trenton

@TheCloud thank you very much for this input. I will test what you told me and inform you of the results. I didn't consider talking to my sisters first. My instincts do mess with my evaluation for the worse. A similar thing happened when I didn't tell my mother about my father's crimes. I have been struggling against my instincts my entire life. This is partially due to autism. People think I'm acting with ill intent, but really I lack social experience. I am learning a lot from this situation.

@TheCloud This is the answer I was looking for. Do you have any tips for where I should go from here? I had a plan, but you are giving me ideas for a better plan. Thank you. I have a history of being naive about things like this. I once believed that somehow mom and dad would get back together.

How am I supposed to rely on family for emotional support? I want someone who understands, but I feel disconnected. Do I have to somehow undo what I learned from actualized.org? Is that the problem? Or is the problem autism and the struggle to understand how neurotypicals think?

@Schizophonia I have been making progress. I was considering making a thread about all the progress I made and some questions.

@Shakazulu I know this isn't much, but I'm sending you this message to wish you luck on recovery. With all the work you did in pickup it seems you have on some level overcome this issue. If you keep working, I hope you can learn that you deserve to be loved.

I have recently opened my mind to this issue. My understanding of relationships is still developing. They seem to be full of shit, and I don't get know how to navigate it. It seems that I need to be a light walker and question the other perspective as little as possible while accepting as much as possible. I am being criticized for being too honest and I think it tears relationships apart. He mentioned this issue in the how to get laid series. I'd like to see a continuation.

I don't belong in my family. Their emotional support is empty to me. These are just the people I happened to be born to and now their supposed to be fucking special. I'm sorry, I don't buy this. Part of my emotional numbness is caused by ptsd. To be honest, I feel like I belong back in the psychiatric ward or some kind of group therapy. Those people are accepting of me. I was able to use everything I learned from everything I studied to improve the lives of others. It would be nice if I could do that more. I love those people more than my family. Now how am I supposed to square my life with something like this?

I want to know how to improve this failing system. currently, about 60% of owed child support is paid. I want to know how to prevent children from going through hell over bad parents, but this is hard to do. I will start with my personal experience. My father fled the state to avoid paying child support. This is a problem because child support enforcement is mostly done at the state and local level. There are a list of things that are done to try to compel a parent to pay, but they all failed in my case. You can suspend his license, but he drives without a license anyway. You can tax his pay check, but he jumps from job to job to avoid being taxed. You can try to use his property or bank account, but he just uses his moms property and bank account. He also gets money from under the table through drug deals. He then makes payment in cash to get around all of the safety nets put in place. He owed about 200,000 dollars when he finally died. I tried calling my representative to ask for change. They told me that this was a rare case, and it sounded like there was nothing they could do. I am trying to find what it would take to get federal enforcement of child support.

@Roy my interest in chess is falling again. I'm still adjusting to the new pills. I'm otherwise not apart of any communities but this actualized forum. I mostly just dream about self actualization without doing anything. The closest thing I felt to belonging was in group therapy.

@PlayOnWords I grew up with a dysfunctional family. They tell me to just let it go and move on. What the hell do I have to look forward to in this life other than recovering from a horrible childhood? I've repeated the story several times on this forum. My family is the reason I have been isolating myself and refusing to socialize. I'm sorry your childhood was hell.

I have become aware of another one of my desires. It is the desire to be a woman instead of a man. If gender is a spectrum, then does that mean I may not be purely a man or a woman? I was never fully comfortable being labeled he/him. I somehow find it depressing. Part of this may be due to intense shame associated with male sexuality for a number of reasons. It makes me not want to be a man because of how much I hate myself. I have been trying to love myself all my life. The shame is too strong. Therapy is recommended in these cases and I plan on bringing this up to the psychiatrist in three days. Part of this may be due to me imagining what it feels like to be a woman having sex. I find it very sexy and it may be due to my straightness, rather than me becoming a woman. Have any of you questioned your gender or sexual identity? What did you discover in your journey?

Update: I wrote out a list of things that make me depressed. The loss of my sexual innocence is at the top of the list. I have been clinging to This identity since the incident from when I was six. It was undermined with masturbation and pornography later on. The loss of sexual innocence has more to do with the issue than the shame of being a man. My desire to become a woman was addressed and is now fading. I have been watching parts of how to get laid. I was open minded for a bit, but then experienced ego backlash. That is when this desire to become a woman came up. Sorry if I seem kind of jumpy. Everything I put on this forum is a discussion of things that have bothered me for a while. It is all coming up at once and I am changing fast. My mind is becoming more peaceful, so this is working. Suicide is starting to seem preposterous. The most important insight is that me trying to love myself stands in the way of me loving myself. I believed that I needed truth to love myself because I otherwise love illusions. I was trying not to be self deceived, but I am now trying to flip what I have been doing. I'm trying to let go of this belief that I am morally obligated to love myself based on who I truly am. I don't have to love myself. Believing I have to love myself makes me hate myself. It is paradoxical, and it goes against what this site holds. That is love and truth are one. Maybe the fundamental problem is that I confused relative love and truth for absolute love and truth. I also meant who I truly am as an ego, not God. Struggling to love myself therefore made it impossible to love myself because I stood in the way by trying to love myself through forcing truth on myself out of a sense of moral obligation to love myself. I ended up dropping the hammer on myself constantly and brutally. It is finally stopped. I feel present. Of course I still have the list ready for the psychiatrist. There seems to be a happy ending to all of this.

