Splitting as a Symptom of Internal Considering

[truth seeker]

Since I'm sort of collecting examples here (and hope that ya'll will contribute other possible examples), there's a particular type of personality that works this way when splitting/internal considering takes hold:

First, they have rapid and overwhelming emotional reactions to whatever the trigger is, and start out from a state of being emotionally worked up. Then, the more this type thinks while in that state, the more s/he freaks out the self, so to say. And the more convinced s/he is that s/he is RIGHT about whatever.

The sad thing is that the more this person continues to "think", the more inaccurate, outlandish, irrational, out of proportion and out of context the thoughts become. This sort of person can drive themselves to do many things that are damaging to others but, in the long run, mostly to themselves.

Yes, I think I do this. I'll have an emotional reaction to someone or some situation and will then seek safety. The actions regarding the retreat to this 'safe place' can take the form of a narrative and/or social anxiety (retreating inward). Those are just two examples, I'm sure there are others.

When this goes on long enough and I haven't figured out a way to safely vent these feelings, take myself too seriously and am unable to practice external consideration and serve others, these feelings overflow and come out in ways that do more harm than good.

It's truly amazing the lengths I/we go in order to preserve our perception of the self. In this state, we are not only victim, but victimizer of ourselves and others, or so I think.

edit: clarity

 

[Laura]

Guilty your honor. lol. I will also admit that, personally, even though when I am in that state of emotional thinking and I only recall facts that support my current view, when presented with other facts or logic, etc., as frustrating as it is at the time, it does act as a breaking mechanism, like the breaks on a car so to speak, to the direction and momentum of my view. But, it does not necessarily release the build-up of emotional energy in my head, if that makes any sense.

Yes, I think I do this. I'll have an emotional reaction to someone or some situation and will then seek safety. The actions regarding the retreat to this 'safe place' can take the form of a narrative and/or social anxiety (retreating inward). Those are just two examples, I'm sure there are others.

When this goes on long enough and I haven't figured out a way to safely vent these feelings, take myself too seriously and am unable to practice external consideration and serve others, these feelings overflow and come out in ways that do more harm than good.

It's truly amazing the lengths I/we go in order to preserve our perception of the self. In this state, we are not only victim, but victimizer of ourselves and others, or so I think.

edit: clarity

Okay, so here's the deal: you HAVE to metabolize the emotions because it is clouding your thinking. But you want to do this with full awareness that your thinking is clouded! It's like grease burning in your oven, filling the room with acrid smoke, and you have to open open doors and windows to get the smoke out, but you KNOW that it is just smoke and what is causing it and you don't go calling the fire department, or get out a fire extinguisher and spray down your room and make a huge mess to clean up, or run screaming "the house is burning, the house is burning!"

Venting safely is "airing things out" getting the smoke out of the room. And then you have to work on getting the grease out of the oven so it doesn't happen again!

The only way I can explain it is that you have to KNOW that your brain is fogged when you think a certain way, feel a certain way, act a certain way, and that your system 1 is running the show and trying to force system 2 into service. And system 2 is usually very obliging.

Thing is, you can't get system 2 - thinking - to straighten out while the house is full of smoke, or using the other analogy, the horse is out of control. You have to get the smoke out, or run the horse safely until it is exhausted and THEN you can work on cleaning/training.

You can play "Ain't it Awful" with one very, VERY, important modification: you must know, and acknowledge throughout, that your brain is clouded with programmed emotions that are like old grease on the bottom of the oven. So, instead of being reasonable in your complaints, you MUST blow them out of proportion until they are ridiculous and you can see how ridiculous they are and laugh at yourself.

 

[dugdeep]

Okay, so here's the deal: you HAVE to metabolize the emotions because it is clouding your thinking. But you want to do this with full awareness that your thinking is clouded! It's like grease burning in your oven, filling the room with acrid smoke, and you have to open open doors and windows to get the smoke out, but you KNOW that it is just smoke and what is causing it and you don't go calling the fire department, or get out a fire extinguisher and spray down your room and make a huge mess to clean up, or run screaming "the house is burning, the house is burning!"

Venting safely is "airing things out" getting the smoke out of the room. And then you have to work on getting the grease out of the oven so it doesn't happen again!

The only way I can explain it is that you have to KNOW that your brain is fogged when you think a certain way, feel a certain way, act a certain way, and that your system 1 is running the show and trying to force system 2 into service. And system 2 is usually very obliging.

Thing is, you can't get system 2 - thinking - to straighten out while the house is full of smoke, or using the other analogy, the horse is out of control. You have to get the smoke out, or run the horse safely until it is exhausted and THEN you can work on cleaning/training.

You can play "Ain't it Awful" with one very, VERY, important modification: you must know, and acknowledge throughout, that your brain is clouded with programmed emotions that are like old grease on the bottom of the oven. So, instead of being reasonable in your complaints, you MUST blow them out of proportion until they are ridiculous and you can see how ridiculous they are and laugh at yourself.

