Realizing how I deal with feelings that I don’t recognize.
The series about what I learn in cognitive behavior therapy consist of the following parts:
- Cognitive behavior therapy
- Strong anonymous feelings
- 751
- Feeling scared
- Accepting comments selectively
- Mad as Hell
Some times I feel
- a kind of tingling white noise going through my body. It’s actually quite a nice feeling but I don’t know by what it is caused. Which makes it impossible to summon it.
- a cold wind blowing through my body. The kind of feeling that wants me to turn on the heating. But then I look at my thermometer and find that it’s 24° C in my room. It’s a horrible feeling but since I don’t know what causes it I don’t know how to avoid it.
- talkative. I shouldn’t list talking to myself as a feeling. But it is kind of a feeling. A very annoying feeling at that. It tenses me up and it paralyzes me. It makes it impossible to do the work I would like to do.
- anger.
- a collection of psychical sensation of which I’ve learned that it means that I’m scared. But I don’t always realize the meaning of those sensations.
I never feel sadness but I do know that when tears run from your eyes you are supposed to be sad. Or it must be the kind of orange tension I feeling when I’m crying. But I don’t think so.
At this weeks session of CBT we set the target for the therapy and talked about recognizing emotions.
Although I’ve been in therapy before this was the first time I actually got to set the goal. Which is nice because it gives my control over the therapy.
Two of the 6 therapies I had in the last 25 years had a clear cut goal that wasn’t reached. But still the psychiatrist was very pleased with himself. Once the psychiatrist set a goal with which I didn’t agree but I was told to take it or leave it. The other three times we just talked for one and a half year. I never felt that my problems were solved but apparently the psychiatrist did.
This time the goal will be two fold.
One goal will be to get a better understanding of my feeling. The second goal is to get rid of the talkativeness. To finally find a way to do the things I want to do.
Since last weeks session I do know why have been talking to myself for all those years.
It has a positive feedback loop to it.
Even though it tenses me up it does make that I don’t feel the tinkling feeling and more important it also makes that I don’t feel the cold feeling. It’s very difficult for me to deal with feelings I don’t recognize. Even when they are nice feelings.
Last week I’ve been trying not to talk to myself and to find out what kind of feeling I would be suppressing. Once I felt a little nervous, but most of the time I just didn’t recognize the feeling. Mostly I felt cold.
After setting a goal we talked about emotions and feelings.
What is the difference?
I always thought that feelings are what you have in your body, headache or pain in your leg, and that emotions were the more abstract kinds like anger and falling in love.
But apparently there is an order to feelings.
The more basic feelings that even a dog could have; anger, fear, joy and sadness are called “emotions”. The more human feelings like disappointment are called “feelings”.
My homework for this week is to think about the difference between feeling nervous, feeling fear and feeling panic.
Difference in the psychical sensations they invoke, the way you would react to them and an other thing I don’t remember.
About 15 years ago I took a few years to figure out what the psychical sensations of the most important emotions were. And to figure out in what way people would act when they had those feelings.
The main reason I wanted to know that was to be able to recognize people who where angry or fearful. But I found that it also helped my to recognize my own feelings.
But in the last few days I realized that there is a difference between feeling and knowing a list of behavioral features.
The problem is that it is to theoretical.
When I see some one dressed for cold whether while it’s 25° C I conclude that it’s quite possible that they are scared. But when I feel cold shivers going down my back while it’s 25° C I never realize that I might be scared.
I don’t think I am, but I never even thought about it.
I know the list of psychical sensations associated with feeling scared by heart:
- choking feeling in your throat.
- pain in your stomach.
- pressure on your lungs.
- feeling cold.
- an ever stronger need to go to the bathroom.
But I never realized that the toilet problems I’ve been having, had anything to do with feeling panic. Even though they started with a panic attack I had a little over a year ago.
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Accepting comments selectively
by Henk ter Heide on Sunday October 26, 2008
Dealing with anger by selectively listening to comments.
The series about what I learn in cognitive behavior therapy consist of the following parts:
One of the assignment of CBT two weeks ago was to find the psychical sensations associated with feeling angry.
Seeing as how easy it was to find the psychical sensation associated with feeling fear I didn’t expect that to be very hard. But it turned out to be impossible.
Although I’ve been angry several times in the last two weeks I never noticed that I was angry until the anger passed. So I did notice that being angry causes you to raise your voice. And I noticed that I have trouble expressing myself when I’m angry. I kind of loose the ability to talk.
But I don’t know how it feels.
Talking about this with the psychiatrist, he suggested to investigate whether I have some thought or feeling just before I get angry. So if I can’t recognize my anger by the psychical sensation I might at least be able to recognize it by the thoughts I have just before.
That assignment turned out to be far more easier then I expected. You would think that if you aren’t aware of your feeling of anger you wouldn’t know what happens just before you get angry. But that turned out to be obvious.
I’m always commenting on myself. Or actually I’m always imaging people commenting on me.
Turns out that when I imagine someone talking me down, I feel scared. When I imagine someone giving me a comment in which he tells me that he didn’t listen to something I had to say, I feel anger.
After I found that, I figured I should go to the next level. Knowing what scares and angers me, I should be able to avoid getting those feelings altogether.
But I’ve tried for years to stop myself from imagining people who are commenting on me. I’ve never succeeded and I really don’t know how I could. Further more the comments I imagine that people are giving me are based on comments I really get from people. They frighten and anger me just as much when I get them for real as when I imagine it happening.
Thinking about something a Steve Pavlina says somewhere in his blog: You can decide for yourself which comments have meaning for you and which don’t.
Sometimes people are only commenting because it’s easier for them to let you do the work then to do the work themselfs.
I decided to only accept two kinds of comments:
This is the point I reached last wednesday. After living with these rules for two days it seemed as though all my problems were solved.
I came across several situation where my feelings about myself improved significantly after using these rules. Some of those situations only existed in my imagination while others were actually happening.
The most important one was when I told my father that I had found out that something I used to fight about with my mother really wasn’t my fault. Most autistics have this problem.
But he didn’t believe me!
That horrified me until I realized that it really didn’t matter anymore. This isn’t something I can change, whether he believes me or not. It’s not my responsibility to decide what he believes. And last but not least I been living on own for the better part of 30 years so he can’t really hurt me.
I really expected that this would be the end of my problems. That I would stop talking to myself and start drawing and writing art reviews again.
But it didn’t. The talking to myself has actually gotten worse. I can’t find the energy to draw and to write reviews. (Although I will be publishing the blog carnival next wednesday.)
But the anger and the fear are gone!
I just have to figure out what’s next.
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