As a chess player, I used to see life as a game of chess. The problem is that I find this worldview very limiting. Life is way more complicated than chess. For example, there is the meta game of being careful not to win too much or people don't play with you anymore. There are world champions who take chess and make life lessons out of it. It is possible to see life that way, but again it is very limiting. I do the opposite. I find life lessons and other areas of development and look for ways to apply them to chess. For example, mental resistance in personal development and why chess players stagnate. We get stuck in habitual thinking patterns. The list goes on and on. By the way feelings matter a lot. Skilled chess players read your emotions during the game to find signs that you may make a mistake soon.

I read the book. Others on the forum recommend that I apply what I've learned. I have been opening up to my family on a lot of serious issues. so far I have made great progress. There is one last thing I have not told them about. It is about my father. Is it okay to tell my grandma that I'm happy my piece of shit father is dead? She is very sensitive about her son. She takes it as a personal attack when talking about all the horrible things my father did. She needs to understand that she did everything in her power to be a good mother, but her son was beyond her control. Her grand children were hurt deeply because of it. I don't blame her for being a bad person or anything. It is just painful for her to love her son as it is painful for me to love my father. A few things about my father. He was involved in gang violence. He was a drug dealer. He fled the state to avoid paying child support. He committed statutory rape when he impregnated my mother. I am trying the forgiveness exercise on him but am experiencing a lot of intense anger toward myself for being blinded by my unconditional love for my father. My father manipulated me. He preached the bible as if the father son bond was sacred. He wanted me to carry on some grand legacy with the Hamann name rather than holding my mother's last name. It was all fake. He wanted to use me as a pawn against my mother to get out of paying child support. He threatened to disown me if I told mom how he was evading child support. He therefore coerced me into committing a felony because of how he made me swear to secrecy. My feelings toward my father are that I love him even though exploited my love for him to use me as a pawn. It feels easy to love dad but very hard to love myself. I hate myself for loving my father. I judged mom for refusing to evict my step father because of her emotional weakness. I'm angry at myself for having the same emotional weakness that prevented me from sending my father to prison for the rest of his life. I deceived myself easily as I lied for my father. I drew a false equivalence between my father and abusive step father who destroyed the house and beat my mom. My father's side of the family told me that mom's side was the untrustworthy ones and I felt that nobody could be trusted. This played into my father's hands. Furthermore, I felt that family values were meaningless. I applied it to my whole family, causing me to feel depressed. I hate myself for defending my father in a way that hurt the rest of my family. I can forgive myself for doing everything in my power to be good. I still need time. Is it okay to be this honest with my grandma? My sisters were against it. They told me that I am too honest and I need to hold the truth back. They told me that I may have caused a man to commit suicide when I told him "I am not optimistic about your future, but you don't deserve to suffer."

I want to tell my family about the porn I've been looking at. I have been holding up the image of being innocent long enough. Deep down I am uncomfortable with my sexual attraction toward women because it reveals that my innocence is bullshit. I want to have an authentic relationship and I don't want to be fake at all.

Update I managed to open up a little more with my cousin. I told him that my sisters are talking about him behind his back. They act friendly when we visit, but it is a thin veneer. It is incongruous with how they talk about my cousin in the car. I told them about a sexual incident from when I was six, my depression from my grandpa's funeral, my suicidal thoughts, my intrusive rape fantasies, my slight sexual desire toward men, and a couple of other things. They are already complaining. They are telling me to hold back the truth from my family while claiming to be emotionally supportive as if they really care about my point of view. They cannot handle my point of view. I didn't tell them I don't believe in family values yet. I just need to be patient and methodical about which truths I let out when and to whom. Sooner or later I will tell them. I don't know how my grandma will feel if I tell her the twisted view that I am happy for her sake that her son is dead because of how he exploited her for money. This one I might actually hold back.

