The Iron Therapy (Part 1)

My intolerable depression was driven by my intrepid abuse of self-inflicted confirmation bias. Every faculty of my attention was laser focused on anything that supported my belief that my existence was responsible for the breakup of my family. As a teenager, I focused intensely on my failures, because I told myself that’s what I needed to do to improve.

I rationalized the sensibility of coming to grips with my defects. As unintentional as they were, mistakes were made, because as a child struggling to develop a sense of confidence, it is understandable that at times, incompetence can supersede effectiveness. Especially given that a lack of life experience in general played a role in my decision making. As a youngster there’s only so much you know and fully grasp about life.

A pall of uncertainty, albeit shallow compared to yesteryear, shadows me to this day when I talk on the phone with my Dad. I spent years of my life looking back with regret on my love for videogames and other distractions as a child. He tried to take me fishing and teach me everything he knows about it. Looking back, I know now that was a form of therapy for him. A way for him to let off his pressure release valves in the tumult that can accompany a life all too consumed by work and other obligations. The fuzzy memory of his bait and tackle box in the trunk of his car still haunts me. I haven’t seen that box in over 25 years. I treated him like he would always be around. That is a mistake I regret. I absolutely loved him and he knew that. But I can’t shake the feeling that I slighted him. Bear in mind, I was a self-centered ten-year-old child who thought the world of his parents. I do not see how I could have connected those dots way back then when I am just now doing it in my mid-thirties.

All through my teenage years I thought on these things. I constantly grappled for the straw that broke his fishing line. Going back and forth, I told myself truths. I told myself lies. My mind was at war with itself day and night for years. I would become well known to overtraining the mind. But what of the body? I battled the falsehoods of my mind for as long as I could remember–It’s tongue ordered by chaos drenched in the blood of disorder. No wonder these impulses fueling them were depraved of normal disposition. I needed something to bring me order yet more pain would be necessary. New lessons had to be learned and more opportunities forged. Those always lie on the flipside.

My mind, as maxed out as it was, needed a landmark distraction. I needed to construct another atmosphere for this new endeavor. I had to “divide” my mind. As a whole, the storms were too cataclysmic and that was breaking me. I had to “cut” a new body. Something inside me told me as much. The vehemence of my thoughts would make the manifestation all the bolder once the process began.

When I step into the gym, the moment I walk through those doors, I rage with the fallen ones. They fall into me and I breathed them in until they are in me. The authors of all my pain become the books I seek to devour the most. I do not transform. I unveil who and what I am and have always been. What happened to me is what opened the doors to letting this force invade me. It is as if profane emotions become laced with insidious force. My body is commanded to do nothing else other than follow. I can remove my mask and pry off my tears. The gym is the one place I can go where I never show mercy. There is no choice. You cannot be bullied by inanimate weights. The gym is a choice to be strong. Inside of those walls it is all about strength. I can fight and I can rage so that my body can ascend like my soul.

No matter who you are and what you do outside of it, inside the gym, you are yourself in your strongest form, because your best is required of you. The gym is a safe place for the rage inside of you to come out and play. I can show my teeth with impunity and without fear of reprisal. If a phone booth could make a man turn into Superman, I can only imagine what he would be if he stepped inside a gym to change. This is about more than obtaining and maintaining a six-pack of Abs year-round. Ripped arms, a striated chest, cannonball delts, a Christmas tree back, and tree truck thighs are not enough to keep me fighting. Nice as these attributes are, once you get there, it is not enough to keep you going. Even with attractive women nodding at you with approval, that still isn’t enough. You grow complacent. Yet and still, you do not seek to regress. When you reach your own elite level, you find that you need a fuel source that is everlasting. Mine is based in trauma. Trauma based programming.

The post-traumatic stress I suffer from is a disorder of my mind that leeches life from my soul. If my time must be taken from me, I will take what is left and maximize it relentlessly. This is less about being in shape and more about beating my troubles into dust that is then swept up and flushed down the dumpster before it is recycled back in, so that the process can then repeat itself. Terrible as this sounds, there are things I can’t let go of because I won’t. What I see and think and broadcast to my inner workings–I need that push. This is what keeps me in elite shape to this day. I am merciless. I have to be that way on myself or I’ll crumble to pieces.

