Over Thinker/Under Feeler
A shift in perspective.
I have always been an overthinker.
I thought it was just the way I was. The way I was wired.
My overthinking is fuelled by fear. Fear of what others will think of me. Fear of what might happen if I haven’t got a plan A, B or C. Fear of just about anything. It’s something I developed at a young age for a few different reasons, which I have spoken about at length in previous blogs, but the short version is I have insecure attachment, abandonment, issues, ADHD, and I have a mild amount of ASD.
I was resigned to the idea that this was my lot. This is how things were going to be for me forever. I didn’t think I’d be able to change the way my brain worked in any way and that I’d just have to find better ways to live with it.
When I got sober, naively, I thought all my anxieties, and other mental health issues for that matter, would simply drift away. After all, I was doing my part. It was only fair for my brain to do its share of the heavy lifting.
The other day, I read something that said, “Overthinking is underfeeling”, and it blew my head off my neck.
It makes perfect sense… to me anyway.
We only have so much mental bandwidth, and if I’m spending a solid majority of mine on overthinking, I’m not going to have much left to feel my feelings.
For a long time, I have found myself frustrated that I have a perfectly sound understanding of a lot of the psychological practices that I read about or discuss with my psychologist, but my sticking point has been finding practical and tangible tools to use to help me to feel and process my feelings.
Why couldn’t my psychologist just tell me that if I walk out and do A and B, I will get an equal and relatively measurable improvement in return? Well, because she’s not an idiot and it doesn’t work like that. I was the idiot.
I knew that I was doing a lot of great things to help me manage my mental health and sobriety, but I also knew that I had been lacking genuine community since we relocated to the coast 21 months ago. In recent months, my anxiety and ADHD symptoms alike have dissipated significantly. The only thing I can attribute that to is immersing myself in a community of other sober people.
It’s been a dramatic psychic shift, and for the first time in my life, I am feeling a space between a stimulus and my response. I now can stop, think about what someone has said, think about what I am going to say before I say it, and then speak with much less risk of embarrassing myself or sounding like a fucking idiot. I’m far less irritable, more compassionate, more understanding, and I’m not getting triggered by dumb shit that doesn’t fucking matter. For the first time in my adult life, my brain has slowed, the fuck, down. I’m more present than ever, and I’m starting to feel like the truest version of myself I have since I was a teenager.
But why?
Anyone reading this from a fellowship will probably get pissed off that I’m doing this because you’re not supposed to try to figure this shit out, rather just try that when you do the work, you’ll get the reward you need and not the one you want, but I can’t help myself. I think I’m onto something here.
As a child, I conditioned myself not to feel. For whatever reason, I learned that feeling feelings was a bad thing and it was something that I shouldn’t do. Of course, this is wrong and fucking stupid, but it happened and here we are.
But when you have all of this mental bandwidth to use up, and you don’t want to feel your feelings or even think about them, what the fuck are you going to use it up on? You guessed it, thinking about dumb shit you don’t need to worry about. Allocating more mental energy than required to each task and analysing every fucking thing you have ever done or plan on doing, all the while neglecting the feelings that while you’re not dealing with are slowly but surely piling up in a back corner of your brain waiting for to shit all over you in a moment of vulnerability.
Because I never developed a coping mechanism to handle these feelings when they popped up, I tried to ignore them, and when that didn’t work, I would distract myself from them. Initially with food and later on drugs and alcohol. The problem is that feelings don’t just stop. They keep coming. For me, they built up, and over time, I required more food, drugs, and alcohol to keep pushing them away. If a bucket is slowly filling with water and the goal is to use a cup to scoop the water out at a rate quick enough to prevent the water from overflowing, I didn’t get the memo. The goal was to help drain the water out, but I was adding a cup of water each time rather than taking one away.
So, what is the link between my newfound community and my newfound ability to feel and process feelings?
I think it’s because, after years of feeling like the odd one out, I have finally found a community of people who are just like me. A community that not only puts up with people talking about how they feel, but it’s the literal purpose of the community. You gather in a group, in person or virtually, and talk openly and honestly about how you feel. Vulnerability is encouraged and supported. You are encouraged to share your guilt, shame and remorse in a room full of people who understand you and don’t judge you because most of them have felt the exact same way. They make you feel that not only is it okay to have those feelings, but it’s okay and important to share them and get them off your chest. And it feels fucking amazing.
At the end of each meeting, conversation, or period where the chat group has been overly active, I always walk away from the experience in a better state of mind than what I entered. Even on days when I don’t want to go or have been telling myself I can’t be bothered.
In AA, they say that the program is a program of action, not a program of thinking. I think that’s where I was getting it wrong. I was trying to think about my feelings rather than feel them. I was trying to understand what caused them physiologically and how I could prevent them from presenting themselves or reducing the severity of their impact because I literally didn’t know how to feel them. It was as though that mechanism in me was broken.
What they say about action is true. Since I have been getting off my ass and being an active member of the community, all things in my life are just better.
As I’ve said before, it’s not thanks to AA, one particular WhatsApp chat group, one or two close friends, my psychologist, or whatever the fuck else. The combination of all these things results in me immersing myself in a community of like-minded people who are all working towards the same goal. They make me feel like it’s safe and okay to be me for the first time ever.
In a short period of time, I have come to realise that I was never an overthinker and that it certainly isn’t a trait that I was born with or a trait that I am stuck with. It’s only taken a slight change in how and where I spend some of my spare time to show me that.
I conditioned myself to be an under feeler, which is not someone who feels people under the table, but someone who never developed the ability to feel their feelings because they were conditioned to think they shouldn’t or that it was a bad thing to do.
Whatever the case, the greatest revelation from all of this is that when I catch myself overthinking, I can remind myself that I’m not allowing myself to feel, and I can do something about that. Also, I am not destined to spend the rest of my life overthinking, under feeling and dealing with the negative crap associated with that, and you don’t have to either.
Find a community, keep pushing, figure out something that works for you, that adds value to your life, and then do the shit out of it. If it can happen to me, it can happen to you.
Cheers Wankers.
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“We only have so much mental bandwidth” - so true and it’s crazy how much of it we waste on crap