Twist your leg or arm and try to bend it in that twisted position. There is a moment when it feels especially uncomfortable. Not painful really, not even directly wrong, just not right. A bit scary too, as you are asking yourself "am I gonna twist my knee/elbow now", or imagining the cartilage being squeezed and maybe smashed, on the other hand you know that as long as you feel no pain everything should be still fine. But you have this strong urge to stop and go back to normal position.

I have been experiencing this feeling a lot after my knee surgery, when it had to be put back to the correct position. And I realised that this is exactly the feeling you get mentally when you try to change your emotional responses and behaviours. They say that it is impossible to change one's character or personality after certain age, but this is precisely what one has to do to recover from a personality disorder. And even though it feels not right, and often scary, I know that if I do it many enough times, it will eventually become normal and the default state.

I have learned to recognise this weird feeling and I am starting to use it as a guideline to know when I am working in the right direction. I use it as a metric. I have learned to separate the metric from the actual change. So sometimes I do not freak out as I would in a certain situation, at the same time I feel really uncomfortable. In the past this feeling uncomfortable could trigger a subsequent freakout, making the improvement irrelevant. But now I am able to recognise this uncomfortable feeling for what it is - the bending moment, which is when I am doing something that is out of my typical ways, but not necessarily wrong. Then I try to imagine the analogy to the knee bending and explain myself that even though it feels wrong, it is only unusual, and with enough many repetitions it will start feeling normal.

Changing your behavioural and emotional patterns is quite challenging in the end. It's like lifting yourself with your own arm. But I do see effects. I do not remember when I really freaked out last time. Okay, maybe it was at work but it lasted 1 hour. I cannot recall a freakout lasting more than 1 day when I would have to numb myself to sleep with alcohol. I cannot remember thinking about suicide recently. I feel I am just too busy and enjoying my life to waste time on such stuff. It has been taking so much time and energy from me.