Living the Aftermath 2015-2021 - Spiritual Emergence, and Archetypal Analysis

Childhood desire for self-observation becomes unintentional awareness practice

The Bizarro World of Post Spiritual Emergence

It was only after I met A. that believe it or not, I felt I had actually entered bizarro world. Bizarre is the only way I know to describe it.

On one hand I was still high as a kite on love. On the other hand, I had become completely disconnected from myself, and I was completely unaware of it. The high of my state completely obliterated the effects of the traumatic event, because I had no memory of it. I had been left with mere emotional impressions of his accusations which combined with the empathy I had had for his fear. This made it seem like nothing that bad had happened. Because I didn't remember, I couldn't observe its effects until years later when I was triggered to remember parts of my experience that night, and could then observe patterns consistent with dissociative states in my behavior. 

The dissociation was invisible to me for a long time. I thought I was fine, still riding the high of my experience, just trying to integrate what I thought was an intense but ultimately manageable experience. The spiritual emergence, and everything that surrounded it naturally became the focus, because everything else in my life seemed average at the time.

I remember how, in those days, it seemed as if there was an unmistakable flow between me and the way the world responded to me. It felt bizarre to me, because the shift happened over night. It was nothing extreme, but there was a visible shift compared to before. Had this shift not been so sudden I would not have been able to observe it as a flow.

People, at least the people I would interact with, seemed different. Kinder, more careful with each other, as if the social atmosphere had softened. This was most observable at work. At times, it was so pronounced that it was as if people, my colleagues, clients, all had a similar shift to mine, and I thought I just wasn't aware of it. I didn't remember them being like that, and there were plenty of moments when it felt like uncanny valley to me. This was a small town in Eastern Europe where I remembered rudeness, gossip, friction, assertiveness veering into aggression being a part of the culture. 

Because I had just moved back home, at first, I dismissed it as the usual politeness of a new working relationship, but that did not account for the length or depth of the change. My directness, or firmness wouldn't trigger the usual defenses, and the everyday frictions I expected barely activated around me. Gossip was the clearest marker. In a setting where it normally circulates, it largely stopped in my presence. It wasn't that people's conditioning disappeared, but it wasn't performance either, because it was sustained for too long for that to be a plausible explanation. I wasn't observing what people might imagine 'perfect harmony' where everyone was all rainbow and roses. It did feel and look like perfect human harmony plenty of times though - the kind that allows for everyone's existence to just be. It wasn't entirely frictionless, but frictions were much less frequent than I would have expected them, were unintentional, didn't escalate and repaired quickly, without amplifying into grudge or gossip cycles. 

I was aware that in theory, the field should react to my high coherence state and ripple outwards, but it was so uncanny at times, that I would end up panicking a little inside. When I would start panicking I would also start scanning my environment, and I would eventually catch glimpses of people's cynical realities and mindsets, the ones I had been accustomed with throughout my life. However, I would have to actively scan, as this almost never happened in my immediate presence. 

As odd as it sounds, those glimpses would comfort me, as they meant continuity in my before and after realities. 

It seemed that my high coherence state made coherence more available in the people around me, as if their better tendencies had more room to surface and their cynical baseline had less room to express itself. 

The odd part was that I was used to these kinds of environments and it would usually end up with being shamed for not participating in the cultural baseline, but not this time. It was as if the entire field re organised around me. It felt every ounce of magical-bizarre, but I believe it sounds more magical than the logical structural explanation for it. My inner state had tilted quite sharply over night and people naturally react differently depending on another's inner state. What made it so uncanny for me was that the shift was abrupt, and despite understanding the mechanism and expecting it to happen, it still felt unreal. 

This contrast was a source of internal panic at times. It felt like the world refused to push back in the way I was used to, and the lack of counter-force felt unreal. My old world returned most visibly when I began to panic and doubt entered my system, and I started scanning for evidence of incoherence as if trying to verify the reality I remembered. Those moments confirmed that the old baseline still existed behind the softened surface of this new, unresisting relational space. From the outside it looked average, like ordinary social interaction, but from within, it was jarring. 

Something seemed markedly different about the way the world was responding to me. 

Then there was the money thing at work, a practice that started innocently and got a life of its own. Where I worked it was acceptable to allow some clients to pay later. My colleague L. and my boss engaged with it mainly as social transaction. Me...high as a kite on love, started doing it out of kindness. I thought that if necessary I'd cover the costs myself. I was doing it for people without homes, or anyone who needed it. Every single person came back with the money. I'm not exaggerating - every single one, regardless of their social or economic status. My colleague, An. who was hired after me found it so strange that she mentioned it multiple times. She'd never seen anything like it and she found the (near) 100% return rate, even for larger sums of money, lasting for years very unusual. This was a smallish town in Eastern Europe, where unconditional social trust wasn't the norm, and this had become standard practice at that workplace. My boss, my colleagues, all started doing it. It had gotten to the point where everyone who was unable to pay then and there could get what they needed, and come back with the money later. It just...got a life of its own. My boss changed it many years later, not because clients wouldn't return to pay, but because it had become that ridiculous and it resembled more like a market than a business. [I placed near before 100% in brackets because it was all except for one incident where it was clear from the start that we won't be seeing any money from that person]

Even time felt weird. I distinctly remember this feeling of having no awareness of time flowing. Another instance of bizarre. It felt surreal at times.   

I was oftentimes struck by how I was having this inner experience that seemed qualitatively different from the experiences of those around me, and yet I blended in perfectly fine. If anything I felt invisible. Here I was, going through the most unusual experience, yet no one seemed to notice. 

I do remember registering a minor deterioration in my state around the 5th year. I remember it because I thought that it might mirror a process of how children's inner states and coherence start blending in more into their social environments. From the 6th year onwards my state started to gradually, yet exponentially deteriorate, and by mid 2021 I had almost returned to my social baseline from before my experience. This correlated with some of my memories returning, and starting to register the emotional disconnect. Time also seemed to take back its shape. 

Before I knew it, I had become a recluse. I wasn't intending for it. I always looked for people to connect with, but connection just didn't happen. I felt I didn't fit in anywhere, not even in the spiritual communities where I thought I would.

Spirituality and Spiritual Communities

I was all alone, not knowing what to make of my experience. I needed help to make sense of it all, and I didn't know where to turn. The spiritual communities were helpful only to a point. I wasn't sure if I wasn't understanding what they were telling me, if they hadn't actually had a spiritual experience as I understood one, or if I misinterpreted what I had experienced. It seemed like everyone was speaking another language than I did. I was willing to question myself, my perceptions, and investigate the gap I was observing.

Despite my best intentions I was never able to get on board with many of the ideas I encountered. Oftentimes it felt like I was asked to embrace a new kind of dogma. 

Everyone seemed to speak in quotes from texts I hadn't read, they talked about meditation, mindfulness, presence, and yoga as if they were the end all be all while I was clueless. I got it, it was the way they reached their experience, and it seemed like that was the right way to them. What bugged me though is that I was constantly left feeling that if I wasn't engaging in the same rituals, in the same form and shape they required to appear in, it must have meant I wasn't doing it right. 

