The book combines a slightly adjusted version of my article “The Choice” with the following sections. It could make sense to read “The Choice” first if you haven’t already.
Progression
If the cost-benefit ratios of any of the qualities from “The Choice” strike you as desirable, you can train them yourself and employ a capable therapist to show you the ropes to speed things along. Some cool types of therapy that I can recommend are Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT) and Schema Therapy. There’s also Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP), which personally always rubs me the wrong way, but it’s also evidence-based.
You know best where your current bottlenecks lie, so you can tackle those first, then add whatever else you desire later on as the cherry on top.
Here are some examples of the sort of progress you can expect, divided into five stages – from ⭐ to ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐.
Prerecovery ⭐
Prerecovery, a personality disorder feels like necessity. There’s seemingly no other way to behave that’ll keep you and your dignity alive. You’re deep in the borderline level of personality organization according to Kernberg (see the glossary). That’s what’s meant when people say it’s ego-syntonic. The opposite is ego-dystonic or ego-alien, which is a state where you continue to observe traits in yourself, but they feel like a bandaid or cast that you’d prefer to remove because you’re healed underneath.
This ego-syntonicity has several sources:
Some people live their lives in a state that allows for very little introspection. They’ve described it as acting very automatically or instinctively. Like a permanent flow state. Some even say that this is a common neurotypical experience that works well for people if only they happen to be ordinary enough in terms of their neurology and personality. I would envy them if I didn’t find it so offputting to be ordinary.
Another source is the splitting off of most parts of one’s personality. If you’re in touch with only a part of you that makes up less than 10% of who you are – only those parts of yourself that are in line with the requirements of your personality disorder, that’s another way to maintain ego-syntonicity. Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci had to work as a soldier. Perhaps he would’ve become a master of the blade, but would he ever have made all of his discoveries and inventions in anatomy, civil engineering, art, chemistry, geology, geometry, hydrodynamics, mathematics, music, mechanical engineering, optics, physics, pyrotechnics, or zoology? Don’t limit yourself!
Then there’s the teleological nonmentalizing mode explained in the glossary. The pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott would argue that a child needs to be found. A baby doesn’t know who they are, and they need parental mirroring of their own emotions to even categorize them as something that belongs to them. If a parent instead projects expectations on the child, that process never happens, and while the emotions are there somewhere, the child doesn’t identify with them or understand them but instead identifies with these extrinsic expectations. The child comes to think that they are these expectations, and hence thinks that they’re broken or will die if they fall short of the expectations. That’s teleological thinking.
This works hand in hand with the pretend mode (also explained in the glossary). Absent actual knowledge of who you are, you create fictional narratives around the reasons for your actions. You end up living in a bubble of your own making, far away from the real world, like a child that has not been born. This bubble is usually one of perfection – you disown everything imperfect about yourself as judged by some narrow self-image. [S] But for sovereigns, that narrow self-image is often one of a villain, someone who stands in opposition to society. You against the world. That has the advantage that it becomes impossible for these enemies to shame you, just like the enemy’s minions in a video can’t shame you, but this separation comes at the cost of exactly that kind of derealization: Reality feels like a video game and other people feel like NPCs. The result is isolation – a tiger locked in a cell of barren concrete.
For everyone but sovereigns this often takes the form of an external locus of control, where all actions can be fully explained as reactions to something that someone has done to us. [S] Sovereigns instead tend to have a rigidly internal locus of control, so they fail to realize when they’ve really been reacting blindly. It just feels like a particularly well-practiced reflex instead of something that they were helpless to control.
Then there are the defenses of projection and projective identification. In the case of projection, you fool yourself into thinking that someone else exhibits some property that keeps your self-deceptions alive. In the case of projective identification, you provoke the person into exhibiting those properties. You can also select your environment such that it is one that supports your self-deceptions.
[S] But these mechanisms also have the effect that, one way or another, you keep alive your belief that others are not trustworthy or at least much less trustworthy than they really are. That means you also don’t trust them to help you see reality more clearly, reinforcing your bubble. [E] Or you become so avoidant that you never test how safe others actually are, so you also keep alive your belief that they’ll likely banish you for who you really are.
My own path spanned all of these, except perhaps the first. Or maybe I just forgot. Some of my earliest memories at age 3 are already about positioning myself strategically and with considerable forethought such as to hide supposedly shameful parts of myself from my parents and teachers. I thought that otherwise they’d likely banish me.
