[Mouse_]

One of the things that is sticking in my mind from my session yesterday was when sobbing through a guilt issue I am currently going through, I said to T that I feel I have exegerated things. T said so what, its not just the external events in life its your inner world that we deal with too. I've been trying to understand that. Does she mean that though things may have happened on the outside, how I insides react to it is just as important, if not more so??? Which leads me to think that no matter what did or didn't happen in "real" terms, we still have to deal with the feelings, and no matter whether they are right or wrong, they are what they are and we have to listen to them regardless of what happened or didn't happen? But then are we all different in as much as there is no one way to expect to feel about any situation? almost like throw the stone into the lake and wait and see how many ripples will appear??

[Perna]

I think "dealing with it" doesn't make a claim one way or another about its rightness. It is important because it's the only way we can look at things; if we have our view different from others, we do need to fix it for some things, get to understanding how others see it or how it is set up to be, etc. But having seen it our way, it's possible we can help others understand it better overall. I'm notorious among friends and family for seeing things in an "odd" fashion but once people see what I see and how I understand things they are often amused, delighted, etc. It helps that I can also see things the way most people see it. I use to be unhappy because I was odd-woman-out most of the time, I'd say some pretty bizarre things sometimes because what I understood and what was actually happening didn't match.

No one else has the same experience you have except in a general sense. "Mother dying" will mean different things to different people so what one feels is never wrong but people who laugh at "mother dying" are not going to be in the majority and if they can't explain why they are laughing, what they see that is so funny to them, the combination (of laughter and not explaining) is going to make them look like they may be having a problem? Their reaction is not expected by most people.

I think that's what T's are good at, letting us know that our reactions and responses make sense, not just to us but to someone else. Seeing that we have made sense all along, that what we use to see as strange or weird or different isn't so given our backgrounds and stories.

[Mouse_]

I think this has just led me into the realm of understanding myself a whole lot better. Realising that hey I do have an inner world and its very entilted to have its reactions. I've lived in the outside world dictated by everyone else but myself in how I should feel that I had never even begun to develop my own inner world. Maybe thats why I've always been like a leaf in the wind blowing in which ever direction the strongest blast is coming from beause I have not rooted in my own place of standing...!!!!

People often misrepresent external events because they are attempting to justify or render their inner response understandable. That is fairly natural. To try and convey external events in a way that evokes a similar emotional experience in the listener.

Maybe that was what your therapist was getting at?

I quite like the line that what is remembered is important not for what it says about external reality (so much) but for what it says about the clients internal experience. Often people confuse internal experience with external reality (e.g., 'I felt afraid' becomes 'they were trying to hurt me - like when they did xxx'). I think that happens as a part of working through ones internal experience. Takes a while before people come to really truely believe that their internal experience was justified NO MATTER WHAT the external facts were...

People often misrepresent external events because they are attempting to justify or render their inner response understandable. That is fairly natural. To try and convey external events in a way that evokes a similar emotional experience in the listener.

Maybe that was what your therapist was getting at?

I quite like the line that what is remembered is important not for what it says about external reality (so much) but for what it says about the clients internal experience. Often people confuse internal experience with external reality (e.g., 'I felt afraid' becomes 'they were trying to hurt me - like when they did xxx'). I think that happens as a part of working through ones internal experience. Takes a while before people come to really truely believe that their internal experience was justified NO MATTER WHAT the external facts were...