Granted, back then I didn't even know I had spent my life engaging in some form of awareness practice, but even after realising that was the case, I still felt the form it presented itself in wasn't satisfactory enough. When I started, I was someone who didn't even know the difference between awakening and enlightenment, and I was always left feeling inadequate and insufficient. I was left feeling as if that was proof I had no idea what I was talking about. 

It wasn't that I didn't try to see what they meant. I did. I tried to look into the rituals and engage with them,  until I was left unable to deny that every time I went online, and tried to follow a video asking me to empty my mind I felt offended. Why would anyone want to do that? Just empty your mind, as if the mind is there as decoration. It's never why is that thought there? What does it tell me? Just will it away.

Then it was the presence thing. Be present, just not with your thoughts, or actual feelings for that matter. To this day I find the interpretation of presence I kept stumbling upon to be bothersome, and all I hear in it is pretend. Pretend everything is great. Pretend you are enjoying something even when you don't. Pretend your world is magnificent. Pretend things are not as they are. I still haven't read the texts, but I am tempted to believe it is not what they try to say about presence. From where I am standing presence means being present with what is, and sometimes 'what is' isn't peace, and that is valid. Sometimes 'what is' lives in the past still, or in the future. 

I do not pretend to be acquainted with genuine Eastern philosophy practices, or the insights one is supposed to take from them, so I can only speak from what I observed and interacted with on my path. One of those observations is around what was presented to me as the concept of the Observer. It seems to be treated as transcendence achieved by standing outside the experience but not inside it. I, personally, do not like that. That triggers me dissociative as it reads as detachment from reality to me, rather than movement with reality. 

I oftentimes got the impression that relinquishing control and allowing one's self to be a leaf in the wind - an insight whose substance I actually agree with - seemed more like relinquishment of discernment and agency whenever I encountered it practiced. Here, I am reminded of someone in a community who was held in awe for remaining detached and unperturbed, to the point of seemingly accepting a serious physical assault. The community's response was reverence not concern, because in his own language he was nothing, so it did not matter. I understand keeping the bigger picture in mind, but I do not see the need for self-erasure in order to co-exist with and in reality.

From where I am standing relinquishing control is allowing the future to remain open, whilst maintaining agency and discernment while remaining fully present within reality as is.

I believe that many of the people in these communities were, just like myself, trying to find their footing, and path, but from my observations and understanding, I can't help but find pop-culture spirituality a misunderstanding. And that it's a misunderstanding is not even an issue - it only becomes one when everyone insists on wisdom about perceptions I can't help but find to be unwise.

My drive for answers didn't help connection either. I wanted to dissect everything, contrast and compare, but it seemed like few wanted that too. For the most part, my need to dig deeper meant that I hadn't arrived, and it made me and my experience lesser. I was supposed to feel blissful 100% of the time. No anger. No frustration. No desire.

Plenty of times when I tried to connect with people from spiritual communities, someone would start wanting to teach me. They didn't want to share, to exchange - they would end up wanting to become my teacher. I had never asked for that. I wanted exchange. I wanted human to human, and they wanted to position themselves as my teacher. And when I resisted the dynamic, I clearly wasn't getting it. 

I kept running into the kind of mindset that insisted suffering meant failure. The kind of thinking that implied that if I was in pain, confused, or angry, then my experience was somehow lesser. Maybe it was, and they had all arrived but me. And yet, I couldn't shake how the advice felt as though I was being asked to deny my feelings rather than move with them, and to replace honest emotion with a performance of serenity. 

These were my grievances with the spiritual communities I came across, and I stumbled upon them often enough to leave me feeling out of place. As a whole, it felt as if no one was hearing me, and I had no plans to pretend my experience was any different than it was. 

The context of this entire circumstance made it easy for me to withdraw from social life with no one really noticing. I had just moved back home, so I think most people I used to know here thought I had maybe found new friends, and it was just a case of having lost touch. I was functional. I was going to work. My life seemed average from the outside. 

I didn't purposefully withdraw. It just happened. I kept trying to connect with people, only to be left feeling more isolated.

I only started noticing my isolation when I started feeling people's silent judgements. All of a sudden it became noticeable to both them and me that I had spent years by myself. 

Reality-Testing and Sanity: Dreams & Memory

As time went by, I only became more confused and disoriented. I tried to understand, to process, but what was I supposed to process exactly? Because my spiritual emergence got tangled with the archetypal activation A.'s existence set in motion, while my reality around him remained suspended, my reality in general also remained suspended along with it. He was a key figure in the structure of my experience, and I only had fragments - emotional impressions, vague memories, and a cluster of observations I didn't know what to make of. 

I was always prepared for A. to be the vehicle through which the Devil archetype would manifest. I allowed both possibilities to coexist: that he might represent Self, Devil or both simultaneously. The Devil figure and symbol had been very much a constant and stable presence throughout my life, and dismissing it would have been difficult, so I tried to investigate, and tried to grasp the meaning behind the symbol. As for the Self hypothesis, letting go of it would have been the easiest option, but I couldn't reconcile what I had observed as a great degree of similarities in our natural orientations. 

I didn't really know what to make of his short, and vague replies. They struck me as either confusion or intentional withholding of a clarity I specifically asked for. The contradiction between what his still apparent values at the time, and his actions had me consider his silence might be deliberate or that it might betray dysfunctional gender dynamics. I had observed him express quite strong principles and his failure to provide clarity, his vagueness and silence left a gap I didn't know what to make of. 

I thought that maybe he hadn't yet managed to wrap his mind around what happened. I thought he probably needed space; anyone would after something like that I told myself. I could imagine how I must have appeared to him: this strange woman suddenly entering his life, speaking in religious coded symbols, claiming she'd dreamt of him as a child and teenager, that she had grown up labelling him the Devil, and that she believed they shared a soul. Given the context, his abrupt withdrawal after intense emotional and physical intimacy, and subsequent vagueness had me consider he might have been feeling hurt coupled with a quiet no evidence my marbles were intact. Besides, if I feared disappearing into him without knowing what I might dissolve into, I thought it was possible he might have felt the same.

It took me years to realise that I didn't remember most of anything that happened between us that second night. I was aware I was lacking some memories, but initially I thought it was normal given the extraordinary number of anomalous experiences that had happened in quick succession. Besides, I always remembered the gist of it, unaware that at least in regards to the second night, I was operating solely from mere emotional impressions. 

I had no sense of time, so the length of time that had passed didn't jump out at me. I cognitively understood the amount of time, but had no emotional relation to it. For a long time, I believed that maybe I hadn't expressed myself clearly enough, and that if I managed to do so, the logic behind it all would become visible. 

The reality of my spiritual emergence had remained the most stable and undeniable part of my new reality. I didn't question its existence internally, but his reaction to it, to me, left me fearing external questioning. I figured to engage in that questioning of my own accord, in order to pre-empt what I was now anticipating as outside judgement. 

I also thought that in absence of his input, and willingness to communicate, by determining the reality of my spiritual experience beyond any skeptical reflex, I would also be able to settle my reality around him. If my spiritual emergence happened, then so did my dreams, and it must have meant he too existed. It was all so blurry, so overwhelming and scary, that I was questioning if he actually existed as a human being on this earth. His human existence felt more surreal, than the reality of my spiritual emergence. Priorities, I suppose, lol.

Besides, whomever he was and regardless of the meaning he held for my experience and existence, I felt he was a reflection of my social reality. 

