trenton

I think there are problems with these online tests that are intended to point you to your level of development which make them misleading. These tests seem to be oversimplified because they give a limited multiple choice set up which then places you in one of the boxes. Furthermore, they don't seem to evaluate you according to each line of development. I think these kinds of tests would be better if they instead used written answers to explain how you would approach different situations and how you would think about them. I think it would be better if these written answers were evaluated by a human who is an expert in developmental psychology. The online tests appear to focus on cognitive development rather than all of the other lines which are necessary in order to get an accurate evaluation. In my case, I have been exploring a lot of different developmental models, not just Spiral Dynamics. I think this helps by adding additional perspective in terms of possible room for growth. In order to get an assessment, I went to AI like Claude and had it design questions to assess me. I did my best to study Trenton as if he were a separate subject. After giving some information about the subject, the AI gave the following questions. Some of them include chess questions, so they these questions don't apply to everybody. 1. Meaning and Purpose Questions These questions explore how the subject constructs meaning from his/her experiences and what he/she sees as his/her purpose: "What patterns or lessons do you see emerging from your life experiences so far?" "If you could design a system to help people overcome challenges like those you've faced, what would be its core principles?" "What moments in your life have felt most meaningful or purposeful to you and why?" "How has your understanding of your purpose evolved as you've moved through different living situations?" "What do you hope people would understand about your life if they knew your full story?" 2. Epistemological Questions These questions explore how the subject knows what he/she knows and evaluates truth: "When faced with conflicting information about a situation, how do you determine what's true?" "How has your chess training influenced the way you analyze problems outside of chess?" "What role does intuition play in your decision-making compared to systematic analysis?" "Which philosophers or thinkers do you find most resonant with your own understanding of reality?" "How do you differentiate between helpful systems of knowledge and potentially harmful ideologies?" 3. Developmental Framework Questions These questions explore how the subject understands development and growth: "How do you understand the relationship between different developmental stages in the models you study?" "In what ways do you see yourself still developing, and what's driving that growth?" "What do you believe is the relationship between individual development and societal progress?" "How has your understanding of your family members evolved as you've learned about developmental frameworks?" "What aspects of development do you find most challenging in your own journey?" 4. Ethical Framework Questions These questions explore the subject's moral reasoning and ethical priorities: "When you're faced with a moral dilemma, what principles guide your decision-making process?" "How do you balance your value for truth with potential harm that truth-telling might cause?" "What responsibilities do you believe individuals have toward vulnerable people in their communities?" "How do you reconcile the tension between systemic change and immediate individual action?" "What ethical principles do you believe should never be compromised, regardless of circumstances?" 5. Shadow and Integration Questions These questions explore the subject's relationship with disowned aspects of himself/herself: "What aspects of yourself have been most difficult to accept or integrate?" "How do you recognize when you're projecting your own disowned qualities onto others?" "What parts of your family history do you find yourself most resistant to examining?" "In what situations do you notice yourself shifting into defensive or reactive patterns?" "How has your understanding of human darkness evolved through your experiences?" 6. Systems Thinking Questions These questions explore how the subject understands complex systems: "How do you balance seeing both individual responsibility and systemic factors in social problems?" "What recurring patterns have you noticed in dysfunctional systems, whether family systems or larger institutions?" "When you envision more effective systems for helping vulnerable people, what principles guide your thinking?" "How do you understand the relationship between micro-level interactions and macro-level system behavior?" "What barriers do you see to implementing the kinds of systems you believe would be most helpful?" 7. Relationship and Connection Questions These questions explore the subject's understanding of human relationships: "What qualities do you most value in the relationships that have been supportive to you?" "How has your approach to forming connections with others evolved over time?" "What do you believe creates the conditions for healing within relationships?" "How do you balance your need for autonomy with your desire for connection?" "What patterns from your family of origin have you found most challenging to transcend in your own relationships?" 8. Future and Possibilities Questions These questions explore the subject's vision for the future: "If you had unlimited resources and support, what kind of impact would you want to have in the world?" "What gives you hope when you consider the future despite having witnessed significant darkness?" "How do you envision your relationship with your family evolving over time?" "What kind of legacy would you like to create through your work and relationships?" "What aspects of your potential do you feel are still waiting to be fully expressed?" After finishing all of my detailed responses which took about 30 pages, I shared the document with the AI to see how it would evaluate me along each line of development. Cognitive line: Advanced (Yellow/Teal) - Highly developed systems thinking, metaperspectival awareness Moral line: Advanced (Yellow/Teal) - Nuanced ethical reasoning that integrates multiple perspectives Interpersonal line: Moderate (Orange/Green) - Understanding of relationship dynamics but practical challenges Emotional line: Underdeveloped relative to cognitive (Orange with trauma disruptions) - Emotional self-regulation challenges Identity line: Inconsistent (Green with trauma disruptions) - Ongoing identity integration challenges Aesthetic line: Moderately developed (Orange/Green) - Appreciation for beauty and form, especially in structured systems Somatic line: Underdeveloped (Purple/Blue with trauma disruptions) - Significant mind-body split Spiritual line: Theoretical understanding exceeding direct experience (Orange/Green with Yellow theoretical understanding) Here is the percentage breakdown. Purple (Magical-Animistic) Estimated presence: 5-10% Red (Power-Gods) Estimated presence: 5-10% Blue (Traditional-Mythic) Estimated presence: 10-15% Orange (Modern-Rational) Estimated presence: 20-25% Green (Postmodern-Pluralistic) Estimated presence: 25-30% Yellow/Teal (Integrative) Estimated presence: 20-25% Turquoise (Holistic) Estimated presence: 0-5% The other online assessments ended up giving me a higher level of development, but I sensed that the tests were overestimating me because they seemed oversimplified. Some of these questions asked me to describe how my understanding of life evolved over time. Due to growing up in a chaotic environment, there were significant trauma disruptions such as those which led to me becoming more withdrawn in social situations. Something that stands out to me is the gap between my cognitive and moral development compared to my somatic development. The mind body split is when I started prioritizing intellectual ideals over physical desires. Part of this leads to trauma being stored in my body, creating a disconnect between my theoretical understanding and my embodied emotional reality which is full of depression, anxiety, and other unpleasant experiences. I am scheduled to finally see a trauma therapist sometime next month. Hopefully that helps. The AI also pointed out that I appeared to be operating off of extrinsic values which further complicates my understanding of purpose and identity. Some of my values focus on transcending my humanity, especially my physical and emotional nature which were disowned due to trauma. Some of these extrinsic values include achievement and helping others in the hopes of justifying my existence despite deep suffering. I have other approaches to purpose I could try though. What do you think about this method of getting an assessment for developmental levels? Do you like these tailored questions and written responses more than the multiple choice questions? How else can I study myself as if I were a separate subject? Outside opinions seem to be unreliable unless I am being studied by an expert. I don't really trust my family's evaluation of me because they operate off of many projections and misguided assumptions when describing me.