I've been experimenting with this 'metabolizing' of emotions. I've found myself getting triggered anytime someone implies that my knowledge or expertise is lacking in anyway. I'm a holistic nutritionist who works in a health food store with naturopaths, homeopaths, herbalists and other holistic practitioners. Most people consider the naturopaths to be the top of the pile in that respect, which makes sense since they have essentially gone to medical school, taking extensive training for 4 years compared to my 1. But any time someone says to me "can I speak to a naturopath instead?", I get my back up. "What, you think I'm not good enough!?" is what usually goes through my head. This is a pretty regular occurrence actually, so I've got a lot of material to work with :)

The other day a customer asked me a question about a particular supplement and I gave her the answer. She disagreed, and I realized that she had meant something different from her question than what she had actually asked. Rather than amplifying the confusion, I just said "oh, I see what you mean", as if relenting that she was right (even though it was actually a miscommunication and both of us were right). Well then the customer starts snickering, as if I'm a complete idiot!

Well, this just sent me into a tailspin. Not only was this extremely rude, but it is a trigger for me - implying I'm less intelligent than I obviously am ;) I managed to hold my composure even though I was boiling inside. I vented to a coworker once the customer was gone (all of us regularly vent to eachother, since dealing with horrible customers is a daily occurence), but it still seemed to be nagging on me. I think it's because I hadn't yet metabolized the emotions by exhausting the original feeling. I'd vented to my coworker a bit but I hadn't really played things up and exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness. I can't, really, since these people aren't in the Work and probably would think I was insane.

So instead I decided to do this on my own. Just in my own head, once I was home, when my thoughts drifted to this incident again, I decided to really go with it. "You dare to laugh at me, with all the supreme knowledge I have!? Do you know who I am?! You should be bowing down and kissing my feet! I know everything there is to know about supplements and then some! Everyone in this store should be bowing down to me - supreme master of nutrition!"

It was completely ludicrous, and somewhere inside I was holding on to the realization that it was completely ludicrous. When I was done I had a good chuckle at how silly it is to have these kinds of thoughts. I don't know how successful it was in the grand scheme of things, though, since my mind keeps going back to the incident every once in awhile, but it certainly seems to have disipated some of the accumulated energy, since I'm not fantasizing about "setting her straight" so much anymore. Maybe to derive the full benefit of this exercise you really have to have another person to bounce these exaggerated emotions off of. I'm not sure, but I'm going to work more with it in the future to see if there's improvement with more effort.

 

[Alana]

Okay, so here's the deal: you HAVE to metabolize the emotions because it is clouding your thinking. But you want to do this with full awareness that your thinking is clouded! It's like grease burning in your oven, filling the room with acrid smoke, and you have to open open doors and windows to get the smoke out, but you KNOW that it is just smoke and what is causing it and you don't go calling the fire department, or get out a fire extinguisher and spray down your room and make a huge mess to clean up, or run screaming "the house is burning, the house is burning!"

I always thought that I was pretty good at expressing my emotions and letting steam off, but reading the bolded above, that is exactly what I've been doing: reacting in ways that made a lot of mess and calling in help, just because of some smoke! I haven't seen it this way before, thank you! It was the image I needed.

What I did notice before however, is that during splitting is when I feel very sure of my self and what I am thinking. It terrifies me, when I am out of the foggy-mindness and can think critically again, to look back and see how wrong I was, how obvious it was I was wrong, but how blind I was to it all. And worst of all, there's nothing I can do to take what I did and said back anymore. So I am very grateful for this entire thread and to all of you who contributed! I am still reading and rereading most of the posts here, and I think I will begin practicing "metabolizing" as described, before I start calling emergencies to the rescue for some smoke from old grease.

 

[Laura]

So instead I decided to do this on my own. Just in my own head, once I was home, when my thoughts drifted to this incident again, I decided to really go with it. "You dare to laugh at me, with all the supreme knowledge I have!? Do you know who I am?! You should be bowing down and kissing my feet! I know everything there is to know about supplements and then some! Everyone in this store should be bowing down to me - supreme master of nutrition!"

It was completely ludicrous, and somewhere inside I was holding on to the realization that it was completely ludicrous. When I was done I had a good chuckle at how silly it is to have these kinds of thoughts. I don't know how successful it was in the grand scheme of things, though, since my mind keeps going back to the incident every once in awhile, but it certainly seems to have disipated some of the accumulated energy, since I'm not fantasizing about "setting her straight" so much anymore. Maybe to derive the full benefit of this exercise you really have to have another person to bounce these exaggerated emotions off of. I'm not sure, but I'm going to work more with it in the future to see if there's improvement with more effort.

Well, don't just do it "in your head." How about creating a pillow dummy and you can pin a name or description of who it is on it. Then, do like V did in the movie, take a fake sword, toy light saber, umbrella, whatever, and "sword fight" with the dummy all the while declaiming like a Shakespearean actor the stuff in your head?

You can leap around, dash forwards and backwards, beg for mercy in the voice of the "opponent" and just generally do a dialogue. Tire yourself out.

