What About Just Being There?

[illusionist]

Although I tend to think along the lines of The Albatross...it's what suits my personality, I think it's fantastic that the two of you can help each other in the way that's suited to you both.....both in able to give and receive help from each other..acceptance ..light years from where I'm from, regarding accepting.

Hugs to the both of you.

 

[sun seeker]

I rely on my friends, peer friends especially to challenge me, rather than accommodate me... but that too is a preference.

I appreciate that you are saying it is a preference. I'd like to understand better the reasons for the preference. If you would play along with me for a moment, suppose you had been in the situation I was in last night. What would you have wanted your friends to do? How would their approach have helped you?

 

[The Albatross]

@shimmerz : "Although shame is an emotion that is closely related to guilt, it is important to understand the differences. Shame can be defined as "a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety."[3] Others have distinguished between the two by indicating that "We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are."[4] Shame is often a much stronger and more profound emotion than guilt. "Shame is when we feel disappointed about something inside of us, our basic nature."[5] Both shame and guilt can have intensive implications for our perceptions of self and our behavior toward other people, particularly in situations of conflict." (from an article Guilt and Shame by Phil Barker, July 2003)

@sun seeker : As I stated in post #9 "I don't want or need anyone buying into my perception. I want them to challenge me on it." I don't want to reinforce the trigger, I want to work through it preferably with a peer to talk me through it so that I can hear a different perspective yes and a perception other than my own.

 

[sun seeker]

"I don't want or need anyone buying into my perception. I want them to challenge me on it."

Yes, I get that. What I'm trying to get at is what exactly that would look like. In the scenario described, where - let's pretend for a moment - a friend comes into the room and finds you crumpled on the floor where you collapsed due to a triggered response - what exactly does the friend say and do? How do you respond? Are you able to take in what they are saying, process it, articulate an answer? How does the scene play out? I have reasons for asking. I am wondering whether you are imagining a scenario where you have access to higher brain functioning and can reason through your reactions, which would imply that you are not actually in a highly triggered state during the conversation. When we are in a triggered or regressed state, usually we need to be spoken to/treated in a way that speaks to the lower brain, and can only take in logic once the perception of danger has passed.

 

[The Albatross]

Well the difficulty with the scenario for me is that I don't tend to crumple, to the floor or otherwise until or unless the threat is over or removed... either I disassociate, or I go into fight mode until "danger" has past... then I deal with the adrenaline and the melt down afterwards. Usually it is a solitary process for me... I deal with it on my own or process it afterwards with a PTSD peer or my spouse.

Edited to add... When processing... the focus is on what happened, what did I think/feel, how did I react, what was appropriate, what was inappropriate, what strategy or goal challenges can I use or what perceptions/beliefs do I need to work on to reduce or get rid of the trigger?

I have very narrow and specific triggers now... that wasn't always the case, but I tend to go all right brain when I have them anymore.

 

[sun seeker]

Usually it is a solitary process for me... I deal with it on my own or process it afterwards with a PTSD peer or my spouse.

That would be where the difference lies. You deal with it on your own, so you aren't used to being in primal fear mode around others. If you were, I venture to guess you would not be open to being challenged on your triggered response while in the midst of it. If it's the processing after the fact that you are doing with others, I can see your way of looking at it better. It's like comparing apples and oranges.

 

[The Albatross]

Yeah apples and oranges. I was conditioned not to show pain or fear but to stand and take it. If I reacted it would be worse. Come to think of it, even when I had my shrink I never did it in front of him either... nor my husband.

Hazarding guesses just makes them guesses though.

I can say that when my mother went into primal fear mode (she too was abused) I would shut down or disassociate.

 

[The Albatross]

Now my brain is circling around on this difference. I think to me it has to do with a block on vulnerability... either that or trust. It takes a whole lot for me to allow being vulnerable/showing weakness or fear or to trust that by doing so anything good could happen. Not sure if I can word it right. But I power through the trigger or disassociate sometimes with awareness sometimes with lost time.

 

[shimmerz]

I was conditioned not to show pain or fear but to stand and take it. If I reacted it would be worse.

Yes, me too. It was due to my experiences prior to my adoption, I didn't know this for decades but always knew I had it in me.
'Don't let them see a THING or they will rip you to shreds.' Not allowing myself to respond felt vital to my not being annihilated but I didn't know why.

We feel shame for what we are.

Yes, and this would most certainly apply to developmental issues. Because our SELVES are tightly wrapped at that time into others' perceptions and, as a result, actions towards us. I think the idea is to 'reset' that perception by showing how it can be (acceptance) and then growing from there. Much of developmental stuff is primal, so 'buying in' isn't part of it, imho. The time for switching that around is when the higher brain can process it.

If one cannot show pain in an authentic way and have it accepted and worked through, is that true healing? Are we not lying to ourselves and others if we must hide or dissociate and retreat from support? I think it is getting out of the lies that truly heals .... and I wonder if the inner critic (IC) is at work here as well. 'Don't you DARE show vulnerability around others' can be a mantra for the IC.

I am not trying to be a jerk here ... but I am lightly challenging. I won't push any more unless you tag me. But I have to wonder, what if you were straight up with your husband and authentic in your reactions? Would it not be (at least a piece of) shame that stops you from doing so? And if that was successful, would that not help to heal that shame?

 

[sun seeker]

It takes a whole lot for me to allow being vulnerable/showing weakness or fear or to trust that by doing so anything good could happen. Not sure if I can word it right.

