Does this ever get better?

Granfallon, 

You are definitely not being annoying....I am happy to try and help you. 

By masking emotions I don't mean that I would consciously mask my emotions with other emotions. I mean that after suppressing emotions for so long, you are not in touch with your emotions and you lose touch of how you feel in response to things happening around you. "Masking" is not in the active verb sense. It is that our true emotions are masked with other emotions. The reason we can't get in touch with our emotions because 1) we have been disconnected from them so we are emotionally illiterate, and 2) we can thus only feel the feeling that is masking the true emotion. 

Here is an example of a masking emotion and also of a defense mechanism. 

We start to feel emotional distress at a certain situation, so we get upset at someone who is close to us, and we then feel angry at them and then push them away, but our core emotion is actually the fear of intimacy with that person. We fear intimacy because we fear being vulnerable, we fear being vulnerable because we have these repressed painful feelings that have not been dealt with and this prohibits us from getting intimate because it brings up all of those painful unprocessed emotions. In this example, anger is the masking emotion and fear is beneath that emotion, but fear is a secondary masking emotion which covers up the unresolved pain that we have not processed and is stored in our subconscious. The defense mechanism in this example is us pushing the other person away. By defending in this way we do not have to deal with our painful emotions that we desperately want to avoid feeling.

Does this make any sense? I may have rambled a bit. 

Knockknock

Knockknock wrote:Does this make any sense?

More than you can imagine. You've summarized the core of the ideas about it from mid-century theorists (many people still think they made more sense than current trends in psychology).

Apparently, the idea is that this process is the same, both in avoidants and schizoids. Like "this + schizo genes = schizoid", and "this + anxiety genes = avoidant". Something on these lines. Avoidance is not as deeply rooted as schizoidsim, so avoidants consciously experience the emotional effects a lot more often and more deeply. But on the other hand it's viable (or at least plausible) for avoidants to revert part of this process.

Schizoids themselves will most likely refute this model, but I personally couldn't agree more.

To thine own self be true - that's how you get better, by finding out who you really are and accepting it completely. Until then it's all BS because you'll be living a lie afraid of letting anybody get to know you.

I'm on that journey again trying to accept myself and defeat my demons. It's not easy but it's better than giving up like I did last year.

Yes, that makes perfect sense knockknock and it is perfectly accurate. I have a few questions which maybe I have to find the answers for myself but: how do I become emotionally literate, how do I get in touch with my real feelings and my true self? What’s the process? Is there a way of doing it without a therapist and regression therapy? And does it always boil down to fear? It seems that way for me.

Granfallon,

Yes, I do believe that it always boils down to fear, the fear of facing the core pain of our childhood trauma that caused us to detach emotionally. 

To get in touch with your emotions, I truly believe that there is only one way, and that is to go back to your original pain and feel it do that you can process it and move through all of your repressed emotions that have been lingering in your subconscious. These feelings are usually unknown to you because you have avoided them due to your defense mechanisms. I honestly don't think it is possible to do this any other way. As avoidants we want short cuts, we don't want to feel the pain of these emotions, they is why we avoid therapy, and of we do go to therapy, it is often in a passive role of just being there and intellectualizing. If you have a good therapist and he/she can work with you without you wanting to leave, eg calling you out on your avoidance, then they won't let you keep coming and wasting your money on small talk and intellectualizing your problems. 

The following link is for a good book on how to become emotionally literate, and you can follow this and practice it with a friend(s), and you can probably get done improvement, but I'm being very honest with you when I say that therapy is the absolute best way to go. Don't view therapy as a negative thing, it is a very positive thing and doing it in the right frame of mind with a therapist that you can really connect with and who understands exactly what you are trying to do will totally change your life. I suggest you reading through this book and also watching these two movies; 'Good Will Hunting' and 'Antwone Fisher', these are great examples of how therapy can totally change a person's life. I can relate to both of the characters in these movies and I saw these after I went through my transformation, so they weren't inspirational for me, but they did really resonate with what I had been before therapy and afterwards. 

http://www.claudesteiner.com/2000.htm

Please feel free to continue seeking answers to any of your questions from me.

