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My extreme feelings kill me

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  • #335688
    Gaia
    Participant

    He’s just.. interesting, intriguing. For a long time we’ve shared similar interests and I always found him charismatic and intelligent, I remember thinking one day that he was the type of person whose opinion and consideration I’d care of. We stopped talking a long time ago cause he only liked me whenever the mood striked him but sometimes lately I’ve been deluding myself into thinking that he truly cares deep down even if he doesn’t.

    #335690
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Gaia:

    The feeling I get is that you are living with people you don’t really want to be around (for years before, and currently, on weekends and breaks from university), people that make you cringe, your mother, originally.

    The idea of being around a person you actually want to be around, is very attractive, isn’t it?

    Do you connect to my feeling here, my feeling about the contrast between the two experiences (cringing/ being repulsed/suffering in the company of some people vs. wanting to be in the company of this guy, finding it desirable to be in his company)?

    anita

    #335694
    Gaia
    Participant

    Dear Anita

    I definitely connect to spending a lot of time with people I didn’t want to be around, my teen self knew that feeling very well, that experience

    It’s also true that my cringiness is completely a personal inner problem, that is… It’s not others who cause it but it’s me who feel like this whenever I’m around others, even with people I like, in fact for a lot of time I’ve blocked from remembering those times I texted with my crush or that one time I gave him a check kiss cause it just makes me feel really uncomfortable.

     

    #335698
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Gaia:

    It is true that your cringiness is a personal, inner problem, that you feel it whenever you are around others, even with people you like, even giving  your crush a kiss on the cheek made you cringe..

    – but it is not that you were born cringy. What happened is that your mother really was insufferable, she would have made anyone cringe! There are such people you know.

    My mother made me cringe. I never thought of the verb cringe to describe it (I learned the word from you), but yes, she made me cringe big time. I remember she held my had one time and it was like every cell of my body was running away in all directions, away from her hand, from her touch.

    To this day I move away from touch, I cringe still. But I say to myself sometimes, if my hand is being held, I say: this is not my mother holding my hand, and the cringe goes away.

    A mother is very, very powerful in her child’s life and when she  makes her child cringe, that cringe stays, like glue, sticky.

    Do you relate to what I am saying here?

    anita

    #335704
    Gaia
    Participant

    Yes i can relate, especially when it comes to physical touch or closeness. Sometimes I feel guilty about it, when my mom show genuine desire for physical closeness or show acts of care and sometimes I react in a annoyed, harsh way. It make me feel like shit afterwards. There’s especially 1 person I crave most physical contact with and is my crush, corny as it sounds

    #335706
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Gaia:

    You can relate. This means that it is not your fault, this cringiness is not your fault. You know you’d never choose- no one would choose- something as terribly uncomfortable as this.

    It is as if your mother took a syringe and injected cringiness into your arm,  same as my mother did to me.

    She injected cringiness into you, and unaware of what she did, she wants you to get close to the original source of your cringiness- an impossible request!

    Your guilt is not valid. You are not guilty at all for feeling cringy and for not wanting to be close to your mother.

    It doesn’t sound corny to me at all, that you “crave most physical contact” with your crush.. I figure you don’t feel cringy when you fantasize about physical contact with him because the cringe doesn’t get attached to fantasy, only to real- life physical contact.

    I understand better now: you naturally desire physical contact with a young man, but you feel cringy when you are in physical contact with a guy.. what a dilemma, what a conflict, needing something so much, naturally, and being cringed/ repelled by the very thing you need so much.

    I think we understand each other well at this point, do we?

    anita

     

    #335710
    Gaia
    Participant

    Dear Anita

    I figure you don’t feel cringy when you fantasize about physical contact with him because the cringe doesn’t get attached to fantasy, only to real- life physical contact

    It’s not that much the physical contact that makes me cringe, but the interaction as a whole, and by cringe I also mean intense unbearable uncomfortableness or even shame, just interacting with someone else in my life is greatly distressing to me unless I’m really used to them

     

    #335724
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Gaia:

    So your cringiness is in “the interaction as a whole”, interacting with people make you cringe, unless you are “really used to them”. I need to get away from the computer, but I want to understand the cringiness better, therefore I ask

    1. Did you feel cringy when you gave your crush a kiss on the cheek?

    2. Did you feel cringy when hugging and kissing other guys in the past?

    3. Do you feel cringy when you fantasize about physical contact with guys?

    4. Do you feel cringy when you fantasize about “interactions as a whole” with people?

    – is fantasy a cringe-free zone?

    5. Who are the people who you are “really used to them”??

    (I will be away from the computer for hours).

    anita

     

    #335768
    Gaia
    Participant

    Did you feel cringy when you gave your crush a kiss on the cheek?

    Nope even if the situation itself was a bit uncomfortable

     Did you feel cringy when hugging and kissing other guys in the past?

