I relate to this a lot. Gonna skip over the young childhood stuff that started me on this path, but this really became an issue starting in high school. I was really stressed out trying to manage my girlfriend’s fragile mental state. Developed acid reflux and thought I was having a heart attack because I ate through the inner lining of my esophagus and breathing was extremely painful. So I picked up meditation. And without a teacher I only focused on quieting my “monologue of upsetness”. I had some symptoms of depersonalization before, but this is when it really developed into a full on disorder. And honestly until I realized it was a disorder I was quite proud of it. I’d leave my body and then I wouldn’t feel any pain, I’d just observe “notme” handling it. A downright superpower if you ignore all the horrible side effects.
Some thoughts on the ”..and now?” I’ve been wrestling with
1) Much like how I went “idk, I’ll just learn to stop feeling bad and then I can keep dating her” I’m now going “idk, I’ll just learn to stop worrying about the things that trigger me to feel nothing” which seems like it might just be a bandaid
2) Metta meditation seems to help a little. Focusing on having feelings instead of stopping them. It ended up having me come to my own parent-child model and when I offered notme to be his father that led to him calming down a lot. (notme ~= my system 1? I know there’s not actually another me, this is just how it ~feels~)
3) I’ve found a core belief of “People are fragile, I must be resilient or I’ll damage people” that is at the base of it all, but it’s not so easy to just knock out the belief at the base of yourself. notme still doesn’t believe that everything isn’t about to come crashing down because of someone else’s fragility. My internal double crux always gets down to this point and then notme says prove it and I don’t know how which leads me to...
4) Progressive overload is normally my answer to everything, but how? I can’t just sort people I know by how triggering they are to me and ask them to trigger me. It’s not the same in that context, and that’s not the most compassionate thing to ask someone to do. I’d have to find some way to naturally be in an environment I find triggering without feeling like I was using the people there. I’m probably not just being creative enough; or maybe I’m losing sight of the end goal by focusing on this and not trying to find other ways to convince notme everything is fine
I feel you so much on depersonalization seeming super awesome until you realize you’re cut off from life itself in many ways. I’m still mad how much the outside world seems to appreciate when you’re half-dead inside...
I’m still mad how much the outside world seems to appreciate when you’re half-dead inside...
Oof, I haven’t thought directly about that before, but man that can sting.
Part of that seems to be the a basic part of “you’re the only one in your own head.” Other people have limited ability to know what I feel like, but can visibly tell whether or not I rage at other people. I get congratulated for not raging at people in tense situations, and it feels like I’m getting praised for the internal thing (ignoring my emotions).
Something I’d be interested in from this comment and maybe the OP is more clearly spelling out the bad thing that happened, as a result on “turning off emotions.”
I happen to agree with the frame you and Hazard have here, but if I imagine a person who’s currently thinking “yeah I can turn off my emotions it’s great!”, this post and comment doesn’t quite articulate what they’re missing or sacrificing. (To be clear, articulating this seems quite hard, just noting that it’d be useful if you could manage it)
Sometimes you scrape your knee really badly and don’t notice. It’s nice to not feel the pain, but also you just bled all over the carpet and now your mom is mad at you because she has to scrub the carpet for 20 minutes to get the dried blood off it.
If you could notice you scraped your knee immediately, make a fair assessment as to what care the scraped knee needs, and then turn the feeling off that is a super power. Sometimes I do that and it’s awesome. But I don’t have the power to turn them back on. They turn back on when they want, not when I want. Now I’m stuck in a bad state until something shocks me out of it. Plus sometimes they turn off completely involuntarily like the worst habit one could ever have.
My symptoms might be slightly different than Hazard’s because I specifically relate to depersonalization symptoms but here are some negative things I deal with when I have involuntary disconnect.
1) Sometimes I try and move my body and nothing happens. I feel the sensations of movement, but my body doesn’t move. When my feelings turned off, so did everything else.
2) Sometimes I can’t empathize. I can logically say what someone is feeling, but I don’t feel any true empathy for them when I’m in that state. I can’t turn just my feelings off, my ability to feel other people’s emotions turns off too. It leads to me treating people like they are disposable. It leads to me not enjoying talking about other people, as feeling their feels is what makes that fun.
3) My memory is extremely bad. I don’t remember what I say when I’m depersonalized. If someone wants me to repeat something they liked, oh boy is that stressful because I have no clue what I said or if I could say something similar. I was completely unaware of how I treated people when depersonalized because I remember so little of it. I don’t really remember much from last August to this June to be honest.
4) Sometimes I feel inhuman. If I spend a long period of time not feeling anything, then I’ve kinda opted out of the human experience and it’s like why am I even bothering to be alive? I’m not suicidal, just kinda meh.
5) Sometimes I make a bad call when to turn it off on purpose. Someone will be upset, I’ll turn my feelings off so it doesn’t bother me, and then the problem comes back later when honestly if I had faced the feelings I would have come up with a solution to the issue.
6) I have a weird relationship with akrasia. Sometimes I am the master of akrasia, just turning off my feelings and doing it anyways! But then I stop caring enough to even do that. Until my system 1 turns back on my system 2 won’t even care enough to input a new command.
7) “Turn off feelings” for me is a bit of a simplification. It’s just like, the feelings were in notme (my system 1?) so when I separate from notme I don’t feel it but it’s still there in notme. And then when I reconnect with notme they’re calm enough that I don’t really notice them but they are still lurking around in very faint ways.
8) I stay in situations I shouldn’t. My natural reaction to a bad romantic experience is just to turn off my bad feelings and continue the relationship. Without the negative reaction there isn’t really anything pushing me to call things off. So I spend a lot of time sticking in things I shouldn’t.
As someone who fatefully discovered dissociation/depersonalization/derealization (https://mhollyelmoreblog.wordpress.com/2016/06/25/dissociation/) around 10 only to have shit hit the fan in my 20s, I think I can articulate what’s lost when you lose touch with emotions. At first it feels great to ride above the pain, for me social pain in particular, and only come back down when it’s safe, like at home with my family. But eventually you can’t come back down to experience even essential things like interest, excitement, most of all love and connection. I feel that I was slowly bleeding out the entire time I was away from my body, never fully replenishing what was lost, and after years I was just empty and shriveled. I had my first real depression at the end of college and I felt mostly numb but also miserable and heavy. There was a deep sense of loss for I didn’t know what. Now I know what I was craving was a sense of being embodied, of feeling real and being connected to the world.
