Category: Mental Health

The Heart and Abuse

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2016-03-26_0931I would like to address a comment I received regarding the ending of my last blog. What do we do if we do not have a parent who truly loves us, and in some cases may have inflicted physical or sexual abuse? For healing to take place, we have to somehow find some aspect of love from our parents or at least a reason to love them even though we cannot feel being loved. Remember love is the only emotion powerful enough to overcome deep inner pain. I believe that if we dig down deep enough we will find some aspect of love from our mother even if it was just a weak and painful connection buried beneath neglect and abandonment. With parents who do not love or who inflict severe damage through abuse, this becomes a very difficult but not impossible journey. In this case we have to find a reason to forgive.

 

The best visualization for this process I believe comes from modern views on reincarnation. Whether you believe in reincarnation or not does not matter. It is the visualization that is important. According to spiritual teachers we are eternal souls who keep coming back to Earth to seek opportunities to grow. Part of that process is the planning session where we plot out our lives so that we can experience certain trials and hurts that do not exist in the eternal world. As part of the plan, we call on souls who are part of our circle of eternal souls that we associate with through various lives. We ask them to take on certain roles so that we can achieve our goals. We count on souls who are mature and close for the difficult roles like abusive fathers and mothers because these roles are very difficult for loving souls to play. These roles are acts of love.

 

When we enter our present life, all memories of our eternal souls are erased and we have to struggle on through our preplanned trials until we come to a sense of awareness of who we really are, powerful beings filled with beauty and light. During this stage of awareness, we begin to sense the other souls in our life as spiritual beings, not at the physical level, or even conscious level, but as a vibration between our souls. At this point we can forgive and receive the love they have sent us by playing their roles for us. Now, if you have no other reason to love and forgive, I highly recommend this process as a healing of the inner soul, as a healing of the heart.

 

Of course there is therapy, which I highly recommend. But the therapy cannot just be used to dig into the past; this will accomplish nothing but reinforce the negative neural pathways. It has to somehow connect to love for self and to a reaching out to the abusive parent to reshape the bond so that we can feel some form of love. We will never understand their behavior but we can simply acknowledge it as a painful flaw in their personality, probably as a result of a deep wound they have themselves received physically, psychologically, and neurologically as young children. They may have made really bad choices, but they were probably responding to powerful destructive pathways within their own mind and brain. We have to acknowledge their pain and try to empathize with them, which is the first step to love.

 

We then forgive and turn to find the love we need within ourselves. We can begin to praise the inner spirit which has survived the abuse, and the courage of our own heart which keeps on caring and searching for love. We have to fill that need for love from our own heart.

Unfortunately, because of the abuse, the heart is wounded and may not be able to do this. This is where the second visualization takes place. It is the higher power that works so well in AA. Whether you believe or not in a god based on traditional religions does not matter; in fact, it may be detrimental as most tend to be male dominated and may be linked to feelings of abuse. You simply have to believe in a power, which spiritual teachers refer to as a universal spirit of life. You have to see the divine design in things and the beauty of life which we can sense when we are quiet and open up our own souls through the powers of awareness and mindfulness. We then join ourselves to this divine presence believing it to be the source of good which we can experience in our pleasure systems, thereby releasing our own opiate, the endorphins. This is the emotional feeling that we refer to as love. We can sense our Self becoming a part of this flow of universal love. We do not have to believe in any god, just open our hearts to sense a presence of peace and beauty.

 

After we begin to experience this presence we can begin to use the love power within to heal. When the old feelings return and the old images try to occupy our mind we simply take these five steps:

 

  1. Acknowledge the feeling, and replace it with your memory pathways of universal love.
  2. Acknowledge the abuser, but gently inform the image that it no longer has any power of over you.
  3. Forgive the abuser and thank the abuser for playing the role that has helped set you on the path to becoming a powerful spiritual human being.
  4. Close the door (you can visualize an actual door) to these memories and open the door to universal love. Walk through it and feel the power of universal love.
  5. Give yourself a hug.

 

We have to love ourselves. I could write books on how to go about this process and of course hundreds have already been written. But it is your own book, your own story that matters. Deep within yourself you have the power to do this, and deep within yourself you have the knowledge. Be patient with yourself. Acknowledge your pain but connect it with the positive from within and without. Seek a friend who really cares and share your feelings, and end each session with a hug. Acknowledge, accept, and embrace the truth: you are no longer a victim; you are a powerful, beautiful human being.

