Judy2

it seems like you already understand the mechanics of what went "wrong" - namely, your resistance to certain thoughts only amplified them further and made you more anxious. as you mentioned that you are struggling with the length of lsd trips: do you set aside an entire day (ideally a Saturday or a personal equivalent in your schedule) and the morning after? this already helps free up your attention. another tip that comes to mind is creating a gentle plan for the last third of the trip. you don't have to resort to it, but in case things are getting confusing, it might be helpful to have a few activities or tricks to change the setting up your sleeve, for example, by putting on music, changing the lighting, watching a specific video about meditation or spirituality, and so on. sometimes having this emergency plan at the back of your mind can already help calm you down and it'll be a nice way to bridge the rougher parts of the trip if you forget that it'll also come to an end in a few hours

yeah, i like that one:) i do it with colours most often. (5 red, 4 yellow, etc.) ...but including the other senses also makes sense. i fully agree in theory - but also know that this can be tough to implement in practice. i suppose the understanding of how crucial this is comes and goes (at least for me), but is, hopefully, ever-deepening:) have you tried the butterfly hug? i would say it would also fit in this category. Thank you very much! i like how you divided your response into different categories, because depending on the specifics of a situation, different reactions may be required. you're very strong:) take care:)

i am currently doing an internship at a bilingual kindergarten and have been observing the children's behaviour and also the adults' ways of relating to them. what stands out is this very particular way of how adults talk to children, namely by exaggerating emotional responses (shock, surprise, disappointment, approval, and on and on). i mean it's nothing new and i do this myself....when a kid tells me a story about how it was hit by another kid or how that kid said a 'bad word', i fake/exaggerate outrage and compassion, and when it tells me where their family's gonna go on vacation, i fake/exaggerate fascination...whereas with an adult, i'd be more casual while expressing "yeah, Italy is beautiful" (something like that). i guess there's nothing wrong with this and i know most adults interact with children this way - even though sometimes this entails overriding and even suppressing what's actually going on for them personally...think exhaustion, annoyance, worry, etc. in new parents. now i wonder if this exaggerated emotional pattern is the only way of actually relating to children, essentially by copying how their experience is 'structured' as human beings who have been alive for only four, five, six years. i mean of course they are going to perceive things differently....but i wonder if exaggerating emotions is the only way for adults to relate to children, or if there are other options that may be more serious/authentic. would love to hear your thoughts on this, especially if we have any parents/aunties/uncles here:)

i feel like i couldn't really articulate my question well here. guess it doesn't matter:)

yes of course.

@PsychedelicEagle ok:) i think when i want to push till failure, it makes sense for me to have some carbs in my system. on some days when i thought i still had enough in my stores from the night before, i miscalculated and couldn't really perform as well as i had hoped. this week i went to the gym at 7am (that's when it opens) and then straight to work and waited 6 hours before my next meal. idk if that's ideal, probably not cause the post-workout meal is more important than pre-workout. but sometimes with things in my schedule, it's hard to time things differently.

i've got a question because i usually work out in the mornings and some of the nutrition advice that i've seen online conflicts in this regard. on the one hand, it's advised to consume around 30g of carbs (preferably simple rather than complex) to fuel the workout, which makes sense to me. on the other hand, women specifically are advised to get around 15g of protein within an hour of waking for hormonal reasons, and carbs in the morning may set you up for more of a blood sugar roller coaster later in the day. as i (currently) don't want to have my full breakfast before i work out and prefer to eat more after i am finished, i wonder what the macros of an ideal pre-workout snack, which is simultaneously my first 'meal'/snack of the day, should look like. so far i've been focussing more on carbs but idk if that is really beneficial or not.

i think i was looking at it the other way around. mirroring makes sense and seems essential to healthy emotional development in children, but i wonder at what point/to what degree parents can also express their own emotions (exhaustion, sadness, ...) without hiding them from children/overplaying them for the sake of mirroring the child's state. because there seems to be a fine line between oversheltering a child from the existence of other people's emotions (which seems like it could be harmful) and making children feel like they are implicitly or explicitly responsible for their parents emotions (which is definitely harmful to their development). but i guess mirroring doesn't have to come at the expense of the parent expressing their emotions (in a moderate, healthy way, of c), too?

