Toxic Blood: Critical Introspection
Chapter 3
Critical introspection is the ability to objectively and critically evaluate the internal workings of your own consciousness. No matter how daunting that may seem, it is an essential tool for improving or healing your mental/emotional self, because without it you are never going to be able to address the root causes of any issues.
Mother and Father gave a great deal of voice to the importance of healthy psychology. Not only did they see therapists and psychologists, but they also paid for myself and my brothers to see therapists when we were children and it was still covered by Mother’s insurance. Most of the time my sessions amounted to having a friendly person I could talk to, a kind of outlet that was otherwise sorely lacking in my life. A couple of the therapists were also able to teach me foundational skills for critical introspection, even if they never explained that was what they were teaching me. All of them instilled a foundational idea that not only was it possible to understand yourself and your inner workings, but it was a normal and healthy thing to do. This was further reinforced by the rhetoric at home, as my parents’ hypocrisies on the issue were not readily apparent to me as a child.
Father struggled with depression most of my life. In fact, the only time I can remember him being anything other than miserable was a span of time when I was a toddler and he was unemployed. He had time to play with my brothers and I, took us to the library and park on what seemed like a daily basis, engaged with us, cooked things we wanted, made toys for us out of scraps of wood, and encouraged our creative interests. It is the only time in my childhood when his smile touched his eyes, and the only time I felt like I was genuinely a priority in his life. After he was once again employed, his life became a very long road of misery and a cocktail of antidepressants to help him cope.
In most things I tend to take a wholistic perspective. That is, I see benefit in taking advantage of a wide variety of approaches to a situation. It is wonderful that antidepressants exist, and they work marvels for a lot of people who need that help getting their brains to produce a balanced set of chemicals. Father always insisted he was one of those people, and he probably is. However, as I hit my teens I looked at his life, at his misery with his career, at the dissatisfaction he had in his marriage, at the filth in which he wallowed, and at the occasional very brief attempts he made at enriching his life with hobbies. I could not help but wonder how much those things contributed to his misery. I wondered if his mental health would also be helped by changing things about his life that were actively contributing to his misery and depression. I wondered if he was using the antidepressants primarily as a bandage for bigger, unaddressed problems he preferred to ignore.
When my parents purchased their first house in the summer before my 2nd grade year, my father built a makeshift “tree house” in the large fruitless mulberry in the backyard. Instead of a ladder, it had a series of boards nailed to the trunk, leading to two open platforms up in the biggest branches. I seem to remember that he felt a family home was not a family home without a treehouse, but it might also have been something he wished he had when he was a child. Regardless of the specific motivation, he decided to give us the closest version he could manage with minimal effort and materials.
When I was eleven, I used to spend hours at a time just sitting or lying in the branches of that tree, sometimes accompanied by my cat. I even had a favorite crook in the branches where I fit perfectly. The platforms had long been taken down, judged unstable from the growth of the tree and weathering of the wood, but enough of the ladder pieces still clung to the trunk for me to easily climb into the branches.
My brothers had long since lost any interest in climbing the tree, but when I was high up in the branches I felt cradled and safe and free, like all the miseries and problems of life could not touch me there. Then, one day, I realized that it would be so easy to just let go of the branches, to let myself fall head-first to the ground, and all the misery would end, just like that. And then I realized what I was thinking, and it scared me. I did not really want to die. I just did not want to be miserable anymore.
I climbed down and went and told Mother. Within a few days I had an appointment with Father’s psychologist. He gave me a single session, with both my parents present, where I explained the one incident and he prescribed Zoloft, the same antidepressant medication Father was taking at the time. I did not see Father’s psychologist on a regular basis. It was just the one appointment, and here, have these pills to magically solve your problems. If I did see him again, I am sure it was just a formality to get the prescription refilled, because it made no impression on me.
I had seen therapists off and on since I was a child, but I do not believe I was seeing one at the time. If I did, it does not stand out in my mind and had no tangible impact on my mental health. I usually had a good grasp of what I was feeling and experiencing even when I was not seeing a therapist, so I still reflected on how the medication affected me, and my overall emotional state. Also, I was a child who had little to no control over my situation in life beyond what I was already doing, so there was little a therapist could do beyond lending a friendly ear. None of them delved into the neglect and emotional manipulation at home. It is entirely possible my therapists did not even realize those problems existed, especially since Mother was actively involved in ensuring that her children saw competent mental health professionals. Instead of any home problems, the focus of my sessions was usually on bullying at school and my loneliness and lack of friends.
