Has anyone ever figured out a solution to the problem of intrusive cringe memories? This shit is torture and nothing I've tried has ever worked. It's starting to feel like walking down a minefield, I never know what random trivial thing will trigger a memory chain where I inevitably remember some embarrassing humiliating moment from the past. It kills my mood instantly and it makes me want to kill myself too. My self-esteem is obviously non-existent because how the fuck can I ever feel good about myself ever again? I'm also avoiding doing things in real life because it's just collecting more humiliation at this point. How do I make my brain shut the fuck up? How do I ascend and become post-cringe?
The cringe eventuall dies anon, I don't remember the last time I had an experience like that. Ur projecting your current anxiety onto the past.Nowadays when I think about how I must have creeped out my crush in school I just don't gaf anymore. Do whatever it takes to calm down now. Doing sports helps. I also take unhealthy amounts of theanine
>>34546375I brainwash myself into believing that it all happened in a dream and not irl. I intentionally blur the line between reality and my imagination so it becomes easy
>>34546375Never turn away from them or try to ignore them. Every time they pop up, remind yourself that you ought to be thankful that it happened in the past so that it won't have to happen in the future. Every one of those embarrassing memories is a lesson that protects you from future embarrassment. Gratitude is the key. Be genuinely glad that it's in the past, that you learned, that you know what to avoid in the future. If you meet those memories with gratitude, they'll stop bothering you and eventually go away.
Yeah, you let them pass through you and experience the embarassment without fighting to avoid it. That's the trick to it
>>34546375I used to get those cringe-attacks regularly, they used to torment me everytime I tried to sleep or whenever I sat in silence without blasting my eaedrums with music.self acceptance is the way.avoid suppressing emotions, it seems to make anxiety and shame worse.don't fight the negative thoughts, simply acknowledge them and don't give them space, rather than burying them or arguing with them.surround yourself with positive and wholesome influences, avoid things that leave a negative impression on the subconscious. if you absorb energy easily it has to come out somewhow, otherwise those negative spirals can cause emotional dysregulation in yourself or in others around you who may become confused by your emotional reactions, thinking you're reacting to them while you're actually reacting to your own narrative.
>>34546375The firewall you need to run every negative thought through is the Bible.ABC's of Salvation:To be safe for all eternity:A: Admit that you are a sinner, who violates the Will of God, and that you need a Saviour. Repent. Turn away from your sin and toward Jesus. (Matthew 4:17; Romans 2:4, 3:10, 6:23; Acts 3:19)B: Believe that Jesus Christ, Son of God & Messiah, died for your sins and rose again, and that He will come again, as prophesied and recorded in the Word of God. Trust in His finished work on the cross. (Romans 10:9-10; 1 Corinthians 15:1-4; Ephesians 2:8-9)C: Call on His name, ask Him to save you, and confess that He is Lord. (Romans 10:9-10, 10:13, 14:10-11; Philippians 2:10)Read the BibleSave your life.Locked In: How to Escape Your Prison (BY JONATHAN KLECK)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf5jXxf4gqw
>>34546375Almost every university psychology department in the world has done this experiment:They stage an embarrassing moment of some sort and then survey the witnesses.1/3 didn't notice it because they were involved in their own thoughts1/3 noticed it but then got back to their own thoughts1/3 noticed and laughed or cringedA week later they questioned the last third again, and almost none of them could remember the eventThe point is that the only person in the world who even remembers your embarrassing moments is you.
>>34546463I remember and it's driving me insane. As long as I have that painful emotional reaction, that's all that matters.
>>34546375Get your vitamins and minerals checked.Look up CBT Therapy
>>34546486>vitamins and minerals are responsible for embarrassing memoriesWe're reaching levels of irrational materialism that shouldn't even be possible.
>>34546486>CBTTried it, read several manuals, even the sister modalities REBT and DBT. None of it works because knowing a thought/emotion is "irrational" does very little against an reflexive and automatic emotional reaction. By the time you analyze it, the damage is already done.
>>34546498Emotions don't come out of thin air. They have a cause, and that cause is thought. It's not enough to just analyze those emotions when they show up, you have to change your root thoughts and judgements before the emotions show up. Daily meditation and introspection are necessary. I'm not that anon and not into CBT, for the record, I'm just speaking from personal experience. As an example, if you view death as a scary thing, then situations that remind you of death will always bring out a negative emotional response and no amount of analysis will chase that emotion away while that opinion on death persists. But if you sit down and introspect about death, and genuinely change your beliefs about death to the point where you no longer view it as a negative thing, then those emotional responses will cease to happen at all because they will have lost their cause, or origin.
