Weird insight.

I say weird because it was happening alongside me talking. It was this sudden knowing. Like a wiser being was telling me the right course to take as I was trying to talk to T about a hurt I was feeling.

I carried on talking but even as I left T (in a dissatisfied state) the knowing was there.

I can't remember where or what I read yesterday but it was something about opening ourselves up to emptiness so we could know fulfilment.

That must have gone into my subconscious because today in T it was about pain & longing and this knowledge didn't want me to run from it. I felt that even my session sort of going wrong is all part of it.

I had an awareness of the ways I abandon myself by escaping uncomfortable feelings. By always trying to make sure I leave session on a positive. Sometimes it's not possible. Things do fall apart. This too needs to be accepted.

Nothing changes if nothing changes was one of the sentences coming from inside me. And that I need to sit with my emptiness so it can be comforted.

Weird feeling.

Painful though it might be, this sounds like a really important awareness and step you're taking. Great work...I really admire what you're doing.

Reminded me of one of my favorite quotes, from the Buffalo Springfield song, "For What It's Worth" of 1967, "Nobody's right if everybody's wrong".

Great insight!

I don't know if what I experience is the same thing as you are describing, but sometimes in T or in life otherwise, I have a "split screen" kind of experience where I am either experiencing or describing one screen, but something kind of parallel or somehow connected is playing on the other screen. My T calls this integration and it can feel like that, or kind of like movement from how I've been to how I want to be.

But I think that wanting to be different, to want to be able to sit with uncomfortable feelings as you're describing, is the first and biggest step to it being different, or to change. Nobody changes if they don't WANT to change. Or maybe people are forced to change for survival, but I don't think that's what you're talking about or what people generally have to do in T.

The really cool thing about negative emotions, on the occasions when I let myself feel them, is that it's really not that hard to sit with them. You learn that they won't kill you, can't hurt you, and that they are just emotions-- they are incapable of producing harm, by themselves. It takes behavior and people to be harmful.

Yeah 'split screen'. That's what it was like

I always thought that was kinda what good therapy was supposed to let us do: experience the insights for ourselves. When that happens, we feel we have done the work. That is great! It means we are learning how to be healthy without being under the T's nose. It is also called internalizing the therapist.
Give yourself a big pat on the back!

sounds like you made a positive step forwards in your healing. great job of listening inside and doing what you needed to do for your well being..