6 months of fighting against PTSD - breaking point

Part 1- 6/4 Faith

Today I am going to be talking about faith.

~~But you're a nontheist.. you don't like faith.~~ Not True, friends.

Human Beings are hardwired neurobiologically for connection. It is in our CELLS. Looking at it from a perspective of our instincts, the deepest most primal emotion we have is in fact a survival response. a shame emotion. what it is: the fear that we are not fit for connection to the others in our life. that something is wrong with us or we are not good. A survival response like none other. we cannot survive if we are not connected to our peers.

Now where faith comes in for me. I have written about this before, but new research I have recently come across frames this brilliantly.

I recently discovered the following: sometimes I have to force myself to treat others like I deserve their attention.

... How do I know I deserve it? I don't.

All I know is I refuse to be afraid of not fitting in anymore. We are all going through the same set of emotions. This is what makes us human. I believe that I am good enough to connect with my fellow humans. I want my action now to be based fully on that belief. In my post theist terminology I have named this Egalitarianism of Self. Really, it's just faith. A positive force I choose to accept. It makes me confident. It makes me know who I am without a toxic need for certainty.

[This is what the faith of the theist does at best-- it lets them let go of fearful instinct, in attempt to transcend it]

These instincts have a purpose- to facilitate connection, keep us in the best position for survival connected with our group. My idea of morality already comes from this exact instinct. How well I do depends on how well my peers do.

I don't get morality or sense of worth from a presumable, unseen creator/parent/origination point of self. I get it from the vast years of memory that my species has passed to me. A collective origination point of self. In this way I am not an individual. I am my parents. They are theirs. We are humans.

My faith is that this state of self is good enough. That I have a life worth living. That I appreciate what has been entrusted to me: consciousness and membership in a very long running species.

Part 2: 6/13- Wrap up (save & continue)

If you (like I did) misunderstand what my PTSD is, thinking some external force broke me, consider the following:

what's been freezing me is far more esoteric than anything that could be inflicted by a "shaming" parent or abuser of any kind.something happens to you when a day doesn't pass without hard contemplation of the end of yourself and the end of everything.

to find a resolution to that, it will be requiring a complete surrender to the nature of what I am, a creature which has inherited abundant, ancient instinct-bounded capabilities & knowledge, and whose role it is to pass these to the next.

With all of this new language from Brene Brown's research and conclusions, helping me to define self in terms of master emotion (evolutionary, primal fear of disconnection), & 3 gifts of imperfection (courage, compassion, connection) ...  it's become apparent a better way to define where my self is today:

PTSD made me painfully inauthentic.

Let the battle for authenticity begin.

The fight for an emerging self that's ready & able to do things I've never done before.

~~~SAVE POINT REACHED. Continue?~~~

once I started thinking about me just lately as a corpse struggling to get by in a world of living humans, only aware of being different by my intense feeling of having no self or identity, and of being alien or foreign to everyone else... Things changed. it made sense all I needed from there was Brene Brown's definitions. 

What she has ultimately done is put language around what I could only describe here as being dead. She provides a means of understanding what functionality looks like in this human creature that is me: We are HARD WIRED neurobiologically for connection to each other. We have deep, ancient instincts driving a need to connect and stay with our group for survival.

What she has done in her research is so vastly relevant to me I can barely configure it into words. Her findings describe a state of human behavior that is a precise opposite of my last 10 years self, stuck in rot or imprisoned in stone (of such severity I couldn't begin to know the real issue). 

I think that the complex ptsd concept has just been a starting point making way for this understanding. PTSD is more encapsulated. I think it is a mode of describing the symptoms and difficulty, similar to how asperger diagnostic is only focused to negative elements that come up from neurological differences. 

What I like even more is this research has given language to transcend the more limiting diagnostic method of viewing our differences. That's only useful when we can identify chemical or viral/foreign invader which needs to be removed or traced to treat the associated malady. These terms really describe & define emotional and biological commonality between all of us--- This commonality empowers me, it allows me to have the strength to summon an alive self. the ability to see this problem as a function of my primitive emotion gives me the freedom to become myself, by responding to this emotion with REFUSAL to be gripped by its control. I have already expressed I am sick and tired of being disconnected. Now I can do something about it