I think I climbed back up in that tree a handful more times, but the magic was gone. It was no longer a safe refuge. It was no longer a place of peace. It was a reminder that I was miserable and that the only way I knew out of that misery was not an option I was willing to genuinely entertain. The suicide option, contemplated for a single moment on a single day, tainted all of my experience of being in that tree.
I spent the next six months taking Zoloft. I learned later that it is specifically not recommended for depression in anyone under the age of 18 because of side effects that include an increased chance of committing suicide. Father’s psychologist, who I believe was of poor ethical character, assured me and my parents that the worst and most common side effect is dry mouth, and that follow-up sessions were unnecessary. I am certain that his assurances were perfectly in line with Mother and Father’s desires, because it allowed them to do the bare minimum and say they cared and tried, while absolving themselves of any further effort.
While I was on Zoloft, I can genuinely say that I was no longer depressed. At the same time, I was no longer sad, no longer happy, no longer excited, no longer interested, no longer… anything. I was numb, like an empty void or shell, bereft of feeling. Nothing mattered. Nothing at all. It makes sense to me how that numbness could make it very easy for people who have real suicidal tendencies to go ahead and kill themselves. I am lucky that I was just miserable and do not have suicidal tendencies, or I think I probably would have ended my life while on that medication.
After six months I decided I was not going to take Zoloft anymore. I decided that I would rather face my life depressed than continue to exist in that weird numb void where I did not really feel anything at all. I know that is a weird thing to say, since depression often feels like an overwhelming numbness, but it is true. Comparatively, depression and misery was something, and something was better than nothing. Mother and Father tried to talk me out of it, but they also did not try to force me to stay on Zoloft. I stopped taking it, and immediately felt better.
Mother’s next attempt to help me was by promising me I could get a puppy if I thoroughly researched breeds and training. Father was less than happy she made that promise to me, but they had a policy of not contradicting each other, so he raised the bar on my preparatory research and let the promise stand. To his dismay, I did even more research than he required, because it did for a time distract me from my misery. He vetoed my choices of breed, because I was interested in breeds like pitbulls or mastiffs or rottweilers, and instead steered me towards golden retrievers. At the time his veto and ambiguous justifications confused me, but now I strongly suspect he was worried a guard dog breed might have decided I needed protection from him.
Even if I was not able to get my first choice of breed, I was over the moon about getting a dog and having the authority to train her properly so she could live in the house with us. I named her Merry Jubilee, to show her how happy I was to have her in my life. I did everything I could and trained her diligently, which went great for the first year or so. Unfortunately, no one else in the family, least of all my parents, took the time to learn how to be consistent with a dog, or how to maintain training. She was also very smart and had a bit of a mean streak, so by the time she was one year old, trouble started.
I had trained Merry well. I wanted to be able to trust her in the house, to be able to let her off leash in the park, and I regularly rode my bike through the park and suburban neighborhood with her running alongside me. She knew commands, and she knew manners. And then, she realized she did not actually have to do any of it. Mother was the primary culprit of undoing her training by constantly undermining it. Mother regularly rewarded Merry for doing the behaviors I had trained her not to do, or for not doing the behaviors I had trained her to do.
No amount of pleading or explaining on my part did anything to change Mother’s behavior, so I gave up. I still loved Merry, but she became hard to manage, I could no longer trust her off leash or at the dog park, and she would occasionally deliberately knock my bike over when I took her for a run. She maintained enough manners to stay in the house, but that was about all. She became the family dog rather than my dog, because other people in the house let her get away with more.
Getting a dog was never a real solution to my problems anyway. It was a stopgap and a distraction. Merry could provide some comfort, but she could not solve my problems with bullying and lack of friendships, or with the neglect and emotional abuse at home. Since she was not personally inclined to emotional support work, as some dogs are, she did nothing to alleviate my loneliness. In the end she served primarily to further highlight the lack of support I had at home, and the fact that no matter how important something was to me, the selfish impulses of other people in the family mattered more.
The same pills that Father popped did not help me, and therapists had not helped me. Getting a dog did not magically make my problems go away. No one could (or would) make the bullying stop, and it was not on anyone besides myself to find me friendships, so my parents threw their hands up in the air in defeat. They could think of nothing else that might help ease my misery. In retrospect I can see a lot of other ways my parents could have helped, but those were all things that would have required them to make drastic changes in their own behaviors and attitudes, or to take time out of their lives to support my interests, hopes, and dreams. They were unwilling to acknowledge their role in my misery, let alone change their behavior, so the very suggestion never came up. The only help my parents were willing to offer, chemical intervention and a dog, had failed. That meant, like with so many other things in my life, I could not count on them and I needed to figure out for myself how to help me.