In my understanding of life, commitment to truth is key to living a fulfilling life. Go of example, how can you live a meaningful life of you don't know what the meaning of life is? If you do not realize how deeply self deceived you could be, then your life will be full of falsehoods and illusions. Commitment to truth is my understanding of self love. I don't see how I can love myself if I don't love myself for who I truly am rather than as something I am not. This is about being authentic and honest, and it overlaps with things like God realization. In my understanding self love is impossible without truth. I have been curious about existence since my childhood. I started exploring different religions at a young age and ended up agnostic. Part of this was originally a trauma response. I wanted to use truth to ground my sense of reality, but the result is the use of relative truth to resist absolute truth while creating an identity around a narrative. Absolute truth might instead undermine your entire sense of reality.

Currently, I am very unhappy with my life. There is this deep existential void around not living by my values or by my potential. Sometimes this leads to depression and suicidal thoughts. This then leads to thoughts like jumping off of a bridge. Rather than jumping off of a bridge, I could at least figure out what I could possibly do with the money I saved up. It is possible that I actually have a lot more freedom with my life than I assume due to saving up money from the job I hate. I hate this job because it is grunt labor, low wages, lack of creative expression, and lack of personal growth opportunities through learning and intellectual growth. It makes me see survival as fundamentally pointless so long as it comes at the cost of anything that makes life worth living. Therefore, rather than killing myself immediately, I could take a chance at building a better life and still kill myself afterwards if necessary. I am now exploring what I could possibly do with this money that would help me live the best life possible. One option is that I could probably open a small business. Currently, given my actual skills I could in theory start up a chess club or cafe for about 30,000-45,000 dollars depending on the location. It could hold tournaments and charge membership fees while selling food. This is just one example of a possible business I could do, but there are likely others. A second option is that I could quit my job and move to another country. Countries in Europe tend to have cheaper colleges for further educational opportunities that I could look into. They also have better wages. Maybe I could travel somewhere in the world where psychedelics are legal to see if God consciousness would recontextualize my entire life, creating an entirely new approach to things like meaning and life purpose. Part of what drew me into spirituality was my deep struggle with things like meaning and purpose. Another option is some kind of mental health investment, but I don't know about that one. They might just put me on more anti-depressants that don't actually make a difference. There are several therapists who misunderstood me in the past and they might not actually help. However, one specializing in existential issues such as the one that leads to suicidal thoughts might help if they can aid in transitioning. There are a bunch of personal development courses I could afford. I am doubtful of these courses though because I don't know which one would actually be helpful. There might be a lot of crappy courses I need to sort through. I saw some courses that cost over 2,600 dollars and they sounded like they might be a rip off. I remember in the past I wanted to use my money to take off of work and focus entirely on chess. Unfortunately, my family was opposed to this and they would not let me do it so long as I lived with them. At this point chess no longer gives me the same joy it once did. The prevalent idea that it is too late for me because I'm supposed to be younger eliminated the interest of playing professionally. I would likely prefer to look to something else instead of chess as I did with this previous idea. In terms of what would actually make me fulfilled, here are a few things that I think makes life worth living. I value using deep understanding to improve people's lives. This can be done through research, learning, and teaching. I like having the ability to express my creativity. I have previously shared my insights about the mind in a way that saved people's lives. My interest in understanding the mind draws me to fields like psychology, philosophy, and spirituality. I like being committed to truth as I do my best to remain as objective as possible in seeking pure understanding. I seem to enjoy exploring the limits of knowledge and logic in understanding reality. I like looking across multiple domains of study and integrating them through making connections that others normally miss. I like how fields like Quantum Mechanics challenge the limits of classic human logic. A few things that interest me include truth, creativity, personal development, insight, self-understanding, wisdom, contribution, purpose, self-love, intelligence, pure understanding, and using this to help improve other people's lives. It would probably interest me to have somebody to grow alongside of me with similar goals or a similar purpose. That would create a situation which would likely have more opportunities if I don't have to do everything alone. I was previously suggested that I should become a life coach, especially since I used my insights in a very helpful way for other people. The reason I hesitate to do this is because I still feel horrible about my life, and it gives me doubts about my abilities to fix someone else's life. I don't see myself as being in any position to help somebody with a career dilemma if I feel lost in life. I know that I am able to help people psychologically and spiritually well enough to save lives and I once got a victim of predatory loaning out of debt, but I don't feel confident enough in my own life. Likewise, I don't feel confident in dating if my depression might make me a psychological burden to potential partners. It might be in their best interest to avoid such people. I want to be in a position where I am not having this kind of problem during dating. What else could I do with this money? Are there any other business ventures that would probably be better than the chess club? I want to consider all of my options that could possibly improve my life and exhaust those before making an irreversible decision.