 

Bisexuality and Contracts with Parents

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In the last blog, we looked at gift giving as a heart-based visualization process for changing negative feelings to positive. With the people closest to my heart, gift giving did not work; the pain and sorrow kept coming back over and over again regardless of how many gifts I gave them. My heart was broken. When it came to these relationships, I had to seek another way of healing my ego so that my heart would be free to command and heal the core of my wounded inner soul.
Pain from powerful bonded relationships involve huge neural constructs containing intense emotions and feelings. They form a complex safety net of rules and regulations agreed upon and imposed on each other by our fragile egos. These constructs can become unhealthy thought and behavior patterns. We can become hooked into expectations and roles that we play for each other rather than being true to our inner self. When we allow our egos to control our relationships and our sexual orientation, we create impediments for the heart. Our relationships can become twisted and destructive. This often leads to thought and behavior patterns involving deception, evasiveness, mistrust and disappointment. The ego then becomes desperate in trying to resolve these issues and maintain these relationships that have become part of our wounded identity. We have to burn the contracts that we have made with people we love through our egos, so that we can be free to love each other unconditionally from the heart.
In a healthy person with healthy relationships, the heart is in control and can allow the ones it loves to enter and leave according to its own wants and needs. We do not want to remove our parents, spouses, and children from our inner souls but we do not want them to stay there all the time as part of our identity. We want them to come and go in positive interactions so that both our souls can be enriched by each other’s presence. If we can remove the pain-filled patterns, we can continue to experience them and their precious gifts inside our inner soul, not as part of our identity, but as part of our network of love. We need to be free to live our own lives, to come and go out of each other’s inner room by mutual consent, so that we enrich each other’s lives.
Contracts with parents evolve naturally with the development of family roles and responsibilities. They seem to become a part of our identity and sense of self. Any attempt to alter these contracts will be met with fierce resistance. One of my prime contracts had been with my mother. I had never experienced my mother’s unconditional love. According to the contract I had written, if I was the perfect son she would have to love me. However, she, too, had a badly wounded soul. She was a single-parent mother with nine children and a husband who had abandoned her before I was born. She could not fulfill the expectations of my contract.
During my year in Costa Rica, sitting on my patio on my volcanic mountain, I went over all the aspects of my relationship with her. I wrote up all the benefits that I had enjoyed from our contract and thanked her for each one. I then looked at all the negative aspects, including her twisted view of sex as “the real apple” (poor Eve), and her attempt to push me towards becoming a priest. I tried to see the reasons for each clause, acknowledged that she had done the best she could, then thanked her for trying to do her best for me as she saw fit as a mother.
I then examined the role my mother had played genetically and socially in shaping my bisexual orientation and then thanked her for that gift. In the process, I realized that I had tried to hide my orientation from her and that a large part of my shame was feeling that I had disappointed of even betrayed her. I then forgave myself and acknowledged the heroic struggle I had gone through to be true to her while being true to myself. I then dealt with my role in the contract and realized that I too had done the best I could under the circumstances. After bringing the contract to the conscious level, I realized that I had outgrown it; I no longer needed the security it had provided. I was even able to thank my ego for the contract realizing that it had been necessary for me to survive.Then I burned the written contract in a real fireplace as well as the visualized contract in the fireplace I had created in my inner room. As I watched the last sparks fade out, I felt a quiet peace flood my soul.
But there was still something missing; my heart was still not involved. Now that the contract was gone, I had no platform on which to rebuild my love for my mother. Now that the false self with its false identity was gone, my heart seemed lost and confused. During the summer in Canada after my first year in Costa Rica, I consulted a spiritual therapist. She put me in a state of relaxed consciousness through hypnosis. She took me back to that moment just after my birth when I lay nestled in my mother’s arms. It was not until that moment that I felt just how much my mother had loved me. My mother had died four years ago, before my mental crash. I had not shed a tear. I visited her grave. I sat there until I finally felt that bond that I had never known, but had always existed. And then the tears finally began to flow. I stayed there all afternoon, just receiving my mother’s love and loving her back with powerful sobs of grief mixed with joy. I wept for all the moments we had had and yet did not have.
I let this love for her and from her flow into my inner sanctuary and heal the broken heart of the child within. While I allowed myself to grieve, my heart led me to the truth which had always been there. I suddenly realized that my mother and I had always been connected through the power of love, but our damaged egos had prevented us from immersing ourselves in that love. I realized that our love bond was real, had always been real, and was still real. I now know that my mother and I have always been, and always will be, connected through the power of love. My connection with her is different now, but it is still very much alive. The love between a mother and her son knows no boundaries, not even death.

