Feeling Miserable

I haven’t posted in a long time, I’ve been feeling so miserable.  In fact I really lost it at one time, so now I’m in the health center instead of independent living.  At least I’m not alone so much.  I eat all of my meals at a table with other people.  I leave my door open and hear people going up & down the corridor and talk, so I really know I’m not alone.  But I feel totally worthless and uninteresting.  Today I had Thanksgiving dinner with four people I like very much.  They had interesting conversations, but I had nothing interesting to say. All I could have talked about was how miserable I’m feeling, how useless and worthless I am.  Doing nothing worthwhile for other people or for the world, just thinking about myself.

Actually I don’t think about myself.  I usually have a song in my mind, sometimes one I like, sometimes one I don’t like.  I try to stop the song and just pay attention to my breath. I think if I can focus on my breath that — what?  Why do I think it would be good to pay attention to my breath?  It reminds me of when I was first at the Zen Center in Rochester, trying to meditate correctly so I could feel better.  I had no idea that I was living with severe depression that was caused by very early trauma.

Now I have to deal with my possessions, because I’m supposed to move to an apartment that’s on the floor below this one.  It’s pretty easy to know what I want to keep and what I feel free to get rid of.  The hard part is figuring out what to do with what I don’t want. That’s where my energy is going at the moment.

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My Trauma is Triggered by Being Alone Too Much

I’m finally feeling more together and coherent.  I had moved to the health center because my trauma had been triggered, and I had pretty completely fallen apart.  The notebook about that is still in my apartment, so I don’t have it and I’m not even sure what date I moved. My best guess for why I fell apart is that I was alone too much.  Here I leave my door open and can hear people talking and walking back and forth. I eat all my meals at a table with other people.

This was written on November 9:

I want to write about what a hard time I’m having, but it’s difficult to find the words. Maybe that’s part of the problem, that for some reason I’m forgetting a lot of words.  I feel like my brain/mind is only functioning at 50% capacity.  Practical things that I have to do, like get things I need from my old apartment, make decisions about what to hold on to and what to let go of, and then make decisions about what to do with things I let go of.  I feel overwhelmed and scared.   How can I possibly do it all?  I’ve tried to find books to read, but they have been disappointing so I go back to old favorites like Pilgrim’s Inn, a book by Elizabeth Goudge, that I’ve read many times.

I’ve stopped typing my journal, and I’m writing only short notes that might be important like what meds I’ve taken, and whether or not I have shit.  The issue of shitting is a big one and has been going on for a long time.  I don’t shit every day, and I haven’t shit any large amounts in a long time.  So is it all piling up in my intestines???  The medical people haven’t been helpful at all.

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Work with Very Young, Non-verbal Parts

This is the first post in a while.  I’ve been having a really hard time, had to move to the Health Center where I could be taken care of.  If I hadn’t found this piece of writing, written when I was still somewhat coherent, I wouldn’t be posting anything this soon.

Written in Tuesday night writing group:
Wanted to write about how awful I was feeling before I worked with Erica and found out it was parts.  Very young parts, non-verbal.  Which means I couldn’t think and it felt awful.  Actually I was taken over by a part who was so young it didn’t speak.  So I couldn’t speak.  Very different from meditating, or being in a mystical state — which I’m not sure I know what that is.  What was so awful about it was feeling trapped in a non-verbal state: unable to speak, even unable to think because thinking needs words.  Trapped in a non-verbal state, unable to think because thinking needs words.  I felt without power to communicate, no way to talk about my experience.  What I had to do was separate from the part and become what Erica calls “your youest you,” who you really are.  That one was able to tune in to the past, and sense about what was going on.  Had to express it in terms of feelings because the part couldn’t talk about its experience.  I had to guess at what it was feeling, express it in sensory terms, and see if that’s what the part was feeling.  As I began to tune in to it, I started being able to reassure the part that it was OK, that I cared about it, that I understood how hard it was to have such uncomfortable trapped feelings.  It turned out that one part had been left alone — which of course was how I got traumatized — and that the second part had not only been left alone, but had been rejected forcefully.  I was able to talk to the part about how painful that would be, and so was able to establish a connection.  Then it seemed like the connection between me and the part had to be established over and over again.  We would make connection, but then lose it, and this happened over and over.  It may take some time and a lot of work to establish a connection that lasts.  A long time and a lot of work of connecting over and over again.  Well, I am certainly willing.  I feel connected to these two parts because of their pain, even when they don’t feel connected to me.

I feel that this explains the process pretty well.

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Tough Going

Originally posted in June 2015

Pain.  “What you feel you can heal”

The session with Erica was filled with so much pain.  I don’t think I’ve ever felt so much except maybe long ago when I splashed pain all over my journals.  Writhed with it, ran away from it.  Running through the streets of Athens at night, crying out “Thanatos!”  — the word means “Death” in Greek — did I really do that?

I was only able to let myself feel the pain because Erica was there.  It came in a hard hard painful squeezing and then relaxed.  I would sigh and sometimes yawn, and then it would hit again.  The yawns comforted me because they indicated that something was being released.  Erica said the pain was coming in waves.  I saw that I had experienced it in waves, but was still afraid (am still afraid) that it could last forever.  I see now that “forever” is what the baby experiences.  O I want to scoop her up and help her bear the pain.  I guess in a way that’s what I’m doing when I allow myself to feel the pain.

Finally I relaxed into what felt like a nothing place.  Erica asked what that felt like.  I said my lower half felt very heavy, butt and legs filled with BB shot, then butt and legs like a Henry Moore sculpture, massive, cast metal.  The top part of me felt collapsed on top of the heaviness and also held down by it.  Erica asked what was the wisdom of the heaviness, what did it have to say to me?  That was hard, searching and searching to find the feeling and give it words.  Finally I got “to hold you in one place” but I knew there was more.  Why did I have to stay in one place?  I didn’t want to, I’d do anything to get out of here     “…until you learn to…”  What? what!     “…rest.”  Gosh, what irony.  I’m so tired, I desperately need to rest, and yet I’m experiencing this being held as being trapped and fighting against it.

I can only remember experiencing pain like this during the David episode, and I splashed it out of me, smashing his windows, writing crazily, turning myself in to the Health Center where they filled me with tranquilizers.

Rest.  If I could truly rest.  I’m so exhausted.  I can sit still, often do, just staring, but it’s not rest, it’s more like lack of motivation to move.

Erica said “I’m so grateful to you for being willing to experience this pain.”  I asked why.  She said that it helped everybody else wake up more.  I guess that’s the same as my idea that I’m healing the human energy field.  If that were true, then I would know that my life hasn’t been wasted.  Some days I believe it, some days I don’t.

This pain I’ve been experiencing tells me that the wound is very deep and very old.  I see that it’s going to take a lot of hard work.  I don’t know if I’ll even finish it before I die, if I’ll ever have a “real life” except for moments like the two days of feeling “extraordinary.”  I told Erica something I told Kevin long ago, that I wanted to get as close to healing as I could, so that the next person who incarnates out of this energy will not find it such tough going.

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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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