Dear Peach: Stopping the Spiral, The Jungian Symbology of Your Ex, and Presence With Psychosis
dear peach is the advice column, accepting mail at peachbellini444@gmail.com. some letters have been edited for clarity. i’ve also given you a pseudonym if you did not give one to yourself, because i have one and i didn’t want you to feel lonely. you can write to peach at any time using the email above.
dear peach,
I’m in a period of transition and have been grappling with a lot of internal struggle, it’s usually centered on the feeling of “I hate feeling X, and I’m going to feel like this forever”. This feeling of being permanently trapped in a negative situation (mental illness, bad job, loneliness, etc) sends me into a negative spiral that can last a couple days. The spiral feels so much more intense than the situation usually warrants but it’s also impossible to stop.
I’ve read some of the famous books about Buddhism, but I struggle with really internalizing the feeling that difficult things will not last forever. It just feels so intense in the moment, and while I know that I’ll feel better one day, it’s hard to make that feel real to me now.
Do you have any advice to break through the illusion that things will be this way forever?
Best,
Miss Myopia
dear miss myopia,
picture this: you’re in the woods. you’re a caveperson. in the distance, you sense a rustling, then a rumbling, and then the figure of a very real bear appears several meters away. it’s running towards you - and fast (i forget which kind of bear you’re supposed to play dead with vs run from but, for sake of metaphor, let’s say this is the running bear).
do you sit your loincloth ass down on the smooth rock below and say to yourself, now let’s not get irrational here, because surely at some point all will be well and there won’t be a bear chasing me anymore. this can’t last forever. this is only a season of life! breathe<3
no! you run. obviously.
the brain is really good at a lot of things, but nuance is not really one of them. as living beings, we need to know when things are life-threatening. it doesn’t serve us, evolutionarily, to sit around contemplating the nature of existence all the time. it takes a lot of work to train the brain beyond evolution, beyond trauma, beyond a state of hyper-aware protection.
because that’s really what is happening here - you’re trying to protect yourself. the brain catastrophizes because it wants you to live. you’re lonely, therefore cut off from the group, therefore will die alone in the cold while the rest huddle together for warmth. you’re mentally ill, therefore fundamentally broken and wrong, and we need to figure out what’s happening with you and how to fix it so you can be normal and do normal people things with the normal people. do you see a pattern?
the most important thing i know is this, said best by gabor maté: “safety is not the absence of threat, but the presence of connection.”
what you’re describing here is a total system overwhelm - a spiral that wants to look endlessly into the future because it is scared to be with itself. you can choose not to be scared of it. you’re older and wiser than the part of you that feels paralyzed. you may even find that, once you get closer, everything gets a bit smaller. sometimes we are big to ourselves because we otherwise our Self won’t pay attention.
you wrote that the spiral of dread is “impossible to stop,” which may be true. so, what if you didn’t try to stop it? an animal in a cage will thrash about and hurt itself. an animal in a field will lie down.
love,
peach
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