@UnbornTao my entire attachment to truth is fundamentally dishonest. I know that my attachment to truth hurts me, but I do it anyway. It is self serving because I think truth is what allows me to love and to be good through unconditional acceptance. Honestly I suck at unconditional acceptance because I'm filled with hate and depression. If you value truth, then even that comes from a selfish desire for truth. It's not like truth is actually valuable, but I act like it is and it matters anyway. I could rewire my entire brain to fine with self deception and bullshit myself into thinking everything is fine, but I don't want to do that. I have been against that my whole life because I want to love. The problem is that it is hard to love.

@integral to be honest, I sometimes feel like I don't belong on this planet. This can be rooted in autism. Neuro typicals don't want people with autism to be their authentic self. Part of the problem is that they are too blunt and they suck at social games.

I need a sense of belonging. I don't feel like I belong in my family. They want me to put on a fake front of being open and social while refusing to actually address serious resentment and trauma. My relationship feels hollow because they do not want me to be my authentic self. There is way too much hatred and depression that I have bottled up for 20 years. I never trusted them to raise me to be a decent human being so I didn't want to associate with them. If these issues cannot be seriously addressed, then I need to find where I belong and it is not here. I feel happy when I am alone in a hotel playing in a chess tournament. It is incredible how peaceful it is and my joy cannot be put into words. I'm almost tempted to quit my job and use the money I saved up to study chess hard-core like my life depends on it to see how far I get in 1 year.

The tragedy is that I am in desperate need of an emotional connection. I have been dissociated with my family my entire life and I can't connect to them if they don't know who I am. I am not being brutally honest yet, but a few things are slipping out here and there and they think it is too much. I told my cousin that my sisters were talking behind his back. They will probably tell me that I am in the wrong. My sisters expect me to play small talk games without addressing these serious issues. I'm trying to get accustomed to small talk. I have never been good at socializing in my life, especially when reading implicit messages. I have a habit of destroying illusions constantly while asking a lot of questions.

@Leo Gura I have basically been creating a split personality. I have a lot of cool philosophical theories, but it is partially because I was struggling to cure deep depression and hatred. I am now trying to walk the walk, knowing that love and goodness are one. It is like I'm so close yet so far. I need to mature a lot and it is painful. This is going to take time and vision. I need to face everything I have been avoiding through spirituality so that I can create integrity in my life and resolve my split personality.

@integral it's coming up again. The feeling that I hate my entire family came up. I could tell them that I have been hiding in my room for so long because I believed them to be degenerate. I am trying to form an emotional connection to others, but when I try what comes up is hatred, depression, and suicide. If I could somehow change myself without telling them, then I guess it would be fine. I'm trying to change like I always have been, but it doesn't work. The reason I don't socialize much us because I don't want others to change me or influence me. I don't trust most people to be high quality people. I have looked down on most other humans my entire life. I look down on myself as well for failing to find a higher purpose that fulfills me in life. I can never be fulfilled with any purpose if depression kills my joy. I'm opening myself up, but it is a hectic process. I'm sorry if I annoy you with the same story. My morals do not apply to today and they cause me a lot of problems. I say I hate myself a lot, but it feels more true to say I hate my family. I probably shouldn't tell them that yet.

I am contemplating how much of a man she is and how much of a woman I am. Surely I could be much stronger than i am giving myself credit for.

This is intense. I have been facing a lot of trauma lately with good progress. One of the feelings that came up for me was the notion of becoming a better dad than dad. I know this seems preposterous given my recent behavior on this forum. I am thinking long term, not immediately. So here's the thing. I have been deeply distrusting of relationships in general for most of my life. My parents were in an awful situation because my father fled the state to avoid paying child support. I have been afraid of ending up in a similar situation by opening myself up to relationships. I didn't trust myself to be a responsible human being because I was afraid that my impulses would cause me to act in horrible ways like my father. My suicidal thoughts were related to denying my desire for an emotional connection through relationships. I felt that it was impossible for me to find a happy relationship. I felt very lonely and depressed because of the feeling that no relationship could ever make me happy. I felt that other people were a bad influence on me because I never trusted my parents to teach me to be a decent human being. I isolated myself from other people because I want to be as good as possible without other people pulling me toward indecent behavior. I know in theory morality is imaginary, but this forum pointed out that I seem really attached to my morals anyway. My father lacked a moral compass because he was a gangster who held people at gun point demanding money. My harsh self judgement makes me hate myself. I know an optimal father cannot be so attached to morals. I try not to be attached to morals, but the whole reason I seek the truth so much is because in think the truth is required for being the best human possible. I will otherwise be lost in lies and illusions. Truth is about being good from my point of view. I am trying to process these newfound feelings. My worldview continues to fall apart. Any tips on this situation?

An analogous example would be a woman I met who was raised to believe that women should repress their emotions because it is a sign of weakness. There are women who believe femininity is actually toxic. It is dysfunctional. This was combined with the fact that her brother raped her, causing her ptsd.