paralyzed

Thanks, jexa! I'm going to skip over a whole lot of other good stuff, to this:
It seems to me that just as you can't give it to her, so she can't hold you hostage for it. Since it's (apparently) not to be had at the moment, would you and she consider joining forces and seeing what there is to be had that might interest both of you?


I keep imagining you studying a map of the situation you just described. Over here is you... and over there is the little girl... and before you can do anything for her you'd have to cross all these miles and miles of oceans and mountains and deserts and jungles... and it looks more and more like you just can't get there from here.

I have an idea.

Fold up the map and sit on it. Close your eyes and go into your space. Ask yourself how you know there's any little girl there. Or how you know you're here. Take what you get.

I think that your way out of this starts with reconnecting with who you are right now. Total reconnection, not just your brain.

What if the little girl disappears when I fold up the map? The map disappears, too, and so when I try to sit on the map instead I am propelled downward, like I have fallen into a well. And as I am falling, I notice that the world is black. Slowly I lose the sensation of falling. In fact, I was never falling. And the blackness expands. And expands. And it is blackness and roaring static at the same time. And the blackness/static is everything, there is nothing, no voice inside of me, no little girl.

It's terrifying. Nothing. Black space expanding. It says the blackness is bigger than my brain, so if I let it, it will fill all the spaces in my mind and expand even more, swallow up every last bit of me, and in the end, I will drown in it, and it will be oozing out of my ears and my mouth and my eyes..

This is where meditation brings me if I stay too long in it. To me it is terrifying, and what happens then is I just give up the whole thing. There is no little girl's voice inside of me, there is no me, and just screw it all. I think I'm missing something though. Some essential piece that will provide some solace, some hope.

"What if?" Are you saying that did happen for you, or you just want to be prepared in case it does?
When I've been in workshops where we did exercises like this, we've been advised ahead of time to keep distinguishing between what we experience here and now, and whatever story or stories we might tell ourselves about it. I almost always found the distinction a lot easier to grasp when it was someone else's story being used as an illustration: "Sheesh, how could I get sucked into mistaking that for my experience?" It was surprisingly hard when the "story" was one I was accustomed to telling myself and (I later found) I had some kind of attachment/investment in it. The story turned out to be my way of protecting myself from experiencing something: I might tell myself I was the kind of person who couldn't successfully experience something so I should, for example, stay away from situations that might trigger such an experience for me. It never felt like a story going in; it was obviously "what's so", "what everybody knows" (or should know) about me. It was only after I learned (more or less the hard way) to draw the distinction between the story and my actual experience that I could look back and ask myself, "How on earth could I have thought I 'knew' that?"

So for you, is this an experience or a story, or are you still working on the distinction?Going out on a limb a bit here: I say that if it's your experience, the tendency will be for you to move through it and out the other side to whatever's up next for you. If it's a story, the tendency will be for it to become more solid, persistent, believable and convincing.

Last year you turned me on to Steven Hayes and his colleagues, whom I've been reading ever since as time permits (doing my laundry, waiting for my flight to be called...). I was tickled to find that they draw a distinction between something they call "clean pain" and "dirty pain". Clean pain is whatever you're willing to experience, allow to happen, let go of and move on. Dirty pain is what you subject yourself to in order to avoid clean pain, and is by far the more unpleasant of the two. I hadn't seen these terms before and I know that if someone had told me earlier that I was subjecting myself to "dirty pain" it would've sounded pretty awful to me and I would've subjected myself to a whole lot more dirty pain to defend myself from the accusation.

My experience of such "situations" is rather different. I typically find myself thinking, "I disappear? OK, I disappear! I've been creating my experience (and my story) since way back so what's one more time?"

Heck, I disappear every time I fall asleep and create myself again when I wake up. I'll bet you do the same!

Many have said this and I'm not sure exactly whom I'm quoting: the only way out is through.

Well, she did disappear. I could not find her at all when I did this exercise. And the world expanded into blackness and I was drowning in it. That was my experience. But what you are saying about the stories we tell ourselves.. after I had this experience, it became a story. I processed it in words and began to analyze it. I think I actually do this to the majority of events that noticeably change my emotions in any way, good or bad.

As in, given the scalpel, they dissect a kiss, or, sold the reason, they undream a dream. And, writing that, I should caution myself not to make another story out of it. But I will, anyway.

Absolutely. Thank you for this. That is exactly the difference. I struggle a lot to tell the difference between my experience and the story-about-my-experience (the judgments, the analysis). This is exactly it. Ha. This is how I experience my "stories."