Healing sucks immensely because years of dissociating from emotion makes them very intense and when you come back and your coping skills extremely weak. But coming back to your body and your feelings is really the only way to come back to life. Being estranged from them is actively rejecting the reality of your experience and dividing yourself. It’s the autoimmune disease of the soul. Someone who’s checked out of a major part of their experience is not only missing the experience, but engaged in a civil war to keep it that way. You may be safe from barbed emotions when you’re dissociated, but eventually you’re not able to rest even in your own experience. It’s a torture that’s difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it to understand but I hope I’ve given some insight.
Big picture (from the subagent model): The children (emotions) will go behind your back and talk coordinate with other sub agents if going to the parent is not safe. Children often aren’t that smart, and will probs pick a spaghetti tower solution. You will end up with behaviors you don’t understand that will be hard to change, and you will won’t be able to improve at meeting the needs of those children (because you don’t know those needs exist).
Some specific examples:
Me being “inexplicably” depressed on the weekends. Because I’d ignored my emotions, I could see no explanation besides “The brain will randomly decide to feel aweful, there is nothing that can be done about this except go to sleep and now I’ll probably feel fine come monday”. So there was a decent amount of pain and suffering that has since been dealt with, but when I was ignoring my emotions I felt like I was stuck with it forever.
Ignoring my emotions has a powerful narrowing effect on the options I have for building skills and getting more competent. When I saw a challenge, possible goal/dream/desire, if I didn’t immediately know how to get it, I would ignore my wants and tell myself I didn’t want it. There’s a way in which I was only able to make local optimizations. There have been plenty of times in which I’ve “just been doing something for the hell of it” and then realized I was skilled enough to enact an old desire. This is a pretty random/happenstance process. Now that I’m better at listening to my emotions, I’m able to Scheme towards things that I want that don’t yet feel possible.
Ignoring my emotions contributed to a behaviors were I’d be very quick to
Another Big Picture: Thinking ignoring my emotions is great feels like mistaking wire-heading for leprosy. Wire heading as “self modify to feel good about whatever my circumstances are” and leprosy as “I’m still being torn apart and damaged by things, I just don’t feel it anymore.”
(notme ~= my system 1? I know there’s not actually another me, this is just how it ~feels~)
If you haven’t I’d read it I’d totally recommend Kaj’s Multi-Agent Models sequence. I used to have a mind model of “There is me, the smart goal oriented s2, and then s1, the fast and primitive lizard brain. Of course I shouldn’t have disdain for s1, but really the game is about getting my s1 to do what I (s2) want”
Now my model is different. I think of s2/consciousness as a type of information processing my brain can do, and I think I is my self-concept (which is stored and maintained in very distributed ways), and S1 is just “all other types of information processing” and in my mind there’s room for lots of sub-agent like entities.
I haven’t read it yet but I’ve saved all the links for this weekend.
I’m still not sure how “real” the dichotomy is for me. I think I understand and agree with what you’re saying about s1 and s2 just being different types of processing. But sometimes while control is transferring between me and notme it really feels like there are two people in my head. It’s not like how I can make two imaginary people to represent two subagents I know I have, it’s like a person who is already there and doesn’t need to be created. It’s my understanding that that’s not a super rare symptom, but that it’s also not normal. I’m not sure “meVSnotme” and “s2VSs1” are the same thing, but I map pretty well onto s2 and notme maps pretty well onto s1. I’m not sure how much this paragraph makes sense but I’m still figuring things out.
Thanks for the post btw, the post/comments from you/kaj have helped and given me a lot to think about. This is all kinda a new realization after a year where I handled this all really poorly so I’m happy to get opportunities to explore it like this.
FYI I have had a very similar experience to what you’re describing. You’re not alone. I too found that being kind to notme instead of shouting at them is helpful. And, I’ve found one of the things that helps most is feeling really seen/heard by others, so hopefully this helps!
I’ve found a core belief of “People are fragile, I must be resilient or I’ll damage people”
Seems to connected to this sort of belief network I had issues where it would be very painful and akward to explain my odd seeming behaviour. If I would describe a psychological quirck I had that was connected with psychological damage I would aplogise for being that way and the excesive restrictions what I was allowed to be started to be problematic. I eventually worked up to a position where it is seen very valuable that if you have trauma/damage quirks that you acknowledge and treat them and trying to pass as “normal” to not trigger the “offence” of being “mad” was seen as super-antigood. In the exreme the position that I previously thought was a good but came to think of as antigood (or bad) that people have a duty to not be brkoen/ get driven mad by pressures of life.
In the area it has become more important for me to highlight the analogy between physical and mental injuries. If your stomach is open and you are bleeding profusely people have the instinct to block the flow of blood to outside the body. People do not start blaming you why you have gotten your stomach open, if they ask questions it’s to clarify what interventions are effective in treating the damage. Even in the case when the injury is self-inflicted peoples pirmary message is not “you should not have done that”. I guess one of the more plausible challneges to this characterization would be a emergency services medical profession accepting a gunshot wound victim in a city infested with gangs. The position of “This guy got himself shot doing stupid gangbanging”. But I think even in cases like these it would not be professionally or ethically proper for the treater to be the one opining “you should stop gangbanging” althought education about the adverse efffects of bullets in stomachs would be within task scope.
And even if physical intentonal huritng is criminal in some cases, that is not a totally blanket rule. Assault exists sure. But surgery is just medical violence and that is allowed. And if a incident involves bigger injuries it probably means the quilt of the offending party is greater. But damage doesn’t imply quilt. You can do sports and be in physical causal realtion to their injuries and you would not neccesarily be in the wrong with your actions.
