Being addicted to feelings related to trauma and pain.

[BlueOak]

Being addicted to trauma and pain. Do you find naturally living is the only way this goes away?

It has done over time. I no longer need to write out traumas as much, when I have spoken about them and got feedback or help I don't need to shape my reality, conversations or experience around the emotions that I am used to anymore. Integrating powerlessness, hate and shame were tough ones. Shame or humiliation isn't done yet fully. 

I haven't for a long time but now I am listening to music that makes me feel sadness or just intensely on repeat. Do you experience that yourself? The deep moving songs that bring it out of you so you can relieve the emotion. Its still addictive, and its hard to let go of what defined your identity for so long. The welling emotion and full bodied feelings that come out of the knots in the stomach or pressure on the chest.

It makes you feel alive, when otherwise you can be apathetic, disconnected or dead inside. 

Thoughts?

[BlueOak]

The flip side being we need to have that kind of pull toward the parts of ourselves we push away.

[puporing]

4 hours ago, BlueOak said:

I haven't for a long time but now I am listening to music that makes me feel sadness or just intensely on repeat. Do you experience that yourself? The deep moving songs that bring it out of you so you can relieve the emotion. Its still addictive, and its hard to let go of what defined your identity for so long. The welling emotion and full bodied feelings that come out of the knots in the stomach or pressure on the chest.

It makes you feel alive, when otherwise you can be apathetic, disconnected or dead inside. 

I have found tremendous solace and healing in sad/heavy/sacred kind of music, it has probably saved me from possibly going down a self-destructive path. If it feels addictive it probably just means you have more to move through/grieve and that it's a language that speaks to you. Classical music in particular was so great at leading me from utter grief to transcendence and love.

I do not know if music alone would've been enough to be where I am now which is a level of peace I haven't experienced before. Writing, reading and understanding, spirituality all played important roles. Therapy - having my shadow sides seen and loved unconditionally with a healer was what completed the circle for me.

Sounds like you're very in touch with where you are at right now and this is a healthy thing to totally let your feelings come up and be 'seen'. To me, it's the only way to move through it.

[BlueOak]

Thank you @puporing I had an emotional peak yesterday where I had to go through a few things. Usually I do this quietly to myself, not sure why I felt like sharing perhaps its as you say to be seen, vocalize. Its a balance of not doing this for its own sake or overindulging in it but still being with yourself or those difficult emotions when you are having a night of it.

I never have been able to afford a healer or professional so its been a long process. Posts like yours are what helped and do help, videos where someone else said what I was feeling or thinking. I used to crave and manipulate for acceptance, argue for it, fight for it in an unhealthy way. Then I realised just by being honest and accepting yourself its often enough. Seeing it reflect in others because you are not pushing it away anymore and its accepted in you.

Thanks again  Take care of yourself.

[Grateful Dead]

13 hours ago, BlueOak said:

Do you experience that yourself?

Yes, I can definitely relate to what you have wrote. 

I think the problem with trauma is that it works in our subconscious and is unconscious to us until we open up to a higher consciousness. I wasn't able to fully let go of my trauma until I found God.

[Mu_]

1 hour ago, acidgoofy said:

Yes, I can definitely relate to what you have wrote. 

I think the problem with trauma is that it works in our subconscious and is unconscious to us until we open up to a higher consciousness. I wasn't able to fully let go of my trauma until I found God.

Ya same.

14 hours ago, BlueOak said:

Being addicted to trauma and pain. Do you find naturally living is the only way this goes away?

It has done over time. I no longer need to write out traumas as much, when I have spoken about them and got feedback or help I don't need to shape my reality, conversations or experience around the emotions that I am used to anymore. Integrating powerlessness, hate and shame were tough ones. Shame or humiliation isn't done yet fully. 

I haven't for a long time but now I am listening to music that makes me feel sadness or just intensely on repeat. Do you experience that yourself? The deep moving songs that bring it out of you so you can relieve the emotion. Its still addictive, and its hard to let go of what defined your identity for so long. The welling emotion and full bodied feelings that come out of the knots in the stomach or pressure on the chest.

It makes you feel alive, when otherwise you can be apathetic, disconnected or dead inside. 

