Trigger Unhappy

Well, I woke up feeling like shite anyway.

Then I'm reading one of my regular forums and someone made a comment in response to one of my comments that really triggered me. I'm trying to tell myself that's why I feel this horrid combination of depressed, furiously angry, afraid, frozen...my therapist says when you hit a PTSD trigger you get frozen like that...

That and the fact that I just can't respond to the comment for various reasons, one of which being that it has to do with religion. And when people get entrenched in religious beliefs, well, there's just nothing more to be said. It's like ramming your head against a wall.

Most religious entrenchments don;t affect me this way. I can just blow them off. But having had some experiences with a particular religion that were...shall we say, less than healthy, I have a particularly hard time with that one. I want to be able to say, "Believe what you believe and it doesn't bother me." But there's an ego factor involved in this one that is curiously disguised as lack of ego. And you just can't discuss it in any rational fashion without getting "the knowing smile" and the general response that "when you reach a certain point you'll understand." Which just activates me on so many levels. It seems to assume that--and I'm having a hard time going on here without naming the religion so forgive me--when you reach a particular place in your spiritual development you'll just naturally see that everything you've believed before is wrong. I don;t believe that.

My own spiritual views have a LOT of leeway for various paths. But any path that masquerades as being open while so many of its adherants (sp?) practice a One True Way philosophy really gets me.

So I'm triggered today. I want to go back and hide under the bedclothes. I want to say, "well, of course from the inside it looks that way to you." I want to...do something to feel better. And I feel helpless and powerless and like I'm going to be punished if I do any of those things.

So I'm sitting writing this blog, for which I also feel as though I'm going to be punished, and smoking way too early in the day and feeling like I'm going to have a heart attack.

Happy New Year's Eve.