Stefanie K Dunning:
Thank you, Stefanie. I've been following your posts with quite a lot of interest. I realize that we're all human, but reading what another female has to say about AF and life is especially interesting.
Would you be willing to say more about the nature of the guilt and shame you speak of here?
What observations about them have you made when they arise? How does the experience of guilt, shame, and unworthiness produce the feeling of volatility; could you describe that feeling as well, how it manifests itself and what are the features of it when it arises?
Stefanie
I'll be honest and say that I have a very hard time separating the various emotions when they arise. My instinctual reaction is just to run away or try to deny the feeling, or just unload it (it's not so much a feeling as it's just a very hard knot in the chest area, making me almost physically hunch).
I'll vacillate between a very intense feeling of failure as a human being and being a sham through and through and intrinsically flawed, then denial and "it's no big deal", irritation since "I" just want to be able to follow my instincts, back to dread, regret, sorrow, submission, fear of being found out and fantasizing about/dreading a future where no-one will want to even talk to me because of my perceived sins.
I think the volatility has a lot to do with the vacillating; when guilt dictates that I'm a bad person I'll do whatever I can to repent; when I'm denying I'll take off on a tangent of intermittent happiness (and very often entitlement and pride), then irritation as I realize the problem is far from gone. While this is happening, I'm sometimes lucid enough to understand that what I'm doing is bizarre, but the counter-reaction to that is to either lay down flat and play dead, or desperately will myself to feel something else (further dissociating). Sometimes I'll wake up from this self-absorbed self-flagellation and wonder why I'm wasting mine and everyone else's precious time feeling sorry for myself, but then it's back again. It's as if I'm stuck in some kind of histrionic script with very little view of reality as it is.
Please bear with me if this doesn't quite answer your question. When I started AF back in 2007 I had an easier time being honest with myself and picking myself apart and putting the process into words, but currently there's a very thick layer of denial and dishonesty on top of everything that I have to dig through. Even writing this I'm unsure if this is really how "I" feel/am or whether I'm just feeding my bad feelings in order to stay put where I am.
Which I actually think it is. I'm just at a loss as to where I go from here. My base feeling is that I have to somehow repent for being nothing more than an animal and hurting, using and disappointing others -- preferably with death (psychic death rather than physical death?).