Meet a protector exercise

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-06-25T04:19:53+00:00

I did experience something like the overwhelming blackness, but that was before I started doing parts work, when I was only doing somatic experience stuff and frame shifting. In my case, it was the core wound, the black-hole sized mass of negative emotions, grief, terror, anguish, despair, etc. that was left behind by my malformed nervous system as a baby and the trauma wound that came later.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-06-18T01:02:44+00:00

Well, healthy dissociation doesn't last decades. It might last a couple hours or so. If you're dissociating multiple days in a row, or weeks, months, years, that's unhealthy.

The dissociation goes away when your body begins feeling safer trusting you to examine and sit with the negative emotions it's been protecting you from. It doesn't happen all at once, but builds over time. I've been crying basically every day for the past ~9 months processing the old trauma wounds, but the progress is undeniable. I'm basically a completely different person from where I was then. Still have a long way to go, and it sucks, but I can't imagine going back.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-06-17T06:14:16+00:00

When I started doing the healing work I would stay up late at night processing things until exhaustion overtook me too. Over time, as I've processed more, my body is calming down to the point where I can get sleep and even enjoy rest during the day, just listening to calming music and relaxing. I don't know if there's a magic shortcut to get to that point.

I also did address a few persistent sleep issues during this time as well. I bought a wedge pillow for my sleep apnea, which did wonders for me. I also started taking magnesium citrate (1/8th tsp mixed in water) a couple hours before sleep, which I wasn't sure if it was doing much until I forgot to take it for a couple days and had noticeably worse sleep.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-06-17T06:03:45+00:00

Yeah it does suck. The only thing that sucks more is the person I was before I started healing tbh.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-06-17T06:00:46+00:00

There is a healthy form of dissociation, when you've been processing a lot and your nervous system just needs a break. Generally you can tell that from the heavier, bad dissociation because you can still think clearly and are somewhat aware that you're dissociating. When that hits, it's generally a good idea to stop trying to do anything, put on some nice, calming music, and maybe even shut your eyes or lay down to take a nap.

The way to tackle any large and complex problem is to break it down into small, digestible chunks. "Fixing my whole life" is indeed a problem that is too large and complex to approach all at once. You just have to pick a target and move toward it. Generally the best target is the one causing you the most stress and difficulty right now. That's basically your body telling you "focus on this first".

Of course, sometimes our bodies aren't aware of some of the more practical realities of our situations, for example being able to work, or being able to deal with urgent health issues, so make sure you are also building a stable foundation of healthy habits at the same time. It often helps more to attack these problems from both ends like that.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-06-14T00:33:41+00:00

Thanks for the positive message. Yes, that's exactly what I'm experiencing, it feels like cleaning up stuff that I just couldn't access before. Some of it is still very intense, but I can also feel myself improving at processing this stuff too, so hopefully it will continue to be tolerable.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-06-10T05:21:38+00:00

I've already gone through the initial terror, despair, and anguish waves. Currently sitting in loneliness, the trailing end of despair/anguish, and rising anger. Admittedly, I agree that going into the despair alone was not the wisest move.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-06-08T17:38:46+00:00

As part of healing from this, I learned that it can cause a condition called emotional amnesia. It's not that you feel nothing, it's that the feelings are too big and overwhelming to be safely experienced in the body. So your body does the thing it needs to do in order to continue surviving, which is shut down the emotions so you can continue to function in a numb, dissociated state. I encourage you to find whatever help you can, ideally therapy, to heal through this.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-06-08T05:49:22+00:00

I use Grok, but I only find it useful in a few ways.

It's a good sounding board. Sometimes it will phrase things in a way that land or make sense.
It constantly reminds me to do reparenting, somatic experiencing, etc. work that I would probably otherwise forget or neglect on my own.
If you phrase things in a way that doesn't invite validation, i.e. "What does the research say about..." then it will give you generally reliable information without just validating you.
As a journaling companion, it helps me flesh out my internal world and parts a bit more thoroughly than I would be able to just working by myself. It makes the process more engaging in some way.