Thoughts?

I can relate for sure.  Enjoy it while its there, if it effects your practical life in such ways that you can't show up for work and relationships, then maybe call it a addiction, otherwise, just let it be what it is, I don't see any harm in feeling what your describing in your process.  Maybe in time your naturally just move onto something else.

[puporing]

@BlueOak Yeah it's important to be seen. Perhaps you have gotten so little of it before that this feels like 'indulging'.

Yes, financial barrier is a problem and keeps a lot of us stuck for longer than it might otherwise have... one day I hope we can all do a bit of this for each other, have the emotional maturity and capacity to reflect the other without judgment and with care. 

Thank you, you as well.  

 

[Loba]

On 2/21/2022 at 3:14 PM, BlueOak said:

Being addicted to trauma and pain. Do you find naturally living is the only way this goes away?

It has done over time. I no longer need to write out traumas as much, when I have spoken about them and got feedback or help I don't need to shape my reality, conversations or experience around the emotions that I am used to anymore. Integrating powerlessness, hate and shame were tough ones. Shame or humiliation isn't done yet fully. 

I haven't for a long time but now I am listening to music that makes me feel sadness or just intensely on repeat. Do you experience that yourself? The deep moving songs that bring it out of you so you can relieve the emotion. Its still addictive, and its hard to let go of what defined your identity for so long. The welling emotion and full bodied feelings that come out of the knots in the stomach or pressure on the chest.

Yes, I do understand - check this song out, it's one of my top five:

 

It makes you feel alive, when otherwise you can be apathetic, disconnected or dead inside. 

Thoughts?

I think it is important to feel the full spectrum of human emotion as deeply as we can, when it comes up for us.
But it can lead to an addiction for some - I recently made a post on how to change habits, and addiction was talked about:

Notes:

Quote

 

You need to reflect on your life, "Who do you want to be and do with your life."

The topic of habits - we humans are creatures of habit - 40-45 percent of our daily behaviours are habits - almost half of everything you do every day is actually a habit.

Examples - the time you get up, computer games, cell phones, driving a car, eating fast food, exercising.

What do all these behaviours have in common? - Habits are by definition automated behaviours that we repeat over and over again always in the same context or environment and that run un our subconscious mind.  You are not conscious of it because you have done it so many times, you don't have to pay attention, your mind is wandering, but you are not really there.

Example - driving a car - you might drive somewhere, you would arrive and couldn't remember how you got there - because driving has become so habitual.

Habits are triggered by a que - They are rewarded at the end, dopamine is released at the end, it signals to the brain that this is pleasure - reward

Example - every time you get a message or notification a little bit of dopamine is released in the brain.  Companies like Facebook, they program their software so dopamine is released in the brain and why cell phones are so habitual.

Habit loop - a que triggers the behaviour, behaviour carried out, rewarded in the end, dopamine released, because of this we do it again the next time the que comes around - we go through this many, many times and we have many habits and in the background all our habits run through this loop over and over again.

Behaviour of working focused - forest app, you plant a seed on this app and when you don't check your phone for a set amount of time, you plant a tree.  At the end, he would grow a forest at the end of the day and have 7,8,10 trees - he called this his new deep work habit and worked perfectly.

By going through this habit so many times for several weeks, he was changing certain mechanisms and structures in his brain.

What he did was simplified the whole thing a bit, and drew a sketch of his brain.

You will see a network of neurons starting to connect, which are at first week, but after several weeks of repeating the same behaviour over and over again, the connections get thicker and stronger and after four, five, six, weeks, seven, eight, ten times a day, the connections will get even stronger.

There will be a layer of fat wrapped around it called myelin.

What does that mean and why does it help? - Our brains are energy consumers, they eat energy - the human brains weighs two percent and consumed 20 percent of our whole energy supply.

Our brain makes important behaviours cost little energy, meaning the thicker the energy level between each neurons the less energy needed to activate the behaviours. 

We shouldn't invest a lot of energy to go through the behaviour, instead do it often.

Human brain has 100 billion neurons and has trillions of connections and is very complex - despite this complexity, this simple principle still applies - whatever you repeat over and over again, that's what the brain decides is important.

