| HN Mirror

Yeah so that's the thing. In my case, I'll call what I received from my therapy "a self-goodness". I think others may term this nebulous quality "self-esteem", "a deeper understanding of the universe/cosmos/God", "motivation", "confidence", and so on. But "self-goodness" is something I came up with so it resonates with me personally.

In my case, "solving stress" (or perhaps "reaching inner peace" in my own words) meant being capable of enjoying whichever activity I put my mind to, success or failure, and being able to look forward to the future in a generally positive light.

But hold on. This sort of thing I had already read in probably dozens of pithy self-help books for years in the past. It is not knowledge that I nor I'm sure many other people don't already know. And it is repeated in places like here and elsewhere ad infinitum.

What I accomplished was not being made aware of what the solutions out there are, but becoming able to enact such solutions I had heard over and over and over again for years for my benefit, but couldn't, because of what most people would call depression.

But this is only a surface-level answer. Allow me to go deeper still:

The main lesson I learned, and try to put into practice each day now, was that a fulfilling life needs to be experienced, not taught. Basically, it's the difference between watching a video of someone bungee-jumping, and actually bungee-jumping yourself. I think concepts like "qualia" and the "Mary's room" thought experiment are relevant here. A good example of this is talk therapy. In my case at least, talk therapy was ineffective because my therapist had all the experience and was eager to tell me all about it, but because of the limitations of words, she could only impart knowledge to me, and prod me in directions I was unwilling to go in to begin with. That leads to guilt and shame for not living up to the expectations or suggestions of others, and led nowhere.

So beyond an issue as simple as "being depressed" and "going to therapy" to try to solve it, my issue was this: due to limitations of my experience (commonly termed "depression" by most people), I was unable to impart any meaning to the knowledge I did have so that I could put it into practice, and thus gain experience in a way that brought me satisfaction. And I had a lot of knowledge, through endless rumination about how best to deal with my situation that didn't lead to a conclusive answer for a long time. None of that knowledge made me happy or brought results. And with no way to enjoy experience, I had no force driving me to get it for myself.

Okay, so what is to be done about these problems?

That's the thing. Literally nothing I've just told you in the paragraphs above would have put me even one step closer to solving my issues - because I'd heard it all before, for years. In fact, there are entire systems like the authors of self-help books that basically rehash versions of the above treatises in endless different flavours - all of them having little effect except imparting knowledge when the optimal solution would be to impart experience.

This limitation is not the fault of those self-help authors. Because they're only using the tools they know how to use - words. And mere words have their limits. In fact, since my psylocibin therapy I've opened quite a few self-help books and remarked just how much I agree with pretty much everything the authors say - because I have enough experience and knowledge to just agree with them and learn nothing profound. The difference between now and then was my willingness to put such knowledge to use. I am convinced that none of those very self-help books would have ever taught me how to cultivate that willingness with any amount of hard work. My belief is that it is extremely hard or impossible to discipline yourself into gaining this willingness with effort, especially if you are already depressed.

(Aside, this is why I find Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus so fascinating - it mirrors the way I see the world now, by building up an extremely complex system of interlocking rules only to declare all of it nonsense in the end, stating that there are certain things beyond mere words that still hold importance to philosophy.)

No, more fundamentally, what I lacked was this willingness to experience things in life - a sense of "self-goodness". This is the thing that lets one convert knowledge to experience. It's motivation, focus, confidence, ability to just get-up-and-go without being prompted, and so on. I know what this is now, and I didn't have it before. I can now engage it at will pretty much every day and get good results. I did not understand (experientially) such a thing existed before my therapy. It was all new experience to me, even if I had knowledge of what it was supposed to be like by reading books, watching romantic comedies, etc.

So how did I obtain this "self-goodness"?

My whole life, society had told me that reward only comes with hard work. If you don't put in hard work, you don't get results, and are screwed. This reflects poorly on yourself, and you need to try harder. Going to talk therapy was one way of "putting in the hard work", and yet I never got results. It was clear that this way of viewing the world was not helping me.

Instead, what I needed to be taught was that this fundamental "self-goodness" is not an experience that can be earned, or transmitted via talking about what it is logically - it must be given, and for free. Most people I suspect receive this self-goodness in childhood by parents that give unconditional love to them, and there aren't as many problems. I was not so lucky, so I had to obtain this sense elsewhere. In order to gain this sense, I needed an experience that I did not have to work for. I had worked as hard as I could my whole life and it did not amount to inner peace.

So where is this experience to be found?

That's the tricky thing. I can only speak for what worked for me, which is psylocibin therapy with a licensed therapist. Some people have religious awakenings. Some people build networks of friends and gain experience that way. In my own experience, nothing other than the correct drug would have done any good. I had several prescriptions for things like stimulants and SSRIs at the time. I tossed them all away the day after. I say this, but ultimately I do believe the "chemical imbalance" theory of depression carried some validity in my circumstance - insofar as it allowed me to get over what seemed like the impossible hurdle of gaining self-goodness, after which I no longer had to bicker about such theories anymore. There are too many more important things to focus on. Psylocibin promotes neuroplasticity in the correct circumstances, so it may have just been a matter of the proper neurons not being linked up in just the right ways. Sometimes (but not always), I reflect and think that's really all it came down to in the end.

But I can rest assured that such an experience took barely any effort to gain, even though I was trapped in my own web of rules and logic. That was the whole point. There is no virtue in fighting so hard for something you were supposed to have been given for free. That sort of effort makes you look at the people who do have self-goodness act so effortlessly and wonder why they deserve that automatic self-goodness and you don't. I think feelings like those drive a lot of sadness between people in the modern world.

Coming back to "stress", I stopped worrying about it so much once I became occupied so much with fascination with the world around me. In fact, stress stops being something to be "solved", but to be tuned up and down according to one's desires. If I relax too much, I wonder what I'm making of myself and strive to work on a skill or two to fill the time. If I work too hard, I desire more time to myself. So stress becomes a sort of neutral force in the world that accompanies your travels. It reemphasizes how a balance in all things is important to keep in mind, even for issues that you may at first desire to "solve" somehow.

In the end, even my rumination served a purpose. I can now put the sizeable stock of knowledge I gained to good use in earning experience. But now my quantity of knowledge looks so small in hindsight, and makes me realize I have a lot to learn. I am quite excited to learn about new things each day.

Ironically, nowadays I end up agreeing with the self-help authors that "effort is rewarding", with regards to things like exercise, cooking, my job, creative pursuits - in every circumstance except gaining a sense of self-goodness. I think many of those authors never had to deal with trying to cultivate self-goodness from absolute nothingness, and thus have no words to describe what such a process is like, so all they can say is things like "you can do it, I believe in you" and "I don't have anything else to tell you". It is my belief that this single idea is one of the most misunderstood self-help mantras in existence. The people who need to hear it the most are the ones who are served by it the least. And some of those who speak about it at length, even with the best of intentions, will end up talking past a lot of desperate people who need to feel an inner peace for themselves to be able to have any chance at understanding it at all.