The Number Of The Beast

"This is my fear. This is my dread.
These are the contents of my head..."

Just a week or so ago, I had dispatch one of my old demons; but Id really just chased it out of one of its guises and back to its original form. I have not let it go at that and although I have been distracted by experiences with inner "lights" and the like, I have been working on the Dragon problem in the background.
Yes, I'm hunting Dragons again but metaphors are far to hard to maintain this time...

Over the last day or two, through random interactions with random people, Ive had some new insights into where the problem went and this time its the really big one! - I'm gonna need time and help I think ... but what ever it takes...

At the close of the last episode I had clearly decided that I didn't need to worry about what I should do with myself to try to be happy. The solution to this was of course to be happy and then do what feels right from there.

Now I'm the first to admit that I am not the happiest person in the world, but the harder question is WHY?
That's a real tricky one and Ive not had success in answering it in the past but we´re here to give it another try.

Ive long felt that my biggest personal challenge and the one thing that I would change about myself if I could would be to not be as frustrated as I am - To be less impatient!
The root cause of this frustration is however much harder to track down.

Recently I spent a good deal of time in the company of someone who was both particularly intolerant of my behavior of easily becme frustrated over apparently minor things... and particularly able to provoke the problem by virtue of the different rates at which we each move through our lives. Despite these significant issues, I found that I liked spending time in their company. Initially the relationship was a balance of supportive and critical, but it didn't take long for the supportive to evaporate and the critical to escalate. There was no understanding on their part of my behaviors origin and no real interest in it either. The fact is that at the time, I could not have identified the true source of the problem anyway so it matters not. When I failed to be able to deliver on the "just let it go", "its such a small thing", the commentary changed tune to "whats wrong with you", "just don't do that", and "I'm done with you today".
OK, that's a fairly normal response as far as my experience goes, but early on, while there was still support, I recognized the situation and I deliberately decided to really take myself to task and get control of my behavior. I felt I had a good stringent and provocative situation that I could use to really watch myself and to dominate the behavior, so I stuck through the criticism and swallowed it up as best I could and tried to change...
While I did make some significant gains on the issue, it never went away and it was sad to be a disappointment.

So, what went wrong?
Well,  Nothing... I did great!
I'm in better control of this behavior than I have ever been before... Trouble is, I now realize that I can never win fighting it this way...
I was wrong to try to dominate it... That's what I have always done, and that's why it has always returned later, stronger.... Dominating it just feeds it!

So, What the hell is it?
Here goes...

For the most part I am a relatively stable and decent person. I'm a bit unusual, but my friends would I'm sure say that I am an intelligent, good person with a great capacity for humor and creativity. A good friend with a kind heart. However, I'm pretty sure that those same friends would likewise admit that there has always been an underlying sadness and the ever present capacity to get frustrated quickly. As best as I can tell, I have always had this behavior and Ive never really been able to track it down.
The trouble is that Ive always looked at the problem logically and analytically and from that stand point, the culprit is very well hidden. I'm trying to listen to some subtler internal information these days and this is what I have come up with...

The frustration is a repressed form of anger. Anger is of course highly unacceptable in our complex social society and lots of it gets repressed in lots of people - nothing new here. So the question is, why do such little things manage to get me so worked up? Even though I stay more or less in control as a good social creature does, it is still very apparent that I get angry easily.
Why?
Well, I think that the little trigger events of daily life are tapping into a much bigger source of anger that was bottled up long long ago and has just been growing ever since. When I try to repress and dominate the small frustrations of everyday life, I put it in the same place as this other anger. When I unplug the cork to put the tiny little annoyance away, I have to hold back the full force of all this other stuff that's in the bottle - And this is really big, And it pushes me way "off balance" trying to hold it all down - and that's what people notice. ...And I don't blame them!
The trick here is that I have never connected the two angers before because they are completely unrelated - It would make no logical sense to me to connect them!
But emotions don't seem to care about logic (yeah, we all know that but for me, on this issue, only at the intellectual level) and I'm sure that this is what is happening.

So whats the big bad anger in the bottle for?
The anger is from pain!
Pain, if not let go, tends to transform its self into either sadness or anger. Sadness is a completely impotent feeling - you can do nothing but feel sorry for yourself. Anger on the other hand is incredibly potent but very difficult to control and direct without doing serious damage to innocent bystanders and even to ones self.
So, Ive been dealing with this enormous pain over many years by oscillating between sadness and anger. Ive gotten pretty good at keeping it well under control and Ive certainly hidden the source of the problem quite well - best of all from myself! However, I'm sure my friends, and even most people who pay attention would readily acknowledge that they see the anger and sadness in almost every thing I do.

