A bit of background before I go on. Without going into detail, my father has dementia. It creeps up on you, and it’s one of the most horrible things that can happen to a person. We first noticed small changes in his behavior in 2009. It was eventually diagnosed in 2015. He’s been in long term care for about three years now.
He’s always been a paranoid and somewhat angry person. I realized at some point that his violent outbursts were at least in part because his rational mind was no longer able to “shout down” his paranoid thoughts, and he’d start to act out more and more. He’d also get mad when he’d hide something (from imagined people who wanted to steal that thing) and then forget where he put it. This would reinforce the delusion and he constantly thought someone was stealing his stuff because he couldn’t find it. I’d also walk up to him sometimes and he’d have an angry look on his face and he’d be muttering some angry thing to himself as a dark scenario ran through his head.
After things had gotten too hard to handle (my mother and I were looking after him, she almost had a heart attack over it, and his violent outbursts were getting too bad to ignore) and he was placed in care, I came to the realization that I had many of the same thought patterns as he did, and it TERRIFIED me when I thought of what that meant for my potential future.
When an absurd paranoid thought enters my mind, something like I see my water on my desk and the thought of “don’t drink that, somebody poisoned it!” would pop into my head, my rational mind could immediately swat that thought down, because it was so absurd. The fact that thoughts like that were even there was what was so scary. For three years it’s been in my mind that I need to fix this part of myself, with utterly no clue how I was supposed to do so. See a therapist? I don’t think so. One way sharing with someone who always be essentially a stranger to me just isn’t in the cards.
Within two days of doing this program, everything appears to have changed.
It seems the root of all of this for me is a program that would run every few minutes in my mind, constantly and continuously all day, every day, every waking hour. Essentially I’d start thinking of some random wild scenario where someone was trying to do some negative thing to me, and this person would be made to stop doing it, by my hand, or the hand of some imagined minion who for some reason served me. Or some seemingly infinite variation along this line. Sometimes it would be a rehashing of some past event, or some negative thing (real or imagined) that had happened to me.
Usually I’d replay it in my head over and over, “refining” it in some way. Slightly varying things. Maybe trying to impress, or impress something upon, whoever happened to be on my mind. So many variations on this theme, and all so toxic and destructive.
It would appear that almost all of the negativity and paranoia in my mind was being fed by this particular program. Somehow, it’s stopped running almost completely. Every time it tries to run now, I see it! I’m aware of it and with usually minimal effort I’m able to stop it. I found myself saying, “Stay in the now” last week, bringing myself back into the present when my mind would start to wander (I need to work on this, I can't just stop myself from ever contemplating. I'm starting to feel like my head is rewiring itself somehow. There's so much I need to figure out.)
Recognizing and stopping this program seems to be thing above all others that will change my life for the better. It was feeding so much anger and bitterness that I didn’t even realize was in me. The continuous thoughts of negativity and violence were all rooted in and fed by it.
Things that used to bother me, haven’t bothered me this week. I’ve always been annoyed when I’d be in a parking lot and someone would “chirp” their car horn multiple times when locking their car. So of course the other day I was getting into my car and someone did exactly that EIGHT times (part me of thinks I was being prodded by that event) and all I did was start laughing at how silly it was so get mad over such a thing.
I’m more mindful of these things too. I feel flashes of anger boil up from within. They erupt. It takes maybe a second or two. It’s so weird, I’ve been catching them as they happen, before “the fuse hits the dynamite” and I can kind of analyze it in my mind.
I’ve planted basil this year, as I do every year. It’s doing quite poorly, for various reasons. I looked out the window and saw one of the plants that was doing well had been flattened and had a branch sitting on top of it. I go outside and as I walked up to the pot, this murderous rage started boiling up from inside me, but I seem to be able to intercept it now. Even if somebody had done that, it’s not like violence from me will help the matter. As it turns out, the branch had chosen that moment to fall off a tree overhead and squash my poor basil plant. Again, I’d swear someone is prodding me to get angry and emotional. It sounds paranoid to say, but things are getting weird and it seems I have the attention of the control system, no matter how unimportant I may feel to the world at large.
This morning I was reading the Naomi Wolf Second Amendment article, and towards the end I had another boil up moment with regards to the whole thought of the populace being disarmed so that the populace could be dominated or worse. Again, I was able to intercept this before it blew up, and the energy was just kind of sitting there, in my solar plexus area. I’m reading through this thread and came across
Éiriú-Eolas - Breathing Program which is shedding some light on what I’m experiencing. That post is filled with terms and concepts that are unknown to me, so I think learning about them will be a focus.
To sum up, I had a fear that the dark thoughts filling my mind would one day consume me, similar to the paranoid fear and rage that was such a big part of my father’s dementia, and I had no clue how to approach the problem, and I thought the process might take years and years to deal with, and it might even be insurmountable. As it turns out, TWO DAYS of pipe breathing, bio-energetic breathing, and meditation have managed to short circuit those and other programs.
I’m exhilirated and a little scared (in the best possible way) to see where things go from here.
Oh, I almost forgot. THE PRAYER! I hadn't really been taking it seriously, as I have negative connotation towards prayer for reasons I don't even understand. It might even be another program I wasn't aware of. I mean I did have one serious, desperate, screaming prayer in my life, and that particular prayer was answered (and I've been thinking about the related event a lot lately) so I know it's no joke.
Something in my mind is determined to make sure I can't remember it. It's so bizarre because I don't struggle with memorization much. So I've got the headphones in and I'm listening to the words, and I don't have to remember! I'm sure this will clear in time. The zoning out is happening a bit less, and the raw energy I'm feeling in the past few days is intense. I felt like I was going to project once...a familiar but not quite the buzzing sensation, and I guess with no intention to project, it didn't happen, and I felt like I was three feet tall and a ball (sort of...hard to put into words.)
I feel emotions slowly building too. I seem to be able to release those, which is really good. I don't relish the thought of having a breakdown in the presence of my mother.
