Rebels Rebel

They say that everything we do in life, all of our decisions, and how we operate, are borne from and driven by two emotions and two emotions alone: Love and Fear.

In a similar manner to my blog post from the other day regarding truth and love being inextricably woven together for me, I think that fear and love have also been very closely tied together since birth as well, due to my adoption status.

Every baby is fearful when they first arrive in this world. That is why every baby cries. But they are comforted very shortly thereafter by their mother. And that sends the message to all those newborns that fear can be satiated by love, that love is more powerful than fear, that fear might be a primal instinct, but that there is someone there to count on right away to provide love for you to overcome that fear. That provides security for newborns, it helps to develop self esteem because they come in to the world feeling unconditional love. This provides them with the always present subconscious knowledge throughout their lives that there will always be love to combat fear, which hence provides them the space to develop self-love and to thrive appropriately on the psychological level as they grow and go through the various trials and tribulations that life will invariably throw their way.

Even before taking our first breath in the world, adoptees absorb the negative emotions felt by our birth mothers through the womb. And even if love is one of them, that love is still shrouded in pain, fear, sadness, anxiety, anger and more…We intrinsically know that our births are not a celebration of love, but a time of pain. The movie “Gifted” made me think about this and I wrote about it in one of my earlier blog posts Here

I lived with a love in my heart for my birthmom growing up, a love that I had to keep to myself because I lived in fear. Fear that I would lose the love I thought I had from my adoptive parents because they instilled a fear in me. They made me fearful that I would lose them should I ever search for my birthmom because they would feel betrayef, so I had to keep my feelings of love for her to myself and they kept me in fear and put me in charge of protecting their feelings as a young child rather than them protecting me. Their fear was more important to them then love.

Being the adoptive child of some with Narcissistic Personality Disorder programmed me even further to live in constant fear. I never knew when he would explode at me or when he would just be in a bad mood for whatever reason. There was constant yelling in the house. As an adult, I have become familiar with the the diagnosis of Complex PTSD. People have often heard of PTSD, but not Complex PTSD and there is a difference between the two.

My adoptive dad turned my adoptive mom in to his flying monkey, which wasn’t hard to do because she lived in fear of her mother her entire life. My adoptive mom seems to think she can exert power over children, that’s the only people she thinks she can control. She still attempts to control both me and my daughter, but is constantly met with frustration when her attempts at control are met by our strong personalities that won’t be held down by her.

I bounce back and forth. I often act compliant out of constant fear. Someone posted on Facebook yesterday that it is more of the bodily sensations we feel when we are required to do something outside of our normal range of experience that causes us the “fear” and inability to do what we need to do and causes the lack of courage. I do rebel enough that I am the biggest threat either of my adoptive parents have ever known. I don’t rebel in the sense of being a rebellious child. They were lucky enough that I am who I am morally, and not thanks to them, because I would guarantee that any other child put in their care would have been far more rebellious than I was, in terms of being a drug user, alcoholic, partier, having sex at a young age, pregnant before marriage etc…For how much they have attempted to control me, I speak out against them more than anyone else in their lives. Even though it scares me so much when I do. I literally have to work myself up to it for months if it is a planned thing. If they trigger me in a moment and cause a primal reaction, then I speak up because they have already stirred that bodily sensation and I roll with it since I already feel that knot in the pit of my stomach. So if I am already there, I might as well express it all before the moment is gone. But if they do things that are less insidious where it is a slower “mind fuck” situation, and it eats away at me over time, then it takes me months to work uputhe courage to confront them with my boundaries and speaking my peace.

One of my new favorite TV shows that I keep referencing, “Perception” poses the question/dilemma:

-Fear can override rational thought. Can we override our most primal instincts? Condition ourselves not to react out of fear?

In order to finally love myself, as my friend has told me is the thing I need most in my life right now (especially since no one who was supposed to display what love really was to me, and model that unconditional love is did that for me), I must, as the top meme on this page states, rebel against myself (and my own personal primal instinct-which I think is actually different from the majority) and do what I fear most. Only then will I truly love myself. Only when I have the courage, in spite of fear, will love prevail for me.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/rebel/

My song of the day is: He’s a rebel by The Crystals

This goes along with today’s word prompt as well as my writing on the theme as well. My adoptive parents never approved of any of the men I dated. With being a Narcissist, my dad never would have anyway, but I did tend to date more of the rebel type. Partially to rebel against them and what they stood for, partially because anyone they would have “on paper” found suitable for me would have been boring to me. But also, once I met my birthdad, who I chose as my husband made perfect sense to me. It really is true that girls marry their daddies (not in a gross way). I didn’t even grow up with my birthdad and knew nothing about him, and I married someone exactly like him in so many aspects it’s scary (that will be one of my next blog posts!) Stay tuned for that one-you’ll want to read that one-its pretty fascinating and uncanny really.

