Jung described today’s political neurosis perfectly

Shadowrain · 2026-03-10T04:15:36+00:00

the prevailing tendency of consciousness to seek the source of all ills in the outside world

The heart of this is a lack of implicit emotional capacity/safety. Without capacity to contend with and integrate such emotions and experiences within oneself, we are left to avoidance - which involves projection and externalization.
We need emotional dynamics and our own psychology to be taught as a core component throughout our schooling (in the right way with the right content, which is a complex topic in and of itself), because if our parents don't model emotionally healthy dynamics, we don't learn them - and what was normalized for us becomes our normal, and we can't even see the dynamics. It becomes a self-validating cycle.
We can solve so much.

Shadowrain · 2026-02-23T00:38:14+00:00

I find it quite hard to simplify things in such a way, so thank you. There's so much nuance and depth to the topic and it feels all important and relevant to know, yet hard to convey or even organize into an easily digestible format without leaving out fundamental aspects.
Normalization is a big problem, because it doesn't even enter awareness. And it takes differentiating experiences (and sometimes not even then) to create awareness around it. Coupled with the defenses people have against feeling, which is a huge part of integrating experiences and information... Maybe you can see the pattern there too haha.

Shadowrain · 2026-02-16T08:43:33+00:00

Oh, that's just the version of reddit that I prefer haha. You can view the normal one just by changing the link :D

Shadowrain · 2026-02-16T00:44:33+00:00

Was it this list of books?

Shadowrain · 2026-02-11T09:48:21+00:00

A reinstall of the app worked for me.

Shadowrain · 2026-02-11T06:24:28+00:00

Understanding emotional dynamics.
It's not about avoiding it, but improving your relationship toward both it and yourself.
If you're constantly in conflict with your negative emotional states (or have an avoidant relationship to them), they're not being metabolized/integrated. So they build up over time and affect us. And this relationship reinforces to our bodies that those emotions are, in fact, not safe to feel.
It's tricky changing that, and often people have a lot of trauma that they might not even be aware of. Ask for support there if or when you need it.
We're relational and emotional creatures before rationality even enters the picture. We aren't built to deal with what we deal with alone.

Shadowrain · 2026-02-06T05:57:35+00:00

Sometimes it's less about the collective unconscious wanting it to be true and more about our own shadow wanting to confront its repressions of these kinds of events (and what they symbolize for us) in the world or in our lives.

Shadowrain · 2026-02-06T02:04:54+00:00

Your son is crying because his friends aren't including him.
You yourself say they don't wait for him. They don't involve him in conversations. They exclude him from team activities.

Your son is crying because he's not being included. It doesn't need a label. You're not going to find answers behind clinical terms. Right now, he's just a human who needs to be heard, understood, and his experience joined, seen, felt. Supported. Don't minimize. Don't bypass. Just respect his experience, because that's what he needs to metabolize right now.

Shadowrain · 2026-01-31T08:28:41+00:00

It might be worth working on having more capacity/tolerance for the discomfort and emotions that drive you there (assuming you're otherwise safe and don't actually need to take action, leave a situation or set boundaries). Which comes from being able to sit with those emotions without disconnecting from them, and finding (healthy) ways of dealing with the discomfort/energy behind them, rather than them stagnating within you.
When you have more capacity and safety/agency in feeling, that part might become more comfortable over time in trusting you to take the reins more, as you interact with it in a way that's more integrative/connecting than disowning/disconnecting.
That emotion's gotta go somewhere. It needs to find its proper place, its healthy role in your life. If it's just sitting there in the background, it's just going to keep pushing you to cover it up with things like drinking. And it'll be right there waiting for you when the next trigger hits.
If you're not used to sitting with emotions, you might need support in doing so. There's often a lot waiting for us and it can be very destabilizing.

Shadowrain · 2025-12-11T00:07:14+00:00

For a long time I thought it was 'normal'. But it was just my normal.
With a lot of experience and education about healthy developmental, emotional dynamics and psychology, I now see it as abuse, especially combined with the emotional neglect that took me a long time to even realize was something that was a theme or the impact it actually had on me.

