Exercise 4

Mood: 0, we're back to meh again.

Meds: 4 pm

Sleep: A fitful 9 hours

Other: Despite the fact that people think I'm a horrible, cold, unfeeling person, I've felt quite a bit of horror and sympathy for the people in Japan. How much more shit can one country handle all at once? Earthquakes, tsunamis, and now the looming threat of nuclear meltdown at one of the power plants? Good Lord.

Also, I'm realizing I've been dwelling on the shitty things again. I fall prey to that from time to time, and even though it helps in some ways to get it off my chest, I guess it's not very productive in the end. However, I do want to clarify one thing: In my sex post from a couple of days ago, I think I may have accidentally insinuated that I fuck men in hopes that they will love me. This is completely untrue. I don't want the random men I fuck to love me. I've loved two men in my life; they're the only ones I've ever wanted love in return from. The rest of them I really don't are about. I've separated sex and love so far apart in my mind that they're basically two different poles at this point. I fuck men because I know it's all I ever get. I do it to drown out my emotional needs with physical ones. It's a poor substitute for what I really need, but I've come to accept that it's all I'll ever get, at least as long as I'm still profoundly fucked up.

I've got to do something to blow off some of the stress. I have perma-knots in both my shoulders now. I feel like I've done well by not giving in to my self-destructive urges to drink, fight, or fuck, but the problem is, I haven't found anything to replace those behaviors with. I need something that allows me a release without resorting to things that make me feel like shit after the fact. I feel like I'm adding to my own stress by fighting the urge to do those things, but I have no idea how to reduce stress by finding a better outlet.

Argh.


So today, I've decided to do another exercise from my workbook because I've been neglecting doing these things and because I believe it will benefit me. Today's exercise is about identifying emotions, their triggers, and the behaviors that go along with them. It's drawn up in a chart in the book, but I don't feel up to recreating it at the moment, so I'm just going to do it in list form. The book lists several emotions: anger, happiness, sadness, anxiety, love, and shame/guilt. I think that hits most of the important ones, so I'll just use those.

Let us begin.


Anger

Triggers: Being hurt. Anger is rarely my first-line emotion, unless someone is threatening a person or thing that's important to me. But that's different than the sort of anger I'm talking about here. This anger is rage, and it's a defense mechanism against being hurt. When people do hurtful, thoughtless, inconsiderate things, the soft, sensitive part of me that I've hidden away inside bleeds. But, again, from having lived in an invalidating environment my whole life, I've learned that telling someone they've hurt you is just an invitation for that person to attack. Most people feed off other people's weakness, particularly when their own behavior is called into question. So I turn the hurt into rage instead. It doesn't solve the problem, but it pushes the hurt away, so that the other person can't hurt me any more deeply than he/she already has. It's a way to turn the tables, to try to make the other person hurt as much as I do because if he/she has hurt me, then he/she obviously doesn't care about the way I feel, so I guess in some twisted way, I think that person deserves my wrath. I dunno. None of this is conscious choice. I don't sit down and decide I'm going to unleash holy hell on anyone who crosses me. It just happens. It's an ingrained behavior that's going to take a lot of time to break.

Bodily Reactions: The joints in my fingers ache from the strain of holding myself back, so I don't physically hurt anyone. My whole body feels hot, inside and out. I can feel my heart pounding all over. As it progresses, I start wheezing from my asthma because the adrenaline rush has no outlet, so my body turns on itself.

When I'm dangerously close to snapping and hitting that point where I black out from rage and don't remember what I do--a place I desperately try to never go into because I fully believe if I ever laid hands on a person when I'm that angry, I could kill him/her bare-handed and never remember doing it later--, I start to shake uncontrollably. (Also, for all those who say I don't take responsibility for my actions, the very fact that I have never crossed the line into laying hands on someone--and thus allowing certain people who have really angered me to still be breathing--is a testament to the responsibility that I take.) Most people underestimate just how brutal I could be.

Thoughts: "Someone is going to pay for this." When I get really angry, I start having images of hurting the person(s) I'm mad at in brutal, brutal ways. This is when I force myself to walk away. The last time someone made me really mad, I had to leave the room because I was having thoughts of grabbing a bitch by her hair, slamming her head against the wall 'til her brains leaked out, and then throwing her body in the fireplace. It was time for me to remove myself from the situation because I have no desire to spend the rest of my life in prison, thank you very much.

Urges: I want the person involved to hurt like I'm hurting. I want to scream and plant people's faces through plate glass. I want people to be afraid of fucking with me again because they don't know when I'll snap. I feel like it's the only way to keep them from hurting me again.

Behaviors: I clam up at first, trying to control my words. When I can't control my words anymore, I scream things. They may or may not make sense. Then, when I become deadly calm, I have to walk away, otherwise the urge to rain holy hell down on everyone might overwhelm me.

Consequences: Everyone hates me. Nobody wants to be around me. The worst part, though is the guilt I feel. It's not guilt for saying what I said or doing what I did. It's guilt for not feeling guilty about saying what I said or doing what I did. I don't feel bad for doing those things. I feel bad for hurting people with my words and/or actions, but I don't feel bad about doing them because it's what I felt at the time, and you can't really apologize for your feelings. And I feel guilty for that because I feel as if I should be more remorseful, but I'm not. And the cycle of hurt and of hating myself continues.


Happiness

Triggers: It doesn't take much to make me happy. A kind word, a touch, a small gift, a day spent in the company of people I care about, and, most of all, quality time with people I care about, where we do something we all like and we focus all our attention on one another. Good food, good laughs, a walk outside in the spring. There are so many things. I don't think I could list them all here.

