WAR & PEACE

So I've been thinking about this whole idea I've been talking about...being at war with yourself. And in some ways I think this metaphor still holds true. Our Super Egos and your Ids have essentially been battling it out for decades. The Ego has been the unsuccessful mediator, in that it tends to favor The Super Ego in an effort to perpetuate the false self, from the True Self. The Super Ego in TMSers generally tends to win...as this is where our perfectionistic, people/society pleasing, moralistic, driving, hyper-organized tendencies derive from. The Id is just a bundle of buried rage, shame, guilt, anger, frustration, and denied pleasure because off all the pressure from and battles lost with our Super Ego. We know that those buried feelings generate energy and with no where to release, that energy is transformed (via our autonomic nervous systems) into physical pain and/or anxiety/depression.

There is also the general war between our conscious Ego (conscious fear, worry, anxiety) and our Id..that is the day to day battle that you and I deal with of feeling pain and then trying not to succumb to all the negative conscious feelings associated with the pain and fear of the future.

However we must be careful not to continually see ourselves in fight mode. Frankly it is exhausting, but more than that, if what is at the heart of all this is feelings of unworthiness and lack of self-love (originating from infancy and childhood and perpetuated through reinforced negative programs of repression) then there comes a time when we have to put our weapons down and simply accept what is.

Now I don't mean, we need to give up...on the contrary...the TMS healing process takes awareness, work, and sometimes it does feel like (and rightly so) that we are at war with ourselves. What I mean is there needs to be balance between war and peace. I discovered this yesterday when my journaling (day 15 exercise) involved writing out dialogue between my conscious Self and my Id (aka Shadow Self). What I discovered was that what my Id really needs is a big hug. Hokey as that may sound...I realized that my poor Id, since the day I came into the world, has been deprived. Deprived of contact with my Mother after her medical birth and choice not to breastfeed me; deprived of closeness during the first two weeks of life while a hired stranger bottle fed me at night, and the list of traumatic and not so traumatic experiences goes on and on. Since I arrived in this world I learned to bury my feelings for fear of further trauma or lack of acceptance and as a result my emotional conscious Self and my physical body have suffered.

I don't want to fight with my Id or my Ego or my Superego anymore. I want them all to know I love them. I accept them. I understand they each play an important role in who I am. What I would like to do, a more diplomatic approach you can say, is figure out a way we can all get along and find more balance. So instead of fighting my hyper-perfectionist Super Ego perhaps I can gently coax it to ease up a little. Perhaps I can convince it to let the Id win every once in a while, or at least not be so hard on her. I don't want my Id to remain in the Shadows. I want her to know that her needs, desires and emotions are valid and very human. I want her to know that I am going to try to do a better job at listening to her and giving her a voice.

This is not to say that on rough days I won't need to be tough with myself and perhaps put the combat boots on once in a while, maybe even blow up some dynamite on a really rough day. I just know that the answer to my healing doesn't lie in constantly being at war. It lies somewhere between war and peace. It's about learning to be firm with myself, staying mindful, and working towards changing my negative patterns of repression. At the same time it is also about truly loving and accepting myself..opening up, letting go, learning to really relax and feel whatever I am feeling, learning to have faith in who I truly am at my core...and being okay with that.