How I [Kaj] found & fixed the root problem behind my depression and anxiety after 20+ years

I hope this time it last for ever. Kaj <3

It's good to see stories like this.

The notes about the impact on your sexuality are interesting. For a while I've been modelling fetishes as expressions of needs that've been displaced to fantasies and basal drives, unable to manifest in higher-minded consciously orchestrated virtue aspirations. They're the needs we find hard to admit to, problems we can't imagine finding a realistic solution to anywhere in the world (like we literally don't know what it would look like, it seems impossible, or, when we try to imagine it, the solution seems deeply undesirable). But they're deep needs, deep hungers. They wont go away. So the system shoves them into another place, a place where they can thrive as just fantasies, to keep them alive, to keep our attention on them, to keep us from giving up on them completely, however long it takes us to find our way to a realistic solution.

Your experiences seem to agree with that model. It has an interesting implication: fetishes are supposed to go away once the needs have been fulfilled, as they're mostly just a reflection of an unhealthy relationship with one's hungers. We've both experienced that. Heal the relationship, learn to perceive the solution in a healthy way, you can no longer exploit the displacement for pleasure. If instead you sustain the indulgence, that may make you very comfortable with retaining the neurosis, staying blind to the solution.

An example of where I would expect that to happen very easily is... Join a large, thriving, relatively long-lived community of people who harbor a memeplex that is exceptionally good at maintaining and amplifying your particular displaced hunger, maintaining the solution's indulgent, fantastical displacement. That is, join a kink community. It's not hard to imagine that there's a risk there, that they will have a cultural parasite for you, a culture that has feeds on and propagates through only people who are profoundly stuck in the neurotic conceptualization, something that will have been optimized to prevent you from getting to a place where you can see the solution in a realistic way. If it didn't defend its constituents from coming to recognize their cure, they would have spread it around among themselves, and the culture would have died. So, inevitably, we will be left only with...

The connection between neuroses and memories was something that made me think a lot. I've been trying to provoke myself into some kind of "transformation" for about 10 years, with some limited successes and a lot of failures for a want of insight. Information like this is really valuable so thank you for sharing your experience.

Your post got me thinking about some stuff I've been dealing with, and I think helped me make some progress on it almost instantly. I don't think the mechanisms are quite the same, but thinking about your experience induced me to have useful realizations about myself. I'll share in case it's useful to someone else:

It sounds like your self-concept issue was rooted in "having a negative model of yourself deeply ingrained", which induced neuroses in your thoughts/behaviors that attempted to compensate for it / search around for ways to convince yourself it wasn't true. And that the 'fix', sorta, was revisiting where that model came from and studying it and realizing that it wasn't fair or accurate and that the memories in which it was rooted could be reinterpreted or argued against.

I thought about this for a while, and couldn't quite fit my own issues into the model. So instead I zoomed out a bit and tried this approach: it seems like the sensation of shame, especially when no one else is around, must be rooted in something else, and when I feel shame I ought to look closer and figure out why, as it's a huge >>LOOK RIGHT HERE<< to a destructive loop of thoughts (destructive because, well, if I'm feeling shame about the same thing for years on end, and yet it's not changing, clearly it's not helping me in any way to feel that way -- so I ought, for my health, to either fix it or stop feeling it).

[Aside: in my experience, the hallmark thought pattern of depression is loops: spirals of thoughts that are negative and cause anxiety / self-loathing, but don't provide a fix and have no mechanism for 'going away', so they just continue to spiral, negatively affecting mood and self-esteem etc, and probably causing destructive behaviors that give you more to feel anxious / hateful about. And I've observed that it's very hard to go through rational calculations with regard to yourself in private, for me at least, and so talking to people (therapists, friends, strangers, whatever) and being forced to vocalize and answer questions about your thought spirals can cause you to see logical ways to 'step out of them' that never seem clear when you're just thinking by yourself. Or whatever -- I could probably write about how this works for hours.]

So I looked closer at where my shame from, and found that it wasn't that I had a negative self-concept on its own (something like "I am X", where X is negative), but rather that it was that I was constantly seeing in my world reminders of someone I felt like I should have been, in a sense. I felt like I had been an extremely smart, high-potential kid growing up, but at some point, video game addiction + sleep deprivation + irresponsibility + depression had diverted me off that path, and ever since I have been constantly reminded of that fact and feel shame for not being that person. So I guess I had (have) a self-concept of 'being a failed version of who I could have been', or 'having never reached my potential'.

For some concrete examples:

1. When I saw my reflection in things, I would criticize myself for seeming not-normal, goofy, or not.. like.. masculine enough? for a mid-20s male. not that I wanted to be, like, buff, but I want to be a person who wouldn't strike others as goofy looking, but I always see my bad posture from computer use and my haircut that I'm never happy with, and get stuck in loops looking at myself in the mirror and trying to figure out what I need to work on to fix it (work out this or that muscle, do yoga, figure out how to maintain a beard, whatever).
2. A lot of times when I read really brilliant essays, on LW or other blogs or etc, about subjects I'm into, especially by autodidact/polymath types, I'd feel really bad because I felt like I could have been one of those people, but had failed to materialize. So I'd be reminded that I need to study more math, and write more, and read more books, and all these others things, in order to get there.

These are thoughts I have been having dozens of times a day.

The second big realization: that motivation borne out of shame is almost completely useless. Seeing your flaws and wanting to change them causes negative emotions in the moment, but it doesn't really lead to action, ever. A person who feels bad about being lanky doesn't often go to the gym, because that's not coming from a positive place and the whole action is closely coupled to negativity and self-loathing. And a person feeling bad for not being a clever polymath doesn't.. become one.. from negativity; that takes years of obsession and other behaviors that you can't curate through self-loathing.

(Well, it's possible that shame can induce motivation for immediate fixes, but I'm sure it doesn't cause long-term changes. I suspect that requires a desire to change that comes from a positive, empowered mindset.)

I'm not entirely sure what the 'permanent' fix for this is -- it doesn't seem to be as simple as redefining my self-concept to not want to be these people. But realizing this was going on in this way seemed like a huge eye-opening realization and almost immediately changed how I was looking at my neurotic behaviors / shames, and I think it's going to lead to progress. The next step, for now, I think, is focusing on mindfulness in an effort to become more able to control and ignore these neurotic shame feelings, now that I've convinced myself that I understand where they're coming from, and that they're unfair and irrational.

TLDR

1. feelings of shame / neurotic spirals = places to look closely at in your psyche. They're probably directly related to self-concept issues.
2. it's possible for negativity to come, rather than directly from your self-concept, from your concept of who you 'should have' or 'could have been'.
3. shame-induced motivation is essentially useless. For me, at least. I've been trying to channel it into lifestyle changes for years to essentially 0 results.

Did anybody else immediately start trying to think of how to munchkin/minmax this technique?