Don’t Suspend Disbelief When Seeking Help
You Might Just Be Merely Neurotic
Definition: A disintegration of one’s sense of person hood/agency/ ego. The personality is broken, fractured, and unable to function normally. There is a sense of separation from one’s surroundings and a loss of orientation to the functional, transactional person as well as place and time.
Cause: Severe psychological distress, psychosis, or trauma. Consistent low-level neglect and abuse from childhood that leads to chemical dependency (alcohol, drugs etc.) and causes repeated associations with slothful abusive people.
Symptoms: Impulsive and emotional thinking suppresses deliberate, rational thinking. Lack of ability to connect with what is happening in the present. A feeling of emotional dependency and victim hood. Severe anxiety, fear, depression, rage, and suicidal thoughts. Grandiosity, paranoia, lack of empathy and sympathy. Inability to concentrate. Other symptoms include physical diseases, dithering, sleeplessness, inability to relax and recreate, low self-esteem, lack of clarity, lack of confidence, good cheer and courage. Long recovery times.
Treatment: Psychotherapy and psychiatry to rehabilitate or “normalize” the persona so it can re-integrate with life. Varying degrees of success and a high degree of recidivism. Drugs may provide a temporary sense of normalcy.
If you are only neurotic perhaps Vedanta can Un-personalize
Un-personalisation is non-identifying with one’s sense of person hood or “me-ness.” It is seeing through or standing apart, objectively witnessing the body-mind-sense complex as a value-neutral object known to the conscious thought-free self. It is noticing that I am free of desire and fear when I successfully gain desired experiences and/or avoid unwanted experiences because the sense of limitation-incompleteness-inadequacy that motivates my pursuits is no longer operative. It is realizing that I have a body-mind-sense complex and that I cannot legitimately claim to be the body-mind-sense complex. It is healthy un-association, negation, or cancelation of the seemingly conscious (but actually inert) equipment required to transact with people, places and things. It is cultivating the sense that the personal self only a projection, like a hologram, an unconscious attempt to generate a coherent sense of a specific, unique identity from fragments of memories of repetitive real and imagined positive and negative experiences stretching back into the distant past. It is an ironic, humorous appreciation of the fictional aspect of one’s story. It is also empathy with others owing to the realization that on the human level we all share the same story. Finally, it is recognizing the healthy happy moments of independence when one is alone, without suffering loneliness.
A True Story: After a seminar a woman and her husband came up with tears of joy in their eyes. It seems the wife had been told by medical doctors, psychologists, life coaches, psychiatrists and their ilk that she suffered disassociation, a diagnosis that caused a lifetime of pain. They spent all their discretionary time and income on therapies and pills too numerous to mention, hoping forever to fit in to society. When she discovered that un-association, or un-personalization if you prefer, was the natural state of the non-dual unborn, ever-free self, the one without a second, thirty years of distress evaporated in minutes. And they lived (more or less) happily ever after.