Epiphany! (Now what?)

[hookinmyhead]

I'm just gonna cut and paste this from an email I wrote my OA sponsor a couple hours ago. Got tired of waiting for her to respond with her take (ADD FTW), so I'm sharing it here. I feel like I've cracked a code, which is super exciting, but I am not exactly sure where to go next with this newfound insight.

(Paragraphs 1 & 2 of the following written on Friday; 3-5 just now in a sleepy haze; nothing at all yesterday; yay procrastination.)

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I am naturally impulsive. At a young age, this got me in trouble, both with authority figures and with my peers. I'm also naturally sensitive. My response to getting frequently burned without warning was to suppress any and all impulses. To shut down. I built a jail in my mind, where I was both prisoner and warden.

This is the model that my life has taken: a permanently deadlocked struggle between opponents who are evenly matched by definition, because they are both me. And yet, as epic as this struggle may seem, as genuinely bruising and exhausting as it feels, I have always had the option to end it, by choosing a victor. It is all, in the end, make believe. Prisoner Me and Warden Me are constructs: in reality there is only one me, trying to direct the whole show and play all the roles.

But if I have always had the ability to call off this ridiculous farce, why haven't I? The biggest and most obvious reason is that change is scary, especially when it's not just any change, but the introduction of change itself. If I was afraid to make mistakes at 5, I'm literally petrified after 2 1/2 decades of slow burn failure.

Meanwhile, the prisoner inside me has grown defiant. Prohibited from pursuing a truly fulfilling life, he resorts to acting out, surfing the web when he should be working, being chronically late to work, sneaking in a few extra nibbles of dinner.

There's so much more I can write, and should, and will. So many orphaned pieces of the puzzle of my behavior, suddenly seem to fit. I know I can't think my way out of a thinking problem. But I do think that this advancement in my self understanding will be hugely helpful in guiding my actions as I take the next 8 steps.

[weary]

That's huge. That is a lot of insight. I can relate to a lot of what you said there, except I've been doing it for longer than 2 1/2 decades at this point. I have gotten some of that insight from therapy, but you crystallized it in a nice succinct passage. Well done.

For me it's nit exactly the same tendency towards impulsivity, but a need to be perfect/right/"good" that is the internal strict warden/defiant prisoner dynamic. And others, from authority figures to my wife reinforce the strict warden because the beaten down defiant prisoner feels helpless and worthless and shameful and must be locked away from the judging eyes of others at all costs.

Just recognizing that both Warden and Prisoner are you is huge. And maybe your key to escaping this pattern if behavior is not to declare a victor, but to realize that both sides have the same interests at heart and can work together towards that goal. The prisoner represents what you want and need and are passionate about, and needs to be listened to and loved. The Warden maybe represents a reality check and embodies the "rules" required to function as a human being in society. They can maybe reinforce and assist one another and not antagonize one another.