Life is like that two week long Chinese traffic jam...

[cyanidebreathmint]

Thanks guys, that helped me out just now. I was feeling really...tumultuous.

[cyanidebreathmint]

RE: Loneliness

I sort of talked about this with my therapist.

She keeps using the word "attachment". My "attachment" is screwed up. I am supposed to accept that this is out of my control, but I am finding it difficult. Maybe I need Robin Williams to scream in my face, "it's not your fault!"

Bad joke.

I wanted to write a bunch of stuff but lost the motivation. We all know what loneliness is. I think I did it to myself by seeking people who are unavailable, people who are not interested in the things I am interested in, and being closed off. But it doesn't make it suck less, and I'm feeling very worn down by it.

Like someone else here, I wonder how you make someone give a shit about you.

[MissingHiker]

God bless you, cyanidebreathmint. For going to therapy and taking a step to do something for yourself. That's so important, and it's so easy for us to forget to do because life manages to keep us so distracted with its stupid bullshit. You're taking a big step into the unknown to take care of yourself so don't forget to give yourself credit for that! It's a step many of us never take.

The podcast brought me here, and I am going through much the same as many of you guys.

I have been to two therapists, but I'm in a new town and haven't found a therapist here yet. My most recent therapist of two years was amazingly helpful. The way we perceive life events as adults was shaped and formed when we were young by how our parents treated us and by how others treated us. And, our perceptions are so important because we cannot control life events that happen around us, but we CAN control our perceptions of those events.

If our perceptions are misshaped because we were picked on, or there was a lot of fault-finding directed at us, or ten dozen other factors happened when we were little, that will distort our perceptions that we have as adults. In my case, through abuse, I had been programmed to perceive most things had some reflection on me or something I did or who I was. And I was always bad or wrong or at fault in some way. My mind had always worked that way, so I didn't question it, but it was ramping up. It was getting worse and more intrusive and harder to be by myself. I was lonely, and seeking out people for all the wrong reasons, as a distraction. And they didn't want to be around me, because I was so anxious. So I wound up alone with my thoughts.

And, life is about downtime when we're alone with our thoughts. We're blessed in this country because we have so much of it compared to other places, but if our downtime is miserable because the way we perceive life have been tainted or poisoned, then our downtime will be miserable, and we will torture ourselves with our thoughts.

Well I'm starting to make some inroads in this area of my dysfunction. It is slow, though. And I have to monitor my thoughts all the time to make sure I'm not traveling down the usual pathways. I have to constantly catch myself.

People say it's "Life is what you make it." But as I work to retrain my thinking, I believe the saying should be, "Life is what you make OF it" because we control soooo very little of the random events that come crashing down around us.

I'm sorry for the lengthy and scattered first post. I can get going and have a hard time stopping when talking about this stuff, because this is the only stuff that matters. I don't want my downtime to be miserable, and I see how to make it not so, and I'm just starting practicing how. I discovered the podcast going through a very, very dark time a couple of months ago, discovered the podcast at random, and it kept me functional, and I am working on getting unstuck.

[dare i say it]

I'm sorry for the lengthy and scattered first post.

No apology necessary, if you ask me. I liked all of what you wrote, but I'm especially interested in what you said about downtime and being alone with your thoughts. These can be very, very difficult times for me too. I spend so much energy to distract myself from the pain of my internal experience.

I guess maybe distraction has its place as a coping strategy, but in working with a therapist recently I've been trying to expand my repertoire to include what I think most people call "mindfulness." It's all very new and foreign to me, but it feels like the opposite of distraction. I could try to describe it more, but I'm afraid I wouldn't do it justice or that I would set off people's b.s. meters. I've spoken to a couple of people in this forum about it, but I wondered if anyone in this thread had come across anything like "mindfulness" or "meditation" or "acceptance" or "sitting with the pain" in your journeys.

[MissingHiker]

I like that term "mindfulness," its not one i'd heard before. I agree with your interpretation and would take it one step further if i could try, and add that maybe it can be an awareness of whats going on in your mind in the moment, and being aware of, and being an objective spectator to, your own thoughts. People talk about living in the moment of now, and i think mindfulness is that. Its checking your perecptions, making sure that you are being fair to yourself, and not perceiving things through a prism of what happened to you in another time in the past.

When we are letting our automatic ways of thinking and perceiving events have control, without mindfulness, then i think we are most at risk to succumbing to our old, preprogrammed ways of thinking, and allowimg neurons to travel down those well-worn pathways back to those original traumas that fire those triggers. Mindfulness maybe allows us to mange that traffic over time with repeated practice (it takes a LOT of practice) and reroute it and to create new pathways and new perceptions, disarming those triggers so those past events dont retraumatize us again. Mindfulness is an awareness?

[BecomingKind]

Maybe I need Robin Williams to scream in my face, "it's not your fault!"

Always funny:
http://www.collegehumor.com/video/35892 ... your-fault

(Sorry if it's inappropriate.)

[dare i say it]

MissingHiker, thanks for writing back. I would agree that "mindfullness" and "awareness" seem quite similar. I wish I had a better handle on those sorts of things. I'm working on it.

BecomingKind & Kim, thanks for reminding me about that scene from Good Will Hunting. I had forgotten how powerful it is. I know the College Humor version is just a parody, and it's intended to make people laugh, but when I imagined myself in the shoes of Matt Damon's character it triggered a major emotional release--lots of tears.

[cyanidebreathmint]

first off, LOL Kind. Not inappropriate. Funny. Although that kid was WAY TOO TALL and the hug turned weird.

(That scene is a guilty pleasure of mine. At once my heart is touched but I'm also fighting it cuz it's cheesy at this point.)

Thanks for all of the responses, guys.

I've been practicing some mindfulness here and there, and it's been helping me come down from dark emotional heights. Basically, like you guys were saying, it's about trying to take a seat in observance of actual reality. You try not to engage with your filter, the thing that judges and labels events, and just experience. I read 1/2 of "The Mindful Way Through Depression" before I had to return it to the library. I was only reading it when I was feeling really bad. I recommend it. It's a good one. Not condescending. I found it also helped me with my out-of-body feelings when experiencing anxiety. Mindfulness helps you come back down to earth a little. And although it is likened to meditation, and possibly is kind of the same thing, for me I was much more receptive to that because there is no expectation of "emptying your mind" or any of that kind of stuff, but instead is just about facing reality, facing negativity and letting yourself experience things as they come. That's something I can get behind. Reality, plain and simple.

[dare i say it]

Thanks for the book recommendation. I've heard of it, and I'm looking for a good resource to learn more about mindfulness.

[MissingHiker]

This is so beautifully said:

You try not to engage with your filter, the thing that judges and labels events, and just experience.

There are many ways your filter can get damaged, twisted, warped, or bent, such as early trauma. Or, just growing up in an environment of extreme thinking, or excessive worrying, or probably dozens of other situations. Our early years create and shape our filter. So for us as adults, I think we have to take that extra thought-step when faced with having to decide how to perceive a new event and the trick is to take it out of auto-pilot. Don't engage the filter, peer around it... and just experience. Like you said, reality, plain and simple.

Apologies if I am repeating, I am just beginning to learn how to own my perceptions, instead of letting them own me.