The Gimmick of Mindfulness

[LastLoveLetter]

My homework from my counselor for the week has been to practice mindfulness and meditation whenever I feel anxious, depressed or overwhelmed, combined with grounding techniques to manage Complex PTSD symptoms.

I have found this practice to be largely ineffective. While grounding tools have been somewhat useful, mindfulness has not been working for me. I understand "it takes practice", but I wonder if perhaps it simply is not as useful as professionals claim it to be, and perhaps unsuitable for complex trauma and chronic pain.

If I do a Body Scan where the objective is to notice any bodily sensations, this only heightens my awareness of my physical pain. The advice is to "neither cling onto or push away" the pain - to simply notice - but how is this possible for constant, chronic pain? Observing it does not somehow lessen it, it only makes it more obvious and pronounced. I can see this perhaps working for mild, temporary discomfort, but not for severe, long-term pain.

Similarly, I have been tasked to simply notice my thoughts, as though I am an observer from the outside looking in, not invested in these thoughts or caught up in them. This could be a useful practice in some circumstances, but it is extraordinarily difficult to be "objective" in the midst of thoughts, memories and flashbacks of past trauma. These aren't merely passing negative thoughts - they are awful events that actually happened to me and that inflicted indescribable suffering.

I cannot help but wonder if "mindfulness" is a bit of an over-hyped gimmick, which perhaps has its uses for those without serious mental health struggles and for regular, functioning people who would like to be "present" more, but not necessarily effective for complex physical and psychological conditions. Yet it seems to be a one size fits all recommendation for a plethora of difficulties.

Has anyone here found mindfulness and meditation genuinely useful? If so, what practices worked for you? I would be particularly interested to hear if anyone with similar difficulties (complex trauma, dissociative disorder, chronic pain and fatigue etc.) has benefited from these practices, or if they reached conclusions similar to my own.

To me, mindfulness appears to be a generic recommendation prescribed to those of us who are suicidal, in the same vein as going for a walk or calling a hotline. It feels like a hollow and empty practice for someone who is simply tired of trudging through life.

 

[GenesAndEnvironment]

Brain scans from meditators show an increase in the parts that sense/process the physical components of the pain (tingling, heat, whatever) and a decrease in the emotional parts of handling the pain (reacting/amplifying). So an increased awareness of the pain and its components along with decreased affect in relation to it.

I don't have the conditions but have done some meditation of my own where pain has been present and my experience lines up with the theory of it. Not a panacea or anything, and I personally think it's unreliable as a form of treatment. Whether we can enter into the mind-states that will reduce the emotional parts of pain or not is often a matter of chance, imo.

I have no expertise or sources, just guessing.

 

[FuneralCry]

In my opinion I feel like some problems are too complex and are not fixable and talking therapies will have no affect on helping them. I was suggested to do therapy last year relating to physical health problems, yet I felt that the suggestion was invalidating the suffering I was going through.

I just think that therapy harmfully suggests that the problem is the way you are viewing things, rather than the conditions that you have are debilitating you. I feel like for physical conditions sometimes a cure is needed and no amount of talking exercises can really help. It probably works for some people but I have had neurological problems my whole life so the way my brain is wired cannot be changed.

I just feel like personally any kind of forced exercise doesn't make me feel better but I instead feel comforted by stroking an animal for example little things like that. I find the whole mindfulness thing and how people preach about it to be an example of toxic positivity.

 

[Dr Iron Arc]

I'm a terrible person so mindfulness has never made any sense to me. Just comes across as fake positivity or people trying to feel better about themselves whereas for me, trying to be mindful only makes me feel worse about the genuine atrocities I've committed or thought of committing.

 

[Makko]

Like any other skill, meditation requires a longer period of practice before you can do it with efficacy. Impatience and a skeptical disposition will also prevent you from improving.

To clear up one common misunderstanding: mindfulness and meditation doesn't have to involve sitting on a rug in a lotus position. If anything, this is the most difficult way of getting into it. The easiest way to train your ability to meditate is during everyday rituals when your body is occupied but your mind is not.

I have severe disassociation and meditative techniques are the only thing that allow me to function as an adult. It's like constantly trying to catch a helium balloon and putting it on the ground until it starts to float away again. For example: I'm at the office working. My mind is concentrated on work. But when I go out of my room to get tea, my mind takes a pause. If I don't direct a force of will to meditate during the tea break, my mind will float away like a balloon and I won't be able to continue working when I'm back in my room, I'll be lost in a 2 hour daydream instead.

Meditation is a way to improve your daily function but it's not the best way to take your mind off pain. Daydreaming/disassociation is much better in my experience, but you need the faculties for it. This is why I go into a mindful state when I have to perform and go back to a disassociated state at all other times.

 

[DarkNearDeath]

It's part of their script in a one-sided assumption. It's always ineffective but they're paid to make such assumptions.

 

[Celerity]

Anything psychology offers is a gimmick, I'm sorry to say. I think the human race will die out before understand how our minds work.

 

[AnnonyBox]

100% this. I just gave up on another self help attempt involving mindfulness. It did nothing for me. I'm decently convinced that all the self help, meditation, and psych advice is not where I can find a cure to my suffering.

 

[Beachedwhale]

If meditation and therapy and exercise isn't working and medical conditions are ruled out people should safely experiment with psychedelics and MDMA. I am kicking myself for not having done this years ago before I fucked things up.

 

[motel rooms]

Similarly, I have been tasked to simply notice my thoughts, as though I am an observer from the outside looking in, not invested in these thoughts or caught up in them. This could be a useful practice in some circumstances, but it is extraordinarily difficult to be "objective" in the midst of thoughts, memories and flashbacks of past trauma. These aren't merely passing negative thoughts - they are awful events that actually happened to me and that inflicted indescribable suffering.

In cases as complicated as yours (or mine), mindfulness can probably work only if you're able to buy into Buddhism. You're supposed to believe that the terrible things that happened to you are just an irrelevant illusion because your ego is just a silly, irrelevant illusion - you don't really exist, you are not separate / distinguishable from the rest of the universe. Pain only hurts if your naive little mind is foolish enough to believe that pain hurts. You just have to teach that childish mind that pain is neither good nor bad, that it actually has no "flavor". Personally, I'd like to impale a wise Buddhist monk on my dick & tell him to let go of his egoistic illusion that I'm hurting him