quote:

I knew a lot of the things you write to be true of myself. I just didn't know that they were so _normal_.

CQ

This is the greatest thought that has kept me coming to this forum each day. The thought that I just might be normal!
I thought I was the freak who had embarrassing, ridiculous, inappropriate thoughts. What an eye opener it was for me to meet people who not only had these thoughts, but completely understood me. Please stay with us. You will be amazed by all the support and compassion and knowledge you will gain from this group.

PL

quote:

Emotions tend to barge in, uninvited, and threaten to usurp what I'm trying to become.

CQ,
I so totally understand that. I hated my emotions for so long and can still get pretty annoyed at them. This would all be so much easier to get through if I could just think my way out of it. My T often says that if it were just cognitive, you would walk in, they would hand you a book, and say have a nice life. But it doesn't work like that, we have to experience the emotions and have them be understood and heard to heal. This is a really good place to do that because we understand what it is to need that place. And I can tell you that eventually emotions become your ally, conveying important information about your life and informing your decisions about how you want to live it, instead of an enemy storming your ramparts and threatening to disarm you.

I'm really glad you found this place. And you elicite the same response because you are a human being with dignity and worth just like the rest of us. Just because we all have trouble believing it about ourselves, don't mean it ain't true.

It is humbling to see the strength, courage and wisdom in everyone (else's) posts. I find it continually amazing that such an extraordinary group of people could be so plagued with self doubt. Good thing I enjoy irony.

AG

HB,

Hmm, good question. I'll give you my take, although I don't believe that it's a definitive answer by any stretch. I'm also still learning this so its a work in progress, if you know what I mean.

I tend to use feelings and emotions interchangably. My definition of a feeling or emotion is our immediate reaction to an event. A feeling is not something we decide, its something we have and is therefore not subject to judgement or condemnation. (NB: That is SO much harder to do than it is to know, I still spend WAY too much time beating myself up for my feelings.) It just is. It's a fact to be examined in order to understand ourselves.

My T often says to me that instead of hating myself for the way I feel, I should look upon it as another opportunity to get to know myself. Our feelings can often be indicators of our underlying beliefs and the template we're using for our relationships. Once you understand why you feel the way you do, then you can use that as input into what action you wish to take.

For instance. Someone does something and you react by feeling angry. In one case, you may think about it and decide that you need to do something to change the situation. Another time when you get angry you think about it and realize that it relates back to your past, that the anger was triggered but isn't really necessary in the present situation, so you don't need to act on it.

We need to learn to "mentalize" to think about how we think. Our feelings are sometimes an excellent reflection of reality and therefore should be acted on. Other times our feelings can be a distortion and our ability to recognize that can open up a lot more choices.

An example from my experience because I'm really struggling to describe this: I am terrified that if I tell my T I "googled" him, he's going to tell me that I can no longer be his patient. That feeling is real, but when I reflect on it, I remember that my T has told me, time and again, that I won't be sent away. So although my feelings would dictate not telling him, after thinking it through I decide that it is important to tell him (so I'm not hiding things in the relationship because the whole point is to let someone know me fully and see if they stay.) so I go against my fear and tell him. (He responded beautifully by the way.) And I was able to learn that moving towards someone brought comfort instead of pain which actually reduces the fear for next time.

On the other hand I could be in a situation like walking through a dark garage and I hear someone following me. I feel scared. When I think about that I decide I should be and head towards a security guard or take the closest exit. The fear, in this case, alerted us to a real danger, so we could take action to stay safe.

Man, I hope this is making some sense.

I also know that examining my feelings and having them be heard by my T allows me to follow the emotions back to the source and make sense of my experience. One more life example, if you've the patience.

My T is also doing couples' counseling with my husband and I, and in a session we were talking about something from a previous couples session. It was an argument where I had been really unable to hear my husband because I was getting triggered. I was often having complete meltdowns in couples counseling at the time that was kind of slowing down the work. I was expressing to my T how I felt like I was just asking so much from both him and my husband that they would get sick of it and leave. That I was expecting too much reassurance out of him. That I was sucking the life out of him. My T told me that he didn't feel that way at all, he wasn't "working that hard over here" but that the feeling was me trying to make sense of my experience. That I wasn't sucking the life out of him, my father has sucked the life out of me. At that moment, I vividly remembered what it had felt like to have my father take from me for his needs while totally ignoring mine. And my need to grieve that. So talking about a fear that my T would leave led to a fear I was asking too much led to the grief surrounding my father's actions. If I could not have acknowledged those feelings and expressed them, I would not have found the source of the pain that led me to not want to ask anything of anyone because it would be too much. So learning that also taught me that it was ok to ask, providing me with more options to deal with my problems.I could ask other people for help. (You know of course that this was not a one time thing and I still struggle with it. But it was an important step along the way.)

AG

quote:

I am terrified of my T, i get worse anxiety seeing him than anywhere else in my life. What confuses me is the conflict, my heart is pounding with fear while the rest of me knows he is not trying to hurt me.

