Fantasies

This is perhaps the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever talked about on the show. Over the last few years, I’ve become increasingly aware of something that my ego does to inflate itself on an almost daily basis. It engages in a kind of semi-conscious psychological masturbation by dreaming up all kinds of elaborate fantasies in which I am some kind of hero, or success, or celebrity, or even just the center of attention and praise at any given moment. It can take the form of imagining myself in the leading role of a film I’m watching, or making myself the protagonist of a book I’m reading, or inventing something completely new and dramatic and extraordinary as my own form of personal mythmaking.

Probably the best example I can think of to illustrate this kind of self-aggrandizing fantasy comes from the opening scene of the film Rushmore by Wes Anderson:

I don’t know if other people engage in these kinds of fantasies, because I’ve never talked about it with anyone (for obvious reasons), nor does anyone else seem to bring it up, but it’s such a common trope in film and TV that I suspect it’s much more prevalent than people let on. It’s a strategy our egos employ to fight inherent feelings of inferiority and shame, but a misguided a strategy at that.

I’m starting to believe that all feelings of “superiority” are in fact just a product of inferiority and shame. That is to say, there is no such thing as someone who actually, genuinely feels superior. Deep down, it’s always inextricably tied to feelings and fears of their own potential worthlessness. This is because I think the only way to truly overcome inferiority is through a sense of equality. So these ego fantasies, as pleasurable and well-meaning as they may be, are actually exacerbating our feelings of inferiority by trapping us in a cycle of “hustling for worthiness” (as Brené Brown would call it), as well as people pleasing and hierarchical thinking. If you believe that you can be inherently “better” than another person, then you know that someone else could also be “better” than you. It creates an endless cycle of trying to climb to the non-existent top of the fictional hierarchy of human value, all of which is shame.

That being said, I also realize that the way to overcome this bad habit of ego fantasizing is probably not by judging and fighting against it. Just like with unpleasant emotions, I think the best way to deal with these fantasies and move past them is to accept them wholly. So I’m trying to acknowledge and enjoy my fantasies as humorous and adorably misguided products of my ego that don’t actually define me. I actually plan to keep track of them and record them as an ongoing segment of the show for the amusement and empowerment of anyone else who may be drawn to similar flights of fancy as well.

“Another threat to the inner balance comes from excessive daydreaming, which in a secret way usually circles around particular complexes.”

– Marie-Louise von Franz, Man and His Symbols

Transcript:

00:00:00 – 00:05:13

I think this is perhaps the most embarrassing topic I have ever talked about on this show. At any given moment, my brain, or perhaps more accurately my ego, is engaging in a kind of self aggrandizing fantasy in which I am the hero in some kind of movie in my brain.

Probably the best way I could describe it is if you watch the opening scene of the film Rushmore, by Wes Anderson. It’s a high school — actually a private school math class and the hero or anti-hero of the film, Max Fischer, is reading a newspaper while his math teacher puts the quote-unquote, “hardest math question of all time” up on the chalkboard and says if anyone can solve it he will pass the entire class, or something like that. And then the whole glass turns and looks at Max, and he gets up… and he solves the problem! And they all cheer and they hoist him over their shoulders, and then Max snaps out of it and he’s back in reality.

That is exactly what my brain does almost every day. Not all the time, but so often that I almost don’t even notice it. It’s just a thing that my brain does to pass the time. It’s a kind of psychological masturbation in which I see myself in all of these heroic, or impressive, dramatic, larger than life center of attention situations. And a key factor of these fantasies is that they’re in the third person. Like a movie, I am picturing myself moving through the space from someone else’s viewpoint. And I think that that is an extremely important detail because these fantasies are all about avoiding shame. They are a way for me to almost build up my ego by imagining the potential ways in which I am special, in which I am amazing, in which I am at the top of the fictional hierarchy of human value. It’s a way to constantly stave off feelings of inferiority, feelings of unworthiness, feelings of unlovability, feelings of shame.

