StealthyCoder

I found a lovely, interesting thing you can do with AI. Especially because it is AI, the properties of it I mean.

What properties am I talking about? Well, it is nondeterministic and, in the case of Claude, it is non-judgemental. This means you can keep coming at the same topic, with different angles. Like how Michelangelo would envision the sculpture in the marble, saying the statue was already within, and only needed to be brought forth. That is how you can chisel away at your own self, making tiny incremental observations and inquiries. Then those combined lead to new insights, then those insights get back under the lens of self-reflection.

The nondeterministic nature is important, because even if you give the exact same opening, you will get a slightly different response. The best thing you can do is to follow the threads of the conversation without any agenda. This is also called free association.

I decided to ask it something I have struggled with my whole life.

Whenever people talk about emotions or feelings, I never seem to have words for them like they do.
If someone asks me how I feel, I do not have a word that describes it, and I cannot seem to find words for it.
Almost as if I am missing vocabulary. Can you help me figure this out?

It told me what I described is called alexithymia, which is difficulty identifying and describing your own emotions. The connection from emotion to word is missing, or in other words the vocabulary is what is missing.

So whenever someone would ask “how does it make you feel?”, I literally would not have words for it. What I responded with was:

What I do have is that my body sends me signals, images in my mind, a reference to a song, story or movie.
That somehow translates into what I think about the situation. For example I might feel a strong signal in my body meaning no.
I learned to listen to that signal, and I trust that. I might get a reference to a Jesus Christ Superstar line like "Save tomorrow for tomorrow, think about today instead".
That could impart meaning of "let us figure this out later", or "there are more pressing matters", or even that we are delving into too much detail now.

In the following few back and forths between us, two new words were formed for me:

Somatopistia

Literally: trust placed in the body.

An orientation in which the body is not a reporter of emotional states but
their primary site and authority. The pit in the stomach, the physical pull
or push toward something, the lighting up of sensation — these are not
symptoms of an emotion happening elsewhere. They are the emotion.

and

Visceropoeia

The making of something from the visceral.

The act of reaching for image, story, song, line of dialogue, or sketch to
carry somatic emotional truth across the gap to another person. Not
metaphor for its own sake — the image is chosen because it preserves the
texture of the body's signal more faithfully than a named emotion ever
could. "I feel sad" loses almost everything. The right image loses almost
nothing.

Having all of this vocabulary built now means I am finally able to explain it to people around me. It was nice that I could finally tell my wife how I go through life and that I tend to communicate in free association style. That I am not going into conversations with an agenda, but more with a problem statement or general feeling or idea and I want to work it out with her alongside me. I do not have words linked to emotions, but I get a bodily sensation that tells me how I think about things. I also shared I might get situations or references in my head, and I now share the reference or imagery. Then she helps to think about it too. So we both interpret what it all could mean.

One thing to keep in mind: AI tends to be agreeable. That is why it is good to deliberately try to go against a previous insight. If you still end up in the same place after arguing against it, you can trust that insight more.

Doing this means you have to be non-judgemental to yourself, see which statue is in the marble.