I can assure you, after doing this a few times, you'll find that the backed up energy inside dissipates and you have fewer and fewer such reactions.

Of course, there are always new and different situations that can come along...

 

[Aithin Tusa Fein]

I don't know about anyone else, but it seems like some of us have more "flammable grease" so to speak. Seriously, when I get that way, I feel like the contortions of Cuchulain that you described in HoM.

Cúchulainn became … a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of. His shanks and joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot, shook like a tree in the flood or a reed in the stream. His body made a furious twist inside his skin, so that his feet and shins and knees switched to the rear and his heels and calves switched to the front. The balled sinews of his calves switched to the front of his shins, each big knot the size of a warrior’s bunched fist. On his head, the temple-sinews stretched to the nape of his neck, each mighty, immense, measureless knob as big as the head of a month-old child. His face and features became a red bowl: he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn’t probe it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek. His jaw weirdly distorted: his cheek peeled back from his jaws until the gullet appeared, his lungs and liver flapped in his mouth and throat, his lower jaw struck the upper a lion-killing blow. His heart boomed loud in his breast like the baying of a watch-dog at its feed or the sound of a lion among bears. Malignant mists and spurts of fire – the torches of the goddess Badb – flickered red in the vaporous clouds that rose boiling above his head, so fierce was his fury. The hair of his head twisted like the tangle of a red thorn bush stuck in a gap; if a royal apple tree with all its kingly fruit were shaken above him, scarce an apple would reach the ground but each would be spiked on a bristle of his hair as it stood up on his scalp with rage. The hero-halo rose out of his brow, long and broad as a warrior’s whetstone, long as a snout, and he went mad rattling his shield, urging on his charioteer and harassing the hosts. Then, tall and thick, steady and strong, high as the mast of a noble ship, rose up from the dead center of his skull a straight spout of black blood darkly and magically smoking …

Knight-Jadczyk, Laura (2013-01-15). Comets and the Horns of Moses (The Secret History of the World) (p. 164). Red Pill Press. Kindle Edition.

If I didn't know that this was a description of cometary/plasma activity and I read that out of context, I would have thought it was an artistic description of internal emotional turmoil. Like an interpretive dance with words. I would have read that and the chorus of "Killing me Softly" would have come to mind: "Strumming my pain with his fingers, Singing my life with his words, Killing me softly with his song, etc." It sounds ridiculous, but I'm just saying.

But I do see what you're saying, "KNOW that your brain is fogged" and "You have to get the smoke out." And I have to say, I like your analogy and advice better than my grandpa's. My grandpa', an old school Irish American (think of Tommy's dad on the series Rescue Me for reference), he used to say, "Boy, your head's full of s**t and you gotta' get that s**t outa' there so you can think. So either drink it out or fight it out, but the quicker the better cause I'm beginin' to catch it."

 

[Buddy]

[quote author=obyvatel]
One outcome is similar to the infant-mother model. If the therapist or projectee can act as a container holding the "unbearable" material and return it to the projector in a manageable form, healing can take place.
[...]
The first outcome which has a beneficial impact reminds us of empathy. It is not the projective identification that results in empathy. Rather, it is the ability of the recipient of the projection to contain it and deal with it appropriately, maintaining a healthy degree of psychological separation from the projector and the projected material while recognizing the latter for what it is that can constitute empathy. Or so it seems to me.[/quote]

I understand your reply obyvatel, and I appreciate that post. I especially noted the clarity of ML Von Franz' comments, and that helped too. The latest posts to this thread are also bringing things into a clearer focus.

 

[H-KQGE]

Okay, so here's the deal: you HAVE to metabolize the emotions because it is clouding your thinking. But you want to do this with full awareness that your thinking is clouded! It's like grease burning in your oven, filling the room with acrid smoke, and you have to open open doors and windows to get the smoke out, but you KNOW that it is just smoke and what is causing it and you don't go calling the fire department, or get out a fire extinguisher and spray down your room and make a huge mess to clean up, or run screaming "the house is burning, the house is burning!"

Venting safely is "airing things out" getting the smoke out of the room. And then you have to work on getting the grease out of the oven so it doesn't happen again!

The only way I can explain it is that you have to KNOW that your brain is fogged when you think a certain way, feel a certain way, act a certain way, and that your system 1 is running the show and trying to force system 2 into service. And system 2 is usually very obliging.

Thing is, you can't get system 2 - thinking - to straighten out while the house is full of smoke, or using the other analogy, the horse is out of control. You have to get the smoke out, or run the horse safely until it is exhausted and THEN you can work on cleaning/training.

You can play "Ain't it Awful" with one very, VERY, important modification: you must know, and acknowledge throughout, that your brain is clouded with programmed emotions that are like old grease on the bottom of the oven. So, instead of being reasonable in your complaints, you MUST blow them out of proportion until they are ridiculous and you can see how ridiculous they are and laugh at yourself.

