The journey has gotten interesting in the last week, read my post The Paradox for the backstory, and I find my mind is just brimming with thought at the moment and thought begs to be written down when it occurs.
Yesterday, of my own accord, I started reading the book The Healthy Compulsive: Healing Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder and Taking The Wheel of the Driven Personality after discovering that this condition has been the major source of all the suffering in my life. The author, Gary Trosclair, is a licensed psychotherapist who treats people with OCPD and happens to suffer from traits of this condition as well. He is the “subject matter expert” and that carries a lot of weight with me. Who better to guide me on my journey than someone who has walked the same road?
Like many things mental illness, OCPD is a spectrum and where you fall on the spectrum dictates how mild or severe of an illness you experience. For me, taking a quick peek back at the shitshow of the last 40+ years I would say I am in the deep end of the pool. We all have to start someplace, rather it be brutal honesty than ignoring the issue like I have for the all of my life, this is rock bottom after all nowhere to go but up.
“ Trying to stay on the healthy end of the spectrum has required me to create, in an ongoing way, a map of my psyche, one that extends far beyond the territory of the conscious and controlling ego. This map includes personality parts that become more helpful as they become more conscious. My professional training as a psychotherapist and Jungian analyst has included a wide-ranging study of different perspectives that have also helped me map this inner territory, revealing still more of the sources that drive all of us, for better or worse.” The Healthy Compulsive Preface IX, Gary Trosclair
The whole preface is actually quite profound, but far too long for me to quote it, this piece however is what has sparked my imagination in a new way, in a way that I haven’t ever considered and that’s what I want to present.
I love mindmaps. Makes sense right? I’m a driven person, perfectionist dad, like order, like lists. I like lists so much I make lists of lists. Trust me it’s as bad as it sounds. A mindmap is nothing but a very detailed list. If you have never heard of a mindmap here is a simple
Example:
First you start off with a topic, for simplicity let’s say I want to mindmap making breakfast. I take a page of paper I draw a circle in the center and I write “Breakfast” in the circle. Then I start to map out everything that I would need to make breakfast. This would involve drawing other circles for the things I may need and then linking them to “Breakfast”.
Breakfast
Food -> Eggs
Cookware -> Frying Pan
You get the idea. It’s a map of a logical process and everything thats involved in that process. For complex tasks, such as working in IT for 20 years, mindmaps can be invaluable for revealing blind spots or weaknesses in a design.
So this is where is gets really interesting. What would happen if I actually tried to map out my mind like the author suggested? It’s not clear from what I have read so far if he is be literal or metaphorical, but lets just say for the sake of argument he is being literal. What would that actually look like? What would going through that process uncover? The whole idea of this is, to be cliché, is blowing my mind.
I have used the analogy of my mind as an office before, usually bombed out from all the trauma and me now with the job of going through the debris and salvaging my life. I don’t think that analogy fits anymore. I think my mind is more like a warehouse that is piled with rows and rows of boxes. Some of these boxes have never been opened, others are well worn from use and still others the rats have gotten into and torn them to shreds or they have been damaged by rot or mold. The truth is that I don’t know why some of these boxes are here, whats in them, why some are unopened, why some are damaged. I have never taken the time to look. Maybe I have been too afraid to? Now, I just want to know. It’s like I need to know. This makes sense on some level because I don’t know who I am. Who I am has to be somewhere in these boxes, the unopened ones.
Part of me is wondering if this is going to be an exercise in flying too close to the sun with waxen wings like Icarus and the other part of me is thinking that the only way I can truly understand the world is if I choose to leave Plato’s Cave. Either way I think it’s too late to turn back at this point, I am well down the rabbit hole, the bottle labeled “drink me” is empty, long since discarded, and I’m racing to have tea with a rabbit, a mouse and a crazy fellow in a fancy hat.
#Anxiety #BorderlinePersonalityDisorder #ObsessiveCompulsivePersonalityDisorder #MentalHealth
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