The fantasies have to be in the third person because shame is all about the opinions and perspectives of other people. So I am picturing other people watching me engage in these incredible fantastic actions and heroic events so that they can see how much value I supposedly have as a person.

What’s interesting about them is that it’s not like I snap out of them like people do in movies and discover, “Oh, I live this mundane life”. These fantasies almost kind of serve as a “what if?” Or maybe more profound than “what if”, they’re kind of like a “would be true”. It’s like, “Well, if this scenario was happening, it would be true that I would be heroic, or it would be true that I would do something impressive, or it would be true that I would say something really profound, or it would be true that people would be thinking these amazing things about me or praising me or admiring me. So it’s almost like my brain trying to convince itself that I already am these great, amazing, valuable, worthy, loveable things, it’s just that I haven’t had the opportunity to enact them yet.

It’s been happening my whole life, and I never really questioned it. In fact, I don’t even know if it’s a normal thing or not because it’s not something I’ve literally ever talked about with anyone else. Why? Because it’s so embarrassing! Nor have I really heard anyone else talk about it either. However, I have seen many films that humorously dramatize this kind of thing, Rushmore, for example. And we always kind of laugh at that character and how pathetic they are. But it happens so much in films that it makes me think that it is probably a fairly universal human experience for our egos to create fantasies that make us feel better — that the ego uses to prop itself up.

00:05:14 – 00:10:03

But once I started going to therapy and investigating my dreams and kind of demystifying shame, I started to recognize these fantasies for what they are. And I found them really problematic. I found them deluded. I found them grandiose. And I found them to be actually maybe stopping me from going out into the world and actually trying to do interesting, amazing, incredible things because I was like, “Oh, whatever. I already know I can do that. I’ve seen it in my fantasies”. Not only that, but I started to see how completely unreal they were. They just they weren’t accurate. I’m not that heroic person. I am not admired by everyone. They were creating this kind of fictional world that I would have rather existed in which people always like me.

And they were stopping me from confronting my own limitations, my own imperfections, and from confronting the reality that there are always going to be people who will not approve of you. And it’s not about trying to get to some perfect situation where everyone approves of you. That’s impossible. It’s actually the opposite. It’s about getting comfortable with the discomfort of knowing that all kinds of people don’t like you. All kinds of people are judging you. All kinds of people think you’re an idiot, or reject you — don’t want anything to do with you. The sooner that I can get comfortable with that reality, the happier I will be. As opposed to trying to create this impossible reality where I’m so great everyone in the world loves me.

* * *

The fantasies have all kinds of different genres. When I was younger, I would often be inspired by comic books and movies. And I would imagine myself in completely unrealistic scenarios where I have superpowers or I am the “chosen one”, like Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker. I mean, we have this narrative in so many cultures and in so much media of the “hero’s journey”. And I think it’s universal because all of us kind of have these fantasies in which we imagine ourselves at the center of some kind of movie, or some kind of tale, or some kind of myth in which we are the hero. And I think in the perspective of our own life, we all kind of do have to be our own hero. We have to go through a kind of self-awakening, battling our own demons and becoming our own hero. Our own leader. Our own parent.

I think that’s a very, very natural part of the human psychological evolution. And I think it taps into Carl Jung’s individuation theory, which I’ve talked about before. And it taps directly into what I would call a “shame breakthrough“. It’s sort of just like our unconscious mind discovering how it can best self actualize. So for me, the true hero’s journey is actually quite an internal one. But we have now projected it in so many myths, so many stories, so much media, so many films, so many video games into a kind of external heroism where it’s not enough for each of us internally to go on our own hero’s journey and self actualize, we have to kind of socially actualize. We have to become a hero to other people, which inherently would make us “better than” other people.

So this natural human psychological evolution myth has actually gotten intertwined in an unhealthy way with our cultural ideas of achievement, and success, and attention, and respect from other people. All of these external validators that, if you’ve been listening to my shame episodes, aren’t really that healthy for us to discover our own internal sense of worthiness. Our own sense of self-love. So as a kid, every time I would watch a movie I would put myself in the role of the hero of that film. Or in some cases, the villain. Because the villain had their own kind of reverse form of specialness. Their own reverse strength, their own reverse coolness, their own reverse attention. A kind of anti-hero, if you will. And I would basically just imagine the whole film over again, except with me in the lead.

