Hello

But words like "anxiety" tend to trivialize and flatten the intricacies out of the subjective experience it refers to. That subjective experience can be an incredibly gnarled, convoluted, disgusting, and challenging horror. And the ability to express the full shape and extent of it is very hard even for adults but virtually impossible for a child.

So you can end up comparing how you coped with "fear" vs. how another person coped with "fear" and ask, why was I affected so much more severely? When you're dealing with completely different regions of that experience.

I ran out of ways to describe it. I still do. It's not just fear though, it's a lot of other things: pain and disgust and helplessness and things that don't have words for them, the ghastly things you witness after it feels that the world has shed its skin and revealed itself to be a fundamentally evil and torturous place.

"feel the fear and do it anyway" was a message that surrounded me on all sides.

So it was apparent to me that feeling fear and not feeling fear could be functionally identical to all outside observers, and might be treated the same in many therapeutic and clinical environments. The purpose of therapy was to dominate and control the fear as an unwanted and useless thing.

This meant that being able to "manage my anxiety" could be entirely separate than my level of suffering. But I didn't know how to express, and in fact felt forbidden from expressing, that I wanted the suffering to stop, that I did not want to accept it.

I have also learned that there's a difference between the subjective experience of suffering and the cognitive experience of "fear."

The more I look back on it, the more I think of my experiences with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques as slowly scraping away my body's ability to communicate suffering to my brain. My thoughts were results of the physiological state of fear I was in, not the causes: the technique of correcting maladaptive thought patterns and replacing them with better ones was eroding my ability to understand and process what I felt.

I wasn't "allowing" myself to have negative thoughts, and in fact I felt bad and guilty when I had negative feelings because it must have meant that I wasn't doing the techniques enough. The feeling that I am somehow causing myself to suffer by thinking about my suffering still gets me sometimes.

So I felt absolute visceral horror at the thought of dealing with [The Bad Things] using exposure therapy...or really any therapy at all.

I compared it once to the idea of using therapy to reach the point where I could summon the willpower to hammer nails through the palms of my hands.

I thought to myself, well, I guess you could teach yourself to "be okay with," or at least submit and be unresistant to, anything. Almost anything.

I thought of a video I had seen where Coyote Peterson allows himself to be stung by a tarantula hawk wasp, which has one of the most painful stings in the world. Before the wasp stings him, he is trembling and breathing rapidly; physiological signs of fear, and I thought to myself, is his fear "rational" or "irrational?" Is it rational or irrational to fear suffering? How much suffering?

(you do not have to follow the beliefs associated with the style if that style has associated beliefs. The wheel curse does not affect anything like that.)

To a dish...

And now there's a new colour.