What it’s Like to Live with PTSD

Originally posted in June 2015

It’s sunny and beautiful out, and I can’t bear it.  It’s a day to go out and enjoy the world, and I just want to hide.  Yesterday was so much easier, it was grey with drizzly rain.

Now I understand something about why I have such a hard time with beautiful days.  I thought that I “ought” to go out and enjoy the beauty, but I couldn’t because of some stupid narrow reason of my own, and I got angry at myself to not being able to do it.  Today I see that I did really want to go out and enjoy it, but it was just too painful because I was so dark inside. The darkness was not who I am or what I chose but how I was wounded.

After breakfast.  Walked Mocha (the name finally given to my new dog) around the loop.  Came back breathless and terrified.  This is called “getting triggered” by a bright beautiful day.  I can’t think of any reason why, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not triggered, it means that the reason is far back and buried in the non-verbal part of my psyche.

Sitting here looking out at my beautiful woods, I think of the survivors of Chernobyl looking at the forests they love but can never again go into because they are filled with radiation.

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Difficult Grief

Written after a session with Erica in April 2015, and posted at that time.

So what happened with Erica?  I told her about the pain of spring — the earth waking up and I’m still frozen.  Also told her I was really wanting a dog.  And the grief that I wasn’t able to take in how much Bella loved me until the end.  Here come the tears again.  I guess that’s big.  And Tiny was in grief too, when I went to write about it her grief was also that she didn’t know she was loved.  I guess I have a lot of grieving to do.

Bella is the dog who died in September 2013. “Tiny” is the part of me that I discovered and describe in Deep Work.

It took me awhile after the session to really get how sad I am that I wasn’t able to take in the love that was there for me.  I think this is only possible now that I’m starting to be able to see myself as lovable.  It makes me so so sad.  How different my life would have been.  But the first thing I learned from mother was that I wasn’t lovable.  I tried and tried to do the right thing to make her happy, but she was never happy with me.  Finally, the youngest part of myself, who needed to be aware of being loved in order to be aware of herself at all, had to split off and close herself up so nothing could get in.  Mother’s poisonous energy was too toxic for her to take in, so she had to block out everything.

I think Tiny must be that youngest part of myself, the first one who had to split off to protect herself. I realize I have too little understanding of the possible Attachment Disorders, though the one I am dealing with is where the attachment figure is a source of fear rather than comfort. Easy to imagine how much damage that does.

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From “First Memory” to Sacred Circle Dance

Written in Tuesday night writing group.    First memory

I remember skipping down a brick sidewalk and falling.  I think I was four years old.  We were in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  My father was back from the war — World War II — and going to Harvard Business School.  I fell and hurt my knee and started to cry.  Both parents got angry.  “You shouldn’t have been skipping around.”  “Stop crying you’re not that hurt.”  I learned that making a mistake was a terrible thing.  I should be very careful to get everything right.

That’s a pretty tough assignment.  Of course, I didn’t get praised for getting things right, I just got ignored.  But that was better than punishment.  Luckily for me, when I got to school I did well.  The things I did right were praised, and what I did wrong was corrected.  And the same thing wouldn’t be OK one day and unacceptable the next.

Still, the fear of doing things wrong has stayed with me all my life.

And what about things I’ve done right.  The best thing I did was build Neskaya, a piece of sacred architecture for movement arts that are also spiritual practices like Yoga, Martial Arts, and Sacred Circle Dance.  I discovered folk dance when I went to Europe after I graduated from Wellesley.  I did a bunch of Greek dances with Greek friends I met in Paris on New Year’s Eve.  It took me a while to find folk dance in this country, but when I bought a house in Brunswick Maine and settled down, I found that a folk dance group met on Wednesday night and I started going.  The first time I went, the teacher came in with a record under her arm — this was 1970 — and taught us a new dance — a very simple dance.  Three steps to the left and three in place.  She put on the record and it was bagpipes — my Scots and Irish ancestors rose up in my blood and I was on a moor in Scotland with a bonfire and a full moon rising.  Actually, the music was by a Breton named Alan Stivell who started the resurgence of Celtic music that long time ago.  I had never heard of Brittany — it’s part of France that sticks out parallel to Cornwall, and for years in history the Bretons and the Cornish was more connected to each other than to the English and French governments in London and Paris.

