Be sure it’s your real self you’re showing. Because it is your real self that needs to be loved.   Daphne Rose Kingma

It’s the most healing thing you can accomplish as you work through the changes in your thinking, your responses, your outlook and attitude about people and your world after ketamine treatment.  As you build an infrastructure of peace and generosity…fix your inner life and learn to embrace the truth about yourself. 

Self-doubt, self-defensiveness, and pretense eat away at your self-respect and love of yourself…and can lead to depression. But you want to reduce the stress in your life to help your wellbeing thrive.

How do you reduce the stress? By facing the truth that eats at you or that you hide from yourself.

What sort of truth..? Well, that you’re human, for starters. That you’re not always perfect in your responses to life’s stressors. And that there are plenty of things you can learn to make your life work better for you.

Things like humility, admitting your shortcomings, and asking for forgiveness, to name a few. To accept yourself as a learner in this life and not to expect yourself to know everything out of the gate.

Using Pride as a Shield of Protection

Pride drives many of us to present ourselves as infallible, until we realize that pride also shackles us from the fulfillment of intimacy in relationships.

Replacing pride with love can be scary. It can make you feel exposed and vulnerable until you get used to it. But doing so can transform your life and drive loneliness away.

Something we do as humans is to construct personas that we tell ourselves others will find more likable or respectable than who we really are. But a persona that you construct is always stilted. Unnatural.  

Have you ever been around someone who’s utterly at home in his own skin?  Isn’t he or she absolutely enjoyable and relaxing to be around?  The reason they’re enjoyable and relaxing to be around is because they’ve found a certain degree of peace with who they are.

They accept themselves as they are so there’s no need for pretense. When someone is trying to prove themselves, it can make you uncomfortable. But when you sense they have nothing to prove, you subconsciously feel like you can relax.

At the same time, you get the sense that their mental health is pretty good.

It’s the exception to meet someone like that, rather than the rule. Most of us aren’t free of pretense, until we learn what we need to learn so we can be who we are.

This shouldn’t be so hard. You know?

But we live in a world that feels dangerous and makes us think we have to protect ourselves. So we do. We build walls around ourselves. Thick, impenetrable armor to keep ourselves safe.

And we guard that armor, those walls, to stay safe. Then, if anything threatens to expose us under the armor, we get anxious and defend it. Don’t we?

So, after all that work, we’re reluctant to knock down those walls. We don’t feel safe without the armor.

And that’s why we have to learn to see what the walls and the armor are costing us. We have to see that they’re interrupting our social development and our opportunities for close, fulfilling relationships.

They also require that we remain vigilant, prepared to defend any attack on our security in the armor. So we can’t relax. We can’t let our guard down.

Fix Your Inner Life

You have to change the way you think. The way you respond to things.

You may need to get really honest with yourself. You may find you have to learn how to embrace the truth, and learn to accept yourself as human, fallible, and forgivable. When you do that, you may also feel more lovable.

And when you feel lovable…and LOVED… you’ll tend to find it much easier to generously love others.

Ok. I know it’s certainly easier said than done. It’s an uncomfortable process to look head-on at things in yourself you haven’t before. But, it leads to a very comfortable, confident, joyful way of living.

Ketamine Treatment Can Help You Achieve Remission

This isn’t news. We’ve known this for years.

But, if you’ve had ketamine treatment, and feel much, much better, you sure want to stay better, right?

Well, one important aspect of staying better is to unravel the conflict you carry inside you that you may not even realize is there.

But…it IS there. And it interferes with the peace within you. So what can you do?

Embrace the truth about yourself.

Just like letting go of what you NEED to let go of, when you embrace truth about yourself it helps you relax with who you really are.

Accepting your shortcomings, and dropping that guard that says you’re flawless, admirable, or beyond reproach, helps you embrace the truth that you’re a real living fallible human worthy of giving and receiving love.

And there’s another plus: doing so will increase your self respect.

Sound pretty far out? What if you don’t know what you have inner conflict about? Or how to tell if your guard is up?

What if you’ve been presenting yourself the way you think people expect you to for so long you don’t remember what it was like to be yourself?

Scrutinizing Your Inner Self

Start with looking closely at that experience or event that scratches at your conscious memories. What are you telling yourself about it? What about it might be seen differently?

Pay attention to your inner voice…do you find yourself defending yourself over what happened? What could you be “hiding” from yourself?

It might be related to some sort of blame you place on another person… or something you’re hiding from yourself. Look deeper. Could you have caused the situation, even though you didn’t intend to? Is it possible you share responsibility for what happened?

And what happens when you look at the other person’s role with a heart of forgiveness and understanding? Can you see how the outcome might not have been his/her intent?

Then. Just say it. “It’s my responsibility that so-and-so happened. ” Or…share the responsibility… ” I share in the responsibility that so-and-so happened. I didn’t intend for it to go down the way it did. He/she probably didn’t intend it either. I’m human, and I was wrong. I handled the situation badly. I’m truly sorry, and I’ll really try to not do it again.” Then move on with the resolve to make good decisions and to treat others well going forward.

I Was Wrong

It’s very difficult sometimes to reach this point. But giving up the fight and accepting that you’re fallible can be so liberating. You THOUGHT it could destroy you, hence the long arduous combat in your mind.

But when you really see that you were wrong…you can accept that it happened. And the fight inside you…the defensive arguments in your head…begin to disappear and become quiet.

And that quiet is a deposit of peace into your inner self. Enjoy the reward of harmony you feel.

Then take what you’ve learned and apply it to the next situation that comes to mind…because another situation will. You’re human and fallible. And so is everyone you know.

Going forward, you may find you’re a little less judgmental, a bit less inhibited…and more and more relaxed.  In that relaxed and peaceful state, it’s much easier to feel better.

With these things at work within you, you can accept yourself as human, and realize that through forgiveness of yourself you are more able to love and receive love. And that brings joy.

Remember, this discussion is NOT to say that if your remission fades away, it’s your fault. 

IT’S NOT.

But since stress remodels and prunes the signaling circuitry in the brain, which can lead to depression and other disorders, it stands to reason that the more you can remove stress from your life, the better the environment is for remission to thrive.

At Innovative Psychiatry, we want to be a part of your recovery as you use your ketamine treatment to help you bring change in your thinking, your outlook on life, and your attitudes.

Everyone needs these changes, but not all understand how to make them.

If you’re not in the habit, but have experienced joy from ketamine treatment, changes like we’ve talked about can help you continue to enjoy that joy, increasing love…and freedom from emotional pain.