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Naming and understanding multiple emotions

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a person who is indifferent to you doesn't love you and we should probably not waste our time and effort loving them.
I think my exposure to 'too many Walt Disney movies' when I was young is the core of this. And yes, I believe you are bang on. This social construct of how families and friends 'should be' vs the nature of humans can be a real mind f*ck. I had an idea of how a friend should be. How a mother should be. How an everything should be.

Now this is my go to model. If they can't show respect even when they are trying their damndest to get something out of me - that's probably a sign. lol. Nope. Definitely a sign.

I had to get out of my own denial to get to my own construct. I need to learn how to raise the bar and expect and judge others to see how that was going to work for me. Something my strict Catholic upbringing warned was NOT a good way for me to get through the pearly gates.

Over it. Excellent questions Scout. Thank you. I hope you are doing well. Much appreciation for all of the support you have provided to me along the way. I think of you often.
 
Thank you @shimmerz!!! Depraved indifference, or simple indifference!!! This feel so RIGHT to identify how I am being treated by a family member since the death of my son. Oh, he's around, and he makes his mouth move. But the actions do not follow the words.

Not sure how I'm going to deal with this with him, but I don't have to do it today. I have time and space to see how this puzzle piece fits with my world.

So good to see you again Shimmerz. Have missed you a lot.
 
@ladee, wrapped up in my head too much to notice the reference to your son. My god, I am so sorry. I can't even imagine how this would feel. I am going to go through your diary to catch up. My heartfelt love to you my friend.

Life can just be plain cruel and shitty sometimes.
 
You know, I just finished typing up a posting in my diary that took a fair bit out of me. I mean, no, not necessarily took stuff out of me, but maybe feels a bit more like a wash of different and perhaps conflicting emotions.

So right now I am looking at the emotion wheel found here
Feelings Wheel and trying to match what this wash of feelings are by name. It is difficult but let's try.

In some ways I feel Powerful because I am here and not back where I was then. I have made gains. Tremendous gains.

I am a bit Amazed as well as Thankful and Optimistic about the future. So yes, those things are all good.

But I am also feeling a head spinning feelings. I am not sure what that means but I am familiar with the feeling. I think it may be some Confusion and Disorientation. I think the disorientation comes about when I have multiple emotions (and perhaps Conflicting) hitting me.

My goal when I hit the confusion and disoriented is to ground myself. I am going to throw on some clothes to go for a walk. Hear the birds, take in the sunlight, grab a coffee. Engineer my day for success.
 
Okay, so mostly the reason I have been focusing on emotions is to help me put words to emotions. I didn't know much about needing this but it felt right to me because of my conversion disorder.

This conversion disorder appeared right after the DV and literally has destroyed my life due to what were chronic PNES attacks. The mind body split has been devastating. My way of attempting to reduce the split and rather reintegrate has been to identify emotions and finding words for them. It has been mostly very successful. Difficult, but rewarding.

What I didn't realize is that there is a video out there with information from professionals that speak about how most doctors (psychiatrists included) are not actually acknowledging this problem. This is making it much more difficult for people who suffer from PNES related events.

Anyway, I wanted to drop these links in here for my own reference and for those who are lost in PNES hell.


He also mentioned this Alexithymia , regardless of how much I have researched over the past 15 years or so I had not heard of before. It fits. I don't feel it has anything to do, in my case, with a lack of emotional awareness, I think it is more a hypervigilence for the emotions of others (to avoid my own disasterous ending) and a learned unattending to my own emotions. Of course. I was absolutely not allowed to have any type of authentic emotion right from get go.

Alexithymia - Wikipedia

I wanted to mention as well that pain is also discussed in the above video as a type of somatoform disorder. There is some good information in the following links about the types of somatoform disorders there are (how they manifest).

Somatoform Disorders

So just something I thought was interesting and helps me to understand that I am still on track with my own healing.
 
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As relates to the video link (above). The 32.00 minute mark is a description of exactly what happened to me. A series of events while I was in foster care that I had not been told about by my 'trusted loved ones' was reactivated and played out again after severe DV took me out again when I was 45 yrs old.

Before I knew what trauma was, when I went to my first Trauma Specialist, he told me right away a fairy accurate account of what was triggering me after having listened to my history (what little I knew of it) and my nightmares and current situation.

'You react in this way when you feel you can't escape from your home and crazy people who live in it with you.'

Damn straight that is what is happening to me. And luckily I am away from the stressor right now as I live on my own in an apartment with very quiet people living above me.

I had NO knowledge of this infant/toddler wounding. Not.even.a.little.bit. As a matter of fact, I was told 'Your parents loved you so much they gave you up.' So f*cking damaging because I met them along the way and wasn't told to be freaking careful of these people because my adopted parents had lied to me from day 1 telling me how loved I was. I wasn't loved. I was beaten, starved, they tried to murder me, sell me, gave me away and when I was content would pull me back again to abuse me some more. WTF? THAT was what the flashbacks were about that were taking me down for days at a time. The reality didn't match the narrative that had been forced upon me.

