It takes an extraordinary amount of energy to answer when he asks, "What's going on?" in any context. So hard to explain to another person what it is like to be me...
This is emblematic of a bigger issue of the limitations of the current therapy model. I suppose it evolved coping the medical hospital model. Doctor to patient simply turned into Therapist to client. These roles can become self-fulfilling prophecies, leading to over-identification with victim roles, always having to refer to external validation or support from experts. This can indirectly weaken a person's own self-sufficiency, expertise, resiliency, and naturally ability to adapt and cope. On the flip side, the therapists can over-identify with their expert role and position, and use that as a self-coping mechanism for their own issues.
Therapists can easily become attached to their 'book learned' expertise, and push too much responsibility on their clients to explain themselves in a way that fits their model or their capacity for empathy.
In an ideal model, the relationship should be more at a peer to peer level. Both parties are responsible for creating and working on the relationship and communication. Sure, at first the one with more experience might be contributing and leading more, but eventually the relationship should evolve into equal unique contributions by both parties or all parties involved.
Also I think social exclusive and secret nature of therapy model is also counter productive. Mental illness has so many origins from social and community influences. Ideal healing should include community and involve close relationships. All too often a person's progress in therapy, simply backtracks once they return to the real world. Or in other perverse models, the therapist by over-rescuing the client, ends up with excess blaming the client's external relationships, contributing to increasing their relationship problems.
This is a problem with the therapy model, it's all done in a bubble. Too much focus on getting healing done in an artificial environment, and not as much expertise or focus on how to incorporate that healing into relationships and re-socialization. But also focus on self-adaptive skills, and developing capacity to having growing relationships with all the underlying mental illness and EPs that likely is a large majority of the population.
There has been an over-use of social banishment and stigmas in society, leading the most wounded and weakest people to be labelled as mentally ill, and banished to suffer in self-imposed isolation, with a therapy model that continues isolation.
.... end rant.... still working on refining this observation, I know it might be overly negative. But I do recognize that there are forces (though limited at the time) within psychology that are working on improving the model and methods. Dr. David Burns talks about a movement from cognitive revolution towards a motivation revolution within psychology. I remember sharing aspects of my critiques with him over a dinner after a workshop, and he seemed open and impressed by the observations.
:) this happens to me all the time. I am just learning about it. Had great success fending off my husband's EP this morning. I was so proud of myself! I would love to know how you figure it out if you are willing to share. If not, that's okay too.
Most of my methods are done by feel, I'm primarily a kinesthetic thinker. I'll have to think about this question some more. But at first glance, I think dealing with other's EPs might be more about developing a better relationship with your own primitive reptile brain or FEAR system. This would involve things like breath awareness, breath work, raw physical sensation, harnessing alertness, slowing down, becoming more mindful, etc. Also reprogramming your reptile brain might have to be done at the level of the body. This would involve rituals, repetitious movements, creating habits, controlling environment, extended exposure, etc.
As I continue to explore the idea that my default behavior mode as Reptile brain, I'll better able to create a mechanics and relationship model to share with others.
Do you think it is possible, within the construct of structural dissociation, that parts can be integrated at some sort of intellectual level but not emotionally?
This is probably the norm, most people partially integrate. And generally, it's the emotional parts that happen last. The social norm is to be fearful of emotions, and the less exposure we have the more mysterious and scary it becomes.
For me, assuming that my limbic system brain wiring is out of sync, along with my kinesthetic bias, my relationship with emotions is raw emotions and vague feelings. I have to put a lot of effort to decipher what they mean, and what they mean. On the flip side, this gives me the advantage of not having to deal with all the autobiographic stories and imagination attached to emotions that most people seem to suffer with.
But for neurotypical brains which have a limbic system that's more in sync, I think there a major advantage in that the emotions often have their own persona, or partial personality. That's why I do find this ANP and EP model interesting, along with the internal family systems models. So instead of my feeling out method, all you might have to do is simply treat these EP's like a new relationship. And then use the baby secure attachment models as a guide. (ie. 'Serve & Respond', 4 S's of Secure attachment: Seen, Safe, Soothe, and Secure.)
