Posted by Dinah on September 24, 2002, at 9:08:44
I'm not sure how odd this will sound...
Friday something bad happened at work. Something that I quite rightly got upset about, although I think my reaction was greater than what would be reasonable. I had one of my meltdowns over it (although thank heavens I waited until I left work). It was similar in intensity to a panic attack, complete with that terrible panic attack smell of fear. Although fear was not the underlying emotion.
I fell into a deep sleep and when I woke up, the emotions had begun to lose their connections to the intitial event. This weekend I continued to experience the physical expression of the emotions as well as the desire to cut, but they were totally divorced from thoughts of the trigger. Thinking of what happened didn't increase my distress in any way. And I didn't think of what happened while I was experiencing the distress, except to acknowledge that it was probably the source.
By Monday, someone at the office mentioned how bad they felt about what had happened, and I was bewildered about why they would be upset. Bewildered might not be the right word, but there was no emotional reaction in me other than mild surprise that they were upset about it. And yet, I should be upset.
And I wondered if this stripping of the emotional content from the cognitive content, and the separate storing of each might not be one of my main problems. I don't seriously believe that I am no longer upset, although I don't *feel* upset. And I suspect that the distress went into a big pile of similar distress memories, while the event went into a pile of event memories stripped of all emotion.
I'm sure it's some sort of coping function, but I think it contributes to my overreaction in the future. The "distress" door, or the "anger" door, or the "fear" door gets opened by an event and I react way out of proportion because all this stuff comes pouring out. I'd rather be able to remember an event with its associated affect, rather than have the affect stored separately.
Does this sound at all familiar to anyone? And does anyone have any ways they have found to help unlearn this defense mechanism?
Thanks,
Dinah
P.S. Reading over this post, it seems like a good example of what I'm talking about. It seems overly intellectualized and devoid of feeling.
poster:Dinah
thread:1126
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20020829/msgs/1126.html