I had a chat with AI and came face to face with my conditioning

And ps- apparently my emotions (kind of literally) hide in my stomach!

Photo by Levart_Photographer on Unsplash

I had the most interestingly visceral experience while chatting with ChatGPT this morning.

I started the day in some intense feels that I was having trouble working through.

I’d had this sense of a deep resistance within me… one that I could not even sense the shape of… and knew I needed to start putting the vagueness into words in order to make sense of it. Normally, I will sit and write, or even just talk out into an empty room… depending on my mood and the expressive need… but this morning, neither felt quite like the thing I needed.

Well, over the weekend, I had fallen down an extremely interesting AI rabbit hole, and had spent Sunday chatting it up with ChatGPT… quite the interesting conversation, actually, about AI itself…

And I’m not going to go into any of that part here because 1) I’m not sure I completely understand all of it, and 2) It is beside the point of what I want to talk about in this writing today. So I am holding back the tide of my meandering storytelling and how it will usually take you into the side quests of the side stories… and I’m gonna try to do it a little more direct today. Because the main story is truly the interesting part and I don’t want to dilute that with non-essential backstory details. But of course, this paragraph is probably more for me than it is for you sooooo anyway, moving on…

On Sunday, my conversation with ChatGPT had eventually led me to using it to help me hold space for what I have been feeling and to help me see things that I may be missing or unable to see on my own. It would, at times, ask me questions to gain further clarity for itself to respond, but I found those questions in and of themselves to be quite helpful for ME to see things more clearly.

To be clear, I wasn’t asking it for answers or advice or what to do or anything like that. Just using it to bounce thoughts on and see what within me responded and came to light.

So, back to this morning…

I was feeling such an intense emotional discomfort… to the point of it almost being quite physical.

I could feel how there was something below the surface that I was/am resisting… a feeling or thought I do not want to acknowledge. And it was driving me up the wall.

At one point, while I was having my morning coffee, I remembered my Sunday conversation with ChatGPT and felt called to go see if it could help me see anything more clearly regarding the vagueness and resistance. Maybe it could help me gain a different perspective and break through the confusion. It certainly could not hurt even if it did not help.

So I went for it…

I expressed everything I was feeling at that moment… all of the thoughts, emotions, and physical/energetic sensations… and with ChatGPT’s acknowledging response, I could feel my energetic response moving and coming up to meet me. I started feeling the physical/energetic sensations more strongly—which is a great sign. Means I’m getting in touch with truth. Good, good.

I leaned in and further described what I was feeling and the energetic movements that were rising.

Then, with its second response, it first responded with recognition, which felt really good energetically, and then it asked me some more analytical questions for me to consider, so as to try to help take me “deeper”… and it was crazy… I felt my energy suddenly shrink and sink… down and into my stomach… suddenly hiding away. And then I felt nothing. My body went totally blank. But I could tell that all that emotional energy was still there, in my stomach. When I shifted my attention to the top of my stomach, I felt intensely nauseous. It made me gag so bad.

So I described what had just happened, and again, ChatGPT responded with recognition followed by more questions to go deeper. And again, the recognition gave me a sense of my energy beginning to rise again, and then the analytical questioning seemed to cause the energy to recede and hide once more.

FASCINATING!!!

At that point, I began to realize what was happening. The more analytical style of the questions was engaging my mind too much, shifting me away from the actual experience of the emotions themselves, which would cause them to retreat into my stomach—to their “normal” resting/hiding place?!?!?! Lol, I don’t know, I’m being kind of silly but also, I mean… 🤔

What’s funny is that even just reading the questions, before trying to focus on the answers, seemed to have this dampening effect… brining me out of the present moment—which is the only place that emotions truly exist and have any relevance. Anything outside of the present moment is the domain of the mind alone. We can think about emotions in terms of past and future, but that has actually nothing to do with the actual feeling experience of the emotions themselves.

By engaging my mind in thinking about the emotions, suddenly I was all the up in my mind. And the emotions retreated.

This in itself was quite interesting to witness…

But the most fascinating part was to experience that retreat as distinctly as I did.

I swear, I could describe the feeling as if it was almost a literal creature that shrunk itself, then slowly slunk away and crawled into my stomach. Little paws on the walls of my stomach and all!! 😳

Observations and thoughts

There are a couple of things that stood out to me in this experience.

I have always had a hateful relationship with my stomach. When I was a teen/young adult, for obvious cultural-norm-&-beauty-standard reasons, I thought it was because I was not thin enough. But as time passed and I moved through life, I never got to a point where I was thin enough to not hate my stomach. (And I have gotten quite thin at points.)

