so long, and thanks for all the fish

This is literally a DBT skill. I remember in therapy thanking maladaptive behaviors for their service when they had been useful and then telling them they're no longer needed

(this post, to be exact)

and I am being fully 100% serious when I tell you that this exact technique helped me completely kill one of my recurring nightmares dead in the water. it was in EMDR therapy and required some processing around it, but I literally imagined Samus Aran killing one of my nightmares and I have not had that dream again in the 6ish weeks since that day.

we hear a lot about maladaptive daydreaming, a phenomenon where someone's physical life in reality is so painful for them to deal with that they retreat into an invented fantasy world rather than stay present with the pain. this can be a dangerous habit if just because it doesn't help you actually resolve any of your life problems, only escape from them. that is not what I'm describing above.

this was a situation where my own traumatic memories and experiences were manifesting in my mind as a still-present threat, even though physically and realistically I am now completely safe from the situation that caused my trauma. part of trauma processing is resilience, or the ability to engage with your traumatic thought processes and situations that trigger them without having a strong reaction to them. and as it turns out: when the problem is coming from inside your own head, it's a perfectly valid and reasonable defense to imagine your own superhero beside you helping to fight that problem off.

so when I was having recurring nightmares where an unseen ferocious monster was chasing me through twisting hallways and doors that felt too heavy to shut, my therapist told me to put myself in that nightmare space along with one or more of my "protectors." I had a conscious mental image¹ of Samus aiming her arm cannon at my nightmare monster, shooting one well-placed super missile between its eyes, and then turning silently towards me and giving me a thumbs up as it fell to the ground. over one session of EMDR processing, my brain Samus watched my back and helped me fight off the demons, and like I said: I have not had that nightmare again since.

as we were processing, I came to understand the exact nature of this nightmare, what the monster and its lair represented, and how to fight it off if it ever tried to return again. these are arguably the "real" reasons that I haven't had that particular type of nightmare again, but I cannot stress how important it was (and how much better and more powerful I felt afterwards) when I imagined someone much stronger than me² helping to fight off those demons. this is a GOOD therapy technique and can really help give you some confidence when you know it's your own brain fighting with you.

1. ymmv here tbh; I have VERY strong visualization skills and can picture things with vivid detail in my mind's eye. but even if you can't visualize what it looks like, imagining what it might FEEL like to have an ally standing by you can still be really helpful.

2. my therapist tells me that one of the more common characters for people to imagine protecting them is Link from the Legend of Zelda series. I just think this is neat, especially in the context of Link being a hero of courage specifically.

Nothing Doing no. 7

but the good thing about that is that I've been keeping busy and healthy offline, and engaging in important family matters during that time