Consciousness is your body explaining to you how it works.
Since a lot of people have trouble making it through level 1: you feel with your whole body. This means that you have to learn to feel things in that specific body part. Pain in your knee—you feel it with your knee, not with your head. This is surprisingly hard if you are used to doing everything with your head.
Toen ik klein was, wilde mijn vader niet dat ik dingen zei.
Dus ik leerde mezelf aan om dan maar niets te zeggen.
Stel je voor dat ik elke 5 minuten iets wilde zeggen. Dat is 12x per uur je woorden inslikken. 12x per uur extra spanning in je keel, omdat je wel dingen wil zeggen, maar dat niet doet. Je onderdrukt je eigen wezen.
Ervan uitgaande dat je 16 uur per dag wakker bent, is dat 96 keer per dag. Dat is 35.040 per jaar.
30 jaar later, 1.051.200 keer mijn woorden ingeslikt later, was ik een angstige en psychotische man geworden. Ik stond stijf van de spanning, alles deed zeer. Ik was allang vergeten dat ik mezelf had aangeleerd om niets te zeggen.
Ik ging naar de dokter. De dokter had ook geen idee: ze probeerde te helpen, ik kreeg een lijst met diagnoses: ADHD, autisme, psychose, GAD, depressie. Maar ik kwam niet verder.
En toen bedacht ik ineens weer dat ik mezelf ooit had aangeleerd om niets te zeggen.
Bovenstaande is echt gebeurd.
Het probleem met psychiatrie
Als je jezelf dingen op jonge leeftijd aanleert, simpelweg omdat je geen andere keuze hebt, vergeet je op een gegeven moment dat je dingen op die manier doet. Dat is niet jouw schuld. Als volwassene bij de dokter aankomt, is het vrijwel onmogelijk te achterhalen dat je dit jezelf hebt aangeleerd (ik had het geluk dat ik het op een briefje had geschreven, ik zag de bui al hangen).
Het is ook niet de schuld van de dokter: de dokter ziet jou in een staat van wanhoop, angst, spanning. En dat correspondeert met alle psychiatrische ziektebeelden. Het lijkt dus alsof je elke psychiatrische ziekte hebt, maar dat hoeft helemaal niet zo te zijn.
Ik stel voor dat we alle psychiatrische ziektes afschaffen
Niet omdat ze niet bestaan, maar omdat we ook mensen kunnen helpen zonder er een label op te plakken. Maakt het echt uit hoe iets heet? Door dingen een naam te geven, lijken ze juist veel erger dan ze zijn.
When I was little, my father didn’t want me to say things.
So I taught myself to just say nothing.
Imagine that every 5 minutes I wanted to say something. That’s 12 times per hour swallowing your words. 12 times per hour of extra tension in your throat, because you want to say things, but don’t. You suppress your own being.
Assuming you are awake 16 hours a day, that’s 96 times per day. That’s 35,040 per year.
30 years later, 1,051,200 swallowed words later, I had become an anxious and psychotic man. I was rigid with tension, everything hurt. I had long forgotten that I had taught myself not to speak.
I went to the doctor. The doctor also had no idea: she tried to help me, I was given a list of diagnoses: ADHD, autism, psychosis, GAD, depression. But I didn’t get any further.
And then I suddenly remembered again that I had once taught myself not to speak.
The above really happened.
The problem with psychiatry
If you teach yourself things at a young age, simply because you have no other choice, you eventually forget that you do things that way. That is not your fault. When you arrive at the doctor as an adult, it is almost impossible to figure out that you learned this behavior yourself (I was lucky I had written it down on a note, I saw it coming).
It is also not the doctor’s fault: the doctor sees you in a state of despair, anxiety, tension. And that corresponds with all psychiatric diagnostic categories. It therefore seems as if you have every psychiatric condition, but that does not have to be the case.
I propose that we abolish all psychiatric diagnoses
Not because they don’t exist, but because we can also help people without attaching a label to it. Does it really matter what something is called? By naming things, they often start to seem much more severe than they are.
Why You Should Listen to All the Voices Inside Yourself
Years ago, I had surgery once. I found it very frightening. When I woke up from the anesthesia, I was extremely scared. It took me a long time to understand why.
I think every part of your body tells a story. They are the different voices inside you. Only when I let them fully speak did I understand that my throat had experienced the surgery as something very intense and frightening (my tonsils were removed, which is why it was my throat).
Only after I allowed those voices to speak did they become calm again, like the wind settling down.
Why Negative Thinking Is Often the Correct Strategy
There’s a reorganization coming at work. We don’t know what to expect yet, and we won’t hear the outcome for another six months. As a result, everyone is lying awake at night thinking about all the possible scenarios.
Most outcomes will probably be positive. For me personally, it would probably be good to do something different anyway. In many cases, the reorganization will likely not be too bad, and only 15% of people will have to leave.
I mainly focus on the worst-case scenarios. If you only look at the way I think, it might seem like I’m a negative person, a pessimist. I basically assume that I will lose my job. The reason I do that is because those are the only situations in which I actually need to take action. Those are the only things I need to anticipate.
What if I lose my job, become unable to work, and can no longer pay my mortgage?
When I tell this to other people, they try to reassure me. “It’ll probably all work out,” they say. But they don’t actually know that either.