How Survival Shapes Who You Are

josh says:

Gratefull

crusty says:

At what age did the leo lose his hair?

Max Gron says:

Leo’s survival is so fake due to the contradictions, he’s logical, he’s illogical, he’s rational, he’s irrational, he survives, he changes his survival, he doesn’t change, his beliefs are the same, he’s teaching ancient wisdom, he’s adding a modern twist. Most of the time he’s different from 10 years ago. What he wants is simply to teach psychology and it’s not a cult, it doesn’t reject conventional religious practice.
My survival will have to mean the death of my twenties, to live from 34, to have consistently the tastes in music, movies, documentaries, news and television I developed, to have the beliefs I have now that I developed, to drop one of my role models, and to doubt everything, some I never really done until over 34 years later.

Random College Kid says:

Just wanted to give some examples of how to reflect on survival in your life, considering I’ve explored this concept in a lot of books in your life, just to share if anyone wants some extra stuff other than what Leo says. For example, there is inner child work, which is a type of therapy where you make friends with your inner child, such as having to relearn how to have fun or giving yourself the positive encouragement you didn’t have as a child by writing letters to your inner child. There’s the ACE studies, or adverse childhood experiences quiz, where if you have three or more, you’re more likely to die earlier according to statistics, if you do not have interventions to work with your trauma. First heard about this from the website traumahealed. I recommend that as an intro to trauma, to offer the basics.

You can also look up the types of childhood abuse or the types of abusive parents. For example, there are the obvious forms of abuse, but also emotional neglect, which is statistically the most common form of childhood trauma, but very little people are aware of it. This is where there is little attention to taking care of your emotions growing up. Your emotions were ignored, or you were told to just suppress your feelings. Your parents may not have abused you, but you don’t feel emotionally close to them at all. Maybe they were always working, and it might not even be out of malice. You were so poor, they had to work all day and they couldn’t talk to you much, like that. Another less well known one is parentification, where you’re forced to act like the parent to your own parent, causing a power imbalance. Maybe your parents divorced, and you had to emotionally comfort both of your parents around that even if you were a young child. Also, see attachment styles and childhood.

Another example is the Enneagram, which is a psychological personality type system based on what your biggest fear is and your main survival strategy according to that fear. This isn’t a black and white thing. Everyone has these 9 fears, it’s more that it’s placed in order of what is the scariest to least scariest to you. There’s also a main tritype, which is based on how you respond to anger, shame and fear. The anger types are type 8, type 9 and type 1, the shame types are type 2, type 3, and type 4, while lastly, the fear types are type 5, type 6, and type 7. Then you order the tritype based on what is the strongest emotion you use for survival to the weakest.

Then there are even wings, where you lean onto one side, like if you’re type 9, you can be a 9 wing 1 or a 9 wing 8, so it’s very complicated with hundreds of possible combinations, considering this is a whole personality system based on your biggest traumas and your coping strategies around that. There are even levels of health for each type, of the healthiest to unhealthiest manifestations of those coping strategies from healthy, average and to unhealthy, but that’s too advanced to talk about now.

There are also multiple childhood trauma self help advice type books, and there are multiple books on dealing with abusive parents or abusive grandparents. That kind of stuff. A lot written by professionals, some with personal experiences and a few are written from a spiritual perspective, though I’ve read them all.

Tried to fill in some things in Leo’s exercise, so I could at least not be considered hypocritical in just giving advice, but not trying much myself.

So here I go.

Life is. . . a puzzle. Life is horrible, but it is interesting. I stick around just to see what would happen, even if things would end horribly. Life is full of drama happening around me, but secretly, I find that entertaining, only if I watch from afar, of which I tend to do. Life is complicated, and people say it’s simple, but I don’t understand how to think of life as simple. Life is a wild ride, full of ups and down, good and bad.

When I think of the men are blank, and women are blank kind of thing, I just think men make sense and women make sense. It boggles my mind why people don’t get the opposite sex, when I grew up being involved in random groups of men and groups of women together. I was always that random kid that grew up that was involved in multiple diverse cliques in high school, and people invited me anywhere, but I never really had a main place to belong to. No one was that close, but I was friends with about everyone.

Happiness. . . is a mystery, and I feel like I have to be a detective like Sherlock Holmes to figure it out. Though not in a distressing way, but the act of solving the mystery of happiness makes me happy in of itself. Philosophy just for the sake of philosophy. No need for anything pragmatic. Happiness is fleeting. Happiness leaves, then comes back, leaves again, then comes back again. Happiness is simple in theory, but it’s easy to complicate it. Happiness has a set of habits associated with it, but it’s easier said than done. Happiness is something I feel at mild average amounts, but nothing on such a grand level beyond normal that I would want it to be.

Success is being able to figure out what would make me deeply happy, and I have no idea what that is, so I’d just say success is unknown. Money is freedom, but most people don’t have that freedom. Sex is normal but very awkward. Science is a tool. Religion is a tool. Both are tools you can use. Like any tool, it can be used badly or well, but some people don’t know how to use tools properly at all, and most people are like that in society. Spirituality is whatever offers a person meaning, whether someone believes in God, or they’re an atheist.

Work is tiring and rewarding, and it could only be better if I had the same IT type work but with a lot more regular breaks. School is long, but it’s part of that political game you have to play to be taken seriously by society. God is a mystery, like happiness. Government is stupid, at least most of it is.

For I am blank. . . I say, I am stupid. People tell me I’m smart all the time, but I feel stupid. I feel like I have no idea what is happening in life. So much of life is unknown, and I’m just winging it. I know older folks say everyone is winging it, but that doesn’t help it much. I want a life where I don’t just wing it all the time because I don’t understand what the hell I’m doing, even if people say understanding what you’re supposed to do in life is impossible. There will always be unexpected stuff, but it’s nice to have at least some outline of what the hell is going on.

Just my personal thoughts.

Max Gron says:

People say I’m any of the millions of abusive things they say about me, they even say I’m stupid, wicked, evil, even crazy, and they call me an arsehole or an asshole. In 99.8% of the cases I’m none of those things and so not an asshole, even though I can be an asshole sometimes. I’m what I think, my beliefs, and my very acts in the real world, even to you (the latter being to you, the former to me), take a look: you know I sit there writing and when someone is breaking the rules I don’t bind them up or do something about it, I just sit there letting them run amuck. My very act if you look closely is importantly centered on drinking wine and eating pasta and parfaits, and drinking coffee and smoking, yet people react as if it’s not what I’m doing but that the way I’m doing it has an evil significance, no it doesn’t, it’s very much what I do and less the way I’m doing it, I haven’t done anything evil. This is how it shaped my psyche, struggling to find the right morals, it’s incredibly simple but people act as if my reasons are complicated, no they’re not, it’s very much one thing: my morals.