Many of the sources I’ve encountered during my search for a more balanced mind have come to the same conclusion: What we think we are and what our heading is will become true. When we start believing that we are at the bottom, that’s where we will be. And when we start thinking and eventually believing the opposite, miracles can happen.
Struggle with the wise mind
For those that are not familiar with the concept of ‘wise mind’: It is the combination of your emotional and rational minds that collaborate together to move towards the best choices from the ones you have available to you. It is something addressed in DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) which is an effective tool in figuring out this mess of a Borderline Personality Disorder.
Alas, the difficulty of BPD comes from the intense, swiftly fluctuating emotions. I’ll give you an example that I told my husband the other day when I felt like I’d messed up terribly.
I had been going for hours, trying to get this very particular weapon for him in a game. He really wanted the weapon. I even went through the trouble of upgrading it as much as I could, with the thought that he will not have to go through the trouble of collecting all the things to do that for himself. Only, as it turns out, I couldn’t give him the upgraded weapon due to limitations in the game’s trading system. I got crushed. I was a terrible person. All this trouble and hyping him up to how awesome his wife can be… for nothing. I explained to my husband that I felt like I had bought him a puppy and then one day I start up my car and run the puppy over. Not that I meant to do it, it was just behind the car, I didn’t see it!
So. I struggle. When a simple thing in a game (which you can do again and regain everything that was ‘lost’) starts feeling like I’m killing puppies… You might say that my Life Traps are still in control. My wise mind gave no fucks that day. Though, I did settle down, fixed what I could, and helped my husband get the weapon on his own afterward. No hassle even. Puppies resurrected!
Make a sound
As much as I succeeded in voicing my emotions and explaining them to my husband that day, it’s not like that all the time. I tend to hide a lot of my fear, my thoughts, and my wants. This is how the prophecies start unraveling.
If we never voice out what is bothering us or what we want, how could we ever expect to get it? I must admit, I am guilty of having the thought in my past that demands that my husband knows what I need and want at any given time. I’ve come to realize how ludicrous this is. I don’t even know what I need half the time, how could he even if he magically somehow learned to read minds?
I need to learn to voice out my needs (constructively and before they boil over to be a tsunami of hot fudge that burns you all the while sticking to your skin). Especially in those moments of pain, when I’m so afraid of getting abandoned and trashed. When I feel like the worst kind of failure. I need to learn to break the cycle. For my own benefit and for the benefit of our little unit, so life can have more light in it.
Was it my choice?
This cycle breeds nothing but terror and chaos as I let my emotion run rampant and take over my life. My husband often tells me that I’m ‘not logical’, and for the longest time, I took that as an insult. So what if I’m not logical, I’m in PAIN! Roar. And all that. My banshee is very adamant in not having any sort of rationality to it as well as telling me it’s completely fine to not have any.
Thing is, when I keep letting my intense, over-blown puppy-killing emotions run their course, I keep inviting more havoc into my life. By constantly believing I’m the worst person on the planet, I may very well become one. I don’t want that for myself. I want to choose differently. I want to change that destiny I’ve been laying out for myself since childhood. The decisions I’ve made based on my Life Traps, and the directions I didn’t take. There is still time to walk a different path than what I have been heading down.
The Core Traps guidance
I’ve been trying to identify the main Trap that keeps me locked into this chaos and I think I’ve somewhat found it. It is either failure or abandonment, or a fusion of both.
I keep being afraid of failure to the point where I drop into my twisted view of being worthless the moment I perceive I’ve failed. It might be a comment, an action, or even inaction that sends me there. It might be my own doing or someone else’s. What sucks about that is that I know life is filled with failure, and that the word itself gets a very negative reputation for no reason. Failure and struggle are how we learn and grow. I know this, rationally, but my emotion doesn’t agree. When I fail, I perceive myself as abandoned. And I really, REALLY, don’t want to be abandoned.
Am I sabotaging my happiness?
The fear of failure makes me not want to try things, even when I know I can do it and do it amazingly well. I amp myself up to thinking that I’m doomed, ending up being in the hell I imagined. With my actions, born from my faulty belief, I brought forward my own unfortunate demise.
With decades of thinking about how I amount to nothing, I’ve brought myself into a place that I now have to climb out of. This is part of the reason why I don’t think medicinal help will do much for me, other than in extreme situations where I’ve lost all control such as my psychotic breakdowns. Outside of that extreme, it’s a question of re-wiring my brain to formulate new beliefs and paths, so that I can break free from this toxic system where I have very little value. And that, my friends, is one fucked up mountain to climb.
What guides you? Emotion, logic, or maybe both? Let us know in the comments!
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I let emotions guide me for sure. I be all over the place too ugh. I’m afraid of failure. So when I fail at things I wanna give up right then and there. My husband is a big help to me. He says come on try again you got this.
I have the same issue, it’s coming up in games we play especially. Whenever I mess up once, no matter how minor, I start with the ”we are gonna die” chant.. I reeeally gotta stop that!