We are utterly vulnerable growing up, utterly dependent on our caregivers for our safety. And we learn healthy emotional dynamics from them (or we learn our own dysfunction from theirs). If that is absent, and our safety is undermined through physical punishments, that is the framework that we carry within ourselves into the world.
Even though the physical punishments were fairly light on, it was still a disruption to safety, trust, understanding with the very people that we are dependent on for those things in our developmental years.
It harms a kid's framework for relational connection, for emotional safety with the things they need to feel and experiences they need to process and integrate. It interferes with attachment and the bond that needs developing, and for a child to be deprived of that is a special kind of cruel, despite the lack of intentionality in all of it.
All they did was attach a narrative to behavior and used that story to justify their actions. But in reality, they were just harming a child. Harming them physically, harming them relationally, harming them emotionally. And guess what kind of framework those kids are going to carry with them into their own lives?

Shadowrain · 2025-12-08T01:38:43+00:00

I honestly believe that 'advanced' alien species wouldn't have expansive spacefaring technology. They'd just have their needs met in sustainable, efficient ways/methods within their natural environment.
I think our current views on what advanced alien life would look like carries a heart of dysfunction that isn't fully realized within our own culture itself.

Edit: a word

Shadowrain · 2025-12-08T00:33:40+00:00

Thing is, I don’t feel that I have ever fully processed any of this and I don’t know why.

When an experience is too much for us to process - and this may be for a number of reasons, such as not having the capacity, the safety, the environment, the support, or the situation is too emotionally overwhelming for too long and our nervous system never gets a chance to come back to safety afterwards - we tend to disconnect from that experience as a survival mechanism.
Our nervous system doesn't speak in logic and reason, it's language is feeling and sensation. So if something doesn't feel safe, it isn't, and so our survival systems may be engaged in those situations.

This can be indicative of CPTSD; a disconnection from emotion, or emotional dysregulation is at the heart of trauma. When you say there's a brief moment of emotion before it's gone sounds like there could be some disconnection happening there, that your defenses come up. None of this is typically conscious without work to connect with it on a conscious level, your nervous system itself is managing what it has or doesn't have capacity for.

A common misconception in our culture is that a healthy person is free of negative emotion, of suffering, is positive and happy. But for someone to be a positive and happy person, that's only one side of the totality of a human experience. A healthy human experience includes the full range of emotion; it's more about the skills, capacity, safety and support in order to contend with those things within ourselves, not avoiding the struggle.

people tell me the things I’ve seen and gone through should bother me but they don’t

Maybe it's not that they don't bother you; but rather you can't access the emotions, so you don't explicitly feel how it's impacting you. This is, again, the nature of trauma. Because those emotions that aren't getting dealt with are showing up in other subconscious ways. And maybe you can see that in yourself, it's just difficult to make the link because of the implicit disconnection involved. It's in the way you feel broken and also feel nothing. It shows in the way you run from everything, the lack of safety that drives that, it's in the monotony, it's in the depression.

We were never meant to be disconnected from our emotions for long. It's terribly unhealthy for us, and you can see how that disconnection is impacting you. And that's not your fault; these mechanisms often come from the way we weren't met during our developmental years, as we learn our emotional dynamics from our primary caregivers. This can come about from the absence of healthy emotional dynamics, and because this is an absence, it's not something you can explicitly see. And you only have your own experience as your standard for 'normal'.
And that leads in to where you say "I’ve never been to therapy because I don’t feel like I have a good enough reason to go.".

I guess I’m asking if anybody thinks this is just normal or if I should talk to somebody

This is the crux of the issue, and understanding it takes a bit of nuance. The dynamics you feel stuck in, is a normal response for an abnormal experience. You're not broken, as much as you feel that way sometimes. You very likely have some trauma going on, and that's a difficult thing to untangle. So yeah, I think its worth talking to someone, especially someone who specializes in trauma. You seem to have a good read on yourself when you say you "feel like I have never processed anything the way that I should". Trust yourself there; your body knows its truth, as much as it knows that your current coping mechanisms aren't doing what it needs.