I've been experimenting with this 'metabolizing' of emotions. I've found myself getting triggered anytime someone implies that my knowledge or expertise is lacking in anyway. I'm a holistic nutritionist who works in a health food store with naturopaths, homeopaths, herbalists and other holistic practitioners. Most people consider the naturopaths to be the top of the pile in that respect, which makes sense since they have essentially gone to medical school, taking extensive training for 4 years compared to my 1. But any time someone says to me "can I speak to a naturopath instead?", I get my back up. "What, you think I'm not good enough!?" is what usually goes through my head. This is a pretty regular occurrence actually, so I've got a lot of material to work with :)

The other day a customer asked me a question about a particular supplement and I gave her the answer. She disagreed, and I realized that she had meant something different from her question than what she had actually asked. Rather than amplifying the confusion, I just said "oh, I see what you mean", as if relenting that she was right (even though it was actually a miscommunication and both of us were right). Well then the customer starts snickering, as if I'm a complete idiot!

Well, this just sent me into a tailspin. Not only was this extremely rude, but it is a trigger for me - implying I'm less intelligent than I obviously am ;) I managed to hold my composure even though I was boiling inside. I vented to a coworker once the customer was gone (all of us regularly vent to eachother, since dealing with horrible customers is a daily occurence), but it still seemed to be nagging on me. I think it's because I hadn't yet metabolized the emotions by exhausting the original feeling. I'd vented to my coworker a bit but I hadn't really played things up and exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness. I can't, really, since these people aren't in the Work and probably would think I was insane.

So instead I decided to do this on my own. Just in my own head, once I was home, when my thoughts drifted to this incident again, I decided to really go with it. "You dare to laugh at me, with all the supreme knowledge I have!? Do you know who I am?! You should be bowing down and kissing my feet! I know everything there is to know about supplements and then some! Everyone in this store should be bowing down to me - supreme master of nutrition!"

It was completely ludicrous, and somewhere inside I was holding on to the realization that it was completely ludicrous. When I was done I had a good chuckle at how silly it is to have these kinds of thoughts. I don't know how successful it was in the grand scheme of things, though, since my mind keeps going back to the incident every once in awhile, but it certainly seems to have disipated some of the accumulated energy, since I'm not fantasizing about "setting her straight" so much anymore. Maybe to derive the full benefit of this exercise you really have to have another person to bounce these exaggerated emotions off of. I'm not sure, but I'm going to work more with it in the future to see if there's improvement with more effort.

Excellent! 2 points on this: i seem to be able to deal with the "ingredients" of emotional triggers such as rudeness or whatever. But a combination of individual "ingredients" seem to bind like molecular components forming some substance that i haven't yet been schooled on (think of anything before you knew them like H2O etc) which sets me off. A person will strike up a conversation about something i don't really care for ( as soon as they start talking i can tell their train of thoughts & where it'll eventually lead & i don't want to go there) & then proceed to give me their opinion - relentlessly. I breathe, refocus my awareness of the situation (see above) & let them have their say, waiting to insert a piece of objective science-backed info that's readily available, & gauge their response as i (try to) speak. Well the look on their faces range from " i need to get out of here" along with obviously unconscious micro-movements toward nearest exit, to "eh? info overload" even though i'm very conscious of short-circuiting (potentially) someone not "in the know." So i immediately start getting frustrated with their facial cues & movements since i politely listened to their semi-articulate belief/opinion-cum fact for several minutes, & i gave easily verifiable info (& where to get it) in plain English in barely a minute! And when i finish (if they haven't reached a point of no return by the exit) they'll pick up from their last opinionated comments with something wildly out of context, or some more gibber-jabber as if i hadn't said anything!
Afterwards I'll review what happened & if it is a combo of "ingredients" i'll hang on to the cr#ppy feeling (learned program from mother - paranoid schizophrenic in early days) even though now for certain instances i have my boss to "use" to metabolize in the example of "V" given by Laura which is fun! (i always think of "don Juan" laughing things off like this, reading that body of work was truly a laugh-a-minute, "the mold of man!")

Speaking of hanging on to negative feelings, my mother hung on to any perceived slight for up to seven day consecutively, regularly bringing up whatever she convinced herself that i was wrong about or had done or said splitting ("how dare you do/say such & such I'm your mother, this that & the other did this to me - sisters mother, now you you b*st*rd child" blah blah) constantly all day, everyday i kid you not.
Lastly, miscommunication with the added "ingredients" of a lack of awareness & a dash of rudeness, a sprinkle perhaps, of arrogance (don't get me started ) will definitely "get my goat." Again these things are what i need to work on slowly but they're tolerable with people i can generally escape from, what of a deeply pathological family that throw in various (sometimes all - collectively) "ingredients" including probably the worst: intelligence.("i know more than you as i'm your elder" & all the fave all time classics)
My only course of action is to totally withdraw from interactions as much as possible & let them destroy themselves (problem is i don't like seeing people in pain/suffering these days since it physically hurts & sets of my emotions damn it) since that's about the only thing they're good at, but watching & hearing people disintegrate in front of you (in a most shocking way - mentally & physically) is really tough on system 1 & 2 with so many "ingredients" potentially spoiling the broth. What does one do?

