Choices about sexual partners. How do I work with this?
Call Tag: chest
In a previous Q&A on being triggered by watching the news you said to differentiate between new grief from the news and our own stored grief being released. I can’t tell when grief is from current, minor, sad things in my life or old unprocessed grief. I have tears, my chest and belly squeezes till I run out of air. I gasp and this repeats until it stops and then I’m numb. How can I tell if I’m just blowing up at minor things and never touching the old stuff?
I often experience overwhelming grief, shame, shutdown, or experience a feeling in the center of my chest like a vice grip clamping down in mid-conversation, and or in social situations. When this happens, it’s extremely difficult for me to attend or even get viable sentences out. Then I feel more shame for being unable to engage and enjoy, and it becomes a vicious cycle. If I’m not able to remove myself to take a quick break or reset, how do I manage this in the moment?
I’m having issues with identifying sensations, emotions, and feelings. Both when I’m dysregulated and when I’m doing the neurosensory exercises. I did think I was getting more regulated, but now feel I’ve gotten more dysregulated. Could you please suggest reasons for not being able to identify these? And how can I make progress? It feels like I’m just not getting it at all. I find I’m making guesses to what these sensations or feelings are, and then I later realize that that wasn’t right.
Yesterday I felt, again, into the trap of using my little regained energy and pushing through things without noticing my body. At the end of the day, I felt so hyper when I tried to sit down and get in touch with my body. I felt like fleeing and looking for distractions as the sensations were so uncomfortable. Tightness in the chest, throat, heart area. Having a history of physical and emotional abuse, I noticed that is how I usually go through every single day. Any recommendations to work with that?”
Let me see. Anything else here. Okay. And then someone else asked, “Every time I do this resistance exercise, I notice a tightness in the chest, throat, and mouth. Something I’ve been dealing with on a daily basis for over a decade. And the first time I did the exercise, the words that came to me were, I choke. How do I know that this is resistance I’m dealing with?”