Breakdown

Posted on April 17, 2010 by jenny

(Written in September 2008)

8: 22 I’m doing pretty badly.  I keep having waves of fear — tho they do pass.  Saw Karen in Montpelier — by the end of the session I was quiet inside.  3 waves of fear passed while I was driving home.  I talked to Dr. L & she said to raise the meds to 150 I and 40 Buspar.  So I took extra in the middle of the day.  If it doesn’t work I will ask her to prescribe Adivam — at least I know that works with Imipramine.
And if that doesn’t work, I’m seriously considering going into the hospital — Lore recommended the one in Berlin/Montpelier and Karen has had patients there and knows some of the staff.

Slept hardly at all, 2 hrs before midnight but nothing after that.  Anxiety has spiralled out of control.  I’m too exhausted to do any of my coping strategies — EFT, yoga breathing.  I can’t even read.  I left a message for Dr. L asking her to prescribe Adivam — since I know I’m OK with it.  I don’t dare try anything new.  I think what’s happening is flashbacks to the Paxil episode.

4:30 Emergency appt with Dr. L.  Gene drove me.  I had planned to leave Bella at Abby’s but Lidstrom gave me some seroquel and a prescription for adivam.  The seroquel certainly calmed me down but I got scared again when Lynelle gave me her take on it: she thinks my medication is not working for me, and I’ll need to find something new — a hospital would be the best place.
I quit this morning.  Just gave up the struggle and put myself in the hands of  …  whoever.  Fortunately I did get ahold of the doctor and she seemed able to help.  At least I did feel contained talking to her, and even after I left.

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Letter to the Editor

Posted on April 16, 2010 by jenny

February 2008
Kayla picked up a Courier & said my letter quoting Eisenhower got printed!

They titled it “Words Ring True”

To the Editor:
Recent stories in the Courier have talked about the high cost of maintenance and upgrades of Town property, schools, roads, sidewalks, etc.  For example, the story on Lakeway Elementary School (Wednesday, February 6) says the district has spent $413,000 in the last two years on renovations and upgrades.  Meanwhile, we are spending over $300,000,000 a day on the war in Iraq.  That’s Three Hundred Million dollars.  Every ten minutes we spend about two million dollars, enough to build a new police facility for the town and have $700,000 left over for the schools. The war has not brought democracy to the Iraqis, lowered the price of gas, or made anyone safe from terrorism.

The words Dwight Eisenhower spoke in 1953 are more pertinent than ever: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people…”   The dollar amounts may have changed since 1953, but not the basic idea.

Jenny Deupree, Franconia, NH 03580

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Failure

Posted on April 15, 2010 by jenny

(Written in February 2008)
“In the middle of my life I found myself in a dark wood — where the true way was wholly lost.” David Whyte, quoting Dante.  The moon was low enough to shine on my face and woke me up at 3AM.  I put on a David Whyte CD, and then dreamed that I was in a class and we were asked to find a quote that described where we were in our life right now.  I had a book — large and fat — with papers stuffed in it.  Someone else’s book.  Then we are in another classroom and I hold another book, smaller but just as thick, no extra papers.  I try looking through the books to find lines that fit me — without success.
So I’ve been sitting here looking through “Where Many Rivers Meet”, finding poems that tug at my heart, not finding lines that describe my life now — but I begin to get a sense: something about accepting failures, something about how our failures are also offerings.  Can I offer my failures to God? Why not? He knows failure.  He hung on the cross and cried out his despair.  He told us we were forgiven.  God met me at the gate of heaven with a huge welcoming hug.  And my successes and failures were blown away, no longer relevant.
What are the lines that describe my life now?  Something about accepting failures.  “Making white combs and golden honey from my old failures.” But I haven’t gotten that far yet.  I’m sitting here, and my failures are sitting here too, and we are not touching, not talking, not looking at each other.  So I am a little scattered and don’t know where to go next.  O yes.  This is the place where I feel the urge to take action, make them talk to each other, and at the same time know that it is better to sit still and allow the process to take what time it needs to.  But I’m not happy about it.  The two impulses are in conflict, the wheels are spinning, and I’m not going anywhere.

Build up the fire — it’s 20 below out and a clear day, sunlight just striking the tops of the trees — make a second cup of tea.  Put a bubble of love around the warring factions and leave them to fight it out.

Yesterday I was typing up my struggle with images of projects I might do — the dance program against war, letters to the editor — and having to accept, with shame, that I simply haven’t got what it takes to carry them all out.  I did get one letter printed in the Courier; and Kate Moss emailed me a thank you.  So there’s one success.  The others aren’t failures, just acceptance of reality.  No, trying to accept, struggling with anger and shame.  I should be strong enough to push them through, my anger and passion and caring aren’t good enough if I can’t make a difference…    How would I be if I couldn’t think that thought (to borrow from Byron Katie)?  It would be a huge relief, but I can’t get there, the anger and shame are still in my body.
What does that feel like?  A tightness in my chest, and my stomach, tension in my jaw, pricking behind my eyes.  A wish to lift my arms and bring my fists down and smash something.  A wish to hunch my shoulders and hide.  At least my breath is easy as I pay attention to the warring tensions inside.
I use my hands to express my shame, a squeezing in of my heart — surprisingly I can feel the tense muscle in my right hip — and then raising my fists and bringing them down slow motion in anger.  It helps ease something.
Why should I feel ashamed?  I was goddam WOUNDED in the war.  Of course I limp and struggle.