 

[Aithin Tusa Fein]

Well, don't just do it "in your head." How about creating a pillow dummy and you can pin a name or description of who it is on it. Then, do like V did in the movie, take a fake sword, toy light saber, umbrella, whatever, and "sword fight" with the dummy all the while declaiming like a Shakespearean actor the stuff in your head?

You can leap around, dash forwards and backwards, beg for mercy in the voice of the "opponent" and just generally do a dialogue. Tire yourself out.

I can assure you, after doing this a few times, you'll find that the backed up energy inside dissipates and you have fewer and fewer such reactions.

Of course, there are always new and different situations that can come along...

I think I'm going to try using a punching bag and give this a try. I think that might work for me personally.

 

[seek10]

Thank you all for the information. I will be rereading the information. It is not a easy read.

I tried to understand the origins of my inability to express emotion. Again this is my system 2 thing. So it could be a complete confabulation to feel safe. Forgive me , if that is the case.

1. I remember being ridiculed for expressing smallest emotion as a child. I was told ‘ I am a good boy who sat on the corner without making noise’. As for as I know, I need to or I must do approach, Even the smallest ‘Needs’ are costly in my household, so I always suppressed smallest desires like chocolate or a movie in years or new shirt or book etc, Though my younger brother was able to make noise to do what he wants to the point , we used to hear ‘ whatever I save, he spends ’ , I couldn’t.

I remember once I showed a finger that was cut during ragging session to my father, he looked at me as if ‘come on take it easy, It doesn’t matter ’. It looks I carried the same. I expressed emotions less than others( though much sensitive than others ) and it always came as rare short bursts ( anger or laughter), though I never made connection. That may be the origins of great difficulty in saying ‘NO’ or expressing negative feedback.

Even in this forum, I felt blocked to express emotion. Part of me asks, are you really feeling or faking it ?. Despite sure of the feeling, I find myself blocked. I never made the connection of being ridiculed as a child for expressing emotion for this behavior.

2. Until I joined my first job, I have only one goal in life. Get a Job and avoid the pain and suffering my grand father’s family and my family suffered due to lack of money. Many times I wondered how people risk while pursuing the business goals. old memories are too strong I think. Adding to that, big Defective life trap that comes with Humiliation for the perceived short comings.

One of my chief problems is anxiety that is triggered with opportunistic prickling in feet and sometimes in hand. Normally I use massage stick to poke and feel the emotions in feet and hand and release or beat the pillow. sometimes I become impatient to ignore it, which leads to emotional thinking and pain. Some time back, I started reading Tamar Chansky’s books ‘Freeing your child from Anxiety’ , ‘Freeing your child from negative thinking’. Felt so good of the simple to implement techniques, but lost it in due time. Again Impatience.

 

[whitecoast]

Today I came home to find my garden torn up by the new landlords. :( I was heading back to water some plants, but when I saw they were gone I instead calmly watered something else they didn't remove and went inside the house. I just feel an intense sadness and outrage and what they did. I had this feeling even though I intellectually knew all the reasons they had for doing it. It wasn't weeded, and so it may have been hard to tell there were plants being actively cultivated there. It could have been seen as an eye-sore to someone who loves nature less than I. I came up with ideas, like maybe seeing if I could go through the weeded biomass and recover some of the choice plants I planted (that didn't turn out well), expressing remorse at not tearing out the weeds enough (closet hippie here). I started considering finding a community garden in the area I could move my activities to, among other things.

The new owner said that they were going to be tearing a good number of things out, and when he said he hoped that wouldn't be too hard on us, all could say was, "it's your house." Implicitly I always tell myself that it doesn't matter what I think/feel about other people's behaviour. That's theirs and I'm to adapt; that's all it comes down to.

My system 1 tried to hijack system 2 in "my" defence, maybe see them as all-bad, etc., but it consistently kept getting pushed back by all the reasoning that developed about why I was just internally considering. I don't know, but the whole episode gave me the idea that I almost habitually turn on myself when I split, as to prevent me from doing anything rash or defensive. So instead of seeing the landowners as "all-bad", I turned that on myself and said I was all-bad for my feeling hurt in system 1 trying to mobilize system 2 to help protect me (in its limited understanding).

The problem with this though is that system 1 is still the one in control; it's just exploiting the negative introject to insult my indignation and feeling of being robbed. So the only recourse my split-off feelings had was to manifest in my body. So I've been bouncing off the walls, punching the air, listening to heavy metal, etc.

I've heard the suggestions to play "ain't it awful," but I cannot bring myself to say things that ridiculous. My mind rebels. Could that come from the same "keep a lid on it" program that automatically censures and disables my negative emotions when they risk making my behaviour unpredictable? Like I said though, the negative emotional center just went haywire, but it feels like part of it went to the mental centre to develop justifications for why I shouldn't be feeling the negative things I did, while part of it went to my body to flame off excess rage.

