Exercise # 2 After Scenario

This is my after scenario: what I would do if I had perfect emotional management skills.

Well, let's see. The anxiety over my school work. I need to get a plan with regards to doing my work.

I can do these things:


[I'll be back TODAY soon]

Exercise # 2 Before Scenario

#1 Scenario

One thing that really bothers me and impedes my growth is my anxiety over doing my schoolwork and other life tasks. No matter how much I know I am smart and capable, my anxiety says I can't do it right, whatever right means.

Typical Scenario:

I am given an assignment and put it off till the day before it's due. Then, the day before it's due, I obsess and obsess about doing it, but feel I cannot. I not exactly sue why this pattern keeps repeating itself. I think I am anxious about failing and also, succeeding. But, my mind tells me I usually don't fail 95% of the time I put my mind into my work. The anxiety keeps me from putting my mind to my work. And so, I put it off until I can must up enough courage to do it, or just let it go and fail or drop the class.

This is a self-defeating behavior pattern--what can I do about it?

I get afraid of not being able to focus right when I do my work. I have tried to do my work, but just sit in front of the computer for an hour or so and nothing comes out of my brain that seems right.

Right now, I am writing and my thoughts are clear. Why does it get so bad when I do a paper?

Shedding my old skin

I'm going to molt my old skin and grow some new skin. I need to really take care of myself, so I can be happy and grow emotionally. I feel like I have the emotional regulation skills of a 2 year old. I need to learn distress tolerance, mindfulness, emotional regulation, and interpersonal skills. One thing at a time. Step by step.

So, I figure Distress Tolerance is the first thing to work on. Remember the mantra--distract, relax, cope when I feel overwhelmed--too overwhelmed.

General Simple Distraction List:

1. Drink Water Slowly
2. Deep Breathing through the nose to the diaphram
3. Eat something mindfully like fruit
4. Take a walk mindfully
5. Read something funny--get some funny, not-too-serious-books. _The Happy Pig_
6. Sing a Song- "Wheels on the Bus." "Lion Sleeps Tonight."
7. Listen to the classical music on my Ipod--Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin
8. Doodle (especially with your left hand)
9. Read the 10 things that are good about you list.
10. Get colored pencils and color a picture.
11. Look at you photo of you, Kel, and Jeff
12. Dance to fun music.

Can I ever be helped?

I am sinking further into horrible depression. I am not sure what to do, but then I never know what to do when I feel this shitty. I feel dead, really. And I worry I'll never be okay. I'll never be happy.

I don't know how I got here or where I am. All of my past seems distant, cold, and negative. I feel like I'll never amount to anything.

Now, I am locked in a horrible trance of thought. I just imagined myself out on the streets, homeless, and shivering cold. And alone. I don't want to be literally homeless and alone. If I do end up homeless, I hope it's with someone else.

You know I have to do something right now. I have to go to social services website and look up the information for PAC, a health insurance program for low-income people.

So, audios.

Losing my way

I lost my way with playing the role of my own therapist two weeks ago. I haven't exercised, meditated, or continued with the self improvement skills I was trying to learn. I am mildly or moderately depressed. I am not sure if it's because of letting go (or trying to let go) of my fantasies and projections of her or what. I feel a sense of loss and disconnectness. I've had thoughts of wanting to die, and they've been kind of repetitive. I just let them be. I try not to become fused with that mind train.

I do want to let go of the fantasies. But my mind resists. It's use to coping with anxiety and loss by falling into fantasy. My mind wants to resist the reality. It feels like I am going to lose her for good. I don't know if that's true or not, but there's nothing I can do about it, anyway.

I don't really want to write to her anymore. It's lost its sense of place. I know it's just not productive.

I don't know where I'm going with my paper. I've seem to have lost all the focus on the actual literature and moved into feminist theorizing territory...Motherhood and patriarchy--what can feminism do about it, really? Women want to be mothers. And motherhood is both enslavement and transformative. A stinking binary we've got to zen through. Yeah, I just used zen as a verb there. I mean by saying "to zen" that we've got to see through the dualistic thought. And this is very tricky. Let me find a koan.

"the river does not flow, but the bridge does."

passing out... I'll be back.

I'm back today

I got an hour and a half of sleep. I am still tired and I have to read _Music for Torching_. I read the first few pages. Oh my, it's dramatic. Do I really need more drama in my life right now?

I need to come back to the questions of who I am and where I belong, but I don't think I have a clear answer to them right now. Does anyone? Are we not limiting ourselves when we chose to define ourselves and where we belong?

The Buddha didn't believe in a essential self of substance. If we define ourselves, then we become things. No, the Buddha thought we were "no-things." The second we define ourselves as things is the second we suffer. Getting identified and fused with a conceptual idea of whom you are limits you and causes you suffering.

I like the way that self-help book I got on Acceptance and Commitment therapy put it. Be the chessboard, not the pawns. The thoughts one thinks and feelings one feels are the pawns--One needs to become defused with them. See them as just thoughts and feeling--not reality. Identifying with the chessboard makes one feel better because she is no longer in the battlefield with the pawns.

Becoming the chessboard is tricky. One needs to practice a lot of mindfulness skills to really get the hang of it. I hope I do. It just takes time.