Knockknock

How did you learn to stop intellectualizing in therapy? Can you give an example of what it's like for you to handle your emotions without intellectualizing? This is something I still struggle with when I'm in therapy.

Thanks for taking the time to share your experience, Knockknock. I agree a lot with what you've been writing.

ShadowTerra,

The first thing is to make sure that you completely trust your therapist, you have to feel totally comfortable with them and know that they have your best interests in mind if you are going to open up to them and reveal yourself completely in front of them. 

The first thing I actually did to connect with my repressed emotions was to get the correct therapist, the first two I did not find that I could connect with, but with my third, I found that I could. I don't know if it was because she was a woman, but that was likely part of it, but it was also due to how she was able to talk to me about what I needed to do, and just a sense that I got from her, I knew that she was a good, caring and compassionate person who had a lot of empathy for me and wanted the best for me. She wanted me to improve my life and she told me how I could do that and I put 100% of my faith in her that she knew what she was talking about and that she could really help me to discover my true self and to release myself from how I was living my life. After all, what point would there have been to distrust her and to question her and her methods? I had nothing at all to lose and I finally realized that with her. That famous quote of "the only thing to fear was fear itself" went through my mind, and I just decided that I would do anything and everything to try to improve my life. That was the key for me, coming to that important realization. The fear that you must go through is actually the fear of losing complete control of yourself and your emotions. The irony is that this is also the key to healing yourself. You do lose control, but the belief that you can control your emotions is actually a false belief to begin with. When we avoid our emotions, we are not controlling them, they are controlling us. This is a fact and you must completely believe that this is true, because it is absolutely 100% true. When we either repress(involuntary)or suppress(consciously) our emotions, they do not go away, no matter how much we want or wish them to. That is another core belief that you must come to understand and completely believe is true, because it is. Those emotions stay with us in our subconscious and control us by keeping us from connecting with our true selves. We think we are helping ourselves by not feeling these painful emotions, but this false belief could not be further from the truth. We MUST connect with our past emotions before we can connect with our present emotions, there is no other way,no short cut...none...please trust me when I tell you this. And we cannot possibly connect with our true selves without connecting with our emotions. People often think that they must change who they are by going to therapy, but the reality is that you are not changing who you are, you are getting in touch with who you really are, you are just letting go of this false self, this false belief of who you are is how you have been feeling and acting. But, you have been running away from who you are by running away from your emotions. When you correctly see what you are actually trying to do and you are with someone you completely trust, it becomes possible to finally break through and connect with your past emotions and feel them so that you can finally feel the pain and process them and then release them from your subconscious. This is an incredibly freeing feeling and you will then be do glad that you went through the pain, because the pain is short term, you will recover and you will then feel the strength within your true self, you will have moved past everything that is holding you back from being your true self. The feeling that you get from thus is truly indescribable, the feeling of catharsis is so powerful, and you will have this sense of who you are that you have never come close to experience in your life. 

I know that I have rambled quite a bit here and I hope that you can make sense of what I have tried to explain here. It is my wish to help anyone who wants to do this by inspiring them and letting them know that it can be done, and answering any questions that they have of me in order for them to accomplish this. I wanted to help a person that I cared very much for to be able to do this, but this person had very high and strong walls and defense mechanisms and ended up pushing me completely out of her life. So, I resigned myself to never again try to help someone who doesn't want help, and to only help a person(s)who want my help. 