 

[Gimpy]

Since I'm sort of collecting examples here (and hope that ya'll will contribute other possible examples), there's a particular type of personality that works this way when splitting/internal considering takes hold:

First, they have rapid and overwhelming emotional reactions to whatever the trigger is, and start out from a state of being emotionally worked up. Then, the more this type thinks while in that state, the more s/he freaks out the self, so to say. And the more convinced s/he is that s/he is RIGHT about whatever.

The sad thing is that the more this person continues to "think", the more inaccurate, outlandish, irrational, out of proportion and out of context the thoughts become. This sort of person can drive themselves to do many things that are damaging to others but, in the long run, mostly to themselves.

This was me before the diet changes, detoxing, and weaning off a list of medications. It can still be me if there's a bad shock involved, I've learned how to roll with it better now. (Maybe.)

In my case there are 'red flags' that can stop the wind up, one of which is the focus on 'being right'. If I feel 'I have to be right', then its a good bet I'm full of crap. When emotions run off with me, it's clear that's what's going on: I can't speak, get bug eyed, and shiver. Depending on what kind of shock it is, my legs go out from under me and I end up sitting there blinking at things. When I can speak? It varies between a ream of curses and outrage. It goes on to cycle through a series of obsession/compulsions that amount to basic drives: run down the threat, shore up defences against said threat, and run that threat right out on a rail.

When detoxing and stopping antidepressants, this happened a lot, and no overt or obvious shocks were needed. That's when I learned to avoid the internet, phone calls, and leaving the house when my emotions were freaking the rest of me out, and to take the time to process the emotions in order to function again. Communicating this was crucial in dealing with it. I let those few people that see me or hear from me on a regular or semi regular basis know what's going on. Hubby tends to be the first one to say "You look wound up, what's going through your mind right now?"

What I try to do is, first...stop and think. If I can't manage to do that, I tell someone I'm wound up, not able to think, and in need of 'walking it off'. Exercise works...provided my body will cooperate. When it can't, "Honey, I'm having the wiggins, can't move, where's a cat toy?" Throwing a cat toy until kitty gets bored and goes to sleep helps. So does cleaning something. It depends on how much energy is available. When I can't move? I write a story about it. My computer here is full of the nonsense that results from that.

Next: what's the root of it? If I can't find that, chances are good it may be another person's emotional state setting me off. That means working through it and letting it pass without interacting with too many folks who won't 'get it'. I let it out through singing and dancing here in the house. My cat doesn't care, and my neighbors know that as long as I'm singing and they can hear the odd polka number, things are fine.

What are the facts here? This is the one question that can help the most when my 'horse' is tired. If I can't see any at that point? I'll ask someone if they can see any. If there are no facts to underpin the emotions, no real reasons for it? Then its chalked up to 'brain farts', 'bad wiring' and I do my 'purple minion dance'...and move on.

To recap:
1. Stop and think, and if thinking is not possible, don't act until you can.
2. Where is this coming from, the root of it (or the heart of it).
3. What are the facts here? No facts...work it off and move on.

Okay, so here's the deal: you HAVE to metabolize the emotions because it is clouding your thinking. But you want to do this with full awareness that your thinking is clouded! It's like grease burning in your oven, filling the room with acrid smoke, and you have to open open doors and windows to get the smoke out, but you KNOW that it is just smoke and what is causing it and you don't go calling the fire department, or get out a fire extinguisher and spray down your room and make a huge mess to clean up, or run screaming "the house is burning, the house is burning!"

Venting safely is "airing things out" getting the smoke out of the room. And then you have to work on getting the grease out of the oven so it doesn't happen again!

The only way I can explain it is that you have to KNOW that your brain is fogged when you think a certain way, feel a certain way, act a certain way, and that your system 1 is running the show and trying to force system 2 into service. And system 2 is usually very obliging.

Thing is, you can't get system 2 - thinking - to straighten out while the house is full of smoke, or using the other analogy, the horse is out of control. You have to get the smoke out, or run the horse safely until it is exhausted and THEN you can work on cleaning/training.

You can play "Ain't it Awful" with one very, VERY, important modification: you must know, and acknowledge throughout, that your brain is clouded with programmed emotions that are like old grease on the bottom of the oven. So, instead of being reasonable in your complaints, you MUST blow them out of proportion until they are ridiculous and you can see how ridiculous they are and laugh at yourself.

Here's an example of blowing the situation out of proportion, and Hubby and I use this almost every day:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqszKFsaBpo

I've got the eye twitch naturally, and the rest works out. ;)

 

[Laura]

This was me before the diet changes, detoxing, and weaning off a list of medications. It can still be me if there's a bad shock involved, I've learned how to roll with it better now. (Maybe.)

