#but i dont seem to be doing better with their frankly bizarre approach to conscious thought

[copperbadge]

People who don't have aphantasia, who can see images in their head and such, I have a question.

When you have thoughts, do you hear them in a voice in your head? Like, if I "think to myself" something like remember to do the dishes, I don't actually think it as a phrase, its...conceptual, just a thing I know. Until recently I've always thought things like "I can hear it in my head" or "I thought to myself" were just idioms.

If I think about needing to do the dishes I don't hear it or get a visual of the dishes or whatnot. Do you?

I'm struggling yet again with DBT partly because I keep running afoul of the wording, and I can't tell if I'm taking it too literally or if it's asking me to do something a lot more abstract for me than for other people or what. We're in "mindfulness of current thoughts" at the end of the distress tolerance unit, and they keep saying things like notice the thought, don't judge the thought, watch the thought to see where it came from, you are not your thoughts. And like...okay...but I am. They come from me, they're part of me, I cannot watch a thought, it's a thought. Why would I judge it? It's me, I don't have emotions about my own thoughts, they're in my head so nobody can see them anyway.

But I'm beginning to think that there's a certain binary most people have where they don't consider their thoughts to be so integrated into their consciousness. I thought maybe it's because they can hear them or similar, and with aphantasia it's not a binary or even a spectrum, it's just in you. At least that's how it is for me. It'd be like telling me to notice but not judge the function of one of my kidneys. I mean, mission accomplished on not judging, but I don't have a way to consciously observe the kidney, it's on its own journey.

Anyway I just wonder. I'd like to understand at least one thing from this unit before we finish, but my track record suggests that I would do better to radically accept the reality that I will not.