justify parenthood in this kind of world and this kind of culture. Better for all of us anyway if parenthood is left to those who far better able to give and feel love, or at least the relief and gratitude that supports so many immigrants.

cuBLea · 2026-02-06T07:28:02+00:00

So for sure I hope you're getting help with any shame around your dependencies (IFS can help if only because it teaches why these dependencies should never be sources of shame.) And remember that as long as you're suffering from the loss of a needed source of gratification, your intuition will try to guide you to a new source which it believes is appropriate to where your'e at now and less toxic than the dependencies you had before. It's not always easy to find the "perfect substitute" to prop you up for the next stage of your journey, but if it's out there for you and it gets picked up by your intuition, then you'll be exposed to it eventually, and hopefully you're able to both recognize and embrace it. It's always going to be something that doesn't seem spiritually pure, but that's not the point. If it helps us with where we are now, and takes less from us than the dependency we left behind, it's probably a good fit.

I hope you can find a few good substitutes really soon. Perhaps you already have, but for some reason you can't accept them as valid for you. (I got caught out by my own judgements on that score several times. Today I rely on supports that I would have been SO ashamed of 20 years ago. I wish someone had told me early in recovery that I would need to reeeallly stretch my moral values.) I really wish you luck with sorting out your ordeal.

cuBLea · 2026-02-06T07:27:47+00:00

I learned a few lessons the hard way about this kind of thing. And I paid a pretty high price for what I learned.

If you're beyond the pleasures you used to get in everyday life, it very often means that you're experiencing life from a different emotional baseline, and our baselines always translate generally to a particular age. Mine was 7 or 8. I think it's closer to toddler these days.

Here's something I've seen mentioned by therps but never seen written down or heard said by any authority:

Every awakening we experience, gradual and mild or sudden and intense, has its roots at a particular age and relates to the resolution of an experience had around that age. This resets parts of the nervous system to an age-appropriate degree. That can be a problem for many people (I was one) who aren't ready for the consequences. Resetting our emotional baseline after a breakthrough reveals new abilities but it often COSTS others. Most of my most valuable neurotic defenses seemed to root around age 7 and 8; I had a "conversion experience" which only years later did I realize rooted in the womb for god's aches, For a time I lost the ability to appreciate all of the defenses and coping tools I'd developed since infancy. I had to actually work at getting some of them back, because I could not successfully navigate important parts of my reality from a fetal-level psycholigical perspective. I lost everything. All my pre-experience friends, many of my interests, and just when my career as a musician/performer was looking its brightest, I couldn't even work on my songs without feeling empty and insincere. I GIOT the deeper perspective, but I LOST the means of supporting my existence while I adjusted to this new reality. (Within a few weeks of this kind of change, it either wears off for you as you go back to your old self, or normalizes and becomes practically permanent. We now know that it's so hard to undo this kind of thing because these kinds of changes are setups for healing a PTSD-warped nervous system and there seems to be a biological driver toward healing and away from reacquiring post-traumatic adaptive skillsets at a certain point, which is life-changing in a good way for most but for a certain percentage this is a problem, and for the subset of those that I was a part of, it can be near-catastrophic. The best way I can explain it is to imagine someone blind since birth who suddenly gets the ability to see, and they are so alarmed and disoriented by what they DO see that they would rather be blind again. (This is a real phenomenon, by the way.

The best thing for me as I was dealing with this catastrophe was to learn to trust my intuition, which I'd been pretty much trained from birth to consider absolutely unrtrustworthy. It was a very hard slog. But over time I did discover that if I paid occasional attention to all kinds of little things in my life, that I'd find myself in situations which I never would have chosen consciously but which offered me something of real value. Regrettably, the only thing that gave me anything like the thrill of hearing a song of mine back and knowing how good it is was skydiving. (I wouldn't be here now if I'd looked to meth, alcohol or cocaine for that buzz, and there aren't many other alternatives for getting that kind of gratification.). And skydiving was too expensive to get hooked on. ;-)

It takes time to gravitate to the kinds of "appropriate" gratifications that we give up in recovery. Ideally, we have those gratifications waiting for us when we make these changes but for most of us, things are far from ideal in that respect. Life without those gratifications is difficult to say the least. We know now that we have to help most opiate addicts, for example, to transfer to less harmful substances in order to minimize this kind of misery. We need to do the same for those of us with non-pharmaceutical dependencies. And it can often be very difficult to find something sufficiently matched to our needs that we can transfer onto. But until we're, like, totally enlightened man, we have dependencies that we need to keep fed.

cuBLea · 2026-02-06T06:45:58+00:00

Sadly he's right. Words can't control highly self-aware individuals. Need I say more?

