lillamy

Try this on for size: I am a woman and I like to research and analyze things.

It's the way you have become accustomed to handling reality. It's not who you are. See the difference?

I have some free advice (from my therapist -- because when you pay someone $250/hr you should share what you get with others, I think). Here's what she said:

Women -- especially intellectual women -- escape from pain not to drugs or mindless entertainment but to rational thought and analyzing. But you have to see pain as a toxin that needs to be removed from your system. How do you remove it? By feeling your feelings.

Look at a toddler: They don't hold their feelings in. They're angry or sad or upset and they pitch a fit and lie on the floor and kick their arms and legs and cry hysterically. For eight minutes. Then they brush off and go on with life.

We should take a page from their book. She actually advised me to drive out on the highway and find a pull off somewhere and just sit there and cry and scream and yell out my frustration and pain.

The dissociation, I've been told, is an extreme way of avoiding your feelings. It's as unhealthy a coping strategy as spending days reading up on the minutiae of how alcoholism affects the brain and what recent brain research is saying.

I'm preaching to myself here, you know. But I thought I'd share. Feelings are messy and scary and a pain in the rear. So we resort to researching and analyzing because that's our go-to solution and that's a place we feel safe.

Here's the thing: Trying to think yourself out of painful emotions is sort of like... having sex when you're hungry. It distracts you for a while, but in the end, you're still going to have to deal with the real issue.