Existential Dysphoria
What religious, sexual, and gender dysphorics have in common
There are as many forms of existential dysphoria as there are repeatable lies. Several of the most popular forms today are religious, sexual, and gender dysphoria. The similarities across the three forms highlight the essential features of existential dysphoria.
Religious Dysphoria
Religious dysphoria involves intrusive doubts about your salvation, God’s reality, or your place within a religious community. These doubts can fundamentally change your lifestyle by eliciting reactionary social, philosophical, and psychological changes. Religious intrusive doubts are painful. They temporarily hijack your attention and create negative bodily sensations. You instinctively want to avoid these doubts rather than curiously explore, clarify, and strategically evaluate their content. The latter approach is processing.
Religious thoughts about the cosmos, the meaning of life, the afterlife, etc. are often overwhelming for people in solemn settings. When these profound thoughts are experienced as intrusive doubts in daily life, they can induce panic. If you avoid rather than process them too often, the intrusive doubts will eventually possess you. Your life will be spent habitually reacting to their random presentations rather than intentionally following your predetermined plans.
For example, continuously avoiding intrusive doubt about whether you are going to Heaven or Hell can cause you to develop a reactionary habit of disparaging others’ faith. It can also make you so rule-focused that you forget how to live gracefully with others (a psychological condition called scrupulosity). These responses aren’t rational (planned) because they are in-the-moment efforts to reduce anxiety rather than increase certainty. Criticizing others from an insecure place doesn’t actually help you in any way, but it can temporarily mask the pain of intrusive doubt.
Religious dysphoria is radically paradoxical. Consider, for instance, intrusive doubt about the existence of a God whose true believers can’t be intellectually certain exists. In this case, the intrusive doubt Does God exist? is doubt about the existence of something that can only exist uncertainly. The paradox is that you must believe that something exists in some sense in order to doubt its reality. Otherwise, what exactly are you doubting? You can’t doubt the reality of nothing. The distinction that resolves the paradox is intellectual versus intrusive doubt. These are psychologically distinct processes that are experienced very differently.
When you thoughtfully answer a question by saying that you aren’t sure, you express an intellectual doubt. This is uncertainty. Intrusive doubts are more active and embodied. They aren’t mindful responses, but mindless provocations. When you are suddenly and unexpectedly gripped by the stomach-churning feeling that you don’t belong where you are, you are experiencing an intrusive doubt. This is not a state of uncertainty, but anxiety.
Intrusive doubt is misleading. It gets you to think the problem is outside when it is really you (your embodied habits of conscious and unconscious interpretation). This does not mean that all religious doubt is a lie, but that only those who know and feel the difference between intrusive and intellectual doubt can reliably evaluate the strength of their faith.
Solutions to your religious dysphoria are always existential. Such solutions aren’t spontaneous reactions to doubt but conscious decisions about how to live a truthful (unhypocritical) life. These are changes that reconcile actually or perceptibly disparate aspects of your life through processing and habit change. Re-committing to your religious community by vulnerably sharing your intrusive doubt is a possible answer, as is consciously choosing to convert to another lifestyle. The way the life change is realized, not the content of that change, is what makes it a solution to religious dysphoria rather than an attempt at escape. Solutions necessarily entail actively processing the content of the intrusive religious doubt rather than reacting to its spontaneous appearances.
Sexual Dysphoria
Sexual dysphorics experience intrusive doubts about whether they are sexually attracted to certain people or kinds of people. Perhaps you instinctively recognize that someone of the same sex is attractive and subsequently ruminate about whether you are homosexual or bisexual. Since lifestyles are personal identities, the experience of sexual dysphoria is as much a conflict about how to live as who you are.
It is not the same-sex attraction itself that provokes the sexual dysphoric’s intrusive doubts, but shame, guilt, or fear attached to this attraction’s possible interpretations. This is equally true of intrusive doubts about the recognized loss of sexual attraction in a heterosexual relationship.
The sexual dysphoric suppresses recognitions of attractions and non-attractions that threaten the stability of their current lifestyle. Unfortunately, this suppression creates the very existential instability that makes continuing your current lifestyle impossible. Suppression negatively impacts your life experience by creating internal tension. Many cases of mysterious, autoimmune, and psychosomatic disorders, as well as fleeting bodily pains and other disorders such as OCD, result from the habitual suppression of intrusive doubts.