Repetition is what the brain decides is important, and this is crucial.

It doesn't matter if it is something good for you, like exercising or bad like smoking or whether it is something needed like driving a car, whenever there is a lot of repetition and dopamine released in the brain the brain decides is important.

Make your nervous system your ally instead of your enemy. How do we do this?  How do we make our brains our allies and don't let it become our enemy?  It is not easy, but not impossible and it is simple.

Be aware.

Addiction is nothing more than an over expression of a behaviour that turns something negative.  If we can see those processes in action, this is where awareness comes in, we can change them.  If we can't see them we are dead in the water.  Awareness is the basis for learning good habits, and letting go of habits that don't help us.

You have to observe, see and be honest with yourself every day for this to work.

Write down for one week everything that you do and be honest with yourself, be honest about the small behaviours that you have and look at the list and be honest - is that what you want to do every day?

Would you like to change something on it?  Go small steps.  Small steps will let you achieve big things, it might take longer but it is much more likely that you will keep moving.

Get one percent better each day, be consistent, start by reading for five minutes a day a difficult book, meditate for three minutes a day, but keep going, keep doing it for weeks and it will get more eventually.  

At the beginning a new behaviour will hurt, but eventually it will be tolerable and eventually it will feel good and you will miss this when you don't do it and that's the point you want to get to, that is when you have formed a new habit.

 

Try both, try treating it as an addiction for a time - and see what comes up, if the emotions are impulsive or repetitious and you can diverge, or sometimes just get stuck on an emotion for a long time and are not bringing it up consciously, this can be a habit and above is how to correct it.

Now, if it's just catharsis and enjoying it as an experience in life, that's fine and healthy - it's up to you to figure out for yourself where you rest on that spectrum.

Sometimes I know I am indulging in a sad emotion, but tbh, sometimes you just have to listen to a rough song to really connect to yourself.  They say that connecting to your own pain can help you learn to connect to another's and eventually the world's.

[Javfly33]

I've been there. Its hell.

[BlueOak]

First off thanks  to everyone that posted.

I resisted coming back to read because I thought after working through much of it my trauma was resolved. I find a level of shame when I lose my head to my heart and the message ends up especially messy or muddled. Shame and Humilation are not yet integrated in me. So I tried to with some success after this but not entirely. 

@acidgoofy

On 2/22/2022 at 0:38 PM, acidgoofy said:

Yes, I can definitely relate to what you have wrote. 

I think the problem with trauma is that it works in our subconscious and is unconscious to us until we open up to a higher consciousness. I wasn't able to fully let go of my trauma until I found God.

I did. I felt god, as god, I experienced a white light reality and what I will call divine love. I experienced large consciousness and small consciousness. I realised there was nothing but [                  ] this, life and sensation. All that persists is perception and that was all that was permanent. Then I argued, fought and my ego came back stronger than ever. Unresolved things move very painfully and fast in that state to hit you in the face. I could seek again, I know all it takes is to be in a state to recieve. Thank you

@Mu_
Enjoy it while its there. Flip the perspective. I like that
Thank you.

Apathy/Acceptance is where I get stuck mostly. Emotions do sometimes cost me my job or relationship. Feelings of shame mostly I would say. I felt it was betrayal last time, going above me to my boss before anyone told me. I think deep down it was that a few people commented on a behavior and my supervisor blindsided me by going straight to the manager. They did not want me to leave but I felt enough shame that I cloaked it as feeling betrayed. I need to work on shame and humilation still. I tried after this post but I was only partially successful integrating and accepting it.

@puporing

It happens naturally as each of us learns more, we can't help but pass it on.

@Loba
Lot of material, thanks for taking the time. My family has a lot of addiction in it. My brother does drugs, my father drinks, I exercise and/or eat, or play games, my mother does codependency. So I always appreciate greater insight. Gratitude for the material I will review it again tomorrow.

@Javfly33
Yes, but feeling something is better than nothing.  I was wondering if i'd made a backstep coming back to this way of being.

Again I didn't expect this many replies. Thanks again all of you, good luck with you life and your day.

Edited February 25, 2022 by BlueOak

[puporing]

@BlueOak