@Cred okay, interesting:)

Thank you for sharing:) loving yourself like you would your own daughter and mothering yourself is something i find quite relatable and it's also something i try to use as guidance sometimes. aside from this idea of grace, i am curious if you have developed any specific techniques to deal with more immediate stressful emotions. does anything come to mind in this regard?

i've been feeling different. a tiny bit more alive, awake, alert. worries keep popping up, but for now i seem to have figured out that they're all pointless, and the best way to go is to get used to finding happiness, peace, and joy in the present - cause where else would i find it? i have also decided that optimism is my best bet, even though i can still be anxious about the future. despite this, it's been a busy and exhausting week. the bilingual kids seem to host twice as many germs as regular kids, and i've been warned, but actually ended up battling some kind of infection this weekend. i haven't felt this ill in a couple of years, although i'm hoping i'll still be able to go to work tomorrow. there's this one boy, i think he's three or four, who is just the cutest. like i think i'm in love with his smile. off topic, but all of a sudden i also notice quite some progress i've made at the gym, particularly regarding the muscles in my arms and legs, and they feel a lot leaner as a result. that's something i want to keep up for sure.

...................................................................................

hm, i get you. first of all, if you are autistic (or similar), your brain may be "atypical" - but compared to the brains of millions of people on this planet, it's also typical enough, i'd say. and it doesn't even matter if you are typical or atypical. I get the challenges of being atypical though - but the important part is finding a structure in life that helps you deal with your unique challenges. you say you are a good analytical thinker. would it help to make a table and rank all of the activities you do in a day on a scale from 1-10 in terms of how much joy they bring you and how much you estimate they contribute to short term vs long-term happiness? bring out all the excel sheets you want if that helps. could you make a separate list of the activities that you think you would be happily engaged in once you are finally in that perfect relationship, and slowly start doing more of that until things fall into place? what are the random parts of each day that you really wish you had a relationship, and how could you make them more bearable and joyful today? atypical or not, people tend to be unhappy when they spend too much time projecting all joy and fulfilment onto a hypothetical future self, and it can help to focus on how to take good care of today-self (while keeping long-term health and fulfilment in mind). hope that helps. if it doesn't, maybe you could explain what you mean by the kind of "normal advice" that doesn't work for you.

i've told him that before.... he probably regrets it by now because people keep firing it back at him:) jokes aside though, you really shouldn't give up @Never_give_up. although sometimes taking the focus off a thing may just be what's needed to help things fall into place. are there ways for you to be happy and complete now, while trusting that you are also constantly evolving?

.... it's been a rather exhausting week, but i am also feeling more positive and hopeful than usual - which i thought should be acknowledged here. i'll try my very best to keep it up.

@Carl-Richard yes, mirroring seems like a good thing:) i guess i just wondered about the specifics.

giant space kangaroo or regular?

@HopefulMan it could be milder forms, still. or none of it:) i didn't mean to imply that any of the above has to be the case for you - just to inform you what that could be like. i'm sure you can find some emotions if you keep looking. best of luck to you 🙏🏻 and take care:)

maybe i misunderstand but it kind of looks like you are first negating this and then describing how it's exactly the case? i might be wrong though. dissociation is a spectrum. in its milder forms, it is more like depersonalisation or derealisation, feeling strange in your body, like you aren't really there as a self anymore. you might look at your hands or your reflection in the mirror and get a very weird feeling from that. some people go physically numb or their senses become a bit clouded like there's cotton around their ears. alternatively, they may be hyper-aware and hyper-vigilant while still feeling very strange in their bodies, with their thoughts and senses. people can freeze physically, but they could also still move while feeling completely out of touch with themselves. in its more extreme forms, dissociation can cause you to start shaking uncontrollably, experience gaps in memory and lose control over your body, i.e. drop to the ground. the most common skill to deal with dissociation is either heat, cold, or physical exercise. the reason people dissociate is typically for self-preservation or protecting their mental faculties from traumatic events. every person can potentially dissociate, for example during a car accident (or in your case SA) - it would make it so that painful events wouldn't seem as real or close to YOU anymore. for those with trauma (post-traumatic stress or personality disorders), dissociation can become a learned response that keeps being reactivated even if the present trigger is no longer as objectively intense as a car accident, and it can be almost tempting to get lost in that world and you kind of don't know anymore if it's good or bad to be in that dissociated state. if you want to get therapy and work on the painful events causing problems in your life, though, it's tough to do that when you are constantly dissociating, i.e., not letting the therapist or yourself access the painful emotions underlying this behaviour that the behaviour seems to be sheltering you from in the first place...so it can be a bit of a vicious cycle, and, again, depending on how uncontrollably it affects a person, quite dangerous. this is also where pretty bad levels of self-harm can occur...cause people are so out of touch with themselves and don't even know anymore how to handle the way their bodies and minds are reacting. ...but it counts as dissociation way before it comes to that. sorry for the oversharing:) i'm quite fascinated with the topic.