I began by verifying every part of my experience, testing each piece for stability, reconstructing reality fragment by fragment. 

I first tested the spiritual experience by testing the existence of the dreams. If the dreams happened, then so did my spiritual experience, and it must have meant A. also existed as a real flesh and bones human being.

I first verified if the dreams were real, or if there was any possibility for my memory to be playing tricks on me. The overwhelming amount of memories anchored in my then daily mundane teen reality, made it seem quite unlikely for the memories to be a fabrication of my imagination. This was also supported by the fact that plenty of the memories regarding the dreams involved, stayed throughout my life, remaining available to my immediate awareness. Available enough to my immediate awareness for them to pop up organically whenever the subject of dreams was brought up in a conversation. 

The amount of fear of having my reality dismissed had me thinking that my relationship with dreams I had grown up treating as noise, but were now at the forefront of my life might have seemed unusual from the outside. It was only later on, that I gained confidence against perceived external pressure in feeling more comfortable to point to their memory being carried by their emotional vividness.

My engagement with the process of attempting to disprove the existence of the dreams, also ended up having more details around them resurface. If at first I was scared that no one would believe me because of how wild it all sounded, I now became scared that no one would believe me because I could not possibly remember mere dreams in this much detail. My consistent questioning made it harder for me to dismiss them, but also bigger, more detailed. 

After some research into memory, affective psychology and neuroscience I gained more confidence in my observations around the process of memory retrieval: each time I connected with the affective sensations surrounding the memory, more details would gradually open. This observation was part of what eventually led me to posit that affect is the first registration of coherence in consciousness. It was also what I believe helped me to eventually retrieve nearly all of my memories from the second night I met A., when I later on consciously engaged the process in wanting to test my observation. 

Ironically, I was able to exclude imagination early on, because guess what? My cousin was right. I don't have that kind of imagination, and surely not to the degree where I could have invented this kind of story. What started as a childhood wound of being told I lacked imagination, became the very thing that helped me confirm my reality decades later. The same orientation toward truth over fiction that made me boring as a child made fabrication structurally implausible as an adult, right when I most needed it.

Trying to downright question the existence of the dreams by looking for any inconsistencies, only ended up having me unable to shake the amount of memories I had around them. The more I tried to question the existence of the memories and the dreams, the more details rose that clicked into the existing puzzle. Instead of shrinking, the picture kept stabilising, until I was compelled to determine and accept them as a part of my lived reality.

Once I could no longer easily dismiss the dreams, it meant that the spiritual emergence that relied on their existence also happened. This, in and of itself however, did not settle the question of A.'s existence. Was he an actual real person? I had so little from him that given the circumstances and the symbolism, I genuinely questioned whether he existed beyond my mind. 

His rare replies were short and vague. I didn't feel I could write an email to ask him "are you a real person?". Not only did I believe I must have seemed strange enough to him already, but the fear around the symbol made me feel the need to be cautious. Even if I was aware of the irrationality of my fear, my reality had shifted over night to include what appeared as God, who was then met by the possibility of the Devil - not the kind of reality one could label normal. Despite the rationalism, the fear encoded in the symbol highjacked me, having me fear even the smallest fraction of possibility of a worst case scenario, and in such a scenario it was not as if he would say no. 

Eventually, Google and social media confirmed he was a real person with a real life that had nothing to do with me. Never before, did I feel as much comfort at the idea that a man's existence didn't center me, or revolved around mine. While the symbol remained active, the fear loosened. Ironically the information I found on Google, and through his social media presence strengthened the idea of a shared structural identity between us.    

After testing the elements of my experience, realising they stood against my skeptic's rational mind, reality hit me hard. Confirming the dreams, the spiritual experience, A.'s existence didn't yield the resolution I was expecting. If a series of unreal, insane sounding experiences had happened across the entirety of my life, weaving into one another and into the banalities of average life, while maintaining a logical structure, what did that say about my reality? For the first time I started fearing I had gone mad, so I started questioning everything all over again. I began taking the possibility of my spiritual experience having been a psychotic episode. It all seemed real, passed the stress tests, but I had next to nothing in the external world to confirm the existence of my experience. The only people who had offered me any semblance of validation were those in spiritual communities but who was to say we weren't all psychotic? At one point, I started feeling so overwhelmed, that I considered checking myself in - somewhere, anywhere.

By then, I would have sought help for depression at least, but the institutions of psychology and psychiatry didn't spell safety for people with experiences like mine. I heard myself and understood social reality. For this reason, I saw no other option but to avoid the likelihood of trauma, and try to do my own research, and figure it out on my own. 

In the midst of that fear, I came across the terms spiritual emergence, spiritual emergency, and transpersonal psychology. I remember the feeling of relief when I discovered a body of research that made me feel normal, and didn't pathologise my experience. It was the first time I truly stopped questioning my sanity, as I understood that spiritual emergence, and spiritual emergencies are recognised human phenomena. I am glad I came across the terms, because after some more research, I became convinced that it was unlikely for the medical field as it is established today to have diagnosed me any other way but psychotic. It seems it is how spiritual emergencies are treated anyway even when recognised for what they are. I can only imagine the trauma that results in. 

Learning these terms brought relief, but not yet a sense of normality. I didn't want to retreat from the world, but I didn't seem to know how to exist within it either. 

You'd think I spent all those years hiding my experience from those around me. I didn't. I actually made it a point to not hide myself, but it still ended up feeling like hiding. I wasn't offering the information, but I wasn't trying to hide myself either. I told friends and family, but stopped talking about it when I felt they couldn't connect with what I was saying. I believe their consciousness couldn't perceive this kind of reality, let alone connect or relate to it. As for the rest of my social environment, it turns out one can live in full view and still be invisible. People don't ask questions about realities that fall outside their own.

It was during this long period of quiet invisiblity that I began to notice the memory gaps. I don't precisely remember when I first recognised the extent of the memory loss of that second night. It took me years to even reach that part. When the first memories were triggered back into my awareness, I dismissed the forgetfulness as normal. It was only after realising that there were a string of them that seemed too significant to forget that I became more alert.

The Beginning of the Self-Restoration Attempts: Mapping Memories and Trying to Reassemble Continuity

Note: While this section is genuinely difficult to articulate, I chose to purposefully leave it in a degree of fragmentation

I think it was already late 2021 when I realised just how disconnected I was from my feelings. By then I had started deconstructing and mapping all sorts of moral concepts: forgiveness versus enabling, where control starts and where it ends, what quantifies as manipulation, what love does and how it moves, how fear arises, why truth matters, and so on. I was interested in the essence of things - wanting to determine their boundaries, understand how context alters the boundaries, compare and contrast my own views with social perceptions of the same principles and ideas.

After I met A., an ambitious goal took root in my mind. I was aware of the opportunity I had and what I would be observing. I was quite confident I should know my way back from what at the time I defined as darkness. Symbolically, it was a descent back to hell from the heaven my spiritual emergence represented. My spiritual emergence was unexpected for me, so I hadn't been paying close attention to the movements and process that led to it - and this was my opportunity to do just that.

I understood some trauma was involved but I either failed to understand its full depth, or it deepened over time. Maybe it was a combination of both. For the most part, I attributed the trauma I understood had to be an effect, to the sheer mental and emotional overwhelm, and load my experience came with. 