 

 

Bisexuality, the Heart, and Transgression

Published on by Bi-Ed: Bisexual Education2 Comments

2016-03-26_0931There is a dilemma, in fact, almost a paradigm shift, in sexuality that needs to be addressed, especially in how it affects bisexual men and women. In years gone by relationship would lead to sex; in today’s generation, sex seems to lead to relationship.  In days gone by, we seem to have been guided by thoughts of transgression which prevented us from engaging in sex in a care-free manner in spite of the powerful desires of our bodies. Today, many of us engage in sexual acts without any feelings of transgression. Is this healthy?   This is a question that no one wants to ask today in fear of somehow offending the rights and freedoms of the modern generation.  Perhaps it is, but it does need to be viewed on a conscious level.  We must not throw out the baby (used to be literally) with the bath water.

Today’s women particularly seem to be exploring bisexuality as a natural flow of their sexuality.  As we have seen in a previous blog, close to 50% have experienced some form or bisexual desire and behavior.    According to the same set of studies, 95% of men tend to believe and act upon the belief that one should be either gay or heterosexual and most of them choose to be heterosexual. There is little room for accepting bisexuality. This brings us into the field of transgression.  Fifty percent of women and over ninety percent of men choose not to be involved in bisexual exploration, many of whom believe bisexuality to be a transgression which is a polite word for perversion. For us bisexuals, what others believe should not be important unless, of course, we are living a secretive life and have to deal with these people on a daily basis. The real question is what do “we” believe, and if this belief system needs to change in order for us to thrive mentally and spiritually.

Let’s look at transgression from a body, mind and soul perspective.  The body hormone system, once turned on by the brain,seeks sexual gratification and pleasure according to its sexual orientation, which for most of us bisexual men and women is same sex copulation or other sexual gratifications. There is no judgment here, therefore, no transgression. However, the mind or ego operates according to rules and regulations, and therefore is influenced by its environment and sets of moral and physical experiences. It produces thoughts which can be the source of  transgression. On the other hand the heart or soul seeks love in all its forms.  It is the heart that must choose between the desires of the body and pleasure seeking center of the brain, and the moral concerns of the ego. This is where the concept of transgression becomes just a feeling, and needs to be clarified before we can thrive as bisexual men and women.

Bisexual women tend to look for connection with other women and seek skin on skin with some degree of emotional involvement.  As long as they can detach from or train their egos to accept this behavior as  normal and satisfying, they can enjoy the eroticism on this level.  There is a danger here in that the act can become satisfying for its own sake and does not lead to the deeper emotional connection of love and compassion for their sexual partner.  They may shut down their feelings of transgression from the heart.  Over time, these feelings can become magnified and lead to disillusionment and possible dissatisfaction with life. This may be the cause of an extremely high number of suicides and suicide attempts among bisexual women.

Bisexual men on the other hand can detach the sexual act from any sense of connection, to the self or to others.  We can seek glory holes in Adult Stores (common in the USA), or bath houses, or paths in the dark in wooded parks, where we are not even aware of the person’s face.  In my opinion, this is very destructive and can lead to deep feelings of transgression even to the body and brain that seeks deeper sensations of skin on skin.  We can also seek dating services where we can find skin on skin with no strings attached.  This allows for deeper physical connection but totally shuts down the heart.  Again, as with women, we can enjoy the pleasure of these experiences if we can convince  the mind that wants some system of understanding, and, of course, the heart that seeks deeper emotional connection.  Over time, we may experience deep feelings of discontentment and emptiness which may lead to depression, drug and alcohol abuse, and possible suicide.

The question on transgression then becomes whether or not we are being true, not to the voices of others, not to the voice of our mind or ego, but to our own inner voice.  If we feel that our behavior is somehow a transgression of our inner values, then we must not silence that voice, because that voice is trying to lead us on to deeper truths and feelings.  These feelings can only come through deeper connections within the self and with others, and, of course, we call this feeling “love”. Love is the root of genuine positive feelings for the Self, our self-concept, and our self-esteem. It leads to a higher state of being where we thrive instead of just survive. In my opinion, the shutting down of this voice leads to meaningless sexual acts that numbs the mind and soul to sexual experiences that are meant to be full body-mind-soul experiences, and therefore, much deeper and healthier. Can we still be bisexual and experience these sensations with both men and women? Of course, but  we have to be selective in the kinds of acts in which we engage, and we have to let our heart lead us to the kind of people where we can share on a body, mind and soul level.