I set about looking at the things in my life as critically as I could manage with my limited life experience. I may not yet have been prepared to acknowledge or been capable of seeing the abuses of my parents, but they were the only adults I knew well. There were still things I could learn from how they handled their own miseries. I looked at myself, and how I handled my miseries. I thought about it, long and hard. I thought about all the things I had noticed Father and Mother doing in their own lives, sabotaging their chances at happiness. I wondered if I was doing the same thing in my own life.
Somewhere along the way I picked up the idea that the only person who can really change you is you. You can influence other people, but unless you are being abusively manipulative you cannot change others. You can influence them, but it is up to them to change. If you look back on your life and find people you can point to and say, “That person changed my life for the better,” think about it this way instead. At a pivotal point in your life, that person gave you the tools, resources, and encouragement you needed to be able to change your own life, which is even more amazing! They inspired/supported/nurtured/etc. You did the work, whether the work was a joy or a chore. You could have turned away and ignored the opportunity, as so many other people probably did when encountering that inspiring person, but you did not.
You are the only one who can change you. I am the only one who can change me.
So, if I wanted to stop being miserable, I decided that I needed to change me. I am not talking about the toxic positivity idea that “thinking only good thoughts” will magically make the hard things in life go away, because it will not. No, I am talking about doing the seriously hard work and critical introspection to change ingrained and subconscious habits and behaviors. I am talking about setting myself on a path that gave me a better chance at real happiness within myself and love for myself. I was not prepared to face the environmental factors related to my misery, which as a child I was helpless to change anyway. There was, however, a great deal of internal work that I decided to embark upon.
When I was a youth, I really did not like myself very much. It is not that I thought I was a bad person or something like that. There were just a lot of things I did, a lot of behaviors and habits and thought patterns I had, that contributed to my misery. There were multitudes of things that I wished I did not do. If I wished I did not do those things, then it made sense to me that those things were not inherently a part of me. If I changed them, I could come closer to being my true self, a me that I completely loved and was happy with.
After I made that resolution, I embarked upon that path and will remain on it for the rest of my life. I think it is the single hardest thing I have ever done, and at the same time the most rewarding. Conscious self-change is not something to be undertaken lightly, but it is something I highly recommend for anyone who wants to better themselves or heal from past trauma and abuse.
One of the hardest parts of conscious self-change is critical introspection. That is, you must look at yourself as critically, honestly, and as impartially as you can manage. If you want to change yourself and your behaviors, you must first identify what it is that needs to change and why. You need to examine your behaviors and internal dialog without judgement, so you can genuinely see it laid bare. You must avoid getting caught up in emotions, self-defeat, defensiveness, and knee jerk responses. You must cultivate the ability to give yourself critiques without being mean to yourself about it.
Whatever is in you is what you must deal with, no matter what that is. Beating yourself up about it is extremely counterproductive because you cannot help what is there until you do the work. If you find yourself wanting to beat yourself up about the things that need changing, make that habit of beating yourself up the first thing you change. Acknowledge how you feel about the thing, recognize that you want to change the behavior, and then do the work to change it.
Conscious self-change is both incredibly simple and incredibly complex at the same time. It is complicated because it is a crazy snarled mess we weave with our emotions and habits and expectations. It is simple because Yoda was right. Either do, or do not, but doing is not instant. It takes time and consistent work, and at times it will feel like you are moving backwards, but it is the doing that gets you to where you want to be.
Critical introspection can be incredibly frightening and intimidating, especially if you see a mountain of things in yourself that you would like to change, or if you have a lot wrapped up in low self-worth. It makes it even more intimidating when ingrained behaviors came about as a defensive mechanism to bad, abusive, or traumatic situations. Sometimes the things we want to change offered great benefit at a different time in life, and because of that past benefit they can be particularly terrifying or difficult to let go of. It also can also be incredibly frustrating if you know something is wrong, but you cannot exactly see and identify the what and the why.
A skilled therapist or psychiatrist is invaluable in teaching the tools needed for critical introspection, helping to start conscious changes, and providing an unbiased perspective to help sort out confusing or overwhelming emotions and thoughts. By the time I embarked upon the path of critical introspection I no longer had that sort of professional help, but the prior experience I had with therapists did help me navigate those murky waters. I have friends who have found tremendous value in visiting with a professional regularly, whether or not pharmaceutical aids were something they also needed.