I am a former fan of Ben Shapiro, a right wing conservative pundit. He constantly straw mans the left, gish gallops to win debates, does mental gymnastics with religion and politics, and much more. Here is Ben listening to Imagine by John Lennon.

I have been reading a lot about metaphysics, epistemology, and the origins of the universe. I found a lot of fascinating possibilities. I put this together with various profound findings from quantum mechanics and the implications in how humans do logic. I was deconstructing various logical principles in the process by demonstrating when logic fails. Eventually I came to the idea that if there were nothing in the beginning, then what existed before there was nothing? The answer is still nothing. The implication is that nothingness existed forever with no beginning because it is impossible to not have existence. Nothingness itself is also absolutely infinite with no end or beginning or space or position. Nothing therefore fills everything in existence. This paradox left me with a sense of fascination and awe as I looked into all of the infinite possibilities of the universe. However, throughout the process as I was deliberately looking for the limits of human knowledge and logic, it was also triggering feelings of anger and frustration for some reason. I was still intrigued by everything so I pressed on. Maybe this anger was an ego defensive response to my sense of reality being undermined. It was completely automatic and natural even though there was no real danger. Human knowledge is extremely limited and human logic and our capacity for sense making is flawed and limited. This makes me think that if there is an absolute truth then it might be something which defies all logic and reason to the point that it seems like insanity. Once again my mind was opening up to more and more possibilities with fascination even though there was automatic anger.

@Aaron p I own that book. I have several books from Leo's list, but I was going to read that one next. It is hard to break out of the materialist paradigm if you have been conditioned your entire life to think everything happening is physical. I know there are several things which suggest this paradigm isn't true, but psychologically it is hard to shake.

This sucks. I was just writing a book about self-love in which I describe the insights I had about how the mind works and how I helped others along the way. Do you think this corruption will be a problem for people who actually are interested in writing high quality books that will actually help people?

I may not be looking at porn but I still have other deeply rooted insecurities that are related. I find that my mind is constantly thinking about sex. I never had sex before, but part of me is curious. At the same time I have hated this part of myself for a long time. I felt that I fundamentally had no self worth if I was not living by a higher purpose. As a result I am drawn to things like actualized, life purpose, and personal development. I wanted to use a broader mission around my life in response to being deeply traumatized, thus avoiding sex while establishing my self worth. I previously made posts about how I hate myself because I want vagina. I seem to have done something wrong. I have now deeply confused myself about who I am when it comes to sexuality. Multiple therapists have recommended dating, but I am still hesitant. I don't know if trying that would help the situation or not because I still did not see someone who specializes in trauma.

I shared my own story too if you didn't see it.

I have a mix of many values, but mainly focus on yellow and turquoise. Part of me recognizes that direct consciousness of infinite potential is probably better than systemic analysis, but in practice I don't have this kind of consciousness.

