Logic and Reason

I have seen the way loneliness has caused all sorts of heartaches in my life.  My desperation for companionship in high school led me to be a pathetic loser-type when pursuing relationships.  I failed at jobs when I learned them, because once I was able to handle it on my own, I wasn’t getting the close attention I enjoyed while in training.  It stands to reason that my spiritual struggles were based on loneliness, as well.  95% of all my struggles were when I was alone.  I would say 99% if I counted the times that I was with people, but felt alone.  This all went away when I realized that I had found someone who was in it with me for the long haul.  When I first got together with my wife, Dee, I couldn’t believe that she would accept me after all I told her.  Once that reality set in, Jaervah started to fade.  He stopped attacking me.  It got more intense on occasion, but overall, it dissipated.  At the time, I believed it was because she was praying for me.  Well, I still believe that, but not for spiritual reasons.  Her prayers showed me she truly cared, and she wasn’t going to let anything change that. 

I began to recognize that I really had some kind of control over all the events that I thought were signs and wonders.  At least I could have reasonably predicted what was going to happen.  A lot of it was a matter of creating my own sense of wonder, after something trivial had happened.  In other words, I was reading more into a situation than was really there.  I started to realize that are these so-called prophecies were self-fulfilling.  I had put these things together in my mind to make it more real to me.  Some of it was coincidence.  It took me a long time to come to the conclusion that coincidences do happen.  A lot of my beliefs were based on the notion that coincidences never happen, and therefore there must be an explanation to everything.  I can see now, though, that if Dee were not to come into my life, and I didn’t find anybody else who cared about me that much, Jaervah would have lived on, and I would have found some other way to explain why he was able to stay after his contracted time was up.  

I don’t believe Tina, Affely, Cyndi, Jaervah, or God were ever real, as I perceived them to be.  If I am wrong about God, and he does exist, then I never knew him, and I would have to start fresh.  I am open to that possibility, as I have certainly been wrong about my beliefs before.  I am always looking for something that would tell me I am wrong about God.  Like I said, I gave up a lot to turn my back on Christianity.  The idea still appeals to me.  But, I can say for sure that I have never known God.  My God was a delusion. 

Going back, one more time.  Over the years, as my Christianity was fading, I started rebuilding my collection of music.  For a long time, I would continue to stay away from anything that reminded me of Cyndi.  That ruled out anything from the 80’s, and some of the 90’s stuff.  I listened to a lot of new music because of that. 

By the time I was 27 (1998), I was looking for a Cyndi-like singer.  I gathered a complete collection of Kate Bush.  I got a bunch of stuff from Bjork, and others.  I also started getting things that directly reminded me of Cyndi.  I took it slowly…Well, slowly for me. 

My life had gone pretty well for me up to this point.  But, when my life became unmanageable, things started happening again.  I started feeling the pressure on my head and shoulders again.  I started hearing a voice again.  I became unable to deal with an incidental exposure to Cyndi’s music. 

This is when I decided to talk to my therapist about it.  Just a note, here I was seeing a therapist for entirely unrelated reasons, and had never discussed my history of having been diagnosed as schizophrenic with him.  I had been with this man for a long time, and though I felt utter contempt for the mental health system, I felt I could trust him to call it like it is, and respect my decisions to not prescribe drugs as a solution for this kind of problem.  One of the first things I told him was that I did not want to talk about it, because it always seemed to get worse when I talked about it.  I felt I had successfully made this problem go away by not feeding it with attention.  He convinced me that talking about it does not make it worse.  It can make it scarier, and if I panic, it can get worse because of my actions, but talking about it is not the enemy.  I took this to heart. 

In short, my therapist believes I am not schizophrenic, as I was labeled in the past.  I have done a lot of research in schizophrenia, and delusions as well.  Since I have done this, I can understand why I was labeled as a schizophrenic.  I do not know if I am, or not, but I do recognize the symptoms I have, and I have learned ways of dealing with them. 

I have come to process things by tearing them apart.  I want to know why something works, because if I don’t understand it, I can’t be proficient with it.  This works for me in everything from mathematics, to emotions.  I need to know cause and effect.  I need some kind of predictability, and structure. 

So, in tearing apart my past, I did a whole lot of writing.  I eventually found the cause and effect to most of my behaviors.  It started when my home-life, and school-life became unhealthy for me, and unfriendly toward me.  I didn’t feel like I could escape, so I created a place to escape to.  I felt like I had no friends, or people I could trust, so I invented people I could trust.  I was bored, so I created adventure and challenges.  I felt I wasn’t worth anything, so I developed someone who would ridicule me.  I didn’t want to take responsibility for my actions, so I made someone who would tell me what to do.  Isolation, and lack of communication was the perfect fertilizer for my ideas.  To put it simply, it comes down to coping skills.  Like all coping skills, if they are taken to extremes, they become dysfunctional.  But, I would not have continued doing it if there were not some great payoff.  Especially when I felt like I was being attacked.  There were very big rewards for me in the personality that tortured me.  Enough to justify my dealing with the mental abuse I felt I was taking. 

After extensive processing, I felt more in control of what happened to me.  Mostly because I knew why it happened to me.  If I felt an “attack” coming on, I could usually determine what it was that triggered it, and I could take action to make things better, like talking to someone about an unrelated topic, writing in my journal, listening to certain types of music, playing a video game.  Anything to take a break from whatever I was doing that was causing my difficulties. 

I need to make some comments here on the word dysfunctional.  It seems this word is widely misunderstood.  My understanding is that it refers to something that is normally functional, but is rendered useless or is inhibitive because of abuse or misuse.  For example, if you go out to the movies once a week, to forget about life for a while, and that really helps you cope with the rest of your week, that is functional.  Then, you find that going once a week is not enough, so you hit the double features.  Then two a week is not enough, and so on until 10 double-features just doesn’t quite do it for you.  They can still help you forget about life, but spending 40 hours at the movie house every week does not help you get through the daily struggles of life.  It inhibits the other necessities, and it is obviously not an effective method of coping if you feel you need to use it that much.  This is dysfunction.  If you think about it, any functional tool, when taken to an extreme, becomes dysfunctional.  This is commonly found in obsessive-compulsive disorders.  Another way a tool becomes dysfunctional is when it is used for the wrong purpose, or to consistently avoid the problem rather than dealing with it.  If you are stressed because your room is a mess, going to the movies won’t relieve your stress.  It may be a valid tool for some purpose, but is not useful in fixing the problem at hand. 

My “tools” were all functional at some point, and on some level.  But, my obsession, and my distorted thinking led them to be dysfunctional. 

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Last modified: July 27, 2003