Bodily Reactions: I've been told my eyes turn a clearer shade of blue. All the tension leaves my body. My voice is lighter. I forget for awhile how I'm plagued with aches and pains and whatnot. I become more affectionate, less inhibited, a little silly. I can talk animatedly, passionately about a subject, and I've heard I can completely light up a room when I'm "on." Don't know how true that is, but I feel at the top of my game, anyway.

Thoughts: "If only this could last forever." I do my best to savor every second of it because I know that truly happy times are fleeting. I wonder why it can't always be like this. I imagine what it'd be like if I *could* always be that happy, and that makes me even happier. I can continue to glow for days afterwards on that thought alone.

Urges: To crawl inside the people who are making me happy and know them completely, inside out. Not in the creepy way, but just in the "What makes you tick?" sort of way. I want to see what makes them happy, so I can make them feel as good as I do. If it's a platonic thing, I want to just talk and talk and talk the whole night through about something we're passionate about to keep the energy up. If it's a romantic thing, I want to snuggle close and talk and talk and talk the whole night through about something we're passionate about to keep the energy up.

Behaviors: I smile and ask a lot of questions. Within the context of romantic relationships, I get very cuddly. I joke and tease and laugh. I want to go do silly things together, so we can just keep on being happy forever. I talk about intellectual things to exercise parts of my brain that are rarely exercised.

Consequences: I'm often so intense that I confuse/annoy/scare people off. For those who can handle it, they find me an interesting conversationalist, even if I do come across as a little weird. My personality is oddly magnetic when I feel at ease.


Sadness

Triggers: Feeling lonely. Being left out. Being forgotten. People saying or doing something hurtful. The aftermath of being angry. Knowing someone else around me is hurting.

Bodily Reactions: I curl in bed to hide from the world. I cry. I tremble and rock back and forth like an autistic child. But I NEVER do these things where anyone can see them.

Thoughts: "Why does this always happen to me?" I try to push the thoughts of despair out of my mind, but they keep coming back over and over and over again.

Urges: I want to escape in any way possible. Drinking, fucking, whatever. I just want to get away from how horrible I feel.

Behaviors: I'll either just lie around and cry, or I'll indulge in escape behaviors like the ones I listed in the "Urges" section. I don't work. I also become really clingy.

Consequences: When I'm too upset/sad to work, it makes it hard to pay the bills. Withdrawing from the world makes my friends think I don't want anything to do with them. Being clingy makes people annoyed.


Anxiety

Triggers: Not knowing what's going to happen next. The unknown. Being forced into situations where I don't know how to react or how other people will react to me. No, I'm not a control freak, not at all.

Bodily Reactions: The same pain in my finger joints that I get when I'm angry. That's without question an adrenal reaction. A more generalized anxiety reaction that's not specific to one thing like a confrontation or an unfamiliar social situation includes a lack of sleep and an inability to sleep (or stay asleep) and/or concentrate.

Thoughts: "Oh, God, what am I going to do?" I run through scenarios over and over in my mind, turning them inside out and trying to prepare for any eventuality. I overanalyze everything in hopes that I can prevent a worst-case scenario by heading it off at the pass. I vacillate, hoping to figure out what the best thing to do is.

Urges: I want to indulge in escape behaviors, as usual. Drinking, fucking, etc. I sometimes give in and sometimes don't.

Behaviors: I ruminate. I fidget. I'm more irritable and snappish than usual. I can be clingy if I need reassurance.

Consequences: I drive people nuts, and they want to kill me. Hell, I want to kill me after awhile.


Love

Triggers: There really aren't "triggers" for this, are there? You either love someone, or you don't.

Bodily Reactions: Similar to the reactions for happiness. Sometimes, I cry, but it's a happy sort of crying. (Yes, I'm getting lazy, but I've been working on this thing for two days, so cut me a break.)

Thoughts: "I love you." Much like happiness, I wonder why moments that make me feel so good have to be so fleeting. I try to hold onto them for as long as I can.

Urges: To run away and join the circus and/or rodeo with this person? I don't think there are any real urges associated with love for me.

Behaviors: I get snuggly, but it's different from fear/anxiety or sadness induced clinginess. I'm affectionate and giggly and light-hearted.

Consequences: I dunno. I generally don't get loved back, that's for sure.


Shame/Guilt

Triggers: When I do something I feel I shouldn't have done or don't do something I feel I should've done. Or when someone makes me feel bad about doing or not doing something.

Bodily Reactions: I have no idea.

Thoughts: "Here we go again." I also berate myself for being a dumbass.

Urges: I want to avoid the person(s) or thing(s) that have made me feel guilty. Also, the aforementioned desire for escape behaviors.

Behaviors: I usually do give in to the urge to avoid the person/thing/situation that's made me feel bad. A lot of times, if someone is trying to guilt me into doing something, I end up doing it whether I think it's a good idea or not to make the shitty feelings stop. This is one way I end up fucking men I never wanted to fuck. It's easier to just give in than to stand my ground.

Consequences: I end up feeling even more shame and guilt for giving into something I didn't want to give into. This particular emotion is the one that's most likely to turn into a vicious cycle.


Ok, I'm finished. The point of this exercise is to have something to consult when I'm not really sure how I feel about something. I know I fell off about midway, but there's so much going on right now that this wasn't my top priority.

Expect a long entry about what IS going, work-wise, in a day or two.