In my case there are 'red flags' that can stop the wind up, one of which is the focus on 'being right'. If I feel 'I have to be right', then its a good bet I'm full of crap. When emotions run off with me, it's clear that's what's going on: I can't speak, get bug eyed, and shiver. Depending on what kind of shock it is, my legs go out from under me and I end up sitting there blinking at things. When I can speak? It varies between a ream of curses and outrage. It goes on to cycle through a series of obsession/compulsions that amount to basic drives: run down the threat, shore up defences against said threat, and run that threat right out on a rail.

<snip>

Great descriptions. And yes, indeed, there are other exercises that one can do. One simple thing to practice every day is to find something that you can say "I was wrong, I'm sorry" about. Just practicing saying "I was wrong... I made a mistake.... I screwed up..." is already a big thing if it is sincere and accurate.

The instant you feel you have to argue with someone to justify being right, why not just consciously and deliberately turn it around and say instead: "You are right, I'm wrong, I'm sorry."

Dugdeep reported above about doing this with not the best of results, but for all he knows, her subsequent reaction could have been mis-read by him in his "state."

Here's an example of blowing the situation out of proportion, and Hubby and I use this almost every day:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqszKFsaBpo

I've got the eye twitch naturally, and the rest works out. ;)

That's hilarious and brilliant! Just imagine those two critters as your emotions and brain... or you vs someone who has triggered your "inner monster."

Because, in point of fact, this system 1 business that runs the splitting/internal considering process is a sort of monster. It's a wolf. Sometimes you have to throw it a piece of meat, but in the end, the objective is to tame it and have it work FOR you, not against you.

 

[Muxel]

Klein treats the depressive state as a product of a stronger, more integrated ego structure. Here the splits are not so intensely "black-and-white", and there is a realization that the self and the other can contain both good and bad parts.

Behaving a certain way because it makes life easier for others and self - in the same breath - must always be weighted on the side of making life easier for the OTHERS even at great inconvenience to the self if needed.

Or as in dugdeep's case, "The customer is always right."

Which reminds me of this (that ajseph21 originally quoted)

Nevertheless, every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late. ...

...

The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom correspond to what life really is.

Also

Man cannot help identifying and considering inwardly and he cannot help expressing his unpleasant emotions, simply because he is weak. Identifying, considering, the expressing of unpleasant emotions, are manifestations of his weakness, his impotence, his inability to control himself. But not wishing to acknowledge this weakness to himself, he calls it 'sincerity' or 'honesty' and he tells himself that he does not want to struggle against sincerity, whereas in fact he is unable to struggle against his weaknesses.

"Sincerity and honesty are in reality something quite different. What a man calls 'sincerity' in this case is in reality simply being unwilling to restrain himself. And deep down inside him a man is aware of this. But he lies to himself when he says that he does not want to lose sincerity.

But if a man really remembers himself he understands that another man is a machine just as he is himself. And then he will enter into his position, he will put himself in his place, and he will be really able to understand and feel what another man thinks and feels. If he can do this his work becomes easier for him. But if he approaches a man with his own requirements nothing except new internal considering can ever be obtained from it.

"Conscience is a state in which a man feels all at once everything that he in general feels, or can feel. And as everyone has within him thousands of contradictory feelings which vary from a deeply hidden realization of his own nothingness and fears of all kinds to the most stupid kind of self-conceit, self-confidence, self-satisfaction, and self-praise, to feel all this together would not only be painful but literally unbearable.

"If a man whose entire inner world is composed of contradictions were suddenly to feel all these contradictions simultaneously within himself, if he were to feel all at once that he loves everything he hates and hates everything he loves; that he lies when he tells the truth and that he tells the truth when he lies; and if he could feel the shame and horror of it all, this would be the state which is called 'conscience.' A man cannot live in this state; he must either destroy contradictions or destroy conscience. He cannot destroy conscience, but if he cannot destroy it he can put it to sleep, that is, he can separate by impenetrable barriers one feeling of self from another, never see them together, never feel their incompatibility, the absurdity of one existing alongside another.

"But fortunately for man, that is, for his peace and for his sleep, this state of conscience is very rare. From early childhood 'buffers' begin to grow and strengthen in him, taking from him the possibility of seeing his inner contradictions and therefore, for him, there is no danger whatever of a sudden awakening. Awakening is possible only for those who seek it and want it, for those who are ready to struggle with themselves and work on themselves for a very long time and very persistently in order to attain it. For this it is necessary to destroy 'buffers,' that is, to go out to meet all those inner sufferings which are connected with the sensations of contradictions. Moreover the destruction of 'buffers' in itself requires very long work and a man must agree to this work realizing that the result of his work will be every possible discomfort and suffering from the awakening of his conscience.

"But conscience is the fire which alone can fuse all the powders in the glass retort which was mentioned before and create the unity which a man lacks in that state in which he begins to study himself.

What they are doing is developing mental boundaries. They are creating an image of the world in the left hemisphere mode of thinking. It is fixed, limited, and most of all, prevents discovery, change and spiritual evolution. Worse than that, it blocks creativity in a cosmic sense; it is the desire to possess knowledge in a limited form; to own what cannot be owned and place limits on something that is in reality infinite.

