How Do You Know If You're Neurotic?

One way is to see if your brain gates are in good working order.  Is your unconscious too close to top level neocortex? Are the gates too strong and unyielding so no feeling gets through?    Is repression too strong or not strong enough?  And what does that mean?  Part of what it means is that, is the brainstem imprints impinging on the top level neocortex?  Or is the ideational brain so powerful as to gate and suppress most feelings?

For example, someone who is severely claustrophobic means that deep terror imprints are trespassing onto the neo-cortex. The result is the exact terror/anxiety that is imprinted down deep in the brain is close to full experience again.  So how is it usually treated?  With pills that help the gates along; i.e., SSRI’s, the same chemicals that were used up when the early trauma occurred in an attempt to push it all back down.  So all that is happening is that we are trying to load up on the same chemicals emptied out in the first battle against trauma.  In short, gates can only hold so much pain; then they give way and we receive the full brunt of the terror/pain below.  So instead of letting the pain up bit by bit, we suppress it and that keeps us from experiencing it. That means no chance of getting well.   And why is that? Because we really don’t know what is down there, how it happened, how strong it is and what happens if it is unleashed.   With the claustrophobic, his brainstem memories are close to the surface.  Wonderful!   Oh wait a minute.  Very few shrinks know that and therefore, would not take a chance on meeting the wild beast.  Freud warned against 100 years ago.   His legacy is to help us be terrified of terror.  What chance has the poor patient? So much of psychotherapy today is bottling it all up.  Or when they try to release it, they have the patient do nutty stuff like screaming, pounding, running around, etc.  Mostly because they do not know what is really down deep.  Release in their therapies means expressing feelings randomly. That is not feeling; it is catharsis, and that gets no one well.

Yes catharsis feels good for the moment, but it has to be repeated ad nauseum because it is not resolving.   Resolution means returning to the scene of the crime, recognizing that there was a crime…….against our humanity….and plunging down deep to feel it over time.
So what is another clue to neurosis?  Aah, I forgot, we usually don’t know it because it is all repressed and place out of sight.   So if I told you that you were neurotic, filled with unconscious pain that has deviated the system, you would not accept it.  Your behavior since birth seems normal; and it was and is adaptive to the harm we received.

If I said that you were compulsively sexual you might answer, “So what, it feels good.”    But the drive inside can wear down your system prematurely because there is a new need, tons of sex to release what?  Pain.  Or take having to keep busy, going and going all of the time.  You are very productive. So what is wrong with that?  Anything that is far out of the normal often means an unconscious drive.  The system is under constant pressure, in the same way that one cannot stop working all of the time.  We think it is only a choice; but a choice we are forced to make.  Like drinking. “I love a cocktail or two,” one might say, but he drifts into several a night, then alcoholism.  To kill a pain one almost never feels. “Alcohol calms me,” it is claimed, with no understanding about why you need calming, and from what?

We talk about addiction like it is only a bad habit and bad for your health. Never that is has deep roots that must be eradicated.  So we find ways to control it, manage it and divert it. Those therapists who cannot go deep into their own pain are certainly not about to embrace a therapy that dips down deep in the brain.  But imagine, if they could experience what is inside of them how it would change their approach to therapy.  They would know what is inside the patient because it is also inside of them.  It is no longer alien, or a stranger.  If the therapist doesn't have an access to a feeling experience,  he is forced to take control, push down, and manage the pain.  He will be forced to treat his patient as he treats himself…..with unfeeling ploys.

No one suffers chronic nightmares without up-surging pain that forces entry into the thinking cortex. It makes the cortex work overtime in an effort to control imprinted pain.  It produces encasing rumination in ways that cannot be controlled or stopped.  Yes there may be other reasons; but I have treated many, many cases of nightmares and I nearly always find the terror inside them.  We have found a way to get inside of them and have them experienced slowly over time.  It is not an aberration; it is adaptation, a way to manage the imprint of terror, the very same terror found in the nightmare.  It is a base, an origin and an imprint.  It is not a mystery.  Take away the imprint and the nightmare goes away too.  Otherwise, we are constantly dealing with a memory and a feeling that will not go away.

The average claustrophobic sees it as a bother so they avoid closed rooms, tightly shut doors, etc. Unhappily, some therapists see it in the same way and teach them how to avoid the very thing that could free them…terror.  Once felt, it is gone not to intrude again into life and their nightmares.