I thought my work would be rather straightforward - I'd make my observations, see the process, and dynamic, and get out when I felt my goal was complete. It wasn't straightforward, fast or clean.

I remember how around 2021, I kept circling the same questions, feeling foolish, as if my own thoughts were slipping through my fingers. I had also started to try to take myself apart, piece by piece - trying to separate thoughts from feelings, beliefs from knowing, opinion from fact.

Through that process I realised that everything inside felt jumbled, and indistinct. I observed my thinking was heavy and sluggish. I kept circling the same question over and over, feeling as if the answer should be in front of me, but unable to reach for it. I remember this moment when I sensed my mind was fragmented, but I didn't grasp how I was supposed to connect the fragments when they just didn't want to pop together. I had never felt as helpless to make connections between thoughts, and it was the first glimpse that something strange was happening to me.

I had been aware of some strangeness, even had some sense of lack of aliveness for a while now, but I constantly dismissed it, not knowing what to make of it, or just attributing it to the nature of my experience. It became an endless cycle of watching myself think and act, being all strange, but not understanding why. I was somehow aware, aware of being aware, but each moment was severely disconnected from the next. Nothing held long enough to become a continuous movement, not my mind and not my own self.

Looking back, I realise how for the longest time I operated on auto-pilot, as if I was performing myself. I was moving through familiar gestures, habits, ways of using language but unable to recognise myself. It was as if my body was giving a rendition of the Self I knew myself to be, while I wasn't fully there to inhabit it. I would sometimes catch myself confused, recognising the familiarity with my own self, but struck by the strangeness. I would sometimes overcompensate, and other times hold back all while trying to be precisely authentic and aligned with my own being. It was like my body was acting on self without having any context of self. Even the words I would use, they belonged to myself but somehow weren't me. I lacked even the capacity to inhabit my own language. I recognised the familiarity, but not my own self.

After a while of trying to separate my feelings from thoughts, I realised that I couldn't find any feelings at all. That seemed impossible. Everyone has feelings. I turned to Google, assuming I must simply be unable to recognise them. I can't remember what I typed, but nearly everything I found pointed to alexithymia. I must be alexithymic, I thought. Having grown up in an emotionally illiterate environment and lacking any vivid emotional memory of who I used to be, it seemed to fit. That discovery naturally led me to consider being on the spectrum.

Reading about the autism spectrum, a vague, uneasy feeling began to surface - something to do with a comment about autism. I couldn't remember any such moment, but the feeling felt heavy. It kept tugging at me, as if a memory lived inside my body. I was unable to see it having any basis in reality. No image, no context, only the weight of it and a sensation. Then, one day, a sliver of memory appeared: A. angrily saying, 'Are you autistic?'

At first it seemed almost unreal, like something my mind must have made up, yet the more I connected with the affective sensation around it, the more details began to surface. That moment cracked something open. It was the first glimpse into the heavier part of that night. For years I had been operating under the illusion that our interactions had been far lighter. My emotional impressions had been vague but generally benign, centered around the affective sensation of being accused of prejudice. All I remembered all those years was that I had empathised with him. It was only when this particular memory resurfaced that I realised how much I had truly forgotten.

It took me a while to realise that beyond the cognitive and emotional overwhelm and load my experience came with, not only were parts of the first night traumatic on their own, but the second night served as trauma around my core identity and values which impeded authentic expression of self for nearly the entire decade. I couldn't act on my self, because my self had been erased by the trauma. It was only the cognitive memory of self that had survived, while my self felt equally as unreal as my experience did. And because the cognitive memory survived, but I had no access to feelings, I never grasped the sense of unreality.

After we met, I had only sent A. a total of eight emails, spread across eight years; confused attempts to establish my reality that were met with silence or vague responses. I tried to respect what seemed like a boundary while working through my understanding on my own. I didn't know what else to do. He didn't want to communicate, so I was faced with having to figure it out by myself.

Impersonating myself, and making use of symbols to communicate, probably didn't help me. Looking back, at least for a while, it was as if I needed to hold onto the symbols. I felt reduced to them, and that part of myself felt rejected. The symbols I was left with, were the only emotional memory of myself, and feeling rejected because of them, because of my spiritual experience, impacted my own perception of myself. 

I knew I had never been religious, and I was remembering myself as a decently intelligent woman. I would end up throwing blank statements in between symbolic talk wanting to prevent myself from overcompensating. There were times when I even misspelled things on purpose because I didn't want him to think I was trying to appear smart, while thinking that being my own self would be me overcompensating. I wasn't trying to make myself smaller in the slightest, but only trying to be exactly my own self. It was confusion central for me and I was simply struggling to communicate myself - I knew it would be uncharacteristic of me to overcompensate, but I am also not someone who positions herself above others. It was this line I was trying to walk but I struggled doing so. It was as if his actions that night simply erased any connection with my sense of self.

My mind was literal contorted and fragmented mess from the very beginning, but I was still capable of abstract reasoning, and in absence of real memories of the traumatic event, I kept thinking 'It's all normal' and just an effect of an overwhelming experience.

He had told me early on how the physical implications would create unnecessary complications for him. It was his prerogative, and yet for me, all of it was bigger than the romantic implications. I told him this later on, but his vague reply was telling me how time had moved on. Sure, I was still hoping for romance, but my needs went beyond that, so I ended up apologising giving him a rather bizarre reply in my attempt to stay with the integrity of my reality. 

His accusation of bigotry, and the memory loss complicated things for me. He knew what I believed. I told him plainly about my mindset that night, my dreams, that I thought we shared the same soul. He never addressed it. Not to agree, not to disagree, not even to say 'you are seeing things that aren't there'. Only ambiguity. I figured it was either that I was failing to see my prejudice, or he believed I was making things up and wasn't seeing the reality inversion. I also thought it was possible that his vagueness was deliberate - either conscious avoidance, or strategic information gathering.

I would have been the one to point blank address it all. Oddly enough I tried to do that with no success, while failing to understand why I failed. I simply thought it was because I was missing his input, as I had yet to discover the severe memory loss. I also thought his vagueness was because he still believed that what had happened between us was because of prejudice, and I felt unable to defend myself adequately, while feeling trapped by the fact that he had never point blank said what exactly bothered him. I said I did nothing wrong multiple times, I said I had no intention of apologising for what he 'silently' accused me of and in return his replies would be short, polite, vague and ambiguous, with the occasional 'you are a lovely person', 'sweet', 'bright', 'it pains me to think of you being traumatised' without actually addressing anything; while I was thinking 'that's not what i remember you thinking of me last we interacted'. This was making it all even more confusing for me.

I considered turning to feminist frameworks to explain why his vagueness was not cool back then, but his silence was making me question whether or not I had done something wrong. With no reliable memory I couldn't defend myself even to my own self and I was wondering if I had done something wrong and my mind was now blocking it.

One of the first parts I recovered of my memory were the thoughts I had regarding him being Muslim. They were less than the fingers on one hand, and because there were still significant memory gaps I thought that I might still be missing something.

I felt that his failure to address our shared reality afterwards, especially given that I had constantly told him I hadn't done anything wrong, and that I believed we shared the same soul was key to understanding my experience.

