flowboy

@Basman This. A really good beginner's exercise to calm down those thoughts, is doing parts work. Ignore Teal's mumbo-jumbo explanation and just pull up different chairs and give those thoughts a voice. The discomfort and restlessness comes from the fact that there's different, disagreeing streams of thought.

@Eternal Unity What an intense ride! That first kiss must be a treasured beautiful moment. I respect you for sharing your story.

I don't have experience with BPD in my personal life. My best friend is a therapist who works mainly with BPD type patients though. I will take the liberty of sharing why I think he said that. I think he's just referring to the tendency to overreact to abandonment triggers and do something drastic like suicide, or reckless like drive drunk and crash. Overall this clinical type view of BPD and similar disorders makes me sad. It's like they are taking as much distance as they can from it. Viewing them as aliens almost. To be inspected in a lab coat. I kind of get why. If you don't dehumanize them, you might find out you have more in common with them than you would like. "selfishness, ..." What the fuck dude. These people are in massive pain and you're going to diagnose them with selfishness? From my understanding, hearing and reading about these things, there's a direct correlation between BPD and growing up with an emotionally immature, abusive parent. Usually the mother is an unsafe character that they can not form a healthy attachment with. They had to be afraid of the mother's mood swings. Nowhere to turn for safety and nurture. And then still psychiatrists want to put them in a box and say "something's inherently wrong with you", and give them very superficial therapy like DBT. It's a travesty.

Well, only you can find out what it is, but you could start by identifying the feelings that you feel instead of motivation, and inquiring: is it familiar? When have I felt this way before? And when else? Etc. It maybe comes across a bit weird, because your problem statement was initially "lack of motivation", and now I'm asking you to view it as "some unidentified feeling on top of my motivation".

@onacloudynight At this point you're just venting and making lots of threads about nothing. I haven't seen you take anyone's advice seriously. This is a self-improvement forum. You're going through a rough patch and letting everyone know it. We heard you. Now do something about it.

That's very insightful and I appreciate the self reflection. There's actually a lot of self help in the niche of getting motivated (Tony Robbins). A dear friend of mine flew all the way from the Netherlands to New York in order to attend Tony Robbins for a 5 day seminar. He got crazy motivated. Back home, it was all gone within days. My opinion is that people get motivation completely wrong. Being motivated is a natural state. Babies come out of the womb motivated. Children have tons of energy which they need to let out by running after each other. And they naturally get curious about stuff. If their parents encourage and support that curiosity, and they have a happy childhood and adolescence, they will keep that motivation forever. If something happens early on where someone learns: "I can't pursue my natural interest, I have to do something else." That's when motivation gets blocked. Or, more commonly, when the childhood is not so happy and there's a feeling of "Whatever I do, it won't work out anyway". Motivation gets blocked. Motivation is not something you acquire, rather you remove whatever shit is blocking the motivation that's already there. That could mean, becoming more honest and realising that on some level, you don't want to do it, you want to do something else. Or it could mean introspecting and realising that some feeling is in the way of it. Hopelessness maybe, fear of failure, fear of success, lack of trust. A sense of being stuck. Or a false belief that what you really want has to wait, or is not possible. Lack of agency, of control over one's life. I'm just naming random examples. Whatever it is, as long as you breathe, you will have plenty of natural motivation underneath all that shit.

Updated my post to include more tips. @Federico del pueblo I guess so

@Federico del pueblo I can't help but respond, I'm very passionate about this topic and I spend a lot of time researching and practicing. Yes, what I left out - because I wanted to warm you up to the concept - is that it takes some effort and patience to dig out these unprocessed pains. I've heard of people taking 10 sessions or more to even find some real tears - but once they flow, they flow and then you're off to the races. The reason for this is that you have a self-protective system - the repressive system - which is working very hard during your waking time to keep the pain unconscious. It does that by 'gating' - neurons that fire inhibitory signals towards the affective part of the memory (facts and feelings are stored in different parts of the brain, so you can remember one but not the other), and by constantly releasing endorphins. People with a high level of unprocessed pain need a higher level of endorphins to be constantly produced, so that they can walk around thinking they're sortof fine. These processes zap a lot of energy and can lead to disease in the long term, because endorphins unfortunately suppress the immune system. Anyways, that's the repressive system. Everyone has one. The harder it has to work, the more side effects there will be (neurotic and psychosomatic symptoms). To start draining off this pain, the repression needs to be opened up so that the feelings can flow. Some people break through easily, others' repression systems take longer to crack. There's lots of ways to help this process, but the important thing to remember is that if you set a strong intention for your subconscious to let you feel some unfelt stuff, and you make repeated efforts, you'll get it flowing. Some tricks that could help you get there faster: Journaling with these questions (thinking about a past event where you suspect repressed pain) What happened? Who was there? What details do I remember? What was I feeling? What could I have been feeling? What else could I have been feeling? What would I have wanted to say, that I couldn't? What would I have wanted to do, that I couldn't? What could I have wanted to ask, that I couldn't? What else, what else, what else... You could do that exercise for some days until you get the hang of it and things start to bubble up. Don't even have to start with the childhood events that you know about, you can start with something more recent where you were irritated, and then use the process to discover what other feelings are behind that irritation. Then if you get to a feeling, express it out loud, while picturing in your mind the original scenario, that helps to get deeper into it Intentionally depriving yourself that day of your favourite painkilling habits, whether it be: sugar coffee your phone social media looking up information/going down rabbit holes reading, even nicotine socializing (including approval seeking behavior) even meditating, if you tend to use it to feel better I'll be making videos about this in the future. I've also guided people through this in sessions quite a lot so I have some experience of helping others get into it, I'm happy to do one with you for free because you're so enthusiastic and it makes me want to, pm me in that case, that's not an offer to everyone who reads this lol And here's someone's background story - super nice guy, he guided me a couple times as well, and just an enjoyable voice to listen to.

