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Cake day: March 8th, 2025

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  • How invalidating that must feel when your genuin suffering does not really register with the doctors. When such a bout of discomfort or pain appears notice your response to it. This gets quite meta, but that’s alright. How do you feel about how you feel about it? You might get anxious or frustrated or angry? Try not to distract yourself and focus on your self responding to it and let it sit for a bit, and once the storm has passed try to perceive how you feel then. This takes practice and it might feel overwhelming at first. Again, better to do this with a therapist. A few words of warning. Imagine you build up a dam to hold back a river. It feels safe to not subject yourself to the incessive force but cracks are forming. Now, you are being told to break down this dam and that the stream is natural and everone else relishes its flow. Take it on your own pace as to not drown as you find a way to let the water free. In the worst case you might experience a panic attack. This is not to scare you, but to foster awareness. I hope this metaphor appeals to you.


  • It is not helpful to think in terms of insane, but I get that this is language your family uses. More useful is thinking in what way you’re coping or suffering. How you manage to go through your day. Only you can judge that. Daydreaming is a wonderful expression of imagination until it becomes so excessive that it is destructive to your life. The other poster suggested to look into schizoid pd: while this is useful to know about, the takeaway should be that one would favour daydreaming above anything else. Sacrifice all social relationships to spend time internally. This isn’t about imagination or creativity anymore but a way to safeguard oneself from the outside, from other people to step too close or challenges encountered in life, etc. From your description i doubt that this fits, but again only you know yourself well enough to judge that. When talking about dissociation / derealisition / depersonalisation, there’s usually a component of trauma to it. One mightn’t be aware of what it is (whatever brought it about might seem normal), or one might suffer in other ways whereas one’s peers just seem not to (common experiences with neurodivergent folks who are not aware of it). All this just to say to learn about yourself is essential, to foster self awareness and all that, which is challenging when you’re young and have no access to therapy. In lieu of that you could confide a good friend or someone i your family who you trust.





  • It shouldn’t surprise you that this thinking / feeling dichotomy is a result of traumatic upbringing. If this isn’t clear to you, let me know, I’ll be happy to break it down for you. Your second point bears out a notion of strong focus in regards of your symptoms (physical and psychological)and is a bit worrying to me. Assuming no underlying medical conditions present, this way of obsessing could lead to somatization disorder. Obviously I do hope you’re well looked after medically, but please note you’re not thinking your way out of this. Of course self awareness is worth a lot but in the extreme it seems to me just another coping mechanism: a tactic I alluded to in my first point above. I’m not saying to ignore your physical experiences nor that you should keep it to yourself and I hope this has been discussed in therapy. Hopefully this makes a bit sense to you or let me know if it doesn’t.


  • My guess is that the thinking part is still blocking the actual processing of the emotions. Reminds me of when you’re trying hard to remember something and it doesn’t come until you stop occupying your mind with that question. You’re on the right path. Your counseler might want to give you more time to sit with these emotions. This is where people talk about acceptance and integration. See them as a part of you, like your heartbeat or the view of the tip of your nose (provided your face has the topology that allows for this). There is no fast way to do this and unfortunately you’re to reprogram your mind after it has been trained by years of adverse life experiences.



  • This is a massive topic and it helps to have someone to talk to. A professional would be most beneficial but I’m aware not everyone has that luxury. Alexithymia is better understood as emotional colour blindness, that is because absolut blindness implies one does not register emotions, rather it’s a question of fully processing them - which is impaired because one would not be able to label them properly to begin with. I like this analogy: Someone growing up with a language that describes colours in restricted terms such as bright and dark might struggle differentiating colours yet still sees them. Someone with alexithymia might be as restricted in their emotional awareness: feeling good and bad. Even good emotions might feel overwhelming such that we would not be able to tell them apart from bad. (I use good and bad to keep it simple, but know that these labels aren’t really justified). This is because someone living in conditions that give rise to CPTSD has learned to survive a life by disregarding their own internal state. This learned behaviour has to be undone. One has to trust that aside from the logical part of one’s mind there’s a vast ocean of information that is encoded in one’s emotional state. Professionals usually let patients map it to the body: what goes through you when you experienced that event and where in your body does that make itself aware. There’s a lot of good information out there to learn more. Last point: the fact that you are aware of this condition / behaviour alone is highly beneficial and conducive to further improvements. Best of luck.




  • Perhaps it helps to understand that a spectrum can be comprised of a cluster of continua: a possibility space of which any subset can be observed. Like each colour in the light spectrum. The continuum notion in that case can refer to its brightness. Same in the case of emotions. We don’t just experience one emotion at any given time although there’s a prominent one and others might be subdued. How we cluster certain aspects, such as traits in mental health as well as the threshold to diagnose anyone is of course arbitrary. Severities in presentations are perhaps seen as a continuum, but the underlying structure that aids in defining it, is a spectrum.


  • residentoflaniakeatomemes@lemmy.worldEverywhere I go, I see a spectrum
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    1 month ago

    I feel like people confuse the term spectrum with the term continuum. Fading from black to white through gray is a continuum. Rainbow colours are a spectrum. In mental health, most conditions have no aetiology - or it is not considered, and the condition is described or defined by signs and symptoms, and not something like a bloodtest. The weight of each of these signs and symptoms is what makes up the spectrum. When someone is on the spectrum of whatever condition, it means the sum of those weights exceed a value that causes some detriment to the individuals quality of life. Maybe I’m spliting hairs but I thought to share my understanding.



  • There’s a lot of overlap in experiences of folks with different mental conditions. Whilst the root cause is different with a neurodiverse brain or mood disorders or personality disorders they might lead to similar experiences. The question becomes how much is it impacing someone’s life or how well can those behaviours stemming from these experiences be integrated. There’s also the fact that self-awareness might be picking up on those experiences better in one group compared to others.