Good enough

For far too long I have cared too much about what others have thought about me or how they have perceived me. I have worried too much about fitting in their neat little boxes in order to be a people pleaser, but no longer. Why should I care to please these vague, slippery, lifeless and uninteresting people anyway? I myself don’t want to be called any of those descriptive terms, so why should I try so damn hard to attempt to lower my standards to please and amend my ways to those sorts of people in the first place? If they were of the caliber that I wish to associate myself with, then they would accept me as I am, for all of the amazingness that I am and would also not be intimidated by any of my eccentricities either. So what if I have my own way of doing things and it is not of the popular or normal culture. Everyone has their own perception of the world as it is anyway. It happens that some have a more common collective view, and others see things differently.

“The neurochemical impulses fired when we’re dreaming or fantasizing g or hallucinating are indistinguishable from the ones banging around inside our skulls from when we actually experience those events. So if what we perceive is often wrong, how can we ever know what’s real and what isn’t? -Daniel Pierce, “Perception”

I have had very low self esteem all of my life in many areas, due to my back story. But conversely, there are some areas in which I have very high self esteem also, some might even say bordering on arrogance. It beguiles me sometimes that I can be so bipolar on this, with no middle ground. I hope that my new mission of learning self love will help to balance and even those polar opposites out. I know in my head that I am good enough. I just need to feel good enough.

Even when I don’t have confidence in myself, I somehow often have the ability when I choose, to manifest that which I visualize, even if it’s not something I ever really believe in my head that I could ever have or do. Sometimes it comes as insight, as a vision of something that is going to happen, and sometimes it is something that I just focus on myself really hard and am able to manipulate through my own energy that I send out to the universe. Even if it’s some fantastical idea that seems so far out of my realm. If only I could back all of that up now with having the full confidence in myself and feel good enough and not just some vague sense of self in some areas. It all starts with love.

“How does love rewire the brain? When we meet somebody new and exciting, they invade our synapses like a virus triggering neurochemicals that feed into attraction, arousal, and obsession. We get distracted. We think about that special someone all the time. But we’re not just thinking about them. We’re building an internal model. A simulation that helps us predict what they’ll or how they’ll feel. Of course relationships get into trouble when the simulation meets reality. Which begs the question, do we ever really fall in love with another person or just with our idea of who they are? Neuro-psychoatrists say that were hard-wired to crave intimate connections. We long for love. Of course the reality is, it usually ends in heartache. Leaving our delicate psyches bruised, if not completely shattered. Why do we even bother playing those odds? I guess because we only have to get it right once. And when it’s right, you know it. Even the memory of the fulfilling relationship can sustain you, and remind us that, although we might be feeling down at this particular moment, we’re never truly alone.” -Daniel Pierce, “Perception”

First you have to love yourself before you are capable of properly loving anyone else.

My song of the day:

“Good Enough”
By: Evanescence

Under your spell again
I can’t say no to you
Crave my heart and it’s bleeding in your hand
I can’t say no to you

Shouldn’t let you torture me so sweetly
Now I can’t let go of this dream
I can’t breathe but I feel

Good enough
I feel good enough for you

Drink up sweet decadence
I can’t say no to you
And I’ve completely lost myself, and I don’t mind
I can’t say no to you

Shouldn’t let you conquer me completely
Now I can’t let go of this dream
Can’t believe that I feel

Good enough
I feel good enough
Its been such a long time coming, but I feel good

And I’m still waiting for the rain to fall
Pour real life down on me
‘Cause I can’t hold on to anything this good enough
Am I good enough for you to love me too?

So take care what you ask of me
‘Cause I can’t say no

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/vague/

Only fools rush in

And so I will start where I left off 2 days ago. In my post “Perception”, I left off with the following quote from the TV show of the same name:

Does free will exist? Do I exert conscious control over my actions? Did I do that on purpose? Or was I forced to do it by some unseen neural process? Fact is, most of the neuro scientific data suggests free will is an illusion. But if that’s true, are we simply meat puppets? All of our choices made for us? -Daniel Pierce

Here is what the band Rush has to say on the matter of free will….

But then, do they in a later album contradict themselves within these lyrics?

So, now let us examine a couple of terms and definitions that are often argued and contemplated when philosophizing about freewill.

Pre-Determinism: the idea that the entire past (as well as the future) was determined at the origin of the universe.