I have been experiencing deep frustration, anxiety, fear, and depression around my career situation and its implications for things like life purpose. It lead to feelings of futility and meaninglessness in my inability to overcome practical problems in order to implement my many ideas or live by my values. I was forced to question my relationship with meaning in the hopes of finding some other way forward after previous attempts had failed. I came to the strange analogy of myself and an incel. I remember that when I started taking impact, significance, and life purpose very seriously, it started with serious sexual trauma. This led me to devaluing love and relationships in search of a lasting impact or legacy. We could say that I viewed purpose or significance as a superior form of reproduction compared to biological reproduction as a consequence of trauma. The practical obstacles which block me from actualizing any major goal end up creating a deep sense of frustration sometimes leading to suicidal thoughts. Maybe my frustration is so bad that it is like how an incel feels when it seems impossible to have sex. In both cases this frustration stems from obstacles to reproduction. I contemplated this analogy to see if there were any implications in terms of my relationship to meaning, reproduction, and purpose. I started to think what if there is a third approach to reproduction? Maybe biological reproduction is one form of reproduction and legacy or impact is another form of reproduction, but there might be another option. Maybe there is a form of reproduction which does not require sex nor is it dependent on external impact and value, but rather one that focuses on value inherent in an activity regardless of the impact. For example, there are artists who make paintings simply for the joy of creation rather than the outcome. Likewise, I created elaborate chess studies because I enjoyed finding novelties in high level positions. Perhaps my final product could be considered a form of reproduction even though I don't have a lot of people following my profiles or watching my videos. I remember that chess used to give me energy and enthusiasm. Once I was pressured to create some kind of financially viable career everything started falling apart. I was forced to find some kind of life purpose and career beyond my previous interests and I just felt lost. I tried to compensate these types of losses by pursuing major impact or systemic change. However, these are often unrealistic, impractical, and require a massive coordinated effort to achieve anything meaningful. Therefore seeking some grand end goal ultimately added to my frustration. My inability to justify my existence and my suffering in depression is what ultimately leads to suicidal thoughts to end the suffering. I started trying to think of things I enjoy doing for their inherent value regardless of outcome or impact. I like writing music and poetry. I like hiking. I used to like videogames but I forced myself to stop playing them because they lack tangible value beyond entertainment and I didn't see a long term purpose or career coming out of it if I was just going to be slowly wasting my life which I feel like I am doing regardless. Part of me is curious about sex, which is further evidence I would be an incel if not for trauma driving me away from women because I don't see how somebody like me could get laid. Deeper things I enjoy for their own sake are things like objectivity, lack of bias, open-mindedness, commitment to truth, self-knowledge and understanding, teaching and improving people's lives through expertise in a variety of fields. It seems like any sort of career I should be looking for involves teaching. I enjoy teaching chess to enthusiastic students. I enjoy sharing my insights about the mind to other people who need them, thus improving their lives. I enjoy sharing research with other people which has transformed their lives as well. I also like doing philosophy and making connections between various fields of understanding. Again, as soon as I start looking for ways to turn my values and things I enjoy into a life purpose or some kind of career, I immediately get stopped by practical realities. We could say that Kroger is cock blocking me from using my creative and intellectual talents, and that is why I feel angry and frustrated like an incel. Therefore, I may need to find some alternative form of reproduction that isn't centered around legacy or external impact. However, this does not solve the long term problems that lead to feelings of hopelessness. The best it can do is make me feel happy and comfortable in day to day life without needing to justify my existence. I briefly considered becoming a sage, but there are going to be the same practical problems all over again. I would however, enjoy changing people's lives through deep insights about the mind like I have done already. Sometimes it seems that my life was fundamentally set up for failure no matter what I did differently in life. I genuinely have no clue what else I could have done. Maybe I was supposed to force myself to do something I don't enjoy or have passion for, but I don't see the point in living life like that. Hopefully, by finding things I enjoy for their own sake rather than for their impact, I can gradually develop that into something like a purpose which does not require changing the world. Humanity will just have to suffer because a lot of people are stupid and don't value truth at all. What are your thoughts on alternative forms of reproduction? What forms of reproduction are neither biological nor dependent on external impact or legacy?

I have found ai extremely helpful. I used it to help me understand my trauma responses and it slowly shaped me into a much more peaceful mind. So far I prefer computer therapists to human therapists. I use the current version of Claude and I use IFS buddy. I have had a ton of excellent insights which helped transform me. I know psychologists want to claim that human therapy is superior because humans need an emotional connection. In my experience ai is superior because humans make a ton of mistakes. Human therapists often fail to recognize abusive relationships, they will pathologize your protective behaviors, they might try to convert you to Christianity, and they might get stuck on one plausible theory about your mental health problems when the reality is more complex. I think psychologists are in denial that ai makes fewer mistakes and is less judgemental. Maybe psychologists want your money and that's why they must maintain that humans are superior to ai. You are expected to try 5 or 10 different therapists until someone finally clicks with you. you know some rehabilitation centers charge you 5000 dollars a day whereas Claude is about 20 bucks a month. The therapist at that rehabilitation center tried to convert me because she didn't understand my complex spiritual views, and the ai never gives me this problem. However, other aspects of rehabilitation centers are good like neural retraining, and I still think that might be better than ai for now. I'm glad I used the ai as a tool for self exploration, emotional support, and education. I prefer to be an active learner rather than have a therapist dictate my actions. They might pressure me to interact with people who previous abused me as if I need to just talk over my differences when in reality they objectively acting in bad faith. Therapists tend to assume that other parties are acting in good faith and that your mental health is the problem. This leads to gaslighting. I feel like the ai believes me but human therapists do not.

