Welcome to the forum, SoakinLady. I don't have an official answer to your question but I think for me to go deeply into the feelings that are buried there needs to be a solid level of trust and safety with my T. This can take a long time to establish and really can't be rushed. You have to build the relationship and get to know each other before you feel safe and comfortable enough to let those buried feelings rise to the top and then be able to discuss them. For me, I do it slowly, letting out a bit at a time as I feel I'm able to handle it.

How long are you with your T?

TN

I don't have any advice, but I have been seeing 1 and sometimes 2 ts for a year and I still cannot say I know what emotions I had as a child. The one I have been with longer will say something about how I might have felt (angry, sad etc) and logically I can say - yes, that would be a response I can agree could have happened, but I do not feel anything now or remember feeling anything at all back then.

I really get what your going through..

I am exactly the same. When my therapist asks 'how do you feel about this?' I haven't a clue. There is nothing. Nil. Numbed off from years back.

Very similar with my Dad. I remember him raging but I don't feel the fury or anger at him. Even when younger I didn't feel like I had fury. Just scared. In a somewhat constant passive state most of the time. I even remember trying to burn my house down once because I was so fed up but it was an act of calmness. I wasn't furious. All I remember was being fed-up, had given up and thought 'yeah, burn it down. Cool'. I was nervous to do it but I was willing, without thinking about the consequences. Unfortunately my Dad turned up in the nick of time.

I would like to know some techniques too in fact. I imagine that the rage is fuming somewhere like a dorment volcano but where, goodness knows.

The weird thing is that sometimes I cry and I'll cry in relation to my Dad usually but I still do not 'feel' authentically. I still cannot connect the crying to the feeling. The tears are real because they come about but the feeling behind that is totally disassociated. Empty heartfelt tears. I'll cry and then I'll forget about it.

Hi SoakinLady,

It's nice to "meet" you. I've been giving your question some thought. I can relate. A lot of times when my therapist asks "How do you feel about that?" I just get embarrassed and say I don't really know.

Soo. . . I'm not sure I have anything at all helpful to say in reply to your thread, but one thing I am trying to do, is when I *do* have a feeling that spontaneously arises (whether while in or outside of therapy) is to pause, pay attention, take note of it, appreciate it for whatever it is and whatever it might mean, and really experience it.

I'm hoping this will lead to more wholeness and emotional richness in general.

Good luck to you on your journey!

Hi SoakinLady

Welcome to the forums! I was very shut down to my feelings when I started therapy and there as a long time when if you asked me how I felt, the answer was "scared." That seemed to be the only one I could really recognize (probably because at one point in therapy I realized that I had lived my whole life steeped in fear.) I think what TN said is very important here. People who are distancing from their own emotions are usually doing so for a good reason, such as their feelings weren't tolerated by their caretakers, or they experienced intense emotion that they couldn't handle themselves and no one was there to help them handle it. So we stuff our feelings away because they can feel really overwhelming, even to the point that it can feel like to actually let them surface and experience them will destroy us. So safety with your T is the first step. You need to know that your T will accept all of you, including all your feelings, and can help contain those feelings when they come out. This does take time, and you have to start letting things out in pretty small increments, so that you can build up the experience of having feelings, having someone there to help you with them and understand you. This isn't about cognitive understanding (I am sure that you could tell yourself right now, but I am safe with my T.) it's about building up the experience of safety until you believe it on a deep level. It's why a T can SAY their trustworthy until their blue in the face but we won't trust them until we experience them as trustworthy. My T always described therapy as place safe enough to feel scared.

And when I started to let my feelings out, like DF, it was through my body. I would have times where I would say I wasn't feeling anything and my T would point out that my voice was cracking, or my fists were clenched. You know the word "visceral," we use it to describe intense emotion because we actually feel a lot of emotion in our guts, in our body.

This is very simplified but when a human being develops in the womb, the nervous system "unfurls" and develops the brain stem and brain at one end but it extends down through your body. So when I am staying away from my feelings I tend to stay "up" in my head. So I would literally try to focus on how does my stomach feel, what am I feeling in my chest, am I tense or relaxed? That's how I found out that fear makes me feel hollow, sadness makes my chest feel really heavy and anger feels like an explosion of heat in my chest. We're more than capable of hiding our feelings from our own minds, but our bodies tend to put it right out there.

Hope that helps, it's pretty slow, hard work. It's ok to be patient with yourself about it.

AG

Well, I have been in therapy for about a year. But, mostly during this year I have mostly been "trying out" therapists. I have tried 3 or 4. Wednesday I have an appointment with the first counselor I had seen. I like him (and have always liked him). He had said some insightful things to me. We just had an issue that we could not agree on and he would not let it go. I am hoping that we can work it out this time.