I get to meet some SG1 cast at a con soon!
I started doing character portrait paintovers for autographs last time I went cos that was during the SAG-AFTRA strike and there was some confusion about if they’d have headshots to sign so I made art for them to sign instead and realized I liked doing that more anyway!
1822-1826 Pelerine (by unknown maker, England)
peacock feathers, pheasant feathers, parrot feathers, white marabou feathers; feathers sewn individually to coarse linen backing
(FIDM Museum & Galleries)
the key idea of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is that "thoughts cause feelings" but upon reflecting on it, I realized that all the successful skills I developed for emotional regulation and coping assume the exact opposite: that feelings cause thoughts
My reason for my opinion is practical: "Thoughts cause feelings" made my situation worse, whereas "feelings cause thoughts" allowed me to make a huge amount of progress.
The cognitive behavioral therapy workbook says that people have "automatic thoughts" like "I am a failure" "this is awful" "this is terrifying" that cause them to feel negative emotions, but closely observing my own mind, I realized that these types of thoughts emerged when there was something wrong physiologically.
For example, when I was trying to do something difficult while hungry, I would have very angry and hateful thoughts and would be saying to myself, "This is terrible! I hate this! I fail at everything I try to do!" When I was tired and overstimulated, I would be more likely to have thoughts like "This sucks...I need to get out of here...I hate this place..."
I have found that these "negative thoughts" are shockingly reliable indicators of when my body needs something, whether a break, a snack, some quiet time, something fun to do, a shower, a walk, or something else. I got to the point where if i was doing something and I got to the point where i was thinking "I fail at everything I try to do!" I would stop and evaluate my emotional state. What feeling was the thought expressing?
I found it incredibly helpful to do the opposite of what the cognitive behavioral therapy book suggests and sink down into the pre-verbal level of the thought, exploring how it felt in my body, to learn what animal-self instinct it was coming from.
What did my animal-self want to do? Bite? Run? Hide? Burrow into a dark, enclosed den? Find something to eat? Roam? Play? I understood emotions to ultimately be instincts that promoted survival behaviors.
If the Animal-self feels angry and wants to lash out and bitebitebitebite, that means Animal-self is in a state where aggressive behavior is more likely. The survival purpose of aggressive behavior in an animal could be to defend territory, to protect resources, or to assert oneself against dominance behaviors by conspecifics.
Therefore, to cope with the angry emotion, I ensure that my survival needs are met and engage in an appropriate survival behavior: eat (so Animal-self feels more secure in terms of resources) go for a walk (so Animal-self has plenty of space and feels less trapped) take some alone time (so Animal-self feels that she can defend her own territory) complain to a friend (so the tension of intraspecific aggression and dominance displays is defused)
This has helped me SO much more than the cognitive behavioral stuff ever did.
