Cognitive Dissonance, Depression, 5meodmt, And Spiritual Chaos

[Surrealist]

At 29 I find myself something like 15+ years deep into my war with major depression, anxiety, and subsequent dysfunctional patterns like addictions, inability to have relationships, obsessiveness, perfectionism, etc. Sparing you the long and gory details of my battles with these things, it's safe to say that my brain plays a lot of the dark classics, like "you are impossibly and permanently alone", "you are a failure on a fundamental level", "you do not get to feel joy", and so on. You already know the chaos and destruction that this vibration causes in life. 

 

I did a Vipassana retreat at 24, for for the first three days started to feel my angle on things shifting. I felt quite optimistic about meditation and buddhism for those days. Days 4-10 however were extremely dark and agonizing and full of twitching, angry reactivity for me. That horrible feeling that "in the end... I lose. Everyone else gets to be happy, but not me. I'm special. I'm special and dark and a wretched creature of hate and I do not get to taste heaven, ever. I am alone with my misery and there's no end." was chewing on me in a big way. I watched the thoughts and tried my best not to fight. By the very end, I actually felt very demoralized, and a little insane even. I tried to keep an optimistic view that I had gone through some painful growth and had bravely learned to face things in myself. Ever since that retreat, I became obsessive about personal development, spirituality etc, whereas I had previously been a bitter enemy of all religion. I continued to practice meditation, but continued to feel like life was a battle that I was losing, to be in a ton of pain and failing to address the root causes of pain, and to feel extremely and maddeningly STUCK in misery, confusion, addictive patterns, artist block, perfectionism, inability to date or even have friends, etc. 

 

Refusing to admit defeat to this darkness inside me, I became the self help junkie. I watched hours and hours of videos, read books, etc, on the subjects of self mastery, depression, dating, spirituality. I tried to optimize things in my life where I could. I dropped cigarettes entirely. I started working out and meditating daily. I started approaching strangers when I was out, and sometimes even making out with them, to my utter shock. I cleaned up what I ate. I regulated how often I allowed myself to use weed or alcohol. The darkness associated with my identity and my perfectionism and stuckness with my work did not budge, however. I also vowed to give up weed for 3 months, which was going to be hard. 

 

Two weeks into the weed break, I watched Leo Gura's videos on 5-meo-DMT and was very intrigued for what it might be able to do for me. As if the universe was watching me, a week later some friends told me a shaman would be coming by to administer some "toad venom". I had already used LSD and mushrooms a few times and decided to go for it, seeing as I was already so into meditation and basically desperate for my damaged ego to go away. As with vipassana, 5MEO opened up the gate into myself, and what I saw was a goddamn nightmare. I had an absolutely hellish trip, a panic attack, and awoke from it to find myself tearing at my flesh. I felt like I had failed the ultimate battle and I may never recover. What followed was one of the most depressing and confusing weeks of my life, with my mind sickeningly spinning with confused and panicky thoughts about the deepest possible questions, which had for so many years now already been my obsession. The main reason for writing this post is to illustrate the cognitive dissonance going on in my mind about spirituality, control, and happiness, which I basically just need to write down for my sanity, and because my friends and dates absolutely do not want to hear this crap anymore. 

 

I am miserable

stop focusing negatively

wait that itself is a negative thought

wait, that thought is a negative thought about a negative thought about a negative thought

ugh i'm trapped in negativity and it sucks and I hate it and reject it

oh look that's resistance to reality or god and that's the root of it

don't resist

wait, trying not to resist is a resistance against trying to resist

Ok this is a mess and it's my personal fault because I can't let go

There's nothing to let go of, reality is perfect, free will is an illusion

Is it though? It really seems like I should be able to make some good choices and turn this around

Reality doesn't feel perfect at all it feels like dog shit

All the so-called good choices I've made have deepened my misery

oh god... my future is only pain

I'm so scared to make decisions because my decisions really have caused this hell and it's my fault

No it isn't the illusion of self and separateness is the source of pain so let go

I am not a person who can let go, i am an unhappy person who is going towards more misery

this sucks, might it feel good to blow my brains out?

probably not

I need a coffee

I need sex

I don't deserve sex because I'm a miserable person who makes women miserable

Don't be a perfectionist get your needs met

Are needs of the flesh legitimate and need to be met to be happy? 

