Day 18 Question to Ponder: What emotions are most prevalent?

Question to Ponder:
Take a look at your journal entries. What emotions are most prevalent?

Hey all,

Looking at my journal entries- all of my entries are about me feeling 'scared' in some way or another. A lot of them are also about me being FURIOUS at people that have hurt me and events that have happened. The next emotion that is almost as common is shame- This one i didnt even realise how ashamed i felt about some things until i wrote these journals.
In all of these journals, i feel alone.

This is really shedding a light on these feelings.

 

Hi wrestlingfanforever,

I enjoy reading your tender insights about your life. To me, you're doing the real, in-depth work here.

The sense of shame is very hard to bear, and yet it may help you come closer to self-compassion. How sensitive we are, we human beings, with so many shocks in our long histories, so many ways that we want to be loved, and get the message that we may not measure up.

Interesting that you note the interplay between rage and hurt, and shame. This is such a vulnerable exploration. I suggest you try to be loving with yourself, and know that as you see more and more, you are exposing "what does not want to be felt" and this, combined with the TMS theory will undo symptoms over time. There is little to "fix" here. It is mostly about feeling, which we out of habit have learned to avoid.


Good luck in your work...

Andy

 

Yep--fear, anger, shame, and feeling alone. These are the feelings so hard to face that our unconscious does it's best to keep them from our conscious mind. Acknowledging and accepting these feelings is a big part of TMS recovery.

You are doing excellent work.

 

Congratulations wrestlingfanforever on your amazing insightfulness.

Feeling scared. Alan Gordon, the head of the Pain Psychology Center in L.A. and the author of the Pain Recovery Program on his website, once said this in an interview: "[F]ear is everything. I don't even look at the pain as something to stamp out. I look at it more as a barometer of how safe the primitive brain feels. It's just the body and the brain's way of letting us know that the primitive brain feels unsafe. Pain is a danger signal, and it's the fear and the preoccupation around the pain that determines whether or not this danger signal stays activated or shuts off."

Furious at people that have hurt me and events that have happened; shame; feeling alone. This list reminds me of ISTDP (Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy), a model that Dr. Sarno favored over cognitive behavioral therapy for patients who needed more than his education program to recover. The cornerstone of ISTDP is the late John Bowlby's attachment theory, which is about bonding relationships between people. The theory posits that we have an innate drive to bond with others, especially in long-term relationships such as between parent and child and between romantic partners. The Darwinian explanation is that such bonding helped our long-ago predecessors survive while those predecessors who lacked the drive or ability to do that perished.

In ISTDP, the core emotions are love, anger, sadness, and guilt. The central principle is that when we get angry at a person we love , that makes us feel sad (about expressing the anger and/or about the nature of our relationship) and feel guilty (that expressing our anger the way we did hurt or may have hurt the person we love). Some ISTDP practitioners add shame (for failing to live up to a standard of conduct we have set for ourselves). I suppose a feeling of loneliness also has to do with the state of the bonding relationship.

I am not a trained professional, but when you say "FURIOUS at people that have hurt me and events that have happened," I suppose that from an ISTDP perspective the former is far more important than the latter. However, from Alan Gordon's perspective, I suppose some events that happened could make your primitive brain feel pretty unsafe about your well being. At any rate, overcoming TMS entails uncovering what is going on in your psyche, and it looks to me like you are on the right track.

 

OMG When i read this part of your reply about bonding, it made me cry & think about a specific relationship! THANK YOU for posting that.

 

THANK YOU! I noticed that whenever i had a bath (instead of a shower) id end up laying there and think about those things and just get upset- so instead i started watching netflix while in the bath so i wouldnt feel these emotions- Definitely a way my unconscious mind tried to stop these thoughts from becoming concious!

 

Thanks for your reply Andy! It's nice to know it looks (& feels) like im on the right track. Even someone else acknowledging that, feels good (omg i really am a people pleaser & perfectionist LOL!)

 

Hi wrestlingfanforever,

Glad you found some support in my words. That is good --both for me as the giver and you as the kind receiver. Is that people pleasing, or simply appreciating a connection?

Andy