What Did My Therapist Mean....

[greenleaf]

I don't think it's a cognitive decision and I haven't said anything about cognition.

I'm interpreting the various comments along the line of "just ask the therapist" as needing a cognitive decision if you don't trust them well enough due to your abuse history etc.

All sorts of loop problems can then follow... I can have a cognitive understanding sometimes that my reaction is due to trust issues, but without that gut-level trust, what do I base the rather flexible, unemotional logic of whether to act like I'm trusting the person on? (I don't mean to trick them, I mean to mimic trusting because it seems like the best option.) I think I've used that level of reaction a lot when feelings have been off somewhere else (I hope they had a good time on vacation somewhere...) People in general learn how to react partly by observing other's reactions; "normal" people might have a more accessible emotional level to help with some judgments like whether to trust than others of us. Personally, I haven't been totally cut off from positive emotions for decades, but I think if I'm triggered or maybe in certain contexts I feel like I'm doing that. Some sort of coping, numbing thing but it's been useful because I could keep thinking (safety required it) after I got emotionally overwhelmed by whatever was going on, which I guess happened a lot.

Dissociation and trust stuff mess with being able to create nice neat categories in this discussion quite a bit! Then, let's talk about dissociating that we're dissociating!! :geek::bag: Pardon me while I float off somewhere...

 

[Hashi]

@greenleaf if you already have this awareness that maybe you react due to ingrained problems with trust, I don't think the only possible approach is cognitive. I'm not much of a fan of cognitive approaches and I think they're pretty pointless if you're trying to address a non-cognitive responses. I wouldn't even bring "emotional" into it because I see emotions as operating from a different place from learned, subconscious responses.

If the problem happens at a subconscious level, then I think it can only be addressed adequately at the same level. Since the subconscious works with programming, imagery and symbolism, I think it has to be addressed through programming, imagery and symbolism. Cognitive is nothing to do with it.

An example would be "reprogramming" your automatic responses to change to something else. That doesn't mean trying to argue yourself out of them logically. Initially, you might need to try to reinforce a sort of non-response, all judgement suspended. If you find yourself ruminating on what was said, you go straight to a pre-written list of things you can do to distract your thoughts to something else altogether. Count backwards from 100 in 3's, or learn a poem off by heart, or play a computer game, or do a Sudoku, or ...

It's not about changing your thinking to a different point of view, it's about moving your thinking to something else altogether.

What it isn't about is getting into a dead-end of "proving" your conclusions right or wrong, or at least trying to.

That's only one example of challenging yourself in a non-cognitive (ie non-reasoning) way. There's loads more and further steps, but I just wanted to give one example of why I'm not talking about logic.