An Eerie Inversion

There is a nuanced but deeply disorienting experience that those with childhood wounds know all too intimately. It tends to flare up during deep, genuine romantic connections at the stage where strong emotional tethers are being formed. They feel the immense psyche-shredding dissonance to run, the sensation is almost viscerally violent in nature, an acute internal upheaval. There is an overwhelming desire to be carried away by the wind, yet they must enact the emergency protocol of pointing a gun to their own heads to force themselves to anchor their winged feet in mud and clay. For the more self-aware, they comprehend logically that this sudden shift towards flight is not how they truly feel about the connection itself. Thus, it becomes an eerie inversion of how they would usually apply their intuition and logic, with the latter typically in service of the former. This experience becomes the exception to the rule, one almost poetically too frequent to be considered an exception at all, given the immense internal anguish it causes.

What they are braving is an internal sensation of complete disarray. The more self-aware realise their gut instincts are pulling them to disembody, to detach completely. Relational wrinkles of contention become stickier, grippier, and more easily weaponised internally to justify their escape, amplified by their state of emotional solipsism and bewilderment. It is a frenzied state of cataclysmic, cathartic, agonising engulfment that carries quiet notes of unsettling pleasure due to the level of alertness it induces - they are trying to outrun a shadowed deluge attempting to swallow them whole. Thus, they are fighting what feels like pure gut instinct which, under normal circumstances, they would trust. Yet in this context, they realise that such gut instincts were programmed into them against their will when young. Therefore, in these contexts, a subtle distinction exists between conditioned gut instinct and true intuition. During these moments, it becomes immensely difficult to differentiate between the two.

They almost have to brute-force intercept the militant hijacking carried out by these gut instincts with a competing instinct and its disconcerting interface, one that feels completely counter to everything that feels “right” in that moment due to the tempestuous inflammation of their instinctive system. Imagine feeling as if your natural compass can no longer be trusted due to the sheer anarchical internal obscurity at play, to go from hyper-perceptive to even more overstimulated with conflicting, layered contradictions at every level of mental examination. Yet during these surreal moments, logic is often the one in service of the competing yet true self-honouring instinct.

In the midst of this, they mistrust their own perceived reality, everything feels counterintuitive because the excruciating levels of fear distort their sense of truth, shaped by wounds they cannot simply gut out and discard - for such wounds are fibred into their internal metacognitive architecture. They often feel as though they are cursed with an involuntary contamination, a competing virus they cannot fully remove, because it lives in their spinal fluid.

The only way through is to recognise it, acknowledge it, and let your body feel it in full. Do not rush to a conclusion. Honour that your being as a whole requires time to metabolise such experiences. And you will feel your truth in time, unobscured by fear, and you will know when it lands. Over time, you will also become acquainted with the texture of such bewilderment itself, but you must feel to know.

Run towards that which you fear, so that it learns to kneel before your highest good.