In trying to find ways to defend myself from his accusation, I ended up deconstructing the entirety of my relationship with prejudice, racism, and Islamophobia. 

The idea that maybe I held unconscious prejudice I wasn't aware of had me look deeply into the possibility. I think it was during those times that I started understanding the depth of the trauma. I remember reading a lot of social psychology at the time as I was trying to figure out if I had been prejudiced. I understood the words, but it was as if I couldn't fully penetrate the texts. For a while I thought maybe the texts were too much for me. I understood that prejudice has an affective component and yet despite trying really hard, I couldn't for the life of me identify affect within myself.

The irony is that the very fact that I could see past a label like Devil, that I refused to impose that weight based on dreams and symbols should have been evidence enough of me and my character. Yet his vagueness left me suspended, unsure whether he believed my account, thought I was delusional, or was avoiding something he could not or did not want to face, while I was left unsure of the reality I was inhabiting.
Doing this, however, helped me to gradually restore some of the memories of that second night. At first, the more neutral fragments came back through analysis alone, as I worked through his accusations logically. The heavier ones involved a different process. Each fragment began as a feeling I initially resisted. When I worked through this, and managed to stay with the feelings around certain gaps, more of the associated memory came into view. These were the hardest feelings to connect with, but I needed to understand my reality. The process of recovering the missing fragments was slow, and it took a few years for them to stabilise and become less blurry.

Relational Ethics: The Cost of Withheld Clarity

By 2023, small chunks of my memory had begun to return. The picture was still incomplete, fragmented, and blurry as a whole, but it was more than the emotional impressions I had been operating from. I had spent eight years trapped inside a past I could not make sense of, years marked by isolation, depression, and plenty of moments when life simply felt unbearable. It was as though I had been living in suspension, neither able to move forward nor close what had happened.

After so much restraint, the pressure finally became too much. I reached out to him on WhatsApp, asking for a real exchange - a back and forth. I needed to understand what was real and what wasn't, to understand why he never addressed anything and remained vague, yet polite and familiar in reply to an existentially charged narrative. I needed him to acknowledge our shared reality, and to fill in the gaps. I needed answers so I could process and heal. The situation had become too heavy to carry as I had been doing until then. Not long after I had sent him that message on whatsapp, I realised I had been blocked.

Without understanding the reality of our dynamic, my mind kept looping through endless possibilities, each one as unbearable as the next. I knew I was asking for something simple. I wasn't asking for agreement with my interpretation, only for the ability to anchor myself in reality. I was desperate to feel some ground underneath my feet, whichever way that ground might have looked like or felt.

When his silence persisted, I wrote again. A series of short emails this time. I couldn't write the longer explanatory ones I had written until then. My mind was too broken for that. I sent rapid fire emails trying to release some of what I had been holding inside. Writing was the only way I knew how to release the pressure and keep myself from imploding. Each short email was an attempt to get something out so that I could breathe. I think I imagined that will be it. Little did I know. Those rapid fire emails ended up turning into a short exchange that left me even more confused than I was before.

I hadn't reached out hoping for anything, or even knowing how to ask for what I needed. I was overwhelmed and barely holding myself together and all I was able to say was distress, memory loss, isolation. Those short emails weren't even an attempt at dialogue, they were just breaths I was trying to take through words. When his equally short replies came: "you should try and live your life" "please realise I do care for you," "my life took on a different path", "I am upset you have felt like this", "I didn't intend for this to happen, and in all sincerity, I want the best for you", "I spend all my time walking", "I have no answers", "I will always be here" - I couldn't tell what they meant, or what some of his words had to do with anything I needed. I wasn't looking for confirmation of anything mystical. I was just trying to anchor myself in something real, and I was left with more confusion.

His words lingered without context. They weren't saying much of anything, and yet some of the words seemed like agreement with my interpretation, and indirect acknowledgement of permanence. I wasn't sure if they were distance disguised as care, or care disguised as distance. I had been unable to shake the self hypothesis. It only grew bigger with time as seeing his social media seemed to confirm that what I had initially intuited about him was accurate. I was already disoriented, and every silence after those messages seemed to expand the fog and heaviness that had taken over my life.

I was trying to understand and make sense of how I was supposed to interpret his words and how they fit into my reality. My mind went back to the year before, when right after I had sent him an email with the full account of the precognitive dreams his online presence shifted. He broke from his usual pattern of political tweet likes to: 'truth has one face', 'leave space between yourself and the trigger'; 'women knew everything from the start'; 'you can't be awakened when you've been pretending to be asleep all along'. To anyone else, these might have been random, but to me - someone unable to shake the possibility that we shared the same consciousness, they felt charged. The ambiguity kept me suspended.

I kept my composure for a while, then tried to explain my state. I had never done anything like it before, but I was desperate. I felt it was likely I was going to look pathetic in his eyes. I didn't really care. I was trying to survive by reaching out to the only person who could have made things easier for me. I thought that making my state clear to him would help him see just how much his ambiguity, and silence were affecting me, so I told him I was having suicidal urges at that point. I hadn't shared this with anyone. Back then, I was confident enough that his silence would only last for a little while longer and that I could keep myself from acting on them. The urges were there nonetheless and I desperately needed to anchor myself in reality and only he was able to help me with that. With no anchor in reality, my mind was going wild switching between countless possibilities and scenarios, and my self was crumbling under their weight.

I could barely think during that time. I was literally struggling to make connections between one thought and the next. I barely had any energy, and my anxiety skyrocketed. My mind would rapidly cycle through extremes as it was trying to make sense of it all. I would then catch my feelings rapidly cycling depending on what reality I thought was real. 

Whenever some fragments seemed to form a small pattern, a possible reality would briefly settle and I would catch a feeling starting to settle, only to realise that I couldn't rely on it being true, and the feeling would be yanked in the opposite direction. The sensation wasn't that of feeling, but of hardly any feeling at all. There were too many contradicting fragments pulling in opposite directions for me be able to rely on any possible reality. Truth, at least some truth, some answers weren't optional for me at that point. It was the lack of clarity and truth that was weighing me down, rendering me unable to orient in reality. I was desperately trying to hold my life together. I didn't want people to notice what was happening, because if they asked me why, I thought that would be the beginning of my end.

I wasn't expecting validation of my interpretation. I did not deny my affection, as I was both still unable to put the Self hypothesis off, and I was hoping or considering possibilities that registered least heavy for my nervous system. I, however, made it clear again and again that he was free to do as he felt and pleased. I only needed answers. I needed to understand. 

Here I was in the most extreme of circumstances of my entire life, where his silence and ambiguity amounted to darkness and my own personal hell. Orienting myself in the reality I so deeply cared for, felt like an impossible task in this context.

I was facing his silence in a circumstance where silence stood starkly against any of the feminist or human rights values he seemed to strongly identify with. It made no sense to me that someone publicly identifying with such values would treat a human being in such a vulnerable place with what seemed like avoidance of any and all responsibility. The double standard I was seeing angered me: man who had unfairly accused me of religious prejudice, to then verbally assault me to the point of near dissociative collapse, man who identified with human rights values was now turning a blind eye to a suffering he contributed to, one his ambiguity and silence over the years only deepened.

