Week 17 - 2014-02-07 Fri.

2014-02-07 Fri.

I'm sitting here reading through Test as I put it up on my blog. People might think I'm near illiterate from all of the grammatical and wrong words I'm finding. I'm not changing all of them, only the ones that are really confusing. I kind of feel sorry for Jeanne because I don't go back as much as I should and fix them. I only edit for context not content but, there is only so far I can go without changing how it reads.

It's about ten hours later. I spent most of the day playing with the blog. Google's HTML encoder for blogger is strange. It isn't consistent and, it doesn't always replace code. I've worked with HTML but, not for twelve or more years. So I've been learning more about HTML.

2014-02-08 Sat.

Something has been nagging at the back of my mind since yesterday morning (it's about 02:50). I've been under a lot of stress taking care of Pat but, I don't think that's all of it. I've been thrashing in my sleep or, at least I was the past five to ten days ago. I'm also sleeping more, the past two or three days. Maybe it would be helpful if I could remember my REM dreams.

09:18 shortly after I finished the preceding paragraph I tried to go back to sleep. I slept maybe half the time from 03:30 to 07:15. At which point subjective time was twice as long as real time. So I just got up and had breakfast. I had pea soup with whole wheat and bran shredded wheat for soup crackers.

I still can't figure this stress thing out. So I'm left with chipping away at it by writing free association style or leaving it to float. Floating is when I keep something on the edge of my consciousness without really thinking about it. When some other thought comes along and triggers it I have a different way to look at it from. I don't know how well floating will work with general unattached things such as stress or anxiety. I use floating to look at ideas I or others have presented to me to see how or if they fit into my world. (Everybody has their own world (later).) Sometimes floating things get lost on the conscious level but because I'm trying to hang on to them I often trigger them even in an unconscious level and they come out. It's a great mechanism for fairly specific ideas or concepts.

Since I've started writing I think I'll continue.

My own world is the part of me that interprets the world around me and how I fit into it. (C)PTSD dissociation, depression, etc. skew this perception. When I've cut off or have dissociated my emotions people who don't know me think I'm cold hearted. At first (less than a second most of the time) I don't understand what their talking about. Then I realize I'm not here emotionally. In a lot of ways this is easier for me than when I appear to be emotionally present but, I can't remember any emotions. I can remember the conversation how the other people appeared to be emotionally but not my feeling. I'm not even sure I knew what I was feeling when the conversation was going on. It's very much like DID but, with only one conscious state. I'm an emotional amnesiac.

My world is also filtered by my spiritual, social, and political beliefs. So as I said everybody has their own world. When I die my world dies with me. This my sound conceited or whatever but when you realize your world is, at least part if not in fact, who you are it makes sense.

Having an understanding and awareness of how I work (emotionally and cognitively) makes it easier for me to deal with and, change things. I have a three step way of getting this self understanding and dealing with changes. These are not easy. I can't do them most of the time but, I've gotten better over time.

1. Pay attention. Just see, hear, smell, feel, or taste. Don't do or analyze. Don't necessarily try to change things unless it's dangerous not to. The idea is to see things work not how they work. Things inside and outside of myself. Pay attention to my reactions and, the reactions of others. Kind of like when I'm in an accident my conscious steps aside and watches my body do thing. Sometimes things I didn't know I could do.
2. Review, analyze, understand what I saw, felt, etc.. Again don't do anything outside of myself. Take things apart, play what if but, not in a judging way. Play what if, as if I were writing a story, playing a game like chess, checkers, backgammon, or make believe. I'm very good at not attaching to a lot of stuff. Why not use this to my advantage.
3. Now comes the doing. Take steps one and two and decide what the best thing to do is and do it. Then I often have to start over because I don't always make the right choice the first time. However since I was paying attention I have more grist for the step two mill.

In one sense doing this is easy if I can get beyond my feelings. Pesky things feelings. That's why I learned to turn them off in the first place. Maybe before I could talk, Definitely by the time I was three. If someone hurts me I usually get angry. So step one comes after the fact. Though I have a good memory it's just not the same because I've lost what I was feeling and/or thinking other than hurt and angry. I don't/can't differentiate my emotions very well. Jeanne understands that I work on a three point scale for most things. I can do five points with anger, I learned that one too well. I think Jeanne is hopeful I can expand to a ten point scale someday.

It's hard to be a fair witness, to just watch and not judge. Play what if without blaming myself can seem impossible. This is why I came up with the idea of looking at it as a game, a story, or make believe. Anything I can do to separate myself from what I'm looking at. Maybe pretending I'm giving someone else advice. Then turn that advice around on myself. It's fairly easy for me to do the second person in my head since it often feels like there are two of me. One is emotional the other is cognitive.

I know some of the underlying stress I'm feeling is Pat. She wants out of the house where she lives. Alzheimer's is really a bad thing. She gnaws on her fingernails all the time but doesn't know it. Right now she's trying to get out. One of the people from the company that runs the house she lives in says she wondering. I don't think wondering is the right word, she wants out!

Break time.

2014-02-09 Sun.

It's only 02:55 but I just woke up and don't seem to be sleepy enough to fall back to sleep right away, so why not... I might come up with something. Besides if I'm up up for a little bit I might fall back asleep better than I did last night.

I could always take a Xanax but, that's not the same. Sometimes when I take Xanax and fall asleep it ends up like last night. So I guess I'll keep going a little longer.

I have what I call emotional logic. I suppose we all do. Little, the emotional me, being only three doesn't really understand logic. Yet she has it. Yeah I know since Big me, the cognitive me, is always there to some degree Little uses Big's logic. This is different though. Maybe it's only intuition ("Instinctive knowing (without the use of rational processes)" WordWeb *¿*). Maybe it's subconscious logic applied to an emotional problem. If I try and explain it using a concrete example I always end up with the subconscious thing. It's an emotional knowing of how a situation works. Just like the two trains heading towards each other at different speeds, when do they pass each other, thing is a rational problem. Emotional logic doesn't work for rational problems, anymore than rational logic works on emotional problems. I know for sure the latter is true I've tried it over and over before I got tired of hitting my head against the wall.

I keep trying to understand/explain this emotional logic thing it's similar but, different from anything I've read about “emotional logic” on the web.

2014-02-10 Mon.

I saw Jeanne on Thursday but, it seems like it been a week. It's not like I haven’t been busy. Maybe it's a matter of doing too much. I still haven't figured out what had me so ramped up Friday and Saturday. Whatever it was/is it's still there. Not as bad as it was by any means but, there. Recently I had said something about not being stressed when I hyperfocus. I was just thinking hyperfocus is an extreme. When I'm in other extreme states I feel less or no stress, even depression.