Alan Gordon June 9 Drop-In Chat with Alan Gordon, LCSW

Hi all, I've been working through this post and listening to webinar recording. I can't work out how the Jody's brain picture fits in. Could someone please explain, thanks.

 

Thank you, I missed the bit about Jody being a former patient, now it makes sense.

 

Hi TMS friends,

New to these drop in chats; are they every Saturday? Just listened to the "Ginger" segment per Alan Gordon's suggestion. It was really insightful and powerful.

Is there a way to videoconference future Drop In Chats? Just spitballin' here...I Skype with Alan Gordon so there must be some technological way.

 

Just finished listening to the session, it gave me some huge insights. It's made contemplate finding a therapist but being downunder I wouldn't know where to even begin to find one. I certainly don't feel like the therapists I saw in the past were close to the mark for my issues.

Thanks to all who organised and participated

 

“I seem to create surrogates in my mind for hypercritical superego figures.” That part got a laugh out of me. I could have written those words myself.

 

Shanshu, I don't know for sure, but that's the way my "internal bully" seems to act: indirectly, via self-created surrogates in my mind that I argue with all day. I think it's a strategy my mind has developed as a way to avoid directly confronting my hypercritical father and the inferiority complex he was trying to pass along to me (although he probably thought it was all 'for my own good'!) At least my dad loved me, but in his own peculiar tortured way! Better than the kind of dad who sits there in a drunken all-day stupor watching the boxing matches and telling you to get lost. At least my dad succeeded in making me into an over-achiever with a built-in inferority complex, which is better than my alcoholic uncle who made my cousin into a drunk, but either child-rearing approach has its own intrinsic limitations!

 

I hope Alan's response was able to help you.

 

Well, at least Alan made me aware of the internal bully lurking behind the various self-constructed masks that people my wandering mental dialogs. I think his conclusion was short, instructive and to the point: "non-productive". I do notice that his critique did seem to snap me out of my mental constructions by making me aware of their true nature. My own conclusion: You have to address your internal bully directly without evading the bigger issues lurking beneath of the surface by punching at a cast of characters from your past who are really more like "sock puppets", alter egos of the real 'Enemy Within'. What's that Castenada says about "Being done with personal history"? I do notice that since Alan made that remark I haven't been able to engage in mental wars quite so easily with adversarial characters like Mike V. the application engineer from work who always criticized me; Mary, the back pain patient from P.T. who always gave me sh_t; Debbie, my Jesus-freak boss at a cable test company; the office bully salesman in Boulder; Jan, the high-school dropout maintenance man; the list of ghostly characters in nearly endless. All different versions of my late father criticizing me for years and years while I couldn't really fight back because he was bigger and had power over me. Once you've wised up to the game you're playing, you can't do it with the same kind of conviction and obsession as before someone like Alan pointed out to you what utter nonsense you were engaged in. I must admit: I still engage in those same sort of mental conflicts from time to time, but then I remember what Alan said and it's much easier to snap out of that kind of "non-productive" mental behavior and silence the disembodied voices arguing in my head.

 

I finally got a chance to listen to this and it was amazing! Thanks so much to Alan for doing this and Forest for moderating.

Feeling feelings is one of my big issues--sometimes I have a hard time knowing what I am actually feeling, and on the flip side I often worry that I feel things way more intensely than I'm "supposed to." I like the idea of just feeling what's going on in the body and noticing feelings but not going at it by *thinking* about feelings (which is what I often do when I'm journaling or talking about feelings).

 

When I'm feeling "too much" I worry that 1) I'm going to get engulfed by feelings and lose control of my life; 2) I'm going to make other people around me uncomfortable; 3) I'm going to stuff everything down to avoid making anyone uncomfortable and then end up feeling isolated and overwhelmed (which is what I usually do).

 

Forest: Ever since I read Peter Levine, I've been trying to use some of his exercises to develop my "felt sense", which is something like what Alan means, I take it, of feeling feelings "in your body". Makes you wonder just how far consciousness extends outside your brain, doesn't it? But after listening to Alan, I have been trying self-consciously to tell my inner bully to just plain, "Shut up!" Of course, my inner bully manifests as different intermediaries - ghosts from the past - people who have criticized me while the social context and my desire to be liked have made me repress my emotions and do a slow burn deep inside. But after listening to Alan I realize that they are all substitutes for my tyrannical inner parent father-figure. I think that Howard Schubiner says the something similar about listening to the voices of your inner parent at the same time you also insist on doing things your own way. Seems to me that too many psychotherapists and counselors are too involved in theory, but Alan is certainly a non-nonsense pragmatist who seems really interested in ways of achieving positive results. I do notice now that whenever one of the masks for my internal bully tries to seduce me into a "non-productive" internal dialog that I've become aware of what's going on and don't continue the internal argument, cut it right off at the root. Not always though, but sometimes with enough conviction that my day goes a heck of a lot better.

 

Ah, thanks, Forest

My therapist is also a TMS therapist and works very similar to Alan. Inner child work has been helping me a lot. I find when I do sit with feelings they usually pass pretty quickly and are not actually scary. It's more the fear of feelings that is the problem.

 

MorComm, that's great work you're doing. It's a lot easier to squish a snowball at the top of the hill than halfway down when it's the size of a boulder.

Alan