2014 The Belittled Mouse and the Roaring Lion - Me Facing Inferiority

2014 The Belittled Mouse and the Roaring Lion - Me Facing Inferiority

Changing Inferiority in Real-Time

This is the process I have walked of me becoming inferior (as a mouse) interpreting other people as roaring lions and how I have changed and am in the process of changing this idea / perception of myself as inferior / mousy in my relationship to other people who I interpreted to be roaring lions. This process I am walking more specifically in the context of my relationship with my partner, which is where I first started noticing the deep impact that this tendency to make myself inferior within myself in relation to others actually has on me within my internal experience and external expression.

The problem I have noticed within how I experience and express myself in my relationship with my partner, is that there is a specific emotional/mental and behavioral pattern that keeps emerging within myself and that, as the relationship progresses, gets more and more problematic.

This pattern is an activation of specific emotional experiences that come up within myself, wherein at some point in the relationship, like already after a few weeks or a month, I start to feel very afraid and scared in relation to my partner and specifically in relation to all sorts of thoughts that are popping up in my mind, for instance thoughts like 'he is going to leave me' or 'he is not interested in/attracted to me anymore' - which then activates images  in my imagination where I can already see him breaking up with me and I see myself going into a depressed and desperate state that I have connected with the idea and thought of 'losing him', to which I react with an emotion of panic and fear -- which then in turn sets of  a sort of 'downwards spiral' within myself because from the reaction and experience of Fear and Panic, I tumble further into an experience and state of depression.

And, what is most interesting about this downwards spiral wherein eventually I feel completely overwhelmed by all these thoughts and emotional experiences in relation to losing the relationship  - thoughts that eventually branch out in various directions, fuelling all sorts of ideas and definitions that I have created about ‘who I am’ and ‘who my partner is’ in my mind that then activate more emotional reactions – is that the starting point of it is just one thought that crept into my mind wherein I made an interpretation  of my partners’ behaviour/expression. I mean, I made an interpretation, where for instance, I see and notice that he is speaking less and interacting less than usual with me and, instead of making a thorough investigating into why there is a change in his expression, through for instance communicating and being open and observant, I immediately go over into making personal interpretations of what his expression and behaviour could ‘mean’ from the perspective of the meaning that I have already given to who I am within myself, which would be all my doubts and fears and insecurities.

For instance, I make the interpretation that he is not speaking to me and being reserved and less interactive ‘because he doesn’t feel attracted to me anymore’ – because, ‘he actually wants to be with someone else’ or ‘he thinks I am not pretty enough for him’ and ‘he feels disappointed  now that he is getting to know me better’, etcetera. I mean, there is no real evidence in my physical reality for why I should understand and interpret his behaviour in this way – so really, it is only because I have placed more value within my mind as personal ideas and belief systems than on physical reality, that I am allowing these thoughts, interpretations and emotional reactions to take me for a ride. And, because they are not actually built and based on a real point in physical reality – it’s like they can just keep on building on each other and thus drag me into an infinite spiral of internal reactions and experiences, without any ‘grounding’ point in physical reality. 

A ‘grounding’ point would be for instance an actual realization, insight and understanding of what is physically really going on in my reality – which is something that I, ironically enough, would only be able to see if and when I open myself up to the possibility that my internal world and reality of thoughts, feelings and emotions may not actually be reality. 

So, what I found about what this emotional state of depression that I go into, activated by that one point of interpretation of my partners behaviour, actually is – is that it is a mental/emotional experience of self-pity and sadness - which are specifically programs/constructs within the mind that the mind uses as a device to manipulate the environment through emotions and to therein be able to experience some form of control over what happens in that environment and in the behaviour of other people.

Per example, at school I used the external image of ‘depression’ to get attention from my peers, meaning that I would deliberately go and isolate myself from the group whenever I felt like I wasn’t getting enough attention because I found that someone would usually come over to me to ask me what is going on and thus I would get my desired attention --- by acting as if ‘something is going on with me’. I did the same at birthday parties to make sure that I was always the centre of attention.

And then when I entered the ‘relationships/sex-arena’ I actually started to completely internalize this ‘depressed state’/manipulation technique by going so completely in to that experience of ‘feeling low/sad’, often accompanied by the physical action of isolating myself, that I started to lose people in my life, specifically the males that I felt interested in and that I either wanted to be in a relationship with or was already in a relationship with. 

The point that I strange enough never understood, saw or realized, is that even though people may give me attention when I am ‘in a depression’, that doesn’t mean that they ‘like me’ or want to be around me – in fact, quite the opposite.  I mean obviously, who wants to be around someone who is constantly depressed and needs you to pity them?  Because I never placed myself in the shoes of the people around me, I didn’t consider that I myself don’t enjoy being in the presence of depressed, attention-needing and pity-seeking people – so, why is it that I am assuming that others will?

So, while in my mind I believe that going into this state of depression is a way to control and hold on to my relationships with people – in reality it is actually in reverse --- which I never saw, realized or understood because I never investigated my internal and external reality, I only ever trusted the onedimensional experiences in and of my mind as my thoughts, feelings and emotions without ever in any way relating them to physical reality.

Thus,  the problematic nature of me going into this mental/emotional pattern of fear and depression within my relationship is that:

1. Within this state of fear/depression, I victimize myself and I make myself inferior not only to my partner, or rather my own thoughts and ideas about 'who my partner is' that I have created in my mind, but therein I also make myself inferior to my own mind as the emotional experiences that come up within myself - which means that I will very easily become very emotional within myself, which then results in an 'irrationality' in my behaviour, expression and decision-making
2. I suppress my expression when I am in the presence of my partner because I am consumed by the constant thoughts of fear in relation to 'if I express myself in this or that way, then he will think this or that and react in this or that way - and then that can eventually lead up to him breaking up with me and me losing him', so then I believe that it is 'safer' for me to not express myself and rather sink into a state of depression, as that creates the illusion within my mind that I somehow have some form of control over him and the relationship
3. I am no longer Here, present and aware in my immediate physical reality and I find it difficult to focus on my work and on my physical responsibilities because all that I really want to do in that state of depression is crawl up in a ball somewhere and isolate myself from everything and everyone and basically 'wallow' in self-pity

Within these three dimensions of the consequences that I am creating in my relationship with myself and my partner by participating within the Reactive Mind-Pattern of Fear of Loss, which I have named the 'Holy Trinity of Self-Destruction', I can see clearly how I am essentially giving up on Myself and my entire Life and Living - only because of one emotional experience of Fear that is triggered in one moment by one specific Thought that I may lose my partner.

I mean, having now established the absolute problematic and just plain self-destructive reality of this Mind-Construct of Fear of Loss within a relationship - I am committing myself to walk a process of correcting this pattern through applying specific tools of self-investigation, self-forgiveness, self-commitment and practical real-time self-change -- so that I can transform the Holy Trinity of Self-Destruction into becoming a Holy Trinity of Self-Support and Self-Nurturing.