hi there:) so i'm still in the process of figuring out what i should do with myself, and this has been quite stressful tbh. while i'm trying to decide on further university programmes etc. i may want to sign up for, i figured that one thing i could do now, without a degree, is to write a cookbook or even start a recipe blog. in general, i really enjoy cooking and baking, i enjoy creating new recipes or watching health and nutrition-related content on YouTube. while i have been thinking for a while that i could also start making my own content, i have a number of concerns in this regard. as i have a pretty intense eating disorder history and have been experiencing more immediate symptoms again in the past few months, not only may the aspect of thinking about recipes etc. be triggering - so may the whole body image aspect, "putting myself out there", being vulnerable etc. i am not fond of the whole self-presentation thing, this idea of needing to "sell yourself" online, and i estimate it would be a huge, huge trigger for me to think about how i am being perceived all day every day. some of you may know that it was a huge fuss for me to have a profile picture with my face on here....and i doubt i'd be comfortable showing my body or even just my face on a blog post or on the cover/inside of my hypothetical cookbook. in general, my vision would be to combine recipes with some kind of framework that communicates more gentle nutrition tips, as i am aware that while many people on this planet need to lose weight and the aggressive approach of certain fitness coaches online may yield great results for some people, it can also aggravate mental symptoms in others as nutrition is not just scientific and objective - it's also subjective, emotional, and psychological. so i'd like my recipes to be framed by that kind of compassionate approach and include tips on how to have a healthy relationship with food etc. (which i don't have yet). anyway, i don't know if i can realistically do this with the current body image and disordered eating challenges at hand that i am facing in my personal life. i also assume it might be quite embarrassing to try this kind of thing, if people who know me find out about it. i'm also not sure to what extent this kind of domain presupposes i'd have to start making videos for YouTube/Instagram, if i'd want my cookbook or blog to be successful. by the way, i also do not have the slightest idea how to start a blog in the first place - if anybody knows, fire away:)

@Leo Gura well now it all makes sense why duolingo taught me to say that the butterfly is reading a book and the caterpillar is sad.

in this context i mean that certain emotions may be there (lingering underneath the surface) but not part of your awareness and thus contributing to your "state" despite not being felt explicitly. a shift in state can occur that would make the contributing emotions explicit and re-shape your present experience/where awareness 'goes' as a whole, or what is part of your scope of awareness. don't quote me on this, i'm just making it up as i go. sorry if it sounds very fuzzy...i'm just trying to point to stuff you can observe in your present experience and how it 'morphs' from moment to moment. maybe it would work better with an example.

good question:) i think it's like the totality of my physical and emotional sensations, my subjective experience (thoughts, feelings) and how they all interact with and influence one another, how they are basically entangled in some sort of matrix.

@HopefulMan that sounds really difficult. if you don't mind that i keep digging (let me know when it's too much)....you say "intense situations" - what demarcates a situation as such, aside from an emotion that may or may not be felt? for example, in such a situation, do you fidget a lot or feel yourself dissociating (most simply in the form of depersonalisation/derealisation, "feeling strange in your body", or like your self/ the 'doer' is not there anymore)? where are your thoughts going? again, the theory i was taught in this context is that internal pressure or a perceived crisis can be so intense that access to emotions is completely blocked, and the way to access them is to start by releasing and regulating tension. i don't know if this applies to your situation, but maybe you can check in and see if this feels accurate next time things seem intense. one way of checking is if physical stimuli (exercise, hot/cold water, very spicy or sour food) change your state at all. ....and something else that came to mind: can you give yourself some self-compassion throughout this? it might make a huge difference for your system to know that you're not blaming yourself for struggling at the moment, and it's okay that you are still working on figuring things out.

@Ramasta9 @Natasha Tori Maru hey:) i had to think of our discussion again this afternoon, particularly the timing of meals. i was wondering how you do/would handle things if you have a workday or some other thing impacting your meal timing. does that upset you at all? for example, i'm currently doing an internship and don't feel comfortable eating at work, so to make that fit my schedule, i have to eat before work at 7am and then after work at 3pm... which is not ideal for me, but i don't see how else i would make that work. do you mind it when you have to eat your meals outside your home, and in this case, would you just eat at work to stick to the timing, or adjust your timing to be able to eat at home? sorry if i'm being so meticulous about this topic:) i'm currently working on figuring out a new structure that works for me and try to hear inspiration from people who seem to have their relationship with food figured out:) btw i tried training fasted a few times and it went okay depending on how late i had my last meal the day before, and also depending on the intensity of the exercise.