Looking back now, I am not even sure how I managed to hold my life together. I was still going to work, still functioning, barely, but I was able to go through the motions of daily life. I think that ironically, what helped me was that I couldn't remember my baseline, so I wasn't aware of how unwell I truly was.

After it all escalated in Feb 2023, I had my instagram hacked into at the end of June 2023, to then discover someone had logged into my Insta one week after I shared my state with him, in July 2023. It felt like too much of a coincidence, and this opened the floodgates. I ended up writing frantic emails trying to save myself from crumbling. I started going over every possible reality, trying to eliminate them one by one. At first, I was hoping that if I nail the correct one, the silence will stop.

Then, in May 2024, strange things started happening in my digital space that destabilised me further, having me spiral at times. I had started getting weird friends suggestions, and later on, my Facebook feed started being flooded with ads and content related to his culture, and distinctive interests. 

I couldn't have been the one fueling the algorithm. I was particularly careful from the first moments the content appeared, as I was looking for stable patterns in my external reality, and for that I had to be able to trust I could rule myself out of the equation. Besides, the fear of being accused of wrongdoing, and the fear that I could have been a bigot held me back all those years. It both held me back from engaging with any kind of content related to him, particularly his culture, anywhere online. Yet there it was, all of a sudden - content related to particular interests of his, and cultural background were dominating my fb feed - ads in Arabic, ads about Islam, and content related to South Asia, and Middle East.

I couldn't help but link the drastic departure from my normal Fb feed, lasting for months, back to him somehow. I didn't know what to make of it, and started taking screenshots to make sure I wasn't seeing patterns where there weren't any. The pattern was there but that didn't make it any easier to anchor myself in reality. My mind was going wild in circular loops trying to understand my reality.

Remembering his data analyst and his partner's social media marketing professional backgrounds had me question if it could have been mere coincidence. The excessiveness of the ads made no sense for the algorithm, and my engagement patterns. I couldn't confirm or infirm anything, but the combination of timing, content, excessiveness and professional capability became yet another question in trying to find answers for other questions.

I felt awful for doing it, and pulled myself back countless times. I had stopped myself from even checking if he was a real human flesh and bones being, for years on end, because I wanted to be able to trust in ethical responsibility, but with no direct communication available, my reality kept shifting. Looking for patterns in social media behaviors became the only external data I could gather while I was trying to survive an existential crisis where the poles were constantly switching places.

I was desperately looking for answers anywhere I could find them, and while he was more opaque, his partner's behaviour provided its own set of data points. She had blocked Instagram accounts that merely had my name attached to them, yet a month later, in a brief WhatsApp interaction pretended she did not know who I was. When I apologised for the mess this caused in her life, she said, "What mess? there is no mess". This was directly contradicting his earlier statement: "My partner found your messages and it's been an absolute mess since". Despite my reassurance, she also reduced my needs to romantic interest, by only telling me "He wasn't interested" completely discounting the trauma and distress that I raised in my initial message.

Her public identity also underwent a series of shifts that correlated with the content of my communications. Shortly after he deleted his account on a social media platform, she began liking pages related to nutrition and obesity - a completely new behavior that I hadn't observed before. She knew of both my struggles with weight, and that I was watching. After that moment, and after sending him an email saying that what she did felt targeted, and that if I had unalived myself it could be considered criminal - nutrition had for the first time become a visible part of her public identity, despite her seemingly having been a nutritional therapist for a few years at that point as I would later on discover.

Her insta bio also shifted to "health and beauty" after this moment, and she created a Facebook page pairing her name with those words, with beauty being a direction she had shown no prior orientation toward, and one that I felt mirrored my background in fashion. Similarly, a sudden public interest in psychology, appeared only after the escalation. These were deviations from consistent patterns of behavior I had already observed. Neuroscience as an interest followed the same timeline, which to me felt like a tool one would reach for, in trying to discount shared consciousness. After I tagged her on a platform, she changed her display name to "I can't magick you anymore" - a phrase that only makes sense as a reference to "magical thinking", a dismissal most commonly levelled at claims like mine.

None of these were enlightening on their own but the pattern - the timing, the responsiveness, the degree of adjustment seemed to have some significance. They were an external pattern I could observe in trying to settle my reality, and my position within it.

His silence made the entire experience incomprehensible. What was I supposed to do with something as existential and traumatic as that, when the only other witness refused to speak? His silence didn't just hurt; it suspended my ability to make sense of my experience, my life, and it seemed equally as excessive as I imagined my attempts at clarity must have seemed to him. I couldn't wrap my mind around how someone like him would act in a way that to me seemed opposed to the very definition of ethical behavior.

My mind kept looping through endless possibilities trying to make sense of it. It was all I could do in absence of any feelings that could help me orient and navigate. I knew I was asking for something simple. I wasn't asking for agreement with my interpretation, only clarity. His truth over our dynamic and shared reality was all I needed, whichever that truth was. 

I wasn't looking to shame, to judge, just to be able to stop the mental and emotional loops, and find some stable ground in reality. I was desperate for that ground underneath my feet. I didn't even need him to pour his soul out - an explanation, his account of what happened, anything that would let me understand and finally resolve the experience. I became so desperate that I found myself writing things designed to provoke any response at all. Even anger would have been better than silence, because at least it would have been real.

My mind kept circling the same unanswerable question: how do you heal from something you can't even name? It was as if I knew something hit me. I could feel the bruises, but I couldn't say what exactly hit me. I couldn't know if the bruises lived in my mind alone, or whether I could trace them somewhere on, or inside my body.

What ended up keeping me alive was that I had no access to ways in which unaliving would be a certainty. I did my research after I wanted to drink plant fertiliser but decided it would be a gruesome way to go. I really wanted to live, but I couldn't bear it anymore. It was pressing down on me like a stone tied to my neck, and even if I preferred life, I wasn't afraid of death. I, however, didn't want to suffer, and wanted to spare myself of needless pain. I didn't trust myself to be firm enough with a sharp object, and it turns out most other options run the risk of merely causing loss of consciousness and physical damage.

The weight of it all built up inside me with nowhere to go, no ear, no reply, no form. The pressure was constant, like something pressing inside my body with no way to escape.

It all turned into deep anger, and the bigger his silence grew, the angrier I was getting because the injustice was becoming clear.

That's when the need for release took over, and I started hitting myself in the chest. Another first. I had never in my life engaged in what would be labelled as self-harm. I, however, wasn't trying to harm myself, only to release the pressure. I was desperate to find relief, and the pain anchored me in my body. I would bruise, then move to the other side of my chest, following the tension as it surfaced. I would never recommend what I did to anyone, but it helped. It was my body's way of forcing release - a rough, instinctive somatic exercise born from mental and emotional overwhelm. Once the anger released its grip a little, the feelings underneath began to return.

The tears slowly came back. I don't remember shedding a single tear all those years, despite having unwillingly lost a decade of my life to a flat existence. It was difficult to do so when countless possible realities had equal chances to be true at the same time. While others may be overwhelmed by sadness to see themselves cry, the tears brought me joy. It was the first time in years I felt remotely alive. I was now experiencing the contrast from the previous dead woman walking to woman feeling something, even if that something meant sadness. It took longer for feelings to return on a more daily basis. I had yet to have stable access to my feelings, but the flickers gave me hope.

