Toxic Shame And Procrastination

What's Really At The Root Of It All?

I procrastinated, to write this, and procrastinated not to.

Procrastination is loss of roadmap—no hills, valleys, rivers, small roads.

I believe “procrastination” is actually when the “freeze” part of the trauma response system takes over, and tries to re-create the death state.

What I mean is this:

When animals “play dead” in hopes of not being eaten by a predator, they are displacing motion with stillness, as “motion” caused something out there in the dark to want to eat (annihilate) them.

[Radical self-devaluation in hopes of not being killed.]

So motion, sound, or even an admission one is alive, can get overtaken in extreme C-PTSD with a “vanish” or “freeze” response.

Is this what “procrastination” is?

Some kind of island between being and non being? Some kind of pathology displayed around not being able to speak forth what happened? (Ever.)

When we “procrastinate” it is (I think) a silent language of feigning death, by not being or enacting the doing that begets life— one’s own life, livelihood, and even closeness to God.

C-PTSD, as it is called, can, in my own experience, virtually wipe out the mind’s consciousness—its architecture of “will,” and “need,” as well as memory. This is because the person has degraded his or her status in the kingdom of living things, from one that makes sound and motion, to one that does not. This is done in hopes of negotiating successfully with some un-named body of anger out there.

A friend may wonder: Aren’t we friends? Why didn’t you call?

You can’t quite explain it so you just go deeper into freeze/silence.

When you somehow feel safer, you can make sound and motion again.

Feeling safer is the first step to transcending “procrastination,” which is not connected to laziness, but to extremely damaged self-agency also known somewhat wrongly as “self-esteem.” You are still trying to persuade somebody who probably or possibly isn’t even alive anymore not to be angry. Making yourself a friendly ghost was a winning strategy at one time.

I’m going in the opposite direction from the dark news, right now—though stories are falling like boulders.

Just thinking about what it means to make contact with oneself, when one loses contact, when one freezes.

One small start is to stamp both feet into the floor, and/or run cold water over your hands. I also pray an Our Father and a Hail Mary. And sometimes I think to boot up Derek Prince’s Deliverance Prayer, but often I don’t actually get that far.