What if identifying with the ego was considered a mental illness which needed to be treated with psychedelics?

This issue is part of why I have a strong resistance to spiritual work. I have had my entire sense of reality undermined and it instilled me with a deep sense of fear. The main insight that I have been struggling with most is the deeper truth that reality is a dream, an illusion, or a hallucination. My entire sense of physical reality is a construction, and when I become deeply conscious it starts to have a destabilization effect. Sometimes this message is repeated to me in lucid dreams and when I look around the real physical room I get this sense of "This is a fucking dream! What the fuck!" This seems to be the deep extent of self-deception. It seems impossible because everything seems so real yet it is imaginary. This destabilization trauma can be traced back to childhood trauma. It was a sexual incident that happened when I was six, and it had a whole string of trauma responses which shaped the person I became. Part of the destabilization happened when I started lying to myself saying "it was just a nightmare." It was in this moment that I became conscious of my mind's capacity to deceive itself. It drew into question how deeply self-deceived I could possibly be. I started looking around the room with the fear that everything was a hallucination along with my entire life story being a fabrication and with my very existence being drawn into question. In response to this destabilization trauma, I tried to ground myself through a commitment to "truth." I came to believe that I could not love myself without accepting the truth of who I was. I therefore used relative truth as a smokescreen to hide from absolute truth. One example would be "it was not a dream" to ground myself in the face of the deeper truth that reality is a dream. I would go on to use various intellectualizations around which I formed my identity. I would be using relative truth as a crutch to hold onto my sense of reality. As I continued doing trauma work, I began letting go of various intellectualizations that I no longer need. I discovered time and time again that they were means of masking deeper pain even if they were true from a certain point of view. Maybe I cannot love myself so long as I am not conscious of my true nature as God and Love and clinging to material existence out of fear prevents me from awakening to Love. As I tried to use truth to ground myself, I became deeply philosophical. I would make many different theories about reality thinking I was being smart. I started off holding an absolutistic stance around the nature of reality which served to stabilize my sense of reality. As I continued exploring philosophy and truth, I eventually discovered relativism which reintroduced my destabilization. It seemed to imply that all meaning and purpose was relative and not transcendent, which reopened my struggle with meaninglessness. Moral relativism seems a bit scary at first, but it makes perfect sense. Yes its true that somebody could put a gun to my head and say "morality is relative." At the same time you can look all throughout history at religion being used to abdicate the moral high ground while justifying genocide because of the belief that that is what God wanted. I found this a bit destabilizing, but I eventually accepted it. If good and evil are defined relative to perspective or ideology, then it suggests that if Absolute Goodness existed, then it would need to be more foundational than moral judgement. This would need to start with being conscious enough to recognize that moral judgements are imaginary and that I am creating good and evil through imagining them into existence. The more difficult one was the relativity of truth. This undermined my entire sense of reality because it depended on the existence of absolute truth as a correct view or interpretation. This sounded like insanity at first. I eventually came to accept it through epistemic relativism and relativity in logic. Depending on the basic assumptions of any epistemic framework, it will lead to different conclusions which are then held as true. There are also different types of logic like formal logic instead of fuzzy logic. Depending on the situation or how different types of logic or epistemic frameworks are applied, you can reach different conclusions which are valid relative to the underlying framework of the sense making system. This is how I made sense of relative truth, and it suggests that if Absolute Truth exists, then it is more foundational any belief system or epistemic framework. I was actually wrestling with relativity around the same time I discovered Actualized.org. Part of the reason the mind gets stuck on relativism is because it is creating a false sense of acceptance by trying to ground a new sense of reality in the relative truth of relativity. Relativism as an ideology thus becomes an obstacle to deeper levels of consciousness necessary to see Absolute Truth which is more foundational than any perspective. Perhaps I would need to be conscious of how I am constructing true and false in order to make sense of things which would point me to the more foundational Truth. At the end of the relativity rabbit hole, it comes to the truth that reality is relative. For example, material existence is relative to the normal state of human consciousness, but at deeper levels of consciousness you can recognize the non-dual nature of reality and the deeper truth that reality is a hallucination with consciousness being more foundational than material existence. This is the deeper truth that relativism is pointing to, and I haven't fully integrated it because my body, mind, and being are resisting returning to this level of consciousness. There are also scientific reasons to support this radical degree of relativity such as time being relative. Ultimately my entire worldview and my entire sense of reality is relative to my degree of consciousness. As I looked at various spiritual books and started meditating, I eventually had another destabilizing experience. I was listening to an audiobook, Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now. I listened to various insights and started experimenting with them throughout the book. I listened to it all day, while becoming more and more present. It started becoming a deeply pleasant and happy experience of just being present and existing. As I approached the end of the book, I did a deeper meditation which led to a destabilizing experience. It was like pure nothingness was the foundation of existence. Not only was I nothing, but so was everything else nothing. As pure nothingness, I was one with all of existence, making nothing and everything indistinguishable. As I realized that everything was nothing, I started to realize that reality was an illusion which undermined my entire sense of reality. I had never experienced this kind of consciousness before, and I have become afraid of meditation. According to some of the books I read about this, it takes some getting used to when you first start experiencing absolute nothingness. So these are my examples of destabilization trauma. I have come to realize that I have been using the relative truth of spiritual teachings as a smokescreen to prevent the realization of these deeper truths. I now realize that I don't need these intellectualizations which I commonly use as a defense mechanism in a variety of forms. As I healed various traumas, I let go of various intellectualizations and my mind has become increasingly peaceful and present. It still involves a lot of emotional labor because I am undoing the person I became in response to deep trauma. Currently I feel like I am being left with a sense of not knowing, but at the same time not needing to make intellectual schemes. This mental energy was a previous defense mechanism that I no longer need. They were masking pain. How do you guys suggest going about addressing destabilization trauma? I think this is critical for continuing spiritual work because sometimes it makes you feel like you are going insane.