When I started critically examining myself, I found a mountain of things I wanted to change, from a complete lack of social skills (and resulting social anxiety), to various coping mechanisms I did not realize were coping mechanisms. I was undaunted, perhaps in part because I was not good at critical introspection yet, so I could not see all my problems at the start. I also was not skilled enough at self-change to be methodical or brutally effective, so things progressed slowly, making them less intimidating.
After identifying each change I wanted to make, the even harder work of changing it started.
Changing myself was slow. It was painful. It was messy. I would work on a couple things, and then I would find a couple more and start working on those. It helped that I did not try to tackle everything all at once, but instead worked on smaller pieces. Social anxiety was persistent. Social skills proved very hard to learn with no close friends or role models to turn to as an example of how to do it right. No one in my immediate family was a viable example, and I knew it. The skills they had taught me resulted in the behaviors I wanted to change.
I did not try self-help books because the blurbs seemed trite and condescending, and I had bad associations from watching Mother do the yuppie self-help runaround that was all the rage at that time. They were full of toxic positivity and ego-stroking, pushing the idea that everyone was perfect exactly as they were, rather than giving any hint of tools for actual self-change. There are better books available now, and probably were a few back then, but at the time that resource seemed fruitless.
Books about navigating social situations seemed to be particularly awful. The book jackets I read were aimed at egotistical individuals looking to manipulate social settings to their best advantage. As an adult, the only person I ever saw reading one of those books was exactly that sort of person, who saw the people around him solely as tools to be used, even his own family. I did not want to have to calculate out every situation in my head. I just wanted to not be awkward, and I wanted that lack of awkwardness to be genuine and natural. Anything less felt disingenuous. Calculated social manipulation felt like lying and was the antithesis of my goals.
For the record, I am still prone to awkwardness in social situations, especially around strangers or in settings I find uncomfortable or unfamiliar. A certain level of that awkwardness is just inherent in me, or maybe a result of my emotional scars, and I think results partly from the fact that I am extremely atypical in a great many ways. My responses to other people can seem odd, and I think I am sometimes baffling to them. “Normal” has never been a word that could be used to describe me, and since I would never want to be normal, I am perfectly happy to accept the consequences of such a state of being.
That said, as a teen I was impossibly awkward in social situations. I was fine in academic ones. Academia I understood and could navigate with complete confidence, but socializing? Not so much.
Through most of grade school I had a single friend who was willing to be seen talking to me on a regular basis. I was that kid, the one that could bring others down by association, or be used as a joke by the popular kids. I literally kept my head down almost constantly, and with each passing year more and more actively avoided interacting with other children as much as possible. To this day, it still makes my skin crawl when I encounter a child with an obsequious smile and overly cheerful, condescending demeanor. When I was a child myself, that meant I was being set up.
I am perfectly capable of reading body language, and always could. I just did not know how to respond, or how to be the sort of person I wanted to be around. As I embarked upon my journey of critical introspection, I did not blame others for not wanting to be around me, because I did not particularly want to be around me either. My plan was, by the end of it, to be the sort of person I did want to be around, and by extension I felt it would then be easy to connect to other people I wanted to be around.
When I came into junior high, that single friend was no longer talking to me, and I found myself with a handful of very casual friendships instead of any deep ones. Those friends I spent the most time with were usually other troubled individuals, suffering from abuse at home or genuine mental illness. One had even been in and out of child protective services over neglect at home. I do not remember talking about my own home problems much, especially since they were subtle enough that I bought into the excuses of my parents, but I always offered those friends a compassionate ear and what little advice I could.
My social saving grace was one of the popular girls, who came from a different grade school and was a genuinely nice person. She decided to be kind to me and encouraged the other popular girls to do the same. It helped a lot. Instead of being picked on constantly from all sides, most of the popular girls just ignored me. I was fine with that. The nice girl was the only popular kid I had any interest in being around anyway, which was rare since she was popular and I spent most of my free time hiding at the back of the library reading or drawing.
I did make a handful of friends, and although I wonder about them sometimes and hope they are well, I cannot say I was genuinely close with anyone. I definitely did not have a bestie. I might have had someone I called my best friend, because ranking friends was somehow of critical importance in that time and place, but I do not remember having anyone in my life at that age that I did “best friend” type things with. I saw my friends at school and that was about it. I only got invited to a handful of sleepovers and birthday parties through all of junior high and high school, and was never invited to the real parties. There was no one I hung out with in my spare time.
