Quote:
Originally Posted by eskielover
@Alive99....I knew I was feeling intense anger but for me, my other feelings & reasons for those feelings were repressed more because I didn't have the words to express them. One day I went to my weekly therapy appointment & my T asked how I was feeling. All I could say was "ugh, just ugh!" She then handed me 3 pages with a list of feelings words for me to check off the ones that related to what I was experiencing. That was my first step to breakthrough. The next step I took on my own was to put words to the feelings as to what was their cause. That broke the word barrier for me & from that point we continues to work through how I was really feeling. That was about 7 years ago & now when I am feeling overloaded, I step back & am able to analize what I am feeling & exactly why.
Mindfulness helped me do important changes in my coping skills & also be more aware of how my environment (or more, an external environment that keeps hitting me) if effecting me & how I am responding to it & what I can do better to handle it.
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Thanks for your notes.
In my case, I don't feel intense anger or any anger even. If I was in that phase of processing where all I felt was intense anger, I'd already be on the way to finding what to do about it. I can handle anger, but when I don't even have that about certain things, that's when I have issues with processing, mindfulness, etc etc.
Is anyone familiar with that issue of, going from full detachment phase to anger phase in processing?
I've been given various emotion word lists by therapists, so yes, I know what you mean by that technique. When you were given the word list, did you instantly manage to tune into what you felt?
I've been working on getting to that step of even tuning in by various techniques, for nearly ten years by now. I've made headway, I've found quite some emotions, but certainly not all of them, and the problematic ones is what I meant above.
You mention feeling overloaded. For me it just shuts everything off, when the overload mix relates to the trauma emotions. So back to first step.
Interestingly enough, the way I interpret mindfulness and nonjudgmentality here for myself, it has nothing to do with my external environment. It has everything to do with being aware of the internal environment (invisible to others, emotions, gut feelings, whatever deep things).
I always interpreted mindfulness that way for some reason. I don't know why.
If you (or anyone else) are at all interested in neuroscience stuff... I believe it's what's called the default mode network (the neural networks responsible for getting into that internal environment), rather than the task positive network (which deals with the external environment). They are at odds with each other by default, i.e hard to keep both active together (not sure if at all possible).