00:10:04 – 00:15:10

I’m sure many many many people do this if not ever. Everyone. We take these powerful stories and we put ourselves at the center. So I would literally imagine myself being able to move things with my mind or read people’s brains or turn invisible or fly, and I would fight evil, and I would save the world, and everyone would look up to me, and I would be special and worthy and lovable and better than everyone else. But there were other types of indices to I would often imagine situations where I wasn’t even there. But other people were talking about me and saying good things. So for example, if I were to like hand in essay in some course, I would then imagine the teacher like reading it and turning to their colleague and being like, wow, I just read the most perhaps the most incredible essay that I have ever received in thirty years of teaching and their colleague was like, wow will who wrote it and the teacher would be like this young man named AJ and the other teacher would be like AJ bond and the teacher would be like, yes. And the other colleague would be like, oh my goodness. I had AJ last year. And he truly was a genius. This. I’m not exaggerating. I am not exaggerating. This is the kind of fantasy that my brain would just spontaneously dream up as I was sending in an essay. It’s so embarrassing. But it’s true. And then of course, I would get the essay back, and I would get like a b plus and I would be like, oh, well, obviously, they just don’t understand me. It’s your classic delusion of grandeur based of course, on the fear of its exact opposite. The deep-seated worry that you are in fact, inferior that you are incapable that you are pathetic that you are bad all of those shame worries rooted in this this sense that there’s something potentially inherently wrong with me. And what was interesting about these fantasies is that they weren’t exactly conscious. They weren’t unconscious in the sense that I wasn’t aware of them. You know, like, I was watching them like a movie, but I wasn’t consciously deciding to have them it wasn’t like, okay. I just emailed that essay in now. Let’s closer is. And take a moment to imagine. How much that teacher is going to fucking love my amazing essay. And how brilliant I am each just was something that would happen very spontaneously. I would send it in. And I would imagine the teacher getting the Email. And then reading it. And then, you know, would just my brain which is naturally fill in the details of all of the amazing things that were potentially going to happen. And it wasn’t even necessarily that. I one hundred percent believed that that was actually what was going to happen. It really was a kind of masturbation it really just it felt good to just go down that ego path and let my ego rub itself. So that it felt all kinds of goods, psychological feelings, and I think I really knew that I knew that. It wasn’t true probably wasn’t going to happen. But it was just a kind of like pleasant thing to do a pleasant little secret between me and my ego. There were also be kind of a dark version of these fantasies where I would imagine that I had died, and people were very very very, very sad. Even people that I didn’t even think really knew me or there were scenarios where something really awful happened to me, and everyone was really worried. Read or I was like sick. And everyone wanted me to get better or you know, any kind of situation where there was a lot of drama and a lot of seriousness and a lot of people were paying attention. And they’re like, wow, look at what age as going through what a trooper what a what a serious respectable strong individual, basically any ways in which our culture looked up to people or aggrandize them. I would have fantasies in which I was those things. As I think I’ve said before I had this incredible fascination as a child with all things Macab monsters villains. I always I always really connected more with the monster and the villain Frankenstein’s. Monster was my favorite of all the monsters followed closely by Dracula because I think I knowing deep down that I was different that I was gay always kind of related to these monstrosities. I’ve talked about this before. But there was something respectable about being feared and actually Dr James Gilligan, who’s violence expert that I talk a lot about in my shame series. He says that when you are looking for ways to feel self esteem and to feel respected by other people fear seems like one of the best methods to immediately feel respected.