This is very new for me as well, due to long experience of being hurt worse in one way or another if I showed any vulnerability, so I understand what you are saying. I will say this: I have spent decades working on healing, but in a more left-brained way until fairly recently. All the years of work gave me a good intellectual understanding of why my life was so screwed up, but little actual healing. Two elements that have changed over just the past several months are learning to trust in my body's responses, and having someone around that I can trust to be there without judgement. The difference is hard to describe. I wish everyone could have that chance.

 

[sun seeker]

I think it's more than just a nice sentiment, to me it's somewhere at the heart of this whole mess or a large usually unreachable part of how/ why we ended up like this.

I think you are correct about this. When children are abused, if they have even one parent or other significant adult to go to who is consistently nurturing, that makes all the difference in terms of resilience. When there is no one to turn to whom we can count on, our development gets messed up in complicated ways. There is no one there to mirror our innate goodness, and that mirroring is essential to normal development. Hence some of the layers of shame. There are no two ways about it. We need that kind of mirroring to know who we really are, and as we get older, we gradually learn to internalize the messages we are given. Children who get those positive messages consistently are not stuck in survival mode but learn who they really are because it is safe to individualize and still know they are loved.

So when we accept each other without judgement, I don't think we are buying into anything, but fulfilling a real need, the need to know that we are acceptable just as we are. The drive to heal is innate. We just need the right kind of support. I didn't need anyone to tell me "that was in the past, you're not in any danger now, stop being silly and get up off the floor" or anything like that. Not only are such words judgemental, but they speak to parts of the brain that are simply not available when a person is in survival mode. I just needed nonjudgemental company to help me calm down, and then I was able to overlay that feeling onto the fearful experiences of the past and work out the truth in my own mind.

And the proof is in the pudding: my friend and I both had a really good day today (for most of the day, anyway!)

 

[The Albatross]

Am I lying if I don't show...??? I don't think so. I have choices available to me now and I make decisions. I choose not to affect other people or inflict on them my own reactivity if at all possible. I love my husband and my friends and don't want to involve them in my issue. Frankly it scares him.

After I left the forum I could recall about 5 times total where I was reactive, once at work before I was diagnosed, once in an AA meeting, several times at home during an argument with my spouse and he was shocked and very affected by it for a long time. I do not want to wear out or adversely affect people I care about. So I focused on personal responsibility, emotional regulation, and management.

My aim has been to be functional, calm, peaceful, and lead a generally beneficial life. I have arrested most of the symptomology and have few episodes over the past 15 years now. I have done exposures to my triggers as I found them over the years, I have stopped agoraphobic/isolation tendencies, and test "mild" in depression. I am not at risk for suicidal ideation or behaviors. I sometimes feel guilt or shame but it is minutes rather than days or months or years. I no longer compulsively obsess about my past or my traumas. I have choices now about how I perceive people/situations/places and if that isn't healing or at least progress then I don't know what is.

Added in edit: Bringing this back around to guilt and shame and if/whether they and emotions are perceptions...
From Wikipedia:

Emotional Perception refers to the capacities and abilities of recognizing and identifying emotions in others, in addition to biological and physiological processes involved. Emotions are typically viewed as having three components: subjective experience, physical changes, and cognitive appraisal; emotion perception is the ability to make accurate decisions about another’s subjective experience by interpreting their physical changes through sensory systems responsible for converting these observed changes into mental representations. The ability to perceive emotion is believed to be both innate and subject to environmental influence and is also a critical component in social interactions. How emotion is experienced and interpreted depends on how it is perceived. Likewise, how emotion is perceived is dependent on past experiences and interpretations.

Disordered Emotional Perception:

There is great individual difference in emotion perception and certain groups of people display abnormal processes. Some disorders are in part classified by maladaptive and abnormal emotion perception while others, such as mood disorders, exhibit mood-congruent emotional processing. Whether abnormal processing leads to the exacerbation of certain disorders or is the result of these disorders is yet unclear, however, difficulties or deficits in emotion perception are common among various disorders.

In patients with major depressive disorder, studies have demonstrated either generalized or specific impairments in the identification of emotional facial expressions, or a bias towards the identification of expressions as sad. Neuro-pathological and structural neuroimaging studies in patients with major depressive disorder have indicated abnormalities within the subgenual anterior cingulate gyrus and volume reductions within the hippocampus, ventral striatal regions and amygdala. Similarly, anxiety has been commonly associated with individuals being able to perceive threat when in fact none is present, and orient more quickly to threatening cues than other cues. Anxiety has been associated with an enhanced orienting toward threat, a late-stage attention maintenance toward threat, or possibly vigilance-avoidance, or early-stage enhanced orienting and later-stage avoidance. As a form of anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has also been linked with abnormal attention toward threatening information, in particular, threatening stimuli which relates to the personally relevant trauma, making such a bias in that context appropriate, but out of context, maladaptive. Such processing of emotion can alter an individuals’ ability to accurately assess others’ emotions as well. Child maltreatment and child abuse have been associated with emotion processing biases as well, most notably toward the experience-specific emotion of anger. Research has found that abused children exhibit attention biases toward angry faces such that they tend to interpret even ambiguous faces as angry versus other emotions and have a difficulty disengaging from such expressions while other research has found abused children to demonstrate an attentional avoidance of angry faces. It is believed to be adaptive to attend to angry emotion as this may be a precursor to danger and harm and quick identification of even mild anger cues can facilitate the ability for a child to escape the situation, however, such biases are considered maladaptive when anger is over-identified in inappropriate contexts and this may result in the development of psychopathology.