Our Inner Angst

Our Inner Angst.
When you are sitting all alone with yourself without any distractions do you become restless, irritable and discontent, do you feel anxious, with a feeling of a need to escape? What is your experience of spending quality time with yourself, being emotionally intimate with yourself?
If being alone with yourself is an unpleasant experience that you need to distract yourself from, then you are suffering from a pathological condition that is destroying the quality of your life.
What is happening to you, is that the unprocessed emotions, repressed into the unconscious rise up into consciousness unless our minds are busy, and we are distracted from ourselves. We are driven to distraction and have become addicted to our distractions. We cannot be alone with ourselves, we must be distracted from ourselves, we must be busy, we must be entertained. This is the underlying human pathology revealed by the Covid pandemic. Covid did not create this mental health crises it merely revealed it to us. The underlying human condition in the west is a pathological (life damaging) state. We distract ourselves with work, tv, social media, and consumerism. We are constantly seeking attention and approval, which is merely one of our unmet childhood needs repressed into the unconscious, which will rise up into our consciousness if our minds are unoccupied.
How did this pathology develop? It started in infancy, in the first year of life, the infant lacks self awareness and experiences itself and its mother as one, without distinction. The rational, thinking mind does not develop until the second year of life and is language dependent, one cannot think without language, therefore one cannot process emotion without language. Therefore the first two years of life are a feeling experience. The infants biological and emotional attachment to the mother must be maintained at all costs in the first two years of life. The child’s needs for unconditional love, attention, affection and security must be fully met by the mother. This places a huge demand on women, one that is easily met if they have the full support of the community. Unfortunately very few women have this kind of support in our modern world, and women don’t have the resources to meet the genuine, authentic needs of the child, and as a result an anxiety is introduced into the infants emotional experience, a feeling of separation of its self and the mother is introduced before the child has the capacity to process emotion, and the infant feels it’s very survival is threatened. This all pervading fear is what lies at the root of our pathology. An infant suffering from a premature sense of separation from the mother is restless, irritable and discontent, which is exactly what you experience as an adult when you are all alone with yourself, without distraction. The raw unprocessed emotions of infancy rise up into consciousness if your mind is undistracted, and so what do you do? The only thing you know to do is to distract yourself from your discomfort, turn on the tv, go shopping, get busy and repress these feelings once again. In other words reengage with your addictions again. Addiction is defined as a pathological (life damaging) relationship with any mood altering substance or experience. Our pathology is driven by our need to constantly repress our unprocessed emotional baggage that we have accumulated throughout our life, starting in infancy.
If we don’t stop this process of constant repression our unconscious will deal with us, it will create life situations that recreate the unprocessed feelings of infancy in our present day experience. The unconscious is demanding access to consciousness so it can unburden itself and you can become whole.
The way out of this crisis is to go through the crisis and not run away from it. If you are feeling rejected, or abandoned, or alone, or unworthy, or inadequate in your current experience, know that your unconscious mind has created this situation or experience to gain access into consciousness. You must deal with your childhood trauma, or it will deal with you. Whatever negative emotions you are dealing with in adulthood are most probably grounded in childhood.
Remember if you cannot spend quality time alone with yourself without distraction you are dealing with an underlying pathological condition that is one hundred percent treatable if you are willing to accept treatment and make the necessary sacrifices for your life.
The first step is admitting you have an addiction to distraction and ending the denial. The second step is abstaining from your distractions. The third step is dealing with the repressed emotions of your life, you cannot take this step alone, if you have a truly empathic friend who has processed their own trauma, they can help you if you are willing to bare all to them and follow their example of recovery. A Twelve Step group like Emotions Anonymous can be helpful, other than that therapy can be helpful if the therapist has worked through their own recovery process. Recovery is all about recovering the repressed content of the unconscious and processing it in consciousness.