Pressure | Part 1: The Addiction to Fear
How ‘Excitement’ Can Become Your Inner Drug Store
If you have ever experienced a near-miss car accident, you have very likely felt the rush of adrenaline coursing through your veins almost instantly. Your heart rate and blood pressure increases, your brain is alert, pupils dilated and you enter a high state of fear. This stress response can literally save your life in a “life or death” situation. Your inner autopilot hits the breaks and you bring your car to a stop.
Also in a ‘safe’ situation, such as a rollercoaster ride at a theme park, you may have a similar experience. You are likely to feel excited afterwards. This is also an adrenaline rush at work.
These were two examples of frightening experiences. There are less stressful situations in our daily life, such as, being in a conversation with friends or family. Also working on a project can cause internal pressure and stress.
For every Emotion you feel in a specific situation, a corresponding biochemical cocktail is automatically released in your body. If you are having trouble connecting with your Feelings, you may not notice these chemical changes happen — but they do: just below your awareness. Do you know people who are often nervous or stressed, but they do not even recognise it? Ask them, and I guess, they would describe their state of being as ‘normal’. They might even assure you that everything is OK, while experiencing a lot of pressure.
Losing the connection to feeling yourself in the Here and Now, goes along with having a high Numbness Bar, which buries your true Feelings. This is a dangerous Emotional Intoxication, by storing unused Feelings as Emotions in the physical body. Losing the connection to reality is living in a survival mode. Just imagine, you would live in a constant activation of your sympathetic nervous system, without noticing it. Your nervous system is ‘on’ all the time, like a constant background noise of emotional fear. Without the guidance of our own Feelings you become dependent on others to direct or approve your thinking and behavior. You will lose contact with your own internal Compass Of Reality.
Loss of Reality
Human beings, who grew up in an abusive or not caring family, or have experienced traumatic situations in their childhood, had to learn to deny or hide their own Feelings. They cut themselves off from their vulnerability. When your environment was characterized by aggression, violence, threats, or even more subtle methods of emotional manipulation like gaslighting or projections, then you could not help but shield yourself against these assaults.
It was ‘smart’ to numb your own Feelings in order not to go crazy in such situations. In other words, just as you had to shield yourself from the outside world, you also had to separate yourself from the inside. Many of us had to do this, to experience at least a sense of control of our lives or to withstand the intense pain of living with the insanity of our surroundings.
Outer World
To be safe, it was necessary to constantly scan the outside world. This involved monitoring mum’s mood and checking again and again to see if something has been missed that could cause her disapproval. You may also have swallowed a lot of what you wanted to say at the dinner table because you knew your father might get angry with you.
In such a case, the child builds a protective wall between him or her and the threat from your parents. You adapt to the world view of others, give your center away to their statements, actions and wishes and, to a certain extent, fall into blind obedience. This obedience is less frightening than the expected consequences, if you do not obey.
As children, we created our own set of rules to keep us safe in a world that was stronger than us and could exert power over us. Many of us still harbor this terror today. To no longer follow the rigid beliefs and rules of your childhood would likely mean that you get overwhelmed by an unpredictable chaos of Emotions.
Inner World
The outer world in its Insanity, and the defense wall towards this insanity, had also an impact on your inner world. Deep inside, you may have developed Beliefs such as: “I can’t do this, I am too weak.” A belief is not required to be connected to reality. Your mind has an ability to believe anything about anything. And this can cause painful emotional confusion. So you cut off your true Being behind a thick inner wall of despair, hopelessness and numbness.
Stuck Between The Walls
Just as you had to reject your outside, you also fought yourself more and more on the inside. Many people do this by blaming themselves, ending up in a Shame spiral or beating themselves up. You created two walls of anger, one to protect you from outside impulses, and one to not be confronted with your true impulses of your being. All this, to make sure that you are not falling out of line. So you keep functioning. The walls work as buffers: a defensive wall between you and the outside world and also a numbness, or self-aggressor, wall towards your inner world.
