Notes on distress tolerance (v stream-of-consciousness)

[kaberett]

Jumping-off point. Content notes for abuse I suppose? Some discussion of self-injury.

• "Some people may not have been shown ways to tolerate emotional discomfort appropriately, for example being punished for expressing normal emotions like crying when they were sad." Ow, yeah.
  
• Okay, so vulnerability/sadness/anger are emotion it's Not Okay for Me To Have. (To some extent jealousy, but that tends to be a cover for feeling sad/vulnerable for me, so.) ("Not Okay" -- will get hit/abandoned/whatever. These feelings are dangerous.)
  
• I started out with "well the main feeling I tolerate very poorly is 'unsafe' and well obviously feeling unsafe is distressing", which is not necessarily helpful.
  
• ... circling back round to identifying the messages my body is sending me before the Screaming Crazy...
  
• I'm really struggling with the idea proposed by this and the panic disorder infopack that if I'm just less scared of the effects of consuming caffeine I'll be able to ~resume drinking tea~~~? I have a substantial evidence base that in physiological terms I really don't get on with it well - significantly raised heartrate, etc - and I don't think it's wrong of me to decide caffeine isn't worth it? Like, I don't think that's actually me exhibiting safety/avoidance behaviours?
  
• I absolutely am avoidant of family members who make me incandescently angry. Again, I'm struggling to see that as a problem? Like, they're going to ignore my boundaries and describe me in awful ways, why would I want to spend time with them, I don't, etc.
  
• Yep, well aware of seeking excess reassurance; working really hard on not doing it (up to and including asking friends et al to not reassure me because it won't help), and slightly to my surprise it is getting better; I still have the Everyone Is Secretly Dead thing, but it's getting much quieter.
  
• I cope really badly with resources that treat SI like it's axiomatically bad, as opposed to a neutral coping mechanism like breathing. This is probably partly because I by-and-large don't do myself lasting damage, but I'm still sorting out how much of it is that autism-related stimming happens to look like SI, or whether resources that think SI is awful and counterproductive also think stimming is. (Something bright and well-defined to focus on is an anchor and a buoy, yes, simultaneously.)
  
• "Now the emotion in and of itself is not necessarily distressing, unless we also hold distress intolerant beliefs which tell us the emotion
  is bad in some way and must be stopped." ??? I mean yes okay "don't be sad in front of other people they'll hit you" is clearly compounding distress, but again I say, being unsafe is... just distressing? what am I missing?
  
• (except that I construe a whole bunch of "negative" emotions as being "unsafe", even if they aren't necessarily, yes, got there)
  
• (I don't have "a perceived inability to fully experience unpleasant, aversive or uncomfortable emotions", I have a well-founded belief that it is not safe to experience those emotions)
  
• (actually this is all relevant to my problems with academic writing, hmm, well, in that case I feel a bit less bad about wading through this during work hours :-p)
  
• hmm, explicit parallel to learning to tolerate physical pain. "But physical pain isn't unsafe!!--" self, you've put a great deal of time and effort into learning which kinds of physical pain are safe and can be ignored, and which aren't and can't.
  
• Perhaps I should be constructing "UNSAFE" as "fear".
  
• ... okay but I already do the stuff of going "what is this feeling of distress trying to tell me" and accepting that it's probably got a point; I just don't trust people enough to share it with them (and finding the line between "reassurance-seeking" and "reasonable requests for support/listening" is interesting).
  
• "you need to feel the emotion first, accept it, ride through it,
  and then take action to improve it." - pretty sure that in general I do a fairly good job of this.
  
• taking the "opposite action" to my distress avoidance strategies frequently implicates other parties; what I am trying to avoid is frequently being sad/angry/whatever in front of someone else. It isn't okay to ask for support of the listening-and-not-freaking-out variety and assume it'll happen.
  
• ... but I just used "ask for" when I meant "demand", and made a blanket statement that doesn't actually hold, and I keep looking for other ways to get out of having to do this ("but my support people have too much going on themselves, it's not fair to ask" oh shut UP)
  
• I'm struggling to see the material difference between behaviours described as "distress avoidance" and "distress improving" (the latter being described as "soothing" or "activating").