Know Thyself

Note: This post contains discussion of suicide and mental health.

“Know thyself” is an old Greek maxim which, based on personal experience, I can tell you has improved every aspect of my life.

I see it as a dang good maxim, just a little wise saying that I repeat to myself as a personal reminder.

The more I learned about myself, the easier life became. I was able to shed anxiety and depression.

By learning about myself, I gained far more control in my personal life.

My insanity went away. Well, I mean, ish.
My concern over whether I was crazy vaporized, let’s say.

I probably still am to some degree. We all are.
“We’re all crazy, just not all on the same f-ing day!”

I say we’re all crazy to some degree. It’s just a matter of whether I’m doing anything about it or not.

I once had a very severe case of PTS, Complex-PTS, and had been suicidal for most of my life.

No one knew exactly how suicidal I was. It’s not something I walked around advertising.
“Hey, I hate myself!”

I was really good at hiding the degree of suicidal self-loathing I lived with.

I tried to kill myself once when I was twelve. It was an honest, serious attempt, but I chickened out at the end, thus I am still around to make this blog post in my late fifties.

I never got any therapy for that. No one else knew about it.
I didn’t have friends back then, and I certainly wasn’t going to talk to my parents about it.

My house was a little dysfunctional growing up. It wasn’t a nurturing environment where one felt invited to openly share their feelings or inner thoughts.
Hell no.

I was taught to keep such things hidden.

My “true self” stayed hidden because I was led to believe that who I was, or who I thought I was, was something to be ashamed of.
That I was shame.

I was taught to think of myself that way.

Because of that, I always withheld vulnerability. I never disclosed my innermost thoughts and feelings with anyone. Ever.

I was so ashamed of who I was that I didn’t want close or personal connections with anyone. I feared that if I ever became authentic and vulnerable with someone, they would discover my shame and just add more.

And I couldn’t hold any more. I already hated myself fully.

So I kept my relationships superficial and light. Not too close.

I got good at that.

I could walk into a party, regale everyone with a few war stories and jokes, and walk back out without revealing anything about my true self.

I went on to have a successful career in law enforcement, and I retired from that.

Once I retired, however, I no longer had my work connections, the people I interacted with daily.

If there were a way to view PTS like a heat map, I was probably glowing like the sun when I retired.

I did not transition into civilian life well. I was severely hyper-vigilant, depressed, and frankly kind of a weird, scary-looking guy.

I didn’t make many connections in the civilian world.
I had been an undercover cop for so long that I had no idea how to stop doing that and just be a regular person.

I fell into deep isolation and depression, and my self-hatred grew each day.

To me, it is a miracle of God that Save A Warrior and I crossed paths when and how we did.

Going to Save A Warrior saved my life.

I didn’t mean to say all of that when I sat down to write, but there it is.

I gained spiritual consciousness at Save A Warrior, and that changed everything.

I felt alive for the first time in my life.

I also saw a pathway that led out of my lifelong insanity.

What it involved was knowing thyself.

I learned about the brain, how it is wired together.
Know thyself.

I investigated my own mind and thinking patterns.
Why do I believe what I believe? Why do I think the way I think?

What do I actually have as fact, and what is superstition or belief handed to me by family, church, school, or society?

I investigated that through reading, meditating, and answering a lot of questions in twelve-step books.

Lots and lots of looking inward.
Know thyself.

I’ve read in various places, A Course in Miracles for instance, that I learn the most about myself when I explain myself to others.

That has also been my experience.

Sometimes I don’t even know how I think about something until I explain it to another person.
As I’m explaining it, that’s sometimes the first moment it dawns on me that I think that way.

Just like the $24 shoes.

Knowing that I learn about myself by explaining myself to others, I’ve found that the knowledge I gain is directly proportional to the degree of vulnerability I’m willing to go to.

To really, really know thyself, I’ve found the best place to do that work is in rooms that end in “anonymous.”

It almost doesn’t matter which flavor.

I tell people to pick one that matches something they’re actually struggling with, just to keep it interesting, but the real value is the ability to be vulnerable.

When I’m willing to be extremely vulnerable, I get to extremely know thyself.

Hey! Thanks for reading.