Casual Determinism: Causal determinists believe that there is nothing in the universe that is uncaused or self-caused.

The basic scientific idea of hereditary determination fulfills the definition of causal determinism, a metaphysical concept.

Determinism: Determinism is the philosophical idea that every event or state of affairs, including every human decision and action, is the inevitable and necessary consequence of antecedent states of affairs.

Determination: Determination is the  idea that our decisions are determined by our motives and deliberations, by our character and values, and by our feelings and desires. The idea that events (including human actions) can be adequately determined by immediately prior events (such as an agent’s reasons, motives, desires), without being pre-determined back to before the agent’s birth or even back to the origin of the universe.

Free will:

the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one’s own discretion.

synonyms:

self-determination, freedom of choice, autonomy, liberty, independence

The photo meme above was one that was generated by one of those Facebook “find your quote of the year, made specially for you” sites….It is of value to this meandering…I would like to start here and work backwards through the definitions. The canvas analogy of this quote resonated in me as an Adoptee because in many ways I felt like a blank canvas with no reference picture, as I was not brought up around my birthfamily. I was floundering around as a child, always trying to fit in, trying to draw from those in my environment, but always knowing that the boxes I was trying to fit in to were not who I was deep inside. By high school and college, the true me, my true identity, emerged and it was very different from anyone I was raised around. When I finally got in touch with my birthfamilies, it was uncanny how much of the identity that I was so drawn to, that emerged despite never having met them until I was in my late 30s, was a perfect blend of my birthmom and birthdad. My identity seems to me (to use the terms within the confines of this argument), to be a casual determinism. In fact, no matter how hard my adoptive parents have tried to quash that identity, it has remained in tact, partially out of choice, partially because it is “who I was”, despite never knowing this on the conscious level at that time.

Moving along to the actual definitions and debate.

Back in college I took several social science classes, a variety of psychology classes, philosophy classes (even one of my math requirement classes was a blended math/philosophy class), sociology, social psychology etc….I will admit it has been some time since I have read up on the classic Philosophers, and unfortunately, due to my ADHD, one of my coping techniques was to purge the info I learned for each exam in order to learn the info for the next exam. Sadly, I have not retained much of my knowledge. So, what I put forth may not be factually accurate and may have already been covered by someone, and I may be behind the game on this one. I am only beginning to re-emerge in to the world of research and knowledge seeking, so please forgive any indiscretions and misinformation.

My opinion on free will simply boils down to what is stated in the above meme. “You are free to choose, but you are not free from the consequence of your choice.” I do believe that the definitions of the terms work in conjunction with each other, in the consecutive order that I listed them. I believe we do all have free will, that we are free to choose, and make any choice we want, but that our choices are influenced by all of the factors (Pre-Determinism, Casual Determinism, Determinism and Determination). We ultimately have to answer to our own minds (as that is the main jail cell we are stuck in 24/7), and then there is the other barrage of possible consequences, depending upon what the choice to be made is. Those who are religiously minded have the fear of their higher power looking over them as a consequence. There is fear of losing some type of relationship as a possible outcome. Fear of losing income, or a job. Somehow, free will seems to coincide with a decision between something that could possibly be beneficial and something that could potentially be harmful or negative in some way. There always seems to be that “what if” chance on the other side of free will. Do I have the free will to leave my house right now and go for a drive in my car? Absolutely. No one is stopping me. Someone else might choose to do so under the given circumstances. Nothing really bad happened. Just some negative energy. Could getting out the house right now possibly be beneficial? Maybe. Would it really do much harm? No. My daughter just went up to go to bed. My husband is home. I wouldn’t be endangering anyone. But it also raises the risk of me getting in to a car accident by being on the road later at night. There really aren’t any places for me to go other than bars at this point, and I’m not a drinker. So what is the benefit? Not much. Options are weighed and there seems less benefit to it than it is worth. But do I have the free will? Yes. Could I exercise it if I choose to? Yes. I choose not to (even though it was really only a hypothetical situation that I came up with merely for this mental experiment). And I still have made a choice not to have to decide, as Rush points out in their song.

Regardless of any one person’s decision, the world will still keep on turning, until the day it doesn’t. So everyone is free to decide however they choose. But they are not free from the consequences (good or bad) of those choices. Even if one person is the reason for the final act that causes the extinction of the world as we know it, there will always be acts and people involved in those steps leading up to it that played their role. No person is ever a complete lone soldier in their mission.

Free will, always something leading up to it, always free to use it, always a consequence and outcome from it. Only fools rush in…

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/rush/