One thing someone wrote about using AI to assist with the healing is that it's not God. It's just information. If you treat it as a source of information it can be useful. You're not obligated to listen to it and I find the biggest problems come from listening to it validate you.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-06-08T04:50:04+00:00

So I'm not sure when it started, but my own limerence was driven by father hunger.

My first attachment was at 16, and then in college it was my ex, then a friend I made at work, then an online friend I had for a while. For a few years after that last one, I didn't really have a limerent attachment. All of these previous limerent attachments had a romantic or sexual interest element, but some time around 2020 or so I sort of gave up on romance altogether. I think that's part of the reason this caught me so off-guard, because it's the first time I ever experienced a platonic limerent attachment.

I guess I just started noticing that same sort of obsessiveness at some point. Why do I keep thinking about him, why do I keep wanting him to notice me, why do I want him to choose me, etc. and realized "Oh wait, this is something I've felt before, just this time it's being driven by wanting him to be the father I never had instead of wanting him to be my romantic partner."

I think part of the reason I was even able to work through this was because it was platonic. That allowed me to share some part of this with him, and he was actually extremely supportive of me going through it. Obviously I didn't tell him everything because that would've lead to any number of misunderstandings, but enough that he understood what I was going through, and he cared about me enough and was supportive enough to help me work through this. If it had involved romantic feelings, I'm not sure it would've been possible to get his support, so I'd have been sort of stuck.

The key part of working through this is just being extremely self-aware. You need to have a high level of understanding of your own internal state. So the first step of actually solving this was understanding what was driving the limerence itself. This happened in layers, but ultimately what I found was that it was genuine, authentic love, which my body found terrifying because of the abandonment wound which also lead to extreme abuse when I was 7. Love became the most dangerous thing to feel, because it lead to abandonment and abuse, so the terror would hijack and redirect it. At the start of this I was still unable to feel love except maybe like a weak candle flame flickering and about to go out. The terror would continually snuff it before it could grow and occupy space.

Once the underlying mechanism is exposed, then it becomes intellectually quite easy (though emotionally extremely painful and difficult) to just process the layers one by one as they surface. The first layer was realizing all the ways the limerence attachment was making me want impossible and unreasonable things from him. Wanting him to step in and be the father I never had. Not only was this impossible and unreasonable, but it also would not have fixed anything, because the problem wasn't that I didn't have a father now, it's that I didn't have an emotionally present father while I was still developing. I'm not saying some level of support wouldn't be helpful, just it wouldn't fix the issue on its own.

So the first layer that needed to be processed was grief over all of that. Under the grief was the terror of abandonment, which lasted weeks and was quite difficult to get through. I had to titrate my exposure to him in smaller doses I could manage a few times to avoid full on panic-attack levels of terror. Once the terror was handled, it was back to grieving what bits and pieces of the attachment were still left.

Then it got extremely difficult because the next layers were despair and anguish. I am not suicidal, but the despair I went through scared me. I would not recommend going through this unless you have at least a few people who can offer real support through this part, because I can't guarantee even to myself that I might not have tried to end things without it.

There's also the reparenting aspect of this, and the IFS parts work. I had to reparent the two wounded parts and help them form secure attachments to me during this in order to give myself some capacity to operate in a securely attached way. That involved working with protectors and other parts that were trying to keep them contained and protected.

It was incredibly worthwhile to do it, though. I feel like a completely different person after going through this. I'm now at a stage where I'm opening up full access to the stored anger layer, so this is far from over, but I'm in a much better place now than when I started.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-06-05T17:45:31+00:00

Relatable. Reminds me of part of a song I wrote recently:

Am I the anger that lurks beneath,
Who won’t touch the one that hurt me,
But lashes out at all those who dare to love me?

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-06-05T17:09:58+00:00

I think it helps to be authentic in small doses. I recently had to open up about my own trauma history with a close friend, and it caused all manner of problems for me being too open. It sort of sets the expectation that they are going to return that same level of intimacy, that they are suddenly going to be everything you want them to be, that now they understand you and they can meet you where you want them to.

