“…it’s not coming from god”

… what a strange and irrelevant comment to make.

This has nothing to do with their imaginary friend and it’s very inappropriate for them to bring such childish things up apropos of nothing.

It sounds like you have a fair few toxic and out of touch people in your life, OP. Especially if so many of them are all spouting the same bizarre, weirdly specific rote rhetoric with, like, zero original thought between them.

All I’m saying is, if that’s the kind of feedback they’re giving, their feedback doesn’t seem to carry much weight and I hope you’re not letting it affect you. Whatever delusions they are entertaining, their attempt to make it your problem is exceedingly unhelpful.

I’m still thinking about what would actually be helpful for you though. I have some ideas in mind but I gotta see if I can sort them out first…

EDIT: ok,

We are animals. baggage stresses us out because we carry it. Obviously we do not always choose to carry it, of course. Much of this is actually automatic and subconscious. it’s not entirely by happenstance that these phenomena (the persistent accumulations and retentions of emotional and psychological stresses derived from traumatic experiences) manifest commonly among our species, and even some other species… Consider why these automatic, subconscious processes exist: They would have been bred out through natural selection if they were only a detriment. There is a FUNCTION they are attempting to perform. The predictive modeled sensory horizon within which we each individually live needs to be adjusted and refined continuously with new experiences. Big events that cause great discomfort, while being statistical outliers potentially unworthy of upsetting our entire perspective to accommodate, have nevertheless had an outsized IMPACT on our personal experiences.

All this to say: every single human being on earth is not entirely in control of their being. you just happen to be more acutely aware of where your executive process begins and ends, and where the instinctive automated processes outside are impressing their influence upon your observer process. The biggest difference here is that other people don’t as often think about or question their knee-jerk thoughtless emotional reactions. They embrace being momentarily controlled by their emotions. You, meanwhile seem to have created a firm bifurcation between the part of you that makes decisions and the rest of you that just exists in the moment. I wouldn’t call that a good thing or a bad thing in and of itself; it’s just … not a fun thing to experience and rather inconvenient and uncomfortable when the disparity between YOU and The Animal Body You Live Inside Of becomes stark enough to perceive clearly.

… when my body is having one of its chemical-storms where it’s dead set on torturing itself with pointless emotional turmoil, I sometimes dissociate even harder, impassively observing this creature going through its motions and exhausting itself while I, the executive process, await my turn to take control again. Sometimes all I can do is nudge it so it can throw its tantrum in a place where it’s unlikely to upset anyone else. But the only thing that seems to actually have any influence whatsoever on how soon I can re-establish control is if I actually mindfully acknowledge why it’s freaking out.

For instance, anger. Anger, I’ve learned, is a sensory system that detects fuckery. When our species were hunter gatherer tribes, we could fix unfairness by bashing it with a rock until it stops moving. This is no longer the case within the context in which we presently live anymore. But at the core of it, it’s still boiling down to: 1. Identified a disparity, 2. Driven to address the disparity. If I can actually identify what’s unfair and then weigh my options as to how (and if) it can even BE addressed, the rage subsides sooner.

Regret, the sensory system that detects personal errors, subsides more quickly when I can rationally identify the nature and mechanism of my mistake and recognize how I can make better decisions in the future.

You’ve seen the beast you ride acting upon its own. Name it. Hear it. Consider its pains. You’re telling yourself “something else is controlling me” but the truth is actually that you ARE the “something else” that HAD BEEN in control of the animal, but presently are not. It is not being controlled by something other than you; this is just how a human body behaves when a sapient mind isn’t exerting guidance over it. That control was lost because the unresolved disparity of your predictive models have left it incapable of trusting what it perceives.

So. Find a place where you can let it feel the things it has put off feeling. But engage those feelings. Process them. Recognize what caused them and decide upon a response should the events that caused them ever occur again. Once your predictive models have been rectified against the disruptive events and a response strategy has been devised and parbaked into your behavioral patterns, the human body in which you reside is more likely to resume actually listening to you, the executive observer process, again.