@Tristan12
Thank you for taking the time and effort to share your situation. Many people are so helpless that they aren't even capable of remotely articulating their struggles or reaching out for help, so you've made a big first step. Give yourself adequate credit for that.
First of all, I want to be completely transparent that I was very hesitant to engage with you. It's nothing personal, but I know you understand that your delicate situation makes it risky for anyone to publicly provide you with serious support. No one wants to be blamed for anything, and I’m sure you understand that.
That being said, what tipped me over the edge was seeing the topics you cover on your YouTube channel in the context of what you're sharing with us here.
It's absolutely obvious to me that your difficult situation has immense potential -- not just for personal evolution, transformation, and healing, but most importantly, for the impact you can have on others who are facing the same challenges as you are right now.
Just imagine the magnitude of the difference you could make for people who are RIGHT NOW, at this very moment, going through something very similar to what you’re experiencing -- if you only manage to be strong enough to learn the powerful lessons locked behind this challenging chapter of your life. It’s almost poetic.
That's why I’d like you to connect your current emotional suffering with the suffering of thousands of other people who are in your very shoes right now. Imagine the pain and suffering of those people who are wishing for someone like the wise and mature future you to help them out.
I want to invite you to be strong -- not only for yourself, not only for everyone who has ever cared for you, not just for me (I’m sort of sticking my neck out here for you), but most of all, for all the people your story and service can impact throughout the rest of your long life.
Of course, I have no idea if this aligns with the life purpose you’ve mentioned, but it’s what I intuit -- correct me if I’m wrong. If you got emotional at all reading any of this it's a good indicator on it being true, at least to a degree.
Who knows? What if you deliberately incarnated into this very situation to work through these challenges, learn the lessons they hold, evolve, heal, and help others do the same? What if there’s no escape and you’ll continue facing exactly the same challenges for ever, until you fully embrace them and finally grow? (Just food for thought -- don’t take this too seriously.)
One of the biggest lessons for you would be learning and understanding the mechanisms of how emotions work.
This understanding will likely give you most of the results you’re looking for -- and it means understanding the mechanisms of your mind: how beliefs and thoughts work in an extremely practical and hands-on way. You’d learn how thoughts and beliefs generate emotional reactions and how, by playing with perspective, context, and belief, you can dissipate, heal, and embrace your emotional reactions and trauma, to the point where the suffering substantially alleviates and eventually disappears.
The good thing about your situation is that your suffering is only emotional, which is generated by your own mind. If you were physically ill or chronically unwell, it would be a completely different story. With adequate support and guidance about how emotions work and how your mind operates, you can begin to untangle the poor mental habits you have accidentally let develop over time.
The challenge with things like depression or negative thinking is that they’re self-fulfilling prophecies and self-reinforcing. At the end of this post I shared some relevant quotes that point this out .
If you think and believe that there is no way to improve your situation, that literally becomes your reality, and nothing you try will work. If you truly believe a door is locked, you won’t even try to turn the doorknob -- or your mind will eloquently talk itself out of trying. Do you see? Being smart and thoughtful has its downside because your mind has the increased capacity of coming up with better negative arguments that sound very convincing and are well reasoned.
But on the flip side, If you have a strong faith in that the door can be opened, you will not stop until you make it happen, even though you don't know how you will make it happen just yet.
One common explanation for why someone is depressed is simply that they’ve accidentally developed a negative, pessimistic self-talk habit. Of course, it can be much more complex than that, but sometimes this is a big part of the issue.
It’s almost like your mind follows the same tendency as physical muscles, and you’ve accidentally developed a poor posture that becomes your default. For example, imagine you’ve chronically stretched your neck to look upwards at the sky all the time, so now you’re constantly staring at the sun. Then you wonder--why do my eyes hurt? ( " I'm consistently thinking depressing, desperate, disempowering negative thoughts therefore I suffer " )
In terms of somewhat specifics of your situation, you’ve mentioned: intense emotional attachment to a girl (“heartbreak”--apparently the biggest struggle you’re facing now), feelings of inferiority because of a lack of experience with women, lifelong feelings of deep shame and abandonment, hypersensitivity to disapproval, anxious thought loops, overthinking, and a general feeling of hopelessness.