00:15:10 – 00:20:00

That’s why he attributes all violence to shame. He thinks that all vie. Silence is caused by people trying to create a sense of external respect, and therefore internal respect. And I can completely relate to that. In the way that I realized villains and monsters and scaring people gave me this kind of respect this kind of power over them that they they looked up to me not in a positive way. But in a negative way and that to me still fulfilled. My need for feeling important for feeling special for feeling better in kind of perverse way feeling like I was a terrifying monster that had power over people was an anti shame fantasy. So as a result as a kid. I was constantly crawling around the house like some kind of loss raptor, or some kind of alien my favorite movie has a child as a twelve year old my favorite movie was aliens by James Cameron in which I looked up to the Zeno morph this disc-. Gusting monstrous killing machine I thought that was the coolest creature in the world. I did essays about it in my elementary school because I just looked up to that as as a kind of anti shame to be the source of power and fear, and monstrosity and evil seemed like a better thing to be nothing or no-one or worthless or useless or forgotten. At one point. And I still think this would be a good thing to do. I thought that I should actually write down every time. I have a fantasy. And maybe I’ll start doing that now, and it can be like a little segment that pops into the series every now, and then ego fantasies that I have actually had in which I tell you what the scenario was. And I tell you what my ego came up with to try to assuage potential shame or inferiority because they really are whole areas -ly transparent. They are always about me doing something ridiculously extrordinary and all of the people talking about how amazing it was. But as I’ve become increasingly aware of these fantasies. I’ve been trying to stop them from happening for a while when I really connected them to shame. I’ve found upsetting. I was so embarrassed by them. I saw how counter intuitive. They really were. They weren’t helping me really. They were keeping me out of. -ality? And when I did come back to reality. I felt worse because I knew that I wasn’t actually that amazing thing that I had just dreamt up. And what’s what’s more? I recognize that the path to not feeling inferior wasn’t about self aggrandizing. Even if I could achieve those things it wouldn’t actually stop me from feeling shame. Because what I now know at least in theory is that the key to overcoming inferiority is through equality not through superiority. So these fantasies were just adding to my desperation, my my misguided desire to be superior. I wasn’t having any fantasies about how amazingly equal. I was. But that would have been a lot more healthy. One technique. I did discover to kind of deflate these fantasies was when I recognize that I was inefficient Assy to shift the perspective. So instead of being a third person perspective where people are looking at me. I would put myself in my own head in the fantasy and look out of my own eyes. And that really undermined the anti shame appeal of the fantasies instead of all these people admiring me. I was looking out at all these people, and I suddenly realized I have no idea what these people think I don’t know if these people are actually admiring me in this fantasy scenario or they’re judging me or they don’t like me it basically just brings the fantasy back to reality. And shows that it’s impossible to create a situation where everyone approves of you. And that shouldn’t be the point the difficulty about this is that it requires this fantasy which really is only. Semi-conscious I have to then become consciously aware I’m in fantasy and I have to consciously wrestle control away from my subconscious and put myself into my own head and at that point the fantasy just kind of falls apart, which is which is good. It’s probably better than staying in that fantasy and self aggrandizing longer and longer, but it doesn’t really stop the root of the fantasy.