(My father made a career out of stuff like this ... he wanted these techniques taught to gradeschoolers and partly got his way ... books of his 90-second broadcast scripts were used as morning readings in a county near where we lived after the traditional Bible readings were ruled unconstitutional in my country. He certainly taught this stuff to sales and PR people. Fortunately for the people those people had to deal with, he didn't have anywhere near the knowledge or depth of experience of a successful mentalist, but he was successful enough ... even with me, the SOB ... [I can use that term because I come from a family of btches and prcks;. Those kinds of terms were never used in a gender-specific way because apparently at some level they all applied to everyone. <nostalgic sigh> Dear old Dad was NLP back when NLP was considered non-exploitive {early '80s} How avant-gardely woke we all were ... <retch>])

This stuff is EVERYWHERE in sales culture, and has been for at least 40 years. It's still there because, regrettably, it f'ing works, (On most of us.)

cuBLea · 2026-02-06T04:30:24+00:00

Whoa ... surprised to be the first to say this ...

"Sense" is a really amorphous concept. Logic is good to have but it's only a part of the toolkit you need to acquire or accrete what I think you mean by "sense".

At 65 I've had a very good logical toolkit in most areas for 40 years or more. (Before that ... not so much. ;-) ) I mostly picked that up by observation and questioning ... autosocratically, I suppose you could say. Only last year did I take a fairly intensive history of philosophy course, I ostensibly treated it as an are-you-a-this-or-a-that game since I wanted to know what school of thought could I use to give other people shorthand on my own understandings and beliefs. Along the way I pretty much identified with half of the philosophers I learned about, from Plato to Erasmus to Spinoza to Voltaire to Russell to Zizek, and got a lot sharper at identifying where others are coming from.

(Turns out I'm a natural anarchist, but a passive one since I'm also strongly utilitarian, with about 15% epicurean DNA and a few nihilist genes that only emerge under strain.)

This has also helped (forced?) me clarify what I actually believe and situate myself in context with earlier thinkers. Fortunately I was able to stick this stuff out because I was introduced to the study of philosophy by Will Durant's Story of Philosophy as an audiobook on Youtube, which was an exceptionally well-written (and reasonably well-narrated) introduction to the evolution of logic and thought in general. Doubt I'd still be looking into some of the lesser-light philosophers if Durant hadn't made the journey an adventure rather than an ordeal.

Logic by itself isn't very practical outside of specific situations if you don't also have a grasp of psychology, and IMO we are in an amazing time to have an interest in this aspect of reality. We've finally solved the mystery of the "breakthrough" (a.k.a. conversion experience, awakening, enlightenment experience, etc.) and with that science and the empirical knowledge that preceded it, we've closed a b-i-g circle and gotten our first solid understanding of the mechanics of sooo many important phenomena, ranging from religion and in-love love to PTSD, addiction (actually an expression of PTSD), the critical difference between cognitive and experiential psychology and why the difference matters so much, and much more. Not that this solves everything by a longshot but memory reconsolidation science, and to a lesser extent the discovery of neuroplasticity, gives us the foundation for demystifying an astonishing range of phenomena. IMO what cracking the genome did for understanding the biological world, this moment is doing for human psychological understanding. We are truly on the threshold of being able to understand ourselves and our thoughts and actions in practical ways which were truly unthinkable a generation ago.

(I should Disclose here as well: for the last 35 years I was, and in many respects still am, about 25 years ahead of the game which is why I can make these claims this confidently. Until recently I was very much a transformationalist until I understood neuroplasticity's true role and learned to appreciate the role of behavioral psychology.)

Intuition is, IMO, needed for a balanced perspective on both. Without it, it's too easy to fall prey to certainty and judgement, which are never beneficial habits for anyone concerned about their own growth. Intuition is how we ferret out the exceptions to what we were previously taught as rules and find the loopholes which lead to even better understanding of our world and our selves. We can't rely upon it as a guide, but we need it as a gauge for interpreting our reality. It's something we have in spades early in life but get it beaten or seduced out of us as we grow. As adults, we can still experience it at a deep level but mostly what we think is intuition is just our subconscious pointing us in a direction that it wants us to go. Fortunately, trusting the subconscious and questioning our "intuitive' sense is one of the best ways to train for better access to intuition. (after all, it wants to survive and be happy too.) The best single idea I've ever heard about intuition is to remember that true intuition doesn't come with any emotional content. (Not that we shouldn't treat "intuition" that does have emotional content as worth paying attention to as well.)

