We had an exercise today that involved turning our automatic thoughts and core beliefs into LORE. We made a lore iceberg out of all of it. Since it involved something I’ve got experience with (like using icebergs for story- and world- building), it was right up my alley. The way we used the sky for conscious awareness and the exposed tip of the iceberg for automatic thoughts, all the way down to the bottom-most depth of the iceberg itself, which is where the core beliefs are, filling everything out all the way down: our subconscious awareness in relation to our rules for living or assumptions about the world — even the standards we set for ourselves that don’t make sense, and our unconscious awareness in line with those core beliefs and the mental framework we create from those beliefs.
Then connecting the beliefs back up to the rules and standards we make, back up to our automatic thoughts and conscious awareness, and how at the very tip top of the iceberg is our behaviors. And that’s what people see from us. That’s what we see from ourselves. And the feedback loop is real. Bottom to top to bottom to top again.
And then, for all the gaming nerds out there, we made character sheets based on our icebergs! Since there’s eight of us, we all had to pick different races and classes and professions, and I got to be a half elf Oathbreaker Paladin.
Half-Elf represents the wealthier side of my family marrying into the lesser-preferred Drow. I did give myself blue skin and dark hair with red eyes to also pay homage to my beloved Dunmer from ESO.
I was worried about getting bard, because it’s just not me. But there is someone in class who just had to be the bard and trust me, it fits them perfectly across the board. We are here for it. But Oathbreaker really meant something to me (always has). The broken oath represents crushing my fealty to the remnants of my oath of people pleasing, and the aura I have now isn’t a reflection of how I’ve chosen to fall away, it’s a testament to my decision to willfully walk away from the pledge of perfection that I was forced to make.
If anyone plays WoW, we did get a gobbo priest in our group, too. And again, completely fitting. We had to make some adjustments to get it to work, but rules are made to be bent, especially in this case.
Our take-away for the weekend is creating backstories for our characters, and our only parameters is using the iceberg as a metric and getting them into the same location at a certain time. In this case, it’s a random cave on the side of an isolated and very large snow-covered mountain.
We did the weekly IPSRT check in, and I already talked about how not following the sleep aspect affected me this week. But nutritionally, I actually hit my goals. Which would explain why I’ve had so much energy — enough to be constantly twitching my feet when sitting — not nervously, but like an outlet for excess energy to be spent. I also lost 3lb and honestly all I’ve done was shift my caloric intake to match my caloric needs. I’ve very loosely followed macros, but at the end of it, I’ve just been making sure I get calories in.
So even though I had a really bad bout with negative self-talk (like super bad bout), I actually did okay. I did learn I was not the only person having stress attacks or similar. We were all reminded that this is technically the end of week two, and this is expected. It’s new, we’re learning to adjust and make room for skills and tools to help us mitigate those kinds of things in an environment that actually helps us do that since basic office-style therapy didn’t work as well. And they’re not failures — they’re a heads-up. They cannot be failures if it’s something we’re already used to doing.
My creative pursuit for the day is both for my safe space and something I did for my mom as soon as I got home.
I finally fixed her recliner and gave it a proper spot in my flat. Now she has a place to sit when she stops by, even if it’s in spirit. I miss her dearly. It’s still a little bland, but I have ideas for the space around it, and now I’m considering a rug for the floor. Her bible and glasses sit where she left them when she got up to leave the house, and her favorite shirt is still wrinkled from when she went to hospice and took it off to change into her gown. So in essence, aside from moving into the apartment, the recliner is exactly how she left it.