Back to the root cause...
This was very hard to track down, but once I made the link , it was clear as day. The pain is from lack of love!, and it has been there as long as I have memories...
At first pass, that seems highly unlikely and it is hard to find a culprit. I had a very benign upbringing. There was no violence whatsoever (verbal or physical). I can only once remember seeing my parents argue with raised voices... and there was no abusive language, just raised voices. I was never beaten or abused. I have absolutely never been in a fight or even seen one up close. I have experienced no traumatic incidents of any sort. I have never seen a serious injury. I have three siblings and none of us abused the others or was treated any differently by our parents. I was quiet in school and never very rebellious. My family was far from wealthy and there were four children, but all my material needs were met. We never went hungry or had need of shelter. My parents got married at age twenty and never got divorced or separated or wanted to as far as I could tell. This sounds just perfect and is far from the normal experience of childhood from what I know of most other people.

So whats the problem?
The problem is that there was NO LOVE.... virtually none!
... To clarify, what I mean here is that there was no affection... and a child cant tell the difference between love and affection.

I honestly can not remember a single occasion when I was given a hug or a kiss from either of my parents or my siblings for the sake of it! I can only recall a single occasion when I was sad that I got a hug from mum, and never that I recall from dad.
This is VERY unusual.
This is VERY bad.
This is in fact the most subtle and elusive form of abuse that I can think of, but it absolutely is abuse! Love is the MOST important and nurturing experience that a child can have - no; NEEDS to have. I have no words to express how profoundly this has affected me now that I recognize the cause!

In the past, I have always looked at the lack of bad experiences and concluded that while it wasn't particularly affectionate, there was no real problem here. My intellect had always passed over this and decided that I forgave my parents for their minor short fall on the affection because they did so well on all the other "important" stuff, and that of course they loved me.
But the little child in me has always craved love and never got it. I can now review my behaviors over the past 40 odd years in a new light and I can see that that is what I always wanted, but that because of the lack of it, my actual behaviors have always driven it away.
I understand now why I have almost no connection to my family (less so than any other person that I have ever known). There is no love there! There is no hate either... Its just a polite empty space! I think of them as my family as I have been taught to by social norms, and I'm sure they think of me the same way. But that's just the intellect; Emotionally I am an Orphan, and it shows in my emotional state of today... I just didn't know it till now.



OK , so now what?
The answer is, "I have no idea!".
This is so deep and ingrained. There is no way that this need for parental love can be achieved at this point. I'm also so emotionally walled off now that I suspect I barely know how to feel love at all. This has been observed in various ways by most of the women whom I have been involved with over the years, but none of them has ever managed to help me figure out why (and in truth, none of them have really given it a try) - Not their fault. I have never had a good working model of love, so I probably don't even know how I'm supposed to feel. Its not true to say I don't know how to feel emotions at all; I'm sure my friends would agree that I have at least reasonable access to the normal range of emotions. But it would be fair to say that my entire emotional makeup is built on a fundamentally flawed foundation. The anger caused by the pain of no love is so big and so strong that I have no idea how to get it out and let it go. I think it became anger in my teen years. I think it grew into rage by my late twenties when my first real relationship ended (she left me for some other guy of course) and eventually I left nothing but "scorched earth" of my entire life in Australia. I'm now over 40 and even though I seem to have been barely aware of it as a force in my life, I'm sure it has grown to an order of magnitude bigger again... I just don't have a word that I can describe it with! Likewise, the alternate version was sadness in my teens that grew into grief in my twenties, and again, I can find no suitable word for what it is now.

I know it has to go, but there is barely anyone to target it at (though that would be unjustified in truth) and I have now idea how to let it out without "raising" my life again! I don't even know how to really get in touch with it. I know for sure that intellectualizing it and analyzing and forgiving self and others will absolutely NOT work. I need to connect with these emotions in order to let them go. I'm not afraid of getting in there to deal with it, I just don't know how! In the past I have tried on occasion simply venting my anger (though I didn't really know the source) at inert objects or the heavens but it absolutely fails to connect and it just gets nowhere. I think I have to deal with it as pain ( the root cause) but what process to excise it? Im sure that acknowledging it and its consequences helps immensly. I think that writing it down and expressing it outside of myself helps too(though I'm sure it hurts others in various ways). But I don't really know what else to do with it, and it is still most definitely there and very big but also very remote now that several decades have passed!

This was far from easy to see, and very hard to write.
I need to work on this more, but there it is,

This is The Number of My Beast!