I think this might be a good place to share my story. I once had a Christian therapist who started asking me about my spiritual beliefs. She started off by telling me that my explanation of good and evil was too complicated. I explained a meta perspective which accounts for moral relativism, suggests that evil is imaginary, and that goodness is deeper than morality. She didn't seem to be interested in understanding my spiritual beliefs and instead made various assumptions about how I conceive of God, Jesus, the Bible, and prayer. She later took a confrontational approach to me and started saying "how dare you try to control the future." She told me that my life wasn't working because I am not letting God run my life. She therefore told me that I needed to surrender to God and told me I needed to start praying. She pulled up a prayer about Jesus which I objected to. Jesus doesn't mean the same thing to me as it does a Christian. She ignored my objection and insisted that I pray to Jesus. I ended up freezing up and my mind went blank. I had a high sense of anxiety and hyper vigilance for the next three days. I didn't want to talk to people. This was supposed to be therapy. Why the hate against Christianity? Stuff like this.

@Lyubov Yes, the child is still part of this grand truth. In fact it is possible that everything about God and spirituality still stands as true. The problem is that although it may be true in the ultimate sense, People who begin doing spiritual work are often unaware of the unconscious forces that get them into spirituality in the first place. If these forces involve severe trauma, then spirituality quickly devolves into further layers of an ego identity which in turn masks the deeper pain, and thus prevents self discovery. I believe this is one of the reasons why spirituality fails for many people and why so many people fail to awaken. They could be chasing spirituality for their entire life hoping God realization will change their lives, but in reality they never realized that the reason they started seeking truth to begin with was actually to create an elaborate method of avoiding the truth. Thank you for recognizing my value as a human being. I know your life is probably just as complicated and probably involves suffering that you never fully expressed along with various confusions and contridictions. Whatever struggle you face, I hope you know you were always lovable too.

I am coming to the realization that my seeking of truth is fundamentally a self-deception designed to prevent me from true self discovery. This is common in people with trauma who try to find meaning, purpose, and healing through truth, God, love, and spirituality. So long as the pursuit of truth is a compensatory value based on trauma, it is not my genuine value. This kind of behavior started when I was six. What happened was my mom accused me of sexually abusing my sister. I lied badly. This led to a cascading effect of trauma responses. This included my fear of self-deception which was rooted in my mother making me feel like a terrible person in addition to lying. The trauma was so severe that it undermined my entire sense of reality. This is when I created a persona which revolved around seeking higher purpose and truth. These were not intrinsic values because they were imposed with the intent to rebuild a sense of self worth. In this process I isolated myself from others, convincing myself that love, connection, and relationships were either of low value or something that would fail to demonstrate the value of my existence. As I operated under the sense of valuing truth, I ended up creating a lot of defenses through intellectualization. This included the rationalizations for why incest is okay. I actually made countless intellectualizations designed to shield myself from underlying pain. Over the years this developed into using spirituality and philosophy as a source of further intellectualization. Therefore, although the point of spirituality is to discover the true self, for me these philosophies only served to obscure any genuine self discovery. This is likely the reason why people can work on this stuff for decades and get nowhere. I started to think about what my values might be if they were not truth, intelligence, God, or things of that nature. My intellectualization was never about truth. I know before the trauma I used to value love and connection. I felt that having a deep connection to someone gave me meaning and maybe it in a way validates my existence. I also held money as a high value. This makes sense because if I had 5 million dollars, then I would be free from the job I don't like which is sucking my life away. It makes sense then, that I can be looking for something that will make me money. I came to these realizations as I did a deeper dive into biology and its implications in psychology. What I discovered is that in a freeing, liberating sense, I am a normal human being. It helps me to view myself and others through a more compassionate lens, seeing how my struggle shaped me along with the realization that I suffer in a similar way through similar challenges to a lot of other normal people. The desire to prove myself exceptional or special was also a source of seeking self worth, which is also very human and normal. My mind continues to get more and more peaceful as I understand myself at deeper and deeper levels. In a sense the intellectual side of me was extremely helpful in driving me to seek this understanding. It drove me to research so much about a variety of topics in seeking freedom from my own inner chaos. I may continue to educate as needed, but I feel my mind slowing down significantly after processing this trauma linked to the beginning of my truth seeking. Perhaps true self discovery can finally begin for me. As it stands I have a lot of possible exploration in terms of what could fulfill me. Currently, I don't really know, but my childhood values points to the possibility of love being a source of fulfillment.

