"staying In Your Head" Coping Skill

[Valentino]

In my effort to understand, while simultaneously combating triggered emotions....engaging here, in this instance, in light bantering, a bit of "analyzing, obsessing and intellectualizing"...Am I actually practicing this concept? In an effort to avoid/cope with the said "triggered emotions"?

Wow, I truly admire your ability to stay so conscious when you're triggered! Most people would go into attack mode with some form of unconscious reactive blame and projection defense. But you're able to stay with the intense feelings and try to explore.

Maybe it's more about degrees of severity? The labels of 'staying in your head', 'zoning out', 'shut down', or 'dissociation' are all just variations of dis-embodying: creating distance from physical environment, temporary escape from the physical & emotional world into other planes of consciousness (mental, spiritual, non emotional, etc.)

Or it could be a strategy of fracturing our consciousness, escaping away from one or two levels where the trauma is most intense, and gaining refuge from being in another. The downside is that this fracturing creates an giant internal disconnect injury, which will need to be later healed and re-integrated. Maybe a lot of trauma symptoms are simply attempts at helping consciousness become whole again? BUT because the injury was so severe, the healing process also can be severe and extreme.

@Woof It feels to me that your trauma might be different from the norm, because it included a TON of psychological attack and it was from and in a very large GROUP environment. That meant your consciousness was forced to be more creative to survive, which is why you developed the ability to consciously 'shut down' or 'escape into your empty parts of your mind and consciousness'. Definitely a very unique and unusual skill set. Like a sort of intense mental/consciousness concentration and focus training. Maybe those same skills developed for emergency escape can also be useful for your healing and recovery journey?

While there are differences that could warrant a new or separate thread, I can see there are also similarities and maybe the differences are simply different flavors of the same bigger coping strategy. Keeping it in the same thread might better offer a big picture context. But I don't really understand the limits of going 'off topic' from a thread. Maybe it's up to the thread starter WillowMarie to interject if she feels it's going too far off topic?

 

[Woof]

@Valentino Yes, and thank you for that recognition and validation (understanding) as well as others that follow what I am attempting to convey.

I do have a greater understanding of the over all topic now....at least better than I did at first. That understanding only opens up the topic, between my own ears at least. As more questions have been brought to the surface. I have taken the que and have begun composing a separate thread. As it seems I have exceeded the scope of the original topic...which I sincerely apologize for, as it was not my intent. In the forthcoming topic I am in hopes that it will be expansive, encompassing all that goes on tween our ears.

@Bedbug :happy: You and I are good. I do not, nor have not felt that you had dismissed me in the slightest manner. This is a discussion page....we are simply having discussion...an exploration, an examination and yes a wee bit of investigation. I am literally bumbling thru in an effort to understand....sometimes, I am simply not as graceful as I would hope to be or like to think of myself as being...

 

[Stanley Shi-Yume]

At first I did not link all of this that you guys just discussed with the attention differential trait, (so described as obsessing intellectually). BUT IT IS! It's a deep level fracturing of the consciousness. A tactic learned from very young... probably in response to boredom as certainly as stress or fear.


My mind is blown. This blows the lid off of my perception of my identity.

 

[greenleaf]

@Woof, part of what you wrote seems very familiar to me, though I wasn't in a cultlike environment - except for my family... I didn't stop analyzing as a kid because that was safest; I learned to act in a way that seemed safest, no matter what I was feeling.

The feelings mostly got very muted, and I didn't realize that I was feeling a lot of them through my teens and early 20s. I think that I experience some difficult emotions as being somewhat outside of where "I" am. I don't feel like I'm floating elsewhere like some folks have described, but I'm still often not really "in" the emotions, it's more like my fingertips are.

The skills were very useful to survive and get out of that early situation. I got a great education. I generally function quite well in day-to-day life, but there are problems now that I'm slowly connecting with this stuff. I have been storing loads of those emotions in my muscles - neck, shoulders - and they're beginning to rebel as I'm not 20 anymore... Plus not squashing so many emotions lets me have stronger connections to people I like, when I can manage it, so I'm motivated to work on this.