Posted by Dinah on September 18, 2007, at 8:17:46
I didn't want to hijack anyone's thread, but I was interested in the phenomenon Real Me and Muffled were describing.
I never think of it in terms of age states, but there are definitely times I "lose my words" and struggle to express my ideas. Anywhere from total muteness to extreme difficulty in word recall to being able to get the words out but in messed up grammar. "I be" instead of "I am" or leaving out important parts of speech entirely.
Those are also the times when I tend to speak too softly for my therapist to hear easily.
I tend to get frustrated and very angry with myself, although my therapist of course reassures me.
In the past, he's referred to it as regression, but he no longer does that.
As I said, I don't really think of it as an age state. I think of it as emotional me/ rational me continuum. I describe it as a wick in water. Depending on where I am residing in my consciousness, I can be mostly dry (rational me), mostly damp (emotional me) or somewhere in between. Rational me owns the words, but emotional me can usually access them reasonably well. When I move into mostly emotional me territory (when the water line on the wick has moved up), I lose access to the words.
My therapist is pretty good at recognizing where I am, and responding accordingly.
I often wonder how visible it is to others. For example, while rational me does the typing and writing, there is usually more or less influence from emotional me. Sometimes there's none, and I go into super rational mode. Sometimes there's a coup, and it really shows, to me at lest. More often at Babble there's somewhere in the middle.
poster:Dinah
thread:783692
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20070916/msgs/783692.html