The key to thriving in all aspects of life is to learn to listen to the heart, to trust our inner feelings, while silencing the corrupted thoughts from our wounded egos. This includes our sexuality. This is different from the “if it feels good, do it” from the body and the pleasure center of the brain.  A better statement from the heart would be. “If it feel right, do it.”

Published on by Bi-Ed: Bisexual Education2 Comments

2016-03-26_0931The key to living from “the heart” is to love your Self, the real you.  To do this you have to put aside the self-hate and recognize and embrace the perfect and beautiful soul that you really are. The heart longs to do that; it is the natural state of the heart to love the Self.  When the heart is functioning as it is meant to be, it engages in true love, first for the Self and then for others. John Steinbeck in his collection of thoughts from A Life in Letters, captured this love beautifully:

 “There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had…..Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it. The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it”[1].

But this is easier said than done. After years of practicing self- hate, we have built up huge neural pathways focused on our perceived failures to live up to some impossible standards. When we apply these standards to our bisexuality, self-hate gets tangled up with sex and takes on the added power of our hormonal sexual energy which is aimed at disgust for our sexual behavior. We have to refire and rewire those self-hate pathways into self -love ones.  We have to separate ego based behaviour from the longings of the heart.  The heart has no hate for the Self.  It is not concerned with our sexual behavior, at least not in a moralistic sense, but it does seek to turn sexual behavior into love. Love of self and love for others is something that needs to be developed over time, until it becomes an art. Again, from John Steinbeck:

“The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering….I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one — my intuition, the essence of the mastery of any art. But, aside from learning the theory and practice, there is a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art — the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art.” 

In other words you have to focus all the energy you use in hating yourself into loving yourself.  You must balance every self-hate statement and feeling with an abundance of positive self-love statements and feelings.

Let’s start off with an easy exercise in the art of self-love. For years I could not make eye-contact with myself in the mirror.  When I engaged in cross-dressing,  and saw myself from my feminine side, it was different.  I could make eye contact, saw that I was okay and  told myself that I was beautiful. But I hated my masculine side. I was ashamed because I felt I was not the man I wanted to be.  I finally overcame that by starting off each morning with a good stare into the mirror until I could feel positive about myself.  Sometimes this took awhile and with a lot of head talk to convince myself that I really did like the person I was. I would end this session by telling myself that I loved myself just the way I was and I was proud of myself for fighting the good fight and then whatever else it was that I could find to say to myself to convince myself that I loved ME.  Try this for the next week.  It really works.  We will go on into the art of love in the next blog.

[1] Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (public library). Falling in Love: A 1958 Letter, A Life in Letters. www.brainpickings.org/2012/01/12/john-steinbeck-on-love-1958/

 

 

The Bisexual Heart

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2016-03-26_0931(Before we start this blog, a brief explanation: self refers to the ego self, whereas Self with a “capital S” refers to the soul Self.)

With this knowledge of the ego and the mental issues we face as bisexuals behind us, we can now look at the solutions and beyond to how we can not only survive but actually thrive as bisexuals. That means we leave the ego and all its issues behind and enter into the realm of the heart. I believe that the soul is more than just a function of the body, the brain, and the ego. The functions of the ego can be explained by brain structure and neural pathways, but our desires, feelings, and behaviors related to those feelings, seem to go beyond the basic foundations of the mind. That takes us to the heart. The heart is that part of the soul that lets us sense and create a higher view of life, reality, and truth. The heart appears to be the inner sense of being which operates by feelings rather than thoughts. Feelings are different than thoughts and emotions. Emotions arise from our thoughts, basic drives, and the anxieties of the ego, but feelings are the unspoken words of the soul.

The ego and the gut direct the self towards self-actualization with the emphasis on the self. The gut seeks pleasure, and the ego seeks harmony, peace and self-centered happiness.  Normally, these are great things and lead to purpose and contentment.  However, as bisexuals, we often live double lives that make it very difficult to find peace and harmony thereby throwing the ego into a state of anxiety. On the other hand, the heart seeks mutual unconditional joy and love with others. Through the guiding power of love, the heart creates heart-values which are the unconditional worth we place on living things, ideas, and people. The bisexual heart needs to function in connection with others and the seeking of a greater good. Guided by the heart, the bisexual soul creates dreams and goals that it hopes will lead to good feelings and the path of love.  By experiencing love from life and others, it is able to increase its love for Self, leading to ever greater levels of Self-fulfillment. It is these acts of love that are the ultimate expression of the bisexual soul which keeps us rooted as whole human beings rather than just seekers of sex from our bodies and anxieties from our ego.  As bisexuals, we must let our heart guide our thoughts, emotions, feelings, and actions, and leave behind the struggles with sexuality.  That is the only way we will and learn to accept ourselves just the way we are.