I was now able to access the felt memory of how full of feeling and aliveness I used to be. I was now able to observe how my feelings had always informed my choices, and had been my navigation system throughout life. I had always been a far cry from the alexithymic woman on the autism spectrum. And yet during the times I had no feelings, and no felt memory of ever having had feelings I thought autism was a real possibility. I remember how during those times when affect couldn't settle, I would spend absurd amounts of time trying to choose a pair of socks. Every choice felt loaded, even the smallest ones, as if I could fracture or restore something depending on which way I turned.

It had only been the cognitive memory of myself that was left. The paralysis, the confusion, the inability to make simple decisions - I cognitively knew the indecision was new, but with no felt memory of who I used to be, I didn't know if it had always been there, and I just lived life acting against it.

I didn't recognise myself, but I also couldn't remember who I used to be, so I had nothing to compare it against. Because my feelings were gone and I had no memories of having ever been different, I didn't understand my behaviors so I thought he had to have been right when he called me autistic. The behaviors I was displaying seemed consistent with it. Him calling me autistic felt like an accusation that second night, but now it felt like an explanation. Maybe he'd been right. Maybe this was just how I am. Maybe I'd always been like this and just never noticed.

During those days, in the midst of his silence, I'd even started internalising the silence as the fixated obsessed woman, and my strong pattern recognition skills had become a sign of neurodivergence. I was no more the intelligent woman with strong pattern recognition skills I had known myself to be. My trauma had become evidence for everything that was not quite right with me. The autism hypothesis gave me a framework for what was inexplicable about myself. In absence of reliable memory, and acknowledgement of a shared reality that had shattered me, I could see more evidence for neurodivergence, than I could see for having been shattered.

By that point, the emails had become a way to generate data in darkness. In his silence, even the smallest response, or lack of one became information. I explored every possible reality I could think of in the content of my emails, and his silence would help me take them off the table. I compared what I wrote with what I could glimpse on his social media, searching for any overlap that could help me verify what was shared, what was projection, and what was real. It was the only external mirror I had left to test my perception against. This was my way to test a reality to which he was the only witness, and the only way I knew how to keep myself from disappearing under the weight of fragmentation.

As I became more desperate for release, the words in the emails I would send changed too. They were no longer careful attempts to explain what I merely thought I must have felt. They became raw. Anger, grief, confusion - coming out directly, not filtered through analysis or care. Each email felt like my pulse was slowly returning, and like my language was starting to remember the body it was coming from.

Writing and externalising my reality, my anger, my feelings and my experience in the relational space between us, became the way my Self started to reassemble. I was aware that could be an outcome as I wasn't ready to abandon my self, but I wasn't looking to cause anyone distress either, although sometimes I feared I did. I only wanted peace, and freedom whichever their context, and I constantly hoped my turmoil would end with each and every email I sent. 

In my emails I always tried to speak the truth as I perceived it, as I felt it - angry, apologetic, grief stricken, confused, pathetic - and the emails themselves started to show countless mirror shards that would reflect back the fragments of my self. It was through those emails that I began to discern what was true and distorted in my perception of self, to see patterns and separate trauma responses from the truth of my being. Shard by shard, the mirror was coming together like a puzzle. Using words to express what I believed I felt, or what I now felt, became a tool to calibrate my consciousness. I would sometimes test words so I could feel if they fit me. It was by writing that what the fragments started to piece themselves together, that coherence would start to take the space of confusion.

If you must know, I had ended up trying therapy in the months before, once I grew more confident in the existence of my experience, but it usually took five sessions just to recount the story. The therapist-client dynamic was a hit-and-miss too depending on the counsellor. It wasn't that they didn't believe me, but it seemed like they didn't have the tools to truly grasp my experience and I was usually left feeling unheard and unseen. Only one of them recognised my spiritual experience for what it was. He even called it "an education in healing", something I hadn't quite thought of before, but our sessions began in an unconventional way which made trust difficult. I tolerated it for a while, because I liked our dynamic and I was desperate, but the trust issue deepened over time. I then had no energy left to start all over again with someone new, only to risking feeling unseen.

The frantic emails were born out of survival when I had no other support system. Writing was how my consciousness searched for reality, and language was a tool to calibrate my consciousness when everything else had fallen apart. I kept testing reality against each possibility I could think of. It was through those emails that I began catching glimpses of myself again. Lines and paragraphs brought faint echoes of emotional connection to the self that was once alive inside my body, one small fragment of self linking to the next. Writing became both a mirror and a lifeline for my consciousness to find its way back to wholeness, one sentence, one truth-check, one remembered piece of self at a time.

I didn't even know if he was reading them. Sometimes I thought he was, other times I thought they disappeared into nothing. Some emails were attempts to explain, others to apologise for how I was, and others to provoke hoping to get a response that would confirm I wasn't imagining everything. It was a mess, but it was the only way I knew how to externalise what I couldn't hold inside, when I had no other reliable witness for a reality that had shattered my life.

I had no reality to work with. The last memory I had of myself lived in those two nights. It was that second night that held my Self's deepest source of fragmentation.

His silence was making me feel as if I imagined the reality we shared those two nights. The greatest source of trauma was not the archetypal encounter, but the failure to acknowledge and address the reality we shared, leaving me unable to make sense of an existentially charged experience that had started when I was a mere child, an experience that had left me all alone, an experience no one understood or was able to relate to, yet one that seemed to engulf, and drown everything else in insignificance. No one seemed to understand what it's like to wake up with a new relationship to reality seemingly over night.

Despite his accusation that I wasn't present that night, the reality is that I was deeply present - present with his frustration, present with my own overwhelming state, present with the impossibility of bridging our realities in that moment.

I want to be cautious because I consistently felt as if I had my rug pulled from underneath me too many times. This being said, I feel I am significantly better than I used to be, although I would say I have yet to reach my baseline. There are still days where I find myself struggling to varying degrees, but those days are progressively fewer and further between, and no longer a constant. I believe I am no longer in acute survival mode. I think clinicians would define my state as post-collapse exhaustion, or maybe post nervous-system burnout. I am no longer in collapse, but there is a lot of grief on a background of significant exhaustion. It is however, a type of exhaustion that seems to have a sense of aliveness beneath it.

I re-established access to feelings, and my felt sense of self. I remember who I am, and I am more like myself, although calibrating and aligning with my consciousness is an ongoing process. It was only a few months ago that I felt the first pulse of my heart returning, and today I have a wide range of feelings. I can see them rising and coming down in a normal cycle.

Unlike before, healing started feeling accessible sometimes, although I prefer to be cautious and say it is still somewhere on the horizon, as I don't want to underestimate the amount of healing work recovery implies.

While I am significantly better, at times I am not entirely sure what to do with myself, as if I had lived for so long in that survival mode that I don't know how to live outside of it. There is a sense of lack of direction. 

As I am writing this, I feel optimistic but I think it's best when the future stays open, allowing room for reality to assert itself.

***

Short Conclusions about Process, Consciousness, Coherence, and Memory

All of the above is truly just a rough sketch of my experience.

From my perspective no part of my experience was random, yet it wasn't defined by predetermination either. It follows the logical path of an emotional-cognitive experiential pattern that had been quietly forming all my life - consciousness fulfilling its own pattern while accounting for agency/agency under constraint as variable, and not discounting the usefulness of accountability where appropriate.