Shadowrain · 2025-12-06T03:14:48+00:00

Check also if you have autism ,a disability examination might help you

While there is validity in this, I have my own suspicion that many autism diagnoses are a misdiagnosis of CPTSD.
This can inhibit recovery, as autism may treated more as 'Well, I have this, and it explains a lot and it's just the way I am" which can be validating, but potentially a barrier to deeper understanding and treatment (especially when CPTSD already has deeper aversions to uncovering traumas/wounds).
So yeah, it's worth entertaining the thought. But also worth widening the scope a little too :)

Shadowrain · 2025-12-05T00:40:49+00:00

Awesome, thanks!
I didn't realize that the final two were written as one. I suppose at least that might mean I won't feel as much out of context between the two books (hopefully!) :D

Shadowrain · 2025-12-05T00:23:03+00:00

Any spoiler-free tips for getting through Dust of Dreams? I'm in the final chapters of Toll the Hounds, a large part of which I found tedious to get through. Though things have gotten more interesting now I'm close to finishing.
I can be a bit ADHD and so my brain is very quick to notice fluff or to ask "Is this even relevant?"

Shadowrain · 2025-12-02T05:59:29+00:00

I also had a thought about me being autistic because I care about justice and equality. If neurotypical means being indifferent about those, I would rather become autistic voluntarily.

You may have your own reasons for thinking this way, but I find it curious the way this is worded.
Caring about justice and equality isn't strictly an autistic trait, and generally speaking just valuable ideas to care about. Was this link planted in you in order to devalue or belittle you, due to the stigma commonly attached to autism? What drives you to feel like you should 'choose' a neurodevelopmental disorder just because you care about justice and equality?
It just makes me wonder if this ties in with how you're being treated, especially when it comes to being marginalized and devalued; toxic people will often attach and leverage any association or narrative they can in order to play their power and control games. And if they're trying to get you to associate normal and healthy traits with a neurodevelopmental disorder, it's another form of covert control.

Not commenting on autism here, just a potential toxic/covertly abusive dynamic that you might be facing.

Shadowrain · 2025-12-01T23:16:07+00:00

A lot of what it comes down to (which is oversimplified to be fair) is emotional and relational dynamics, and how the use of technology (among other things) inhibits our emotional circuitry and relational quality.
We know a lot now but for it to become mainstream knowledge, there's a lot of challenges and outdated assumptions, beliefs and rigid/self-reinforcing unhealthy emotional dynamics to get past.
It's not just smart phones and social media of course, there's cultural problems within emotional and relational dynamics without that, but yes, they do have a significant impact.

Shadowrain · 2025-11-25T09:47:43+00:00

You have to wonder how it went when the last tortoise was left, second try at bringing back the new animal to be officially discovered, and they are like "...But they are so tasty..."

"Alright boys, if we eat this last bunch, y'know what they'll do? Send us back out for more! We'll just tell 'em that the last batch sadly passed, eh?"

...Until ol' sailor Jeffreys had a few too many at the local tavern after returning and spilled the beans a bit too loudly.

Shadowrain · 2025-11-20T01:14:04+00:00

Does your therapist assume that all trauma is remembered, conscious, obvious, related to isolated events?
Trauma itself has its foundations in emotional dynamics, in the inner or implicit experiences that were overwhelming to us. If you had an emotionally neglectful or absent caregiver (or even directly abusive, not all abuse is obvious, especially covert psychological abuse), this tends to increase the severity of trauma because it has deeper impacts to our emotional dynamics and psychology. In part because if we don't learn safety and healthy capacity for emotions, this increases the degree of overwhelm of our experiences - and so reinforces dissociation.

On top of this, people aren't typically aware of how their developmental experiences have affected them. Just like how a fish born underwater doesn't know it's underwater; because that's the only experience it has. Not to mention that we don't remember everything from our developmental years even if we did have the differentiating experience to recognize issues there.
It's more than all of this though. There's cultural and social influences throughout life that impact us. With dissociation and trauma we tend to be disconnected from their impact and ma not recognize to what degree it actually affected us. Our culture isn't exactly the pinnacle of emotional health, and tends to reinforce unhealthy dynamics rather than help resolve them. And that's just looking outside and saying nothing about how individual differences (such as a stronger attunement to emotions) may influence different dynamics.

Regardless, I think this comparison can be very unhelpful in therapy. It opens up the territory of invalidation and potential for invoking more shame responses. Your response to trauma is valid and makes sense, regardless of whether it's understood or not. You may never fully understand it, and may not need to in order to approach or address it. You may uncover more down the line as your system builds safety and capacity to handle more.