Clean pain vs. dirty pain has been my favorite ACT explanation so far, actually! It's cool to hear you bring it up! I also like the "struggle switch." I ask myself, "is your struggle switch on?"

Actually, do you remember the thread after my last session with my old T? At the end of the post, I said something like, "this is clean pain, this is life-lived-well pain." I was totally thinking in ACT terms at the time. And at that time, I drew heavily on ACT skills to get me through the whirlwind of crazy emotion.

Each metaphor has a tendency, though, to trap and trick me, since I can use any metaphor to avoid internal experiences. Or, I should say, I have a tendency to use metaphors to trap and trick myself. Even one like distinguishing between clean and dirty pain. But maybe that tendency to trap and trick myself kind of plays along with this idea:


If you know what I mean.

I don't feel ready to believe that I disappear when I sleep! I feel I'll go insane if I allow myself to notice, like Sylvia Plath, that when I close my eyes, the whole world drops dead. Right now it is a story, so I can bear it, but the experience is something different. My brain sometimes starts to scream when I meditate, well screaming like sirens, telling me that this experience is dangerous. And who am I to know whether it is possible that I could approach a gate which would propel me to "another side" and my "self" on this earth would be forever lost? Who knows what makes people really lose it?

I'm sorry you feel this.
Its so ironic that I just wrote a new post and you described so fluently what I'
was trying to explain to everyone.

I too, feel very very paralyzed.

And that's fine. On other occasions your experience is likely to be quite different. What makes a big difference, perhaps the biggest, is how willing you are to allow whatever comes up for you to come up.
We all do that! What mindfulness is about, is learning to observe your experience as you're experiencing it instead of reading it back from the record later along with whatever meanings you've attached to it by then.
[e. e. cummings! ]

Good! When you notice yourself making a story out of something, that is an experience. Just go ahead and do it, and continue to notice yourself doing it, for however long you do.
Just keep noticing. "I am struggling." "I am telling a story about my experience." "Now I'm judging..."
That would be this thread (referring also to this one). I only caught one of those the first time; thanks for bringing up the other one now. It's clean pain right when you're experiencing it. Afterwards, it becomes just another story. (A good one, though! )
And you did seem to get through, and even to benefit from having been there. I do something a lot like that too, though I didn't learn it as ACT so I don't call it that. By the way, I think the most appropriate tribute you could possibly pay to your former therapist is to keep using and expanding on what you learned while you were with her!

It's going to take quite a while for that video to load on this connection. I'm also a bit nervous that it may lock up my computer (as has sometimes happened) so I just saved a copy of this post down to here. I love Alan Watts, though!
Good. (1.) just notice that, and (2.) ask yourself, are you willing to experience your mind screaming at you like a siren and whatever it's warning you against? Either answer is perfectly fine. If you're willing, go ahead; if you're not, don't; and either way, just take what you get.

Oh, wow, you're reminding me of some experiences I used to have pretty regularly when I was in my 20s and even some way into my 30s. I'd be alone in the house at night, say, and I'd start wondering: "I remember that outside my room there's the rest of the house, and the front door, and then the street. I checked the front door an hour ago and it was locked; nothing can get in. I should be perfectly safe here, only... what if it's not the way I remember it? What if right outside my room now is a haunted castle, or a cavern, or hell, or another planet?"

Or later, when I lived in a cabin a few hundred feet back in the woods, I'd be making my way home by flashlight and the trees and bushes would start to look unfamiliar. If it turned out that I was no longer where I thought I was but had somehow ended up on the wrong trail, in a different country, or on a different planet, how would I ever explain to myself how I got there or find my way back? In retrospect I compare such experiences to dreaming (which, I understand, isn't very different in some ways from psychosis).

(Please treat this next part as idle speculation.) It occurs to me that when I'm relying on my mind (story, history, conclusions, judgments, evaluation, and whatever I'm attached to) for guidance, then anything that calls my mind into question -- "How do I know that I'm still on the same planet?" for instance -- feels like a severe threat. If my mind were to let me down once, as by letting me inexplicably get transported to an unfamiliar location, how could I ever trust it again? When I'm willing to be in the here-and-now, though, I can picture myself saying "Ooh, cool, I've never visited hell (or wherever this is) before!"


The Alan Watts video has loaded about 1/4 of the way by now and yes, I do like it! "After I have suffered enough -- then maybe I'll deserve it". That reminds me of Hayes's "dirty pain" and of someone else's older, absurdly simple suggestion: "Give up suffering." Watts may get around to that himself but I don't know if I'll have time to let enough of the video load.

i hate life