Where is the feeling line between sexual and asexual same-sex attraction? How can you recognize that the same-sex person is attractive without being attracted to them?
The more time you spend analyzing perceptions of same-sex attractiveness to try to find that distinct feeling line, the more likely it is that you will identify as homosexual or bisexual. Sensitive people notice the ambiguity of the supposed feeling distinction between sexual and asexual same-sex attraction. That is why women report more bisexuality than men. The opaqueness of the feeling line is also more likely to be observed by traumatized people and those with autism spectrum disorders, who analyze unplanned thoughts and feelings at a greater frequency and with more intensity than the general population. These populations are therefore at greater risk of sexual dysphoria.
There is a paradox in sexual dysphoria remarkably similar to that in the religious variety. What are you doubting when you experience intrusive doubt about your sexual orientation? “Sexual orientation” does not materially exist anywhere, but is identified in patterns of human thought and action. Animals do not have a sexual orientation because they don’t and can’t identify things. They just have sex unburdened by all the complications imposed by humanity’s linguistic capacity. If your sexual orientation is a linguistic categorization of your inner and outer activities over time, then intrusive doubts about your sexual orientation are really disguised doubts about you (your thoughts and actions).
The only way to live without intrusive doubts is to change the way you exist. Sexual dysphoria is overcome by first processing the guilt, shame, and fear behind the intrusive doubts and then deciding for yourself which people or kinds of people you will have sex with and living out your decision. If you know that you are following the path you set for yourself, you are far less likely to feel guilty or ashamed for falling short and far more likely to be courageous in the face of the fear that you are a hypocrite or imposter.
Gender Dysphoria
For this type of dysphoria, I’d like to share a couple of experiences that help illustrate the condition. There are a lot of misconceptions about this form of existential dysphoria.
I have an unusually high voice for a man that, for some reason, sounds even higher over the phone. This is so severe that, even after I introduce myself as “Marshall,” callers refer to me as “Marsha.” Evidently, the pitch of my voice can sound so feminine that people override the masculinity of my name and conclude that I’m likely a woman. Sometimes, to avoid awkwardness, I just go along with it. Other times, I express masculinity through language by saying that I am, in fact, a man. The experience of being misgendered on the phone is annoying, but being repeatedly misgendered has made me question the way I present myself. I now often lower my voice when answering the phone, a form of intentional masculine gender expression.
When I was in high school, I took drama classes and was in a few school plays. The actors wore makeup so that their facial expressions would be visible to the audience and not overexposed by the stage lights. A couple of the girls in the class told me that I looked good in the makeup. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I felt pretty. It was a disorienting feeling because I had never particularly wanted to feel pretty, but it was nice to be complimented and to feel like I could be a pretty person if I wanted to be. It’s comforting to know there’s a thing you could be, even if you don’t plan on being it.
Is the desire to have a lower voice the same as the desire to be a man? Is the desire to be pretty the same as the desire to be a woman?
Imagine the following sequence of events.
I hyper-fixate on instances I’m misgendered on the phone, and other experiences in which people comment about my apparent immasculinity, and feel guilty and ashamed for not being “manly enough.” I begin to fear that women will hear my voice and think I’m gay. Because I avoid these painful feelings, they develop into intrusive gender doubts. I start to feel disgusted with my reflection because I don’t fit the part of man that I’m supposed to be enacting in life. I begin to feel like I’m living a lie. My increasing insecurity about my masculinity combined with social praise for my performance of stereotypically feminine acts like putting on makeup lead me to think that maybe I’d be better at embodying social expectations of femininity than masculinity. Every time that anyone says anything about me that doesn’t corroborate my manhood, I ruminate about it incessantly. I start to wonder if maybe I wouldn’t continue to suffer from these painful intrusive doubts about my existence as a man if I relinquished my attachment to my masculinity and tried to become more feminine. I begin to fantasize about burning all my existing relationships and starting my life over again in a way that ensures that no one, especially my own hyper-critical self, can call me a liar again by questioning my manhood. I daydream about being (socially recognized as) a woman. If people thought I was a woman, then maybe I’d be free from feeling like a false, fake, hypocritical man.
