Sometimes it seams like there are two people inside of me, maybe even three or four. That’s how drastic and sudden my mood changes can be. But I always know who I am, where I am, who I’m dealing with, what my feelings are, what my conscious level thoughts (the surface level thoughts that all of us are familiar with), and sometimes the subconscious or even unconscious thoughts that effect me because I have spent time exploring these thoughts and beliefs which are often falsehoods through psychology, philosophy and spirituality. The various “Steves” are like this:
Because I am not currently working, on disability, and still have no idea what I will eventually be able to do, rather than saying “I want to be a fireman” or “I want to be a rock star”, I told my wife: “I want to be an angel helping others, and I want to be a sniper with legal authority to kill bad people like terrorists or rapists.” And that reflects my personality, my current situation, my feelings about the world at this point in time, and the multiple moods that I have. This is not an either or wish. If it has to be an either or wish, then I’d rather be an angel. I’d much prefer to be love and spread love, than to be hateful and spread hatred. But I feel hatred just as strongly, or it almost as strongly as I feel love. Love always prevails and that is probably why I am still able to be a good husband and a good father. My wife doesn’t even believe in Capital Punishment, whereas I not only believe in it when the evidence is 100% conclusive, but would be happy to pull the trigger as well. I know that the more hateful thoughts do not fit in with spiritual beliefs, and they certainly do not fit in with existential knowledge, so the hate thoughts are really a kind of fantasy.
Then there is depression. Depression is a very selfish disease. I either feel like I can’t do anything to help others including my wife and children, or I feel like I cannot feel love, which is probably not totally true because if something were to happen to a loved one I would probably react. But I have had times where I felt so disconnected from my wife and children that I felt nothing for them. I felt no love. And that scares me. I would never want my children to think that I don’t or didn’t love them with all of my heart. But sometimes depression and various antidepressants and mood stabilizers can create this mind state, when the feeling of love becomes suppressed.
My wife is an amazing person. She truly loves me and I am totally honest with her. I have been able to tell her at those times that I was unable to feel love. The fact that I felt sad about it probably helped both of us to understand that I really didn’t lose love, I was just unable to access it. And that sounds a lot like depression doesn’t it?
Try to remember when you are depressed and you feel no happiness that happiness still exists within you. You are just temporarily cut off from it. You can’t access it. Either that part of the brain which feels happiness is not functioning well, perhaps because of a neurotransmitter imbalance, or the communication network between what is the seat of happiness within you (possibly your soul) is again inaccessible to your brain. The same holds true for other feelings like love, compassion, sympathy, and empathy.
One thing that I am sure of is that I have a soul and my soul is all about love, happiness, joy, compassion, sympathy, empathy, wanting to help others, The other nasty stuff doesn’t come from my soul. It comes from my personality. It come from all of the garbage that has been dumped into my head since birth from my parents, my teachers, my idols, my extended family, my religion, my culture, and the world. Notice the increasing spheres of sources of garbage and falsehoods that go into the making of a personality, let alone genetic predisposition, and cellular memory. This is all of the crap that the psychiatrists love to bring up so that you can “work through them” for the next 10 years. It guarantees them a nice comfortable living, and it’s almost always useless. Almost everyone who goes to traditional psychotherapists wind up being very angry with their parents and having more problems and grief because of it. Please remember that I am talking about a particular part of psychology called psychotherapy. CBT and Positive Psychology are just two examples of what I am not referring to here. Whether our parents did a good job or a crappy job of raising us is irrelevant. If you want to be happy then you have to take control of your life, and blaming your parents and looking for them to apologize and change is 99.9% useless and hopeless. Your parents at that time all almost always did the best that they could at that time given their personal circumstances and what little knowledge and capabilities they had, which is often pathetic at best.
The point is the past is the past. Leave it there. The present is here now at this very moment, and whatever is in this very moment is unchangeable. If you accept it (life) the way it is at this moment in time, then you will be freed from your wishes, fantasies, wants, and needs. If you don’t you’ll just be miserable. All of the time you’ll go on being miserable from one moment to the next. The future is your opportunity for change, but only of yourself. You can’t change others in another moment, or maybe never. But in the very next moment you can change yourself. Each new moment is an opportunity to change, even to begin again. So let’s leave the past alone. It’s gone. It’s done. I means nothing. Lets get 100% into the current moment and accept and enjoy what it has to offer. Even if the current moment is filled with pain, therein lies the potential and opportunity to get something out of it. To learn from it. To improve your life from it and make yourself happy again.
I know that I have gone off course here from my original title of “Multiple Mood Are not Multiple Personalities”, but I think I’ll leave the title and just take this post with things like #parents #angeratparents #themoment #lifeinthemoment# #psychology etc. If you have an idea about changing the title then let me know. I will consider it. But I might not do it so be prepared to accept that because when and if you get that “thanks but no thanks” message from me, you will be in the moment. Will you accept it and still read my blog? Or will you say “Fuck you Steve” and never look at this blog again? Which is more beneficial to you? I can’t tell you the number of times that I shot myself in the foot because of my hurt feelings, and then lived to regret it. Then you have to let the regret go. More psychiatry? LOL