    In those cases, it wasn’t so much the cringiness of the physical act but what was around it, the interaction, as I said. This summer I kissed a guy I had a very light crush on as a teen but then I definitely tried to block this memory because nothing came out of it, our interactions didn’t deepen, the chemistry we may have felt as teen was pretty much disappeared, I just felt uncomfortable on how much unfitting we were for each other. I guess the unfitting part is what makes me cringe everytime. I remember seeing him flirt and play around with a friend of mine this summer, and thinking that that could be us if I was a little bit different, a bit like her, that doesn’t make interacting with someone a uncomfortable thing.

    Do you feel cringy when you fantasize about physical contact with guys?

    Nope, it feels good. I make up stories and characters around it. It gets cringey when I imagine people totally out of my league and I have to unavoidably clash with what I am really, that is inexperienced and unaccomplished as a person on so many levels, maybe pretty but nothing more, intelligent but not always and things like these. Otherwise it doesn’t feel bad

    Do you feel cringy when you fantasize about “interactions as a whole” with people?

    Yes. It’s really distressing. In the sense that I can feel my whole muscles tense up and that’s what I mean for physically painful. My body isn’t relaxed and loose but it’s like I shrink. I doesn’t always look bothered, it’s not that I can’t make the first step towards others or that I hide away when I see someone, it’s not that I look like a coward, you could say there’s nothing wrong but I truly only relax when I’m alone

    – is fantasy a cringe-free zone?

    Yes if I want it to be. In fantasy I can push away everytime that makes me uncomfortable of real life and real events and pretend they don’t exist

    Who are the people who you are “really used to them”?

    When I was a teen, it was a friend I was always with and always talked with. We’re no longer that close though. It could also be my most close relatives and other kinds of close friends. Or even someone who is naturally a friendly and talkative person that just wants to get along with everyone.

     

    #335848
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Gaia:

    I wanted to let you know that I am re-studying your thread and am on page 7 next. It is taking me more time than I thought. I will post to you when I am done.

    anita

    #335864
    Anonymous
    Guest

    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

     

    #335870
    Gaia
    Participant

     

    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 definitely know I’m making some progress on perspective and I’m changing internally, even if it’s not clear on the outside. May I ask what kind of change have you noticed, especially on regard of mental health?

    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

    I like your new found principle on myself, the Magnifying Glass, because it’s accurate about my experience with my mother, a least it is a significant amount of the time. I’d like to add something on my social situation: my sense of cringiness or uncomfortableness is also due to how much social situation and interpersonal connections are linked to something bad and feeling bad, in my mind. I’ve felt all kinds of shitty feelings, I’ve experienced all kinds of unpleasing situations, while with others, I’ve felt like nothing, or like shit, while with others, so there’s a bad link in my mind that only gets stronger with time.

    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

    It’s strange, because on the outside you wouldn’t say I am on the extreme part of emotional spectrum. People would say I’m the stoic one, I’ve also beaten myself a lot of time for not considering myself to be caring, or sensitive, or emotionally expressive enough like certain people, but definitely ERS is something I’m going to look up and tell you if and how it works for me, just like the skill of showing myself empathy instead of hatred when I fall into my habits.

    #335878
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Gaia:

    The positive changes I noticed about you are a gradual softening of your emotions when interacting with me, less extreme. You expressed empathy for me and concern that you were burdening me, which means you were not self centered like you were before in communication with me. Recently you’ve been softer or more gentle than ever, addressing posts to me kindly, answering me thoroughly, at length in a neat, orderly fashion, differently from the early on very short/ dry/ angry or impatient answers. You expressed more of a balanced thinking regarding people and situations, reasonable understanding of your mother, better understanding of yourself, plus you expressed optimism lately that wasn’t there before (I am sure there are other things I am not thinking about at the moment).

    I didn’t understand what you meant here: “there’s a bad link in my mind that only gets stronger with time”- can you explain it to me as clearly as you can?

    “on the outside you wouldn’t say I am on the extreme part of emotional spectrum”- in the context of this thread, I don’t really care about the outside. I care about the inside. The extreme of before got softer, as I mentioned above, and will continue to soften as you practice emotional regulations skills and  “showing myself empathy instead of hatred“- most important.

    I will be away from the computer for about six hours.

    anita

    #335884
    Gaia
    Participant

    I’m glad that my interactions with you got softer and more pleasant for you. Unfortunately my inner self is still extreme and harsh but I’m dedicated to have a different attitude towards it, let’s see where it will take me.

    “there’s a bad link in my mind that only gets stronger with time

    In my mind, social interactions is linked to bad feelings and unpleasant experiences, an association that gets harder to change or shake as time passes

    #335900
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Gaia:

    It is pleasant for me, to communicate with a softer Gaia. It is so very good to read that you are dedicated to.. if I may put it in my words, to be less extreme and more moderate. This is what I have been doing myself, moving from Extremes to  Moderation. I want to re-read your short post above (and anything you may add to it) and reply further tomorrow morning, my time, which is about 13 hours from now.

    anita

Viewing 15 posts - 226 through 240 (of 414 total)

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