Destabilization Trauma

[trenton]

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.