Tears in their original, old context discharge the electrical energy that is twisting the body and also the mind of someone with repressed trauma (which is almost everyone). The more crying the better. Don't confuse it with tears about the present, those are relieving but not curative.

Thanks for sharing more context, I now have more insight on your challenging and complex condition. What I think is this: the chronic fatigue and the anxieties and insecurities could be two legs of the same tree (rooted in trauma). That's not for me to say, but it's an assumption that you could make. If you make that assumption, then there's a path that opens up to verify that hypothesis and also improve both things. Here's a distinction: There's shadow work that purely works with the unhelpful thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings and either helps you let them go or turn them into better ones. You've found one that works for you, EFT, and there's many more. This works, but only on that layer (thoughts, beliefs, emotions about the present) There's also modalities that work on a deeper layer. Those have the potential to also rewire psychosomatic problems (the physical side effects of trauma) An example is the decrease in brain fog, fatigue and ADHD-related body tension that I've experienced, and also the countless examples I've read about of people regaining their physical energy and getting rid of unexplained pain. If you would want more of the second type, and not only benefit mentally but also physically, then a tweak would be needed. You're already finding some past memories that have repressed pain attached to them. Instead of letting them go, you could try to intensify them and put yourself back into that scenario, whatever it is. - See what you saw, all details you can remember - Feel what you felt. If you don't know, ask yourself: what could I have been feeling? - Express what you couldn't express. Out loud. Say what you couldn't say, ask what you couldn't ask back then. This will lead to remembering more pain and feeling more of it. In the past context, not the present. Very important. And first person, no "inner child" third person stuff. The more of that past pain you spend time feeling, the more you drain it. Forever. A couple of sessions can already have profound results in physical energy and otherwise. That's how you eventually end up at younger and younger stuff, birth memories. But you don't have to go that far even. People who spend time draining off their most important childhood pains, tend to experience a 70% permanent improvement in neurotic symptoms, this includes psychosomatic symptoms. This is based on data from Imprints, so people under professional guidance, but I do it on myself and it's working for me.

That's interesting! Thank you for sharing. I'm in the middle of a deep research rampage concerning everything shadow work, therapy and healing. So that helps to put it into a category in my mental model. Also I've been doing different modalities of it for years. I feel a bit conflicted now because on the one hand, you seem to have a process that works for you and that's great and I don't want to invalidate that. And on the other hand, also reading about the body tensions and the experience that there's always more and it's a never-ending process, I can probably explain why that is and how you can make your practice more effective in the long term. If you're interested.

Unleashing anger into the world will cause retraumatization. I've tried it. When I was young and angry and lost, I got into street fights. Not a good time. Created new traumas. Meditating it away will also not work, your intuition is correct there. Do you actually want to know how to heal? Because I could tell you, but if you're in a place where you just want to stay in this victim energy, it's too early.

@onacloudynight Good for you! It's a healthy anger. Don't become a toxic person and take it out on the new people you meet, though. Takes discernment and shadow work to distinguish between setting healthy boundaries and projecting past anger onto new people and toxifying relationships that way. But I feel you. Enough is enough. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/46gJFMAY456ytJO98sb8eW?si=816f9bd559274f36 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjG_4MSZDP0&t=6s Some things that help me work with my emotions

In Austria, doing Erik stuff

@Tyler Robinson Here's something I found on the forum a few years back and put it in my commonplace book, check it out: Secondly, also look at: https://wwoof.net/get-started/ You can choose any place in the worldwide network they have, and just help them with farming for a couple hours a day, and you get free food and internet and stay. I think some manual labour with nature and animals around in and of itself can be very healing and stabilizing. These are the two options I would look at if I wanted to escape a toxic situation, take some time off to heal/balance, and didn't have the income to rent my own place.

That need to go back to her, that you don't want to feel, is exactly what you should be feeling as part of the process. Then realising you won't, unlocking more grief. The idea that she's the only one for you, that idea also needs to be grieved. You're only a month into it, this could be rough for another month or two. Keep at it and be gentle with yourself.

I'm not very familiar with the tapping. Does it make you cry a lot?

