Thank you all for the thoughtful responses and sharing your experiences with therapy (whether good or bad experiences), it really is giving me food for thought too.
Quote:
Originally Posted by FooZe
You say, if you dropped emotional detachment and anger and instead tried to just make yourself feel depressed and weak and low and lonely and to try to think all those irrational negative automatic thoughts... etc. I'd like to suggest a couple of questions. They're just for you, you don't have to tell me the answers, and of course you're free to change your answers at any time:
1. Is dropping emotional detachment and anger something that you want to do? If so, what's stopping you? Or if it's not, then why do it?
2. If (or when) you try to make yourself feel depressed and weak and low and lonely and think negative thoughts, what's the result? Do you find yourself stuck in feeling depressed, weak, low, lonely, etc., indefinitely or do you eventually notice that, perhaps, something else has caught your attention and you've moved on?
3. If (or when) you try to make yourself not feel depressed, weak, low, lonely, etc., or think negative thoughts, what's the result then? Do you stop feeling depressed/thinking negative thoughts right away, or only after something else has caught your attention and you've moved on? For me, it was always a lot like "trying not to think of a white elephant". What's it like for you?
It's getting past my bedtime so I'm going to stop there, but I'd love to pursue this some more eventually.
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(I hope the length is OK, I haven't had a chance to organise my head to shorten my message to be to the point more. My apologies if this is hard to read, let me know and I will try to make it more concise in that case.)
Yes I relate to you with your digression, I have had that problem too thinking that maybe me doing self-help (books written by actual therapists, not shallow stuff), and trying to do therapy, that those are distractions but I did also feel that it has helped me keep from drowning even if just an inefficient and usually not enjoyable distraction. As I have given quite a few honest tries to therapy and psychoeducation and all that work on myself. Just like you, I had the feeling that I'm to do this, so that I could keep holding a job even if my digging into my stuff also almost made me lose my job sometimes. And with the eventual hope of having a truly good relationship(s) too.
But over time it has started to feel like - whether this is a rational or irrational concern - that I'm being required by the therapist (IRL, or online or in books) to drop any safety even if the safety is provided by defenses.
And then as a result, I would feel I was getting pulled really low and deep inside my head and my mind, and absolutely dysregulated with emotion and without any productive processing of emotion or it would be very slow and inefficient and painful processing of them due to the strongly dysregulated states.
The dysregulation meant I stopped being functional, I could not do work, could not eat, often I could not even sleep, etc. Crises basically that I always had to handle on my own taking days from my life each time. It led to me almost losing my job, etc.
And I could not see a way how to do it instead coming from that place of strength and positive beliefs to heal and get on the journey towards being more functional instead. I have never found that kind of support in therapy.
What I did desire and wish for in therapy with therapists was for them to accept my expression of anger (not anger AT them) and to try with lots of effort to actually reach to me with more intense emotional invitations through my emotional detachment. I have never received that kind of help though and I have never heard of any therapy like that. Standard therapies do not seem to be like that in my experience.
So, I had felt pressured to simply drop the anger, the detachment, all that and plunge deep then.
When I would be low in the crises, things like self-soothing (taking a bubble bath, you know!
)would hardly have any meaning; it would seem like a superficial thing that simply did not affect me much. Instead I'd always have to endure by just holding on, hanging in there, a question of pure life-or-death survival.
I do not believe that therapy is supposed to inflict that much pain and loss of functionality, I understand it has to be uncomfortable of course, but these experiences of mine seemed excessive.
And when I did try to open up emotionally to therapists, online, IRL, anywhere - open up beyond anger and detachment - I almost never felt good or safe about it, whatever safety even means. Like I said I don't have a true experience of safety in these situations. If I have had a little experience of it it was randomly for a few seconds only, with 1-2 therapists sometimes. With most of them, no.
I do not really understand why therapy has had this effect on me.
Sorry if I am repeating myself. But, it has constantly felt like I was either being made even more detached than I was....or suddenly plunging into these really deep crises. With little warning in advance.
It also has made me feel deeply uncomfortable and with a gut feeling telling me that this is somehow wrong and off, that trying to do all this would push me deep inside myself, too deep in my head, too detached, yet suddenly strong emotion in the end, without warning in advance. While my desire and a main goal with therapy was always to be able to go out of my head, outside, rather than inside. I do not understand these things. Did this make any sense at all?
....
To answer your questions:
1. I want to have more control over how much detachment and/or anger I would have. Not too much of it, but not too little either. I feel both the detachment and anger are a fundamental part of me, and not just defenses. Like I do personally identify with a lot of it. But I do want to fix something about it all. So that I can have other emotions and a more full life and vitality. This is my motivation here. I originally had the main motivation to find and build quality, emotionally connected relationships, but I have to be very careful about wanting such a thing right now.
(In IFS, I liked how it tries to see positive qualities too of "protectors" like these angry fighters and detached managers. In Schema therapy, it felt like to me, I could be wrong, but it felt like to me they were truly seen as just bad defenses to be demolished)
2. Yes, I find myself stuck in it indefinitely. To be precise, I am not able to actually *identify* with such negative thoughts, but it does bring out "bad emotions" (not thoughts, just raw emotion), low emotions, very much upset, very much pain, and then I have to go through the very deep crises on my own as therapists have not been able to help there to help me keep safe or regulated.
A big problem (?) is I actually am not able to identify with emotions and states of feeling depressed, weak, low, lonely. Low perhaps, in a technical sense, I am aware that I can have a low energy state so I call that a low mood whether I feel the mood or not (detached from it). I am not even sure what negative emotions are in me somewhere that I could actually identify with in an authentic way and not feel pressured into it. Or how to identify with them. I understand you have to go through pain to heal but I must have a misunderstanding about this whole topic.
What I would hold on to to not drown in all this would usually be some self-help books written by knowledgeable therapists, but those books usually contain generalities, not so many examples or actual practices to do. Or the actual practices still contain so many generalities and little guidance beyond that, much like you said there are no instruction manuals for therapy. But I did hold on to these books and other notes from some knowledgeable therapists online, trying to believe that using tips from CBT or IFS or some other framework will help me not drown. Also I would have some of my own very private beliefs about progress and positive change, so that helped too to not drown.
A note, I have not tried to actually make myself feel weak or vulnerable, while doing and surviving all these crises. Just other various, intense "bad emotions" that would want to inflict strong emotional thinking on me but I could not ever identify with such thinking as that is what would give me the feeling of drowning and losing my self. I have to very strongly defend against such attacks and not give in to them.
3. If I allow my anger and/or emotional detachment to come back, I instantly feel fine again, but if I got very deep in the crisis this takes hard work to regain that sense of normalcy. I just have to I don't know what exactly I do to survive, and after that I am back to normal. When I am my normal self, I do instantly push away (with anger) or block out (detach from) all negative or depressive etc thoughts. It is not like trying to not think of a white elephant. Maybe you would call these strong defenses, I don't know. I am not sure if it is that or something else.
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You might want to ask, why I would want to go through these defenses then if they work so well, well my motivation for it was as above. Because I was told that this is an important part of getting better. But I am getting really tired of how exhausting all this process is. I have certainly processed some emotions but it's been exhausting. And it really is hard for me to tell if I have been getting better. I sometimes feel like I have, then sometimes I don't know. If I have, then it has come at a big cost and I do not wish the experience on my worst enemy, ever. I cannot tell if it is just my problem being some difficult problem, or if I was doing it all "wrong", or I didn't find the right therapy, or if I am plain incompatible with most therapies.