Dear Sesha:

You are welcome. “I think it’s not going to be an issue for me to read the theory about toxic shame” – reading something in an academic sense/ in theory- will do nothing for you.

You have to read a bit, then practice that bit, and in so doing, bringing your 2-dimentional/ academic- theoretical understanding of things into the 3rd realm (3-D) of practical application and understanding.

“How did you handle your shame..?” – bit by bit, moving from the 2-D understanding to the 3-D understanding, it makes ALL the difference, bit by bit.

anita

Dear Sesha:

You are very welcome. You stated the truth so well in your recent post: nothing falls from the sky except for rain or snow. Thank you and I wish you a nice weekend as well!

anita

Dear Sesha:

“Unfortunately I took that suffocating feeling to my work” -I was wondering more about the suffocating feelings:

I think, and correct me if I am wrong, that your suffocating feelings are not feelings in your chest that involve hyperventilation, breathing fast and shallow and as a result, lacking oxygen, is it?

The Joy of Wellness/ Feelings of Suffocation: causes and treatments addresses suffocation feelings of the primarily anxiety kind.

I think that your suffocating feelings have more to do with shame (and the anxiety involved in shame). From a different website- blake psychology. com/ how to escape the suffocation grip of shame:

“Do you know shame? For me, shame is the most painful of all the emotions. Its message is, ‘You are not ok, there is something wrong with you’. And when it bubbles up, I try to run! How do you react, when you feel shame?  Shame nearly suffocated me as a teenager when I got the message from my peers that I was not ok because of the shape of my body. I was too tall. Thinking back, it is still palpable to me how that kind of toxic shame felt in my body: the knot in my throat, a heaviness wrapped around my whole body like a lead blanket, and such deep desperation because there was nothing I could do about my height. There was no way for me to become ok, I was stuck and doomed. I was not ok, and would always be not ok.”  – does this sound exactly like what you feel? If so, you might want to read more from this website.

I never heard of Rapid Transformation Therapy until you mentioned it. Wikipedia has an entry on it.

I am looking forward to your clarification regarding your suffocating feelings, if you’re okay clarifying it for me.

anita

Dear Sesha:

You are very welcome. You shared today that your suffocating feelings (I’ll refer to them today as SF) are not physical, such as involving hyperventilation, breathing fast and shallow and lacking oxygen. Your experience of your SF is more mental: restless thoughts, feeling overwhelmed, sad, angry, paralyzed, shaken by external circumstances.

I want to learn something new today about your SF by going through your 8-page thread. You introduced your SF in the first 3-sentence-paragraph of your original post about 4 months ago: “I feel like I lost every meaning and purpose in life. My head is filled with racing thoughts of self-blame, shame and worry. Also feelings of loneliness and worthlessness suffocate me”.

Although everyone experiences racing thoughts, self-blame, etc., sometimes- your experience of these things is particularly INTENSE.

On March 3, you wrote about your parents: “They feel overwhelmed every time when I get emotional… they can’t bear my emotions”.

In that sentence, I now believe, you introduced the origin of your SF, how they came about: “They feel overwhelmed every time when I get emotional… they can’t bear my emotions” => you feel overwhelmed every time when you get emotional… you can’t bear your emotions.

Next, => “I am somebody very negative and unbearable… Those intense emotions are scary and terrible for others too”.

Your parents expressed feeling overwhelmed by your emotions=> you feel overwhelmed by your emotions=> you formed the core-belief that you are very negative and unbearable, and that OTHER PEOPLE feel overwhelmed by you and feel SCARED AND TERRIBLE to be around you.

I often say that a parent or parents are like a mirror to the child, what the child sees in that mirror, she believes it to be who she really is. What the mirror showed you was an image of yourself that is … like a monster: scary and terrible for others to be around.

“people feel suffocated by me and are searching the distance.. nobody can handle my oddity“, you wrote, still on March 3. Your SF suffocate you and they suffocate other people. At some point, you wrote: “(I am) uncomfortable in my own skin… so tense and nervous around people” – because you believe you are some sort of a monster, you  believe that other people notice the monster and are affected by it too, so you are uncomfortable in your own skin and around people.

There are lots of people who feel uncomfortable around people (social anxiety)… but your discomfort is.. again: particularly intense. At this point I think of a monster suffocating you, a monster that lives inside you= an extreme form of a negative self-image.

You wrote someplace: “I want to find a way to become free from my suffocating self” – free from the monster, the monster that terrorizes you when you are alone by yourself (“the tendency during the time I am alone, those suffocating feelings haunt me“) and even more so, when you are around other people.

You wrote: “When those suffocating feelings appear, I can feel how my head feels tense almost like a headache… I can’t think clearly. Everything and everyone don’t matter to me anymore” – it’s like the SF which I now think of as a monster, takes possession of your brain. As it takes possession, your brain hurts, and after it possesses you, it feels like nothing matters.

“I can feel how scared and paralyzed I am while having those suffocating feelings. I feel like I don’t have any joy and energy to do anything” – the monster having possessed your brain paralyzes you and drains the joy and energy out of you.

* My goodness, it just occurred to me that the “intense moaning” you repeatedly mentioned in regard to your behavior (ex. “those intense moaning is not tolerable“) fit the image of a moaning monster.

On May 2, you described who you are when you are not suffocated by your SF/ monster: “I can be calm…  I can also be funny, daring and adventurous… I reach out for new people and new experiences to discover… open minded to other perspectives and world views…  deeply cares for people who I trust and feel connected with…  empathic and understandable person…  adaptable, humble and self-determined“.

Let’s look at what the monster did most recently, as you described yesterday, June 19 (I think of “that suffocating feeling” as the monster) : “Unfortunately I took that suffocating feeling to my work”: you took the monster to work.

How did you react/ feel working  with the monster: “I acted weird and felt very uncomfortable… I just don’t feel comfortable in my own skin”.

How did people react/ feel working with a monster co-worker?: “people were irritated by me…  some people feel uncomfortable with me and took distance with me. The managers had the feeling that I don’t enjoy the work… The others didn’t take my attitude very well”-

the monster didn’t break anything or anyone… It only irritated people perhaps, made them feel uncomfortable so they distanced themselves from the monster and went about their workday as usual.. no big deal. Except that for the person who is IMAGINING that she is a monster it feels terrible, as if the monster broke everything in sight and took people hostage.

At the end of your post yesterday, you asked me: “Is there any direction or advice you can give?” – question is how do you get rid of a monster WHO DOES NOT EXIST? I placed this in big print because it frustrates me: the monster does not exist!

My advice is that you confront the monster (your extreme and exaggerated negative self-image) and dissolve it. What you will find when it dissolves-  is a funny, daring, empathetic, understanding, caring young woman with… somewhat of a negative self-image, a self image like that of so many millions of young women, one you can work on and improve. As it is right now (and has been for a long time), your extremely negative self-image is too much to work with, it needs to become less and less extreme, it needs to weaken.  Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) come to mind.

anita

Dear Sesha:

You are welcome and thank you for expressing your appreciation.

“I will confront the ‘monster’. I just don’t knowhow to weaken it yet” –

– interestingly, I googled and found “7 Ways To Deal With The ‘Inner Monster’ When It Tries To Take Over (thought catalog. com): #”0: Yes we must start at zero- … The monster energy that possesses me, and probably you too sometimes, does NOT like it that we are talking about it. Because when we are willing to face it, it begins to lose power… #1- Discovering the monster- … That is what happens when we discover it; It‘s rendered a LOT less powerful, even comic…”

Reads good so far, I didn’t read most of it but I like what I did read.

anita