so, the vague picture is that a sensitive child, especially one who's been somewhat neglected and/or abused by caregivers, who experiences bad things is especially likely to react by making a lot of unconscious contracts to protect themselves: "avoid THIS at ALL COSTS"
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an individual unconscious contract in isolation can seem heroic or noble. i still want to treat other people better than my father treated me
the problem, and the connection with depression, is when you accumulate so many "avoid at ALL COSTS" that no actions feel possible
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when every action that occurs to you feels like it runs the risk of violating one of your unconscious contracts then you kinda can't do anything, or nearly
when i get particularly deep in this i'm basically limited to books, video games, and TV, and the occasional tweet
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sometimes it feels like i'm trapped in a straitjacket constricting almost all of my degrees of motion, and i can like only wiggle my pinky, metaphorically speaking. and so i've pondered quite a lot how to get out of this sort of trap
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the stuff about crying and feeling feelings i used to tweet a ton about was a major piece of the puzzle for me and unblocked a ton of stuff
*and* in retrospect i was missing a huge huge thing around what you might call reconnecting to joy
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i didn't focus on that because mostly joy naturally became more accessible after crying a lot, but it left me really stuck when it became more inconvenient to find a good place to cry, i was a little too dependent on that one outlet
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so one of the several things i tried was this: i noticed that i wasn't really paying attention to the video games i was using to self-soothe. so, even though it felt extremely self-indulgent and kinda cringe, i tried enjoying them more on purpose
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in a small way this accumulated over several months. i gradually started looking for TV shows and movies i thought i would genuinely enjoy instead of just stuff that was comfortably familiar and mind-numbing, and some of them even made me cry a little which was great
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thank you for sharing your experience, I felt something that was frozen inside me melt a little as I read it, somehow, in a way that reminded me of the part in The Snow Queen where Gerda melts the ice in Kai's heart by crying on it
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I think we were (and are) onto something really good when we write about our healing experiences. to mix fairy tales, everyone needs their own breadcrumb trail...
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