THINGS I'VE BEEN WRONG ABOUT
21 DECEMBER 2021 (11 MIN READ)
In my opinion, one of the most essential skills in life is to constantly question your own beliefs, leading you to expand on what you already know and consequently grow as a person. Unfortunately, in today’s era, this skill has been thrown in the garbage can and lit on fire. Due to divisive agendas creating stubborn assholes, people never want to be wrong, or else they will have to question their own identity. When your beliefs become your identity, such as identity politics, you will never want to question those beliefs because they will change who you are as a person. And guess which evil motherfucker loves never changing and becomes angry whenever you try to: your ego. This is due to angry reactions and explosive levels of self-importance occurring when your reality gets questioned, which stems from the ego. For example, I used to adamantly believe that when a white person treated me badly, it was because I was Hispanic—not because they were having a bad day or I was just being rude. If the case was me just being ignorant, and someone rightfully telling me that I was being irrational, I would flare up and try to “cancel” that person. I did this because accepting their viewpoint would mean changing my whole belief system, which in turn, would change my identity, creating deep discomfort in my ego, giving room for anger and blame as an external outlet. Until I took a step back and realized that I had to question my beliefs, I never truly matured—because your beliefs feed your identity, and if your beliefs never change, neither will your identity.
For those of you shaking your head at me because you love where you are right now and think that you don’t need to change—think of yourself five years ago. Reminisce on the lessons you learned and the people you scared away. Would you want to be that person again? Even though that was five years ago, five years from now you will be seeing yourself in a different light, so honor that necessity in life to keep growing. However, the rate at which you grow can multiply tenfold if you constantly question your own beliefs, choosing what serves your highest self, and throwing away the rest. This strategy works better than only changing your beliefs once the negative consequences of them punch you in the face—you can save yourself time and a lot of pain in the process. I should not have required reaching the point of suicide before realizing that the beliefs causing my victim mentality were not serving me. So please, constantly question your own beliefs.
As an exercise, to make sure I do not stay comfortable in my own beliefs, I scavenged through my website, searching for arguments that I no longer agree with. I hope you can learn something from these newfound observations. Hell, maybe in a year I’ll write an article about how even these revised arguments were still fucking wrong.
“The worst thing is not being wrong, but being sure one is not wrong.” - Paul Tournier
PORN AND SHAME
In my article, “The Problem with Porn,” I dive into how porn drastically contributes to social isolation, self-loathing, dating woes, and rape culture, but I messed up one specific part: how we should go about quitting porn. I emphasize how porn should just be quit cold turkey, simply on the basis of how bad it is for you. But, nevertheless, by quitting an addiction you are still left with the feeling underneath that caused the addiction. So, the key isn’t quitting porn necessarily, but dealing with the grueling emotion sitting underneath the bad habit. I believe that once you outgrow the negative feeling, you will consequently outgrow the bad habit. But if you just quit porn without dealing with the emotions underneath, they will cause you to seek another damaging addiction to replace the porn. This could be rampant, meaningless sex, having sex with prostitutes, or continuing to view females in a damaging light. These habits continue to occur because the lingering feeling causing the porn addiction has not been dealt with. Well, what the fuck is this feeling? The answer is sexual shame.
Many of us went through unwanted sexual experiences in our adolescence—whether it be molestation or experimentation, those moments caused a lot of shame in our bodies. And whatever darkness you do not heal will unconsciously dictate your reality. As a result, since your association with sex, at a young age, included shame, that association will unconsciously feel familiar and comfortable, meaning that you are more likely to commit sexual acts that result in you feeling ashamed. As a child, I had a sexual experience that made me associate sex with shame—driving me towards porn addiction at such a young age because that feeling of shame and sex was all I knew. Although I stopped watching porn a while ago, I felt the urge to engage in one-night stands and, at times, felt tempted to hire a prostitute because healthy sex felt foreign to me. These temptations only stopped occurring once I healed the sexual shame inside of me. On a more relatable level, these days, due to our increasingly politically correct world, men are raised to be ashamed of their penis and their sexuality. Unfortunately, what this does is create sexual shame inside of a man, which makes him more likely to act from his shadow—leading to porn addiction and contributing to rape culture. Porn and sexual aggression are incredibly attractive to a man who is deeply ashamed of his own sexual nature.
TREATING YOUR EMOTIONS WITH A DEGREE OF DISTANCE
In my article, “Toxic Love: How To Stay Away,” I discuss how a key component to having a healthy romantic relationship is treating your emotions with a degree of distance, especially anger. My basis for arguing this is the notion that love is what you do despite what you feel, opting out of throwing your negative emotions onto your partner because you love them, or even refusing temptations that would damage your relationship. There is definitely some truth to this statement, such as dealing with your own internal chaos rather than making your partner receive the bitter end of it. However, most people end up swallowing their emotions, rather than processing them and releasing them in a healthy manner. For instance, feeling incredibly angry at your husband or wife because they sometimes ignore you when you are talking to them, but rather than explode, you just swallow the emotion and put a fake smile on. The problem with this is that every swallowed emotion adds gasoline to the tank, waiting for the right fire to cause an explosion. Furthermore, undealt with emotions unconsciously color the world you see, not allowing you to be as present and as happy as you could be if you dealt with them. All that being said, what’s the healthiest way to deal with the negative emotions that come up in romantic relationships?