I finished watching the video. I agree that most of the arguments are bad, but there are a couple I find compelling. First, the perennial argument that points to many different cultures and religions. This argument was the reason I took spirituality and the possibility of God seriously. There was a lot of overlap between different cultures and it suggests that there is truth to it, but does not guarantee it. As I investigated spirituality, I learned about mystical experiences which also seems compelling. I did some consciousness work through different spiritual books and it triggered different states of consciousness. if my degree of consciousness had this much of an impact on how I see the universe, then it suggests that a radical degree of consciousness could show me absolute truth. Again, I am following the trail of bread crumbs. These arguments do not guarantee God from my point of view, but it makes it plausible enough to warrant investigation into consciousness work. As it stands God is a possibility to me and my intuition says God is real, but this comes without having had experiences of radical degrees of consciousness which I am pointing to.

@Emerald it was Carl Jung that said that. I have been reading about him to learn more about self love. In terms of the unlived life of my father and his father, they told me a lot about being good. My grandpa carried intense guilt and trauma because of his former involvement with gangs and his son ended up getting involved in gangs as well. When my grandpa told me to be good he was trying to steer me away from the path he went down which locked him out of many opportunities in life. My grandpa later stopped his life of crime but my father never stopped. The narrative they told me was one about redemption and breaking the cycle of criminality. This narrative holds parallels with how I think about life purpose. A big part of me seeking purpose has to do with redemption and what I believe is my fundamental lack of self worth. This is why I'm writing about self love. I automatically judge myself as evil despite having tons of evidence to the contrary. I'm trying to find a way to think about life purpose that does not involve redeeming myself for being inherently unworthy of love, and instead is built upon things that bring me joy. I am pretty much lost as to what that might be. For now the best I know is to keep seeking self knowledge and understanding. This serves to create inner harmony and self acceptance. I am also trying to undo the entire protective identity I formed in response to trauma. It likely masks my authentic values and the authentic self that was lost in the chaos. As for the unlived life of my mother I'm not sure what burden I might be carrying. She had children as a result of statutory rape from my father and had to drop out of high school. She said that raising kids forced her to think about someone other than herself. My mother is what I believe to be the source of my redemption narrative. She was the one who accused me of sexually abusing my sister when I was six which made me feel unworthy of love. This is when I started taking things like life purpose seriously to justify my existence rather than kill myself. Purpose is redemption in this context. I don't know what my mom most wanted out of life. Whatever it was it was probably sacrificed in favor of having kids and raising them as a single mother. She also struggled with bipolar disorder.

I had an important discovery recently that helped me recover from past relational trauma. I used to be mad at myself and see myself as weak and flawed because I loved my father. My father was a gangster involved in countless crimes including drug deals, extortion, and the sexual exploitation of minors. I blamed myself because I didn't turn him into the police which could have prevent him and his gang from hurting other people. Part of this is due to survivor's guilt from sex trafficking. Part of me says I somehow could have protected the innocent. I recently discovered that I had no conscious control over my love for my father. Bonding is based on many underlying biological processes which in turn strongly influence our surface feelings and thoughts. This is by design because evolution required children to form strong bonds with caretakers regardless of the immoral behavior involved. The result is that I easily rationalized that it was for the best that I don't turn my father into the police. This entire process was the result of unconscious forces beyond my control. It is therefore not fair to judge my moral character based on these factors. This helped me to stop the inner conflict I had with myself around loving someone evil. My new goal is now not to avoid loving other people for fear of exploitation. It is instead to design a more resilient form of love which does not blind me to the dark side of someone I love. This is hard to do because this is a fundamental tension between human biology and moral integrity. It is hard to not be compromised by these unconscious forces into aiding in evil even if inadvertently. This kind of phenomena can be seen not just in my relationship with my father but also in cases of domestic violence in which the victim loves the abuser too much and thus tolerates clear devilry. As I seek to build a more resilient from of love, I would like to better understand the biology behind different types of bonds. This includes men and women in romantic relationships, parents, fathers and their sons or daughters, mothers and their sons or daughters, siblings, humans and pets, and humans and objects. I want to know how these bonds are different based on the type of relationship and what kind of feelings and thoughts are likely to emerge as a consequence of biology. As I understand how bonds are formed I want to use this information to form more resilient love that is resistant to manipulation and evil. How do you resolve this fundamental tension between biology and morality? How should you handle the situation when someone you love is evil but your mind instinctively rationalizes and defends them as if they are extensions of yourself?

