The Enlightened Fool

Your Epiphany May Be Another Mind Game

I have a cautionary tale to share with you today—one that I learned the hard way and it cost me dearly.

I was in a legal battle with the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board as I had been denied compensation for lost wages following my car accident which happened while driving a company car (I was technically still on duty) and subsequent PTSD that was triggered by hitting and killing a deer.

This legal battle, like most legal battles that have the potential to incur great financial loss or gains, had been going on for years.

In the opposing lawyer's closing statement, she used my own words, which I had confided to my psychologist, against me. Because this was used in a closing argument, we could not offer a rebuttal. It was a low blow and a devastating strike because we lost, as the ‘judge’ (who wasn’t impartial as this was still an internal review process—I.e., the judge was an employee of the WSIB) seized on this statement.

In one of my many sessions with my psychologist, who specialized in PTSD, I had shared with him an “epiphany”; a realization about a belief that had been limiting my perspective. As with any epiphany, it’s like you’ve been submerged under water for far too long and you’ve suddenly surfaced and can take a deep inhale, there’s instantaneous relief. That’s what I had described to my psychologist. I had a brief mental breakthrough that provided me with some relief and yes, the word I used and was recorded in his notes was epiphany.

But can we all please take a moment to reflect on my next point, the one I never got to make all those years ago? That sudden great revelation that we refer to as an epiphany, yes, it’s like waking up but it doesn’t suddenly and magically transform your life. There has to be implementation of your epiphany - a what’s next? What do you DO with that realization? It is not enough to simply have a realization to create change in your life. Without implementation, that epiphany doesn’t get anchored to reality and you fall back to sleep.

It took years after that epiphany for me to overcome my PTSD.

I often chuckle at the many short posts about life lessons, especially the one-liners, found on social media. These posts readily get liked but how helpful are they to you? Sure, they may make you feel good for a brief second and it may even be a universal truth but can you say that your life was transformed by it?

Every self-help book, every program that offers guaranteed success, is someone else’s epiphany. Going from epiphany to implementation is a whole different story.

Can we all just stop trying to copycat another person’s success?

It’s great when somebody has success. I’m all about cheering somebody on when they are successful, but their path was their path. What they have to offer is unique from what you have to offer to the world. Instead of disappearing into a sea of copycats, a sea of sameness, I suggest “you do you” and I will “do me”, this way we all can shine in our own right.

I’m not trying to sell you something. I’m not trying to make you more like me. What my writing is about are my experiences of waking up to my conditioning that may or may not inspire you to reflect on your own stories of conditioning. What you do is 100% up to you.

“You have a choice to either believe everything that you’ve ever been told about yourself (that’s one kind of conditioning) or you can believe in yourself.” This is not an original epiphany. I’ve experienced it and I’ve heard or seen others say this same message.

You can take a moment here to take that statement in. How does it resonate with you? True or not true?

If not true, you are free to completely dismiss it and your life continues unchanged.

But if it resonates as true, now what? Are you able to give your head a shake and all those pesky negative thoughts about yourself that others told you just fall out into some trash receptacle? Not that simple, huh!

This is where waking up is a process that takes effort. And being handed someone else’s epiphany, no matter how enlightened it may be, is of little use to anyone.

Please don’t berate yourself if you have spent decades reading self-help books and still find yourself stuck in some self-sabotaging behavior.

Or if you have spent what feels like a lifetime studying all kinds of personality models, or psychological frameworks, and still feel dismayed by human behavior and/or utterly disconnected from yourself; waking up is only the beginning.

Working with a coach or psychologist or any mental health professional isn’t about them force-feeding you their sense of being enlightened. They are not some kind of superior being. Remember, they’re human too. We’re all fallible. It’s not their job to hand-feed you their epiphanies. Again, that will be useless to you. Their job is to guide you through questions to your own epiphanies and then to support you through the “what’s next” on how to implement your insights that can lead to personal transformation.

I hope my articles trigger some personal reflection, to open your self-awareness but I know there’s more to your journey and that’s why I encourage you to ask me questions. Questions help me to help you. Not that I have all the answers!

I wrote about low-level background stress, posted on 23 September 2024. This was my epiphany at the time about the stress I was experiencing and its impact on me. It wasn’t as if it was something unknown to me, just temporarily forgotten.

More recently, I woke up to another epiphany. What I was calling “low-level background stress” was causing sleep disturbance again. I blamed it on my autism, thinking that I was exposing myself to too much sensory stimulation.

I had mislabeled my “low-level background stress” for what it was, was “constant background UNCERTAINTY”. This uncertainty was directly related to my mother’s well-being. What I had failed to recognize was how this “constant background UNCERTAINTY” was re-triggering my childhood *conditioned* nervous system response.

In my childhood my mother was my sole guardian and there was constant uncertainty about her safety as well as my own. She had violent partners. Her safety was paramount to my safety. If something happened to her, what would become of me? This is a primal fear, one of survival.

From November through December (2024), I witnessed my mother’s well-being once again be in jeopardy. All I had were more questions and doubts. The phone could ring at any time with another medical emergency. Understanding that this wasn’t just some low-level background stress or that my nervous system as an autistic person was at fault was yet another deeper-level realization. I share this example with you because even a so-called “epiphany” may be yet another mind game; a temporary relief and distraction from the truth.

Waking up to that isn’t enough. What do I do next?

I like to rewire my brain by using the Emotional Freedom Technique which involves tapping specific meridian points while acknowledging what is triggering my nervous system and affirming my well-being. In this example, I acknowledged that I am safe no matter what happens to my mother. My survival no longer depends on her. However, I also have to acknowledge that to a degree her survival depends on me. It’s a role reversal yet there’s still the same primal fear of survival the same as a parent has for their child. If I perish what will become of my mother?

I find this technique particularly useful to help me accept the things I cannot change or that I don’t have any power over. In this example, whether my mother lives or dies. Beyond that, I follow my Human Design.

Where am I now in relation to the above trigger?

I wrote in my journal the other day…

“I am thankful for the simple JOY of being and living from my rhythm. Life feels uncomplicated. I don’t have to be in a constant state of overwhelm. That’s not natural. (Even for an autistic person) I am still learning to use my senses to guide me as to what is correct for me.”

Living from my rhythm is about honoring my nervous system and respecting my limitations and boundaries.

This doesn’t mean that I won’t be triggered again sometime in the future.

Holding onto that awareness takes effort otherwise it will evaporate into thin air and nothing changes.

The next time YOU have an epiphany what you do with it is where your hero’s journey begins. An epiphany is like being handed a map and you’re standing at the bottom of a mountain. You still need to learn how to use that insight to navigate your life. And beware, it may be another mind game. It must be tested to be validated.

Back to my earlier comment about one-liner life lessons; I’d much rather hear about the life lesson that followed once they had success with implementing their epiphany. What did that journey look like?

Please be mindful of overconfidence in feeling enlightened or of those who claim to be enlightened. You don’t know what you don’t know.

I will forever be a student of life. I know this form (body and mind) is limited and I cannot possibly know everything so I remain curious about what is unknown.

I apologize for my excessive use of the word epiphany!

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For the Human Design Enthusiasts

I want to remind you that you don’t have to go down the rabbit hole - how the mind ceaselessly seeks to understand everything. You don’t have to FIGURE OUT from a mental level everything in your HD body graph just like there is a difference between book knowledge and real-life experience. Wisdom comes with experience.

I will leave you with this gentle reminder of all that you need to know when it comes to Human Design (please click to see a note posted 23 August 2024).