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From my journal for Sept 5,1995

Reading the new version of Son-Rise — a friend offered it to me because of their practice of radical acceptance of their autistic son — I find myself very angry at the exposition of their philosophy, the idea that “happiness is a choice,” that nothing is impossible, that all we need to do is change our beliefs (which they see as an easy matter, subject to an intellectual process) — “change the belief and we change the feelings as well as the behavior.”  [Margin: not according to Anna Salter]  While I agree with this last statement, I think their whole philosophy is dangerously one-sided, they have failed to take into account the differing nature of beliefs that have been adopted through different means, at different ages and stages of development, they have no idea of the power of conditioning.  I remember how easily, and with amusement, I was able to drop my belief that Sears & Roebucks was a terrible store, that no one could live in Maine through the winter, and how I continue to struggle with the belief that I am worthless and powerless, how long it has taken me to learn to believe in my own creativity and generosity and how that belief easily crumbles in the face of adversity.  I can see why their “option process” failed to work for survivors of childhood sexual abuse — our belief that we are evil and worthless, that we deserve to be the objects of someone else’s exploitation, is one that we learned through experience, from how we were treated.  It’s not like beliefs we learned later on, about what we can and can’t do, that were learned through an intellectual process and can be disempowered through intellectually understanding.  The idea that “nothing is impossible” is a very painful invalidation of the experience of survivors, if nothing is impossible, we should have been able to prevent our parent from molesting us, we should be able to heal ourselves, we should be able to make everything OK.  All our lives we’ve been trying to do the impossible: make it that it never happened, get our parent to stop drinking, so to be told that nothing is impossible just adds to our pain and guilt, increases our self-hatred and self-invalidation.  What we need most is the revelation and reassurance that some things are impossible, that a two-year-old can’t prevent her father from orally raping her, and that she can’t just make the resultant damage disappear by “changing her beliefs.”

At that time I still thought that I had been a victim of sexual abuse, and had no idea that I had been traumatized.  Interesting that I had dropped my belief that Sears & Roebucks was a terrible store, because Mother had threatened to send me “back to Sears & Roebucks.”  What I still had, alas, was the belief that if I didn’t behave as authority wanted, I would be “sent back” — that is out on the street, unable to take care of myself.  The story about the “two-year-old” was the story of one of the women in Journey Into Courage.

At this point in 1995 I had no idea I was dealing with PTSD. From my journal for November 10:

Second cup of tea. … and nothing to say.  I feel cold.  There’s the ache in my stomach and heart that feels old and dead, the “what’s the use” feeling.  I suspect that I’m dealing with a complex tangle of rage and grief which is why neither feeling comes clear in a form I can discharge by myself.  I have wondered if the grief I unloaded with Robin wasn’t grief about being so depressed — that’s why I felt better for a day, but because it didn’t address the underlying cause, I’m still feeling bummed out.  I can see that suffering the symptoms of chemical depression — being unable to make decisions, etc. — leaves me unable to go on with my life in a way that I feel good about, so of course I feel a lot of anger at myself about that, and a lot of grief for my poor lost wounded life.  Well at least this confirms my decision to see Dr. Stoll and explore medical help.

Robin was a body worker I had been seeing.

Yesterday in the work with Karen I tried to cry, and vocalize, and pound on things, but mostly what happened was I kept arriving at the place of grey frozen hopelessness.  Karen said “hopelessness is a concept, not a feeling.”  But I don’t think it, I feel it.  And what I feel is numbness and lack of energy.  I said I felt like I had been up all night, crying all night, and I didn’t feel the relief of a good cry, instead I felt exhausted, and didn’t know what to do next, and didn’t have any energy to do it with if I could think of something.  I sat there staring blankly at the pillow too tired to do anything, too uncomfortable to lie down.  Finally Karen suggested that I had frozen some part of myself because it was too painful to feel those feelings.  She kept saying that it was unfair that my mother had left me alone so much when I was a baby, but this didn’t bring any answering spark.  She thought perhaps the anger about such treatment was one of the things I had to numb.  She also said that I had spent a good bit of my life running away from this sense of numbed hopelessness.  I felt comforted by the idea that the numbness was something I had done to wall off some part of myself that actually might be of value to me: the part that gets angry about injustice and is colorful and passionate.  And I see that trying to run away from the numbness, or jack myself up out of it, are not the same as sitting with it and allowing it to thaw so I can recover that part of myself.  I find it interesting (sarcastic inflection) that having decided to spend the hanging out with the numbed part of myself, I promptly get quite sick.

My description of numbness and frozenness I can now recognize as symptoms of trauma: when you can’t fight or flee, freeze is the default. Standard forms of psychotherapy are not designed to heal trauma. Not until I start doing Somatic Experiencing will I begin to address these symptoms.

In this passage I see that I am essentially a creative person, but I’ve never been able to actualize more than a small percentage of what I was capable of. The reason is because of my mother constantly telling me “Don’t think you’re so great.” I had no idea how damaging that was, but I can see it here in my response to the little four-year-old running around, showing off her skirt. I was only able to do it at the Woman’s Way Retreat because I felt safe, and I wasn’t me, I was acting the part of a child. I also see how afraid I was of doing anything that might cause mother to “go away.” But that was how I was traumatized as a baby, mother going away and leaving me alone.

From my journal for October 16, 1995

I’ve been imagining an art project that I might work on.  I’ve thought about covering the cardboard dodecahedron with collage — with a whole “carpet” of cut & pasted images and bits of color.  I would need to reinforce the structure and I’m not sure how to do that.  … [lots of ideas for similar projects] …  so that’s a lot of possible cardboard-and-collage projects.

