Monday 15 April 2013

An Adventure in Doublethink

Many of my friends were confused when they learnt the extent of my mental health problems.

It confused them how I can be a well-informed person and not believe half the things I know to be true; how I can give other people sound advice and yet apply none of it to my own life; how I can be so pro-rational thinking and yet think so irrationally at the same time. All of this confuses me as well. How is it possible to be both sane and insane?

There are two terms for this apparently paradoxical state: the first was coined by psychologists and is called ‘cognitive dissonance’; the second I stumbled across while reading 1984, and it is called ‘doublethink’.  That is…

George Orwell
I believe that nobody should be judged by their appearance or eating habits. I believe that weight-watching and calorie-counting are products of capitalism and patriarchy. I believe that ‘low fat’ food is more often harmful than cake, that health cannot be measured by size or BMI and that the best diets should be varied and sufficient.

I also believe, however, that I am fat. I believe that me being fat makes me disgusting, that it makes me undesirable to be around. I believe that I am greedy, and that I don’t deserve the food I eat. I believe that my size is a reflection of my personality, and that I am more worthy if I am hungry. I believe I will be happier if I weigh less.

(Addendum - I believe the children are our future, teach them well... etc.)

One set of beliefs is influenced by fact and consideration, and the other by emotion, but that doesn’t make either less pertinent in my mind. I want the former paragraph to be more true to me than the latter – but if that were true then I would now be eating disorder free, something which I am not.

I hold two contradictory beliefs in my mind simultaneously, and I accept both of them.
I’m not going to use this post to speak about my mental illness, as that is something I have covered considerably (specifically here ). I want to write about how I came to be so reliant on doublethink to begin with. I want to write about religion, and my upbringing. I want to write this while adding a nice little disclaimer about my experiences being subjective, and reassuring my theist friends that nothing I write is a personal attack on them.

Disclaimer Dinosaur


Thanks disclaimer dinosaur - it’s like you read my mind.
For sake of non-bias, I will make up a religion. This isn’t too difficult to do. I own a large cross-dressing, chimney dwelling deity named ‘Trevor’. He’ll fit the bill nicely – apt as he is also a rubber duck. He’ll foot the bill too, cos he’s a total babe like that.
Trevor
My parents told me a lot about Trevor. They said that Trevor was the embodiment of good. They said He had created everything. They said He had he created me, that He had a plan for me, that He guided my every move… but that if I did bad things they were my fault. I was taught that He loved each and every person, but that if you ever questioned 
His presence then He would punish you.

To my adult mind, this sounds like an abusive relationship, but as a child you don’t challenge what you are taught. You accept everything as normal – especially if you are told that questions might result in damnation. Trevor was somebody you should be terrified of, but want to spend eternity with. None of this made sense to me, but I trusted my parents to tell me the truth and so tried my best to believe. Trevor was the epitome of doublethink.
Omnipoduck

I have always had a very active imagination - as ‘Digger’, my then yellow imaginary excavator friend will tell you. Or at least he would, but he can’t type due to a “broken arm”.

Having an active imagination, and being a natural over-analyser, means that I have always thought too much. Not all of these thoughts are welcome and not all of these thoughts would be pleasing to Trevor. I was a very quiet, very well behaved and very hard working child; yet because I could not differentiate between my actions, my emotions and my thoughts, I believed that I was bad.

I want to leave Trevor out of this now. I am too fond of him.

Around the age of 15, I began to seriously doubt my faith.  It is also when I had my first mental health crisis, which I believe was related. All of this questioning took place in my mind which, as moving through agnosticism is a gradual process, I still shared with an all-powerful deity. This meant that my mind was not a safe place to be. I couldn’t cope with the internal conflict. I was entering a phase of negativethink. I couldn’t believe, yet I couldn’t disbelieve either. I had no place in the world, and no place in my own head.

My decision to firmly identify with atheism was gradual, and drawn out. It was painful. Nonetheless I survived this time, though it feels like a miracle now, (metaphorical, I hasten to add. You can reset your irony counters!). I am now very much an atheist. Trevor is now very much  just a duck, in a fireplace, using lower-case pronouns. And why would I want him to be anything more?

Trevor 2

In spite of this, I have never shaken the constant guilt, nor the vague nagging feeling that I am being judged for existing. I may in hindsight perceive my past beliefs as nothing more than a strange delusion, but there is still a long way to go before I am free of all faulty thinking processes.

I will not apologise for sharing this, because none of it is a lie or written with the intent of hurting anybody. I know that faith and religion bring a lot of joy and hope to some people, but I feel that there is little said of the mind-messery-misery it can cause, (or how the truth of either statements has no bearing on the likelihood of there being a ‘higher power’).

With that in mind - if you have any complaints, I ask that you send them to the Disclaimer Dinosaur.

Disclaimer Dinosaur Complaints

Yours in good faith,

BT x

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