First up in our Choose Your Own Spook Venture Guided Self-Haunted Tour:
STRESS.
We with PTSD (especially CPTSD) do not know how to have stress healthily.
We either have stress to a drowning degree and then disassociate from our meat bodies to avoid it .... Or we have meat suits that no longer have stress responses because they are so oversaturated for so long that they no longer give a shit.
Either way, it is a problem in general, in life, and when you reconnect with your self.
Returning to stress after disassociation
If you're stress sensitive and overloaded, you're likely to be deeply physically uncomfortable when you rejoin your self.
This is because you gathered tension and then dipped out through a consciousness trap door, accumulating more stress while you were out of the building and leaving a bunch of accumulating garbage in your house that has to be dealt with whenever you return.
Here it is, all the stress that you've been unconsciously hoarding!
Now you get to clean out all the moldy shitbags and mummified cats before you can return to feeling like you at all.
On the other talon, if you are stress non-responsive, your nervous system has been burnt out and won't give a reaction anymore....
You're probably going to have more cognitive strain than physical; upset thoughts while the body stays kind of numb. Because without the motivating force of stress, there's a chance that you've been in a drifter state in life, just getting by without registering or responding to the strain that you faced.
And garbage, again, accumulates all around you, this time perhaps in a more material and life progress-based fashion.
That can really piss off a brain that knows it can do more - creating layers of self-frustration and overwhelm and goal confusion which may lie in wait inside of yourself, left unarmed with this strain, you will probably continue to flee from this stress, to disintegrate, disassociate from yourself and your life, and leave your existence uncaptained.
Why is stress work necessary?
To enable sustained and regular bouts of being with you and actually guiding you while providing care to you,..
You will need to work on your relationship with stress as you work on your relationship with your self.
Now, what do I mean by that?
If you don't trust your self to be able to process and solve stressful situations, then you'll keep fleeing at the first sight of it, leaving yourself behind and overwhelmed all over again.
If you can't feel stress without letting it take over or shutting down or detaching completely, life will always be out of your control and the stress will only grow.
You need to improve your relationship with stress, increasing your tolerance to sit with it and respond to it intentionally.
And you need to integrate that knowledge of this improved new skill set into your self-concept so that you recognize that you are capable of dealing with some shit; it won't crush you to face stressful situations.
In general, you need to realize you got this. Always. You are with you. You have good thoughts and make good decisions.
You know what matters to you.
You will be fine because of your personal qualities and your learned skills, because you are here with you... which might just look like calm self-contentedness, not the grand display of self-confidence that we might expect.
Window of Tolerance
To do this, to increase your window of tolerance for stress,
I recommend an approach of touching upon the stress that you're holding and then popping back out of it.
Associating with your body by dropping out of your brain and into your guts, and then becoming aware of the stress that you carry for just a moment.
Feel the tension and stay with it for a short while, whatever you can handle.
If stress-based thoughts are coming up, just lightly brush against them, let them register, and let them go.
Concentrate on the fact that your self-connection is stronger than your stress, and your self-connection can manage your stress.
When stress feels overwhelming in the body, you can balance it out with the brain.
When stress takes over the brain, you can resource the body.
Stay with both.
Stay with your self and keep out of panicked water with practice.
But you're going to have to learn to note the stress, to let it register.
And for this... this is where I personally like to coach myself as I state out loud, like a dummy, "breathe through the stress."
Staying with your self in stress
To help with the task of being with you and your strain at the same time....
To remind your self that your body is not alone with the discomfort....
Say out loud, "breathe through the pain, breathe through the stress."
And do so, focusing on the feeling of air in the back of your throat, tightening it so that there is a sound and a sensation to it.
Try to notice your stomach supporting the breath and all the way down into the feelings in your toes and the (possible) tension in your chest (try to soften, melt, and loosen bit by bit with each of these breaths).
"It's okay. You're all right. Just breathe through the stress, breathe through the pain. You got it. You will be fine."
It reminds you that you have brain oversight and a body for support. You're okay if both of these things are online.
You can feel into the pains and loop back into the calm center of your brain, which is supported by the stable sensation of being held in this warm, strong, physical conglomerate of meat.
You're in control and you can have stress without collapsing, detaching, or starting a marathon because of it.
Stretch your window of tolerance for feeling stress, staying inside of yourself and processing the strain.
Start easy, just lightly touch on those stressful feelings and thoughts.
Feel where the stress is centered in your body. Notice the sensation it creates there and...
the sensation it might create in your brain, the compulsions and the intrusive thoughts that it inspires.
But let them go.
Breathe and return your mind to this recording, to my voice, to using this breath visual in the video and be with you. Be with your stress.
For one second and then five and then maybe 10.
Stress goals
Little by little, this is how you build up the skill to have stress and notice it and use it, to feel it and retain your higher mind, to decide what to do with it rather than being crushed or running from it.
You learn to feel the stress, to use your brain and body to support each other.
So stress is never solely cognitive or physical, which it's likely to overwhelm.
Instead, you realize your concerns are controllable through efforts of your physical being, and your physical being is in very good hands through the efforts of your consciousness.
And also, you learn to notice stress and to switch your attention to another target, rather than getting tangled and strangled in the stress.
So that the stress does not grab you like a Velcro and hold tight, or you don't accidentally do that to the stress in your mind or body.
Instead, you can have these hard feelings, let them register so you can decipher them, use them to make plans, and transition the attention of yourself elsewhere when return on stress investment is running dry, or you've made your decisions and you're ready to move on.
More stress tolerance exercise
Here's another tip.
Approach your stress as if there are two realities taking place at once;
The stressful one...
And the alternative dimension where you are totally relaxed, detached from the stress, and maybe purposely unaware of it, protected from it.
