, 8 min read
The Various Ways We Distract Ourselves From Feeling Pain || Night Thoughts #3
I don't know if anyone has been here long enough to remember my "night thoughts" videos, but anyone who remembers, this is a "night thoughts" video — I think video number three. And basically, it is like a podcast, but I don't have a podcast, but it will just be a video of me walking, so you can turn the screen off.
Trauma
So today, I suck at this, I'm thinking a lot about addiction, and running from pain, and running from trauma, and how those things absolutely control your life, and how it is currently controlling my life, and how it has controlled my life for the majority of my life, if not my entire life. And specifically, the addiction for me is my phone, and to some, that might not sound too serious, but it is extremely serious because it's out of control. And when something is out of control, that's serious.
It takes up hours of my day, every day. It's taken up, it has probably taken up, like, months of my life — if not even more — the amount of time I spend on my phone. And I know for a fact that I spend so much time on my phone because I am running away. I'm running away from uncomfortable feelings that are always inside me, and I'm trying to figure out how.
- How to work through those feelings, and
- how to feel those feelings.
But again, they are just so uncomfortable that it feels impossible to stop and be quiet and actually let myself feel those feelings.
Or, I can't even really say they're feelings. It's just this, like, this feeling that engulfs my entire body all the time, and it's probably trauma. That's what I think it is. And it's so bad that, like, and I'm being so honest here, this is something that I've been ashamed about, and I try not to share it because I would like people to think that I'm more healthy than I am, and I am doing well in so many respects. But I'm still struggling deeply in some respects. But it's so bad that I cannot handle silence. I cannot handle silence, and I can't handle being alone in silence.
So, whenever I'm in my room alone, I'm always on my phone, listening to videos. And thank goodness it's not always, like, it's usually not just trash videos. It's often educational videos, but still, I know it's a way to escape.
And another thing is, not only do I use videos, but, you know, I lost my train of thought. One second. Oh, yes. So, my entire life, since teenagehood, about when I started feeling all the effects of this — I didn't realize at the time — but I used other means as addictions to escape trauma and that feeling that I'm trying to describe. And I want to hear from you if you know what this feeling feels like, or if you know what this is, where there's just something inside you that you can't deal with.
I'm trying to explain what it feels like. I'm usually good about, explaining feelings, or, or knowing what my feelings are, but this feeling is such a strange one that I can't really explain how it feels. But it's a mixture of a bunch of different things. Part of it is a feeling of extreme loneliness, extreme, like, like the deepest sense of loneliness you could ever imagine. And it's just this feeling that no matter what, you are always alone. Even if you have people in your life, you are deeply, deeply alone. That's trauma, or that's based in trauma, and it can be worked through. I've heard of that.
Childhood
The other feeling is, like, tons and tons of anxiety about all different things — life, trying to survive in the world on my own. And another feeling — this is a big one, huge, maybe the biggest — is, tons and tons and tons of pain, lots of emotional pain, from years and years and years and years and years of things happening that I have not worked through, family things.
Family has been the last thing I've ever had to look at, or I've ever decided to look at, because for so many years, I decided to avoid it. I actually avoided it so well and repressed it so well that I didn't actually think that my childhood affected me that much. And this is a good segue. I did not think that childhood had affected me much at all, and I was really happy to just, like, shove it down and move forward in my life and act like it didn't happen, and just not continue relationships that were absolutely awful or abusive. I felt good about just leaving that in the past. But I did not realize at the time that what I was actually doing was using limerence. I mean, kind of a mixture of limerence and love. I'm not fully on board with the idea of limerence because I think that you can feel both at the same time. So I would choose someone who I would fall in love with, or have a crush on, and they would take up all of my thoughts, all, and I can't get into it.
But, like, it was just straight-up obsession, and I did that to escape my life. I didn't realize that that was what I was doing. It was literally a survival mechanism, but yeah, a way to escape my life and the pain, this deep pain. And yeah, so today, like every day, it's so hard to turn my phone off and just be there in silence because the second, the literal second that I turn my phone off, the pain is there.
It's just there waiting. It's always there waiting. Oh, another part of the feeling is grief, unresolved grief and loss.
So yeah, it's just all these feelings that are pent up, lots of trauma. And I'm trying to work through how to not be addicted to things. I've done a lot of work in the way of limerence and not being addicted to men in quite the same way, and not using them as a distraction of my own life, to my own life.
I didn't think I was going to record my face, but it's, like, five outside, and I got myself in a pickle where I walked too far in one direction, and I was underdressed, and I got cold, so I ended up running back.
On the note of limerence, I had this, like, breakthrough a few years ago. It was kind of when I cut off contact with my first ex, where throughout our entire time of being together, and then being on and off, I was so convinced that he was the source of my pain the entire time. In fact, even before that, when I felt like I was in love with him before we were together, and it felt like it was unrequited, and all of that.
I always thought that he was the source of this, like, overwhelming amount of pain. I just think it's so cool because then once everything ended, and I cut him out of my life, and he was no longer there as a source of anything, and I felt like I was moving on and moving forward, I realized, my mind blown moment, I realized that it was trauma from my childhood. So, that was the source of most of my pain, and what I had been doing for years was chasing someone in order to escape pain from childhood trauma.
That was the biggest breakthrough moment because all of this, like, I was feeling all of that, and I thought it was, like, a romantic problem for, like, close to, like, 10 years. And then finally, it clicked that it wasn't a romantic issue. It wasn't pain from that at all. It was me trying to run away and trying to chase something that I hoped would fix me, or fix the pain, or help me.
So that was huge, and that was really cool. And ever since that breakthrough a few years ago, I've been taking a harder look at childhood and realizing just how much of an effect it had on me in so many ways that I never knew.
Doing projects
There's not a good segue into this, but something else I wanted to mention was that when I was a child, when I was young, it was so easy for me, before phones, to sit on the couch after school and do a project, either drawing or making bracelets or reading. I did so much reading, and so many projects. And sometimes I would, like, throw on a CD of Bach or something, like an old classical CD or Celtic music and just do my project, and it was great. I created so much when I was a child, and now as an adult, when I have free time, I get sucked into my phone most often.
And I would like to, this year, challenge both of these things, both of the things I've been talking about, which is challenge myself in year 2025 to take more of a look at my family and childhood trauma and actually work through it, actually look at it and feel it and process it fully.
I've been doing some of that work the last two or so years, but there's so much I could go so much deeper. And another thing to focus on this year, and they need to be kind of in conjunction, is to not spend so much time on my phone and to instead, I guess, force myself to experience silence and aloneness again and get used to it. And I guess force myself to read and create more. I desperately want to create more and do more art and more projects and, live life more fully by taking classes and things that I don't want to be wasting my life on my phone, especially my youth.
All right, that's what's been on my mind today. I would love to hear your thoughts.
Bye.