Most would think that I was too young to remember in any way that these events happened - yet 7 years later when I retrieved my Children's Aid documentation - there were references to exactly what my somatics were when I was 2 that were replaying almost half a century later without my knowledge of my history.

So yes, it is possible that people are suffering from traumatic responses even though there is no memory of a prior trauma. But we all know that right?

Anyway, nice to finally - after having seen 15 psychiatrists (at least), neurologists, and so on and so on and NOBODY validated that this somatic dropping was real.

Assholes. Thank god for 'Doctor Google' or I would have been dead by now 100 times over.

Okay, rant over. I think.
 
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Anger. This is about the justified anger that I had as an infant. I have known that anger has been at the root of all of this for quite some time. I just haven't known how that applied until today with T and talking out what comes next.

I am driving the bus on this. That is the way I roll. I know what I need to deal with next and now is the children. Who somehow have become mid 30's to almost 40. Yikes. I have lost a lot of time in all of this. I am working hard to catch myself up.

Back to anger. I tend to get myself into trouble through all this trauma stuff by incessantly explaining myself. I can't seem to stop it. And it hasn't been helping my cause. Because apparently within power dynamics I don't realize that the person who explains themselves look to others, like a person who is guilty. Of what I don't know but I am still learning.

Okay, so to simplify. I don't get angry. That's bad.
I also explain myself. A lot. That is very bad.
In looking at this forensically, it appears what I am doing in replacing righteous anger with incessant explanations - hoping that someone will listen.

T is constantly saying 'less is more'. Somehow I can't remember that when I need to. We are hoping by digging into what the 'explaining' part of me is trying to accomplish that we can get somewhere. And we volleyed around with the idea that it was anger. Both of us agreed. Paydirt.

So here we go. When I start to explain shit to people I need to pause, remind myself that what I actually am is angry. Then full stop and talk to T to see what might work better for me.

We had a great long talk about how anger is actually the spring board for really great progress. She spoke about her teachers and what they taught her about anger. These people sound like unbelievably great people as I have heard many stories about them.

Okay. So I know I do the explaining thing all the time so there will many opportunities in the next while to take this righteous anger thing outside of me and take a good look at how I want to 're-install' it into myself to serve me better.

I am really turning a corner here I think. A ton of things are turning around in life for me right now. I feel solid, in control, optimistic. I am feeling less than connected (not to do with COVID thing). I think I have some stuff to figure out before I set my mind on connecting with others.
 
Thanks for the link. When I was just into adulthood I did not know what a feeling was, let alone how to name it. I was so lucky to have a good friend and as I'd share what i was experiencing she would name my emotion. I would be so amazed that she knew what it was called, but also how it brought me "together" in that moment, from being so free-floating, lost, scattered, etc to wow I'm feeling a feeling and this is what's it's called. I want to look at your resource in more detail. I think it's so helpful/

I noticed it is coming from a Postive Psychology source. This is fascinating to me. Perhaps I should make another thread about it. But I noticed that my sister did better than I did emotionally and in her life. From the time she was 18 she got a hold of postive thinking and I rejected it, or just didn't think it was possible. She taught herself a resilient mind-set. Yet, it also made her somewhat superficial and I didn't feel much empathy from her, and she gravitated away from anyone who had problems. I, on the other hand, seemed to gravitate towards those with problems. haha! But overall I have witnessed over the decades how positive mindset has truly been a help to my sister, versus myself and how I did.

Recently through my business, some new training I signed up for was positive psychology. Boy, it really works! haha! Who knew! They use positive psychology in the united states armed forces in boot camp. Anyway, I just thought the feelings resource you posted coming out of positive psychology source, and how much naming my feelings helped me in my 20's, and how much practicing some of the positive thinking skills and ideas are really helpful in overcoming some of my issues with ptsd--it was interesting coincidence.
 
I also explain myself. A lot. That is very bad.
Can I gently push back on whether or not that's "bad"? It might be ineffective. It might be irrelevant. It might be a lot of things, but it's not, necessarily "bad".

One of the things I see as a potential problem with defaulting to "explaining yourself" is that a lot of the people you're explaining yourself TO don't actually care. I think it's totally fine to explain yourself to people who care. They will either take it in as useful information or humor you by listening to stuff they already know, or something else equally harmless. But, the people who don't actually care are a totally different category. If it's a fairly neutral way of not caring, they might just find explanations to be boring. Sometimes they probably just don't listen to you, they focus on telling you what THEY think anyway (because that seems to be the way a lot of people operate) and you just go around in circles with everyone trying to explain themselves and no one listening. (I think that used to happen around here kind of often.) If it's a less neutral version, my guess is that they take it as a sign of weakness and sometimes you actually hand them ammunition by indicating what you care about and where you might be sensitive.

A good and wise friend of mine used to like to say "never complain, never explain". I think "never" might be a bit strong, but, in general, I think he had a point. The anger thing sounds like it's going to be valuable territory for you to work on. (Glad you found a decent T!)
 
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