But to do that we have to first heal the heart. The mental issues we face are more than a disease of the mind; they are diseases of the heart. They are based on the failure of the heart to love itself. As the soul struggles to understand and repair itself, it does not have this resource to endure the hurts of the present because of its brokenness from the past. The healing has to occur in the heart. The heart has to learn how to love itself.

 

In the next blog we will look at the nature of the broken heart and why it is necessary to be broken before we can enter into mindfulness, consciousness and Self-love.

 

Ego Disorder

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To help you understand the role of the ego in a bisexual man with a personality disorder with confusions in gender identification, we will turn to a case study.  Me.  Most of us bisexuals have some of these issues but experience them in different degrees.

My body was working against me. It wanted to avoid the pain; it wanted to explore all the pleasures of my senses, especially gay, erotic pleasures. It was working overtime trying to prevent me from gaining access to my mind and inner soul. Because of all the abuse and pain of my religious background, it was trying to deny the existence of the soul. It was saying, ‘”Baby, this is it. That is all there is! This is all we have to work with!” It was trying to say that everything erotic was “Okay!” It was saying, “Enjoy or die!”

I tried to justify my body-driven behaviour, but another part of my soul would not let me accept that this was the best I could do. It wanted me to move on from eroticism and find love again. Unfortunately, my ego had a personality disorder; it could not feel or give real love. My fragile inner child was lost, and alone, and tortured by feelings of detachment, rejection, and abandonment. I had to somehow dismantle these constructs, but I had nothing to replace them. I had no true foundation of my own. I lacked the one component that would allow my ego to thrive: unconditional love of the self, by the self, for the self.

My faulty beliefs were the foundation of my insecure ego. I had no self-concept; I never believed in my abilities. Anything I had accomplished, short of perfection, I viewed as failure. I did not believe I had any right to respect, because I could not respect myself. I did not believe that happiness was attainable, because every moment of happiness was linked to a foundation of pain. I ignored the feelings and desperation of my soul. I allowed my ego to be the only expression of who I was and who I thought I wanted to be. I focused on other things to believe in like family, career, and church rather than on my own wants and needs. When I crashed and these crutches were taken away, I could no longer stand up and face the world.

After my crash, I could no longer hide behind the beliefs I had borrowed; I had to build my own personal, true set of beliefs. Of course, this rebuilding process was a ludicrous proposition, because all the tools I had, by their very nature, were borrowed and conditional. I had no guiding compass of my own to guide my ship of fate through the mother of all storms.

I had never had a true social picture of myself that would allow me to relate confidently with others. I was vulnerable to their words and opinions. When I crashed, I turned to my ex-wife, friends, and church members for emotional support. I found out that I was alone. In my communication with them, and in the things I heard being said about me, it seemed that some people that I had tried to love were downright mean and nasty. They felt they had to take sides and support my ex-wife by hating me. They actually seemed to be enjoying the pain I was in.  It was the turning point, isolating me from everyone else, leaving me with the most intense pain I have ever felt. I am thankful for their cruelty, because I was able to use it to turn self-hate into righteous anger. I was able to use this anger to separate myself from my relationships. It was really my first opportunity to actually get to know and be true to my inner self.

 

What I Used to Believe

 

And what do I believe,

Now that the closet door has been smashed down,

And the tiny room has been inspected and purified,

And the ghosts that used to dwell there

Have been set loose to wander the halls of time,

Alone,

Moaning and groaning,

And bearing the cold iron chains of shame.

 

Those secret confining walls are gone,

The self-dignity built brick on brick in achievement,

That never allowed itself to hear the praises of others,

The security of a religion of rules and earned mercy

Given stingily by a god I had created,

The comfort of conditional love evaporated

With the careless madness of a moment of honesty.

These walls have all crashed around me

Leaving me exposed and naked.

The secret room is gone.

There is no comfort of darkness,

No support for what was not,

Just me and my sadness,

And a terrifying endless string

Of moments,

Upon moments,

Upon moments,

Without love.