Elderly people have the property that they can get bruises easily. And part of organising such a persons life might mean that things are done safely without significant risk of physical striking. Part of that might be giving advice how ot move about. Some familiy of an old person might scold the elder for being covered in bruises for “not following instructions to move safely”. But this kind of scolding would be by an large to be in the wrong and very insensitive. And if a elder is found with bruises it doesn’t mean that somebody has done something wrong (althought statistical high amounts would be reaon to suspect that adherence to safety propocols is not up to notch). Elder people are physically fragile and that is okay and they do not have a duty to be sturdy.
The interesting case could be that if a young person throught throught neglience for daily sports (althought you would almost need to never get out of bed) got himself to the same fragile state that elderly people are in. Some mean person might accuse that the lazy person is quility of being a “weakling” that they “have themselfs caused their pitiful state” But I would find this kind of reasonning to atleast miss the point and almost safely say taht such reasonign would be in the morally wrong.
Yet in the mental health aspect if you show sign of damage it’s not uncommon for that to be treated as you having comimtted a wrong. Elder people do not have a duty to physically sturdy but adult people have a duty to be mentally sturdy. Note that we do not have the same kind of duty to be unwounded. Note that you might face discrimination if you become physically disabled but there is no perception of people being wrong for being disabled (and I guess some forms of discrimination can be traced to a theory where they are blamed for their disability).
Mental damage sucks and intentionally inflicted mental damage is not nice but I think there should be room for people to be mentally fragile. It’s far more important that people breaking down happens well rather than it never happenning. It’s not a taboo state. We would rather never get wounded but forbidding to be wounded seems like a bad way to arrive at never being wounded. So being wounded well doesn’t mean promoting woundedness.
Taking maximising ability to be mentally fragile would mean that all adults should enjoy all the mental provisions afforded to children (or there being danger of that). Sometimes we solve some things by demanding something of someone and some problems we currently solve by demanding mental sturdiness. But it’s possible to be too demanding. Or like profession s that need to be strong can still have sickdays ie days when they are not required to be strong.
I realise that there is a potential conflict with (some conceptions of) the “I want to be stronger” ethos. Inverted it means there is less of that weak/fragile you there. For example in the “strong guy” professional trying to be “stronger” by avoiding sickdays or not granting them sickdays would be a questionable strategy. And there is a big difference between wanting to have 1 sickday in a 1year, 1 sickday in decade and 1 sickday in a century. Refusing to take a sickday when you are coughing constantly is problay not conductive for total amoutn of calories burned for lifting things in a lifetime (or whatever the strength use is). I guess part of the maybe underephasised flipsides is that “when you want ot be stronger” you acknowledge your weakness more and actually address it ie “realising that you are weak” is strength and “ignorance of weakness” is antistrength.
Also what i have covered here implies a edgecase where you use mental damaghe in the same way that one uses physical damage to heal, some sort of mental surgery. When doing this sort of activity it could easily be imagined that the damage is close and certain and the benefits are uncertain and far away like doing random surgery motions is more likely to be damaging rather than constructive. But there is the possiblity that when you see that your action does mental damage the fact that keeps it from bring automatically morally wrong (or one of them) is that maybe the demeage done is exactly what the person needs for healing at the time. Maybe letting your kid fall a couple of times from a tree in your yard makes it so they don’t get crushed under a wrecking ball when being nearby construction sites or be mortally afraid when exposed to justified danger. Maybe starting a needless fight that hurts the participants feelings but gets a particuaar drama sorted out and/or means that people present less derailing arguments when doing important society policy discussions.
Thanks for sharing your experience! Though I haven’t written up a set of norms, I really like when someone engages with my posts by sharing the experiences they’ve had that relate to the ideas I’m talking about.
My internal double crux always gets down to this point and then notme says prove it and I don’t know how which leads me to…
What happens if, instead of trying to prove to notme that it won’t happen, you ask notme to show you (in a way which won’t overwhelm you, in case the belief emerges from some particularly nasty memory) why it thinks it will happen?
Well, notme has REALLY great examples for everyone being fragile. He can’t really come up with good reasons why hurting them is worth negative infinity points to me other than “Can you blame me?”. Which, no, no I can’t. He did the best one could expect of someone that age.
If I talk with notme about how not everyone is fragile, the only thing I have to offer is a hope that I’m just in a filter bubble and there’s some way to get out where people aren’t like this. He only gives a vague admission that’s a possibility. He feels very suspicious with the way I’m throwing around hope and hypotheticals. He also loses some confidence in me. Says I’m abandoning things and running away. The conversation ends here. I know that evidence points towards it being just a filter bubble, but notme really isn’t willing to have this discussion.
If I talk with notme about how it’s not his responsibility to make sure they stay undamaged… huh, he’s a little bit open to the idea that I could assign a very high but not negative infinity weight to the thought of hurting someone. Still suspicious, he’s asking for a concession in return, and he’s asking me to come up with what that concession is… but he’s slightly more open to lowering the weight when I acknowledge his venting a bit more first.
he’s slightly more open to lowering the weight when I acknowledge his venting a bit more first.
My suggestion is to continue with this route. Receive his venting, seek to genuinely empathize with it, try to understand and acknowledge his position as well as you can. Remember that understanding his position doesn’t mean that you would need to act according to all of his wishes: you can validate his experience and perspective without making a commitment to go along to everything. Just seek to understand as well as possible, without trying to argue with him.
(If you ever find it difficult not to argue or empathize, try treating that desire to argue or empathize as another part of your psyche, one which can be asked if it would be willing to move aside in order to let you help notme better.)
That said, he might not be willing to tell you everything until he trusts you enough. And if he is willing to negotiate with you in exchange for a concession, that can be a useful way to build mutual trust as well.
In all likelihood, you are talking with a traumatized part of your psyche [1, 2, 3]. He has witnessed experiences which make him have extreme beliefs, so that normal IDC is a poor fit and is likely to stall, the way you’ve seen it stall. The part is only going to relax once you’ve witnessed the original memories which make him take on that extreme role, understood why he feels that way, and been able to give him the comfort and adult support that he would originally have needed in that situation.
