| | Ok, maybe this is coming straight from dark night territory, maybe being compounded by dark night territory, but in any case, I want to share because I've known the members of this community to be very empathetic and wise.
I'm moving out of my parent's house soon, and it's starting to hit me that my upbringing has been "locked in", meaning, I never got the chance to make things right, never got the chance to express emotions to my parents, never had the chance to have the closeness that I imagined one day would naturally and inevitably come. I'm having a lot of trouble with feelings of pain and depression. A few years back, I used to experience all kinds of anger, anxiety, desperation, guilt, and such, because of the way I've been raised. I've already hashed out these things in another thread in the past, so I don't feel like going into the whole story, but I'll just sum it up.
My parents both come from "broken" households, both had dads that left when they were young, both grew in poverty. I don't know how that plays into who they are, but I'm sure it does. Anyways, my mom is basically a narcissist. She is completely obsessed with her own beauty, getting botox and always obsessing over the way she looks. She's obsessed with image in general. In fact, I think that when she considers me as her son, she considers that I'm just an extension of her, an accessory to her status. She has constantly been horrified by my acne growing up. To this day, I may have one almost unnoticeable pimple every now and then. My mom will come up to me, grab me and start applying medicines. When I object, she'll tell me that it's not my fault if everyone is disgusted by the way I look and that I'll never get a job. I've grown up with so much hate and negativity, fear based thinking fed into my upbringing. Growing up, I don't remember getting hugs, I don't remember anyone asking how my day was, I don't remember anyone comforting me in hard times. I just remember constant paranoia and suspicion, constant bombardment with accusations of drug use, sexual sin (aka anything sexual is basically taboo and sinful in the Mormon church), and even threats of divorce being mine and my sisters fault. At a young age, I even remember my mom threatening to put me up for adoption since she said she felt the threat of rape because I had been caught masturbating or something like that. She's constantly complaining about how awful her kids turned out and pointing out how successful others are in the church (which I quit, fairly early on, due to the injustice and closed-mindedness that was obvious). My dad is more reasonable, but he has never been willing to defend us, because when he steps in and tries to defend us, my mom goes through long (months long) depressions, where she'll tell us to hide the gun and weapons in the house. She'll remind us all how we think she's the worst mom ever and how she's a failure to us.
A common theme of my life is getting no love or attention, or care. All my weaknesses and sad moments in life added up to personal faults to my parents. "What do you want or expect me to be able to do about it?"... Some love and care, just even saying sorry would have been better than constantly being punished for feeling sadness. No one really listens to anything I say, so I'm a silent person around my family. It isn't necessarily that they're harsh when I try to talk, they just don't listen. It's like a massive adhd of sorts. People will just talk over me, after vaguely listening for a few seconds. However, my mom has no problem walking in the door after work and unloading all sorts of hateful gossip from work for long periods of time, without listening to anything I have to say. I'm amazed when I talk with most any other adult and they listen to what I have to say without turning away, and actually ask questions, like they're actually interested. I was honestly under the impression that adults simply didn't tune in to children/young adults. It is ridiculous though, to be 20 and have more of a college education than my parents ever had, and still be belittled and treated like a dumb kid. "You're too young to understand 9/11. You're too young to understand why we have to fight the war on terror. You're not old enough to know how much it hurt us as a country to have terror start happening. You're not old enough to understand love. You're not old enough to talk about politics". My parents are obsessed with money, and fairly well off with it, yet still stingy. My mom won't hesitate to drop thousands on furniture/jewelry/useless junk on the weekend, but when it comes to buying food that I can cook (since everyone is always gone at work, I'm alone most of the time anyways), she'll cringe that I want to buy vegetables, saying that they're too expensive. But then she can go out to some $100+ a plate dinner with my dad and complain that the spices weren't totally right or whatever. Completely self absorbed and completely negligent to the emotional needs of her only son. Completely blew the chance to provide a loving and supportive atmosphere for her only son. Paradoxically, family is the #1 focus on in her church.
Anyways, enough bitching about my life, it obviously has pain and there's really no chance of ever fixing how things have been, and now that I'm moving out, that's not my concern anymore. I'm just concerned with finding a way to deal with this pain. Vipassana does seem to be a path to understanding, but I still don't understand the implications of wisdom on pain. I've heard the doctrine that after a path or two or three or four, sensations (of pain) still arise but don't stick, aren't sticky, or whatever. After getting what I think is first path, I see some truth to this, but still see problems. For me, I've definitely noticed that the mind is inventing at least 90% less things, spinning far less of the time, and not taking the effort to extrapolate from thoughts and stress out. But the problem to me is that my family issues still seem real. I still have to feel the way they treat me, and it still causes so much sadness and depression. No self is apparent, but I'm in so much frustration now because it feels like the pain is just there, hurting on it's own. It seems like the Dalai Lama feels a lot of pain for his nation, and I'm assuming his attainments are greater than mine. What are we to do with the problems that don't come from excessive thinking, but from the immediate external world? When a 4th-pather loses love or loses a close friend or has a crisis, does the pain really not hurt? I thought that by getting path, the pain would just not arise, like it wouldn't be a reaction I could have. But now, I feel a sense that pain is incredibly real, and the circumstances that lead to it are real, and that I'm trapped in them. I also see how I have more trouble in the real world, dealing with people, because the way I've been raised is so ingrained in me that it's instinctual to be scared of people, to think that people are judging me and looking for faults, to think that no one truly loves me, that no one can truly love me. I'm generally feeling worthless and purposeless, and also very bummed that initial insight into no-self doesn't mean that the pain isn't painful. I'll wait to see if higher paths can help.
So there's the duality that exists between practice and real life. On one hand, I can't deny how vipassana and 1st path has changed the tendencies of the mind, leading to much quieter mind and thoughtful actions. Basically it seems that the mind isn't inventing problems in it's idle state, which is a great change. But on the other hand, my external problems still be able to cause so much pain, and it's very discouraging to see that these problems still seem to be extremely real and painful, in the same way that Daniel talked about his attainments having no effect on the severity and pain of his sickness. So I'm wondering what the hell there is to do, or what to attain to, to fix the pain of being raised in such a horrible way, and to help undo the tendencies of the way I've been raised, as I don't want to be doomed to being a silent, distant loner type, who can never find love or support from anywhere. Just get higher paths? I've seen a counselor and I've figured out that counseling is not for me. I get to feeling so good when I'm just left to do my own thing, with a lot of natural equanimity, jhanas arising on their own, metta seeming to flow naturally and with a lot of strength, but despite what I think equanimity is supposed to mean, it still feels like it can all be ripped down just by hateful/manipulative things said to me by my parents, or being completely neglected and belittled, or even just from realizing that I have nothing remotely like metta coming in from anywhere, no people to go to with my emotions, no people who I know care about my thoughts. I don't know if these things just have more weight in dark night, or if the dark night serves to exaggerate and magnify the issues that seem deeply rooted inside myself.
If the point of enlightenment is to come to a point where repressed emotional pain and lack of any solid, loving human support are not necessary, where even the worst, deepest wounds don't hurt or bother you, I'll proceed with going through more insight cycles, but if it's not, I'm still in the dark on what I'm really looking for or how to go about finding it.
Edit:
Another way to look at this... I approached vipassana thinking that it would be the solution to my life problems. But when I got path, I realized that my problems were still intact, and that I was still living where they could influence me. I see benefits of 1st path, but I thought that the problems in my life would be less painful. It feels like they're still painful. I don't know if this is simply not an effect to expect, or if maybe this isn't the 1st path that I thought it was. |