Hi Vineeto, I didn’t even realise you had replied but now I came to write something and it was amazing how apropos what you wrote was.
I wanted to write because I am having somewhat of an epiphany right at the moment. Something really really significant - I can feel it is because all the tectonic plates are shifting in my brain. It’s not my usual experiencing, I’m feeling a big shift that’s causing big changes to my feeling experience as I write, even at this very moment [not so easy to describe in words but 1) a release of feeling good 2) feeling “unlocked” 3) nervous system relaxation 4) shifting of perception of the way things are]z
And it’s all happening because of investigation into one thing - safety.
So it’s very apt that you wrote the following, which I am now answering even though I didn’t know you had asked me this:
Vineeto: However, investigating the obstacles to feeling good is more looking for the reasons why you have those (sticky) negative feelings in the first place, in other words why you keep them. Is there a belief or moral/ dogma or other reason behind it? Are you defending a particular aspect of your identity?
Indeed - I am currently seeing through a huge internal belief framework around threat, stress and safety. Usually, me and this threat detection are one and the same - my sense of identity is wrapped up in it, with all the fears and panic and emotional shutdown that comes with it. For the last few years I’ve had a distinct sense of being “emotionally shutdown” or “numb”…almost like there is a heavy grey sky over every thing that happens. Of course I was “trying to feel good”, but it seemed as if the grey sky with its threatening thunder and bolts of lightning was making it impossible. As if you and Richard were asking me to look at that grey scary sky and call it a clear, blue one.
I have felt trapped by actualism, trapped by the real world, and trapped by my own brain/psyche - as I scrambled. All the time it felt the walls were closing in, that I didn’t have enough air, that I was stuck in a kind of pressure cooker - seemingly caused by the need to become free juxtaposed with my apparent inability to do so. The paradoxical nature of actualism itself (to be an illusory self dismantling itself) also felt so scary too, like something important I couldn’t mess up. My brain has been in absolute overdrive trying to figure it all out, find the right explanations (such as hypotheses about having various conditions whether autism or chronic fatigue or childhood trauma) and try to explain all the trouble.
It goes deeper than saying that the fear and panic there was a set of feelings I occasionally had. It would be more accurate to say that it has been my primary modus operandi. This neurotic, paranoid and fearful lens has been so engrained, and seemingly so encoded in the nervous system (appearing to be an actual survival strategy or survival response) that I was not able to see a possibility outside of it. I saw myself/the world like that and any thought or feeling I had seemed to fit itself into that overarching perception.
I even wonder if some of the PCEs I had actually exacerbated all of this too. It was a hypothesis of Richard at the time (that I may have been freaked out by the PCEs). Indeed I have had a sense of being so emotionally frozen - not suffering intense emotional extremes (depression, grief, euphoria etc) - but nevertheless suffering a kind of chronic shutdown state. So I clung to all the supposed actualism “rules” I’d memorised, along with various insights and pieces of advice from Richard, yourself and others, just trying to find a way to survive in my circumstances.
It’s so strange how something so loud and obvious (and obnoxious!:)) has escaped my awareness for so long. I think fear has had me totally in its grip, that I couldn’t see things clearly enough to disentangle myself from it.
How can I be so cunning as to evade my own fear? 
Now I see that everything I do, I do out of fear. And I think I am seeing there is something beyond it. Wow.