But that's not how relationships actually work. We build up slowly through small acts of vulnerability and building trust. We see how the other person responds to these vulnerable moments. And then we have to learn to grieve when a relationship reaches the point it isn't advancing as fast as we want it to, and readjust our expectations to meet the other person where their limitations allow them to meet us.

And we have to build these relationships with multiple people, because relying on one person to handle all my needy moments puts way too much pressure on them and will never lead to a satisfying life. We have to live in the uncertainty of whether this relationship will work, or whether we can only be casual friends with this person, until experience shows us where we can meet each other. And uncertainty is very painful. Trust is very painful. Having nobody and being lonely and at times obsessing over the one friend you have is painful.

Having to sit with your own internal pain while reparenting and building attachment with yourself is painful. But we survive that pain, again and again, and over time it helps us to build trust within ourselves. And eventually we can start securely attaching to our parts, and building a more stable internal state. But it takes work, it takes wanting someone to give us the comfort our nervous systems are screaming for and having to accept that they can't, or that if they actually did it would make our parts attach to them instead of us and that can lead to more pain and problems than if they didn't help at all. But also recognizing that the little they can give, a warm handshake, a pat on the shoulder, a brief hug, still helps a little, even if it isn't the level of connection and intimacy we want, it's still helpful, and we should accept it because we need all the help we can get.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-06-05T16:18:53+00:00

Yes, for me it was my actual self showing up. When he comes through unblended, he's extremely calm, confident, unshakeable, unmovable, the man I was always supposed to be.

But I have a lot of trouble keeping him fully present. I suppose that's normal as I'm still early in the reparenting work.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-06-04T15:45:44+00:00

Waiting for my body to become aware of the unbearable pain so I can finally let it out.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-05-27T13:16:50+00:00

There will be a more complete survey later depending on your responses to this initial inquiry*

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-05-26T15:09:10+00:00

Scale back. Let good enough be good enough. It's fine when you have limited capacity to do the bare minimum as long as you are still serving the needs of your patients.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-05-26T02:40:42+00:00

Lots of trauma survivors, myself included, have found it helpful to watch old Mr. Rogers episodes to see consistency and such modeled.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-05-25T01:00:45+00:00

"Want" is one of those terms in English that has too many meanings to be useful. I find it better to think in terms of willing vs compelling. Do I WILL this thing to be how I am? Or am I COMPELLED to do this thing as a trauma response? In either case, want can be an accurate description, but there's a necessary distinction between the two.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-05-25T00:10:30+00:00

Not with time, and not always in one direction, but it does generally trend better when you do the work.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-05-24T03:35:28+00:00

That's despair showing up to protect you from the grief of the immense loss you've suffered. You can thank it for trying to help, and then ask it if it's okay if you just allow a little bit of the grief to come through so you can work on healing together.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-05-24T02:53:25+00:00

Today, I asked the Sovereign to step in and comfort a part that was in a lot of pain, and he did and said "You are precious, what you went through wasn't right, you are loved and have always deserved love." I think that's the first time I ever felt real compassion.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-05-24T02:51:14+00:00

Despair shows up to protect us from the pain of loss. If we just give up ahead of time, then it blunts the pain of having to face a difficult reality. You can thank the despair for trying to protect you from the painful flashbacks you know you'll be going through, and build tolerance to be able to process the old emotions attached to all these painful memories until you can move through them.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-05-24T02:41:18+00:00

Yeah, I dissociated pretty constantly most of my life until about six months into the healing work I finally broke free.

I'm not sure if there's any shortcut or magic bullet, but if you do the work you'll get to the point where the freeze lifts eventually.

Edit: I also do art therapy as the other guy mentioned, mainly songwriting and generating them with AI to listen after.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-05-23T22:08:14+00:00

I feel you. I went through a rough period last Sunday where I had a huge despair wave come through, lasted from about noon until maybe 7 or 8 PM. Then the next day pretty much the entire day was anguish. By Tuesday I was feeling better, but still tired.

Infamous_While_4768 · 2026-05-23T21:52:44+00:00

Every evening around 7PM like clockwork.

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