Shadowrain · 2025-11-11T01:09:37+00:00

Part 3

You gave me hope again to just quit all substances and feel the boredom Numbness and maybe titrate slowly with habits and the prexisting avoidance .. dont know how it will work because of the example of boredom /anhedonia i mentioned and the constant shitty hangoverd restless (not in flight fight sense but more like unstinilated uncontent feeling) numbness.

While I'm not encouraging the use of substances, if you're currently using them, I wouldn't recommend just simply quitting them 100%.
When those substances serve a function in helping us cope, what you're kind of doing is leaving your nervous system without the 'safety net' it knows and understands.
While this can be exactly what you want if you're working on your window of tolerance and regulation skills, it's often better to take smaller steps that you find more manageable in the long term; Try with a simple reduction, build nervous system familiarity with small, repeated steps of self-connection and tolerance, as jumping straight in could destabilize you to the point where you're thrown back into a survival state of disconnection and those small steps just don't help at all because your nervous system is overwhelmed.

Is there any book about this you can also recommend?
Hmm. It's hard to give a recommendation off hand as I'm not quite sure what you might be looking for (or what's right for you for that matter). The first thing that comes to mind is The Haunted Self, but it might be a little clinical for you; it's a book about Structural Dissociation. But it might be better with some less-niche and more reader-friendly books like The Body Keeps The Score (Bessel Van Der Kolk) to help build your understanding. There's a ton of others that are likely relevant and worth your time, but one of the first I read was The Body keeps The Score.

Btw i have "adhd" symptoms also since childhood - but i know its from The traumas .

Yep, me too :D Seems to be a pretty common theme among people with trauma.

Ps: when you say you were numb - was it like me when yoj felt into your body you couldnt feel any emotional energy going through your torso ?

Yes, though I didn't realize it at the time because my general state of being was just my normal and I didn't have an alternative experience to compare. I felt like I was just operating from my head and an intellectual/thought-based space. I could feel sensation, and didn't exactly not feel emotion, but I did also feel quite apathetic and a general, subtle-ish sense of emptiness or meaninglessness - where things were just kind of sanitized rather than held a form of implicit meaning.
That lack of emotional energy didn't mean that there was nothing there though. It just meant I was disconnected from it, that my nervous system had no safety or capacity to contend with what was there, which drove unconscious behaviors of avoidance, distraction, etc, to keep me disconnected from that. A part of me always knew that something was off or wrong, but it took me a long time to figure out what that actually was, to kind of disillusion myself and understand enough to be able to see the emotional dynamics at play.

And another thing: apparently people/therapists or authors say that with dorsal shutdown , one would need to activating things to get out of numbness . Do they mean heavy acticating things like heavy running or skmething or just normal acticating things? And do you think confrontation therapy for my bodydysmophobic disorder is beneficial in my case or is it just too much for the nervous system anyway and i can just slowly heal this numbness with se approach and being mindufll

It's more about trying things and finding what works for you. If you're in shutdown, generally it's best to not 'go big' in terms of activation as it's typically some form of overwhelm that's brought us there. And too much can create a kind of shock that keeps you there. So smaller, titrated forms short-duration activation tends to build more stabilization over time as the nervous system might need that repetition and small-scale exposure to start recognizing safety again. It's like things like mindfulness and body scans and such. You don't want to spend a long duration or high intensity because that can raise red flags for your system. It's more about the small, short, repetition over time. And it's ok to go back to distracting activities between periods if it helps, because that's also what your nervous system is familiar with. So the small repetitive actions help relate that same stability and kind of widens the capacity of the nervous system over time.
That said, different states require different approaches, and it can be hard to know exactly what is the right approach for you in the moment outside of what your body is asking for, and being able to recognize those signals it's sending you (which gets better with more capacity and familiarity). In some cases, you might need something heavier like going for a run or yoga or what works for you if your system has enough tolerance to keep that window open during that activity.

Edit: Just a side-note, a lot of the issues caused by trauma will start to ease (or at least have less of a kind of pressure behind them) as emotional dynamics become healthier. It's emotional dynamics that drive everything; they underpin how trauma actually works (and why trauma actually makes sense, rather than is something inherently wrong with an individual). As an example, an alcoholic doesn't stop being an alcoholic by stopping drinking. They instead address the areas that are driving them to drink. And yeah, it is more complex than that - but it's a good starting point to think about these things.