But I never did any of them.

The important thing about the session with Karen is that I was forced to see the way in which I am unable to receive my accomplishments.  I trivialize them or go numb.  When Karen asked if I could celebrate what I had done in Shenandoah, I burst into tears and said “No.”  I have no sense of my contribution as being something valuable enough to celebrate.  …  Karen pointed out how I trivialized Shenandoah — well it’s just a bit of community theater, not very meaningful.  Then I had to acknowledge that it’s about a man who is anti-war because he really cares about his children, and Karen reminded me of how important community art is for the healing of the planet, for the future.  Karen also reminded me of the four-year-old who ran around at Woman’s Way “Look at my skirt!  Look at my skirt!” and asked if I couldn’t find that energy inside me.  But I can’t, I feel like that was someone else, like she’s dead.  Karen began to speak for her, and it made me very uncomfortable and scared.  I told her to stop and called her a show-off and said she was bad, but she wouldn’t stop and I was desperate to shut her up and said “Something terrible will happen if you go on like that.”  I don’t have a clear catastrophic expectation, I don’t hear a voice in my head, I just feel a chill, a thickening tension, a draining away of all value, inspiration, exuberant energy.  I think that what I’m afraid of, what I in fact experienced that was so devastating, was the withdrawal of love, and that scared me so badly that I shut down anything that I thought might have caused Mother to “go away.”  And I know for sure mother wouldn’t have been able to tolerate me feeling good about something creative that I’d done.

This passage shows how my mother shut me down, and how I learned to shut myself down, in the fear of something horrible happening if I dared express exuberance.

Woman’s Way was a week-long retreat working on psychological issues with a number of different modalities. At one point we were told to choose a partner, and then one of you would be the child and the other a mother for a time, and then you would switch roles.  As a child, I imagined I was four years old, and I put on a gold lamé skirt that was among the many costumes available. The woman playing mother was very supportive. But now, away from that supportive atmosphere, I could only try to shut down that energy.

I had an image of that exuberant four-year-old, in her gold lamé skirt, at a vast distance from me, down at the end of a long dark tunnel, and I wonder about doing something in cardboard and collage — “The attempted murder of Tinkerbelle” or something.

Needless to say I never expressed this image in art.

I wish I had named the book and the author.  I find it fascinating that it took so long for me to find out that I was dealing with trauma, that my reaction to the noise of the planes was a symptom of the changes in the brain that trauma causes. Part of the reason I didn’t believe that I had been traumatized was that, though my parents were alcoholic, they weren’t violent. I didn’t understand that trauma happened, not because of the violence of the traumatizing event, it has at least as much to do with the capacity of the brain and nervous system to absorb and integrate the experience. Because the brain and nervous system don’t mature until the baby is three years old, a baby’s brain and nervous system are unable to process events that would not be overwhelming to even a teenager.  Such as being left alone. Because a baby is helpless, if it’s left alone, it will die if no one comes to provide warmth and food. The moment the reptilian brainstem concludes that the baby will die, and goes into fight-or-flight, we are dealing with trauma. A baby can neither fight nor flee, so the default is freeze.

From my journal for October 3, 1995

I’ve been reading a book about new discoveries of a biological foundation for mood disorders, panic disorders, even bulimia — actually I’ve also learned more about the manic side of the cycle and see that the tired/wired state is in fact a manic state even though there’s no euphoria.  Somehow I had always thought that the manic state would feel good, and it doesn’t.  Perhaps it did once, when I was younger, and cosmic visions and inspiration seemed like a gift from the universe and a justification for my life.  Now I see that the visions are ungrounded, I’m unable to give them expression in a way that I find satisfying.  Yes, I see why uncontrolled brilliant talking was one manifestation of mania in the young men of Byron’s time — and I see that it’s just talk, just the dissipation of energy in words, something I’ve worked very hard not to do when my re-emergence out of the candida depression meant that I had more manic episodes.  I went through a brief one last week, and noticed the buoyant feeling but didn’t like being so ungrounded.

I also wonder whether my reaction to the airplanes does not have a physiological basis.  In a way, it’s so physical in its effects.  I can’t breathe, can barely walk, and my brain won’t function.  And it ends relatively quickly after I get away from them.  The book describes enormously complex biochemical interactions and the connection between malfunction of neurotransmitters in the brain and all kinds of disorders.  She makes a very good case for the use of medication to help with a lot of these.  It’s also very clear that nothing is either all physical or all psychological — a trap that is easy to fall into with too little knowledge.  She suggests that childhood trauma may play a role in this, we simply don’t know to what extent trauma can affect the physical/chemical structure of the brain.  Obviously there’s a lot of interplay between a physiological predisposition and a triggering event.  The book has certainly made me think again about trying to find a doctor who knows something about the complexities and could guide me in trying to find something that would help my reaction to the airplanes.  At the moment I feel very angry at the idea of taking a medication that would just dull my response to intolerable conditions in the world — this is too much like my parents’ use of alcohol to deny conflict, and like my own denial of the enormous damage done to me.  …  And I also think that my fear that if the pain caused by the planes was removed that I would then go on in blissful complacence and fail to fight against injustice and pollution — this is ridiculous. …

I did, actually, find someone who was able to help me with the noise of the planes. When I was first here at Kendal I noticed a lot of noises.  Mowers especially bother me, though not to the extent that the planes did. Other noises bothered me until I knew what they were at which point they tended to disappear. I love that I described that fear that I “would go on in blissful complacence” and then realized that it was ridiculous, there was no way I would stop fighting for things I believe are good.