I had rough ideas of what was expected of me – maturity, heroic self-abnegation, perfect motor control, perfect adherence to unknown rules, effective invisibility, impeccable fluency of language, and more – and in my childhood still flip-flopped between thinking that arbitrary rules are pointless and pretending that I had known of the rules all along. Then I became too ashamed of the first to think it clearly and ashamed of my memories of the times when I did. The teleological mode had a stranglehold on me for as long as I can remember. Some parts of myself I disowned with a vengeance, others I never claimed as my own in the first place.
Around age 8, pretend mode joined the fray. I preemptively spun a make-belief story for everything I did. The story formed an iron-clad bubble of alibis around me. No one ever asked, but they didn’t have to because I had introjected the Grand Inquisitor. I see it often that people are not just afraid to show weakness or imperfection because they might be judged or exploited by others but because they themselves would judge themselves for it.
Then I did something unusual – I’ve only heard from one other person who did this – by identifying so fully with my pretend mode narrator that I was quite free to think strategically with the disowned parts of my mind. That was tremendously useful: The average person just comes up with some post-hoc blame-shifting excuse, the person who gets the blame calls bullshit, and it feels like a thorn in one’s self-image. Instead I wondered how I have to set up the situation from the get-go such that I can fool myself into thinking that someone else is to blame for my potential mistakes without that person ever realizing it and having a chance to defend themselves. For example by tricking them into convincing me to do whatever it is I want to do! Of course I also have to prepare a reason for why I can’t tell them that I blame them – for example out of generosity! That avoids the thorn. But it does require getting strategic about fooling oneself. The strategy gets set up in the disowned parts, and gets set up in just such a way that the pretend mode has an easy time throwing its alibis at the problem and making them stick: Here, pretend mode, I set this up nicely for you, please take notice and do your thing with your words.
Very clever. Don’t do that or you’ll have an even harder time breaking free.
Finally I remember many times when I wondered why I was still alive. I fully expected to be banished and die every time I realized I had made a mistake and didn’t have a solid alibi. And yet there I was, several mistakes later, still alive and kicking. I felt a bit like a zombie. I should be dead, and yet I wasn’t. Was I like a severed head in its last seconds, thinking the sword’s blade must’ve missed? Or was the risk of banishment lower than I had thought? I was in high school at the time and estimated that given the number of times I’ve miraculously survived, the real risk of banishment must be around 10% per mistake or else I would’ve had to have gotten incredibly lucky.
That’s a mix of psychic equivalence (see the glossary) and avoidance preventing me from busting a delusion. The fear of banishment and death – really an externalization of the terror of a narcissistic injury – felt unquestionably real because I always experienced it in psychic equivalence mode where emotions and reality feel like they’re one and the same. Naturally, I didn’t want to die, so I avoided any activity where I could make a mistake and be blamed for it. As a result, I made very few mistakes of this sort, so my upper bound on the probability of banishment was at 10% rather than the ~0% that would’ve been accurate.
Decades later a friend of mine thought she’d die if she failed her exams. Her therapist recommended writing out, step by step, all the ways in which she would die in such a case. She filled a whole sheet with sequences of events but all turned out to be recoverable long before death. I wondered why I never thought of that. After all, there are laws governing who gets banished or otherwise killed, and it would’ve been easy to reassure myself that that’s exceedingly unusual for me in my country at my age. But psychic equivalence is so convincing, I never stopped to question it. Who knows if my friend would have if it hadn’t been for her therapist.
Flickers of Insight ⭐⭐
The Flickers of Insight stage is a particularly confusing one. Where previously all parts of your personality were neatly separated from each other and blissfully unaware of each other’s existence, now they sometimes overhear each other.
Perhaps you want to message your therapist because you just completed a particularly difficult homework task and can’t wait to tell them about it. But as you open the chat, you see your own unread messages from the previous night and flash back to all the shame and anguish you felt some 12 hours earlier. For the most part the messages look foreign, like someone else wrote them, but for split seconds there are flickers of the intense emotions from the previous night. You feel ashamed of the messages and delete them. For months afterwards a strange anxiety prevents you from opening that text chat.
Or you have a video interview with a new sales employee. She shares her screen and switches to a presentation she prepared, but not before switching to the wrong window for a second, a sex shop. She stares at her slides for a moment, then disconnects without a word. A colleague asks you what happened and you say “I don’t know; she just hung up.” But really you remember empathizing with her shame for a second, which made you feel pathetic. You must disown the feeling and pretend you had inferred it intellectually, “I wonder… She opened the wrong window for a moment, so perhaps she felt embarrassed.”