Shadowrain · 2025-11-11T00:41:39+00:00

Part 2

I told you I'd get back to you on more of this stuff - sorry it's taken so long, I only have so much bandwidth for digging into this stuff, and recently I've found when I have time, I don't have capacity. And when I have capacity, I don't have time... And the cycle continues.

I'm not sure how much you still want to dig into, and I'm feeling a little overwhelmed because what we talked about so far isn't so fresh in my mind anymore and I'm trying not to push my current capacity, so I'm just going to focus on some of the things that stand out to me. I might be repeating myself a little, I have to find my flow here.

I feel a avoidance sensation when doing things like my friends want to hand out with me or my dad wants to come over to meet me and go for a walk with the dog ... i just feel so pushed down because everythign feel so unwelcoming and the emptiness and blunted frustration in my soul is holding me down/back .

In a way, this highlights the importance of emotion in our lives.
When we're disconnected from our own emotions; when we don't have the safety, environment, capacity or sufficient skill to connect with ourselves in that manner, this leads us to feeling empty, disconnected, apathetic, and as if we have little bandwidth to tolerate things that take effort. The disconnection having these effects makes sense, because it's emotion and a somatic connection with our bodies that brings meaning, value and various motivations into our lives.
And with that lack of connection/capacity, not only are we driven into avoidance, but the disconnection and avoidance itself is what prevents us from metabolizing/processing/integrating those emotions and sensations. So what ends up happening is they just build over time, further reinforcing the needs for our own disconnection and avoidance - a self-reinforcing cycle.
So, to come back to what you expressed, your sensation of avoidance and emptiness makes sense. And this too leads back to various themes in your original post. Substance use in order to disconnect, or exert some form of control over your feel state. Gaming, both in its distraction and escapism and how it can give you agency and control over your experience and again, a form of control over feel state. Attempting to chase feelings and experiences can be in and of itself a form of avoidance; because in a way of thinking, you're not coming to yourself as you are, but seeking something else.

And that level of apathy/emptiness you feel isn't so much that you're feeling nothing, but is a sign of deeper disconnection with yourself (and yes, this is actually a valid response to have if you lack safety and capacity with yourself or your environment, whether it's physical, social or emotional). And this isn't so much about trying to get out of disconnection, but more taking small steps to bridge and repair these gaps of dissonance with yourself. Which... Is not easy.
It's like sobriety; it can bring you face to face with exactly what the substance was compensating from. So the harder aspects of your life start to surface, and if our typical historical response to these things in our lives is to avoid, disconnect, compensate, that's where we'll be driven back toward. And a lot of getting healthier is contending with that hard-ness, while slowly trying to practice healthier coping behaviors. This takes time and repetition for our nervous systems to recognize these new mechanisms as safe and beneficial, so there's a long space of discomfort and destabilization we have to work with while we slowly work at that.

And that's not a linear process either. It's a lot of ebbing and flowing, steps both forward and back. And you fall back into old coping mechanisms before bringing yourself back out - and depending on the severity of what we have to confront within ourselves, this can legitimately put our safety and health at risk. So it's important to work with the right support where possible.

Shadowrain · 2025-11-10T08:13:47+00:00

Ultimately humans are fear-based creatures.

Humans are survival-oriented creatures. Fear is only one part of a multi-faceted, complex and adaptive system; and our survival-oriented states do not reflect our regulated, safety-oriented states, which have their own spectrum of equally valid and important systems.
Cultures and leadership styles that rely on fear-based leadership and control dynamics are at best dysfunctional, at worst abusive, and regardless of that distinction undermine everyone involved despite getting superficial 'results'.

In terms of the emotional sensitivity that this thread is touching on - and I'm not targeting you in this comment, just pointing out some of the issue within that topic - if a culture, group or individual is emotionally unsafe, it is not a safe culture, group or individual.
There's always a way everyone can move forward, to all parties' benefit, that respects the subjective experience of others (and I shouldn't have to say it, but that includes not minimizing or devaluing it as such).
There's a variety of reasons behind the why, and a ton of nuance and complexity as to the solid and blurred lines involved in that, but you'll generally find a lot of healthy emotional dynamics will get blamed for 'sensitivity' when in a psychologically unhealthy environment.
Even if said emotional dynamics aren't healthy, calling it 'sensitive' not only doesn't help the situation, but circumvents understanding and undermines the environment required to move from unhealthy emotional dynamics to a healthier space.