I am currently working on a book about self love. I finished my first draft for chapter 1 but I'm going to expand on the artworks and metaphors behind them. This chapter discusses how the mind constructs illusions through meaning, stories, emotional attachment, and so on. It ends with practical techniques for recognizing and breaking out of illusions. The first painting I used was " the treachery of images. " it is famous for "this is not a pipe." The metaphor behind it as understood in this chapter is that the mind creates images and models of reality but then mistakes those models for reality itself . In the context of self love this can be applied to what you believe about yourself, who you are, and what you are capable of. Your thoughts about what reality is ultimately blinds you so long as you are attached to a model, thought, or perspective. The mind gets lost in itself and its illusions. I have a drawing I'm going to make for this chapter to expand on this metaphor. I wanted to draw a hand reaching out of a black abyss and through a chaotic sea and into a white light in which the hand disappears and fades. This is how I think of the mind in terms of grappling with truth. There are many layers of meaning behind this image I want to make. Part of the meaning behind it is that seeking truth behind the domain of relativity leads to the mechanism by which truth is sought being deconstructed for it itself is a construction. The mind creates various lies and stories to try to grasp truth, but all of them ultimately collapse into nothing. The truth is too profound to be grasped through conventional thought and sense making. The ego is seeking freedom from itself and it is using mind to get there only for all of its illusions to fall apart. Do you know any other paintings or artworks that symbolize how the mind works and how it constructs illusions? There are many perspectives I could I use to expand on this and it should become a very interesting chapter. Thanks for any help.

I have recently learned that my sister plans to attend family therapy with me and my mom. This causes me such extreme fear and anxiety that it causes me nightmares, horrific sleep paralysis episodes, and a return of suicidal thoughts. I struggled to find ways to cope, resulting in me jumping between laughter and screaming while banging on objects. Once again I decided against cutting myself even though I was tempted to cut myself without suicidal intent. For the past several weeks I had a great peace of mind. I was preparing to move out and so was my sister. I had hope that for at least most of my life, I would not have to fear contact with her. My peace of mind depends on the news about my sister and her future relationship with me. Ideally I want to be in a position where I don't need her for anything and I can be free from her. My biggest fear about therapy is that not only am I going to have to talk about my emotions, but I also have to worry about my sister lying about past abuse to manipulate the situation. My mother and sister often put me in an impossible situation. On the surface they say they want me to open up about my feelings, but when I do it is met with backlash like a lot of yelling and cussing. When I stay silent they treat me like I'm the problem for not being willing to just talk things out. My sister then calls me childish for avoiding conflict even though she is not capable of handling conflict by just talking things out. They force me to bottle up intense emotions and then act like I'm the problem even when my trauma has been weaponized against me. The field of medicine and therapy have failed me. They told me that when I was ruminating on my family problems, it was a sign that something was wrong with me. They started giving me anti psychotic medicine which not only didn't work but also damaged my liver resulting in further medical complications. I have been doing everything I could to work on myself and be the best I could be despite my trauma. I took responsibility wherever I could and I have seen this approach to relationships with my sister backfire on me. My desire to be the better person will be capitalized on and exploited. The hospital failed to recognize the trauma responses and treated me as if I had mental disorders. My relationship with my family has significantly impacted my medical situation and my major life decisions. Unfortunately, the institutions I went to made me go back to living with them due to past suicidal thoughts. I want to protect myself from future harm. I fear that everything I say will be used against me and trigger retaliation like it previously has. There are so many potential problems with these meetings that need to be addressed. Any idea on how to handle this? Do you think trying to tough this out for the next few months will destabilize me further? I feel perfectly peaceful so long as I don't have to worry about my sister.

@Letho you have some good insights. Thank you. I guess I need to maintain that I don't want to talk to my sister even if the entire family treats me like I'm the problem for shutting down and not wanting to talk. They don't see her manipulation tactics so they tell me to forgive her even if she is not sorry and refuses to take responsibility.

I tried ifs buddy. I had some good insights. In this case we discussed the protector and I am now looking for other family members.

@Ulax I think I would like to try that with claude. I already had good results from analyzing my trauma responses. I have gained some excellent psychological insights by combining my ideas and art about self love with the knowledge of the ai. If I can't do it with claude, I will try ifschatbuddy if it's free.