(Written in July 2008)
Reading 1987 is fascinating and painful. I’m struggling with the plane phobia — doing a lot that I hope will help: DMA Structural Consulting, David Grove Workshop, NLP — also blaming myself and trying to figure out what’s really going on. All of these are doomed to failure because I’m not aware of the root cause which is trauma. No wonder I was depressed. And no one around me understood my agony so I was continually being invalidated, and I was invalidating myself. Painful to watch myself working so hard for no results. At least I can now appreciate my strength and determination and hard work. And have compassion that so much was misguided. Another huge issue I was struggling with was the one of not trusting my own feelings. At one point, doing structural consulting with Dana, I said “You mean I really am as lost as I feel?” which brought about a huge deep change. Although I think it will be a long time before I get how important feelings are in being able to be grounded in reality. Then there was the problem that traumatized fear is not coming from current reality. So much of what I was trying to do to heal was sabotaged by not understanding the mechanism of trauma.
Then there was the whole issue of “lethargy” vs. “laziness.” At one point Dana even says “Maybe you don’t want to enough…” thus reinforcing my parents’ invalidation, but I was up against LOW THYROID, DAMMIT. DAMMIT DAMMIT. No, I am not a lazy person. And I did care about many things, and I was unable to take action because my body wasn’t functioning properly.
I’ve been reading from 1988. I seem to be doing really well, pleased with my progress. Knowing that I’m going to tumble down into severe misery leaves me wondering — what was this? Was I really doing better? Yes, I guess I must have been — there have certainly been plenty of ups amid the downs. At the same time I wonder what happened to all the great insights and learnings. Perhaps I felt better because I had seen that sexual abuse was part of the picture and thought that if I worked on it I would get better. But I did the best I could and still didn’t get better. I talk a lot about “addiction to achievement”, and I was certainly dealing with that somewhat, but now I see that I also had a need to be effective, to trust that if I had an intention I could carry it out, to see my intellectual insights bear some fruit in change of behavior. But all my insights and intentions kept running aground on post-traumatic stress and low thyroid. Then I would fall into the default position: it was all my fault, I wasn’t disciplined enough, maybe I “didn’t really want to.” So painful to read.