flowboy

@Federico del pueblo That retreat is an excellent intro and you should do it if you have the opportunity. You'll process a lot in a short time and learn how to get yourself into a deep feeling state. I'm sure it helped open up the pathway for me and made it easier to primal about other layers that came up later. The group process and the way it's structures helps weaken the defenses and makes the feeling accessible. It's 2.5k at the moment. And after that you'd still need to keep going, in the way I described in the linked post, whenever a feeling is trying to come up (whenever you get depressed or moody or anxious or something else, you can learn to recognize your signs of old feelings). That means having a session, unguided or guided, once or multiple times a week. Takes people between .5 - 2 years to process all their major stuff that way, after which they are not neurotic anymore and their mental and psychosomatic symptoms are gone forever. That takes a lot of discipline and most people don't do that, unless they live near the Primal Institute and can come in for a session whenever they want. But it can be done. And really, what alternative is there. Letting the brain heal itself through a completely natural process of discharging stored pain, is much better imo than creating new neurosis upon old through hypnotherapy and other band-aids.

Also I tend to lose consciousness for seconds at a time while my body vibrates and shakes, so I've learned the hard way to lie down on a mattress and have no place to hit my head (especially my big nose) on. No more meditation pose breathwork for me.

You're not breathing deeply enough. It really takes some force. Check that your belly and chest are both really expanding as much as possible. I've noticed in sessions that it's hard to get people to realise how deeply they actually need to breathe to get the full effects.

@Lincisman I appreciate you being vulnerable here. I can see that took courage. Yes, in short, you should start digging up shit from your past, when you're ready to live a better life. I've been an angry jealous villain for a good while, it just causes more pain and then leads you back to the path of looking inside. https://youtu.be/zXi_-8wssb4 https://youtu.be/qjG_4MSZDP0 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/reclaiming-your-life-jean-c-jenson/1114262202 https://www.pujalepp.com Both people I linked here are excellent and you should buy the book and go to the retreat if you can afford to. It changed my life. Most things out there related to shadow work and self-therapy are watered-down BS.

That’s a doctor question.

@Tyler Robinson That's great. Keep looking until you find one that feels good. Don't settle for less! I'd avoid cold, analytical jerkoffs like in the video like the plague. I think my video is pretty good, but also this guy's videos about finding therapists are great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWvK-EX6jMk His channel is a goldmine. Definitely check it out

Sounds like a rough time! You and your son will get through this together. The postpartum depression is caused by the hormonal shift between the pregnant and non-pregnant state. It can subconsciously remind the mother's body of the complications during her own birth. If you had complications when you were born, where you came close to death (very common actually), that would explain the "death feelings" rising up and causing thoughts of suicidality and killing your baby. Just remind yourself that it's old feelings messing with your present reality. They will calm down. If you were fine before pregnancy, you can be fine after. Medication can be helpful in the short term. It's best to have a therapist for the long term. Also, for managing these particular types of depression, exercise is really important, such as going for runs. Also touch helps to calm it down, so get as many cuddles as you can from your partner.

It would explain why I'm so easily depressed in winter, when the days get shorter. It definitely plays a role I'd say. Trauma also plays a role usually. But you shouldn't need to process all your trauma in order to not be depressed. That would take years. I suspect that vitamin D helps the trauma-repression system work better, so if you don't get enough of it, shit starts to come to the surface and mess with your mood. Of course, when that happens, it's much better to process a bit of trauma and feel good again, rather than stay depressed. I like to take it as an opportunity like that. Regardless, give your body what it needs! Mens sana in corpore sano.

@Starlight321 Just made a video (linked below) on what to look for in a therapist, you might want to check it out. Basically, if you can afford to pick your own therapist: find one that does regression sessions. Without hypnosis. Real tears about past hurt are what calms the system down and improves trauma symptoms long term. Mindfucking techniques like binaural beats and subliminals will just agitate you more. Additionally, for calming down, people get really good results with the "active meditations" from Osho, especially the Dynamic. Yoga is also great and easy to implement. I would definitely incorporate that.

Really good advice has been given by other ex-gamers above, and I'm not going to duplicate that, I agree with most of what's been said above. I'm just going to pick this thread to pull on: you say it's "all you've known since you were 8" That makes me think that you've had some emotional neglect from your parents. Why did you turn to excessive gaming at that age? Why did your parents let you do that, and not coach you towards including other activities that would make up a healthy life balance for a kid? (physical activities with friends, music, sports, etc) Did they provide enough emotional support, and listening without judgment? Did you freely talk to them about anything and everything that was troubling you? Or were there problems that you didn't feel safe discussing? Something to figure out with your therapist, I think there might be something there. Also watch my video linked below on what to look for in a therapist.