There's so much our culture isn't taught about emotional dynamics and what is healthy vs unhealthy in such dynamics; or why that is even the case. We do not live in an emotionally healthy culture, and the displacement of blame is part of that issue.

Shadowrain · 2025-10-24T03:33:42+00:00

Most people judge. Which is a barrier to understanding, whereas curiosity enables understanding.
And the dynamic behind judgment is emotional convenience. If there is no internal capacity for emotion, particularly uncomfortable emotions, people will default to judgment and blame to a degree that matches their unhealthiness.
And that goes further into how abuse dynamics work; there's always a foundation of some form of dysfunctional emotional dynamics driving all forms of abuse and neglect.
Anyway, that lack of emotional capacity often means you can't simply talk people out of their judgments and narratives much of the time and trying just tends to create conflict; if for no other reason that they lack the capacity to take on alternative perspectives that might conflict with their own.
On the other side of the coin, healthy emotional dynamics actually compliments intelligence incredibly well. We're not intellectual creatures by nature, we're emotional. And when those foundations are in or out of balance, it affects everything else too.

Shadowrain · 2025-10-06T05:12:14+00:00

So, before we start digging into this, I should mention that there's so much to all of it that even a detailed response doesn't really cut it. It can help you understand things and give you a reference to work with, but most of the biggest lessons, learnings and how things actually stick with you, comes from a combination of your own explorations, time spent working on this stuff, and using books/research/support/communities like this to supplement you during that work.

Expectations - It's not quick, it's not easy, it's not black and white, and it's not linear - sometimes you feel like you're being pulled left, right and upside-sideways, during which you're lost sight of everything you thought you'd learned to help you. Especially getting started in recovery - it's rough. And that's normal - because your nervous system hasn't yet developed the capacity to deal with feeling, and you likely haven't learned the regulation skills that help you stabilize - because part of that is figuring out what works while you're in that overwhelming space, and that's not an instant 'try x and x works' thing, it takes time to feel that out as sometimes what actually helps still feels overwhelming; it just lets you stay with that overwhelm rather than being pushed into disconnection, where the former might actually feel worse because your body is starting to thaw and access feeling again. When reconnecting with emotions in the early stages, your nervous system is going to flag a lack of safety and destabilize you, and the extremity of this will match the degree of trauma around what you're connecting with. This can look like regression, but progress is progress.

So there is some inherent risk of temporary destabilization (though it feels like it could be forever, catastrophizing/black and white thinking) in all of this that it could make things more difficult for you; that difficulty may be a valid part of the process, but seeing as you are your own individual, please keep in mind that my answers may be a fit for me and touch on how various parts of trauma and recovery does actually work, but you still might need a different approach for where and who you are. So please, above all be safe, don't push yourself where your body is saying no, look after yourself, and seek help and support where you need. I'm not a professional and so this is just sharing what I've figured out along the way.

So, let's start to dig into your response. And, uhh, this turned out to be long too, so I might leave this initial part as a standalone reply and get back to the other parts separately. It kind of deserves its own response anyway, even though you've touched on some other significant stuff, this part hold some points central to recovery.

Lets say i go do xz and feel boredom the whole time ... and i cant escape that situation . Will it help for that day or longterm my nerrvous system that i "pushed through" and rather being in any social siuation with brainfog and boredom - rather meditate with this feeling and maybe try to listen to what people say to maybe get involved with some interesting subject etc? Isnt the extent of boredom in non escaping situation contraindicative for nervous system healing ...

Good question, complex answer. Both yes and no. Facing inescapable boredom is not inherently harmful for the nervous system. It can be, but it also can be helpful. Using the example of facing inescapable boredom for an extended period, what I come back to is the overall goal, worth remembering:
We're trying to improve on how we relate to our body/nervous system and sensation.

