Posted by shortelise on August 21, 2004, at 21:20:44
In reply to Re: Life is falling apart again, posted by Susan47 on August 21, 2004, at 18:23:37
Susan,
So many here seem more "advanced" than I feel I am.
It's all just moment to moment for me. WHen people write pain, I want to send some kind of comfort, because the pain of ... well, is it madness? Is it emotional distress? Call it what we may, the pain of it is so, so familiar to me. It brings out a certain maternalism, because I myself often want to be held, gently, tenderly held as if I were a child, so my response to someone else's pain is to want to hold them.
It's important to me that I not appear to think I have THE answer. A book I read part of a few years ago "Suffering from Illusion" by Dr. S. Brenner talks about chess and checkers - I like this analogy - that we go along playing chess with checker rules and can't figure out why we're losing the game.
To use the same analogy - sort of - each of us have our own set of how we live, how we see the world. And for me to pretend that how I see the solution to anyone's problems could be "the truth" would be absurd. You might be playing chess and I checkers, so my rules for sure wouldn't help at all.Needless to say, my mother is a person who thinks the world is as she perceives it. If she thinks a colour is brown, and to me it looks burgundy, she thinks I am seeing it wrong. No no, it's certainly not burgundy, it's brown, without a doubt. Ah... I don't want to do that to anyone else.
With a few exceptions, with good friends whom I know so very well, I would not presume to know better for anyone.
Reading here the other day it hit me that I went years, like 40 years! without understanding I was having anxiety attacks.
I now realize I have tons of feelings that express themselves in my body, but I don't know what they mean, what emotions --- argh, it's hard to describe what I mean --- my feelings are sensations in my body, and I don't know what they are. Does that make any sense?
Sorry I didn't mean to go on like this.
You're welcome. And thanks for writing that I brought you new understanding. I struggle so much.
ShortE
poster:shortelise
thread:379946
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040821/msgs/380607.html