00:20:00 – 00:23:53

It doesn’t stop the fantasy from happening. It’s basically just a way to forge it while it’s in progress. And I’m starting to realize that it may not be possible for me to stop my ego from van Cise ING, I mean, it might ego has built up this technique over almost four decades as a self protective mechanism against inferior Oreta. So it will be very difficult to rewire my brain. I I guess it is possible. I do think it’s possible. But I don’t think being hard on myself is the way to go about it. I don’t think it’s going to happen through. Just pure willpower or sheer, desire or logic. It’s gonna take a lot of reprogramming. And I think that in the meantime, I might actually be better off to just accept these fantasies for what they are to to look at them with a degree of love and say, oh, that’s Doral. Look at what my ego thinks it needs to do in order to be meaningful in order to be useful in order to protect me in order to keep me alive. Essentially, I can accept them and look at them with a degree of lightness and with a degree of humor. And I think that is a lot more likely to take away their power than to fight against them. And I’m finding as you may have already noticed in this podcast that one of the best ways for me to accept them is to recognize that they aren’t really me. It’s just one of many aspects of my personality, and it doesn’t define me. I’m basically learning not to identify so much with those fantasies. Sure, they’re happening and they’re going to keep happening for the foreseeable future. And they may not be the most healthy means of dealing with shame. But I recognize that there’s so much more to me than just these ridiculous fantasies, and by creating that space, and that that perspective, I’m able to see them as a lot less powerful. I’m able to kind of undermine them Mabel to kind of laugh at them. I mean, we’ll talk about them with you right now. I obviously didn’t have the courage to talk about them like this in the past. I mean, in fact, I wasn’t even. Quite conscious enough of them to really do. So except in the last few years, but I’ve clearly already done a good enough job of disassociating myself from them enough that I can have joke about them. I can I can speak the truth of them. And that is such a powerful change when we can name something when we can be honest about it when we can speak our truth, it no longer controls us as Brunei Brown would say it allows us to write the end of the story. So I’m happy that I’ve gotten to a point where I can see these antitheses as an aspect of my ego. You know, trying its best its own adorable misguided way to basically keep me alive to to keep my psychological sense of AJ strong through these fantasies and just appreciate them for what they are. And to. Talk about them and to integrate them into my life, hopefully in an ongoing amusing series that being said, I am now imagining this podcast coming to an end and the music starts to play. And you the listener think to yourself. Wow. This AJ guys such a brave genius. Really? I also have these fantasies, but I never talked about. Oh, my. And he’s really.

actually a private school math class and the hero or anti hero of the film, Max Fischer, is reading a newspaper while his math teacher puts the quote unquote, “hardest math question of all time” up on the chalkboard and says if anyone can solve it he will pass the entire class, or something like that. And then the whole glass turns and looks at Max, and he gets up… and he solves the problem! And they all cheer and they hoist him over their shoulders, and then Max snaps out of it and he’s back in reality. That is exactly what my brain does almost every day. Not all the time, but so often that I almost don’t even notice it. It’s just a thing that my brain does to pass the time. It’s a kind of psychological masturbation in which I see myself in all of these heroic, or impressive, dramatic, larger than life center of attention situations. And a key factor of these fantasies is that there in the third person. Like a movie, I am picturing myself moving through the space from someone else’s viewpoint. And I think that that is an extremely important detail because these fantasies are all about avoiding shame. They are away for me to. Almost build up. My ego by imagining the potential ways in which I am special in which I am amazing in which I am at the top of the fictional hierarchy of human value. It’s a way to constantly stave off feelings of inferiority feelings of unworthiness feelings of unlovable –bility feelings of shame. So the fantasies have to be in the third person because shame is all about the opinions and perspectives of other people. So I am picturing other people watching me engage in these incredible fantastic actions are her roic events. So that they can see how much value. I supposedly have as a person. What’s interesting about them is that it’s not like I snap out of them. Like people do in movies and discover, oh, I live this mundane life, these fantasies almost kind of serve as a what if or maybe more profound than what if they’re kind of like, a a would be true. It’s like, well if this scenario was happening. It would be true. The I would be heroic or it would be true that I would do something impressive or. Would be true that I would say something really profound or it would be true that people would be thinking these amazing things about me or praising me or admiring me. So it’s almost like my brain trying to convince itself that I already am these great amazing valuable worthy loveable things. It’s just that. I haven’t had the opportunity to enact them yet. It’s been happening my whole life, and I never really questioned it. In fact, I don’t even know if it’s a normal thing or not because it’s not something I’ve literally ever talked about with anyone else. Why? Because it’s so embarrassing nor have I really heard anyone else talk about it either. However, I have seen many films that humorously dramatize this kind of thing Rushmore, for example. And we always kind of laugh at that character. And how pathetic they are. But it happens so much in films that it makes me think that it is probably fairly universal human experience for our egos to create fantasies that make us feel better that the ego uses to prop itself up.