I moved to Franconia New Hampshire to get married and brought some tapes of my favorite dances.  I started teaching a small folk dance group.  Someone told me there was Sacred Circle Dance on the green at Danville for the Equinox, so I went and they were doing dances I already knew with a candle at the center

I notice that when I fell and hurt myself, my parents were angry, not comforting.  For a very long time I got angry at myself whenever I did something “wrong.”  Finally, I learned to be compassionate instead.  But it took a long time.

I say that “the same thing wouldn’t be OK one day and unacceptable the next.” That tells you something about my mother in particular

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Work with a Very Young Part

From my journal for October 8:

Reading my blog post for February  2015, “Deep Work,” work I did over quite a period of time, January 11 to February 14. It was an attempt to get in touch with a very young part of myself.  I wanted to help this very young part begin to feel safe and connected with me — my adult self.  I did a whole series of related drawings.  Reading it now, I am astonished at my persistence and willingness to feel a lot of pain.  This is what it takes to heal from early trauma.

In the pictures, the part first appears as a blob, perhaps spherical, a single cell, and then gradually morphs into a recognizable baby, which is then held and comforted by a pair of hands.

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Returning Someone to Themselves

I’m reading Tattoos on the Heart, subtitled The Power of Boundless Compassion.  The author, Father Greg Boyle, tells about his work with “homies” (kids from the gangs) in the worst section of L.A.  “Empowerment rests in returning folks to themselves, to the very truth of who they are.  Gang members (and everyone, to that matter) are surprised to discover that they are exactly what God had in mind when God made them.  To discover that God is too busy loving them to be disappointed is life changing.  But there is work to be done besides — to engage in attachment repair, healing, collating of resilience, and the largest task of all: to redefine who you are now in the world.  All these constitute the empowering work a homie must undertake to be free and clear.  This is no small endeavor.”  This is in the interview with Father Greg at the end of the book.

This work can’t happen in a vacuum, or be learned from a book.  It requires that there be a human being who can love you enough that your life can change in the ways that Father Greg describes.  Reading about these kids, whose parents were drug addicted, or abusive, or disappeared, or killed themselves, or all of the above, makes me feel ashamed.  After all, I grew up in wealth, my family were “upper class,” I went to an Ivy League college and graduated with honors — I could have had a lucrative career or married and had children.  Instead I stumbled around, trying to learn social skills, trying to find a man who would love me, having lots of painful and destructive relationships, more than one breakdown.  I thought I was a defective person and hoped therapy would fix me.  I’ve been in therapy almost all my life.  Certainly continuously for the last 20 years of my life.  My parents were alcoholics, and I didn’t learn how that damaged their children until I was 42.  I did not understand that I had been traumatized in infancy until I read Peter Levine’s book on trauma, Waking the Tiger, where he says that an infant can be traumatized by being left alone in a cold room.  p49  When I read the chapter on hypervigilance, I went into a hypervigilance spiral that I experienced as “terror through the roof.”  p155   In the book it warns you that if you are triggered by something in the book, stop reading and find a Somatic Experiencing practitioner.  So I did.

I’ve worked with Somatic Experiencing, with five different practitioners.  It helped a lot, and part of my healing was learning about the physiology of trauma.  Now I am working with a new therapist, who deals with both trauma and attachment issues, which means the core experience of attaching to your caretaker at the very beginning.  Without this, your life has no foundation.  So you stumble around, trying to figure out how to live.  I was fortunate in being intelligent and going to good schools.  My intellect was engaged, supported, and rewarded.  Unlike at home, the assignments were clear and grades provided clear feedback.  So my intellect developed in a healthy way, and has given me a powerful tool to help me figure out how to live.  Unfortunately, as I learned very quickly, there are lots of difficulties that intelligence can’t help with.

