So the upside of emotional integration: few or no blockages, awareness of what you are feeling, ability to act on it with crystal clarity.
Downside (and probable utility of stuff like dissociation): this sometimes sucks and is very uncomfortable.
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I get better and better at avoiding lingering harm from feelings that haven't been felt, things not acted on that should have been & emotional confusion.
It doesn't come without its fair share of "wow, there is pain" pulsating really strongly when there *is* pain, though.
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If this was a year ago, I'd be talking about how practices like meditation can crack open a door to some really unsavoury buried emotions.
More and more I find that door is just jammed open. Things rarely fester, but they do hurt. Sometimes a lot.
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Someone you care about said something devastatingly painful? No walls, no boundaries. Just hurt. It passes, but you feel it.
So that is one kind of freedom. No clenched shoulders and passive aggression for days or weeks or years. Just what is there, when it's there.
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But you can probably see why this on its own isn't a great solution for people who have Good Reason to dissociate throughout their day.
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I sometimes think my ADHD (and, you know, lack of really intense trauma) helped me out here. You can't quite to connect to the importance of times other than now, so you feel your feelings now and quite hard, and soon they will be gone and you'll feel something else.
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I have to feel something deeply and very often before it begins to leave emotional residue.
(I mean, the meditation and general efforts towards self awareness help too)
I have two close friends who dissociate and - yes. You can completely see why that happens.
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Yeah. People get blamed a lot for dissociating, but it's very much a survival strategy. Most people are really quite dissociated.
Often the ones doing the blaming are doing that because *they* are dissociating around something else.
Low-level PTSD seems pretty common.
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So it's interesting, it seems like you can really pull a number of ways with anything. Humans are pretty complex, in the technical sense.
Turning one dial can do a lot more than just adjust that particular value.
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