Between these two walls, you are stuck in a Fantasy World! It is like living behind a perfect mask or facade of functioning. A world full of pressure and fear that the “house of cards” or you, yourself, might collapse. Here, you endlessly repeat a game of fighting your inner and outer worlds by not truly living. Everything you create or experience here is a charade. It is a world of stress, of pressure, of conscious or unconscious fear.
Functioning comes with a high price. It comes with the price of emotional fear and excitement, in all its flavors: restlessness, agitation, panic and anxiety. The fear of not being good enough. The fear of being a failure. This is the crazy fear cocktail running through your system — you are emotionally intoxicated! Stuck between the walls, you became an addict to excitement. Excitement you already know from earlier in your life. And as crazy as it sounds, this feels familiar and safe — everything stays as you already know it.
Walls Function As A Filter
Being stuck here can even distort your own hearing so that everything you hear from someone else in your direction is perceived as pressure. Every task in front of you becomes a threat instead of an opportunity to create. This is a clever mechanism of your Box (your psyche, your worldview) to protect you. Listening with this ear or seeing the world through this filter, you can be sure that you are doing everything “right” so as not to upset your parents. How exhausting!
Here, between the walls, everything feels so “real”. But the fact is, you are just repeating a game, which you know from childhood. You are addicted to pressure and excitement. This excitement is a cluster of Emotions, including also Guilt, Shame and Resentment.
Mixed Emotions — No Real Feelings
Excitement is a mix of at least two Emotions: fear and joy. If a person is addicted to excitement, he or she is unconsciously seeking for repeating situations in which they are afraid, and a subconscious part is enjoying this. This can sound weird. “Why or how,” you might ask, “shall I enjoy the constant worrying, if there is enough money at the end of the month to pay my bills?”
Emotional Excitement can be generated by Mixing Emotions. As a result, you lose clarity and end up in a very well known game. The game of the “Drama Triangle” or “Karpman Triangle”. It is a popular game to play Rescuer, Victim or Persecutor. By playing these roles, you maintain the status quo. Nothing changes, everything stays the same. The only thing that happens is you get older while playing this game.
You repeat the game you already know from your family of origin. You can switch roles in an instant, to imitate the interactions that give you a sense of “home”. When a person plays this game, he or she is not living in the here and now, but in the past or trying to solve the problems in the future. Lynne Forrest called the triangle “shame generator”, because through it a person unconsciously re-enacts painful life themes that create shame. This has the effect of reinforcing old beliefs that keep us stuck in a limited version of reality, or in a total Fantasy World.
A Gremlin Game
In Possibility Management, the part that loves and enjoys playing this game is called the Gremlin, the king or queen of our subconscious, our Underworld. Your Gremlin tries to keep you safe by protecting you from the “pain” that can occur when you try new paths. “You never know what awaits you behind these walls. Let’s play it safe.” The pain is nothing more than really feeling what is!
Growing up in a challenging environment or a threatening household, your everyday state can become one of hypervigilance. “Am I safe?” You walked on eggshells or tried to be invisible. You learned to read other people’s moods and to predict a possible future.
Hypervigilance creates a stress response in our body. It even releases dopamine in our brain. As children, our small bodies were bathed in those chemicals. And today, even if you have never taken any drugs, or alcohol, to reproduce those chemical reactions, you become an addict.
You might subconsciously seek out situations, thoughts or actions that recreate these Emotions. Your Gremlin took over your life with hidden addictions, so you can experience a “hit”. To satisfy the addiction, the Gremlin now resorts to an internal drug store, to create a biochemical mix you are used to and addicted to for such a long period. Many of our Feelings turn into repressed Emotions and become yummy ingredients for our Gremlin in our personal inner drug store.
Gremlins are masters of mixing very special Cocktails. Would you like to have a look into my and others Gremlins favorite ones?
- Worrying about what others might think of us.
- Questioning oneself all the time.
- Overworking to keep up a “good appearance”.
- If that doesn’t work, pour the “collapse” cocktail after it and vie for the attention of others.
The Gremlin loves it. This is pure ecstasy!
How to get out of this fantasy world, and how to stay out of it, is the subject of the next article, to be published next month: Pressure | Part 2: Quit Pressure
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Love,
Lisa