You might even imagine that this de-stressed world is encased in a protective bubble.
You may already know this dimension pretty well. It might be the way that you survive your stress-filled days. It might be where you disassociate to for your own safety and sanity.
It might be the place that the aliens abduct you to when you go missing from your own life.
Pretend that you have each world available to you, one in each hand.
The real world full of stress and survival over here and the safe world, where your brain cannot be bothered by negative concerns over yonder.
And sit, And breathe.
Feel the differences between the two dimensions. Utter stress and no stress registration whatsoever.
And check out this trippy part. Both really do exist.
Both are just states of your mind.
In one state, all you can see is stress.
The forest is not seen for the trees. The forest is just very hot. The forest is on fire. my God, we're burning.
In the other state, what trees?
You are blind to that flaming forest because you've left our atmosphere completely via escapism and whatever conduits you might enjoy. Stress doesn't exist. Time-space is questionable. None of it even matters as long as you don't look at it.
Sit. Imagine each world in each hand. Really feel the sensations of each, the weight of each, the reality of each.
Breathe.
Touch the stress world back away from it when needed.
Reground into your meat.
Re-enter your stress-free zone bubble.
And again, accept that both realities are here and available to you. It just depends on what you're paying attention to. Which world you choose in each moment, for your best benefit.
Each has utility if used together collaboratively with your consciousness circling between both in order to support yourself.
Benefits of dual-worlds practice
With practice, you can develop the ability to hold space for and flip back and forth between this state of complete stress and the world of zero stress as needed.
So that at any point in the process of processing strain, you can lay your stress down when it's threatening to get so big that it halts you in your tracks.
You can pick back up again when you've returned to a homeostatic state of calm, self-stability, re-engaging with some of your stress and calming yourself as you need to.
You can also get entirely into your stress world and stress reactions if you are someone who uses this survival-based overdrive mode to get shit done, as we say.
From there, you can walk yourself back out and reintroduce the world of detached, disassociated relaxation when you feel your to-do list has been shortened enough for yourself to resettle.
This capacity to hold both worlds, both states, to tune in and out of your stress, to recognize these oppositional realities that are available to you...
Enables you to feel your stress, to make sense of it, to derive solutions from it, and use it for your own real life motivation to behaviorally follow through on important tasks, rather than being too flattened or freaked out by your stress.
This stress becomes not necessarily a friend, but an ally that you can work with.
We can't deny that first, before hands are shaken with your stress, having a healthy relationship with it as you encounter your body, as you reconnect with yourself is scary and might remind you of why you unconsciously prefer self abandonment.
It can go from zero to a thousand if stress is dealt with unconsciously.
And also, it's important to realize that having control over this super powerful stress state and super calming detachment condition can become a superpower of yours.
It allows you to deal with things that others cannot touch due to your extreme adaptations.
With all of that in mind, work on breathing through tiny doses of stress acknowledgement.
Visualize holding a stress reality and your preferred coping reality in each of two separate hands or each of two separate rib cages if that helps you more.
And learn to tap into each condition while holding both as viable truths and realities.
The overwhelming strain and the sense of self-protective disassociation which blocks out all of the stress.
They both exist.
You can learn to use each state for your best benefit, pumping up your system when you need some get going chemicals and slowing down your nervous system when you've had enough of an epinephrine motivational drip.
With practice, as you get acquainted with stress, you'll get more skilled at identifying what's enough for now and how to slowly back away, how to care for you in the face of stress...
You'll learn to exist peacefully with stress by setting internal and external boundaries for yourself, allowing both worlds to exist, both states of mind, so that you can deal with what's challenging you in physical reality.
While you successfully begin recognizing when you have had enough based on time, sensation, and cognitive change, you'll begin to notice these things.
You'll begin to set rules for yourself to keep you safe while feeling the strain.
And once you have that sensation or that thought pattern locked into memory as an important target, you won't let yourself trounce upon your own boundaries into overcooked territory when you notice those things taking place.
You can slowly back away from the stress and return to a place of safety. In other words, you will install a safety fort around yourself and allow stress to permeate that barrier only on your command as it benefits you.
You'll learn to feel safe even with stress.
Stress summary
Remember that stress does have a time and a place.
There is nothing inherently dangerous about it. Stress has a biological function and that's getting your ass moving.
It is here for your own good, for your progress, for your usage... If you learn to tap into it and mobilize it carefully with measured exposure, and learn to set it down when you need to.
You'll be able to navigate the challenges that you face in the real world and even within your self.
And ideally, you'll be able to do so without leaving the planet completely or uncontrollably and then finding that you have a real goddamn mess to mop up the next time that you drop back into yourself, your haunted, abandoned building; the core that you have left empty and unattended.
Remember, "breathe through the stress, breathe through the pain."
Remember that you are safe to sit with your stress if yourself is there to oversee it.
And remember, as long as you have yourself to resource your brain and your body collaboratively to support yourself through to process and to utilize stress, transitioning from internal reality to internal reality, from utter stress to absolutely no stress as necessary so that you are never overwhelmed, you will succeed.
Even in difficult times, you can find yourself, you can feel yourself, you can choose which world you need to live in,
You can find your way back home to you with maybe just a tiny bit of stress waiting when you get there.
But it will be nothing that you can't experience, decipher, and use for your own good once you've started practicing being with yourself, being with your stress, and flipping your attention between the worlds as needed.
Breathe through the stress and breathe through the pain.
Say it aloud as you need to.
It's demonstrative of living in an embodied physical reality to have stress, not a nightmare.
And with you on your own side, you will learn to survive the haunt.
This has been what you'll find re-entering your haunted self. Oh my God, it's STRESS.