Or your partner asks you to do the dishes. You say you always do the dishes. You wonder how long to wait before doing the dishes so it’ll look like it had been your plan all along to do the dishes. You notice that that’s a strange thought to have for someone who had been meaning to do the dishes all along. Did you change? Was the old version of you flawed?
Or you fall asleep at the wheel and crash your car. You tell the police a story about the dangerous road conditions and they believe you, but that achievement can’t quite repress an earlier feeling of shame that you’ve fallen asleep, as much as you try not to acknowledge it.
Or you find that your favorite actor played a role in a movie directed by a complete idiot of a director. You go off like a firecracker on your life partner who wanted to watch it with you. The next day your partner asks you what happened there, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t remember what connection there was between the betrayal by your favorite actor and your partner. It felt so obvious the previous day, now it feels absurd. You change the topic to forget about it.
Your therapist mentions that for someone who gets nothing out of therapy, you’ve been attending with admirable regularity. For a second you think you want to be helped and feel ashamed. Luckily it’s not a question, and you respond that you have to cancel next week’s session because you want to get a haircut. You’re annoyed you said haircut rather than dental checkup, because now you have to actually get a haircut.
Your parts are like exes who live in the same village and sometimes awkwardly bump into each other at a store and pretend it didn’t happen. They’re not really talking, but it gets harder and harder to pretend the other doesn’t exist.
I noticed the first signs of this in my 20s. I was too ashamed of my authentic self to identify with it at all, so I instead kept a constant narration running in my mind – pretend mode nonmentalizing – that told me a story of my reasons for my actions that was simpler and more in line with my self-image than my real motivations. That’s where I put my identity. My authentic motivations could play out in the background unfazed meanwhile, because they were not me. I just had to be careful never to verbalize them.
But here’s the rub: Sometimes a professor interrupts their lecture to ask a question, and one of the students is quick to answer it. Quick enough that I didn’t get to mentally verbalize my answer but not so quick that I didn’t have time to come up with the answer. Whenever that happened, I was stuck in a weird state where I could clearly remember thinking of the answer but because I had not mentally verbalized the answer yet, was also convinced that I hadn’t thought of it. But only one can be true at a time. You could say that one part of me had thought of the answer, but the part that I happened to identify with had not.
Another time, much earlier, I remember committing a small lapse in my signaling and then thinking that I’ll never receive the help I can’t ask for if my signaling is so inconsistent. A thought that baffled me and that I put out of my mind quickly again.
Eventual Consistency ⭐⭐⭐
A monumental shift happens between stages ⭐⭐ and ⭐⭐⭐: The default is no longer that the parts are separate and unaware of each other, and it’s rare that they bump into each other, but the opposite, that they are mostly in contact with each other and it’s just under stress that one becomes so dominant for an hour, a day, or a week that the connection breaks down. This maps roughly to the transition from the low to the high borderline level of personality organization (see glossary).
You have a crush on someone, and the person is not responding. Was it the name of your university that intimidated them? Should you have been more careful to underplay the growth rate of your startup so as not to intimidate them? They must be shy to respond because you outclass them in the professional domain. If only they knew that you see greatness in them and want to lift them up too! A week passes and gradually it dawns on you that they don’t find you attractive and you’ve been defending against that realization all along because it produces feelings of shame in you. But you can survive the shame!
Or a manager tells you that they’d like you to put in a more consistent effort understanding and following company procedures. It feels like your soul leaves the room. You stop caring about anything, leave work immediately, buy vodka, go home, close all blinds, and spend two weeks in bed wasting away on a liquid diet while alternately fantasizing about suicide and vengeance. Then you try to find your advocate (see the chapter on Stigma and Community) among all your hundreds of unread messages and tell them what happened to you. You find that you’d like to keep your job, if you still have it, and print out the document with the internal procedures so you have it right on your desk where it’s easy to reference.
Or a romantic partner messages you to ask you to change something about your behavior. You become irate but you have the presence of mind to condemn your partner’s impudence not in a response to them but in messages to a friend of yours, maybe your advocate (see the chapter on Stigma and Community), who responds with kindness and reassurances. An hour later you feel like your partner has a point and reply to them calmly.
You’ve unlocked an integrated state now, so the challenge is to find back to it after a traumatic event or reactivation.
I don’t have clear memories of this phase, but I had a few hours at times during which my preoccupied attachment acted up and I was overcome with abandonment anxieties that I experienced in psychic equivalence mode (see glossary). Hours later, I realized that I had behaved strangely, but the emotional intensity of the experience still colored my memories. A week later, that started to fade too, and I became able to engage with what had happened in a more even-handed way.