Just keep listening and building trust, until he’s ready to show you those original memories. Questions like “what are you afraid would happen if I didn’t do what you wanted” or “what would be bad about that” may be useful, as is actively validating whatever he says and offering him comfort. So might “Do you feel like I fully understand you now”. “How old are you” and “how old do you think I am” may also provide interesting results.
Like you said, he did the best one could expect of someone that age. But he’s probably still partially stuck in those experiences. It’s time to help him heal, and to help him see that you’ve got the resources to handle things on your own now. Once that happens, he’s free to take a new role inside your psyche, one which is likely to feel much easier for him.
I’ve saved all the links for this weekend. Thanks for the post btw, the post/comments from you/Hazard have helped and given me a lot to think about. This is all kinda a new realization after a year where I handled this all really poorly so I’m happy to get opportunities to explore it like this.
Suggestion about how behavior is due to repressed memories can something be problematic. In psychological history, plenty of false memories have been created by pressuring people to remember events that lead to present problems.
I don’t oppose going down that road in principle, but it’s good to be careful and ideally do it with a skilled person who directs the process.
I agree that some nasty stuff has happened under the context of “revealing repressed memories”.
From what I’ve read on that, my understanding is that the mechanism there is similar to what happens with police lineups. There is a pressure for you to recall, the authority figure is intentional or unintentionally wanting you to remember a particular thing, you pick up on those signals and pull together a fake memory of “seeing them commit the crime.”
I’m guessing that Kaj is talking about something very different from the frame of “find repressed memories.”
He has witnessed experiences which make him have extreme beliefs, so that normal IDC is a poor fit and is likely to stall, the way you’ve seen it stall. The part is only going to relax once you’ve witnessed the original memories which make him take on that extreme role, understood why he feels that way, and been able to give him the comfort and adult support that he would originally have needed in that situation.
Now I don’t have experience with IFS, but I’ll explain something that I’ve done which feels like what Kaj is talking about, and feels very different from “find repressed memories”.
I notice I’m feeling an intense feeling about an abstract thing (“I can’t fucking stand doing anything that looks like begging!”). Then I investigate why I feel that way. I think of different movies, books, memories, songs, that feel connected to this feeling. Some memories jump out (the lunch room in middle school, one kid having to tell his joke three times before the group decided to listen to him). Then I go, “Cool, this big cluster of memories of experiences is roughly the grounding for my attitude.” Now that I’ve got a sense of what the attitude grounds in, I can consider what might I might need to do to reshape it.
When I do this, I there’s not much of a sense of “I buried this memory for years!”. I can recall other points in my life when these memories have popped up, and don’t expect anything besides “standard memory drift” to be happening. I’m less “unearthing hidden memories” and more “connecting seemingly disjoint memories to an attitude.”
You made me realize that I almost never think in terms of “How might a given person take this post/writing?” I’m now wondering when that has and hasn’t been helpful for me.
I don’t think it’s a problem to just gently ask and then be open to the possibility of something coming up. That’s different from the kinds of leading questions that typically create false memories. Especially since Focusing/IFS/etc. style techniques seem to cause memories to come up spontaneously in any case, it’s just slightly nudging the process forward.
It also doesn’t necessarily matter whether the memories are true or not, as long as it helps the healing process along. We all have plenty of false or misleading memories in our heads anyway.
When leading techniques like Focusing or IFS you don’t normally tell the person you are leading things like “The part is only going to relax once you’ve witnessed the original memories which make him take on that extreme role”.
The sentence can be understood as a suggestion to seek for traumatic memories that might be the cause. It also contains a limiting belief in that it implies that the only way to deal with the issue is to go consciously through memories.
Writing communication has the problem that the space of possible interpretation from readers is often much larger then in 1-on-1 communication. There the risk of someone doing the wrong thing after reading the post and not just doing a lot of Focusing/IDC.
It also doesn’t necessarily matter whether the memories are true or not, as long as it helps the healing process along.
False memories can have negative consequences unrelated to the healing process. You might falsely remember something that causes you to think badly of someone, for example.
But even ignoring those, I feel like “I’m going to remember false things for instrumental gain” is the kind of thinking that gets people into this kind of mess.
Kaj can correct me if I’m misinterpreting them, but my understanding of:
It also doesn’t necessarily matter whether the memories are true or not, as long as it helps the healing process along. We all have plenty of false or misleading memories in our heads anyway.
Would be something like this: let’s say I’m trying to figure out why I’m scared of people, and a memory pops up of a kid in in elementary school sticking their tongue out at my and everyone laughing. It could be that no one was making fun of me, the kid was just playing around with their tongue (as 8 year olds do), and I later edited in the laughter of the other kids, and added more negative emotional valence to it.
I think Kaj is saying that it is useful to trace “Oh, I’ve got this thing in my head that has motivated me to act like ABC”. Whether or not my memory is an accurate representation of what happened, this memory has been affecting you, and you could do with examining it.
I wouldn’t interpret Kaj as saying “Go ahead and remember false things for instrumental gain. What could possibly go wrong with that!?”. Truth is obviously important, and allowing oneself to pretend “this looks instrumentally useful to believe, so I can ignore the fact that it’s clearly false” is definitely a recipe for disaster.
What Kaj is saying, I think, is that the possibility of being wrong is not justification for closing ones eyes and not looking. If we attempt to have any beliefs at all, we’re going to be wrong now and then, and the best way to deal with this is to keep this in mind, stay calibrated, and generally look at more rather than less.
It’s not that “recovering memories” is especially error prone, it’s that everything is error prone and people often fail to appreciate how unreliable memory can be because they don’t actually get how it works. If you try to mislead someone and convince them that a certain thing is happened, they might remember “oh, but I could have been mislead” where as if you do the exact same thing but instead you mislead them to think “you remember this happening”, then they now get this false stamp of certainty saying “but I remember it!”.
What Kaj is saying, I think, is that the possibility of being wrong is not justification for closing ones eyes and not looking. [...] It’s not that “recovering memories” is especially error prone, it’s that everything is error prone and people often fail to appreciate how unreliable memory can be because they don’t actually get how it works.