>>34546375For me grounding works bestYou need to find a hand movement or smth to get you out of your headIn the past I would lightly knock on the top of my head, flick my forgead, boop my own nose (retarded ik), but now I just meow lolBut it does the tricks and pulls me outAnd then you try to think/focus on smth elseBut the part with disrupting the thought and coming back reality is the most imp one
>>34546525I've been introspecting my whole life. I've gone through that rabbit hole... trying to get behind the thoughts somehow, but there's nothing there, no "belief" or "judgement", it just hurts and I can't make it stop no matter what I do. I think the whole thing is just very simple and concrete, I perceive myself being humiliated and my body reacts, there's no time for me to intervene. If anything, I would love nothing more than to not care, yet the body is older than the mind and keeps me in check with these primitive mechanisms. Collect enough cringe memories and you're done, you pass some threshold of human decency and you can no longer respect yourself anymore.
>>34546375ForgiveYourself
>>34546596How?
>>34546588>I perceive myself being humiliatedThat's the belief. You can't perceive yourself being humiliated unless you believe that humiliation exists, that "yourself" exists, and that the situation did in fact humiliate you, and you can't feel a response to that unless you believe that humiliation is a bad thing. Each one of those premises can be addressed and disproven. You can do it, it just takes diligence and effort. And as a general rule, anyone who thinks "i've already done all of the introspecting so i don't need to do any more" could not have possibly even started introspecting in a meaningful way yet. It's by definition endless, there is no amount of meditation that could ever be enough and there's no limit to how much you can grow through it.
>>34546681It goes: perception -> reaction -> thoughts/beliefs. The feeling comes before I can even process the thing into language, so there's fundamentally no space for me to intervene in real-time. I've spent a long time observing this happen over and over, and any analysis or thinking or changing my beliefs happens post-hoc when it's already too late. This rumination afterwards doesn't really do anything, at best it's a distraction and I calm myself naturally as the image disappears from awareness. I don't think this is solvable on the level of language, it's much lower level. The humiliation circuit is probably very deeply ingrained in the homo sapiens, it's supposed to regulate social connections, so you can't really ignore it. Obviously I can tell myself it doesn't matter or whatever, but the psychological pain gets triggered anyway. The people that could just turn off that circuit didn't survive very long...
>>34546706>It goes: perception -> reaction -> thoughts/beliefsIt's a circle. Thoughts/beliefs loops back and impacts perception. You can see this with pretty much every other fear. Someone who's oblivious to which spiders are venomous and which ones aren't might have no reaction to a spider being near him. Someone who knows that he's right next to a black widow will immediately tense up without even having thought about it, because his pre-existing knowledge informs his perception and reaction. In the moment there's very little you can do, but the times in-between are when you can work on those thoughts and erode them with logical arguments. Don't wait until it comes for you to react, but instead spend a little time every day meditating on how nonsensical it is to regret past mistakes. For example, every past mistake is a mistake that won't show up again in the future. Mistakes are how we learn, and mistakes absolutely must happen. It wasn't a question of "if", it was a question of "when". You cannot know to avoid doing something until you've already done it and disliked the outcome. So every humiliation that's totally in the past is actually an infinite number of humiliations in the future that you successfully avoided, by remembering it and refusing to make the same mistake twice. That's just one of many, many arguments that can help. There's also the idea that your past self is quite literally a different person, there's the idea that you would have compassion if it were somebody else's embarrassment, and therefore you ought to have compassion for yourself, there's the idea that everyone has been through something similar, if not worse, and there are dozens of others you could discover given time. The key is that these arguments have to be true, and you have to allow yourself to follow the evidence to the very end and confirm them true without doubt. Adopt a broad scope, and don't get caught in feedback loops.
>>34546375Aspect of depression. The rumination. Doing the basic healthy daily routines correctly should make those memories bother you less.
bump
>>34546375yes. you consciously declare "i am NOT going to think about this anymore" and repeat until it goes away. as you reinforce that behavior over time it gets easier and works faster
>>34546588>no "belief" or "judgement", it just hurtsThe hurting IS the judgment. It only still hurts because you are still judging yourself for whatever happened. You perceive that you behaved poorly, that you could have done better, that you should have known better, etc. But understand this: you are always doing the best that you can at any given moment. After any experience, you may realize in hindsight that you could have acted differently, but you weren't aware of those choices at the time, otherwise you obviously would have chosen them! At the moment that it happened, you behaved the best way you could with the knowledge and the skills and the resources and the tools that you had available in that moment. Now you have become more aware, BECAUSE of what happened!, and thus you can act differently from now on.
SSRIs and Depakote
Improving your self-talk and self-esteem generally (it takes ages just keep at it)
