Rumination and false premises, false assumptions.

[Robertcw]

I wrote a take on discomfort with intimacy and a lack of self-assertiveness.

Now I want to go one step further and talk about rumination.

Thinking too much about the causes and symptoms, and not enough about solutions.

Rumination is the act of using your mind as an echo chamber for your internal thoughts. This can be problematic because if you never get out of your own head, then you might start formulating complex and involved lines of reasoning with one thing leading to another until finally you arrive at a conclusion.

Only problem is, you don’t have any real idea whether or not all those premises you were ruminating over/about were actually true in the first place!

For example, one might walk down a street on their campus and notice that lots of people aren’t being outwardly friendly towards you when you look at them. You might think: ‘wow, they must be rude. Or, wow there must be something wrong with me.’

One could go home thinking one of these two premises and starting extrapolating huge lines of deduction such as ‘my college is full of jerks. Wow.’ Or ‘wow, I should just stay in since clearly nobody wants to talk to me.’

The thing is, you don’t actually know that’s the case. Sometimes it might be right, other times it could be wildly wrong.

In general, thinking this way is a learned helplessness trait that grows out of a parenting style which deployed ‘conditional love’ to you rather than ‘unconditional love.’

This causes one to externalize their value as a person, and therefore base their own self-worth on the judgments of others. But not only that, the ideal self is incongruent with the actual sense of self. This means that the notion one might ascribe as the perfect self for them could well in fact be unattainable and yet since they grew up being taught that they are only worthy of love when they achieve some externally set standard they strive at all costs for this attention in strangers.

This is the nature of low self-esteem: defined as the incongruence of the ideal self and the actual self.

Once one can realize this and actually figure this out, one can go on to building congruence here realizing that the ideal self and the actual self can be the same and that striving to be actual is the same as striving to be ideal. If one can make this leap, insecurities previously ascribed to external validations disappear and it becomes possible to perceive things the way they are rather than the way you might have thought would be better or more ideal in some way.

This is the fundamental trait trait involved in rumination. Indeed, anxiety is caused by conditional love parenting styles.

If one becomes stuck in the rumination cycle, one can never see that maybe the real reason for their coldness might actually be, say, you are not actually talking to any of them, but simply walking and making eye contact. Perhaps not even with a friendly expression.

Or maybe the reason is something terrible happened to that other person walking around or a loved one that day, or maybe they just feel really down and don’t feel like socializing that day.

People with this issue need to let all that go and instead put their efforts towards projecting friendliness and potentially agreeableness with people in their surroundings. There’s no other way out.

Carl Roger described this phenomena as a person who is unable to socialize properly because they were never given the freedom in childhood to explore their tastes outside of what an external authority figure demanded of them. They only received love when they did what that parent wanted from them, and received scorn and punishment for doing anything else. This, then, is the cause of anxiety.

Step out of the echo chamber, talk to someone like a fellow human like a decent person. You might be surprised to find most of the time others aren’t out to get you, and sometimes they are. And as a general rule, when in doubt be assertive.

This combination is how regular people socialize on a daily basis.

The act of bringing the ideal self inline with the actual self involves the process a person normally takes in elementary and high school — involving soul searching and discovering what you like and want and what you don’t like and don’t want for yourself. These people never get that phase until later in life where they can break free from their parent’s financial dependence.

This is how we get people into their 20’s who may be as much as 10 years behind the norm in terms of social development. And I believe this defines people who struggle with everyday milestones in life, including romance and sexual experience. Thanks Clinical Psych class. Learning a lot.

✌🏻