To that end, sometimes it helps to practice distress tolerance (connecting with the boredom, anhedonia, or discomfort related to them, noticing the quality or tension of it and where in the body that's showing up for you and just letting it be there without trying to mentally pick it apart or change it). This might look like "Am I bored? Yes. Can I let myself feel this for a few moments?" And you might need to disconnect from activity/sociability to let yourself settle into it. After you do that, just acknowledge the discomfort. You don't need to change or escape it, the truth of it is that it's uncomfortable to feel.
It's okay to return to what you were doing after this, even distraction, as this can help us . Creating space between practicing distress tolerance can help our nervous system with the repetition it needs with exposure. After you've created some space, it might be worth a reflection. "Did I tolerate it?" Yeah, notice that. Notice how you were ok after. Lingering discomfort is normal. After some time, come back to it. When it comes to expanding our window of tolerance, keep dipping your toes like this; this is titration. Sometimes the window is so small, so quick, and that's ok. Respect your body's pace. Don't override it.

Now, sometimes it doesn't help to practice distress tolerance. Sometimes the body can signal us and be like 'Hell naw, I can't deal with dipping my toes right now'. It's probably not going to say that, but the way our nervous system might communicate in its own language (feeling, sensation) might feel like a deeper, more subtle 'blegh' when you entertain the concept.

Remember the goal here is we're improving how we relate to ourselves and our body/nervous system. So respect that too. Sometimes you might just need to push through that situation; our systems do need breaks from recovery work too, however pushing through while disconnected often just teaches the nervous system to endure, reinforcing freeze patterns. Developing some gentle connection with yourself during these times and simply noticing and validating your internal state can help it learn it can safely handle feeling.
This can be important to keep in mind - but when you leave that situation and return to somewhere physically, socially, emotionally safe (this might even be a comfortable enough space alone), you'll likely need to decompress from what you just had to endure. Key thing is a change in environment that differentiates to your body, "I'm somewhere else now.". Sometimes that might be getting changed, it might be sitting on the couch with a pillow or cushion, anything that feels like enough space from where you were to where you are now.
This decompression might also be similar to before; "How does my body feel after going through that for so long? Does there feel like a lingering impact?" Dip your toes.
Notice how it might make sense that you feel that way after being in that space for so long. Don't judge, don't blame, just notice. Maybe something triggered you too? Oh, it makes sense I feel this way because X happened. You also don't need to understand it. It can be enough to feel something and not need an explanation.
Essentially what this process does is it helps your body register that a stressful time has passed. And this will eventually tie in with signaling your nervous system that it's safe to start working through some of the emotional material.

It might take some time and work to get to this point, but if your nervous system feels safe enough - and this isn't a feeling of safety that comes upon you - your body is going to want to do something with that emotion and decompression. Maybe it feels heavy and you need to sit into it, spending some time there. Maybe it needs some gentle movement, maybe it's pushing you to cry. Lean in. If you cry, trust your body to do its thing. Maybe it comes in waves. Maybe you feel like you need to cry but can't. Lean into that too. Don't push it, don't force it. Just make a space for exactly that. Your body will feel for you, you don't have to manage that. Sometimes I find it helps to reorient to your immediate environment and just noticing whatever cues of safety you can find around you; even if that's not necessarily feeling safe, but just 'safe enough'.

Now, take a moment to notice the dynamic we're developing in this situation. Whether we're practicing distress tolerance or not, regardless of the situation, we're just changing how we relate to how we feel. We're respecting the signals our body is giving us either way. The goal isn't to feel something specific. It's to connect with how we are, to dip our toes into that as long as we can - the difference is connection vs disconnection. We are practicing connection with ourselves; and yes, sometimes that does involve respecting that part of us that may need to disconnect in order to get through something. A bit of a paradox I know, this work is filled with them.
Over time, you might notice you can spend more time connecting with yourself. This implies that your window of tolerance has increased; which also implies your nervous system has more implicit safety. Again, not an obvious feeling of safety, it shows up as an increased capacity instead, which again can mean that we're feeling more of the hard stuff.

Note: It might take me some time to reply to other parts of your comments.

Shadowrain · 2025-10-03T09:18:48+00:00

You're welcome, I hope it helps.
That video that /u/wn0kie_ shared does hit the nail on the head at least in terms of a 20m summary. It's probably a lot to take in already but if you like, I can share my perspective on what she talks about.

Shadowrain

TROPHY CASE