January 6, 2025
One hallmark of my personality is a pervasive sense of contempt for other people. I’ve been aware of this for a long time and periodically have insights into why I feel this way. It’s like a blanket that covers and colors my experience. I guess psychologists would call it a projection or an overarching identification/object relationship. When I inquire into the reasons for this contempt, I come up with a lot of reasons. I feel like over the years I have worked through a number of them and yet the projection remains.
Lately, it’s been very noticeable to me. It is so bad at times that I consciously avoid looking at people for two reasons: 1) To avoid seeing them and therefore feeling their suffering and 2) to avoid being intruded upon by their neurotic spinning. When I meet people I am struck by these two things: Neurotic spinning and suffering. Sometimes, it’s too much to bear and I have recently begun to suspect that what makes it too much is actually this overlay of contempt. If I didn’t feel contempt for people, I would most likely feel compassion for them when I notice their spinning and suffering. I probably wouldn’t be so reactive to them as well.
Anyways, I’ve been aware of this for a long time and have been watching it, curious about it and not trying to fix myself because judging myself for it doesn’t help. Last night when I was meditating, I had a little further insight into the roots of this overlay and it has resulted (temporarily at least) in a slight reprieve from the judgment and hatred.
To explain it, you have to take a couple of things on faith: 1) I have had a past life. 2) Around the age of four in this current life, I was hospitalized for depression and this resulted in a split inside my psyche. Given the above, I’ll now endeavor to explain.
Being born into this life was not fun for a lot of reasons. I’m a sensitive soul to begin with and my family was pretty awful. My mother was depressed and overwhelmed and my father was abusive. It was an incredible shock, made worse given the nature of my previous death at Griffin’s hand in a sort of mercy killing.
That murder/suicide has resulted in a ton of trauma that I carry with me to this day and I’m only now beginning to sort out. Well, I’ve been working on sorting it out for the past four years but it’s slow going. The suspension of conventional wisdom around reincarnation is not the least of the hurdles I struggle with in coming to terms with it. I still want to doubt it but it keeps resurfacing, getting clearer over time rather than revealing itself as a fantasy. Fantasies fade when you stop imbuing them with meaning but this one keeps getting stronger and clearer without my trying to feed it. Make of that what you will.
When we are born, obviously we are babies. Most specifically, our physical bodies are babies. Babies by their nature are limited. They have limited coordination, limited brains, limited nervous systems, limited understanding, limited emotions. Basically, everything about them is limited apart from their life force. As such, they can’t comprehend things or reason through events. Only as the brain, nervous system and body mature, can a child begin to do these things.
I saw last night how enraged I was when I was born again. Part of me was infuriated and really, really wanted to stay dead. I didn’t want to be in this physical world again. I just wanted to be erased, to cease to exist because existence was too painful after what had happened with Griffin. I realize I was more than just furious, I was a lot of things. But one thing that was always in the background was my ambivalence about being alive and this ambivalence reflects my fury at being incarnated.
Maybe if the holding environment of my family was different I would have felt differently about being reborn. It’s hard to know because it’s just hypothetical. I do know I was ambivalent and I was enraged. As my body and brain grew, so did my fury. Now, a child can’t go around being furious all of the time. I felt so overwhelmed, I couldn’t handle it and had to put a cap on my fury. This wasn’t a logical decision, it was somatic. For survival reasons, I became depressed. This is when I was hospitalized for the failure to thrive.
That period of hospitalization was a crisis point. I had to either give up or survive. It came at a critical time in my life, just as my ego was developing. Since I didn’t give up and die, I did the next best thing: I split off from my nascent ego. My previous life’s identity split off almost permanently from my current life’s identity, being resigned to living in the depths of the Imaginal, the death-life boundary space. This space is familiar to anyone who has been reading this blog because it’s where I go sometimes during meditation.
I think I split off this part of my identity to keep from going crazy. Once I split, I recovered slowly and my ego developed. I was like a car running on only two cylinders, though. Splitting doesn’t really solve the original problem, it’s a stopgap measure that allows for living in limbo. You never really fully thrive but you also don’t wither and die. You live a half life.
The fury and hatred remained but went mostly underground. Their overlay–that overlay of contempt I was talking about at the beginning of this entry–remained. It was like I was giving the whole world the finger. My default state was sort of an eyeroll and, to this day, I roll my eyes a lot even to this day.
Perhaps getting in touch with this new layer of understanding around my contempt for my fellow humans will help me chip away at the overlay? I know it’s not going to suddenly disappear but hopefully it will begin to lessen. There is definitely more to understand here!
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