00:05:14 – 00:10:03

But once I started going to therapy and investigating my dreams and kind of demystifying shame. I started to recognize these fantasies for what they are. And I found them really problematic. I found them deluded. I found them grandiose. And I found them to be actually may be stopping me from going out into the world and actually trying to do interesting amazing incredible things because I was like, oh, whatever Ardy. No. I can do that. I’ve seen in my fantasies. Not only that. But I started to see how completely unreal they were. They just they weren’t accurate. I m not that Harav person. I am not admired by everyone. They were creating this kind of fictional world that I would have rather existed in where people always like me, and they were stopping me from confronting my own limitations, my own imperfections and from confronting the reality that there are always going to be people who will not approve of you. And it’s not about trying to get to some perfect situation where everyone approves of you. That’s impossible. It’s actually the opposite. It’s about getting comfortable with the discomfort of knowing that all kinds of people don’t like, you all kinds of people are judging you all kinds of people think you’re an idiot or reject you don’t wanna needing to do with you the sooner that I can get comfortable with that reality. The happier. I will be as opposed to trying to create this impossible reality where I’m so great everyone in the world loves me. The fantasies have all kinds of different genres when I was younger. I would often be inspired by comic books and movies. And I would imagine myself in completely unrealistic scenarios where I have superpowers or I am the chosen one like, Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker. I mean, we have this narrative in so many cultures and in so much media of the hero’s journey, and I think it’s universal because all of us kind of have these fantasies in which we imagine ourselves at the center of some kind of movie or some kind of tail or some kind of myth in which we are the hero. And I think in the perspective of our own life. We all kind of do have to be our own hero. We have to go through a kind of self awakening battling our own demons and becoming our own hero. Our our own leader our own parent. I think that’s a very. Very natural part of the human, psychological. Evolution. And I think it taps into Carl Jung’s individuation theory, which I’ve talked about before, and it it it taps directly into what I would call a shame breakthrough. It’s sort of just like our unconscious mind discovering how it can best self actualize. So for me, the true heroes journey is actually quite an internal one. But we have now projected it in so many myths so many stories so much media so many films so many video games into a kind of external hero ISM where it’s not enough for each of us internally to go on our own hero’s journey and self actualize. We have to kind of socially actualize, we have to become a hero to other people which inherently would make us better than other people. So this natural, human, psychological. Evolution instinctual myth. If has actually gotten injure twined in an unhealthy way with our cultural ideas of achievement and success and attention and respect from other people all of these external validates that. If you’ve been listening to my shame episodes aren’t really that healthy for us to discover our own internal sense of worthiness our own sense of self love. So as a kid every time, I would watch a movie I would put myself in the role of the hero of that film. Or in some cases, the villain because the villain had their own kind of reverse form of specialness their own reverse strength, their own reverse coolness, their own reverse attention, a kind of anti hero. If you will. And I would basically just imagine the whole film over again, except with me in the lead.

