Re: How Eckhart Tolle took me to the brink of suicide
Date: July 22, 2020 05:47AM
Right so, in terms of recovering a sense of self, a big thing for me was learning to assert my ego. Yes, that's right, ASSERT my EGO - in contravention of the New Age nostrum that ego must be eliminated.
In practice, this meant getting back in touch with the things I like and enjoy. No longer feeling guilty about saying, I like this, I want that. It also meant, perhaps most importantly of all, learning to draw boundaries and REJECT unpleasant and harmful things. I guess my choice of username, PowerofNo, reflects how even in that very early stage in my recovery I already had an inkling that 'No' was one word I badly needed to learn. And so it proved.
But it took time. In fact, I would say it's an ongoing process. I let a lot of very harmful things invade my personal space very early on in life - Eckhart Tolle was only the straw that broke the camel's back, really - so we're talking very deeply ingrained habits and attitudes here.
But yeah, learning to draw boundaries and to stand up for myself, has gradually dissipated the worst of the dissociation. I still get a bit of it from time to time, but at a frequency and intensity that is much more livewithable.