 

The Ego and Mental Health and Wellness

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2016-03-26_0931Looking back at that day when I danced around my big living room in agony, the day my wife decided to leave, I recognized that there had then been something deep inside me that had said it was still not ready to give up and die. In an aha moment, I realized that I had an inner voice, a source of self still yet untapped. I decided to take another look at my forgotten soul. As I examined my knowledge of neurology, psychology, and my religious beliefs, I found it difficult to know where the tortured mind (ego) ended and the soul began. I decided to look into my soul, not with the closed dogmatic eyes of religion, or the strictly rational side of the human mind, but with an open-minded view, a carte blanche.

To heal and understand the ego, we have to first understand the soul. I believe the soul is like a mystical trinity; there is one soul, but there are three sides to it: the part of the body and brain that is sometimes referred to as the gut, the ego or the mind that is sometimes referred to as the self, and the inner soul which is often referred to as the heart. The gut appears to contain genetic memories, body memories, gender identities, and the basic functions of the brain including drives and emotions. In a healthy bisexual soul, these drives are based on surviving, thriving, and the pursuit of pleasure. In a healthy bisexual soul, the gut is safe and comfortable and at peace with its sexuality; however, in an unhealthy bisexual soul, the issues begin with the ego which interferes with the desires of the gut. In an unhealthy bisexual soul the ego fights with the gut because it believes its sexuality is a source of pain that has to be avoided at all costs.

To heal a wounded ego, we have to realize that it is not our enemy; it is actually a part of our persona and therefore a part of the soul. It is the part most vulnerable to the stresses of life.  Its role is to filter out harmful events and issues and help us remain in a state of homeostasis.  It is like a soldier on the front line that has to be monitored and supported for us to be healthy human beings. That is the role of the inner Self or what we can refer to as the heart (more on this in a future blog).

There are varying views on the ego. In some spiritual circles, it appears to be the “bad boy” of the family that works in opposition to the soul. I prefer to take a broader view; I view the ego as an essential part of the soul itself. The ego is our sense of identity, our sense of self, the rational decision-making center or our being. It is there to keep the soul grounded in the day to day realities of life.  A healthy ego uses the brain to solve problems as they arise.The ego constantly seeks that point of homeostasis where security is assured and it can pursue a path which leads to knowledge and a greater degree of purpose, contentment, and happiness.  In the process, it develops complex sets of neural pathways made up of memories and emotions that become sets of beliefs. The ego then combines these beliefs to form schema which we can refer to as attitudes and ego-based values. Beliefs, attitudes, and values manifest themselves as thought and behavior patterns which the ego then uses to deal with present situations similar to past experiences. It uses all this information to set goals to take us to self-actualization where we can function and thrive in the real world as independent human beings.  In this process, we become powerful adults who can make decisions that lead to more success and pleasure and less failure and pain.

These beliefs, attitudes, and values shape all our cognitive-social patterns. We are social creatures; we need the support of the group, and in the case of our sexuality we need to form positive, loving relationships. The ego seeks out relationships that bring positive feelings of pleasure and connection. Negative encounters, however, build a powerful body of painful memories and constructs that we can refer to as the pain body. When the decision making process of the ego is based on the pain body, it can become a vicious circle that can lead to destructive thought and behavior patterns in relationships. The key to mental health then is to assist the ego in dissolving the negative neural relationship connections in the pain body and reconnect them to positive feelings and emotions from the heart.  The ego cannot do that alone because it gets stuck in its cycle of negative thought patterns and uses the same old schema to solve the same old problems.  That’s where the heart has to step in and help build new thought patterns connected to feelings of love and appreciation instead of the old ones of hopelessness and worthlessness (to be covered in the next series of blogs).

 

 

Mind Control

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It is almost impossible to define and describe my ego, let alone trying to tell anyone else how to control theirs.  In the next series of blogs, I will address the issue of mind-control through a collection of snapshots that contain the moments of insights I have experienced in my lifetime.

 

Living with stress is not easy; it is even more difficult when the stress comes from within, from the unquiet moments of the past, sometimes all the way back into the womb. The pain is buried in the neural pathways of the brain just waiting to be fired by some trigger from within or without. In my case, with a generalized anxiety disorder, I can feel it in my chest every moment of the day. As Eckhart Toile says, it is a pain body that constantly seeks to be fed.

