You may be wondering how I’ve come to know so much about the development of my own mental illness. Today I’ll briefly talk about my journey of discovery which has brought me to the level of understanding I have today about my mental illness and mental health issues generally.
This journey of discovery and research, which I refer to as my ‘mental health self assessment’, began innocently enough twelve years ago when I finally realised how poor my level of output had been over a long period of time. I could clearly see how little I was getting done each day in both my business and personal lives.
For years I just put it down to being a little slow, or to being a bit of a perfectionist – nothing more than that. And for years before that I didn’t even realise I was doing it.
There were a couple of large projects I was trying to complete and I knew they were not going to get finished if I continued to perform at such a low level of efficiency. There were no obvious causes for the problem with my workplace well set up and my IT processes sound.
So I asked the question “Why is this always happening?” I knew something was causing my poor level of output but I honestly had no idea what it was. And I hadn’t considered that mental health issues may be behind it. After all, I was only at the stage of asking the question, and I hadn’t thought beyond that. I really was clueless.
Naively I thought it would only take me three months or so to find the problem and to implement a solution!
As it turned out, finding the specific problem was a long and difficult process. In hindsight, some of the discoveries may seem relatively obvious, but the reality is that, when you start more or less from scratch, there are so many different potential reasons with so many different potential fixes at so many different levels of detail, that the whole process is fraught with false leads. I needed to investigate all of them, and that took time.
And that’s one area where you can probably learn from me if you decide to do your own self assessment, because I can now say with great clarity what the real causes were – for me at the very least. So potentially you may save a lot of time!
I’ve also learnt that taking remedial action to greatly improve our mental health does not mean that we need to know every specific detail of the origins of our own mental health issues. However, an understanding of how mental health issues start and are perpetuated in general is important.
Self Assessment and Self Honesty
One of the hard parts about my mental health self assessment was having to be completely honest with myself. However, I knew to do otherwise would render the whole exercise a complete waste of time. So I dived in, generally at quiet times when there were very few distractions.
It wasn’t what I’d call meditation. It was simply a process of looking back in time for clues in my mental and physical behaviour, my self-beliefs, and perhaps my decisions or reactions in certain situations.
When I took some quiet time away from my schedule to have a really honest look at different aspects of my life, I started by focusing on two areas – my past life experiences and my mental state of being. And it actually didn’t take me very long to come up with a couple of clues.
For a few years up to that point I’d had a sneaking suspicion that I showed signs of OCD, although up to then I hadn’t considered it to be any real problem in my life. On rare occasions, I seemed to exaggerate the level of threat in certain situations, and this caused me to be extremely anxious until the threat subsided.
As I looked back, I reasoned that this was perhaps a sign of something deeper that I should’ve looked into earlier, but given the rare nature of the problem, I hadn’t taken it very seriously.
I had other little quirks but these were not really a problem, and I usually put them down to simply being different to others.
So the possible influence of OCD was the first thing which I felt I should look into. By the way, confirmation of living with OCD would later be confirmed by two doctors.
Self Assessment Reveals Some Painful Truths
However the clue which really got my attention was my discovery that I had a really bad inferiority complex. Knowing this made me feel very uncomfortable. It hadn’t been obvious before because I’d denied it to myself. I simply didn’t want to know about it. After all, truly believing that you’re inferior to others is not a very pleasant concept.
Being brutally honest with yourself is not easy, but if you’re committed to your cause, it can reap excellent, though uncomfortable, results.
My deduction for having an inferiority complex was based on several things, some of which I identified quickly. For years, I’d never felt truly comfortable in social settings. Further, I’d often look at relatively successful people and think “I’ll never be like them”. I might look at others and think in the back of my mind “Good things happen to them, not me”. A feeling of inferiority of some sort was clearly present in my thinking on these occasions.
Then I picked up on something I’d been doing which was even less obvious. It was a subtle, commonly repeated thought which I identified during a time of quiet self assessment.
I realised that, in day-to-day life, I would often interrupt a train of thought which would otherwise have innocuously led me to doing something productive or pleasant. This mental interruption would be incredibly subtle and fleeting in the extreme but just discernible enough to tell me that “Remember, you’re not as good as the others, you can’t do that” – or words to that effect.
One slight variation of “You can’t do that” was “You don’t get to do that”. In other words, you don’t deserve it.
And critically, it would always stop me doing that productive or pleasant thing that I would’ve otherwise done – because I believed those words without fail.
I could recall this happening repeatedly over the years but never giving a thought to the significance of it when it happened, or even to the reason why I was telling myself this. I seemed to just accept it without question at the time. The fact remained that this barely-noticeable habit had strongly influenced what I’d done over many years.
It had prevented me from doing countless good things.
I thought more about how the inferiority complex had affected my life. It was very unnerving. I could see how easily a poor self-image could badly hinder someone’s output, and that’s certainly no newsflash!
Poor self-belief prevents things from being done. Apart from thinking that to attempt certain things is a complete waste of time and effort, a fear of failure and humiliation when things don’t work out is front of mind. Anxiety is ever present.
It wasn’t rocket science, but the fact that this applied to me was confronting. I now had an inkling of how my head was controlling my behaviour and why I was not getting as many things done throughout a typical day as I reasonably should have.
I also started to identify with great clarity all the anxiety I’d felt over the years – without having thought much about it before – and finally had some sort of explanation for my introverted, withdrawn personality.
Inferiority Complex and OCD
After these initial discoveries, there were times when I thought the OCD might be the cause of the inferiority complex. On the contrary, the evidence that the inferiority complex was actually the cause of the OCD was more compelling! And through patience and persistence, I managed to trace the origin of the inferiority complex back to a traumatic period in my childhood, and I’ll talk about that in great detail in the next post.