I do not feel this way, to be clear, although I have experienced gender dysphoria in the past. I included this illustration because I believe the way gender dysphoria is commonly represented as the experience of a disjunction between “gender identity and biology” is incoherent and supernatural. Like “sexual orientation,” “gender identity” does not materially exist anywhere. The fictitious gender dysphoric version of myself isn’t focused on an immaterial gender soul, but on feelings of inadequacy and a desire to feel more unified in life. No one can know that their biology “meant” for them to socially present in a certain way because biology doesn’t have intentions. Instead, people respond to gender dysphoria by choosing how to express themselves.
Gender dysphoria is the experience of intrusive doubts about your inability to express yourself in a way that fulfills social expectations tied to your biological sex. Social expectations are in the minds of everyone who is socialized, which includes you. Dysphorics tend to be their own worst judges. They harshly criticize their reflections according to internalized social expectations. Gender expression is a social game of skill on an unfair genetic playing field. We are always “doing gender,” performing in more or less masculine or feminine ways. Like how people with tall genetics are naturally more skilled at basketball, people with female genetics are naturally better at performing femininity. This is not always the case as there are men skilled at femininity and women skilled at masculinity. Since “masculinity” and “femininity” are terms for perceived group averages in the ways males and females live, respectively, there will always be people whose gender expression doesn’t fit the generalized expectations.
As with the two previous forms of dysphoria, the only way out of gender dysphoria is to first process the intrusive doubts and then autonomously choose how you want to live. You can live in a masculine or feminine way, or you can intentionally blur the lines. There is no way to know which way to find the best answer, but you must still choose your way out of the dysphoria.
The Essence of Existential Dysphoria
Existential dysphoria is a pattern of intrusive doubt about your way of living. Unprocessed guilt or shame about lying about your lifestyle, or the unprocessed fear of living a lie, provokes this illness. If you repeatedly experience the unwanted thought that the way you are living your life is or could be a lie, then you suffer from this condition. Every form of existential dysphoria is a mental disorder. You do not suffer from intrusive doubts if your mind is well-ordered.
Each of the above three types of dysphoria involves obsessive hyperawareness of events in consciousness, intrusive feelings about how you are living a lie, and the habit of interpreting stimuli in a way that portrays you as hypocritical. Together, these constitute an addiction to self-consciousness. Existential dysphorics are addicted to critical self-analysis. Like breaking an addiction to drugs, the dysphoric must recognize the problem for what it is, choose sobriety, rehabilitate, and start life anew without the drug. In this case, the drug is a pattern of thought, a habit of attention.
Each form has its own existential paradox. The religious dysphoric doubts a consistent God that can’t certainly exist (yet), the sexual dysphoric doubts a consistent sexuality that can’t certainly exist (yet), and the gender dysphoric doubts a consistent pattern of gendered self-expression that can’t certainly exist (yet). In all three cases, the doubted existential consistency is created through autonomous choice. You must choose which God to believe in, who to have sex with, and how to present yourself. Choosing how to live while recovering from dysphoria is always a leap of faith because there are no assurances that any new way of life out of the options will save you from the dysphoric hell you’ve inhabited.
If there is a benefit to dysphoria, it is that it can reveal that something you had previously taken for granted can be chosen. New dysphorias can alert you to new frontiers in intentional living.
When you are existentially dysphoric, the one thing you cannot be is “yourself.” Dysphoria is the painful experience of not knowing yourself. To overcome dysphoria of any variety, you must choose yourself in the sense that you must consciously decide to live according to a predetermined lifestyle. You can’t choose to “be yourself” when you’re self-conscious any more than you can choose to be sober when you’re intoxicated.
You create who you will become by choosing how to live and then filling your consciousness with the activities that lifestyle requires. To overcome dysphoria, you must intentionally decide to perform new actions and think new thoughts to fit a desired life pattern. These will initially require mental surveillance to do, but with enough practice, they will eventually crystallize into unconscious habits. Only when you have successfully habituated the lifestyle (self) that you previously chose will it be possible to just “be yourself” because then you won’t be destabilized by intrusive doubts about who you are. Only then will you live in the peace of self-knowledge without the constant clamoring of self-consciousness.