Anyone who has experienced pain has to learn to live with it one way or another. In the past, I had developed negative ways of dealing with it that just added to the pain body once the rush had subsided. Now, it is a call to the only thing that can neutralize the pain body, and that is to seek peace and quiet on the outside to quiet all the neural noise on the inside.

I learned the secret of peace by walking for hours in the deserts of Arizona. During my darkest days, I learned to walk in beauty, to see the beauty in everything.

A Moment of Solitude

Here, in this moment of quiet solitude,
The monsters of the mind stand revealed,
Merely false gods sent by my tired ego,
To destroy my will to resist and persist,
Urging me to engage in another act of insanity.

And yet – I sense –
Another spirit here – a spirit of friendliness –
That protects me by paralyzing me.
It settles down my spine, immobilizing me,
Keeping me here in this place of peace for a while,
Forcing me to stop and breathe and patiently wait,
Away from the pain of the burning, blinding sun,
Away from the harsh, hideous howls of reality.

Come my friend, the comforting Spirit of the desert.
Come, my sweet friend and hold me, and rock me to sleep,
To the whispery song of the gently shifting sands;
Come, my friend, come.

(If you think these thoughts and poems may help someone you know, please share.)

Bisexuality and the Ego Revised

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2016-03-26_0931Bisexuality is more than just sexuality, or how to have better sex, it also involves the soul and turning confusion into understanding, self-hate into self-love, and then, best of all, developing passionate, committed, and intimate relationships with  men and women.  There is an art to living a great bisexual life, and it begins with control of  the twisted thought patterns of the ego. Before we can truly enjoy our bisexuality, we have to come to terms with our links to pain created by our ego-mind. We want to enjoy sex with other mentally healthy bisexuals who are free to enter into a relationship with us without the negative energy attached to guilt and shame. But first we need to get rid of our own guilt and shame.

According to statistics that we have discovered in previous blogs, bisexuality is a hotbed for growing numbers of mental disorders and suicides, and for everyone that shows up as a statistic, there are several others who just plain struggle with their bisexuality. Many of us simply have a difficult time coping with the anxieties related to our sexual orientations, the back and forth male and female relationships, and inconsistencies of our sexual desires and our need for love.  We then accumulate a string of mental or ego anxieties that can vary from person to person in range and intensity.  At the far end of the curve, we label these struggles as disorders which usually require some form of medical or therapeutic intervention. The two most common disorders are clinical depression and generalized anxiety. However, there is another disorder common to many bisexual men and women that is the root of these other two more common disorders.

We bisexuals often have some mild issues that may lead under crisis (like divorce) to a personality (ego) disorder. Let me be clear.  NOT every bisexual has a personality disorder; in fact, many do not even have any mental health issues. That is great; that is where we all want to be.  However, a very large number of us do have issues related to personality.  In most diagnostic instruments, the following symptoms are listed:

  • Liability to become involved in intense and unstable relationships, often leading to emotional crisis;
  • Disturbances in and uncertainty about self-image, aims, and internal preferences;
  • Excessive efforts to avoid abandonment;
  • Chronic feelings of emptiness;
  • Recurrent threats or acts of self-harm;
  • Impulsive behavior, e.g., speeding, substance abuse.

Two of these symptoms are needed to determine if the person has a personality disorder.

So how is this disorder formed? The mind creates powerful constructs and schema during times of stress and anxiety in childhood, infancy, or even back into the womb. People with a personality disorder have corrupted neural pathways or schema connected to strong emotions and feelings.  They feel inadequate; they believe they cannot succeed; they feel they are a failure. As a result, they create destructive defense mechanisms like denial and repression. Most importantly, reality is too painful so they make up their own reality, their own fluctuating version of truth. In other words, as troubled bisexuals, we tend to be dishonest with ourselves and others about our true wants and needs.

Many individuals with a severe personality disorder also have an attachment disorder. They cannot live with love because they link love with pain. They cannot love themselves; therefore,  they trust no one, love no one, and  cannot bond with others. They create artificial bonds to fill their needs. When they feel threatened or perceive that their needs are no longer being met, they detach from the relationship.  On the other hand, because they feel worthless and fear abandonment, they may feel the need to sacrifice themselves and hang on to a relationship even though it is destructive to their own mental and physical health. In the case of us bisexual married men, this detachment often takes the form of periodically seeking an anonymous gay encounter where we can feel detached from the stress of the relationship we have created.  However, these encounters are usually enjoyed is secrecy and followed by more guilt and shame.

