Steve Madison - Whats Eating You?: How the World Is Screwing You Up

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Whats Eating You?

How the World Is Screwing You Up

Steve Madison

Copyright Steve Madison 2020

All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

The Demon Feast

A re you feeling more and more vulnerable? Are things crowding in on you? Are you struggling to cope? One thing you have to realize is that you are not alone. Mental health problems are reaching epidemic proportions.

What secrets are you hiding? Are your demons getting worse? Secrets ruin your life. Some people can hold secrets. Those people are rare. Secrets may be denied, or kept hidden, but your demons wont stay quiet. How will you go about understanding your inner demons? If you dont master them, they will become your outer demons. You will project them everywhere.

Most people find themselves compelled to unburden themselves of their secrets. Their secrets torment them and need to be divulged. Others are so tormented by their secrets that they bury them as deeply as they can. But secrets dont disappear. Their energy leaks out everywhere and affects everything. People may have hidden a specific secret for so long and so comprehensively that they no longer remember what they are suppressing. Their secret has mutated. Its a shape-changer. It manifests itself in all manner of odd ways. It generates anxieties, neuroses and phobias. The people affected are afraid, but they dont know why. A great, unresolved, unidentified anxiety hangs over them. They present to therapists with unwanted fantasies and notions of unlived lives, or wrongly lived lives.

In our childhood, we learn what gets approval and what gets disapproval. We learn to keep certain things locked away. Yet things we repress always gain an amplified power, precisely because we have had to use so much energy to keep them at bay. They are Shadow elements.

The critical problem for so many people is that when they confess their secrets, their secrets are radically different from their original form, and so they havent confessed them at all. You must possess the secret rather than let it possess you.

Freud said, Phobias have the character of a projection in that they replace an internal, instinctual danger by an external, perceptual one.

A secret is often projected onto others, onto people or things. Many people have a compulsion to externalize their pain, their distress, whatever is bugging them. Only then can they cope with it. They have expelled it from themselves.

Freud said, Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity. Conservatives are more likely to suffer from both phobias and neuroses. They disown their undesirable traits and project them. With their famously closed minds that love wall-building so much, they cant stand ambiguity, otherness, difference.

Politics should be understood as a contest between conservatives afflicted by neurosis and multiple phobias, and liberals afflicted by anxiety and lack of a solid core.

Whats the difference between neurosis and psychosis? Freuds answer was: Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and its environment (outer world). Neurosis is thus an internalized problem, occurring between different elements of the psyche. However, the psyche can still engage adequately with the external world, sufficient to function. With psychosis, the psyches problem is actually with the external world. It can no longer make sense of it and cope with it. Therefore, the person is no longer able to function in society.

Freud said, We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality. By this logic, neurosis is pre-psychosis, and must terminate in psychosis if unresolved. After all, what is psychosis if not total alienation from actuality?

Are your secrets eating you? You need to stop your secrets having power over you. Confront your demons. Bring them out into the light. Disinfect them with the light of day, with the light of reason.

The Tension

J ung wrote, I lived as if under great inner pressure. Everything in the world seemed difficult and incomprehensible. I was in a constant state of tension. I plunged down into dark depths, and couldnt fend off a feeling of panic.

When the pressure gets too much, people experience an alarming loss of self-identity. They are terrified they are going mad. Shakespeares King Lear wailed in anguish, Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven.

Have you lost your bearings? Are you all at sea? Has your core disappeared? When that happens, you dont know who you are anymore. What do you do when the captain of your ship has gone? He is no longer standing at the helm. No one is steering. No one is in charge. Yet a storm is coming, the biggest storm you have ever faced. What do you do when all your anchors and certainties have dissolved? When the I has gone, who or what is left? Whos in control?

You spiral downwards. Everything is falling apart. Panic is relentlessly increasing. No one is at home.

We are all stumbling into the storm. Not all of us come out.

Bring out the bodies.

What do you do when your familiar world is turned upside down? What do you do when your identity and power is broken? All certainty has gone.

Most people today are lost. They dont know where they are going. They have no targets, no objectives. If you have no destination, you will never reach it. You have no idea where you will end up. You had better make sure you enjoy the journey.

If you have no path and no destination, who are you? A purposeful person has a direction, an inner compass, a definition. A person with no purpose is forever blown by the wind. You cannot have an identity if you have no purpose. Your purpose is exactly what defines your identity.

Are you chasing a blank banner, one that flutters in every direction the banner of all those going nowhere in their lives. They have never joined a sacred cause.

Its Coming

A dark night, a lost way. Is death coming?

All crises are an opportunity for transformation. Dante reached heaven by first undertaking the terrible journey through hell and purgatory. Can you get to heaven in one bound, or must you always experience hell first? Even Jesus Christ supposedly descended into hell before his resurrection.

A breakdown always presents the chance for a breakthrough. Can you break on through to the other side? Or will you go down with the ship in the face of the teeth of the storm?

No pain without gain. No triumph without tragedy. Things have to get worse before they get better. You must go down before you go up. Katabasis (going down) always precedes anabasis (going up).

Have you found your true self yet? If not, whos running the show? A false self, a fake you, a doppelganger, a phony? How can a false self survive a storm? It shouldnt even be there in the first place. It has no core. There is nothing to ground it, to anchor it.

The false self will always buckle when the pressure is applied, when the heat is turned up, when it faces the hammer. It cant bear the strain of living against its true nature, which is to say its inherent falseness. It wasnt designed for this. Only Truth endures.

Is a breakdown an instinctive way of self-healing? Nietzsche said, Shedding ones skin The snake that cannot shed its skin perishes. A breakdown allows the shedding of a false skin. Its time to find your true self. Imagine how strong and content you will be if you discover the real you?

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