Consider the four magic R’s: restrict, relax, reflect, and release. Restrict yourself from the presence of your partner, relax your nervous system so you can reliably reflect on where the trigger really stems from, and finally, release the undealt with emotions from that trigger. Let’s pick apart each word to explain the process more in depth. It’s essential to restrict yourself from your partner once your anger or ego flares up—for two main reasons: to not bring them under your fire for no reason and giving yourself room to heal. By taking a step back, you are allowing yourself to cool off and reflect, which are essential components for making any emotional progress in that moment, rather than regression by flaring up at your partner. Next, you have to relax your nervous system to make any reasonable deductions as to why you got so angry. Once anxiety or rampant anger takes over your body, the parts of your brain that control reasoning, such as your prefrontal cortex, will shut down until they are brought back online. To make them start functioning again, exhale twice as long as you inhale for about ten minutes, which signals to your body that you are safe. Now that you're relaxed and your reasoning is optimal, it’s time to reflect on why you got so angry. Almost every trigger point in a relationship can get tied back to one’s childhood or previous relationships. At its core, any trigger translates to stored emotions in the body that need to be released—not avoided—since avoidance only makes the trigger get stronger over time. Once you have connected the trigger to a specific, painful moment in your history, you must release the emotions from that memory that you never had a chance to. The more you release those stored emotions, the less you will find yourself flaring up at your partner over the same bullshit.
THERAPY AS GOD
One of the first articles I wrote, “The Argument For Therapy And How To Do It Correctly,” emphasizes the power of therapy and why everyone should do it. While I do agree that therapy is powerful and everyone should partake in some form of it, I am now realizing that it’s only a quarter of the mental health equation—when I thought it was almost all of it before. In my opinion, optimal mental health has four components that need to be constantly strengthened: physical health, mental health, the spirit, and community. Most people just see mental health as solely involving the mind, viewing therapy as the best and only way to strengthen it. This is why so many people go to the doctor for depression, leave with some pills, and believe they are cured. Unfortunately, that’s only a small piece of the puzzle, and you will keep having the same issues you went to the doctor for in the future. In terms of physical health, you will not be mentally healthy until you are physically healthy, especially in your gut. Personally, I tried absolutely everything to fix my depression, and I mean everything, but nothing ever worked until I checked my gut health. Turns out I had stomach parasites, which after they were taken care of, I felt infinitely less depressed. And that’s because about 90% of your serotonin is produced in the gut. This is also why eating healthy is so important for your mental health. Another important pillar of physical health is both exercise and extreme temperature exposure. I believe that without consistent exercise and access to extremely cold water or a sauna, I am not giving myself a fighting chance at feeling happy. I can cite about a thousand studies showing how exercise, saunas, and ice baths vastly reduce depression rates; the evidence is overwhelming.
Next, in terms of the mental component, therapy is absolutely essential. We tend to hide a lot of deep trauma both consciously and unconsciously. And although painful, those wounds must rise to the surface to get healed, which therapy proves an incredible aid for. I had no idea about the amount of trauma I was hiding, and how it was affecting me, until I went to therapy. However, until I paired the therapy with optimal physical health, a spiritual practice, and a healthy community, I did not really see any big difference. For the spiritual component, I believe meditation is an essential activity we should do on a daily basis. We cannot really understand who we are until we declutter our minds. Although some of that clutter is our own stress, most of the stress are pieces of the collective unconscious and generational trauma we have not worked through. The way to break through this is consistent, deep meditation, which connects us to our spirit—aka who we really are away from this mental conditioning. The more you realize your true identity through connecting with your spirit, the more you will distance yourself from thoughts, people, and places that do not align with your highest self—boosting your mental health in the process.
Lastly, surround yourself with people that push you toward the highest version of yourself, rather than inflate your ego. We often find ourselves becoming friends with someone based on status and popularity, rather than healthy intrinsic values. The problem with the former is that you are boosting your ego that way. This is due to the fact that you are making friends with someone because of the internal wound of wanting to be seen as worthy. Engaging in this dynamic will make you feel even more lonely and unworthy, because you will be putting on a performance, rather than being yourself. Back in college, I was the big man on campus, attracting any woman or friend I wanted, but I had never felt so lonely in my whole life. And that’s because I was hiding who I really was in order to be seen as worthy in the eyes of others. So, to combat this, become the best version of yourself and attract people who happily accept you for all that you are. (People can only accept you to the extent that you accept yourself). The minute you feel like someone is putting on a performance in front of you, or you feel the need to do so in front of them, run the fuck away. And that's because you need to be in a community that allows you to feel accepted for exactly who you are, while others also feel the same way about themselves.