Or simply just have a conversation with the emotions. Adyashanti (a spiritual teacher) describes it this way:
Experiencing the Raw Energy of Emotion - Allow your suffering to speak
Our suffering consists of two components: a mental component and an emotional component. We usually think of these 2 aspects as separate, but in fact, when we're in deep states of suffering, we're usually so overwhelmed by the experience of emotion that we forget and become unconscious of the story in our minds that is creating and maintaining it. So one of the most vital steps in addressing our suffering and moving beyond it, is first to summon the courage and willingness to truly experience what we're feeling and to no longer try to edit what we feel. In order to really allow ourselves to stay with the depth of our emotions, we must cease judging ourselves for whatever comes up.
......
Once you touch a particular emotion, allow yourself to begin to hear the voice of suffering. To do this, you cannot stand outside the suffering, trying to explain or solve it; you must really sink into the pain, even relax into the suffering so that you can allow the suffering to speak. Many of us have a great hesitancy to do this, because when suffering speaks, it often has a very shocking voice. It can be quite vicious. This kind of voice is something that most people do not want to believe they have inside them, and yet to move beyond suffering it's vital that we allow ourselves to experience the totality of it. It's important that we open all the emotions and all of the thoughts in order to fully experience what is there.
.....
What you're looking for is how your suffering, how the particular emotion you are experiencing, actually views your life, views what happened, and views what's happening now. To do this, you need to get in touch with the story of your suffering. It is through these stories that we maintain our suffering, so we need to speak or write these stories down -- even if the stories sound outrageously judgmental or blaming or condemning. If we allow these stories to live underground in the unconscious mind, all the painful emotions will continue to regenerate.
Having a complete experience
In the face of a difficult emotion, we often turn away from the experience by either repressing it or impulsively acting it out; we do not in fact experience what is there all the way through. We have learned to do this over many years as a way to cope with unpleasant emotions and thoughts as they flow through our lives. Whenever we turn away and avoid what is there, however, we generate future suffering for ourselves and often those around us.
These coping strategies arise in our minds in an attempt to explain the events that happen to us. When we experience painful emotions or feelings, our mind will immediately and sometimes frantically start telling itself a story in order to construct a scenario that will explain why we feel the way we feel. As this process unfolds, we usually go more and more unconscious. By "unconscious," I mean we don't really experience what happened in a full and open way. We contract and pull away from the experience, which is actually quite normal. Nobody wants to feel bad, so it seems quite natural to contract and pull away. But anytime we contract from direct experience and spin a story, we have gone unconscious. As soon as we go unconscious, whatever emotion that happened at that time will be locked in our system. It will stay there and regenerate itself over and over again until we find the capacity to experience that emotion without going unconscious in any way.
Even though our stories about what happened may seem very justified, the important thing to remember is that they actually cause us to go unconscious and lock suffering into our bodies. Instead, what we need to do is to find the capacity to feel what we feel without creating more thoughts about it. When you start to experience a difficult feeling, you see that it's often associated with a memory. As you replay that memory in your mind, if you allow it to be there without a story or conclusion, you start to feel the emotion releasing itself from your system. It may not do this immediately; in fact for a time the experience of suffering may even intensify. But this is only because you're now experiencing it in a conscious way, not a numbed or a disassociated way. You are becoming very intimate with the moment-to-moment experience of your suffering.
--- excerpts from "Falling into Grace Insights on the End of Suffering" - by Adyashanti
Sorry for the long post along with my slight thread hi-jacking with the sort of giant brain dump. I have a tendency to be able to overwhelm people's brain understanding capacity. I'm sure it's happening here because my own brain capacity is also reaching it's limits.
I'm also exploring that with my default reptile brain leaning, I might have more access to the DOMINANCE emotional system, Panksepp doesn't list it as a core system, but he did describe the possibility of that circuitry. It could be simply a variation of the RAGE system. But this system has a different flavor of aggression, it's not about offense or defense like RAGE, it's more about pure raw commitment and overwhelm. Likely the out of control tantrums Autistic kids are well known for, is this DOMINANCE mechanism kicking in, and parents freak out because the RAGE or PANIC/GRIEF circuits fail to contain, control, or soothe the child.