Another time, the emotionally intense phase lasted for weeks during which I cycled through feelings of shame, anger, and more, and turned to friends to process the experience. A month later, I knew that the behavior of the other person hadn’t been great but that the real reason for my reaction was my complex PTSD. I felt guilty for talking so badly about her to my friends, some of whom might meet her one day. I made sure to update my friends on my new assessment of what had happened.
These were already rare, once-a-year regressions for me at the time, but if they happen every other week, we’re probably still at the ⭐⭐⭐ stage.
Integration ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Integration marks the transition from the borderline level of personality organization to the neurotic level (see glossary). Now most parts of you are in touch almost all of the time. When stressful events happen, you get stressed, anxious, angry, but you still see yourself and the other as two full, complex people rather than as all-good or all-evil caricatures. It takes effort and self-control, but you can force yourself to try to understand their needs. You don’t feel all powerful or completely helpless, you’re still in touch with who you really are, all of you, just like you are in relaxed situations.
Now, if you have a crush on someone, and they’re not responding, you feel the shame immediately rather than with a delay. The idea of calling your advocate to process it adds another different layer of shame because you feel weak for not trying to do it on your own, but you can put that feeling aside too and call them.
After receiving the critical feedback at work, you feel destroyed, but you go to the restroom to cover your face in cold water, the TIPP skill from DBT. (See the chapter on Emotional Regulation.) Then you tell your manager that you’ll print out the document with the internal procedures to be able to find them more easily, but you also realize that the work feels beneath you, and taking unconventional shortcuts was a way for you to feel like it doesn’t have power over you – a realization you make a note of in your diary to try to understand better when you have time.
Your romantic partner asks you to change something about your behavior. Shame boils up, then anger, but you remember that you’re in this together and go, “I’m sorry, lovebug, I need a moment to process that.” Then, “What was it exactly that annoyed you? I’m trying to understand it better.” You collaborate on a solution that works for both of you.
All the traumatic situations still have great emotional intensity to them. Maybe you’ll still dissociate a bit, sweat, and get a racing heart, but you immediately know what’s happening with you, can observe yourself and observe your thoughts, and deliberately choose an effective response with minimal delay.
Have I really graduated from ⭐⭐⭐⭐? I’m not sure! A partner recently told me that she felt betrayed by me, and I just thought, “Wonderful! An opportunity to show off my incredible emotional maturity!” The conversation went really well! But at another time a partner asked me to wash the dishes more often, and I felt like I’m responding from some script because I felt so ashamed I had to mask like a hermit crab in an armored warship.
By and large, romantic situations have become easy for me in the past two years, but professional situations continue to be a challenge. Just recently, I got a rejection for a job I would’ve been an amazing fit for and would’ve loved, and I felt like a superheroine stripped of her powers in the midst of the battle. I struggled for about two days, but not alone. I processed it with the help of my partners and friends.
Chill ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Whereas at stage ⭐⭐⭐⭐ your trauma, however intense, can’t rip you to pieces anymore, can’t put you in states anymore where you split on yourself and others and see only caricatures, at stage ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐, the trauma has healed to the point where it’s either completely absent or feels like a silent notification you can just swipe away.
You and your partner attend a weekend-long conference that’s relevant to your business. You get to bring a +1, and your partner thought it might be interesting. It’s Saturday evening and your partner tells you that they felt left behind because you had gone off to network with a hundred people and were nowhere to be found anymore. You apologize and ask how you two can do that better on Sunday. Your partner suggests that they can join you on your networking prowl, and visit a nearby museum if that gets too boring. On Sunday you two have a blast: Turns out your partner and an important stakeholder share an interest in underground vertical mushroom farming, so together you made an impression on her. Later at night you realize that this would’ve been a challenging situation for you just a few years earlier.
Your partner asks you to clean all the empty bottles off the table. You wonder for a moment whether it’s an accusation that you’ve been amassing all these empty bottles. But your partner is not your mom, some of the bottles are theirs, and it would be out of character for them to be passive-aggressive like that. This is probably really just them asking for help. You clean away the empty bottles and make a mental note to tell them about your mental processes in that moment, partially because they’ll find it interesting and partially because you’re proud of your ability to entertain multiple hypotheses when inferring another person’s intent.
