Who Is the One Living Me Now?

This essay is a follow up to Paradise Lost as a Psychological Exploration, specifically taking the abstract and theoretical ideas and talking about how they have applied to my life directly.

Trauma makes it difficult to figure out who you truly are. When I started learning about CPTSD and doing trauma therapy, I began to question who I truly was. What aspects of my behavior are just expressions of trauma, and what aspects are fundamental to me? 

Therapists say that the dysfunctional behaviors that therapy heals were once behaviors that served a purpose in helping us survive. Common examples are drug addiction, self-harm, and workaholism, but my addictions weren’t conventional ones. No, my alcohol was death metal, my self-harm was lifting weights, and my workaholism was to spend a lot of time playing video games. These are things which nobody would think to be a real problem, especially since my life looked relatively put together. In fact, my listening to death metal ended up pushing me to get better and better at guitar, which gave me self-esteem. My weight lifting helped me put on muscle and look better. I didn’t have much of a justification for playing video games, but I figured binging a video game for 8-10 hours per day for a week once or twice a year isn’t the worst thing possible. I built an identity around these things, only highlighting the positive aspects while ignoring the negatives, and convinced myself that this identity was who I fundamentally am. 

When I started to actually peel back the trauma, I was flooded with painful feelings and memories, and suddenly these things which I never considered addictions revealed themselves as such. I needed death metal, blasted through my headphones all the time, so I could numb out my feelings with an undercurrent of rage. I needed to go to the gym most days of the week, sometimes twice in a day, so that I could regain feelings of empowerment and control. What was previously perceived as an identity that seemed constructive revealed itself as an identity of compulsion and rage, because underneath that rage were feelings of pain and powerlessness that were hiding there all along.

I’ve been doing trauma therapy for about 7 months at this point. While I’m nowhere near finished, I’ve made a monumental amount of progress, and in that progress, I’ve found that my identity has changed. In fact, I don’t listen to death metal anymore. I don’t like lifting weights and prefer to rock climb or dance. And I don’t spend as much time playing video games (though this is something that I’m still working on). These things which I thought were fundamental to me I now know were merely coping mechanisms, bandages for wounds that I had finally managed to heal. And with this hindsight, I’m left wondering who I am underneath the trauma. The reality is that those coping mechanisms were things that robbed me of free will because I had an internal compulsion to act them out. They were the results of my Jungian shadow, and my higher self was buried away. I listened to heavy metal so that I could feel powerful and safe and give myself will power to overcome things when I felt overwhelmed, and I lifted weights because subconsciously I wanted to make sure I was never bullied again.

So who is my higher self? To answer this question, I look at the trajectory I’m on now and who I was as a child, seeing which parts overlap. To an outside observer, I’ve changed so that I’m more sensitive and empathetic. I’m less angry and more likely to be in a good mood. I’m also much less “refined” of sorts and more likely to talk about academic topics and allow the “nerdy” side of myself to show. These are traits that my parents tell me my very young self had. My mother used to tell me about how I was such a caring kid when I was younger (around 3-5 years old). While her specific stories screamed parentification on my end, I believe that at the end of the day it’s true, I’m a very sensitive and empathetic person. These parts of me were locked away at around age 11 due to a combination of invalidation at school and a massive amount of physical and emotional abuse at home, creating the compensatory rageaholic that my friends have known for a long time. Similarly, I spent a lot of time reading when I was a young kid and had a natural curiosity for the sciences, religion, and math (to the extent that a young child could have an interest in them). Because of the environment I grew up in and a culture that looks down upon people who enjoy studying and reading in their free time, I felt compelled to abandon those aspects of myself so that I could fit in better with “normal people”, which is a constructed concept in the first place. This deviation from my true self was at its maximum during my semester off, which is when I’d tried learning to get a hold of my dating life. I had to force myself to become the complete antithesis of who I am at my core, which was to become focused on image and develop a sort of compensatory narcissism. Luckily I realized this was damaging and unhealthy quickly, so this is no longer the case. So have I actually changed? Or is it more so that I’ve allowed myself to be who I truly am? I’d say it’s the latter. The child version of me was a better representation of my true self, it just took psychotherapy and a lot of meditation and reflection to dig him out and integrate him into my adult psyche. 

In the Paradise Lost essay, I made a specific mention of the fact that many who suffer from PTSD lose their concept of God or lack a connection to God. I don’t believe in the Christian notion of God, which is the context the essay was written in, but my healing work has connected me to some notion of God, which is better represented by the ideas of Hinduism. In my first EMDR session, which just involved creating a safe place in my mind, I was able to have my first extended break from the trauma and feel a deep sense of peace. I believe what happened was I got in touch with my Atman for the first time since I was a child. In the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism, the Atman is the inherent real self of the individual. EMDR allowed me to bore a hole through all of the trauma to get in touch with it for the first time. Continuing therapy allowed me to increase the amount of time my ego spent acting with respect to Atman as opposed to nervous system dysregulation that comes with trauma, though I still spend a good amount of time in various states of nervous system dysregulation. I believe this is what Jung was referencing when he spoke of the ego as having to choose between the higher self and the shadow, where the shadow is the archetype corresponding to dysregulation. This dysregulation is not inherent to my being and is a result of past trauma, so the emotions my body feels without the dysregulation can be linked to Atman itself. If we think of emotions as a set of rules that govern how we react to reality, we can see that our true self lies in those emotions. Coming back to Advaita Hinduism, Atman is a fragment of Brahman, which is thought of as God. In this way, our fundamental emotions that are not a result of dysregulation cause us to act in a constructive, altruistic manner, as opposed to a destructive, survival oriented manner, so perhaps Brahman is this pattern of constructivity that the universe has embedded within our biology. In any case, this is the notion of God that I’ve been tending towards which has guided me throughout this entire healing process.

At the end of the day, our identity comes down to how we make choices. In specific, do we choose to act from our higher self or the shadow, act from the discernment of true reality or the veils of maya that nervous system dysregulation weaves? As we make these choices, we begin to learn who we truly are at our core. This has been the greatest lesson I’ve learned in attempting to answer the question of who I truly am, and it continues to provide me a path towards greater peace and acceptance.