Reddit mentions of Self-Therapy: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Wholeness and Healing Your Inner Child Using IFS, A New, Cutting-Edge Psychotherapy

The fact that you're able to see clearly the trajectory of what happened to you is amazing.

Your parents, in their immaturity, robbed you of your rightful childhood course of development. This is called parentification. When a child is forced to be adult before their time, they develop a strong defensive false self: this means you had to dis-identify with your true self (who was a child at the time, and had childhood dependency needs, which includes the vital need for play) and take on a protective facade/veneer of maturity. Threatening to kill you or your pets or cut up your belongings, etc. would add an existential urgency so that it would strengthen your need to cling to the defense and dis-identify with your true self. Over an extending period of time living under such a threat, it becomes very hard to let the facade/veneer down and let yourself be vulnerable again. Unfortunately, living in a defensive mode robs us of our vitality, motivation, and true course of development.

I would highly recommend looking into Internal Family Systems (IFS). There is an excellent self-help book by Jay Early based on this system called Self-Therapy that can help you apply the principles of this therapy to yourself. Working with a therapist to help soften the need to defend and heal the interpersonal wounds is also something I'd highly recommend. The work of psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott is particularly relevant to your experience, so I also recommend looking up his work, if you're curious and need validation.

> Emotions have their own distinctive feel to them, not quite a physical sensation, but close. It feels like the emotions are somehow above bodily sensations. That's my subjective experience of them. It's like the body is the earth, with the emotions being the grass growing on it. Or something.

> So I became aware of this sadness, not quite the same thing as the knot, but definitely linked to it, and I sat with it. I probed the knot for a while, trying to coax it into opening, releasing, while simultaneously using self talk. I realized after doing this for some time that what I was doing was sort of violent, so I backed off and tried a different approach that lead to a breakthrough.

> There was an impatience to the way I was relating to the sadness, I just wanted to get underneath it, move past it, have it purify itself away. Essentially, I didn't want to feel sad. I learned a while ago not to approach physical tension and pain like this. Why would the emotions, or anything else, for that matter, be different? To move through something so that it may pass is just as aversive as ignoring it. It creates yet more tension to have to deal with.

> So I changed my tone, the way I was speaking to it, the words I was speaking to it. I softened, relaxed emotionally (what a novel idea) and found myself feeling tender and vulnerable. I started to say things to the body like, "you've done a great job protecting me all these years by containing this sadness within you, but you don't have to any longer. It's okay to let go, I'm just going to lay here with you until you decide to open."

> It was a beautiful experience that led to some wonderful feelings of metta, karuna, and tenderness. The soft gushy stuff that is usually so foreign to me. This experience showed me in a direct way the power our thoughts can lend us. Hence the entire idea of Right Speech and Right Thought. I felt silly for never seeing this before.

If you haven't already done so, you may be interested in checking out Inner Relationship Focusing (1 2 3) and Internal Family Systems; what you describe here sounds very similar to them. They're basically detailed techniques for doing the kind of work you describe having done instinctively. (The "distinctive feel of an emotion" sounds like what Focusing usually calls a "felt sense".)

Yeah, sounds like you have very strong parts. You may want to check out the /r/Dissociation subreddit, as there are many folks there (though it's not super busy) who deal with different 'alters'. The IFS recommendation in the comments is also a good one. It's Internal Family Systems, and there are a number of books about it and a handy workbook that goes along with Jay's book (https://www.amazon.com/Self-Therapy-Step-Step-Cutting-Edge-Psychotherapy-ebook/dp/B00452V8EG)

Definitely bring this up with your therapist. I think it's cool that these parts of you see you as ready, that's great.

Re-posting because I edited to add a few thoughts and links, and wanted to make sure you got the update. Here it is in full:

Do you use a weighted blanket? I don't have your condition but do have Generalized Anxiety & PTSD. I've always felt better when I had weight on me, kind of like an infant feels better swaddled. Do you ever use that therapy for SPD?

Another thing you may want to look into is EMDR Therapy. Here's a website: http://www.emdr.com I'm new to this concept myself but I've heard it's very useful for PTSD/Anxiety/Trauma.

Finally, here's another new therapy I'd never heard of that I think will be useful to me for working out issues of self-protection / fight or flight, etc. I don't know how this works into the brain of someone with Autism, but it seems to be a great therapy approach for coping with many things in life. It's called IFS - Internal Family Systems therapy. Basically the idea is you have many different sub-personalities inside you that help you to cope and live your life. Some of the sub-personalities are called "exiles" - those are the parts within your and your body that have stored trauma. Exiles are very vulnerable and sensitive, so other parts of our personality gathers around to protect it. Those protectors can be assertive protectors (i.e. they can block memories, or put it in perspective, etc) and others are self-soothing protectors (i.e. they encourage us to self soothe through drinking or doing drugs or isolating, etc.)

Here's a link to a great book on the subject of IFS - just began working through this book myself: https://www.amazon.com/Self-Therapy-Step-Step-Cutting-Edge-Psychotherapy-ebook/dp/B00452V8EG?ie=UTF8&psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=nav_timeline_asin

All sound worth looking into. I'm sorry you had to go through that trauma as a child. I'd like to add that I too have anxiety attacks where I don't trust myself out in public. My first one had in NYC, which was really scary. I had to ask my brother to help me walk across the street. Like you my proprioception (great word btw! had to look it up!) was out of whack, it was less that I thought I'd deliberately walk into the busy street, more like I couldn't trust where my body was in relation to things.

Sounds like you've done lots of work and gone really far in your process. I hope you find a solution to your anxiety attacks, and please post an update when you have one! Good luck to you!

I got five licenses with my original purchase and I think I've maxed them out, but here is a link to the book:

https://www.amazon.com/Self-Therapy-Step-Step-Cutting-Edge-Psychotherapy-ebook-dp-B00452V8EG/dp/B00452V8EG/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1571173846

The kindle version is pretty affordable at 8.49, or you can buy the PDF with five licenses on their website for 9.99.