Regarding A., even if a spiritual emergence and archetypal activation were involved that does not absolve the parties involved of responsibility. Agency was exercised in his decision to offload the emotional labour, leaving me to hold an ambiguous shared reality, the meaning and consequences alone. He withdrew from a relational reality he helped create, and refused responsibility for his participation in the relational field.

I believe reality is a relational field by its nature and abandoning responsibility for the relational space is therefore a form of reality denial.

Within the dynamic between me, him and those surrounding him I reached out to, gender stereotypes were also likely involved where I was positioned as the irrational, obsessed, unstable woman, while my direct spiritual experience was stigmatised and reduced to magical thinking. Not only was this coming from people who are vocal about religious prejudice, but it occurred without any genuine engagement with my account, without dialogue and without being recognised as a human whose presence was worthy of acknowledgement.

The length of time this spanned registered as existential erasure at times. My suffering was rooted in silence, ambiguity and the refusal for repair. While I assume the silence was framed as compassionate boundary, a healthy boundary must protect the dignity of everyone involved, not merely the comfort of the party who enforces it. The silent treatment could never be a healthy boundary, but only an instrument of control aimed at re-writing reality through omission and obstruction.

Regarding consciousness, based on my observations it seems to me that consciousness is a continuous recording medium that registers everything as relational patterning - less a linear archive and more like a living hologram. What it retains is not the external world in detail, but the total relational configuration of each moment: the felt geometry of perception, attention, and meaning. Every instant is recorded as a complete field of relationship, weighted by what awareness deems significant.

For example, as I write, awareness holds a vague image of my hands on the keyboard, the screen in front of me, a sense of the purpose of my action, and a diffuse sense of the room around me - even a passing awareness of the bathroom's layout if I think of taking a bathroom break. Should a loud bang occur outside, the field would instantly reconfigure: awareness would expand to include the direction of the sound, the imagined distance, my relation against the street, and perhaps even a flash of the building's colour. All of these perceptual and affective impressions are registered as one integrated pattern - a living record of how consciousness relates to itself through experience.

I spent a long time analysing the dynamic between cognition and affect, and based on my observations affect seems to be the first registration of the field's coherence. This is supported by several mainstream and widely taught lines of work in psychology and neuroscience (Lisa Feldman Barrett, Antonio Damasio). Affect as primary can also be observed in child development when affect comes before language, as it can be observed throughout human evolution when early humans oriented entirely based on affect before conceptual thought and language evolved.

Once everything had settled a little for me, likely because many feelings that had always been there but inaccessible were now bubbling up, I also felt my nervous system particularly strained. I was under the impression that I was able to register any tiny shift in affect (coherence or incoherence) through the nervous system. It was as if I could feel coherence or incoherence in my spine, and orienting by it, choosing what didn't strain it further felt life saving. This also involved allowing feelings to come organically to the surface.

Based on what I observed affect seems to hold the undifferentiated structure of the entire relational context in condensed form. Cognition then differentiates that registration into explicit structure. The more loyal this cognitive structure is to the full pattern carried in affect, including the relational data between inner and outer conditions, the more coherent and stable the structure, and ability for successful and coherent experiential and reality navigation. I think that if the cognitive structure built on top of that affect is not faithful to what was registered, the affective imprint does not dissolve; it remains as unresolved tension, pressing toward a more coherent differentiation that finally matches the original registration.

In this sense, I think affective memory functions as undifferentiated structure, while cognitive memory is the synthesis we build on top of it. Integration is the ongoing process that keeps these two in correspondence, allowing cognition to be revised whenever affect signals that the story we tell doesn't match what was actually registered. 

In practice, I was often able to retrieve detailed structures by connecting to the feelings and perceptions around a memory. It was never an instant recovery, but a back and forth between thinking about the event and allowing myself to immerse in its affective tone. Each moment of affect seemed to act like a coordinate in the field, marking a specific configuration of thought, emotion, and environment. To me, remembering was not retrieving information from storage, but re-aligning awareness with those affective coordinates, re-entering the configuration of consciousness as it once was. When my awareness returned to the feeling at the core of a recorded moment, it moved through a recursive process where the depth of re-alignment determined how much of the original field became perceptible. Shallow re-immersion evoked only traces – a tone, an image, a mood – whereas sustained engagement helped me to gradually reconstruct the full experiential geometry as it was first lived. 

For the dream I had at 17 for example. Initially I had an overview of it, and by immersing myself in the memories I did have, and the feelings they evoked, triggered more details to gradually open. The memory of the possibility of having recounted my dream to my colleague at school the next day started from the memory of the dream lingering and haunting me at the time. This was more stable in my memory due to the fact that it was unusual for my dreams to have that haunting quality. The moment of coming home from school and the need to do something about the dream was also more stable, but initially I remembered nothing between my dream and my return from school, except for a sensation I associated with the color yellow. I also had the vague sensation that maybe I recounted the dream to someone, yet nothing else but vagueness. I didn't understand at first. I wasn't too concerned with it, as I felt it had little relevance. Then I remembered that the colleague I was sharing my desk with would often wear a yellowish mustard color blouse. Then the thought of recounting her the dream hoping for some insight came as well. I also remembered the feeling of embarrassment around recounting the dream, and that my colleague was passionate about psychology. It was a constant string of re-connecting and allowing myself to experience the feelings and sensations associated with what had remained stable in my memory. The most stable parts in my memory initially were also the most emotionally intense ones, like the S.A. accusation, and the contrast between going back and forth between A. being the other half of my soul, or the Devil.

It seems to me that during experience, consciousness does not register only what is noticed, but also the emotional and cognitive topology beneath perception - the subtle currents of anticipation, resistance, or ease that shape each moment. The deeper the emotional participation, the denser the recording; the more fully I was engaged in feeling, the more complex the imprint. Later, this depth of emotional coherence determined the fidelity of detailed recall. What returned was not a fixed image of the past but a living reconstruction, animated by the same relational logic that first gave the moment form.

I do not regret the countless emails, or engaging in actions that society would likely judge me for. The level of coherence I re-established is a consequence of allowing myself to disrupt embarrassment that is externally imposed, and then internalised, and shame over societal conventions that are both dysfunctional and disproportionately placed onto women, especially women with complex experiences that fall outside of what is approved as 'normal'.

I believe it's patriarchy and its insistence on suppressing affect, and the plethora of downstream structures that emerge within the system, that lead to dysregulation. Patriarchy disproportionately punishes those whose psychological integrity was affected by the very system that infringes on it, and shame is the instrument of choice. Awareness of that shame being externally imposed, and it going against nature in this context helped.

Also, I do not believe in any way that cognition is secondary, or inferior. I am a big fan of reason, and I have always been, but I also believe that cognition should be faithful to affective registration, in establishing precise congruence with the data affect holds about the entire relational field.

I believe we are not aware of that everything we interact with in our environments has a vibe, and that we feel to a certain degree, in every single moment of our lives. For society to have ever considered it wise to render feelings as inferior is akin to rendering an entire dimension of what it means to be human to inferiority. Feelings are not noise, but data.

Disclaimer: This website reflects my personal memories, perceptions, and interpretations of past events. All ideas are my own, and names and identifying details have been changed. Its purpose is healing, coherence, and self-expression.