Janov's books will blow you away. Roughly. As you're probably aware, your subconscious intelligently decides which pains you're ready to integrate at which time. It will start feeding you bits and pieces in an order that you can handle. It tends to go in the order of: later childhood stuff, early childhood stuff, birth. But not always. I personally know people whose birth trauma was so intense, that they started having reliving experiences right at the beginning. Complete with their body reproducing the fluids in their nose that they were choking on, and the intense heart rate and body temperature. It's a physiological memory. Here's a video of someone having such an experience, under guidance of her husband: That's awesome, what techniques are you using? I'm currently reading an account of hypnotherapy being used in combination with trauma work. This particular case was in 1851, where over a period of 11 months someone was cured of their psychosis. What they did was bring her under hypnosis, question her about the memories that still bothered her, and she'd be able to talk about them. Then she would need to go out of hypnosis in order to relive them. (because under hypnosis, conscious integration can't happen) I don't know too much about hypnosis, it seems there are many levels of it, and there's a particular level where some sort of intelligent self-diagnostic consciousness is activated and can be talked to, which knows exactly which steps need to be taken in order to heal.

@Federico del pueblo Well if you're interested in the topic of trauma, I'm reading Imprints by Arthur Janov at the moment, and he describes many cases where people have unexplainable tensions in their head, neck, shoulders, and it turned out that that's where they got hurt during the process of being born. This can be consciously remembered after clearing out the trauma from later life stages. Not that that gives you a practical solution though. Undoing birth trauma is a long process. But if your intuition says that that might be it, you could ask your mother about it, and you might have an explanation that interests or satisfies to some extent.

Yes, no reason you couldn't do that. Do it for as long as it satisfies you. As long as it's all above board, you can find women who are up for that. When you feel the calling for a deep relationship, you will know it's time for a new construct. Here's where my perspective comes from: I've done the casually-seeing-women for a good while, and then I started to realise I wanted something deep. I had a whole belief system built up at that time, around needing freedom and open relationships and why that's better and great and everything. Then, after some searching, my love presented herself. And she didn't want an open relationship. So I had a choice between giving up on her, or unwiring the web of beliefs I had built up. My knowing that she was right for me was strong enough to make me choose the hard, ego death option. Now this didn't go smoothly, it was a bumpy ride with a lot of confusion and pain and insecurity for both of us. But after lots of time and contemplation I got to the stage where I loved her deeply enough that no part of me wanted to do anything with other women that would cause her to feel pain. My empathy deepened. You can't really force that, forcing it would have seemed to my younger self like a terrible restriction of freedom. So my advice to my younger self is to not worry about it as much. A really strong love had to come in and slowly melt me. Can't force that. I tried to make myself believe in monogamy before, because I thought that that was the next evolutionary step for me (Aubrey Marcus evolved from polyamory into monogamy so I thought I should) It didn't work. Loving someone deeply is taking their best interests as part of yourself. That dissolves the desire to do something that would hurt them. No need to fear that or rush that. And then within the boundaries of what would not hurt them, you can explore your and each other's desires and fantasies. I've found it best to first really let go of all such expectations. Then over time, as trust builds, some boundaries might widen. Or they might not. What prevents me from feeling deprived and restricted, is not what I'm allowed to do within the bounds of my relationship, but the fact that all my desires can be talked about without judgment, and so I feel fully seen.

You're probably right about that. But they're not going to change. They couldn't give you what you needed then, and it's not going to happen now. Being sent to a psych ward against your will seems like an awful experience that can do more harm than good. So what options do you have? Are you over 18? Can you decide for yourself? Do you have friends who can help you figure out an alternative plan? Maybe even crash on their couch? Are there more distant family members who you can actually trust and might be willing to help? Does your insurance cover therapy, a form of it that you would actually like to do? Do you have a job, or a source of income that can pay for rent, food and therapy? If not, can you do something else like volunteer at a farm for food and stay, or at a yoga center? You're going to have to muster all your strength and summon your adult self here, because you have a real practical situation to take care of.

Yes, I mean I've seen all podcast episodes with Graham Hancock (Joe Rogan) and Mathias DeStefano (Aubrey Marcus). Highly recommendable. I don't do much rabbitholing myself, but I'm glad there's other people digging this stuff up, and I enjoy listening to them.

Yes, November is the worst for me. From September to December I tend to wake up every day with anxiety and doom feelings. The entire day my body is so restless and anxious that I just don't feel okay. Sometimes I'm so disregulated that I can't think properly. I take vitamin D and tried light therapy and stuff. Works a bit, but not a lot. The only things that help, for me, are: Pushing through on stuff (accomplishment) Gym Shadow work St John's Wort supplements if I really need. And even then it's no picnic.

Hahaha. I suppose I'll just try to embody more what I miss

@John Paul Watch my video on what to look for in therapies. I understand your fear of being put on pills, I also wouldn't want that if I didn't need them. Being on medication can stifle your growth, if they're not absolutely necessary. But there's other things that can be done. Things that actually improve the symptoms of: Potentially. That's not a benefit you want to miss out on. Self-therapy can also do a lot, but I'd recommend getting started with a professional.