How Self-Awareness Works to "Digest" Emotional Pain

Quoting Alan Watts in The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Memoir for an Age of Anxiety:

"Even in our most apparently self-conscious moments, the 'self' of which we are conscious is always some particular feeling or sensation -- of muscular tensions, of warmth or cold, of pain or irritation, of breath or of pulsing blood. There is never a sensation of what senses sensations, just as there is no meaning or possibility in the notion of smelling one's nose of kissing one's own lips.

"In times of happiness and pleasure, we are usually ready enough to be aware of the moment, and to let the experience be all. In such moments we 'forget ourselves,' and the mind makes no attempt to divide itself from itself, to be separate from experience. But with the arrival of pain, whether physical or emotional, whether actual or anticipated, the split begins...

"As soon as it becomes clear that 'I' cannot possibly escape the reality of the present, since 'I' is nothing more than what I know now, this inner turmoil must stop. No possibility remains but to be aware of the pain, fear, boredom, or grief in the same complete way that one is aware of pleasure. The human organism has the most wonderful powers of adaptation to both physical and psychological pain. But these can only come into full play when the pain is not being constantly restimulated by this inner effort to get away from it, to separate the 'I' from the feeling. The effort creates a state of tension in which the pain thrives. But when the tension ceases, the mind and body begin to absorb the pain..." (All italics mine.)

As just posted in an addition to Interoception vs. Introspection on Reddit's r/CPTSD.

But the medical explanation would be:

Douse the mid-brain with meditation >

reduce amygdalar stimulation >

reduce triggering of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis >

reduce secretion of cortiocotropin releasing factor >

reduce secretion of adrenocorticotropic hormone >

reduce secretion of adrenaline >

reduce the intensity of the general adaptation (fight / flight / freeze) response of the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system >

reduce imbalanced polyvagal stimulation >

reduce rebounding levels of cortisol in the brain >

reduce allostatic loading throughout all striated muscle tissue >

reduce STRESS on the immune system >

disempower the feedback loop between stress and the experience of AGITATION.

Nothing a $135K worth of med school with an emphasis on psychopharmacology won't teach a student who's paying attention. Or one could just read Joseph Wolpe's Life Without Fear: Anxiety and it's Cure, Hans Selye's Stress Without Distress, Herbert Benson's The Relaxation Response, and Bruce McEwen's The End of Stress as We Know It, Robert Sapolsky's Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, Stephen Porges's The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory, Pat Ogden's Trauma and the Body, Jiddu Krishnamurti's This Matter of Culture and Alan Watts's The Wisdom of Insecurity and Tao: The Watercourse Way.

This is how I do that with their considerable assistance.