I wouldn't know because I'm incapable of getting my needs met

ugh

Oh that's the ego 

But I have god damn needs

I never could meet my needs in my life and i'm 30

i am going towards pain and despair

There's the ego thinking it controls life, it doesn't

but yes it also kind of does and it has needs and we need to meet it it's a goddamn emergency

My heart is pounding and it's uncomfortable

I NEED A COFFEE

fine

we need to quit all this stressful spiritual crap before we go crazy

we're already crazy

we've been crazy as long as we can remember

all you ever think is crazy fear garbage

just get the fucking coffee

I need to quit all this

wait no i need to double down on all this

wait no. I need to make a huge god damn list of everything I need to change. Don't let fear win!

That's resistance

Jesus christ. 

I seriously don't think I'm driving this ship. 

Coffee. 

Free will is an illusion. 

Oh my god shut up. 

[Emerald]

What beliefs did you adopt 15 years ago? Sometimes the most innocuous seeming beliefs can create so much repression that all kinds of nastiness grows in the unconscious mind. I recommend doing consciousness work slow or you may end up biting off more than you can chew, like I did eight years ago. It caused me a major dark night of the soul and it was hard for me to pick myself up out of it. Sometimes, if you open up to things all at once, all the monsters that have been growing in your subconscious can all escape and overwhelm your conscious mind. The best way to deal with them is through understanding and awareness. But it will take a while to process and reintegrate. Just try to keep in non-judgment mode in order to reintegrate them. 

[nightrider1435]

Yeah the monkey mind won't shut up, I feel you on that one. I like to remind myself that everything will be OK when the inner voice spirals into negativity, seems to work good for me. Overall, don't let the monkey mind beat you up, don't be hard on yourself, you can't control it but you don't want to fight it either. The voice says " I am miserable, I Need to doing this!, I can't be happy unless I have that...etc" just let it come and go, don't buy into that stuff.

Seek out self help information that is relative to what you currently need to work on. Work on one thing at a time, don't overwhelm yourself with to much information.

I would practice self love if your not already doing that. Leo has a good guided video for practicing self love. 

You opened the box, so I would go all the way through with it now, keep mediating and all that stuff. This is why I personally haven't taken 5 MEO yet, I already bit off more than I could chew and I'm having to deal with all that now.

[Surrealist]

@Emerald it's hard to say. I certainly had the belief that i was somehow an outsider or special in my darkness even earlier than that. I never felt like I belonged or got to enjoy the normal things. I always gravitated towards villains and monsters rather than heroes even as a child. I have a mother who was an abuse victim and never healed from serious depression and anxiety and to this day despairs of still being so twisted up, so i imagine i learned to fear and fight life from her.

Since i have been off weed and tried the 5meo I have never felt so mentally ill im my life. I feel on the verge of checking myself into a mental home some days, or going on ssris, which i cant help but see as the ultimate failure. I am spinning in so much indecision and fear that i do not have faith in even the simplest self improvement habits anymore, bc it seems that i have wound up here by being too self denying and self controlling in the first place. I feel utterly lost and ready to take drastic measures.

[Erlend K]

I understand that checking yourself into a mental home might feel like a failure, but based on the way you are describing your situation it might be the best thing to do. Testing out some antidepressants would probably be a good idea too.

Vipassana might not be the right form of meditation for you. Vipassana is not about conventional personal development or healing emotional wounds. It's ment to help you progress through a series of phenominological shifts called nanas/stages (usually defined as 16 distinct stages) eventually leading to cessation. Some of these nanas are very uncomfortable, and some can even temorarily mess with your mental health and life untill you progress past them. In theravada this is called the "dukkah nanas" = 'knowledge of/insight into suffering'. It is analogous to what christian mystics call the "Dark night of the soul". For someone suffering from mental issues this does not seem like a wise path at this point.

If you want to keep meditating I can recomend mindful self-compassion (MSC) meditation wich is more aimed at self-development/healing. Here is a meta-study going through some of the documented effects of MSC: https://chrisgermer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Germer-Neff-JCP-2013-SC-ClinPracticefinal.pdf . Some of its main conclusions are 

Quote

"With selfcompassion, instead of replacing negative feelings with positive ones, positive emotions are generated by embracing the negative ones. In fact, self-compassion is associated with numerous psychological strengths such as happiness, optimism, wisdom, curiosity and exploration, personal initiative, and emotional intelligence"

and 

Quote

Research suggests that self-compassion actually enhances motivation. For instance, self-compassion has no association with the level of performance standards adopted for the self, but it is negatively related to maladaptive perfectionism (Neff, 2003a). Self-compassionate people are less afraid of failure (Neff, Hseih, & Dejitterat, 2005), and more likely to try again when they do fail (Neely et al., 2009). Breines and Chen (2012) found that having self-compassion for personal weaknesses, failures, and past moral transgressions resulted in more motivation to change for the better, try harder to learn, and avoid repeating past mistakes. Similarly, self-compassion appears to motivate health-related behaviors such as sticking to a diet (Adams & Leary, 2007), quitting smoking (Kelly, Zuroff, Foa, & Gilbert, 2009), or starting a fitness regimen (Magnus, Kowalski, & McHugh, 2010).