I just realized that I may not have completely answered your question of how you can stop intellectualizing your problems in therapy. Try the following steps.
Tell your therapist that you want to go through and feel your repressed and suppressed emotions that you have avoided, going back to the core pain of your childhood. 
Start to talk about your childhood and if you can't feel the emotions at first, at least try to identifying what those feelings likely were based on the experiences that you were having.
Once you can talk about your childhood and identify what you must have been feeling, you will start to get more comfortable with eventually feeling them.
Even of you are talking about these painful experiences in a matter of fact way and intellectualizing them, at least you are talking about your past and the more you talk about it the more memories you will start to have. 
Keep on this track, don't get sidetracked with talking about the current things happening in your life.....the key is in your past, stay with your past....trying to connect with your current emotions without moving through and transmuting your past painful emotions will never work, and I truly believe this is why people give up on therapy. The therapist is crucial, and he/she has to want you to overcome this, and just appeasing you in the present by not challenging you and just wanting you to feel comfortable and continuing to come to them might be a conflict of interest to them. They have to want to risk losing you in order totally help you. Making you comfortable may keep them with a paying long term client, but challenging you and risking losing you as a client is the right thing to do. Not all therapists are good or capable at what they do....you have to find the right one that will work hard on helping you. 

Again, I know that I have rambled, but please don't hesitate to ask for clarification or ask further questions. 

-- Sun Jun 17, 2012 9:19 pm --

A tactic that my therapist used with me to help me to feel comfortable opening up to my emotions was when she had me visualize a genie bottle in the middle of the room. She had me imagine that inside of that bottle were all of my past painful emotions, and to visualize taking the cork from the top and that all of my emotions would come out and fill the room and that when we were done with that session, we would put all of those feelings back into the bottle and put the cork back on and it was only in that room that we would release those painful emotions of my past. This visualization did a lot to help me to be able to overcome my fear of feeling those emotions.

I hope this visualization can help you as much as it helped me.

I'm good at communing with my emotions, but maybe not-so-good at accepting them. I run into problems during the part where I'm putting them back in the bottle, so to speak. That's the part where I start intellectualizing. I have this compulsion to analyze my emotions almost scientifically after I experience them. I guess I do it in an attempt to justify them. I feel like I need to get to a point where I can experience my emotions fully without the part where I apologize for them. I need to let the primal part of my psyche do what it needs to do.

A lot of my emotional baggage comes from having once had a reputation for being "crazy." People told me I was crazy as a way of minimizing/denying what I was going through. I had no one else to turn to, so I started believe them. Long story short, after a ton of invalidating experiences I tried my best to suppress my real self so as not to offend anyone or scare them away. I kept bottling my emotions until they escaped in inappropriate, damaging ways, which led to me scaring people away. Group therapy helped me realize that I was stuck in that pattern (because it wasn't clear to me until I was able to observe how other people don't have that pattern). Until then I didn't do particularly well with therapists who challenged me because I had always had my thoughts, opinions, and feelings challenged. I needed validation first and no matter who I talked to or what I did, I wasn't getting it--which only made me sink deeper. I didn't even know how to articulate that it was what I needed until I finally got it.

Now I'm at the point where:
-I can experience my emotions and identify them pretty accurately
-I can acknowledge that I am an emotional person and that my emotions might run somewhat deeper than other people's
-I'm a little more comfortable expressing my emotions and my true opinions

As a result, I'm functioning better in life than I have in years (because I don't get depressed as often). But I think the next step is learning not to apologize or feel like I need to perform penance for my emotions. I guess shame is the emotion that lies at the root of everything for me.

Thanks for the link knockknock, it was very interesting. It seemed to me the premise is that one person’s emotions affect another person’s emotions therefore we need to become emotionally literate so we don't cause other people emotional damage. I just spent an hour writing out my issues with emotional literacy, but then I realized maybe I'm missing the point of it. I agreed with what I read, I'm just not sure how it can help. How did it help you? What's the relationship btw AVPD and emotional literacy in your opinion?

Something I thought was interesting was the idea of a critical parent. Do you think for us regression therapy is how we conquer our critical parent? I think when one has avpd their critical parent is too dominating over the other ego's, that's what we need to correct.

Sensitivity and anxiety, that's why my critical parent dominates. I'm not sure that can be overcome.

It's not your fault. I can't watch that movie with friends because I always breakdown during that scene.

Duplicate post deleted.