I’m pondering this again. I expect, though I have not double checked, that the studied cases of pressure to find repressed memories leading to fake memories are mostly ones that involve, well, another person pressuring you. How often does this happen if you sit alone in your room and try it? Skilled assistant would almost certainly be better than an unskilled assistant, though I don’t know how it compares to DIY, if you add the complication of “can you tell if someone is skilled or not?”
Would be interested if anyone’s got info about DIY investigations.
I relate to this a lot. Gonna skip over the young childhood stuff that started me on this path, but this really became an issue starting in high school. I was really stressed out trying to manage my girlfriend’s fragile mental state. Developed acid reflux and thought I was having a heart attack because I ate through the inner lining of my esophagus and breathing was extremely painful. So I picked up meditation. And without a teacher I only focused on quieting my “monologue of upsetness”. I had some symptoms of depersonalization before, but this is when it really developed into a full on disorder. And honestly until I realized it was a disorder I was quite proud of it. I’d leave my body and then I wouldn’t feel any pain, I’d just observe “notme” handling it. A downright superpower if you ignore all the horrible side effects.
Some thoughts on the ”..and now?” I’ve been wrestling with
1) Much like how I went “idk, I’ll just learn to stop feeling bad and then I can keep dating her” I’m now going “idk, I’ll just learn to stop worrying about the things that trigger me to feel nothing” which seems like it might just be a bandaid
2) Metta meditation seems to help a little. Focusing on having feelings instead of stopping them. It ended up having me come to my own parent-child model and when I offered notme to be his father that led to him calming down a lot. (notme ~= my system 1? I know there’s not actually another me, this is just how it ~feels~)
3) I’ve found a core belief of “People are fragile, I must be resilient or I’ll damage people” that is at the base of it all, but it’s not so easy to just knock out the belief at the base of yourself. notme still doesn’t believe that everything isn’t about to come crashing down because of someone else’s fragility. My internal double crux always gets down to this point and then notme says prove it and I don’t know how which leads me to...
4) Progressive overload is normally my answer to everything, but how? I can’t just sort people I know by how triggering they are to me and ask them to trigger me. It’s not the same in that context, and that’s not the most compassionate thing to ask someone to do. I’d have to find some way to naturally be in an environment I find triggering without feeling like I was using the people there. I’m probably not just being creative enough; or maybe I’m losing sight of the end goal by focusing on this and not trying to find other ways to convince notme everything is fine
I feel you so much on depersonalization seeming super awesome until you realize you’re cut off from life itself in many ways. I’m still mad how much the outside world seems to appreciate when you’re half-dead inside...
Oof, I haven’t thought directly about that before, but man that can sting.
Part of that seems to be the a basic part of “you’re the only one in your own head.” Other people have limited ability to know what I feel like, but can visibly tell whether or not I rage at other people. I get congratulated for not raging at people in tense situations, and it feels like I’m getting praised for the internal thing (ignoring my emotions).
Something I’d be interested in from this comment and maybe the OP is more clearly spelling out the bad thing that happened, as a result on “turning off emotions.”
I happen to agree with the frame you and Hazard have here, but if I imagine a person who’s currently thinking “yeah I can turn off my emotions it’s great!”, this post and comment doesn’t quite articulate what they’re missing or sacrificing. (To be clear, articulating this seems quite hard, just noting that it’d be useful if you could manage it)
Sometimes you scrape your knee really badly and don’t notice. It’s nice to not feel the pain, but also you just bled all over the carpet and now your mom is mad at you because she has to scrub the carpet for 20 minutes to get the dried blood off it.
If you could notice you scraped your knee immediately, make a fair assessment as to what care the scraped knee needs, and then turn the feeling off that is a super power. Sometimes I do that and it’s awesome. But I don’t have the power to turn them back on. They turn back on when they want, not when I want. Now I’m stuck in a bad state until something shocks me out of it. Plus sometimes they turn off completely involuntarily like the worst habit one could ever have.
My symptoms might be slightly different than Hazard’s because I specifically relate to depersonalization symptoms but here are some negative things I deal with when I have involuntary disconnect.
1) Sometimes I try and move my body and nothing happens. I feel the sensations of movement, but my body doesn’t move. When my feelings turned off, so did everything else.
2) Sometimes I can’t empathize. I can logically say what someone is feeling, but I don’t feel any true empathy for them when I’m in that state. I can’t turn just my feelings off, my ability to feel other people’s emotions turns off too. It leads to me treating people like they are disposable. It leads to me not enjoying talking about other people, as feeling their feels is what makes that fun.
3) My memory is extremely bad. I don’t remember what I say when I’m depersonalized. If someone wants me to repeat something they liked, oh boy is that stressful because I have no clue what I said or if I could say something similar. I was completely unaware of how I treated people when depersonalized because I remember so little of it. I don’t really remember much from last August to this June to be honest.
4) Sometimes I feel inhuman. If I spend a long period of time not feeling anything, then I’ve kinda opted out of the human experience and it’s like why am I even bothering to be alive? I’m not suicidal, just kinda meh.
5) Sometimes I make a bad call when to turn it off on purpose. Someone will be upset, I’ll turn my feelings off so it doesn’t bother me, and then the problem comes back later when honestly if I had faced the feelings I would have come up with a solution to the issue.
6) I have a weird relationship with akrasia. Sometimes I am the master of akrasia, just turning off my feelings and doing it anyways! But then I stop caring enough to even do that. Until my system 1 turns back on my system 2 won’t even care enough to input a new command.
7) “Turn off feelings” for me is a bit of a simplification. It’s just like, the feelings were in notme (my system 1?) so when I separate from notme I don’t feel it but it’s still there in notme. And then when I reconnect with notme they’re calm enough that I don’t really notice them but they are still lurking around in very faint ways.
8) I stay in situations I shouldn’t. My natural reaction to a bad romantic experience is just to turn off my bad feelings and continue the relationship. Without the negative reaction there isn’t really anything pushing me to call things off. So I spend a lot of time sticking in things I shouldn’t.
Thanks, appreciate this writeup a bunch!
