I want to keep putting here the discoveries I made about the world and myself. Each such discovery is removing one impediment that has been keeping me from getting better.
Emotions
  • Basic emotions are directly connected with the body, and the body has thousands of years of evolution behind it. Anger, fear, sadness, guilt, happiness, joy - those emotions are never false. Only those emotions can be the reference point in life. When you shut down emotions intellect takes over, and intellect is clueless when it comes to making you happy. Because it does not know what happy means. Because happy is an emotion. Understood here.
  • Alcohol, cigarettes, distractions - they are all ways of shutting down emotions.
  • What I used to call a "freakout" is actually a known phenomenon and it is an emotional flashback resulting from past ongoing emotional abuse (CPTSD) - found here.
Childhood abuse
  • We grow up thinking that what happened in our homes was normal, regardless of what it was. That is why it's useful to educate oneself about emotional abuse. Realised then.
  • People manipulate others by exploiting the way the others have learned to handle emotions. Manipulating children is a whole new story since children are only learning how to handle emotions. It has to end with a disaster.
  • Respect and fear are two different things. It's not right to justify the latter with the first.
  • There is a difference between accountability and responsibility. Even though you are not accountable for what your parents did to you, it is you who is responsible for it as an adult. Described here.
Rescuing others
  • If someone hurts other people it may very likely mean that it is them who have been hurt in the past. But it does not mean that they deserve compassion now. Yes a child may have been abused and it may have caused it to grow into a sociopath. But it is not the sociopath who deserves compassion, it is the child. The problem is, the time for that is up, the child is no longer there. We live in a time-constrained reality.
  • There are people who indeed do not have any consideration towards other human beings and see not much difference between a person and a fridge. And nowadays there is many of them around. Emotional self defence is a very important skill that nobody taught many of us.
  • While freaking out there is a crucial difference between feeling like punching someone in the face and actually punching someone in the face. Merely because I would never actually hit someone does not mean that another person describing the same thoughts is similar to me. Different disorders can produce similar symptoms.
Authorities
  • Most people don't know what they are doing, and the rules are meant to give peace of mind rather than assure quality of anything. Realised as part of this.
Therapy
  • "A therapist is a specialist that can cure your disease." - a therapist cannot cure you. Only you can cure yourself. It's like with physiotherapy. The therapist can show you the way, but you have to walk that way yourself.
  • There are crappy therapists just as there are crappy software developers