This is, however no substitute for therapy and medicine. To repost something I write in an other topic, about spiritual bypassing:

"Spiritual bypassing is the use of spiritual practices and beliefs as a means to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved traumas/wounds, and developmental needs, and legitimize this avoidance by imagining that the 'noble pursuit of spiritual growth' will someday solve all our everyday, worldly problems, making it unnecessary to ever deal directly with them. A lot of spiritual practitioners fall in the trap of trying to work out their psychological/emotional issues, only through spiritual practices, as if this was somehow superior to, or  “higher” than, engaging in psychotherapy. Some even view psychotherapy as an inferior means of dealing with their stuff, and something they shouldn't do. They may feel superior to those who deal with their emotion issues in this conventional (and strongly empirically validated) way, rationalizing that dealing with their issues only through spiritual practice is "superior"/"nobler"/"higher", irespectable of the actual real-life effect it has.

By focusing too much on your spiritual practice before you to a certain degree have your shit together, spiritual practices too easily become ego traps that dosn't lead to any form of freedom, but only reinforces the “I” that wants to be a "somebody who has attained enlightenment", since you are banking all of your happiness and social/emotional development on achieving this state, you unavoidably become attached to this outcome."

[Surrealist]

@Erlend K thanks for your advice, it is appreciated. I read Dante's Inferno when I was 16 and immediately identified myself with the dark night of the soul in that book. It feels like it started then and never stopped, and evey day is another waking up lost in a dark wood, knowing things are far from ok, and with no direction to go that feels anything like a good idea. Every day brings a new epic battle in my head about "am i just sick and need to be medicated, and am resisting out of ego? Or is that medication going to make it worse? Or is it just a huge procrastination that will delay the relief i desperately desite even further, because I will know I am in a drug haze all along?" And a huge amount of contradictions clashing within me about "do i desperately need to keep working and seeking, or desperately need to stop, or desperately need to banish the thought of desperation in the first place??" Teachers, therapists, coaches, friends all tell me to go easy on myself, to give myself a break. I think they do not understand just how painfully needy I am to discover what the hell that even is. I have always hated vacation, have lost sight of what feels good and replenishing, and have really only felt the ability to let go of myself when drunk or high, and a ton of shame about my self created misery and inability to let go that just exacerbates and reinforces the hell. I am acutely aware of the totality of my behavior and thoughts being totally derived from a baseline assumption and psychological landscape of pain. I am terribly confused about confusion itself.  Hurting about pain. And really more than anything scared of fear itself, because I see clearly that it can kill me. The dramatic war that is my life is beyond tiresome. I wish i had any idea how to back off or give myself a break, because it's clear that I need it, and clear that I do not at least consciously know how to take a break, when my mind is in an almost permanent cycle of exhaustion, panic, seeking, questioning, etc. From the outside I am lying on the beach chilling. On the inside i am staring the demon that is myself in the face, aware that I am an expert self torturer, losing a battle against the devil, always strategizing and fighting.

[ajasatya]

@Surrealist hello there!

would you try to implement some of these?

 

[RossE]

@Surrealist I would advise abandoning spirituality for now, I can't see it being effective. This includes meditation. Even things like basic PD won't do much to help you. I think you need to go straight to eliminating those patterns of thinking and slowly begin to purge it all. You may have already tried this in your life but I would highly, highly suggest you go to a psychiatrist/psychologist, they can help you to really unearth all this.

I don't know your daily routine or obligations you have, but let me tell you that emotional well-being should be number 1 to you - if that means leaving your job going to a mental home, fine. If that means expensive therapy, fine. Put it first and foremost for now.

[Arkandeus]

''if you got the message, hang up the phone.'' 