As someone who fatefully discovered dissociation/depersonalization/derealization (https://mhollyelmoreblog.wordpress.com/2016/06/25/dissociation/) around 10 only to have shit hit the fan in my 20s, I think I can articulate what’s lost when you lose touch with emotions. At first it feels great to ride above the pain, for me social pain in particular, and only come back down when it’s safe, like at home with my family. But eventually you can’t come back down to experience even essential things like interest, excitement, most of all love and connection. I feel that I was slowly bleeding out the entire time I was away from my body, never fully replenishing what was lost, and after years I was just empty and shriveled. I had my first real depression at the end of college and I felt mostly numb but also miserable and heavy. There was a deep sense of loss for I didn’t know what. Now I know what I was craving was a sense of being embodied, of feeling real and being connected to the world.
Healing sucks immensely because years of dissociating from emotion makes them very intense and when you come back and your coping skills extremely weak. But coming back to your body and your feelings is really the only way to come back to life. Being estranged from them is actively rejecting the reality of your experience and dividing yourself. It’s the autoimmune disease of the soul. Someone who’s checked out of a major part of their experience is not only missing the experience, but engaged in a civil war to keep it that way. You may be safe from barbed emotions when you’re dissociated, but eventually you’re not able to rest even in your own experience. It’s a torture that’s difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it to understand but I hope I’ve given some insight.
Good point. I’ll try to add details.
Big picture (from the subagent model): The children (emotions) will go behind your back and talk coordinate with other sub agents if going to the parent is not safe. Children often aren’t that smart, and will probs pick a spaghetti tower solution. You will end up with behaviors you don’t understand that will be hard to change, and you will won’t be able to improve at meeting the needs of those children (because you don’t know those needs exist).
Some specific examples:
Me being “inexplicably” depressed on the weekends. Because I’d ignored my emotions, I could see no explanation besides “The brain will randomly decide to feel aweful, there is nothing that can be done about this except go to sleep and now I’ll probably feel fine come monday”. So there was a decent amount of pain and suffering that has since been dealt with, but when I was ignoring my emotions I felt like I was stuck with it forever.
Ignoring my emotions has a powerful narrowing effect on the options I have for building skills and getting more competent. When I saw a challenge, possible goal/dream/desire, if I didn’t immediately know how to get it, I would ignore my wants and tell myself I didn’t want it. There’s a way in which I was only able to make local optimizations. There have been plenty of times in which I’ve “just been doing something for the hell of it” and then realized I was skilled enough to enact an old desire. This is a pretty random/happenstance process. Now that I’m better at listening to my emotions, I’m able to Scheme towards things that I want that don’t yet feel possible.
Ignoring my emotions contributed to a behaviors were I’d be very quick to
Another Big Picture: Thinking ignoring my emotions is great feels like mistaking wire-heading for leprosy. Wire heading as “self modify to feel good about whatever my circumstances are” and leprosy as “I’m still being torn apart and damaged by things, I just don’t feel it anymore.”
If you haven’t I’d read it I’d totally recommend Kaj’s Multi-Agent Models sequence. I used to have a mind model of “There is me, the smart goal oriented s2, and then s1, the fast and primitive lizard brain. Of course I shouldn’t have disdain for s1, but really the game is about getting my s1 to do what I (s2) want”
Now my model is different. I think of s2/consciousness as a type of information processing my brain can do, and I think I is my self-concept (which is stored and maintained in very distributed ways), and S1 is just “all other types of information processing” and in my mind there’s room for lots of sub-agent like entities.
I haven’t read it yet but I’ve saved all the links for this weekend.
I’m still not sure how “real” the dichotomy is for me. I think I understand and agree with what you’re saying about s1 and s2 just being different types of processing. But sometimes while control is transferring between me and notme it really feels like there are two people in my head. It’s not like how I can make two imaginary people to represent two subagents I know I have, it’s like a person who is already there and doesn’t need to be created. It’s my understanding that that’s not a super rare symptom, but that it’s also not normal. I’m not sure “meVSnotme” and “s2VSs1” are the same thing, but I map pretty well onto s2 and notme maps pretty well onto s1. I’m not sure how much this paragraph makes sense but I’m still figuring things out.
Thanks for the post btw, the post/comments from you/kaj have helped and given me a lot to think about. This is all kinda a new realization after a year where I handled this all really poorly so I’m happy to get opportunities to explore it like this.
FYI I have had a very similar experience to what you’re describing. You’re not alone. I too found that being kind to notme instead of shouting at them is helpful. And, I’ve found one of the things that helps most is feeling really seen/heard by others, so hopefully this helps!
Seems to connected to this sort of belief network I had issues where it would be very painful and akward to explain my odd seeming behaviour. If I would describe a psychological quirck I had that was connected with psychological damage I would aplogise for being that way and the excesive restrictions what I was allowed to be started to be problematic. I eventually worked up to a position where it is seen very valuable that if you have trauma/damage quirks that you acknowledge and treat them and trying to pass as “normal” to not trigger the “offence” of being “mad” was seen as super-antigood. In the exreme the position that I previously thought was a good but came to think of as antigood (or bad) that people have a duty to not be brkoen/ get driven mad by pressures of life.
In the area it has become more important for me to highlight the analogy between physical and mental injuries. If your stomach is open and you are bleeding profusely people have the instinct to block the flow of blood to outside the body. People do not start blaming you why you have gotten your stomach open, if they ask questions it’s to clarify what interventions are effective in treating the damage. Even in the case when the injury is self-inflicted peoples pirmary message is not “you should not have done that”. I guess one of the more plausible challneges to this characterization would be a emergency services medical profession accepting a gunshot wound victim in a city infested with gangs. The position of “This guy got himself shot doing stupid gangbanging”. But I think even in cases like these it would not be professionally or ethically proper for the treater to be the one opining “you should stop gangbanging” althought education about the adverse efffects of bullets in stomachs would be within task scope.
And even if physical intentonal huritng is criminal in some cases, that is not a totally blanket rule. Assault exists sure. But surgery is just medical violence and that is allowed. And if a incident involves bigger injuries it probably means the quilt of the offending party is greater. But damage doesn’t imply quilt. You can do sports and be in physical causal realtion to their injuries and you would not neccesarily be in the wrong with your actions.
