Thread by @QiaochuYuan

bio-emotive weekend with @DougTataryn was v v good as hoped. some quick highlights / notes / thoughts:

1. "emptiness is a feeling of loss that's been there for a long time. you can ask yourself what's supposed to be there instead"

2. from a brief session of mine:
"i feel happy" (stab of sadness)
"maybe i get to be happy" (tears)
"maybe i get to be a little bit happy sometimes" (crying)
"i don't deserve to be happy" (more crying)

callback to:

https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1176616091482640384?s=20

3. once you see people go from, like, being mad at their coworker for criticizing them to crying about how their dad never told them they were proud of them (made-up example but similar to something i have) it gets *real* hard to take people's reactions to things at face value

3 (cont). when you experience a shift in something like that for yourself - you cry a lot about your dad and now you're noticeably less affected by criticism - you realize that people are spending their entire lives haunted by the past, and it seeps into everything they do

3 (cont). i can tell you this but there's no real substitute for the direct experience. this is at best something you remember once you have the experience for yourself and go "oh shit, yeah, that thing, i get it now"

4. after a particularly good NEDERA / crying session you get to find out what a person who is actually relaxed and not emotionally constipated is like. they are radiant, angelic, calm, loving, wise. the contrast to how people are the rest of the time is heartbreaking

5. i am more convinced now that a lot of the CBT-ish positive-thinking kinds of things that people do for mental health are not useful in the long term. stuff like noticing when you're judging yourself and trying to remind yourself that you're actually good or w/e

5 (cont). Unlocking the Emotional Brain calls this "counteractive" work: you're trying to counter a "negative" pattern by building a new "positive" pattern. the problem is that this doesn't shift the original "negative" pattern. you're just learning to fight yourself even more

5 (cont). NEDERA is what UtEB calls a "transformative" modality, which means you try to transform a "negative" pattern at the root (as with the crying-about-dad ex.), *without counteracting it*. you take a non-pathologizing stance: your self-judgment is not bad or wrong

5 (cont). and so you don't need to fight it. you offer it curiosity, attention, and love (to the extent you can), and let it uncurl itself; you find out what it's protecting and where in your past it came from (at the level of experience / feeling, not thoughts)

5 (cont). the way this can look in NEDERA might be almost horrifying to some people: it often consists of what you might call "negative affirmations," where you repeat your worst fears - "i'm alone and nobody will ever love me" etc. - over and over, then crying about them

5 (cont). some people worry that doing this will make the "bad" thoughts more entrenched. this is not my sense of what happens. the "bad" thoughts reflect emotional material that is already there and which you're just allowing further into consciousness, which is good, actually

5 (cont). emotional material that is actually in consciousness (again, at the level of experience / feeling, not thoughts) can be worked with, it can collide with the rest of your memories and with your present experience, it can actually transform (see UtEB for more on this)

5 (cont). and meanwhile i suspect CBT-style countering can actually suppress the relevant emotional material more. it's like trying to shut up a crying child instead of finding out what they're crying about - not only are they still upset, now they trust you less

5 (cont). i wonder if @FioraAeterna might say that the appeal of CBT-style countering ("i'm a piece of shit" - "no i'm not!") is that it repeats familiar childhood patterns where parents or other authority figures told you not to be feeling what you were feeling