I don't really see any further use for you to do psychedelics especially when you have bad trips like this. 
but don't let these bad trips make you think that you're doing bad...it simply means that psychedelics don't have their place in your life right now. 
everyone's life is unique and the circumstances too

I personally don't do them anymore, as I feel they don't serve me right now, and if they ever will again that I will see, they did help me in the past for sure. 
 

my most honest advice is that you're starting to see how the mind just keeps looping. 
you'll never attain peace with thinking thoughts, one thought will be challenged by another, which will be challenged by another...
it quite simply means that you have gained consciousness and intelligence to the point where you acutely realize that your thoughts always loop, which is why they always loop right now.
if you weren't aware of this, you'd let yourself be guided by your thoughts without much conflict, but you literally figured out the thinking mind, which is why it keeps looping. 
to see your mind is a sign that you're seeing the insanity of the thinking mind, it is a very good sign

it's time to lay down the thinking and start following your feelings more, I may even guess that is it time for your inner guide to start actively guiding you. 
the truth is spoken when no thoughts are heard. 
try to follow your instinct instead of your thoughts, try get into action without planning it, keep less track, be more spontaneous. of course meditate more, which allows you get used to a thoughtless state. 

instinct, thoughtless decision and action, is the result of the intelligence of your higher self, it is the result of cosmic intelligence, it is an intelligence beyond space and time, all-seeing, all-knowing, and never will it make you loop, or hesitate, it is instant, that's how powerful this intelligence, it is so powerfully instant it seems you did not think anything through at all while in that small space where you decide to go by instinct a million calculations are made in one split

Edited July 11, 2017 by Arkandeus

[MiracleMan]

Surrealist, I think we're the same person lol.  I'm the same age, I have very similar "self talk" and attitudes about being the dark silent type.  When I was going through school I faced rejection constantly by people I loved and trusted, this was repeated not only in my social life but in my family life as well.  I faced verbal abuse, physical abuse, and I was isolated to a windowless basement and left to my own devices.  I can't give you much advice seeing as how were kind of on an even playing field, but if you haven't looked into Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) I would check it out.  It can be very powerful combined with your meditation practice.  It's about challenging those negative thoughts and recognizing automatic negative thought patterns like you described at the beginning of your post.  The "dark classics" your brain plays can all be named and defined like catastrophizing, denying the positive, fortune telling, all or nothing thinking, etc.  You can't fight the monkey mind or reason with it, but you can challenge the truth and validity of those thoughts.  You know that "forever alone, not deserving happiness" is exaggerating and catastrophizing, because you can't possibly know it's the truth.  I would become a conasuer of truth, and don't believe the dark thoughts, just accept them and then let it go, onto the next thought.  It's just a brain, doing what brains do, and brains change every minute of the day.  If it can change for the worse, which is the loop your in now, can't it change for the better?  Negative thoughts are almost like a bully trying to beat you up, if you confront those thoughts and shine the light of truth you can essentially punch the bully right in the nose.  I would imagine your life is objectively okay, it's really an internal struggle right?  Use that to validate positivity.  I might feel like shit but God damn it my life is objectively okay and I'm okay and I will be okay.  And it's okay to feel like shit, sometimes were so focused on the bad, all you feel is shit, sitting back, breathe, let everything go, and for 1 second feel bliss, just try 1 second of relief, and start from there.  "In this moment I let it all go, I  breathe the air, I feel the sun, I love."  My mantra.

[Ry4n]

As someone who use to struggle really badly with intrusive thoughts and no longer does, I think I have some advice and tips that should apply to your situation.

First of all, try antidepressant medications (Prozac or Zoloft are good starters), I by no means suggest this as a long-term solution, but simply as a way to get you out of the negative funk.

Second, try and make contact with a good quality therapist that can help you with your issues. One qualified in Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy should help.

Also, improve your diet. Read "The UltraMind Solution" by Mark Hyman, it goes into a lot of depth about how physical health affects mental health.

Another important thing is to learn about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Read "The Happiness Trap" by Russ Harris.

Another good book! "The Mind Workout" by Mark Freeman.

Ultimately, there are a few important things to highlight that are significantly contributing to your struggle.

#1-Compulsions ("Anything you do to cope with, check on, or control anxiety, uncertainty and any other feelings you don't like"-Mark Freeman).

#2-Believing that your thoughts are the truth. ACT can help a lot with this. YOUR THOUGHTS ARE JUST STORIES!!!! OPINIONS!!!! IDEAS!!! They are not facts and they are not you. Anytime you have these thoughts, be mindful of them and simply think to yourself "thanks mind!" and notice how they are simply stories. There is no need to challenge these thoughts, as doing that is often an attempt to get rid of uncertainty, which is just another compulsion to be cut out.

#3-Not accepting uncertainty- Maybe free will is an illusion! Maybe its not! Accept that uncertainty and do what you value.

To put it simply.

Practice Cognitive Defusion over your thoughts.

Accept your internal experience (Its ok to feel depressed and anxious!)

Choose a valued direction and take action.