The fact that I was so ruthlessly picked on my entire grade school career did have one very positive effect. By the time I hit puberty I had reached the conclusion that there was literally nothing I could do that would make the people who did not like me suddenly start liking me, so I had zero motivation to do anything to please them. When other girls started filling out from the onset of puberty and started worrying about becoming fat, I found that baffling. The BMI charts actually made me angry because I knew for a fact I was not overweight. Doctors were clearly pushing inaccurate information and pretending it was universally true, contributing to the neurotic concerns of my classmates.
I tried shaving my legs and armpits for a short time, but it was too much bother and the only reason I saw to do it was to please others, so I stopped. I wore bras for a bit because I was supposed to, but they were uncomfortable and my breasts were tiny, so I stopped and no one said a thing, if they even noticed. Even Mother did not notice until years later when I had dressed up nice for something or other and bothered wearing a bra, so it went in the laundry. Mother saw the bra in the laundry and could not remember the last time she had seen it, which meant I had not been wearing it. She was appalled and confronted me about not wearing a bra. She was very upset that I had been going out in public without proper undergarments. I told her that she had not noticed until now, even though it had been months since I last wore it and years since I had worn it daily. It did not matter one whit whether I wore a bra or not. No one noticed a difference, so it was not doing anything other than making me uncomfortable.
My propensity for self-awareness and self-determination was invaluable for my efforts at critical introspection and self-change. It meant that I was, without any hesitation, the captain of my own ship, directing myself to where I wanted to be, with little regard for where other people wanted me to be. Sure, I did not always chart the best course possible (I usually did not), but I knew what I wanted to achieve. As long as I was working towards that, I knew I could weather the storms and navigate the obstacles that I found in my path.
It was a very long path indeed.
When I was 19 and met the woman who would someday be my partner, I found the friendship and advice I needed to be able to achieve my goals. I knew I wanted to change, but in many ways I was still completely clueless about how achieve that change. I was starting so far removed from where I wanted to be that I had no idea what the solutions were. I knew what I did not want to do and be, but I also had no grasp of what I did want to do and be. In her, I saw someone that I wanted to be around, and so I knew somewhere in that were the clues I needed to figure out how to be the kind of person I wanted to be around.
We have talked about it and laughed about it in retrospect. When Diana and I met, she did not like me any more than I liked myself. I was weird and awkward in the worst possible ways, and under normal circumstances she would not have bothered giving me the time of day. Fortunately, we did not meet under normal circumstances.
Diana was at the time dating Older Brother, who I believed was my best friend. In fact, when he introduced us, he specifically told her that I was his best friend. She decided that meant if she was going to date him, she needed to be friends with me as well. It did not take her long to figure out the abuses going on at home, and my genuine desire to be a more complete person than that environment allowed. So, she set aside her dislike, took pity on me, and started helping me figure things out.
Most of the time that translated to me doing something weird, and her going, “What the hell?!?” before telling me why it was a bad thing to do and how to do it in a reasonable way. That might sound harsh, but it was exactly what I needed and wanted. I did not want to be coddled. I had been working on myself long enough that I was frustrated by my lack of progress. I wanted to know. I wanted to understand. I wanted, desperately, to be what I knew I could be if I learned what I needed to learn, and I did not feel much like beating around the bush or taking my time about it. She was honest, and she acted as she spoke, without the hypocrisy I was so accustomed to. I respected her and trusted her completely, so it was easy to accept what she said and did as the model I had been missing.
I did not want to be her. Rather, she was like a guidepost or a lighthouse, and demystified the way forward. Once I had a good grasp of something that she showed me, I could then apply critical introspection to the new behavior and modify it further until I was where I wanted to be.
It still took time. Years of time. Ingrained behaviors and coping mechanisms can be very stubborn things, so much so that every now and again I will still catch myself doing something I thought I had broken myself of decades ago.
Critical introspection is not something I ever stopped doing, and I never will. Change is the only constant, and there is always something else to examine and improve. I am just not desperate about it these days, because I am happy with myself and understand that the ongoing process is just a natural part of life.
When I was hitting my late twenties, well over a decade after I had decided to embark upon the road towards self-change, and nearly a decade after meeting Diana, I finally reached a point where I was happy with myself and genuinely proud of the person I was. I was nowhere near perfect, nowhere near done healing my traumas or working on many of those social issues that have haunted me my entire life, but for the most part I could happily declare that I was Me, completely, without hesitation or reservation. I was proud of that.
When you have spent most of your life feeling like an imposter in your own body, it is an amazing thing to finally feel like you are whole.