HB

I went through months and months of this. It was so confusing because I knew that I really wanted to see her, but I was scared to death. I felt as if I were hyperventilating every time I drove to her office. I shook like a leaf as I sat in the waiting room. When she called me in, I would sit in the chair with every muscle of my body tensed up. To me, the fear and anxiety was very real. None of this made sense to me, until I started to test the waters with her. I would let out one small feeling and realize that she was so accepting of it.

You are right that our feelings are not black and white. My T keeps reminding me of that because I seem to be a very black/white, right/wrong person. These feelings that I have for her are very much in the present, but as we look at them together, I can see how they are related to my internal world. Related to my relationships of the past. And because her reaction is different from the reaction that I am used to, or the reaction I am expecting, I am creating new patterns in my brain. It is very enlightening to relate these current feelings to situations that I really never looked at before, and realizing that they are related. I have only just begun to make sense of this. Hence, this long journey continues.

PL

quote:

I am terrified of my T, i get worse anxiety seeing him than anywhere else in my life. What confuses me is the conflict, my heart is pounding with fear while the rest of me knows he is not trying to hurt me.

I get this, too. Not so much with my old T (Tfella), but with all of the new ones. And with group therapy. Boo. But based on my experiences with Tfella, I _think_ this goes away? Kinda? Sometimes? Once we're gone through the whole "mentalizing" process AG was talking about?

I'm really interested to figure out how mentalizing (which, as you describe it AG, is pretty cool) from "intellectualizing" (defense mechanism, often bad) - which I'm guilty of at least some of the time.

Sorry its taken me so long to respond, things got crazy wild at work yesterday and I had a couples session last night (in which, guess what, my T, husband and I discussed sex. Which was as embarrassing as I thought it would be, I had little flames shooting off my ear lobes I was blushing so hard, but it really was helpful. My T is unflappable, you would have thought he was discussing the weather. )

As far as being scared to go to therapy, have I ever shared my "ballistic rocket" theory of therapy? When a rocket follows a ballistic flight between planets, you essentially fire the rockets and accelerate towards the planet or moon you're trying to reach. But at some point you have to stop accelerating or you'll shoot past or run into it so hard, you'll be killed. So the rocket flips over and starts firing its jets so that its accelarating AWAY from its destination, which acts as a brake.

That's how I often feel about my sessions (not so much lately which is nice). The further away they are the more I want to go because I want to be with my T and feel safe and cared for. But at some point, when I get close enough to the session, the realization starts to surface that when I'm with my T and feel safe, I'm also going to have to feel some really uncomfortable things and do some really difficult work. At which point, I start trying to accelerate in the opposite direction.

I literally spent months terrified to go to each session. I am the best terrified driver in the world. I've actually started sessions by sitting down, telling my T I needed a few minutes, then bending over and just concentrating on breathing I've been so scared. So yeah I understand what you guys are talking about.

Wynne,
Here's my shot at mentalizing versus intellectualizing (I am a champion intellectulizer.) BTW, I read about mentalizing in a number of sources but the best description I've read so far is in Attachment in Psychotherapy by David Wallin. It's tough going because its really a text book for therapists but there was a lot of really good information on attachment and how it translates into clinical practice. He actually described a lot of the work I've done with my T (who has a very dog eared copy of this book on his desk.)

OK, when you "intellectualize" it's an attempt to perform a logical analysis of a situation in order to not feel a situation. You are staying in your left brain to avoid feeling the emotions going on in your right brain.

Mentalizing is the process of "de-embedding" from your emotions. Our emotions can be so intense that they overwhelm our ability to make choices or discern whether or not they reflect reality (which we discussed above). When you mentalize, you let yourself experience the emotions and all the associated affects but you then pull back so to speak, and try to put the emotions in context. You realize that how you think about and react to your emotions is different from just taking them as perfectly reflecting reality. You're thinking about thinking.

So bottom line, intellectualizing is an attempt to avoid emotions while mentalizing is an attempt to use your emotions as a resource.

Does this make sense? I'm still very much learning to do this so I'm not sure how well I'm describing it.

AG

Makes sense, AG. I hear that mentalizing is using your emotions as a resource to understand. I'm pretty sure I could fall off the wagon into intellectualizing, but I can see that it's at least possible to sustain a difference over the long haul.

Thanks for the clarification.

*note* appointment tomorrow with new CalmT, scarescaredscaredscaredscared.....

Wynne,
If you weren't scared, it would probably be because you didn't know what you were getting into. That ignorance is kind of hard to maintain while spending time here.

Just remember to breathe, you'll be ok, And let us know how it goes.

AG

Wynne

You are so courageous to keep working so hard and not giving up. I wish the best for you tomorrow, and that it ends up being a match.

PL

Wynne,
What is there to be scared of? Therapy is a cake walk, just look at me!
Just kidding of course.

I hope you have a good, calm session with new Calm-T. We'll be waiting to hear from you.
JM