00:10:04 – 00:15:10

I’m sure many many many people do this if not ever. Everyone. We take these powerful stories and we put ourselves at the center. So I would literally imagine myself being able to move things with my mind or read people’s brains or turn invisible or fly, and I would fight evil, and I would save the world, and everyone would look up to me, and I would be special and worthy and lovable and better than everyone else. But there were other types of indices to I would often imagine situations where I wasn’t even there. But other people were talking about me and saying good things. So for example, if I were to like hand in essay in some course, I would then imagine the teacher like reading it and turning to their colleague and being like, wow, I just read the most perhaps the most incredible essay that I have ever received in thirty years of teaching and their colleague was like, wow will who wrote it and the teacher would be like this young man named AJ and the other teacher would be like AJ bond and the teacher would be like, yes. And the other colleague would be like, oh my goodness. I had AJ last year. And he truly was a genius. This. I’m not exaggerating. I am not exaggerating. This is the kind of fantasy that my brain would just spontaneously dream up as I was sending in an essay. It’s so embarrassing. But it’s true. And then of course, I would get the essay back, and I would get like a b plus and I would be like, oh, well, obviously, they just don’t understand me. It’s your classic delusion of grandeur based of course, on the fear of its exact opposite. The deep-seated worry that you are in fact, inferior that you are incapable that you are pathetic that you are bad all of those shame worries rooted in this this sense that there’s something potentially inherently wrong with me. And what was interesting about these fantasies is that they weren’t exactly conscious. They weren’t unconscious in the sense that I wasn’t aware of them. You know, like, I was watching them like a movie, but I wasn’t consciously deciding to have them it wasn’t like, okay. I just emailed that essay in now. Let’s closer is. And take a moment to imagine. How much that teacher is going to fucking love my amazing essay. And how brilliant I am each just was something that would happen very spontaneously. I would send it in. And I would imagine the teacher getting the Email. And then reading it. And then, you know, would just my brain which is naturally fill in the details of all of the amazing things that were potentially going to happen. And it wasn’t even necessarily that. I one hundred percent believed that that was actually what was going to happen. It really was a kind of masturbation it really just it felt good to just go down that ego path and let my ego rub itself. So that it felt all kinds of goods, psychological feelings, and I think I really knew that I knew that. It wasn’t true probably wasn’t going to happen. But it was just a kind of like pleasant thing to do a pleasant little secret between me and my ego. There were also be kind of a dark version of these fantasies where I would imagine that I had died, and people were very very very, very sad. Even people that I didn’t even think really knew me or there were scenarios where something really awful happened to me, and everyone was really worried. Read or I was like sick. And everyone wanted me to get better or you know, any kind of situation where there was a lot of drama and a lot of seriousness and a lot of people were paying attention. And they’re like, wow, look at what age as going through what a trooper what a what a serious respectable strong individual, basically any ways in which our culture looked up to people or aggrandize them. I would have fantasies in which I was those things. As I think I’ve said before I had this incredible fascination as a child with all things Macab monsters villains. I always I always really connected more with the monster and the villain Frankenstein’s. Monster was my favorite of all the monsters followed closely by Dracula because I think I knowing deep down that I was different that I was gay always kind of related to these monstrosities. I’ve talked about this before. But there was something respectable about being feared and actually Dr James Gilligan, who’s violence expert that I talk a lot about in my shame series. He says that when you are looking for ways to feel self esteem and to feel respected by other people fear seems like one of the best methods to immediately feel respected.

00:15:10 – 00:20:00

That’s why he attributes all violence to shame. He thinks that all vie. Silence is caused by people trying to create a sense of external respect, and therefore internal respect. And I can completely relate to that. In the way that I realized villains and monsters and scaring people gave me this kind of respect this kind of power over them that they they looked up to me not in a positive way. But in a negative way and that to me still fulfilled. My need for feeling important for feeling special for feeling better in kind of perverse way feeling like I was a terrifying monster that had power over people was an anti shame fantasy. So as a result as a kid. I was constantly crawling around the house like some kind of loss raptor, or some kind of alien my favorite movie has a child as a twelve year old my favorite movie was aliens by James Cameron in which I looked up to the Zeno morph this disc-. Gusting monstrous killing machine I thought that was the coolest creature in the world. I did essays about it in my elementary school because I just looked up to that as as a kind of anti shame to be the source of power and fear, and monstrosity and evil seemed like a better thing to be nothing or no-one or worthless or useless or forgotten. At one point. And I still think this would be a good thing to do. I thought that I should actually write down every time. I have a fantasy. And maybe I’ll start doing that now, and it can be like a little segment that pops into the series every now, and then ego fantasies that I have actually had in which I tell you what the scenario was. And I tell you what my ego came up with to try to assuage potential shame or inferiority because they really are whole areas -ly transparent. They are always about me doing something ridiculously extrordinary and all of the people talking about how amazing it was. But as I’ve become increasingly aware of these fantasies. I’ve been trying to stop them from happening for a while when I really connected them to shame. I’ve found upsetting. I was so embarrassed by them. I saw how counter intuitive. They really were. They weren’t helping me really. They were keeping me out of. -ality? And when I did come back to reality. I felt worse because I knew that I wasn’t actually that amazing thing that I had just dreamt up. And what’s what’s more? I recognize that the path to not feeling inferior wasn’t about self aggrandizing. Even if I could achieve those things it wouldn’t actually stop me from feeling shame. Because what I now know at least in theory is that the key to overcoming inferiority is through equality not through superiority. So these fantasies were just adding to my desperation, my my misguided desire to be superior. I wasn’t having any fantasies about how amazingly equal. I was. But that would have been a lot more healthy. One technique. I did discover to kind of deflate these fantasies was when I recognize that I was inefficient Assy to shift the perspective. So instead of being a third person perspective where people are looking at me. I would put myself in my own head in the fantasy and look out of my own eyes. And that really undermined the anti shame appeal of the fantasies instead of all these people admiring me. I was looking out at all these people, and I suddenly realized I have no idea what these people think I don’t know if these people are actually admiring me in this fantasy scenario or they’re judging me or they don’t like me it basically just brings the fantasy back to reality. And shows that it’s impossible to create a situation where everyone approves of you. And that shouldn’t be the point the difficulty about this is that it requires this fantasy which really is only. Semi-conscious I have to then become consciously aware I’m in fantasy and I have to consciously wrestle control away from my subconscious and put myself into my own head and at that point the fantasy just kind of falls apart, which is which is good. It’s probably better than staying in that fantasy and self aggrandizing longer and longer, but it doesn’t really stop the root of the fantasy.