This is something I experience frequently now. Recently my partner asked me whether I have the keys to her apartment. I said yes. She told me to double-check. There was a mental notification prompting me to choose humiliation or anger. But the thing is that we both have ADHD, and she probably forgets her keys frequently. She doesn’t know that it’s rare for me. So it’s highly unlikely that there was any kind of accusation in there. So I wonder whether I should just say “Trust me,” or show the keys, and I swipe away the notification.
In another instance a friend told me that if I offer my support to her, she feels disgusted with me. I asked what that feeling is like and where it might come from. Meanwhile I’m fascinated by the complete absence of any kind of reaction to being told I’m disgusting.
I have the same when I drop or spill something. In the past, that triggered an intense PTSD response for me, because I was used to being punished for days for any little clumsiness. Now I outright enjoy those moments for the complete absence of any kind of emotional response.
Motivation and Ways of Being
Unlocking achievement after achievement so not to feel worthless is a strong motivator! So at some point I had to ask myself: Do I prefer to be happy and content but with little drive to do anything other than enjoy my life, or do I want to continue to make my self-worth dependent on unlocking new successes at a high rate?
Whenever I’m faced with a choice like that, I wonder: Can I have my cake and eat it too?
First I just enjoyed my new ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “equanimity” state for a year. Even when it was interrupted occasionally by a bout of shame when I thought my friends had gone geocaching without me, my engagement with the shame was that of a hobby entomologist studying a particularly interesting bug.
But after a year of that, I felt that it was time for something new.
There are many different ways to be, which are best collected by befriending many different people. I like to pick and choose between them according to my mood. I hope that this section will also inspire you to take a more playful stance toward these attitudes.
Equanimity
That’s the state I referenced above. All the usual emotions of shame, anger, etc. are still around, but they’re not dangerous tigers trying to eat you but cute kittens you enjoy catsitting and watching. Insults and criticisms and how they land are just more curious kittens frolicing around. You’re mostly motivated by things that are enjoyable in the moment. The state approximates how M.E. Thomas describes her attitude to life.
There’s a quality of similarity and oneness more than connectedness. I’ll contrast this against collective effervescence below. Metaphorically speaking, more like drops of water merging together on the hood of a car than people holding hands. I thought extensively about the differences between me, my friends, and some of the most reviled people from history and identified the minor differences in our conditions that could’ve just as soon shaped me into them if they had been different.
Is not a denial of those differences, but a recognition of their contingent, ancillary nature compared to everything that we have in common. Just like we might not be able to tell the siblings of a lemur family apart, but one lemur might feel suicidal because they think they’re ugly compared to their brothers and sisters, so I look at humanity and mostly see the overwhelming similarity between us all compared to which our differences are mere afterthoughts.
In this state, I’m not particular dependent on self-esteem injections, but it’s enjoyable to feel like I’m one of the most self-transcendent people alive, that I’m almost the same as some of the most extreme characters from history, that I can relate to more people and more extreme personalities than most, and that it’s perhaps more meaningful to think of myself as sentience itself – all of sentient life throughout history and future – than just this body.
There has actually been a bit of a progression over the course of my life:
I like to say that I used to identify only with a small part of myself – only my internal narrator.
That I expanded that to identify with more parts of myself, but only present ones.
That I expanded further to identify with one or two communities.
That I expanded further to identify with some parts of my romantic partner.
That I expanded further to identify with other beings than just humans.
That I expanded further to identify with more parts of myself.
That I expanded further to identify with past and future versions of myself.
Finally I got so confused by the idea of identifying with things that I identified with most person-moments in existence at least a little bit, and hence with almost nothing in particular, though notably without particular changes to my sensate experience.
There is an aspect of avoidance to non-identification. If identification is painful, stopping it makes life effortless and painless, but there are many ways to identify, which are all beautiful in their own ways. If you’re an artist who’s afraid of the difficulties and criticisms that come with being an artist and putting your art out there for others to see, then one way is to stop being an artist. But it’s only one way.
Admiration/Recognition-Seeking
An easy default to fall back on, at least for me, is recognition-seeking (the more common term admiration-seeking feels slightly off). It feels like I take my self-worth and give it away willy-nilly only to then try to earn it back by being impressive. It’s motivating, but most of the time it sucks too.
When I’m in this state and I get a job rejection, I feel shame, like I’m not good enough. That’s not useful because it can set off a vicious cycle of rejection, shame, and avoidance.
This mode has served me well with people who I’m confident will welcome and respect my gift of self-worth or when I’m alone, and even then I use it only sparingly and playfully.
