Solid.....solid as a rock.

Ok a stone at least.
Today I left my session with Peter not only with positive thoughts, but also a physical reminder for me to THINK!

Today's session was a real eye opener, and probably the most effective session to date. After a few minutes of chatting and starting the session, hearing what I was saying, I started to realise that change is happening without me even being aware of it.

Talking things through, reflecting on how things are changing for me right now, and how my attitude towards things, it all starts to become a little more obvious to me what I do right and wrong during a normal day. From anger and frustration towards selfish arseholes blocking my driveway, to how I react to being cut up, or someone cutting in in traffic, its all about being aware of the emotions that are being invoked, and how I choose to work with them, deal with them and vent them.

One revelation that arose from today's session was, how I treat anger and sadness in a very similar way. The process of feeling them both is almost identical, however I manage anger in a better way, if that's the right way of looking at it. From trigger, emotional reaction, and expression, right through to resolution. Anger for me goes through all the motions. And while dealt with badly at times, it reaches its conclusion. Where as sadness just seems to stall at expression, or maybe even before at the reaction stage.

Never concluding an emotional cycle seems to be where I trip up, and rather than being a 100 metre sprint, it becomes a never ending 400 metre loop that just keeps going on and on. To draw an analogy, running the 100 metres is a straight clear journey with the ending in sight. But running emotions round an oval just goes on forever. Yes we know there is a finishline there somewhere, but where? We keep going, running hoping and praying it will all end soon, but with the line nowhere in sight, we just keep running, tiring out and losing hope and motivation. To me, THIS is sadness.

Anger, a dash, a quick journey, and straight forward.
Sadness right now is the loop, so what I need to do now is find the tail of the 100 metre track, the emotional run off, and find the place I know I can end the cycle when it occurs.
To me, sadness is a deeper, longer process, to taking a longer journey is fine, as long as that line is in sight.

So, that was deep eh! And that's the real me coming out again. Unleashed again into the wild world (sorry about that)

But that's a good thing. Now I have a parallel to draw on, I can maybe start to see why sadness seems to be such a hard emotion to deal with. Am I afraid to cry, no. Am I emotionally detached? Nope. I am more than capable of understanding sadness, and feeling it. But when its something like grief, I seem incapable of seeing it through to its conclusion, which is the problem we have here, hence the sessions with Peter.

On my provisional chat with Peter on the phone before the first session even started I was asked what I felt I needed from the sessions. At this point I said I needed someone to sound off against, a sounding board. Someone to bounce thoughts off, to help me make sense of what I was thinking. 3 weeks later, as we sat in session I said that I felt in control, having known what I needed from the start.

As we talk in the sessions a weird thing happens. I will say something, something relevant, an emotion or a situation. Peter will then repeat it to me with his wording on the matter. Then the weird part happens. I will then take what he has said to me as his own problem, reflect on it and start to break it down, make sense of it and understand it. Helping myself more than anything else.
The exact process that usually occurs with me helping someone else, but somehow as I am replying, I am feeling myself start to understand.

All a little complex I guess, but hell its working.

Right, with all that said, I had better return to the daily grind and get a wiggle on.

So thank you Peter for my thought stone, and today's session. And thank YOU for reading :)

Regards
Michael

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