Hey neighbour. Thanks for your input. Can I ask you about some things?

What kind of difference do you see?

I downloaded the book, and flipped to the emotional pain section... it basically starts with "Of course, the natural tendency is to avoid feelings of pain whenever possible and to wall ourselves off from as much of it as we can, or to be automatically swept away by a tidal wave of feelings."

I don't have a tidal wave of feelings when I talk of pain. It feels exactly like real bodily pain, except it's missing that one specific dimension of actual sensation that is only generated by actual physical pain (if this makes sense). So that's how I know that it is not real physical pain or actual sensation. But otherwise it's just as bad. So yeah, I guess I'm stuck on that part then.

And then it says "Just as in the meditation practice, our minds have a strong tendency to reject things as they are when it comes to my pain, my dilemmas, my grief." ...I am actually not calling it "my pain, my dilemmas, my grief". It's simply a raw experience of a fake sensation.

"When we observe our emotional pain as it unfolds, with acceptance, with openness and kindness toward ourselves and at the same time take a problem-focused approach toward the situation itself, we strike a balance between facing, honoring, and learning from our emotional pain moment by moment as it is expressing itself and acting effec tively in the world, which itself minimizes the many ways in which we can get stuck in and blinded by emotion."

This is all very nice but I'm more on the other side... that I just do the problem-focused approach and emotions are not even there, just fake sensation of pain. I did have this traumatized borderline-ish phase where I did actually have emotions but that emotional phase largely passed by now. And while it was replacing the "negative symptoms", my functionality was not improved by having the negative emotions.

The trauma itself though, at one point that stuff was so bad that I was literally immobilized. That was until I accidentally got access to direct emotion and somehow it really did look like a big wave. And it helped because afterwards I was no longer immobilized... Anyway that whole "borderline" phase passed already but the pain thing remained from the trauma or idk what.

I can also try and think positive to try and find positive motivation and positive emotional energy. But the energy doesn't come even if the pain is not there. I just get to feel like I really want to rest. And it's been like this forever and it isn't changing enough.

I've just looked this up, and love some of this bit on it: Frontiers | Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy | Psychology

Where it talks about deep brain structures for emotional and visceral handling of stuff... I do feel like something's stuck there. I did get strongly traumatized last year.

The pain is probably from that...

So where it says "the core emphasis in SE is on restoring subcortical function", this does sound good to me.

Though when it gets to "orbitofrontal cortex" I'm lost again. That brain part is for social emotional processing and I know that stuff is very undeveloped for me overall. It's a BIG part of why I got my issues.

Including why I even got traumatized last year, and why I've had all these issues overall.

Anyway still reading this article.

That one seems to be for more emotional types than I am.

It isn't moods I have a problem with.

To sum up... The problems I have are 1) the pain 2) "negative symptoms". I no longer have disorganized thinking or psychotic or manic symptoms, "just" these two.

Thanks again!