@Basman This. A really good beginner's exercise to calm down those thoughts, is doing parts work. Ignore Teal's mumbo-jumbo explanation and just pull up different chairs and give those thoughts a voice. The discomfort and restlessness comes from the fact that there's different, disagreeing streams of thought.

@Eternal Unity What an intense ride! That first kiss must be a treasured beautiful moment. I respect you for sharing your story.

I don't have experience with BPD in my personal life. My best friend is a therapist who works mainly with BPD type patients though. I will take the liberty of sharing why I think he said that. I think he's just referring to the tendency to overreact to abandonment triggers and do something drastic like suicide, or reckless like drive drunk and crash. Overall this clinical type view of BPD and similar disorders makes me sad. It's like they are taking as much distance as they can from it. Viewing them as aliens almost. To be inspected in a lab coat. I kind of get why. If you don't dehumanize them, you might find out you have more in common with them than you would like. "selfishness, ..." What the fuck dude. These people are in massive pain and you're going to diagnose them with selfishness? From my understanding, hearing and reading about these things, there's a direct correlation between BPD and growing up with an emotionally immature, abusive parent. Usually the mother is an unsafe character that they can not form a healthy attachment with. They had to be afraid of the mother's mood swings. Nowhere to turn for safety and nurture. And then still psychiatrists want to put them in a box and say "something's inherently wrong with you", and give them very superficial therapy like DBT. It's a travesty.

Well, only you can find out what it is, but you could start by identifying the feelings that you feel instead of motivation, and inquiring: is it familiar? When have I felt this way before? And when else? Etc. It maybe comes across a bit weird, because your problem statement was initially "lack of motivation", and now I'm asking you to view it as "some unidentified feeling on top of my motivation".

@onacloudynight At this point you're just venting and making lots of threads about nothing. I haven't seen you take anyone's advice seriously. This is a self-improvement forum. You're going through a rough patch and letting everyone know it. We heard you. Now do something about it.

That's very insightful and I appreciate the self reflection. There's actually a lot of self help in the niche of getting motivated (Tony Robbins). A dear friend of mine flew all the way from the Netherlands to New York in order to attend Tony Robbins for a 5 day seminar. He got crazy motivated. Back home, it was all gone within days. My opinion is that people get motivation completely wrong. Being motivated is a natural state. Babies come out of the womb motivated. Children have tons of energy which they need to let out by running after each other. And they naturally get curious about stuff. If their parents encourage and support that curiosity, and they have a happy childhood and adolescence, they will keep that motivation forever. If something happens early on where someone learns: "I can't pursue my natural interest, I have to do something else." That's when motivation gets blocked. Or, more commonly, when the childhood is not so happy and there's a feeling of "Whatever I do, it won't work out anyway". Motivation gets blocked. Motivation is not something you acquire, rather you remove whatever shit is blocking the motivation that's already there. That could mean, becoming more honest and realising that on some level, you don't want to do it, you want to do something else. Or it could mean introspecting and realising that some feeling is in the way of it. Hopelessness maybe, fear of failure, fear of success, lack of trust. A sense of being stuck. Or a false belief that what you really want has to wait, or is not possible. Lack of agency, of control over one's life. I'm just naming random examples. Whatever it is, as long as you breathe, you will have plenty of natural motivation underneath all that shit.

Updated my post to include more tips. @Federico del pueblo I guess so

@Federico del pueblo I can't help but respond, I'm very passionate about this topic and I spend a lot of time researching and practicing. Yes, what I left out - because I wanted to warm you up to the concept - is that it takes some effort and patience to dig out these unprocessed pains. I've heard of people taking 10 sessions or more to even find some real tears - but once they flow, they flow and then you're off to the races. The reason for this is that you have a self-protective system - the repressive system - which is working very hard during your waking time to keep the pain unconscious. It does that by 'gating' - neurons that fire inhibitory signals towards the affective part of the memory (facts and feelings are stored in different parts of the brain, so you can remember one but not the other), and by constantly releasing endorphins. People with a high level of unprocessed pain need a higher level of endorphins to be constantly produced, so that they can walk around thinking they're sortof fine. These processes zap a lot of energy and can lead to disease in the long term, because endorphins unfortunately suppress the immune system. Anyways, that's the repressive system. Everyone has one. The harder it has to work, the more side effects there will be (neurotic and psychosomatic symptoms). To start draining off this pain, the repression needs to be opened up so that the feelings can flow. Some people break through easily, others' repression systems take longer to crack. There's lots of ways to help this process, but the important thing to remember is that if you set a strong intention for your subconscious to let you feel some unfelt stuff, and you make repeated efforts, you'll get it flowing. Some tricks that could help you get there faster: Journaling with these questions (thinking about a past event where you suspect repressed pain) What happened? Who was there? What details do I remember? What was I feeling? What could I have been feeling? What else could I have been feeling? What would I have wanted to say, that I couldn't? What would I have wanted to do, that I couldn't? What could I have wanted to ask, that I couldn't? What else, what else, what else... You could do that exercise for some days until you get the hang of it and things start to bubble up. Don't even have to start with the childhood events that you know about, you can start with something more recent where you were irritated, and then use the process to discover what other feelings are behind that irritation. Then if you get to a feeling, express it out loud, while picturing in your mind the original scenario, that helps to get deeper into it Intentionally depriving yourself that day of your favourite painkilling habits, whether it be: sugar coffee your phone social media looking up information/going down rabbit holes reading, even nicotine socializing (including approval seeking behavior) even meditating, if you tend to use it to feel better I'll be making videos about this in the future. I've also guided people through this in sessions quite a lot so I have some experience of helping others get into it, I'm happy to do one with you for free because you're so enthusiastic and it makes me want to, pm me in that case, that's not an offer to everyone who reads this lol And here's someone's background story - super nice guy, he guided me a couple times as well, and just an enjoyable voice to listen to.

