Category: Personality Disorder

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, the Heart, and Gift Giving

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2016-03-26_0931It is very difficult to live a thriving spiritual and emotional bisexual life with a wounded soul.  Yes, we can try to stay in the moment, but our ego-minds keep dragging us back to past wounds and fears. To live a victorious life we have to come to terms with the ego part of our soul. This means trusting the heart and using its love power to heal the bisexual mind.

I searched my soul and began to trust the feelings from my heart. I knew these feeling would lead me to the true path where I could find peace and understanding. But to get to that place, I would have to retrace my steps one more time, but this time with the creative powers of self-love in stead of the destructive powers of self-hate. This meant going back into my core relationships and into the heart of my wounded inner child. It also meant going right back to my biological make-up, my sense of identity, and my bisexual orientation, and reconnecting these thoughts and feelings through unconditional positive regard for my Self..

 

During my two years in Costa Rica, surrounded by peace and beauty, I stopped hating myself and began the healing process which immediately focused on my past relationships. I came across this image of gift giving. I did not want to destroy the thoughts, images, and feelings connected to the people I had loved; I just wanted the pain part to go away. I still wanted to give them the gift of my love and receive the gift of their love. I needed to separate the good parts from the bad; I had to destroy the connections to pain.

 

One of the most powerful tools of healing is imagery. Imagery bypasses the thought processing part of the brain and gets us directly in touch with our feelings. One of the best strategies of imagery that I have found is gift giving. Most of our struggles are related to past and present relationships.  I believe we can best rewire negative social patterns to positive ones by accepting the contributions people have made to life as it is and by thanking them for their gifts and by giving them gifts in return.

In my opinion, there seems to be two sides to each relationship, the negative and the positive. I feel we have to recognize that both are gifts, even the negative. When we allow our feelings of love to mingle with the emotions of rejection and abandonment, we can reroute the fears and hurts of the ego into the positive feelings of acceptance and gratitude from the heart. We simply acknowledge the people involved and thank them for the good gifts they have brought into our lives. Then we examine the negative influences they still have on us, wrap them up into a second gift, and place it on an altar we have prepared just outside the spiritual room we can visualize and create in our soul. We then call on the fire of passion from the heart to burn it up and blow it away. We can visualize the negative vapors dispersing into the gentle summer wind that blows continuously in the spiritual garden just outside the inner room. We need to visualize the burning of negative constructs as an act of kindness, a gift to the people involved, because it frees their souls from the negative bonds we have created.

As we do this a miracle takes place. We begin to become conscious of the fact that we had done our best under the circumstances.  We begin to see patterns of behavior that we had established to survive.  Then we begin to understand that these patterns involved others who may have unintentionally wounded us, especially during the early childhood developmental years when we were innocent and vulnerable. We become more understanding, patient, and even loving with our Self.  We give ourselves credit for having done a remarkable job just to survive.

After giving gifts to some people with whom I had had more intense, intimate relationships, I could almost sense a release of their pain and confusion. I realized that I too had given them gifts, some good gifts from my heart and some bad gifts from my wounded ego. As my ex-wife said to me ten years later, the break-up and dealing with the truths of my secrecy and deception had made her a stronger person.  At that moment, I stopped feeling guilt and shame.  I realized that we were just two souls trying to thrive and grow and that for thirty-three years we had helped each other become powerful human beings. I also realized that our parting, painful as it was, was also a necessary part in that path to self-awareness and Self -actualization, which for me meant accepting and cherishing the gay part of my bisexual orientation. We are now friends once again and we have  rededicated ourselves to working together to make the lives of our adult children and our grandchildren just a little bit easier and a little bit better.

 

The Bisexual Heart

Published on by Bi-Ed: Bisexual EducationLeave a comment

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

Published on by Bi-Ed: Bisexual EducationLeave a comment

2016-03-26_0931

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.

 

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 – the Search for Sanity

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logo_2I know that within the LBGT community everyone is an individual, everyone has different experiences and brings a different biological and physical make up to the experience of life.  But we do have one thing in common.  We experience a huge buildup of anxieties that lead to profoundly more mental issues and suicides than the “normal” population. Why is this happening?  Let me give you a different take on this.  It happens because we want it to happen.  We attract it because we need it.  It is a tool to be used to heal. It is the doorway to understanding life. It is the portal to ecstasy.

One of the defining characteristics of every gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender person that I have ever interviewed is a state of profound confusion experienced at some time in their life.  This state is most persistent in the bisexual community (misnomer- most of us are not part of a community – we choose isolation instead of community). But let’s take a closer look at confusion.  Confusion is not a bad thing.  It is a good thing.  It is an experience common to all mankind.  On one hand, it is the experience that causes us to run to the shelter of a religion, a philosophy, or some kind of “group think”, so that we can bring some kind of order to the chaos. But for us bisexuals, we cannot find solutions through these typical short cuts to sanity.

Because it is not that easy to run away from our particular form of confusion and anxiety, we are forced to stay in our own version of chaos.  But that is not a bad thing.  It is a good thing.  We are compelled to dig deeper to find some meaning to take away the anxiety, to find a pattern, to find a purpose, to remain sane.  Some never do and they lose it or give up and exit.  This is very sad because if they had just stayed in the game a little longer, they might have found that there are no solutions, and if they would have persevered, they may have come to the point that they could accept that confusion was okay.

in fact, confusion is more than okay; it is the only reality.  When we accept the confusion, and we accept the chaos, and we accept ourselves just as we are, life becomes quite simple.  No pretense.  No religious short cuts. No need for philosophy.  No need for labels.  No need to hide behind the security of the word “bisexual”. No need to seek out the comforts of a group. We just are and we are okay.  We are more than okay.  We are one with the chaos. We are one with the beautiful pattern of random abstract.  We are free to pursue the pleasure of our senses for the sake of pleasure. We are free to explore all our sexual desires.  We are open to the infinite possibilities of this amazing universe.  We are open to experiencing the ecstasy of being one with chaos.

You see, we were not insane after all.  We were just searching for the answer to the ultimate question – what is the purpose of life?  And some of us have found the answer.  There is no purpose.  There is only life with its infinite possibilities to be experienced through the eternity of the ever present moment.