I don't know if what I experience is the same thing as you are describing, but sometimes in T or in life otherwise, I have a "split screen" kind of experience where I am either experiencing or describing one screen, but something kind of parallel or somehow connected is playing on the other screen. My T calls this integration and it can feel like that, or kind of like movement from how I've been to how I want to be.

But I think that wanting to be different, to want to be able to sit with uncomfortable feelings as you're describing, is the first and biggest step to it being different, or to change. Nobody changes if they don't WANT to change. Or maybe people are forced to change for survival, but I don't think that's what you're talking about or what people generally have to do in T.

The really cool thing about negative emotions, on the occasions when I let myself feel them, is that it's really not that hard to sit with them. You learn that they won't kill you, can't hurt you, and that they are just emotions-- they are incapable of producing harm, by themselves. It takes behavior and people to be harmful.