This goes back to everything I have been through. Every problem and setback. Every slight I’ve received. Every negative comment. And everyone who perpetrated such: I forget nothing. I bring the memory into my mind in bright sun shining intensity and broadcast the images to my high definition eye screen with every possible angle and viewpoint imaginable–replaying these experiences over and over until I am taken over by comfort rage. Comfort, because it is controlled and contained until I begin my next set in my exercise. The anger fuels me. My unleaded recipe is the most sadistic, radioactive variety. Since I will not eradicate it, or pretend that it does not exist, I use my anger and I rage with my machine. Whenever I need that extra kick, I will take a negative memory, and revisit it. I could make it a picture or a movie. I can make it black and white, or color. I can make the frame around it large or small. I can turn the volume of the memory up or down. I do what I have to do to get the best possible results from myself. It depends entirely on what kind of effect I need at the time. Whatever will garner the most potent reaction from my natural abilities–that’s what I broadcast to myself.

If you are struggling to either get in shape or stay that way, allow me to save you some time. Here is the most important thing when it comes to getting in shape and staying that way: Your MIND. It does not matter how genetically gifted you are. It does not matter how thorough your workout program is. Supplements, from protein powder to creatine to fat burners to testosterone boosters–NONE of this matters if your MIND is not 100% completely devoted to this journey. A trip is temporary. At most, a trip might last but a temporary time. A journey, lasts a lifetime. To get these results and keep them requires a complete commitment. This is a marriage. You are married to your body. No one knows your body better than you do. You are the only one that can truly hold yourself accountable. Relying on others is better than nothing at all, but I want you to fully grasp the importance of YOU taking sole control over your body, and the direction you point it. Only you can write the program and here’s what it is: You have to take happiness everlasting and marry it to fitness.

You have to take unbridled joy and marry it to the fitness lifestyle. This is what I refer to as a “mind-divide.” I say divide, because that other side is still in me. Inside I’m still the same husky cheese pizza loving child I grew up to be. My taste buds haven’t gone anywhere. The key difference is I’ve reassigned controls in my own mind by acting and pulling on the different levers available. You “pull” an addiction from one part of your brain, and attach it to another healthier option on the other side. You associate your pursuit of fitness to all those feel-good impulses inside of you already. You link fitness to pleasure. That is a bond that you must seal. This makes it unbreakable.

Between pain and pleasure we will always seek out pleasure. We are wired to seek out pleasure and will do almost whatever it takes to avoid its evil twin–pain. I learned to attach pain to pizza. I attached pain to soda. I attached pleasure to chicken breast. I attached pleasure to water. This is mind programming. It is very simple in theory but far more difficult in practice because you must be consistent. The quality changes you see when you eat right and workout a few days a week in the gym–we want to make these permanent. You marry the limitless power of your mind to your body. Even though they are in the same vessel, they can still be disconnected. To get your body right requires a devotion overseen by the auspices of your deepest desires. Now you can do this, but you absolutely must tell your mind what to do. Only then will your body follow. Your body alone cannot do it. It is the follower. Your mind the master and your soul the governor over both.

I use White Paper to do what I need. When training, I print up sheets inside my head emblazoned with images as to how I want to look. The exercises I choose to do for any particular session are designed to put the muscle precisely where I want it. Any images that are imposed upon the paper are looked at until fully consumed. Remember that the mind will tell the body where to go and how to achieve its intended goal. In addition, a well-lit gym with lots of mirrors only exaggerates the ideal–muscles bulging, veins expanding, muscle fibers ripening with every single rep. This is vain. It is selfish. And you cannot stop it. This obsession and the fuel to be burned is endless. This goes beyond food and calories consumed.

Those dark crestfallen memories from my past that I hold on to are the ones that I burn in the cauldrons of my mind. I target and destroy every single negative initiative ever aimed at me. The viciousness of the power that falls into me casts a pall of dark light punctuated by waves of black light. The negative voices I heard as a child–I play them back. I crush them. I own them. I destroy them. And then I rebirth them, so I can do it all over again. I use them and go back at them with the same ferocity that they expressed toward me. Whatever you face in this life is small potatoes to the grand feasts that your mind is capable of producing. Fitness is nothing for a mind that will not be denied.

There is a dark side to this if you have not been able to tell. Much of the power I use is evil. I can only burn what inspires me and much of that energy is evil. That “chip” on the shoulder is the very best unfiltered fuel. Feeling stabbed in the back much? You pull that knife out of your back and keep it in your back pocket. You never know when you’ll have to use it. You must learn to “use” these negative experiences and turn them around to your favor. Sometimes the very force that seeks out your destruction is the solution to that same challenge. I can only put out the fire with more. During this process, my mind turns, I become electric, and the blood in my veins circulates at such velocity that I never cease sweating. These demons arrive at the door of my imagination and go full-throttle until their vision exceeds the limits of my body. This energy–instead of letting it eat away at me, I call on it, I turn it up, and burn it off, in the ovens of my muscles, until piles of fat tears bleed out through my epidermis.