A mind with a severe personality disorder may direct its anger at the self. In time self-anger can eventually turn into self-hate. Hate is different from anger. The healthy mind uses anger as an impulse to provide the body with the energy needed to take actions to protect the self. The unhealthy mind employs anger as a state of being where anger smolders and lingers. This anger may evolve into self-hate and self-loathing.  As bisexuals, we often have only three choices: detachment from the needs of the self, forcing discovery by their partner by careless behavior, or becoming consumed with punishing and destroying the self.

Bisexual men with a personality disorder may also have a sexual identity disorder.  We tend to attach self-hate to our gay sexual orientation. We have to learn to accept and love our whole self including the gay or lesbian self. True healing of a personality disorder accompanied by a sexual identity disorder is often beyond the scope of psychotherapy for the mind. True healing has to take place in the soul or the inner self that is often neglected. This inner power is the higher power that we seek to heal the soul. Next week we will begin working on the ego and bringing it into harmony with the soul or this inner Self.

 

(For my personal story check out my posts on Celebrating Creativity through Poetry)

Bisexuality – Emotions and Mental Health

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2016-03-26_0931For people with mental disorders, and for us bisexuals who struggle with our bisexuality, most problems can be traced back to the emotions. Emotions are good things.  They protect us and urge us on to seek satisfaction and pleasure. However, the ego tags emotions to memories involving unresolved issues.  We need to take back our emotions and use them to protect and enhance the inner Self.

Emotions involve powerful, neural pathways including sensations, feelings, memories, and body hormones.  They are also associated with the broader concept of sexual attraction or arousal.  If it involves memories, arousal then becomes infatuation or perhaps love. Sexual attraction creates a dopamine drive system activating the pleasure center of the brain.  If these perceptions and memories appear to be harmful, the control center (ego) of the frontal cortex goes to work to resolve the problem. When the problems cannot be resolved, they are often repressed but the sympathetic system remains active. The key in controlling these responses is to bring our emotions to the conscious level.

To do that, we can once again use the power of visualization which allows us to dig deeply into matters of the body and soul connection, and the emotional factors that guide and govern our individuality, our belief systems, our spiritual sense of who we are, and our ability to connect to ourselves and others. We need to activate the passion center of our physical/mental being, the center of all those emotions, and use them to experience contentment and love, first for ourselves, and then in our connection to others.

Again, to maintain a healthy emotional center, we can use visualization to restore our drive and pleasure centers to health and wellness.  If there is a struggle to restore we call upon the emotions to lead us to the source of pain. We can again employ visualization to trace the neural pathway until we sense body tension and anxiety.  We then ask the body to reveal the events causing the tension.  Then we allow the emotion to burst out and do the work it is intended to do.  If it is anger, we direct the anger away from the self and towards the person or cause of the pain while giving our self permission to defend itself.  If it is fear, we face it and walk through it to the other side, dealing with it within the safety of the wisdom and power of the conscious Self. If it is sadness, we allow the tears to flow until there are no more tears.   The final step is to touch the emotions, gently, thanking them for their diligence in protecting the Self.  By doing this we connect these emotions to the positive vibrations of Self-acceptance and thankfulness. Once in a conscious state we can decide whether or not we need to take steps to address the issues behind the emotions, or to simply thank the universe for allowing us to grow as spiritual beings by the influence of these people and events.

Another visualization practice is to view the body/soul as the aura.  By being aware of aura colors we become aware of the mood or emotions we are experiencing at that time, and their positive or negative influence on our well being. We can change the dull, or over-expanded aura to a healthy, clear, brilliant, and compact shape and color. By doing this we take negative emotions and transform them to positive ones. The key is to recognize the color, look for negative signs like over expansion and dullness and then restore it to power and clarity.  If there is difficulty restoring the aura, one can again ask the body to reveal the cause of the problem and then follow the same procedure of using the emotion signified by the color to restore the neural pathways. Is this real? Perhaps.  Many wonderful people, including my wife, claim to be able to see and read auras. Even if you do not believe in them, they can still be used as a visualization strategy where you recreate your own emotional reality. Again, it gives your body and soul a chance to talk to you and let you know what needs have to be addressed.

The key in these visual strategies is to not get caught up with words, excuses and lies, but to allow the body to speak its truth through images and feelings.  You will know when you have put these emotions and events to rest because you will see a healthy image in your mind’s eye or feel a sense of peace or power whenever these memories are reactivated in your mind.