Another thing I've learning about myself is that I can regulate my emotions by learning and doing various skills. I got this book on expressive art therapy, and it has a lot of exercise one can do to learn how to express one's emotions in a positive and healthy way. One thing that was interesting in the book is that the author asks you to do some written and drawing excercises with your non-dominant hand. When I wrote my name and some other sentences with my left hand, I learned about emotional regulation. My handwriting looked like a 3 or 4 year child's. It made me angry and frustrated but I began to accept it. It was neat. So, I bought a pack of thick-bodied markers, so I can just scribble with my left hand. I need to learn distress and frustration tolerance very much. This is like the EQ test where they a child a marshmallow and go out of the room saying if you don't eat it until I come back then I'll give you another one. I probably couldn't do this as a child. If I did, it probably only to please the tester. I wouldn't discipline myself in a real life setting like that. I believe they say if one can pass the marshmallow test as a child, then they have good distress and frustration tolerance skills.

Oh, I'm so hungry or something. That's another thing. I use food to calm my emotions. I need to look into this when I get more basic frustration tolerance skills achieved. I can't eat away my pains.

All right, hopefully DBT (dialectical behavioral therapy) and expressive arts therapy will help me learn to regulate my emotions better, have been control over my life, and become happier.

my space, my self

Here we go for round two. I haven't blogged in almost a year.

There's questions in my mind that I cannot seem to make sense of. Two questions I have today are what and where is my space and who is my self?

It's difficult for me to answer these questions. I've struggled for the last 23 years of my life to make sense of who I am and where I belong. These two questions, I think, I will never be able to answer completely because I don't think the self is a static entity nor is a place of belonging. When I think about the dynamic flow of life--that life changes always--I think that maybe an essential quality of the multiverse is chaos. And somehow, through chaos, the human mind designs order.

I didn't sleep much last night. I don't feel the passion to write right now. But, I want to put into words some answers to my two questions.

Is it not that a place of belonging and a sense of one's self ar interdependent on each other? Isn't a sense of one's self needed to know where one belongs, and a sense of belonging needed for a sense of one's self? That may be the problem here. You can't really separate the two concepts in reality. For rhetorical purposes, maybe I should just try to see what I come up by separating the two ideas.

First, I'll start with the places I belong. I don't exactly know the places I belong. For a general answer, I know I must belong somewhere, as I was born here on this earth. I wouldn't be here if I didn't belong here. I think that this sense of belonging on this earth reflects a sense of accepting what is. I am here on this earth--a basic conclusion I accept. If I didn't accept it, I'd probably have bigger psychological problems than I already do. I used to wish some aliens like E.T. would come and take me away to their planet. I liked the earth as it is, but I didn't like how humanity behaved on the planet. I thought there were wiser, more spiritually-developed aliens out there who'd somehow come and get me and teach me to live and be peaceful on their planets. I didn't think my human kind could live in peace.

I will comeback to this. I need to get some sleep...

Ed Psych test

I have an essay test to do for educational psychology--Here we go.


First off, it's about applying educational psych prinicples to a creative writing exercise. Aliens are coming to earth in 5 years. Teachers have to prepare all people on earth for their arrival to teach them about the alien's nature and culture.

Okay, so what do I teach them?

I think I'm going to teach moral and philosophical principles. Human beings need to know that they're still worthwhile even though these aliens are intellectually and technologically superior. I think a fundamental concept to teach is how to deal with the loss of power and priviledge human beings will feel over losing their sense of superiority and uniqueness. I feel we have to look inside ourselves to find our common human identity and being able to look to for commonalities in the alien beings. It has been shown that these aliens have a similar laws of gravity in their universe, and they also have a similar atmosphere and can breathe oxygen. These aliens also have superiorly developed and tested the moral law of karma, which is found in Indian and Buddhist texts here on Earth. The aliens have found a way to break the cause and effect chain of morality. On Earth here, at least in Buddhist and Indian belief system, we continue to live out lives and be reincarnated when we die; our karma, the virtuous and vicious actions we carry out in our lives, determines how the next life we live will fair. The aliens have broken that cycle of reincarnation and are morally superior. We know their mission is peaceful, and they are interested in helping human beings break their cycles of suffering.

The basic concepts I must communicate to my student: the alien's intentions are peaceful; their moral, intellectual, and technological superiority should not be feared; and we can learn from these beings greatly. I forsee a great challenge and struggle with my students--I must deal with their prejudices, their fears, and their...

On self-respect

"To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free ourselves from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the the great, the singular power of self-respect."

-- Joan Didion from Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

I am going to read this essay again because I'm not sure if it sank in enough, so I could allow myself to fully digest it. It sounds good, and I like it.

Yes, I do have dignity, and no one can take that away from me. Not my father, mother, brother, sister, or gandmother, nor you. Esteem for my dignity? It's difficult because it's new. I was not born into this idea; I have to become it. It's like Donne's poetry because it takes conscious work. I can understand Donne, and so, I can do the conscious work of self-respect. I can jump off this rollercoaster and not be afraid of dying. I may have to die again in order to live. I say die again because I have already died many deaths, and to die metaphorically in order to live takes place every day of my life. It's hard to articulate these deaths. But to feel free to die, to break off these chains of emotional panic and threat, is to live. That is my self-respect.