As Father Greg says, the work to be done is “to engage in attachment repair, healing, collating of resilience, and the largest task of all: to redefine who you are now in the world.  … this is no small endeavor.”   I have to engage in the same work as the homies.  So far my life has lacked a “Father Greg” — someone who is so loving that they would get through my defenses against taking in anything from outside.  Father Greg describes this as someone who “through their kindness, tenderness, and focused, attentive love return folks to themselves.”  p192

This describes my new therapist, and she works in a different way than anyone else has.  She responds to me actively, and she gives me careful, minute and accurate feedback of a kind I’ve never gotten.  She describes what my face looks like or what my voice sounds like.  The person she is describing is VERY different from how I see myself.  That old image is imprinted in my cells and the neurons of my brain.  So making that kind of change, at the very foundation, is very hard work and often very scary.  It doesn’t leave much energy or attention for getting through an ordinary day, much less coping with extra tasks, like getting the oil changed, or dealing with bureaucracy.  Unfortunately, I have only a few friends who really understand this, so I am forced to be alone too much of the time.  Being alone triggers the original abandonment.  Sometimes I get very fierce and decide that this work is worth doing. Sometimes I think it’s just too hard and I would rather be dead.  So far, the one who is willing to work is winning out.

For more information about attachment disorder (Wikipedia).

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1997: How My Writing Has Changed

From my journal for September 29, 1997

So how has my writing changed?  Being “literary” is no longer top priority.  I no longer find myself thinking “This is one of the great journals of the world,” no longer fantasize someone “discovering” me.  I no longer write for a “reader,” except for myself in the future, I no longer write to justify my life.  And because I’m not in constant pain from depression or anxiety, I don’t feel pressure to write to try and “fix” it.  Yes, I see that a lot of my writing in the past was an attempt to assuage or manage anxiety, and the root of the anxiety was (a) physiological, combined with or enhanced by (b) the belief that I’m not worth anything just as I am, and that I “do everything wrong.”

I find this very interesting. I’m not sure what I mean by “the root of the anxiety was physiological,” since I don’t yet know that the root of the anxiety is PTSD. Perhaps I just thought that I had a dysfunctional physiology. I also seem to think that I “no longer” believe that I’m worthless, and it’s going to take many years to change that belief. I also seem to find the anxiety more important than the depression. I still haven’t found out what it’s like to not be depressed.

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Stories about my Father

Written in writing group:

When I was born my father was away at WWII.  I was three years old when he came home.  He came in the front door and I was in the hall.  Mother said “This is your daddy” and I said “That’s not my daddy, my daddy’s upstairs.”  Not perhaps the best way to start a relationship with one’s father, and I don’t think it helped our relationship at all.  What neither parent understood was that I thought my “Daddy” was the frame with glass in it and a picture of a man behind the glass, but I had no idea that picture represented a real person.  This is something we have to learn, it doesn’t come naturally.

Stories I suspected, but didn’t know.  I don’t remember what I was told about my father’s war experience.  I know he never talked about it.  One story was that Mom had got pregnant hoping it would keep Daddy from being drafted, but it didn’t.  I know she was resentful, and it’s true it was hard being at home alone with a baby.  Another story was that as Dad’s company of soldiers moved up through Italy, he left them and went looking to buy some liquor for them all.  But when he came back, his whole unit had been blown up.

My father was an alcoholic, I think he was medicating PTSD from the war.  I remember that I only saw him sloppy drunk a couple of times, talked to him sober once — after he’d been operated on for colon cancer, and the rest of the time he was just drunk enough to dissociate but not drunk enough to be sloppy.

A few weeks after my father’s 70th birthday, he was pretty sick.  My brother Jack called me and said Mom and got drunk, and Dad had called him and he had called an ambulance to take him to the hospital.  But now he wanted to come home and watch the tall ships sail up the Hudson on the 4th of July.  So, Jack said, one of us had to go home & make sure Dad’s all right since Mom can’t be trusted.  And I was chosen.  So I went home, Dad came home and was able to watch the tall ships on his own TV in his own house.  Then he was taken back to the hospital.  I remember I was standing on the stairs crying as they started wheeling him out to the ambulance.  Suddenly he looked at me and it was like his whole soul came into his eyes.  It was like he suddenly realized he would never see me again.  His last words to me were “Thank you!”