My mental health self assessment was making progress and, as painful as it was, I was quite pleased with how it was going. As I kept digging, I became more and more convinced that I was on the verge of a major breakthrough, believing that the inferiority complex was the primary problem from which all the other issues originated. “Fix that”, I thought, “and everything else will fall into place”.
Supported by a lot of research, I tried everything I could to reverse my inferiority complex including affirmations, visualisations (of all sorts of nice things), self-hypnosis, living by various philosophies such as “Accept what is”, “Act as if…” and “Focus on your family”, and all manner of other things. And although some of these were very good practices to try, the way I went about things proved unsuccessful over a long period of time.
Frustration turned to despair, and as a result I suffered long periods of deep depression. It was obvious to me that something was very wrong, something which I felt tantalisingly close to discovering. Something was causing all my mental issues. And yet it remained out of reach.
I was losing hope that I’d ever find the answer. And by this stage I was barely functioning at all. I wasn’t able to work. A low level of output would’ve been the least of my problems. And because I was experiencing depression, my inferiority complex grew worse. And that made me more depressed…
Mental Health Self Assessment: No Regrets
Had I never started the whole process of self assessment, the depression would not have been as severe as it was. Yet I have no regrets because otherwise I would never have found the answers which I eventually did. And I have great hope that the knowledge in those answers will make it a lot easier for others who go down the path of self assessment.
So, with the inferiority complex refusing to budge, I revisited my period of childhood trauma. This time I tried to get my mind as close to the headspace that I had during that period. Again, doing this in quiet times was the most productive.
It became clear that, along with the inferiority complex, other specific present-day fears and self-beliefs which I identified had started during my traumatic period.
The most noticeable of these were as follows:
- I am inferior to everyone else.
- Bad things happen to me. Good things happen to others.
- I fear what will happen. I feel trapped and helpless to do anything about it.
- I feel shame for what I am and fear being humiliated by having my inferiority exposed.
I wondered why all of these would still be so influential in my thinking. After all, many years had passed since that traumatic time. I’d matured a bit since then (well, I’d like to think so anyway!) and surely by now these fears and beliefs had passed their ‘use-by’ date.
One aspect of this which I found intriguing was that all of the fears and self-beliefs were in the present tense. There was no hint that any of these thoughts related back to the time when they first plagued me. These thoughts, in all their ugliness, related to the present day and my present life situation.
In that regard, there was nothing meaningful underpinning them. There was no apparent logical reason for their continued presence. On the contrary, I’d tried everything to get rid of the inferiority complex which at this stage I thought may have been the reason for the other three anyway.
So I decided to do more research. This of course can’t be rushed, and you have to be aware that there’s a lot of misinformation out there, especially online.
Breakthrough: The Mind-Body Interaction
The research, along with continued self-reflection, finally led to a breakthrough which came after around eight years of self assessment – by which time I’d been to hell and back. I learnt two things which, in combination, were the reason why my mind was still the way it was.
The first part of it was that all of the self-beliefs and emotions from my days of childhood trauma had such an impact on me that they became profoundly etched as a ‘snapshot’ in my memory.
Dr Joe Dispenza describes it this way: ”The stronger the emotion you feel from some event in your life, be it a betrayal or a trauma…the brain takes a snapshot. It freezes an image. It embosses that pattern neurologically on the brain.” In other words, the whole state of mind one experiences during a certain trauma becomes a powerful, long-term memory.
You might say “Oh, it’s only a memory. Think about it if you want to, otherwise forget about it”. It’s not that simple unfortunately!
Which brings me to the second thing I learnt – you could call it the icing on the (rather unpalatable) cake.
During my journey of discovery up to that point, I’d neglected to explore something which I’d never been able to fully comprehend in all the times I’d read about it. No doubt it was partly my fault – I should have made more of an effort to understand what the writers were talking about. However, I do think that hard-to-relate-to language was partly to blame. Or maybe I was just daydreaming at the time!
I’m talking about the interaction between the mind and the body, how the hormonal chemicals in our body are influenced by our life experiences, how our thoughts are in turn intimately influenced by the chemicals in our body, and how this can go on practically imperceptibly for years and years, manifesting as all manner of mental issues.
If you’ve heard about this before and accept and understand the science behind it, fantastic! However, you may be like I was, genuinely thinking “I know why my head is the way it is. It’s because of my childhood experiences and the beliefs I formed back then which I just can’t shake. The causes are mental; it’s got nothing to do with the physical side of it.”
Perhaps you dismiss the concept of a conscious and subconscious mind without fully understanding it. That was me too, and I’ll discuss this in more detail in future posts.
If you’re like I was, I implore you to open your mind to the idea that the mind and body really are intrinsically linked and that this link is what underpins our conscious mind and our subconscious mind. It’s nothing weird or mystical like I used to think, merely science.
And it’s a science we don’t hear about anywhere near enough, given the high rate of mental health issues in the world today. Even then, it’s rarely explained in practical, useful terminology, and that’s something I will try to do within the next few posts. Stay tuned!
And so, when a traumatic event gets all of one’s attention, it’s the snapshot of the mind, encapsulating all of the emotions and thoughts caused by the trauma, that is perpetuated by the mind-body interaction.
In a nutshell, the body becomes addicted to the chemicals in the hormones produced during times of threat. A traumatic event in one’s life sets this whole process in motion. Throughout life, the body’s reliance on the chemicals influences the mind to think negatively, thus perpetuating the memory of the traumatic time.
These days, I’m spending more time taking very helpful remedial action for my mental issues than I am looking for answers, although I’m still learning and will continue to learn until the day I die. Peace of mind has finally come, and I’m in the best mental shape I’ve been since early childhood.
In the next few blog posts I’ll go over how my mental health issues developed, how they were perpetuated for many years, and the remedial action I’ve been taking.