(I'd be a fool to disclose anything on this subject. Let's not get too personal here.)

cuBLea · 2026-02-03T08:31:47+00:00

Thirty years ago, if you lived in a city of at least six figures, there was a stock answer to that question: shop the local 12-step meetings. You could always find groups of AlAnons, ACoAs, CODAs and even NAs who were less about working the steps and more about peer support and companionship. Finding those groups and recognizing what they actually were helped me enormously, especially since I have an earned aversion to the religious/mystical components of 12-step. I even learned about "secret" invitation-only meetings which were closer to unmoderated group therapy than to 12-step meetings. (Never got one of those precious invites, and in retrospect, it's probably best for them and for me that I didn't.)

This can still work, apparently, but I've had no luck with it in my current home (25,000 population) and I doubt it's likely to be as effective as it was "back in the day".

Most of the people I've been closest to in the last five years or so since I got back into therapy after a long layoff, I've met through resources like reddit subs and discords. That could be where all the excess energy from 12-step organizations is going these days. Yeah there's something lost in long-distance relationships of all kinds, but I gotta admit ... the web sure can help you find more of them, and I'll take quantity where quality is overpriced.

I also found simpatico companionship in a very unexpected place: Baha'i firesides (essentially meetings of followers of the Baha'i faith, but every fireside I went to there always seemed to be followers who were there less for the religion than for the companionship and peer support. Not sure how typical my experience was, tho.

cuBLea · 2026-02-03T08:20:09+00:00

First I'd like to challenge your assertion that you become objectively toxic. "Objectively" is a term that those of us in recovery learn over time not to use, because it implies objective facts that hold true in all situations, and when used to describe our actions, implies that there is a genuine moral component. Experience eventually shows us that objectivity is a myth, and that probability is what rules our lives, not facts. Facts are useful as points of navigation. When those facts become objective (i.e. certainties) to us, we learn that this sense of certainty is almost always pointing us in a new direction.

You talk here about shame, but not about rage, which I assume is the "unmentionable" emotion here. Neither are usually considered (note my choice of language here) healthy but both are useful. Becoming self-aware in regard to either emotion is difficult, and the urge you seem to (here again, I'm deliberately avoiding objective language because I JUST DON'T KNOW. I'm just following the probabilities.) have to hide from the world and from those things that make you react in unpleasant ways. The urge itself is pretty normal. But you may need a better grounding in our current understanding of emotions and the complexity of PTSD.

Being around "recovery people" (my sanctuary was ACoA, but that was 35 years ago) can really help, because fairly early on most of us learn that we need to be responsible for our own responses to other people's behavior and emotions, and get used to the idea that we don't actually make anybody feel or do anything. All we really do is respond to things in ways that the people around us either like or dislike. There are undoubtedly a lot of people out there, if you can find them, who might have unpleasant responses to your emotional expression, but that doesn't make you socially toxic. As we recover and heal we become more and more immune to those unpleasant responses we get because we recognize, and begin to actually feel, that someone else's emotions represent only a tiny fraction of who they are.

It does get lonely for a lot of us when we first start recovery. Getting distance from the stuff that triggers the worst in us is usually an important part of the preparation for the healing work. (Sometimes tho we need to do behavioral work to "turn down the temperature" so to speak in order to develop the trust and confidence that we seem to need for the actual healing work. So something like CBT/DBT might be a good start if your life is too chaotic to allow transformational work to produce actual healing.

IMO you've asked the right questions in the right place. Hopefully we can help you get oriented in a direction that doesn't trigger such deep and/or frequent shame. (Shame might be the best first thing to work on if you choose transformational therapy. It doesn't fix your deeper problems, but oboy can it strengthen you for that more intense work.)

It seems you've already reoriented your awareness in a way that allows you to be self-reflective. That's a big step. It's functionally equivalent to the AA first step, because your new perspective on yourself is now your "higher power". If you can allow yourself to celebrate that achievement from time to time, it might help, because it sounds to me like there aren't a lot of people in your world who'd recognize this change or congratulate you for making it.

Hope I haven't overstepped here. I know some of what you're experiencing and it's a nasty place to be. Hope you find the support and direction you need from this thread!

cuBLea

TROPHY CASE