Power-Seeking
I find this state more fun to be in, but it also comes less naturally to me. I imagine recognition-seeking is associated with preoccupied attachment and power-seeking with avoidant attachment, and being low on avoidant attachment, recognition-seeking is where my mind goes automatically.
But with power-seeking I’m not giving my self-worth away to other people but rather to achievements. It’s not like having judges rate my dance performance and more like trying to break a Trackmania world record. There’s still self-worth on the line, but the other people are out of the picture. That makes it feel safer.
A job rejection feels not like shame but like something that I almost owned that is taken away from me again. Losing a possession like that is less painful than feeling like I’m bad. I find that it’s a good motivator with limited side-effects.
Collective Effervescence
Something I would like to experience more is this feeling of being part of a group. Still identified with your body, but about equally identified with your group or team.
This requires a strong group identity, so it’s impossible to establish with people who you feel are very different from you or who you distrust. It requires a common mission, which makes it applicable to settings such as that of a team at a company or charity, or a friend group on a holiday trip. I experienced it during a sailing trip with some 20 friends.
Feelings of inferiority or superiority are not in the way – can even be helpful – so long as you can expand them to the whole of the group.
The most remarkable aspect of it was that my self-consciousness dropped away. Where normally I would constantly fret over what I look like and how people perceive me, these thoughts, when they came up at all, seemed so uninteresting that I forgot about them again within a second.
Playfulness
Playfulness goes hand in hand with equanimity, but it also opens the door to a playful engagement with grandiosity. Outside grandiose moods, it’s easy to feel ashamed of grandiosity, and we don’t want that. Grandiosity can be something beautiful and creative. We lean into our five-year-old self, but instead of role-playing a famous entrepreneur, activist, or artist in the playground, we method-act the famous entrepreneur, activist, or artist in the real world, because now the real world is our playground.
If you’re in a bad spot in life, it’s difficult to access this playfulness. But as you establish more stability in your life and environment and improve your emotional regulation and behavioral control, the more will your conditions feel safe enough for you to let loose and indulge your grandiosity playfully rather than as a rigid shield against reality.
Where equanimity approximates absence of identification or identification (at least to a small extent) with everyone, recognition-seeking is an identification with a more well-respected version of yourself, power-seeking is an identification with a more powerful version of yourself, and collective effervescence is an identification with a small group rather than (just) yourself, playfulness is not about identification. Hence it can be combined with all forms of identification while also reducing the felt importance of identification.
Conclusion
Some people claim that recovery is something forced upon them by society that they have to resist or lose their individuality. That’s totalitarianism, not recovery. Recovery is when you notice that something in your life sucks, and you get to a point where it doesn’t suck anymore. And then perhaps to a point where it becomes outright enjoyable.
As a bit of a control freak myself, I wish I could mold everyone into my own ideal of perfection – but, alas, I can’t. So what’s left is for you to decide what you like and what you don’t like about your life, and then figure out how to convert the second into the first.
This book is your menu and toolbox.
Exercises
Where are You Now?
Do you have some kind of diary or want to start one? Start a new entry and try to figure out where in the star scale you currently stand.
Which of the dimensions of recovery (stability, regulation, insight, integration, values, guilt, remorse, empathy, attachment) sound interesting to you? Which are you already proficient at and which are not your forte?
Repeat this exercise a few times yearly to track your progress!
What’s Your Mountain?
Jordan Monroe has this metaphor for healing that likens it to scaling a mountain. For some, the mountain is bigger; some have a map or a wise guide to show them the way up; some take a comfortable but winding road up while others cut straight up through the thickets and up the steep walls; some run up with only brief breaks to eat and sleep while others walk up at a leisurely pace.
All of these factors influence how quickly you’ll reach the apex.
Picture your mountain, describe it, perhaps draw it! Understand what your pace is, how many hours per week you dedicate to your healing, what help you have, what road you want to take.
Recovery Conversations
Check in with your advocate or a close friend who knows you well. Introduce them to the taxonomies and ask them to assess where you stand on each dimension. If it’s scary to hear someone’s assessment that is perhaps different from your own, then the exercise is working. There’s no value judgment in this. Some people’s mountains are just higher or steeper.
Bear in mind that both of you have your unique perspectives. Your perspective is filtered through your defenses, but their is filtered through your relationship. Especially if you have a regular friendship rather than a romantic or professional relationship, it’s possible that you’ve never been in particularly challenging situations in their presence.
I have a friend who currently feels like ⭐⭐⭐⭐ to me, but I want to wait until I see how he handles himself these days in relationships before forming an opinion on that because has not had to content with all those challenges in recent months.