[jasonalex]

i saw you recently for a consultation (mid December). (So you *have* to help me, right?)

I just read your book which i found, contrary to your description, was in fact markedly different from the usual (crap) i have read in self help genres. However, i really don't understand about projection at all. When I try to think about it, it is like a maths problem where I cant keep all the steps in my head, or like imagining time travel where the present would be changed if you went to the past, but then you wouldn't exist (or something).

Anyway, specific question is, if you shouldn't change your life to suit your feelings, then how can you do anything to help yourself? e.g. if youre feeling suicidal (what a coincidence, I am!) perhaps you could go for a run to cheer yourself up, but then you've just changed your life and tried to get rid of your feelings. But surely it can't be right to stay in bed all day wishing you were dead. But would this be staying with your feelings and therefore the 'right' thing to do? And why would your all-knowing unconscious mind want you to feel suicidal when it should know you have *no* idea how to help yourself?

Another example: i live in my father's house and he keeps banging all the doors. I feel like murdering him every time he does it. At the same time I am afraid to tell him not to as, a. he overreacts / is frightening / is horrible generally, and b. he just keeps doing it anyway bc he's a complete twat. If i'm not supposed to change my life to suit my feelings then should I welcome the fact that the noise is making me into a nervous wreck? Bc it is giving me an opportunity to experience the anxiety / fear of something that happened to me in the past? But I don't want to be feeling murderous / sick with shock every time there's a loud noise. Neither do I want to retch every time I smell someone else#s disgusting food cooking. This has been going on fro years, surely i must have 'felt' it *enough* by now for it to just *go away*? (I wear earplugs permanently now, all the time - cut in half so people don't notice and interrogate me aobut them - altho of course they still do- but i can still hear everything way too loud, it makes me want to scream at everyone to *shut up* all the time.)

What do i do to just get all the pain *over with*? I could take, say, one full week of non-stop horror jsut to get rid of it all. Alternatively, maybe I *should* commit suicide. Seriously, i have so had enough of this crap. I have spend thousands on therapy and I still have nothing but misery. Going on my life so far I would have to live until I was a thousand years old to feel and let go of all the pain.

[Benjamin Fry]

These are all good points that you raise.

Like any worthwhile instruction on life, my conclusion is intrinsically paradoxical. therefore what are you supposed to make of it? It is not easy.

However there are some important preconditions that I think are being overlooked here. firstly to do any work on yourself you need to have some sense of feeling safe enough to begin. secondly there is a difference between resolving old trauma and instigating new ones. these two factors are related.

in your case it sounds like you are overwhelmed by the present to such an extent that you are in crisis. in this state you are not really available to yourself to feel your feelings emerging from the past. this is usually something that will happen when you feel safe enough for it to develop. if you are still in the environment that stimulated your original issues then you may simply be stuck going round and round processing and adding to the same issue. the net result might be stasis.

Certainly your hyper-awareness of sound and smell suggests a state of heightened awareness which is the body's natural reaction to crisis. You may need to find somewhere else to be that allows you to process these feelings at a different pace, without adding new ones to them along the way.

Your frustrations are understandable. it is a very difficult process. if it wasn't, then none of us would have any of these kind of problems because we would naturally heal our emotional traumas much more efficiently.

so the base of this work is safety. that's often what a therapist is for: to provide a safe person and place for at least an hour a week. that's when you can begin to emerge.

I hope you can think about what conditions you would need in order to be able to feel less assaulted in your daily life. if you can help yourself to a safer feeling way to live, then you may begin to have a calmer perspective from which to see projections which you could then value and "not change your feelings"; and be in less of a crisis when you think about "not changing your life".

[METAFILTER]

IF YOU COULD GET BACK TO ME ON THIS I WOULD APPRECIATE IT! THANKS! I'M CURIOUS, WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY "DON'T CHANGE YOUR LIFE?" PEOPLE NEED TO CHANGE JUST PERIOD. ALSO I WAS WONDERING WHAT YOU MEANT IN RESPONSE TO SOMEONE WHO
ASKED YOU A QUESTION AS WELL ON THIS THING AND IT WENT LIKE THIS: "if you can help yourself to a safer feeling way to live, then you may begin to have a calmer perspective from which to see projections which you could then value and "not change your feelings"; and be in less of a crisis when you think about "not changing your life". THAT'S WHAT YOU SAID! GRATEFUL I BE WOULD IF YOU CAN RESPOND TO THIS! ANYWAY THANKS!

[Benjamin Fry]

Don't change your life means don't change the external things in your life in the hope that they alone will solve the problem; for example if you hate your job because you hate your boss, you can change it but you will probably end up feeling the same way about another colleague. The trick is to find out what you are learning about yourself from the experience, stay with it, and then go back to the source of the problem and deal with that.