All of these challenges can be worked through, and there are thousands of people who have overcome them. It doesn’t have to take an excessive amount of time or effort. Once you identify the few core underlying tendencies that are holding you back, you could possibly get back on your feet relatively soon. It doesn’t have to take years.
Regarding psychedelics:
I do not recommend taking an excessively large dose. It is bound to cause a strong ego backlash and potentially destabilize you by giving you a glimpse of an unsustainable state of consciousness. It’s unlikely to result in much permanent steady improvement, which is what you need right now. Also It may be challenging to face certain things psychedelics point out to you if you're not very proficcient at using your mind and coping with emotions, so ideally working on that first would prepare you.
It doesn't have to cost thousands. Aren't mushrooms semi-legal or in a legal grayzone in Toronto and Vancouver? They're not the ideal substance in my opinion but better than nothing. ( I'm assuming you live in Canada by your profile )
One good thing psychedelics can do for your situation is to give you some distance from your mind and not identify yourself with the mind to a dysfunctional level. It can help you to go from living your mind in the first person perspective, to observing it from a more dettached third-person perspective.
Psychedelics increase your level of consciousness and allow you to see that you are not your mind ( there is more to you than just that) and that just because thoughts occur in your mind’s eye or because the mental voice is speaking doesn’t mean they’re true or accurate -- or that you need to believe them or take them seriously.
It's almost as though you were watching the television from a distance of 15 centimeters, and you were so caught up in it you truly believed that what's going on in the television is reallity. Whatever disgrace you saw there you would inmediately emotionally suffer in real life. But if you manage to step away from the television to a healthy distance of a meter and a half, you would be able to recognize what the television truly is, and you could detach your emotions from what you perceive from the television. You would gain a buffer between thoughts and emotions, where you get to question the validity of the thoughts that cause those emotional reactions.
Emotions are ALLWAYS caused by beliefs, whether you're conscious of what those beliefs are or not .
At an existential level, psychedelics might help you understand the nature of what you are. In a strange-loop paradoxical way, you both are and are not your mind. You are and are not your body. What you can identify with certainty is the silent observer of the mind and body -- pure awareness.
In a way, this pure awareness is co-living in a single experience of existence together with the body and mind (which are almost separate entities). Sometimes, they are not aligned in interests or don’t entirely understand each other. Once you get clear about the body’s interests and the mind’s interests, you can begin to live in a more holistic way, learn to speak a common language between them, and stop sabotaging eachother.
These different parts of you are ultimately looking out for themselves. Whatever apparent negative thing you’re experiencing actually has a positive intention behind it, though it may be too twisted to understand at first glance. For example:
Your strong negative emotions are sending valuable information.
Your limiting beliefs are trying to protect your self-esteem.
Your neediness, obsession and oneitis with that woman is actually your biology hijacking your mind to maximize reproduction chances. ( Crush psychology)
If I knew more specifics about your situation, I could point out clearer examples.
Yeah, $30k in debt sucks. But on the other hand, it’s literally just the average student debt. It’s not the end of the world, and you can definitely get out of it. I don't know if you happen to have any prior work experience of skills, but you can start with less fulfilling less demanding jobs and build yourself up. (It would be useful if you shared more about this as well)
Not being smooth with the ladies at age 24 is no big deal. You’d be surprised how much you can experience and learn in just a couple of months. There are 4.000.000.000 women on the planet. A good 10.000 that are potentially in your local arms reach, attractive, young, hot and single, almost desperate to meet a decent guy. Do you seriously think that NONE of them would want to be with you? Not even one?
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If you find any of this helpful, feel free to share more details here or PM me. I could potentially hear you out and offer you a degree of free help. I'm not a licensed professional but I've helped a few dozen people with very similar issues.
DONT GIVE UP!
Some quotes for emphasizing the catch 22 of the mind, thoughts and beliefs:
Human beings act, think, and feel in accordance with what they believe to be true about themselves and their environment – Maxwell Maltz
Whether you think you can, or you think you can't -- you're right - Henry Ford.
You can’t solve a problem with the same mindset that created it. – Albert Einstein
It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters." – Epictetus . (( It's not the facts of a situation that matter, but the context and perspective which make sense of it ))
You don’t have to control your thoughts. You just have to stop letting them control you."– Dan Millman
