Page 84 of I Shouldn't Feel This Way

“No, of course not. I would take a bullet for her. I’d rather have my arms hacked off than lose her.” As graphic as that was, I was dead serious.

“This is a good sign—well, not the self-violence, I would never encourage you to do that. But what I mean is that you are self-aware.”

“Then why am I constantly talking to myself in my head? I feel split in half.”

“What are these conversations like, Noah?”

I was too embarrassed to open up about my fantasies the last time I jacked off … or what happened in my head when I made love to my wife—including that dream I had when I first met my daughter.

“It’s just … I feel like I’m constantly battling right and wrong. There’s a part of me, a darker half that wants me to …” I revised my choice of words. “… to pursue Aria and give in to her advances.”

“Wait, hold it right there a moment.” He gestured with his hand. “Has your daughter been seducing you?”

I scratched the back of my head and tried to recall the incident in the car.

“Um, if attempting to kiss me on the lips is considered seduction, then yeah, I believe so.”

“She initiated that all on her own?”

I nodded and started to summarize what had happened in the car and the night before.

“Hmm, most interesting.” Grey nodded pensively.

I took a deep breath and interlocked my fingers. “I want it all to stop. It’s wrong on so many different scales, Doc. I’m sure you’re aware of that.”

“Yes, I am. But I would like to enlighten you about the general factors that contribute to GSA. You’re not the only person in the world who’s going through this.”

“I feel like I’m bipolar or have split personality or something.”

“I think you’ve opened a bit of a Pandora’s Box here, and you’re psychologically coping with it by disentangling yourself from what you consider your evil half.”

“So, I’ve fragmented good and bad?”

“Yes, precisely. We are not born evil. On the contrary, we come into this world as blank slates, but we do have rebellious propensities. It’s human nature. All three parts that develop your psyche seem to be at war. You’re just exaggerating it in your mind.”

That made sense.

“Are you seeing things? Hallucinations?”

“No.”

He jotted some things down and asked me several questions regarding my marriage and Aria’s relationship with her mother and stepfather. Grey listened attentively until I was done talking.

“Are you familiar with Sigmund Freud?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’ve heard of him.”

“Freud had devoted a lot of his studies to explaining the unconscious mind. He started psychoanalysis and believed that a lot of our behavior comes from the unconscious mind. His particular area of interest was on sexuality, and this was because he grew up in the Victorian era where people in society were very sexually repressed. Anyway, according to his structured model, the id, ego, and superego play a key role in completing the psychic apparatus.”

“That sounds confusing as hell,” I responded.

“Well, in short, the superego is predominantly preventing the desires of the id from manifesting into reality.”

I guess that explained all the internal dialogue.

“The id is the disorganized part of your personality that holds a person’s instinctual drives. And by this I mean the needs that are present at birth. It’s a primitive instinct that operates according to the pleasure principle. It is the source of our biological needs, wants, and impulses. Particularly our sexual and aggressive drives. I believe there is a possibility that you are trying your best to rationalize these thoughts and feelings, and the id and superego are boxing it out in that head of yours.”

“You’re certain that had I raised her, these feelings wouldn’t have existed?”

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