His fiance works in Boulder in PTSD-related treatments. in practices that have surfaced during the past few years as game changers for people suffering from trauma, stress, depression and anxiety.
Two years ago, I would categorize my own range of emotions as intense, genuine, and the result of being what's referred to as "highly sensitive." Yet, throughout and following Linda's illness and death, I've started to look more closely at my views, mindset and emotions. Specifically at their origin.
I have not fully identified why, when or where my propensity to feel how I feel began, but I am definitely becoming far more conscious of the idea that much of the negative self-judgment thoughts that are practically instinctual are also an absurd unwarranted waste of limited time and energy. I don't deserve to be treated the way I treat myself. And in parallel, I have to acknowledge that others, such as Jennifer, Linda, Tommy and Lauren, all the way down the unknown person whose failure to go when the light turns green gets deemed a "dip shit" by my inner dialog, also do not deserve the rigid judgemental nature I can default to.
But again, where is that coming from, where did I learn it, why did I incorporate it into my subconscious responses, and how do I shut that down permanently?
I have been told I overthink things and that it's natural and human to get annoyed and irritated and to react to a circumstance from a place of reflex intuition. It's not, seemingly, routine to pause and calmly consider the situation without an attachment to emotional triggers.
My counselor indicated last week that my measured improvements are "DBT-based processes tools. "Dialectic Behavior Therapy" is, I think, having that inner dialog first and making conscious choices without incorporating a "personal "nature.
The person missing the green light is as easily me on any given day, and their delay is not directed at me. The decision to lay me off due to a diminished need for me in a business capacity is also truly not personal. And my son's rude, dismissive impulse response to me has everything to do with his maturity, upbringing and influences, including my own modeling and responses. It's still not "personal" in the realm of deeply knowing my character, heart, and best intentions despite my faults and difficulties.
That same counselor recently said that we are products of our parent's own tightly knotted ball of interwoven issues unconsciously passed along from the knotted ball of interwoven issues passed to them from their parents, going back for endless generations throughout time, shaped by unique and common social and economic factors for any given lineage.
At this point, I mentally follow the family tree backward, watching it splinter and broaden wider and wider at each juncture, and wonder if I had been born into a completely different family, country, society, era... who would I end up being? Would I be more confident? More unbalanced? Richer? Poorer? A hunter, a priest, a tribesman, a communist, or any aspects and characteristics I don't consider myself today?
Perhaps the core question boils down to the simple bottom line upon which all of this is based. Who am I? I can't say I really know. But I'm pressing the question consistently.
"Something in me, dark and sticky
All the time it's getting strong
No way of dealing with this feeling
Can't go on like this too long"
- Peter Gabriel