The story of watching the Tall Ships on the Fourth of July is told in detail here.  I don’t remember how I learned the stories I suspected, possibly from another member of the family.

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1997: Moving Out of Depression

From my journal for September 12, 1997

Dream fragment: something about how I got out of depression by praising myself.  “Out of depression and into an energy high!” !!

It seems to be working again.  This time I’m more conscious and persistent about it.  I know I need to build it into my life as a habit, not just use it until “I’m OK now” and then drop it.  I don’t know why I think that once I’m OK I’m going to stay that way without further effort.

Yesterday was another good day.  I worked at cleaning my altar triangle, waxed the chest, put new candles in the big candlesticks, restored Kuan Yin and the oil lamp to their places.  I see that if I’m patient about these tasks, and take my time with them, I actually enjoy them.  It’s the rush to get finished, to be “efficient” that spoils the fun.

I think I’m finally beginning to understand what DMA meant about receiving the results that you’re created.  I think I’m finally beginning to be able to do that, and especially learning to praise myself for partial results, steps on the way to a larger goal.  This is the bigger picture resulting from Dr. Rankin’s observation that cured the airplane phobia.  So amazing.  So maybe I’ve changed something important about the structure of my life. and it has another layer — I’m able to acknowledge and receive my ability to acknowledge and receive — just as I give thanks not only for the beautiful landscape I enjoy but also for the ability to enjoy it.

Yesterday, noticing my willingness to move slowly and patiently toward putting my altar back together, I see that this is what I’ve been wanting all along, to putter around the house, and to be able to enjoy it, which is something new.  So this is new, a great gift, a great grace for which I thank god.

I notice that I don’t give being on an anti-depressant any credit for feeling so much better.  My new ability to “enjoy” is at least partly because of the medication. Depressive brain chemistry makes it impossible to enjoy.

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Writing: Sacred Dance

Written with Sharon on a big open porch:

I hear some machine grinding away.  There’s blue sky with clouds, sun sometimes.

I’m alone too much.  It started with COVID, but it doesn’t seem to end.  I don’t know what to do about it.  I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to make friends.  I guess I feel scared a lot, that’s again from being alone too much, but it certainly makes it hard to do anything different.

I’m hoping that having a writing group will help. But now I’m worried about what I’m going to write about.  The story of folk dance — sacred circle dance — Neskaya.  Certainly creating Neskaya was the best thing I’ve ever done.  Actually it’s clear that “I” didn’t do it, I was the midwife who brought something through from the imaginal realm that was just waiting to be incarnated. 

The grinding noise has stopped.  I suspect it was a mower, cutting the grass in a different area than the one right in front of me.  It would be intolerably loud if it were right here.

The sun is out, a maple with some orange leaves already is blazing in the sunlight.  White cloud, blue sky — it’s almost too much.  The sun goes under, the colors fade. The freshness of the air is pleasant as is the slight breeze that brings it in.

Thinking about Neskaya and sacred dance lifts my spirits.  It’s been a very long time since I danced in a circle holding hands and I really miss it.  What dances would I like to do?  Kos, Turning Toward the Morning, Winds on the Tor, Miserlou.  Lore — another dance I’d like to do.  

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Grief for Unlived Life

From today’s email from Matt Licata: This tenderizing deep in the soul activates the blue ones, a group of inner figures who carry grief that has until now remained unfelt, somatic and imaginal pieces of the unlived life who long for illumination and holding.

Grief that until now remained unfelt, pieces of unlived life.  This rings a bell  for me.  I think about never having had a good sexual relationship, and only one good sexual experience.  I think about my creativity that only managed a part of what was in me to manifest.  I don’t even know what capacity there is in me to love and help people, I feel like I never did much of that. And I wish I had been able to put more energy into working on environmental issues like stopping global warming. Yes, I can feel grief for these parts of my unlived life.

I also think, without my struggle with depression and trauma, I might have been able to live a life more dedicated to Spirit. Then again, without the pain of depression, I might never have turned to Spirit.

Interestingly, listing my failures immediately brings up my one big success: Neskaya. I did manage to create, or bring through from the imaginal realm, one thing that made a huge difference in many lives.

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