Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes
– Carl Jung
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
― Michel de Montaigne
I look inside me: I have no business but with myself; I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself. Others...they always go forward; as for me, I roll about in myself.
— Michael Montaigne
Difference between interoception and introspection
To truly get the emotion processing ("digestion" and "discharge") job done, one has to interocept to feel / sense / experience their emotional sensations
Introspection -- which is looking inward at verbal thinking and past behavior is useful. But it is too easily hijacked by our counterproductive defense mechanisms to be truly therapeutic or even reliably "safe"... very much as the critics of Freudian Psychoanalysis and other Psychodynamic psychotherapies have asserted for about 40 years now.
And it is soooo simple: All one has to do is be willing to consciously sense the emotional feelings and sensations for a few seconds, let go, then a few seconds more, let go, then a few seconds more, etc., to cause that "digestion" and "discharge" to happen. (One may not get it all "out" in one session, but over time, the stored neural energy that drives the feelings and sensations is increasingly depleted.)
While mindfulness-based, consciousness re-raisers to yank one back up out of the "invisible" box / frame / trance / paradigm of thinking about the trauma is not the same as re-experiencing the trauma, it is useful. Because thinking about the trauma not only fails to "get the job done," it further densifies the "fire-together > wire-together" neural circuitry of the traumatic memories. (And we sure as hell don't want that.) Even if one cannot go all the way into repeated interoception yet, using mindfulness to "back out" of the introspective feedback looping is better than staying in it, for sure.
In my experience, asking "Why?" and utilizing introspection is highly valuable to gain insight into having been conditioned, instructed, socialized and normalized to think, feel and act in certain ways (including Learned Helplessness & the Victim Identity... and to dis-I-dentify with such conditioning. But asking "How?" with the use of interoception is what bleeds off the neuroemotional energy that propels the cognitive-emotional-behavioral recycling.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/comments/7bq34c/interoception_vs_introspection/