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ORIGINAL: gypsygrl

I'm curious, but do you feel the fact that you're dissociative plays into your insecurity?

I ask, because I have strong dissociative tendencies (no formal diagnosis).  I'm never sure exactly what's 'real' so I get real paranoid really fast and am very quick to "flip" things in a negative direction.  I also tend to be hypservigilant so not a whole lot gets by me and  I generally have lots to work with when I'm spinning scary stories inside my head.  These tendencies get worse the closer I am to someone (I tend to keep people at a distance which probably exacerbates my feelings of disconection.)  All this makes me insecure in a deep sense.

The "flipping" idea mentioned earlier is a great one, and  something I've learned to do, though I never had a name for it.  The way I see it is that I know, in a logical, sense that the world can't be as  scary/bad/awful as I sometimes perceive it to be, but I have no sense for the reality so there's a good as chance as any that something I perceive to be negative could actually be a positive.  So everytime I perceive a negative, I try to twist it into a positive and tell myself that things could go either way. I just try to remember that, and keep my cool/ refrain from acting, until I get to a point where I can decide whether somethings a positive, negative or neutral.  I guess I try to suspend judgement until further notice.

All this not withstanding, I still slide into backward spirals.  My Master's really good at bringing me out of them. :)

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ORIGINAL: Squeakers

breatheasone,

   I left you a message on the other side.

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for me it was never about feeling negitive about myself per se.

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ORIGINAL: gypsygrl

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for me it was never about feeling negitive about myself per se.

Oh, no.  I wasn't talking about feeling negative about myself in the sense of low-self esteem.  Its more about how I'd intuitively evaluate things/events/people and their potential impact on me; my perception of 'reality.'