Uncomfortable making eye contact

[Sideways]

Does it help with healing if you can?

Big part of communication, so if you can add that in, its definitely not going to hurt.

How much can you ever allow to trust someone if you won't let yourself make eye contact with them? It's a protection against that, in a way, I think. So, if we're expending energy in therapy avoiding that vulnerability, then therapy is going to go slower.

I do the no eye-contact thing in therapy. And use eye contact incredibly effectively in pretty much any other setting. Me personally I'm protecting me, because I'm ashamed and don't want to connect and feel vulnerable. But I'm also wanting to protect them, from what they'll see if they look at me too long when I'm exposing my insides to them.

I hope others here are also able to hold onto focus and just be ok with the fact that sometimes eye contact doesn’t need to be something we force ourselves to do.

Yes and no. Rocky boat so far. I'm making a point of making some eye contact with my T each therapy session. But it's momentary usually.

Eye contact while I'm vulnerable is frightening. Looking away helps me ground. So, I look away, often so that I don't dissociate and switch.

Particularly difficult questions my T asks me? I'm trying to make eye contact at least briefly. To help my brain connect with my T. Brain doesn't want to trust her, encouraging brain to see she's not threatening me with that difficult question she just asked is helpful for that. I look up after she's just asked me to expose myself in some way, and there's no judgment in the way she's looking at me.

Just like a kid learning how to tell when an adult is lying/joking/caring/etc, and they look up and examine the person's face when they've said something strange, because the face communicates. So, I'm resetting my brain to learn to trust, using eye contact as an intrinsic part of that. Just like a kid would do when sussing out a strange new person.

That's facial recognition stuff that goes on in the mammalian part of our brain. Mammals use facial connection with each other as a critical part of communication and connecting, and understanding each other. Ie it's firing helpful neurons in part of my brain, learning to trust humans again, that the words and speaking part doesn't reach.

Trust, respect, caring: things you need to look at a person to really feel it, you know? Because yeah, there's an old part of our brain which, like other social animals, deals with looking at faces and eyes in particular as a primal way to connect (or threaten, depending on the message being sent). So, throw in eye contact, and maybe those things will start to fall into place.