Dear Gaia:

I noticed how much progress you made in regard to your mental health over time, as I read your words, and that pleased me a lot.

I got to page 10 and decided to stop. My compulsion is to complete re-reading all 16 pages, to do a complete job, but it is not a helpful compulsion. There is no benefit to it, I have enough to go on in the first 10 pages. This brings me to my first point today: there is no way for me to completely understand you, or to completely understand myself. There are simply too many, hundreds of thousands of connection in our brains, too many to make it possible to map out the brain and understand all the connections between our thoughts and emotions and behaviors over years and decades of living, in all the different, changing physical circumstances and events in years and decades.

If you put together 100 professional psychotherapists, psychologists, scientists and medical doctors all with PhD  and medical degrees, and have them work 24/7 for 10 years on completely understanding Gaia (or me, or anyone else), 100%, they will fail, they won’t even get close to 90%. There will always be something left misunderstood.

Yesterday, I decided to understand your cringiness better. I compared it to my cringiness and found out that your and my cringiness have things in common but they are not the same. When understanding Gaia, I have to separate myself from you, look at your cringiness and not see my cringiness in yours.

Even if this thread continued for a hundred years, I will still make mistakes in understanding you. Thing is, if I understand the principles of what makes you who you are (and you agree with those principles, of course)–> it is good enough.

No one understand Anyone Completely, not even close. But understanding all the major principles of who we are is enough to make it possible for us to improve our lives a whole lot.

As a result of my study today, I discovered the principle that I will name The Magnifying Glass Principle.

You wrote regarding your mother (principle for all humans: the mother in a child’s life is very, very powerful): “Whenever me or my sibling.. had issues or negativity she only make it worse by starting to crying or getting anxious instead of being soothing or more objective”-

-what she did is to point a magnifying glass at your “issues or negativity” and make these look much bigger than they were. You were already distressed over this or that issue or negative feeling. What you needed from your mother was a .. shrinking glass, to make your issue or negative feeling look smaller. That would have soothed you. But what she did instead, was magnify your issues and negative feelings and make them look way BIGGER.

Look at the title of your thread: “My extreme feelings kill me”, extreme, as in magnified.

She magnified your negative feelings; fast forward- your brain magnifies your negative feelings. You wrote: “overwhelmed by violent thoughts and emotions.. utterly enraged, shamed and revengeful.. emotional storms and mental conflicts.. feeling my inner world overwhelmed by violent thoughts and emotions and feelings pulled and disintegrated by several conflicting parts… Sometimes I feel like I could kill people with words or I feel like I am possessed by some evil cruel energy”- this is how it feels to have one’s issues and negative feelings magnified many times over!

The first time you mentioned cringiness on this thread was on September 14 2019: “most often I can’t help but feel taken by intense overwhelming uncomfortableness, cringiness, discomfort. Sometimes it’s very very strong, even if it’s small talk”- I am now defining your cringiness as the emotional experience caused by significant magnification of issues and negative feelings.

Your cringiness is most acute in social situations, while interacting with others, not connected to physical touching others, or being touched by others, but overall social interactions with others. This is why you like to be alone. You feel very heavy because issues and negative feelings that are magnified, are bigger and therefore heavier.

This is all for now. I will add this though: I figure that if there is a single point in this very post that you feel doesn’t exactly fit you, that there is an exception to it here or there, that the issue that doesn’t exactly fit will be magnified in your brain and bother you a lot, and you will be quick to let me know about it, that my understanding is not correct because it is lacking this or that (magnified) something.

Also, I can almost hear you say: so what am I supposed to do about this???

Answer: learn emotional regulation skills. This is a well known and developed concept in psychotherapy. Because everyone magnifies issues and negative feelings from time to time, if not a lot of the time. (You happen to be on the more extreme part of the spectrum, magnifying a whole lot, more than most, seems to me)- psychologists developed the concept of emotional regulation skills, so shrink magnified negative feelings. It takes daily work and persistent practice,  but it is very doable. You already made excellent progress. in six months, with persistent practice of these skills, you be way more calm and comfortable in social situations than you are now.

anita