00:20:00 – 00:23:53

It doesn’t stop the fantasy from happening. It’s basically just a way to forge it while it’s in progress. And I’m starting to realize that it may not be possible for me to stop my ego from van Cise ING, I mean, it might ego has built up this technique over almost four decades as a self protective mechanism against inferior Oreta. So it will be very difficult to rewire my brain. I I guess it is possible. I do think it’s possible. But I don’t think being hard on myself is the way to go about it. I don’t think it’s going to happen through. Just pure willpower or sheer, desire or logic. It’s gonna take a lot of reprogramming. And I think that in the meantime, I might actually be better off to just accept these fantasies for what they are to to look at them with a degree of love and say, oh, that’s Doral. Look at what my ego thinks it needs to do in order to be meaningful in order to be useful in order to protect me in order to keep me alive. Essentially, I can accept them and look at them with a degree of lightness and with a degree of humor. And I think that is a lot more likely to take away their power than to fight against them. And I’m finding as you may have already noticed in this podcast that one of the best ways for me to accept them is to recognize that they aren’t really me. It’s just one of many aspects of my personality, and it doesn’t define me. I’m basically learning not to identify so much with those fantasies. Sure, they’re happening and they’re going to keep happening for the foreseeable future. And they may not be the most healthy means of dealing with shame. But I recognize that there’s so much more to me than just these ridiculous fantasies, and by creating that space, and that that perspective, I’m able to see them as a lot less powerful. I’m able to kind of undermine them Mabel to kind of laugh at them. I mean, we’ll talk about them with you right now. I obviously didn’t have the courage to talk about them like this in the past. I mean, in fact, I wasn’t even. Quite conscious enough of them to really do. So except in the last few years, but I’ve clearly already done a good enough job of disassociating myself from them enough that I can have joke about them. I can I can speak the truth of them. And that is such a powerful change when we can name something when we can be honest about it when we can speak our truth, it no longer controls us as Brunei Brown would say it allows us to write the end of the story. So I’m happy that I’ve gotten to a point where I can see these antitheses as an aspect of my ego. You know, trying its best its own adorable misguided way to basically keep me alive to to keep my psychological sense of A.J. strong through these fantasies and just appreciate them for what they are. And to. Talk about them and to integrate them into my life, hopefully in an ongoing amusing series that being said, I am now imagining this podcast coming to an end and the music starts to play and you the listener think to yourself, “Wow, this A.J. guy is such a brave genius…”

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