Dear Olivia:

You asked: “How do I stay present with my feelings and let myself feel them without judgment or anxiety”- to feel what you are afraid of feeling, to stay present and not escape (the Flight response to Fear), it will take applying emotional regulation skills over time and ongoing practice, so that eventually and gradually, your fear lessens and you build trust in your ability to endure the (reduced) fear and stay, not run away.

You wrote that you “withdrew to daydreaming alone to escape the anxiety of real life. Ironically the daydreaming is often about who I idealistically want to be in the future… feeding into my anxiety of not being ‘good enough’ in the present”.

I don’t dance, never did have a talent or a feel to dancing, was clumsy. But I used to daydream that I was an internationally known and admired dancer, dancing on the stage to millions of people watching and cheering, right there in the audience and in front of the TV all over the world. I used to daydream about being a successful and rich medical doctor. There was of course a huge gap between reality and those daydreams. In comparison to the images in the daydreams, I was even more less-than, more inadequate that I felt in comparison to peers in school, to cousins my age, etc.

In August you wrote regarding your mother (and I am back to your mother/anyone’s mother, because we are formed in those years during our observations of her and interactions with her):

“The existence of my problems threatens her fragile identity as the ‘good mother’… I could not express weakness or faults without being attacked, as though my imperfection was a threat to her… she tearfully attacks me until I surrender, apologize and reassure her that she is a good mother, and then I am a good daughter again… I think over the past few years I had wanted to shed the pretense of perfection around her… I wanted her to see me as I was”.

You needed safety as a child. As a child, you were not a separate mental entity from your mother. The two of you, in your young brain, were one. If you expressed a problem, an imperfection she attacked you. So you cleared from problems and imperfections best you could, but failed because that task is impossible.

Do you agree with me so far, and if you do, will you develop this thinking I just expressed, or otherwise tell me what you think regarding my quote of you from August?

anita

Dear Olivia:

You wrote: “I felt the need to care for her emotionally and fulfill the dreams she could never achieve. In this way, I could be close to her”- notice this: you were already close to her, as close as you could be. She was not close to you. It is that mental unit that needs to be… reorganized.

“How do I develop the emotional regulation skills and the trust in myself to stay with the fear?”- you are studying to be a psychotherapist, correct? Years into it, if I remember correctly. You already know about emotional regulation skills and have been practicing those, haven’t you?

anita

Dear Olivia:

You are a medical student and you want to be a psychotherapist in the future, then. I see.

“How do  I develop the emotional regulation skills and the trust in myself to stay with the fear?”- guided meditations with the theme of Mindfulness, Other Mindfulness exercises and practices (abundant information available, including on the home page of this site under Blogs), physical daily exercise, distractions that are not harmful, a list of those to fit different circumstances so that you can pick and choose depending on the circumstance. Also, CBT exercises (workbooks available in bookstores).

Medically, all of our communication, you typing away and I typing to you, all that  is made possible by the brain which is a mass of flesh, cells, organic material. In that brain your fear is stored in thousands of neuropathways involving thoughts and fear, as well as other emotions.

Your childhood experience with your mother is recorded in many thousands of neuropathways all in between your ears. When you currently spend time with her, and if she continues, as she did in the past, to keep “hateful grudges against others whilst silently fuming”, if she still “disclose(s) this all to me”; if “her moods (are) unpredictable and she (still) often snap angrily without warning”- then you don’t have much of a chance to loosen the emotions in those pathways, that is, to regulate your emotions.

No matter how many mindfulness exercises you do, if you are still exposed to what is fueling what troubles you, keeping it going and going, how can you possibly move forward?

“In my young mind, it felt as if she hated me”- that young brain is still there, your brain now.

anita

Dear Olivia,

With regards to staying with a difficult emotion, I read this book based on Acceptance and Commitment therapy – Get out of your mind and into your life By Steven C Hayes. There are some useful exercises in this book that may be helpful in developing skills that help you stay with your fear.

Take care