Elderly people have the property that they can get bruises easily. And part of organising such a persons life might mean that things are done safely without significant risk of physical striking. Part of that might be giving advice how ot move about. Some familiy of an old person might scold the elder for being covered in bruises for “not following instructions to move safely”. But this kind of scolding would be by an large to be in the wrong and very insensitive. And if a elder is found with bruises it doesn’t mean that somebody has done something wrong (althought statistical high amounts would be reaon to suspect that adherence to safety propocols is not up to notch). Elder people are physically fragile and that is okay and they do not have a duty to be sturdy.
The interesting case could be that if a young person throught throught neglience for daily sports (althought you would almost need to never get out of bed) got himself to the same fragile state that elderly people are in. Some mean person might accuse that the lazy person is quility of being a “weakling” that they “have themselfs caused their pitiful state” But I would find this kind of reasonning to atleast miss the point and almost safely say taht such reasonign would be in the morally wrong.
Yet in the mental health aspect if you show sign of damage it’s not uncommon for that to be treated as you having comimtted a wrong. Elder people do not have a duty to physically sturdy but adult people have a duty to be mentally sturdy. Note that we do not have the same kind of duty to be unwounded. Note that you might face discrimination if you become physically disabled but there is no perception of people being wrong for being disabled (and I guess some forms of discrimination can be traced to a theory where they are blamed for their disability).
Mental damage sucks and intentionally inflicted mental damage is not nice but I think there should be room for people to be mentally fragile. It’s far more important that people breaking down happens well rather than it never happenning. It’s not a taboo state. We would rather never get wounded but forbidding to be wounded seems like a bad way to arrive at never being wounded. So being wounded well doesn’t mean promoting woundedness.
Taking maximising ability to be mentally fragile would mean that all adults should enjoy all the mental provisions afforded to children (or there being danger of that). Sometimes we solve some things by demanding something of someone and some problems we currently solve by demanding mental sturdiness. But it’s possible to be too demanding. Or like profession s that need to be strong can still have sickdays ie days when they are not required to be strong.
I realise that there is a potential conflict with (some conceptions of) the “I want to be stronger” ethos. Inverted it means there is less of that weak/fragile you there. For example in the “strong guy” professional trying to be “stronger” by avoiding sickdays or not granting them sickdays would be a questionable strategy. And there is a big difference between wanting to have 1 sickday in a 1year, 1 sickday in decade and 1 sickday in a century. Refusing to take a sickday when you are coughing constantly is problay not conductive for total amoutn of calories burned for lifting things in a lifetime (or whatever the strength use is). I guess part of the maybe underephasised flipsides is that “when you want ot be stronger” you acknowledge your weakness more and actually address it ie “realising that you are weak” is strength and “ignorance of weakness” is antistrength.
Also what i have covered here implies a edgecase where you use mental damaghe in the same way that one uses physical damage to heal, some sort of mental surgery. When doing this sort of activity it could easily be imagined that the damage is close and certain and the benefits are uncertain and far away like doing random surgery motions is more likely to be damaging rather than constructive. But there is the possiblity that when you see that your action does mental damage the fact that keeps it from bring automatically morally wrong (or one of them) is that maybe the demeage done is exactly what the person needs for healing at the time. Maybe letting your kid fall a couple of times from a tree in your yard makes it so they don’t get crushed under a wrecking ball when being nearby construction sites or be mortally afraid when exposed to justified danger. Maybe starting a needless fight that hurts the participants feelings but gets a particuaar drama sorted out and/or means that people present less derailing arguments when doing important society policy discussions.
Thanks for sharing your experience! Though I haven’t written up a set of norms, I really like when someone engages with my posts by sharing the experiences they’ve had that relate to the ideas I’m talking about.
What happens if, instead of trying to prove to notme that it won’t happen, you ask notme to show you (in a way which won’t overwhelm you, in case the belief emerges from some particularly nasty memory) why it thinks it will happen?
Well, notme has REALLY great examples for everyone being fragile. He can’t really come up with good reasons why hurting them is worth negative infinity points to me other than “Can you blame me?”. Which, no, no I can’t. He did the best one could expect of someone that age.
If I talk with notme about how not everyone is fragile, the only thing I have to offer is a hope that I’m just in a filter bubble and there’s some way to get out where people aren’t like this. He only gives a vague admission that’s a possibility. He feels very suspicious with the way I’m throwing around hope and hypotheticals. He also loses some confidence in me. Says I’m abandoning things and running away. The conversation ends here. I know that evidence points towards it being just a filter bubble, but notme really isn’t willing to have this discussion.
If I talk with notme about how it’s not his responsibility to make sure they stay undamaged… huh, he’s a little bit open to the idea that I could assign a very high but not negative infinity weight to the thought of hurting someone. Still suspicious, he’s asking for a concession in return, and he’s asking me to come up with what that concession is… but he’s slightly more open to lowering the weight when I acknowledge his venting a bit more first.
My suggestion is to continue with this route. Receive his venting, seek to genuinely empathize with it, try to understand and acknowledge his position as well as you can. Remember that understanding his position doesn’t mean that you would need to act according to all of his wishes: you can validate his experience and perspective without making a commitment to go along to everything. Just seek to understand as well as possible, without trying to argue with him.
(If you ever find it difficult not to argue or empathize, try treating that desire to argue or empathize as another part of your psyche, one which can be asked if it would be willing to move aside in order to let you help notme better.)
That said, he might not be willing to tell you everything until he trusts you enough. And if he is willing to negotiate with you in exchange for a concession, that can be a useful way to build mutual trust as well.
In all likelihood, you are talking with a traumatized part of your psyche [1, 2, 3]. He has witnessed experiences which make him have extreme beliefs, so that normal IDC is a poor fit and is likely to stall, the way you’ve seen it stall. The part is only going to relax once you’ve witnessed the original memories which make him take on that extreme role, understood why he feels that way, and been able to give him the comfort and adult support that he would originally have needed in that situation.
