Hey slip,

Glad to know I'm not alone in having trouble finding words. I think it is kinda cool that you are so visual. That you are able to describe visual images to your therapist. Are you into art at all? Just wondering if you are into creating or viewing art.

For me... I guess it is more a feeling. It is funny... I remember shortly after my first hospital admission. One of the p-docs (in training) was giving me a physical exam and I told her I hurt. And she asked me where. And I was kinda puzzled... But figured somewhere around my stomach. And she asked me where more in particular... And I was really puzzled. Not that kind of pain. She didn't seem to understand that there could be a non-physically located kind of pain. I know now that it was emotional pain. Emotions... Who would have thought. Maybe she did get what I meant but found it weird. I didn't think it was so weird...

Maybe my therapist is trying to get me to do something similar to what helped you with your therapist. Instead of trying to get me to describe the feeling... He seems to be inviting me to feel the feeling. To feel it. So I can convey it to him in that way. So he can come to feel it to by way of empathetic attunement. And that will alter the feeling because I'll be able empathetically attune to him feeling it with me and his feeling calm and collected in the face of that. Sympathetic and not condemning. And then maybe... That horrible feeling won't occur to me outside therapy. Like how conveying your images helps them not occur so much outside therapy.

Maybe... That is the point. I never really thought of it like that.

I like the idea of lying down. The floor, a couch, whatever. I've suggested it to my therapist and he kinda ignored it... Maybe because I kinda need to see him to stop being lost in the feeling... But lying down has always had an appeal to me.

Thanks for sharing your experience.