Tears in their original, old context discharge the electrical energy that is twisting the body and also the mind of someone with repressed trauma (which is almost everyone). The more crying the better. Don't confuse it with tears about the present, those are relieving but not curative.

Thanks for sharing more context, I now have more insight on your challenging and complex condition. What I think is this: the chronic fatigue and the anxieties and insecurities could be two legs of the same tree (rooted in trauma). That's not for me to say, but it's an assumption that you could make. If you make that assumption, then there's a path that opens up to verify that hypothesis and also improve both things. Here's a distinction: There's shadow work that purely works with the unhelpful thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings and either helps you let them go or turn them into better ones. You've found one that works for you, EFT, and there's many more. This works, but only on that layer (thoughts, beliefs, emotions about the present) There's also modalities that work on a deeper layer. Those have the potential to also rewire psychosomatic problems (the physical side effects of trauma) An example is the decrease in brain fog, fatigue and ADHD-related body tension that I've experienced, and also the countless examples I've read about of people regaining their physical energy and getting rid of unexplained pain. If you would want more of the second type, and not only benefit mentally but also physically, then a tweak would be needed. You're already finding some past memories that have repressed pain attached to them. Instead of letting them go, you could try to intensify them and put yourself back into that scenario, whatever it is. - See what you saw, all details you can remember - Feel what you felt. If you don't know, ask yourself: what could I have been feeling? - Express what you couldn't express. Out loud. Say what you couldn't say, ask what you couldn't ask back then. This will lead to remembering more pain and feeling more of it. In the past context, not the present. Very important. And first person, no "inner child" third person stuff. The more of that past pain you spend time feeling, the more you drain it. Forever. A couple of sessions can already have profound results in physical energy and otherwise. That's how you eventually end up at younger and younger stuff, birth memories. But you don't have to go that far even. People who spend time draining off their most important childhood pains, tend to experience a 70% permanent improvement in neurotic symptoms, this includes psychosomatic symptoms. This is based on data from Imprints, so people under professional guidance, but I do it on myself and it's working for me.

That's interesting! Thank you for sharing. I'm in the middle of a deep research rampage concerning everything shadow work, therapy and healing. So that helps to put it into a category in my mental model. Also I've been doing different modalities of it for years. I feel a bit conflicted now because on the one hand, you seem to have a process that works for you and that's great and I don't want to invalidate that. And on the other hand, also reading about the body tensions and the experience that there's always more and it's a never-ending process, I can probably explain why that is and how you can make your practice more effective in the long term. If you're interested.

Unleashing anger into the world will cause retraumatization. I've tried it. When I was young and angry and lost, I got into street fights. Not a good time. Created new traumas. Meditating it away will also not work, your intuition is correct there. Do you actually want to know how to heal? Because I could tell you, but if you're in a place where you just want to stay in this victim energy, it's too early.

@onacloudynight Good for you! It's a healthy anger. Don't become a toxic person and take it out on the new people you meet, though. Takes discernment and shadow work to distinguish between setting healthy boundaries and projecting past anger onto new people and toxifying relationships that way. But I feel you. Enough is enough. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/46gJFMAY456ytJO98sb8eW?si=816f9bd559274f36 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjG_4MSZDP0&t=6s Some things that help me work with my emotions

In Austria, doing Erik stuff

@Tyler Robinson Here's something I found on the forum a few years back and put it in my commonplace book, check it out: Secondly, also look at: https://wwoof.net/get-started/ You can choose any place in the worldwide network they have, and just help them with farming for a couple hours a day, and you get free food and internet and stay. I think some manual labour with nature and animals around in and of itself can be very healing and stabilizing. These are the two options I would look at if I wanted to escape a toxic situation, take some time off to heal/balance, and didn't have the income to rent my own place.