...

The third stage is when he begins to believe in nothing but the love of a woman. This only means that he finally sees that what is natural and real is more trustworthy than a God who is an unreal, supernatural construct of the left brain. And it is at this point that magic begins to happen.

...

Yet, it was only when Parzival rejected all of the advice, the exhortations, when he quit seeking to be a great knight on a sacred quest to save the world; only when he rejected God as the pure and good all-father that … it found him.

What is the wasteland? That we cannot accept the world and all within it, including ourselves, as being perfectly natural and perfect just the way it is — with all the good and evil it contains as part of the natural and necessary balance — the whole of existence is natural and as it should be at every moment. When you accept that all is perfect, when you cease holding God hostage by usurping the power of the right brain feminine principle with the images in your left brain, then the world will be perfect and fertile and you will heal the wound of the wasteland in your own heart.

Q: I want you to know you have lost a fan because ...
A: Several comments: First of all, "fan" is short for "fanatic."

Q: What is the most probable and likely result of ...
A: Bouquets and daggers. Fame and infame. But, Laura, Frank, and Arkadiusz: such is the state of the realm in which you now reside... If you cannot stand the heat, get out of the kitchen... But if you leave the kitchen, you will miss the aroma. In general, those predisposed to react positively will do so, regardless of literary content, and vice versa.

Gurdjieff calls lots of things "weakness," and it leads me to think that not splitting, not seeing in black and white, but seeing the complete whole that has both good and bad parts is a measure of "strength" - and knowledge.

 

[kenlee]

Well, don't just do it "in your head." How about creating a pillow dummy and you can pin a name or description of who it is on it. Then, do like V did in the movie, take a fake sword, toy light saber, umbrella, whatever, and "sword fight" with the dummy all the while declaiming like a Shakespearean actor the stuff in your head?

You can leap around, dash forwards and backwards, beg for mercy in the voice of the "opponent" and just generally do a dialogue. Tire yourself out.

I can assure you, after doing this a few times, you'll find that the backed up energy inside dissipates and you have fewer and fewer such reactions.

Of course, there are always new and different situations that can come along...

I think I'm going to try using a punching bag and give this a try. I think that might work for me personally.

I think the above example with the light sabers, the play sword fighting, while talking Shakespeare to the dummy is a really good one since it involves the mind and body working together in acting out the extremes of subjective thinking when an 'I' goes to the extreme and 'splits' off from the human totality because of extreme inner considering and then this fragmented self becomes the center of it's own universe. At this point it becomes an absurdity of seemingly cosmic proportions.

Then the emotional center can feel the comic absurdity of it all and we can laugh at ourselves and the laughter releases a lot of the negative energy so we don't take ourselves so seriously by blowing things way out of proportion giving objective significance and essential value to those things that really have no intrinsic value at all and are really unimportant.

I used to punch and kick the punching bad (really hard!) when I'd get angry while thinking about the situation that triggered the anger. It did help a lot in allowing me to separate my thoughts from my emotions since my body and emotions were kinda linked together and when I hit the bag both my emotions (in this case, my anger) and my body would now be occupied since my anger and it's emotional force was being redirected and focused on hitting he bag.

At this point my body and emotions would sorta decouple from my thoughts. As I was hitting the bag I'd think of the events that made me so angry. Since my anger and my body was now focused only on hitting the bag my mind was no longer so locked up by my emotions and it was a lot freer to reason, review and recapitulate the events that triggered the anger. I was more able to look at any given situation more dispassionately and seeing these situation from several different perspectives and frames of reference. It allowed me to put myself in the place of other people that were involved and seeing where I might have been unreasonable in the situation along with seeing where others might have been unreasonable and so on.

In short my thinking mind was able to look at the situation somewhat more objecively (I think!) since my emotions and body were redirected and focused elsewhere. Even though my mind was decoupled (as it were) from my body and emotions there was still another deeper part of me that would obseve it all and was pretty much aware of what was going on with all the activity that was going on wih my body, mind and thoughts and this other part could, in this situation pretty much direct any aspect of this activity if required.

The only problem with hitting the bag as a kind of "therapy" was that, although it helped me a lot to see those situations that were getting me angry more clearly, it didn't really help a whole lot to separate my anger from my body and release the anger so that I could fully "digest" (so to speak) the experiences since my anger relating to these experiences was still able to 'kick' or strongly jolt the body whenever I got triggered even though my mind became better trained to separate from it.all.

However the bagwork did help my mind to "learn" to separate from my anger whenever I experienced it and not be so influenced by it (although my body sill felt the anger strongly). As far as that goes, at least for me, the bagwork helped me to deal with some of my stuff but it had its limitations. IMO a better way to deal with our subjective world is seeing and acting out in the extremes our absurdities (such as our petty annoyances, narcissistic reactions, fixed/prejudicial attitudes, and so on) so we can stand back and witness it all at surface level and then laughing at ourselves so we don't take ourselves so seriously,

But IMO bagwork is OK but I do think it does have it's limitations.