5 Wants + Shadow work metacognition
Apr. 20th, 2025 06:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flamingsword5 Wants + underlying Unmet Needs:
• I want to not be sick = I really need to be healthy as in not-chronically-ill, and I can’t have that.
• I want candy - but not the candy that I have with me. I want sugar to stop doing fucked up stuff to my inflammation markers so I can have regular candy again. Pastries. Fruit. Jelly. Ice cream. Soda. Frou frou coffee concoctions. = I need comforting things to eat, that are cheap and plentiful and not terrible for me, and I can’t have them.
• I want to see Ghost and the kitties, even though he is not ready. = I need people to reflect my resilience and rapid negative cognition processing back at me, but other folk don’t bounce back that fast, and Ghost doesn’t process negative feelings, afaict. He mostly seems to suffer beside them and never be vulnerable enough to feel them enough to make them go away.
• _img src="guillotine.jpg"_ = I need Texas to be safe for my people to live in. I need to help make the whole world safe for people like us to exist in without pointless bigotry. And I can’t have that.
• I want my feet to be warm and comfortable = I need to not be in chronic pain, but we don’t know how to fix that yet, so I can’t have it.
In shadow work news, either I’m really good at sliding sideways around things that make me uncomfortable, or the people who wrote the Shadow work prompts I’ve been using are way too fucking neurotypical for the way they frame things to be helpful for me. Like, the last prompts implied that I should rate my loved ones on a hierarchy? Which does make me uncomfortable, but for autism-type “my brain doesn’t do that” reasons and not “this is a part of yourself that your past has taught you to disavow” type reasons. I may need to go get a library card and check out some print media on the subject, or just start doing a bunch more thinking about the questions and figuring out whether they can even be helpful or if I need to rewrite them the way I rewrote so much of the cisheteropatriarchy out of the CBT workbook prompts here.
• I want to not be sick = I really need to be healthy as in not-chronically-ill, and I can’t have that.
• I want candy - but not the candy that I have with me. I want sugar to stop doing fucked up stuff to my inflammation markers so I can have regular candy again. Pastries. Fruit. Jelly. Ice cream. Soda. Frou frou coffee concoctions. = I need comforting things to eat, that are cheap and plentiful and not terrible for me, and I can’t have them.
• I want to see Ghost and the kitties, even though he is not ready. = I need people to reflect my resilience and rapid negative cognition processing back at me, but other folk don’t bounce back that fast, and Ghost doesn’t process negative feelings, afaict. He mostly seems to suffer beside them and never be vulnerable enough to feel them enough to make them go away.
• _img src="guillotine.jpg"_ = I need Texas to be safe for my people to live in. I need to help make the whole world safe for people like us to exist in without pointless bigotry. And I can’t have that.
• I want my feet to be warm and comfortable = I need to not be in chronic pain, but we don’t know how to fix that yet, so I can’t have it.
In shadow work news, either I’m really good at sliding sideways around things that make me uncomfortable, or the people who wrote the Shadow work prompts I’ve been using are way too fucking neurotypical for the way they frame things to be helpful for me. Like, the last prompts implied that I should rate my loved ones on a hierarchy? Which does make me uncomfortable, but for autism-type “my brain doesn’t do that” reasons and not “this is a part of yourself that your past has taught you to disavow” type reasons. I may need to go get a library card and check out some print media on the subject, or just start doing a bunch more thinking about the questions and figuring out whether they can even be helpful or if I need to rewrite them the way I rewrote so much of the cisheteropatriarchy out of the CBT workbook prompts here.