This force comes into me and I let it consume me only when in the presence of weights. I do not exercise my body. I go to war against my struggles. On every weight I pick up, I superimpose any and everything that has always stood against my rise. They become not so much my obstacle as they do my victim of the workout. I do not need a workout partner. I do not need to be held accountable. I do not need to socialize or be motivated by others (although those two things do help).

I call upon any number of bad past experiences and that is the fuel that forces me to ascend. I relish each workout I engage in because I get a little bit better every time. I squeeze out just a bit more self-improvement, getting more bang for my buck in the game of life. Working out is a marathon, so I prize longevity over anything else. Let other’s be bigger, stronger, and faster. I want to go the longest. After thousands of workouts, I can honestly say I love training even more now than I did when I started, because I can focus less on getting my body to look a certain way, and more on beating the man in the mirror.

The mind runs this movie. The body is just the star of the show. You are going to “go there” in your mind so your body can follow. You must lead it where you want it to go. If you don’t, it will just fight you and continually resist you. This is why so many people fall into the yo-yo up and down weight elevator.

This is not how I started. Let me back up a decade or almost two…. At this time, I was a new resident of Las Vegas, Nevada. It was January 2002 and I was in a new school for the new year in a new place with new opportunities stretched out ahead of my horizon. This opportunity was “White Paper” in its final form. To the surprise of my new classmates, I had no qualms about moving in the middle of my senior year of high school. At the detriment of severing connections to friends who always encouraged me, an environment change was absolutely necessary for my mental health. I was happy to move from Durham, North Carolina, because I could finally release myself from the place where my trauma occurred. Putting everything into context at the time, Vegas, was a new opportunity for me to live a completely different life. The only frame of reference I associated with Vegas was opportunity. My only regret is that we did not move there earlier. That would have made for a far less turbulent couple of years and I absolutely would have dedicated myself to my studies in college more so than I did.

All the pain and heartache that I harbored for so long could finally begin to recede in its intensity. When you go through something terrible, it is very easy to associate certain images, such as landmarks, to painful reminders. Triggers if you will. These triggers were all around me in Durham, and they made for a very painful existence. This traumatic baggage would be left in Durham, never to be packed inside the moving truck of my brain. My evolution into a fitness machine began in Durham and would increase prodigiously in the sunny desert atmosphere of Vegas. Beforehand, I didn’t know that living in hot dry desert would supercharge my progress. However much water I drank in Durham in the course of a day would be doubled living in the desert. That change alone made for a more salubrious existence.

Looking back at my high school years, I knew why I ate so much and why I wasn’t active. The source of my never ending appetite was my depression. Over the years, I grew tired of my slumped shouldered body broadcasting to the world how defeated I was. But I was not yet ready to change until I stepped on the scale one pivotal day. In high school, my posture reflected every negative feeling I’d consumed. I was tired of looking like I felt and tired of feeling less of a man than I should. When I made the changes and started seeing amazing results, more triggers were pulled and shots fired. Confidence started to rise. My self-esteem started to build upon itself. As I got older, I noticed a commensurate rise in my standards for myself. When I know better, I tend to do better. These changes continued in my new school.

By the time I graduated high school in June of 2002, I looked completely different. I was downright skinny, but not all was well. Judging myself objectively as I could, I was excited about my new slim look but there was some scarring on my skin. For some reason, the stretch marks were far more noticeable since I lost the weight, and while I was skinny, there was some hanging skin on parts of my body, specifically my mid-section, surrounding and below my belly button. I had to improve myself. There was also the issue with my body shape. I was “straight up and down.” There was no degree of appreciable muscle mass to be seen. So, while a few years prior, I would have killed to look the way I was now looking, because of the commensurate rise in my standards, I needed more. I demanded more. I began to wonder what else could be done. Up to that point, I only imagined myself as skinny. While like anyone else growing up I had seen images of super fit muscular men in movies and tv, I never saw that for myself. But for the first time, these connections began to form. It all started with a spark…. A question. A “what if? moment.

White Paper images of myself covered with enviable levels of muscularity had yet to be printed. But the fact that I began to imagine would soon rectify that. I came this far, so I figured I could come a little further. That is a reoccurring theme for me whenever I’m making progress. When I start something, before finishing it, I’ll keep it going. Especially if the results are what I want them to be. Shortly, life would again pivot itself in a heading, whereby improvements for the better would be achieved. All I had to do besides be in the right place at the right time was take action.

–Daniel Cousin

Click here to read part 2.

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