All nervous system dysregulated people are like black holes. It’s the whole terrain of being disordered psychologically. A huge part of it. Feeling desperate to fill ourselves up with something, with anything to not feel the absence of a cohesive self in personality disorders or the endless grey fug of depressive disorders. Or the noticing of how disconnected we are from our physical bodies.
Being out the other side of this gives me some personal perspective i can describe. I think the first node is understanding that the modern psychological concept of having a self is very different from the metaphysical one which is pure indisputable awareness. The psych model asks us to be joined up enuf inside to know why we do different things & to be roughly leaning in a life enhancing/sustaining direction. roughly.
I absolutely did not leave childhood or even begin my 40s with a functional enuf self under the construct of the modern psychological model. .
I had a thimble full of consciousness, of conscious awareness intermittently through my worst decades of severe untreated cyclic manic depression (which was causing worsening brain/cognive damage with every cycle. So like dementia) As many mentally ill people do, I had a desire to be unconscious to be out of pain. To be dead seemed preferable although in that thimble was a tiny knowing & that knowing made suicide unviable to me personally. Same place of silent knowing prevented me participating in pharma, legal or illegal.
But my relationship with being conscious was fractured, deeply. I learnt basic mindfulness things in my early 30s that triggered a high. Really unfortunate. But I wasn’t dxed or supported. I couldn’t see highs coming at all, they just felt like lots & lots of energy & racing anxiety/thoughts.
It’s well known that with PD adaptations have a particularly difficult time with presence, being present in the moment. I know for me trying to stay present, become present triggered a lot of discomforting things non the least the sense of not really, not quite existing. The famous missing self of the PDs.
Retrospectively, now, from a much more somatically integrated, embodied state, I can see that old ‘non state’ as being aware of the fractures that made up the adaptations of my BPD. But it was terrifying without fail but of course I know now that the terror is the path.
The terror is a somatic experience, it’s v v willing to become somatically visible, feelable. We stuff it down with wtv we habitually stuff things down with but terror strives to be felt. And learn to feel it I did, over time, a long time. And some of the best somatic strategies for managing this kind of deep trauma is the self hold. A hand on your own heart & a hand on belly. This tech is a lifesaving device because your body, whether you can feel it of not, experiences this as being held. So it feels safe, or safer, than when you’re railing against your fate & stuffing pain back down etc. it feels safe enough to try to process.
Because that black hole is made of unprocessed trauma material. And trauma material ostensibly is mainly you, but the you that you experience as MIA.
I may never have a completely integrated self, maybe that’s actually rare & everyone is fractured in one way or another but I’ve rebuilt a self that doesn’t suffer endlessly anymore, that can feel somatic joy at animals, & beauty, feel it in my body and that’s worth all the tears. Because crying is the deep clean. Salty tears bring natural pain relief. Crying, they say is the ego, in our case a v v fractured ego letting go of control & the bodymind loves that, it’s been waiting for that & that makes it v v powerfully healing.
So my advice to pwPDs is build that moment, the inbetween moment because that’s where you can build you. That’s you. The consciousness thimble full, or even empty, it’s the observer spot & building that plus self/other kindness/forgiveness is pretty much everything.
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