From my journal for December 10, 1995
I’m feeling very lost and uncertain. I finally finished Anna Salter’s book because Lynelle said the last chapters were relevant to her situation. Horrifyingly, I find them relevant to mine too, I see that I have a “trauma-based worldview,” “a profoundly hopeless sense of personal vulnerability and lack of efficacy in the face of what seems to be a random or even malevolent universe.” (p252) It looks like once that basic trust in a benign universe is broken, one doesn’t ever get it back. We just learn how to manage the pain. “The survivor’s arsenal for reducing pain can be fairly extensive: remaking meaning, developing a cognitive life-raft; confronting the internal, perpetrator-based critic, behaviorally de-sensitizing; and consciously avoiding. Even so, there will still be a need for self-soothing after doing all the pain reduction possible. As in the serenity prayer, the adult survivor must self-soothe that pain that cannot be reduced, reduce that pain that cannot be self-soothed, and develop the wisdom to know the difference.” (p295) That’s it. That’s the best I can do. There’s no “making the pain go away.” I’m looking at the prospect of living the rest of my life in chronic psychological pain — so what’s new? I understand that I’ve lived up til now in chronic psychological pain. But I think I always had some hope that I could change it somehow, if I could just understand, it would go away. But all I have done is just break the denial, become more conscious, eliminated the various distractions that I was using to self-medicate. So now I’m left with the pain. I don’t see any way out at all. I look forward to struggling through the winter with various physical ailments, and struggling through the summer with the plane phobia. Circle Dance is a small candle in a dark cavern. It’s all I’ve got. Except for the knowledge that I love Dana, Shenanigan, Lynelle, Beverly, I love the trees and the rocks and the streams. I wish there were also feelings of love, it would make it a little easier to be in this grim desert. I wish I believed in God, or the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, but I have no sense of a benevolent spiritual force. I think of Jesus, and the pain of being forsaken by God, but even that doesn’t seem very real right now.
I almost wish it weren’t so beautiful outside. The contrast makes the dark deadness inside more painful.
I wish I had written the name of Anna Salter’s book. I suspect it was Transforming Trauma, because it was published in 1995. It’s about treating adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse.
I talk about “basic trust in a benign universe.” This is an idea that Kaethe Weinberg talks about in her book Common Shock. She wrote that “children raised in a “good enough” environment grow up with three assumptions: the Universe is Benevolent, Life is Meaningful, the Self is Worthy. Trauma breaks this basic safety, suddenly the Universe is Malevolent, Life is Meaningless, the Self is Not Worthy.”