Just keep listening and building trust, until he’s ready to show you those original memories. Questions like “what are you afraid would happen if I didn’t do what you wanted” or “what would be bad about that” may be useful, as is actively validating whatever he says and offering him comfort. So might “Do you feel like I fully understand you now”. “How old are you” and “how old do you think I am” may also provide interesting results.
Like you said, he did the best one could expect of someone that age. But he’s probably still partially stuck in those experiences. It’s time to help him heal, and to help him see that you’ve got the resources to handle things on your own now. Once that happens, he’s free to take a new role inside your psyche, one which is likely to feel much easier for him.
I’ve saved all the links for this weekend. Thanks for the post btw, the post/comments from you/Hazard have helped and given me a lot to think about. This is all kinda a new realization after a year where I handled this all really poorly so I’m happy to get opportunities to explore it like this.
Suggestion about how behavior is due to repressed memories can something be problematic. In psychological history, plenty of false memories have been created by pressuring people to remember events that lead to present problems.
I don’t oppose going down that road in principle, but it’s good to be careful and ideally do it with a skilled person who directs the process.
I agree that some nasty stuff has happened under the context of “revealing repressed memories”.
From what I’ve read on that, my understanding is that the mechanism there is similar to what happens with police lineups. There is a pressure for you to recall, the authority figure is intentional or unintentionally wanting you to remember a particular thing, you pick up on those signals and pull together a fake memory of “seeing them commit the crime.”
I’m guessing that Kaj is talking about something very different from the frame of “find repressed memories.”
Now I don’t have experience with IFS, but I’ll explain something that I’ve done which feels like what Kaj is talking about, and feels very different from “find repressed memories”.
I notice I’m feeling an intense feeling about an abstract thing (“I can’t fucking stand doing anything that looks like begging!”). Then I investigate why I feel that way. I think of different movies, books, memories, songs, that feel connected to this feeling. Some memories jump out (the lunch room in middle school, one kid having to tell his joke three times before the group decided to listen to him). Then I go, “Cool, this big cluster of memories of experiences is roughly the grounding for my attitude.” Now that I’ve got a sense of what the attitude grounds in, I can consider what might I might need to do to reshape it.
When I do this, I there’s not much of a sense of “I buried this memory for years!”. I can recall other points in my life when these memories have popped up, and don’t expect anything besides “standard memory drift” to be happening. I’m less “unearthing hidden memories” and more “connecting seemingly disjoint memories to an attitude.”
The issue isn’t what Kaj intends to talk about but the space of possible ways of readers, reading Kaj’s post.
It’s possible that someone would read the post and take the lesson that they should seek for the repressed memories from it.
Oh, I see your point.
You made me realize that I almost never think in terms of “How might a given person take this post/writing?” I’m now wondering when that has and hasn’t been helpful for me.
I don’t think it’s a problem to just gently ask and then be open to the possibility of something coming up. That’s different from the kinds of leading questions that typically create false memories. Especially since Focusing/IFS/etc. style techniques seem to cause memories to come up spontaneously in any case, it’s just slightly nudging the process forward.
It also doesn’t necessarily matter whether the memories are true or not, as long as it helps the healing process along. We all have plenty of false or misleading memories in our heads anyway.
When leading techniques like Focusing or IFS you don’t normally tell the person you are leading things like “The part is only going to relax once you’ve witnessed the original memories which make him take on that extreme role”.
The sentence can be understood as a suggestion to seek for traumatic memories that might be the cause. It also contains a limiting belief in that it implies that the only way to deal with the issue is to go consciously through memories.
Writing communication has the problem that the space of possible interpretation from readers is often much larger then in 1-on-1 communication. There the risk of someone doing the wrong thing after reading the post and not just doing a lot of Focusing/IDC.
Right, I agree that having an explicit intention to go looking for traumatic memories is likely to be counterproductive.
False memories can have negative consequences unrelated to the healing process. You might falsely remember something that causes you to think badly of someone, for example.
But even ignoring those, I feel like “I’m going to remember false things for instrumental gain” is the kind of thinking that gets people into this kind of mess.
Kaj can correct me if I’m misinterpreting them, but my understanding of:
Would be something like this: let’s say I’m trying to figure out why I’m scared of people, and a memory pops up of a kid in in elementary school sticking their tongue out at my and everyone laughing. It could be that no one was making fun of me, the kid was just playing around with their tongue (as 8 year olds do), and I later edited in the laughter of the other kids, and added more negative emotional valence to it.
I think Kaj is saying that it is useful to trace “Oh, I’ve got this thing in my head that has motivated me to act like ABC”. Whether or not my memory is an accurate representation of what happened, this memory has been affecting you, and you could do with examining it.
I wouldn’t interpret Kaj as saying “Go ahead and remember false things for instrumental gain. What could possibly go wrong with that!?”. Truth is obviously important, and allowing oneself to pretend “this looks instrumentally useful to believe, so I can ignore the fact that it’s clearly false” is definitely a recipe for disaster.
What Kaj is saying, I think, is that the possibility of being wrong is not justification for closing ones eyes and not looking. If we attempt to have any beliefs at all, we’re going to be wrong now and then, and the best way to deal with this is to keep this in mind, stay calibrated, and generally look at more rather than less.
It’s not that “recovering memories” is especially error prone, it’s that everything is error prone and people often fail to appreciate how unreliable memory can be because they don’t actually get how it works. If you try to mislead someone and convince them that a certain thing is happened, they might remember “oh, but I could have been mislead” where as if you do the exact same thing but instead you mislead them to think “you remember this happening”, then they now get this false stamp of certainty saying “but I remember it!”.
I endorse this summary.
I’m pondering this again. I expect, though I have not double checked, that the studied cases of pressure to find repressed memories leading to fake memories are mostly ones that involve, well, another person pressuring you. How often does this happen if you sit alone in your room and try it? Skilled assistant would almost certainly be better than an unskilled assistant, though I don’t know how it compares to DIY, if you add the complication of “can you tell if someone is skilled or not?”
Would be interested if anyone’s got info about DIY investigations.