Blog – Page 8 – Keith Wilson

Fear at the Grand Canyon

Chapter 5b of Meeting the Voices in My Head and Searching for an Inner Adult

It was an ordinary day inside my head. I was relaxed, happy, and had not a care in the world. All the people in my brain were getting along. I couldn’t ask for any better than that.

Outside my head, it was a beautiful February day in Arizona. I was on vacation with my wife, and twin boys, age twelve or so. We had driven up to the Grand Canyon to show it to the boys. I had been there once before and thought it was one of the best places in the world.

When I had been to the Grand Canyon the first time, I did what everyone does. I gasped at the beauty and enormity of the place. Then I stood as close as I dared and leaned over the edge. There is a sheer drop, a mile deep and no fences. As close was a good three feet away. I’m not a daredevil and there was no risk of falling from where I stood, but it was near enough to that chasm to get a thrill. Being on the brink of annihilation is one of the reasons to go to the Grand Canyon, a feeling you will never get from pictures.

On my second visit, I parked the car and began to walk towards the canyon with my family. As it came into sight and the boys ran ahead, a telegram arrived in the boardroom of my brain. A part of me that always sits by the door intercepted it. The name of that part was Fear. It sounded an alarm and ruined everything. I wasn’t afraid of falling into the canyon myself, I was afraid of my sons falling in. I was concerned they would do as I had done, stand as close to the edge as they dared and plummet to their deaths in front of me.

The Spectrum of Addiction

A Reading of The Urge: Our History of Addiction, Part I

I’d like to devote a few posts to chew over Carl Erik Fisher’s book, The Urge: Our History of Addiction. Fisher is an addiction psychiatrist, bioethicist, and assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University.

The Evolution and Domestication of Feelings

Chapter 5a of Meeting the Voices in My Head and Searching for an Inner Adult

I suspect I’m not going to find my Inner Adult in my feelings. There doesn’t seem to be anything adult about them. Good or bad, they are some of the most childish things I’ve got.

How can I be so down about feelings, you wonder; don’t shrinks always want to talk about them? I haven’t always been a therapist. When I was younger, I was a roofer, busting my hump, carrying packets of shingles up a ladder. I swung a hammer till my hand fell off. It was a hundred and ten on the roof, with no shade. If I thought about my feelings, I wouldn’t get the job done; I’d be under a tree, having a beer. Feelings do you no good when you’re putting on a roof. Feelings get in the way.

Are the Inner Voices of My Parents My Inner Adults?

Chapter 4b of Meeting the Voices in My Head and Searching for an Inner Adult

Parents hope you will install bots of themselves in your brain for when they can’t be around to stop you from doing things they would disapprove. If your father was the kind that yelled at you when you swiped a cookie, you might still have his voice in your head when you break your diet and go for the Oreos. Is that voice your Inner Adult, watching over you just like your parents watched over you when you were a child?

The Bot I Call My Parent

Chapter 4a of Meeting the Voices in My Head and Searching for an Inner Adult

An image of the robot ‘Kismet’, Wikimedia

When we closed the last post, we left me screaming, alone in my crib. Eventually, I learned to accept transitional objects I call security blankets to help me pretend I wasn’t alone. At this stage of my life, they were all I had for an inner adult. There were outer adults, for sure, or I would not have survived. After I learned to use language, I developed the security blanket into a voice that more closely resembled my inner voices of today, a distinct point of view I can I engage with, argue, and wish would go away. The security blanket will become a bot I call my parent.

How to Be Close to Your Loved Ones Without Losing Your Mind

Spending too much time at home will put a strain on your relationships. You’ll get on each other’s nerves. Pet peeves will put your love at risk. Even if you get along, you’ll become like roommates; seeing each other continuously, but lacking real intimacy. So, you either drive each other crazy or get bored.

The Security Blanket

Chapter 3b of Meeting the Voices in My Head and Searching for an Inner Adult

In the last installment, I began to talk about how babies learn to cope with being left alone in their crib and the long-term outcome of this universal experience. The baby finds itself in an abyss, utterly helpless and confused about what is going on. It can go three ways, and I talked about the first two. A kind of firefighter can come out, maned for those civil servants who have license to ruin a home in the interests of saving it. We usually call this rage. The second is the baby could get the Fuck-Its, which enable the baby to cope by becoming lethargic. Fully grown people can exercise these same two options when they feel lost and powerless.

In this post, I present the third option. The baby can create a security blanket and pretend everything is fine.

How to Cope with Being Left Alone

Chapter 3a of Meeting the Voices in My Head and Searching for an Inner Adult

There had to be a time when I was a baby, left in my crib, screaming my head off, wondering if someone would ever come. Someone did, but not before a momentous realization occurred. Up until that point, I might have regarded my caretaker as a part of me, like an arm or a leg. Arising from that dreadful experience, I learned I couldn’t control everything, there were other people in the world, and it wasn’t all about me. This is an important thing to know and it’s an essential step towards maturity, but it’s also terrifying. To cope with it, I developed three new voices I still have to this day. And that thing I learned that I couldn’t control everything? The three voices convinced me it wasn’t true, so I went on nearly as self-centered as before.

The Face of the Other

Chapter 2 of Meeting the Voices in My Head and Searching for an Inner Adult

It’s the first day of school and I’m late. As I step into the classroom, I feel everyone’s eyes. They’re judging me. I look down and realize something I should have noticed before. I’m naked.

This common nightmare is your everyday experience if you’re self-conscious. It’s not that you walk around naked all the time, but you feel like you do. It’s not that everyone is really judging you; but, in your mind they are.

The Innermost Child in the Abyss

Chapter 1b of Meeting the Voices in My Head and Searching for an Inner Adult

In the middle of everything, there’s this deep, dark, depressing hole. When you fall in, sometimes there’s no climbing out. When we call it anything at all, we often call it death, brokenness, meaninglessness, futility, emptiness, or despair. I like to call it the Abyss[i]. Think of it as a psychic black hole. The Abyss is beyond what you can imagine. It cannot be grasped by language, it’s something other than your belief in ordinary reality. It’s everything that’s left over after explanations try their best. The Abyss is what you’re trying to fill up with your insatiable, misplaced desires.