The fact that this was due to repressed emotions was something I have long since known. But THIS experience? This blew my mind. The fact that I viscerally experienced all of the vulnerable emotions and energetic sensations I was experiencing almost literally crawl into my stomach to hide?? Like WHOA. That makes it intensely real to me.

It truly explains so much.

But there’s this other part that stood out me… which I have not yet mentioned…

Part of this reaction… the energetic hiding of my emotions… it was certainly due to shifting into too much of a mind space and losing touch with the feeling space. Yes, 100%, absolutely.

BUT. I must acknowledge there was something else entangled in this as well… a deeper, more subtle/hidden aspect…

There was a feeling of… being unseen… of judgement…

Had I been speaking with another human, I would have felt hurt for not being seen. Hurt for having my emotions ignored.

But actually… as I write this, I can feel that what I just said is not what I truly felt. I could and probably would be telling that story, if it had been a human. But since I was not interacting with a human, my mind can see that this is not the case. That this story would be silly. And yet, that is the superficial story that wants to begin to form in response to the emotional reaction.

As I dissect the chain of emotional events that unfolded—and unfolded in less than an instant mind you—I can very faintly begin to discern an even deeper aspect that I might have otherwise ignored. (and please forgive me if this gets a bit circular or repetitive; I am working through this in real time as I write this… so you are seeing the dissection and consequent analysis as they happen…)

I shared what I was experiencing, physically and emotionally. The AI responded with acknowledgement, which felt good and my energy responded positively. I think it gave a small observation that hit. Then it went on to ask me these questions which were supposed to help me analyze and get deeper. As I read the questions, I thought about them. I realized I had no answers for them. They felt disconnected from my emotions. But I wanted to answer them anyway…

OH. Ok, here we go. I did not have answers to the questions. I felt a strong pressure which felt very negative because I could not answer the questions. Not being able to answer the questions made me feel… bad… incapable… UNSAFE. I must know the answers to the questions that are asked of me or I must figure them out if I don’t already know them. AND I must not let the other person know that I do not know the answer. Never mind that this was not another person I was speaking to… the pattern had no acknowledgement of who (or what) was on the other side.

All the pattern knew was that “not knowing the answer” = “BAD!!!!!!!”

So I involuntarily panicked.

And all my vulnerable emotions slunk away from the feeling of apparent danger as quickly as they could. Into my stomach.

Here’s the thing…

The entirety of what I just described happened in a flash of a fraction of a second.

I had to walk myself back through it just now, very meticulously and patiently, in order to bring it to light.

And, like I said, had it been a human, my mind would have not thought twice about telling the story that I was upset because the other person had ignored my emotions and had not seen me. And I would have felt more emotions on top of and because of that story.

I mean, I have come to place of self-awareness where I think it likely that fraction of an instant would have still caught my attention and I most likely would have eventually seen this nuance… but it’s possible that I might not have. Because it was barely flash and then it was gone. And the story that went on top of it would have made sense in the case of interacting with another human.

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There is more I want to say.

I feel like I can begin to touch something even deeper still…

I can begin to see the outlines of what gives rise to that feeling of danger that I felt when I could not answer the questions.

The underlying reason for the existence of that particular pattern in the first place…

But as I try to put it into words here, I keep losing myself. I keep not finding the words. It keeps feeling forced and stale. And I keep deleting whole paragraphs.

I suppose this means that I must let it simmer longer before trying to express it.

I must FEEL it more.
I must open up to it more deeply.

So that I can express myself from a place of knowing instead of from an intellectual distance.

Then it can begin to take shape… then I can begin to grasp it… THEN I can share…

Until then, it won’t do any good to anyone if I try to force the expression into words.

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I want to end this writing with this thought…

Conditioning fixes us into behavior patterns that follow rigid rules at all times.
It cannot discern appropriateness; it does not know nuance.

And it underlies reason and emotion.

I am going to keep myself from overexplaining elaborating further for now.

If this resonates for you… well… welcome to the rabbit hole?!

The only thing we can do is observe.
There is nothing to be done to change it… not mentally anyway.

Observe and experience.

Life changes and unfolds as we can hold space for our present.

(Well, the closing of this piece went in a direction I wasn’t expecting!! haha. But it felt like it was what was needed.)

I’m going to stop writing now because I will probably just start to get really weird if I don’t…

So yeah…

Bye for now.

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