Some great posts peep's!
Welcome and thankyou Quercus for your complement too. It's lovely to see newcomers involved in such positive ways.
Today my hat goes off to Starwolf! The following advice and info was given to me which helped insurmountably. ...A Japanese Maple in Autumn colours to you Star!!!
'There are 2 things in conflict within you at the moment. One is the long entrenched response to a traumatic past, an abnormal pattern that has developed over quite a few years. The other is more recent, acquired via personal research, therapy, soul searching, even your interaction with other forum members. This one makes intellectual sense so it is what you know should be right.
However, the long established brain patterns are still functional. They come under the influence of a different part of the brain, that which is in charge of the fight/flight response. This survival instinct has of necessity taken over full-time during all the traumatic years. It is -in some ways- what has kept us alive. It is how we coped, the only way we could, day after day. No wonder it is hard to budge.
The logical, reasonable left brain has little impact on it because instinct by-passes intellectual understanding. It is reaction, not reflection. Both modes can't communicate, they "speak" a different language. So conflict arises. But those 2 different modes co-exist, a constant mental/emotional contradiction. It makes it difficult to accept we think one way and act another though it is inevitable.
When you set yourself the task of explaining feelings and emotions for example, to someone around the forums, it is the logical, reasonable brain which automatically kicks in. But when confronted with everyday life, particularly situations which remind you of the past...guess what necessarily kicks in. The instinctive, non reasoning brain. Hypocrisy doesn't come into it. That's just the way things happen. Reconfiguring the mind takes time, repetition, setbacks etc...
Acceptance of this apparent contradiction is an initial step. Acceptance that it is something happening but not caused by you. Acceptance that those 2 modes both fulfill a necessary purpose and should kick in appropriately but don't...because due to traumatic years, the survival mode has become the mind's predominant influence. An inevitable role reversal'
I hope others will find Star's info as enlightening as I did.
Sara x