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God & Shells

Posted on April 13, 2010 by jenny

Conversation with God (on a retreat with Deena Metzger, August 1996)

On the New Moon, we celebrated the Feast of Hecate.  Deena asked us to find something to represent a seed, to fill with our visions for the future, and then plant as a seed of a new beginning.  I found a lovely little golden shell, like a translucent bubble.  I had been walking along the beach talking to God and crying out how difficult this passage was, and when would it be over.  The voice said “You will always be doing this work.  But — it gets easier.” At that moment I saw the shell embedded in a drift of seaweed and knew it was to be my seed.

The next day I went to the beach again, hoping to find another shell like the one I buried.  I looked and looked, especially in the seaweed, but found nothing.  Then I decided I should stop looking for what I had found before and take what was offered.  Still nothing appeared.  Finally I remembered that I had been talking to God when I found the other one, so I started talking to God — it was hard to make the switch from searching, felt like giving up all hope of ever finding anything — but the first thing my eye fell on was something that didn’t look like a regular seashell.  I picked it up and it was something like the other one, translucent, irregular.  I found several more — they follow no form, no two alike, some flat, some cupped, more or less translucent, color from white to yellow to orange, some have barnacles or seaweed attached.  After I found the first few, I considered going back to where I had buried the one I found yesterday and making a switch because that one was so much more beautiful, but I decided that when you plant a seed, you don’t get it back.  Unwilling to stop with just a few, I kept looking.  I said to God, somewhat apologetically, that I was being very greedy.  God answered with more shells.  I thought about how God had said “It will get easier” and found another one.  I rejoiced in what was becoming a sizable harvest, but again felt an ache in my heart for the one I had buried.  No, you can’t have it back again, not that unique, irreplaceable moment.  Other moments will come, with their own beauty, but never that one again.  Then I found a shell that was equally as beautiful though very different, and soon afterward a small orange one that also satisfied my heart.  By this time my hand was full, I was having trouble piling more on.  I thought perhaps I even had enough to give them away to the women in the retreat.  (In fact I had thirty-six, but the moment to give them away never arrived.) I found another small orange one and felt that my cup was running over.  Turning back, walking along the edge of the small island, my heart began to lift and swell with gratitude.  “God be praised” I cried.  “Thank you” I said to the beach, the sky, the geese, the seagull.  And found another shell.  I thought about how one of my constant questions is how can something as fragile as I survive in this hostile world (not God’s natural world, but the one humans have made) but here are these lovely little objects, each unique, and so many of them have survived.

When I brought them home, I realized that the pinch pots I had been making in pottery class were oddly formed cups similar to the shells.  By the way, I’ve been told that the creature that makes the shells is called anomia simplex.

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Guidance

Posted on April 12, 2010 by jenny

(Written in December 2006)
Dear Guides & Guardian Spirits, I’m feeling caught in some cold intellectual place.  I need connection and meaning.  Please help me.
Dear Jenny, we love you.  Eleanor loves you, Kayla loves you, Iona loves you.  The cold place is not who you are, nor is it the reality of the universe.  It does represent a kind of intellectual refuge from feeling pain, a form of denial.  It is very much the world your mother lived in and all she had to give you when you were small.  It is a very narrow limited world.  You never wanted to live there but you can be easily caught in it, because you were helplessly caught in it as a child.  You had a sense, a hope, that another world was possible, but you had few chances to live in it.  Now, you have created a life that is full of meaning.  You have friends to work, play, and celebrate with.  You are doing your best to live a sustainable life style in a culture of unsustainability.  You are living in alignment with the thrust of the universe toward greater consciousness and greater compassion.  Never fear, you are part of it even when you feel disconnected.  Continue to be aware of what is happening now.  It will change.  Remember that we love you.

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Journal: some positive experiences

Posted on April 9, 2010 by jenny

(Written in June 2009)
It rained in the morning, then got very windy with gleams of sun.  Randi and I walked to the picnic table in the wind and sun and it was exhilarating instead of terrifying which was wonderful!  To be able to enjoy the power of the wind, the roar in the trees, the flying clouds, the sunlight, the way the trees bowed and quivered and the leaves were almost inside out.  We came back and did some toning together and had tea.

Woke OK! I actually felt happy last night dancing.  The board meeting with Katrine was wonderful!  It was so heartwarming to hear the stories of what Neskaya has meant to people.  And very exciting to hear their ideas for how Neskaya might grow.  The energy and enthusiasm buoyed me up, lifted me.  I’m part of a team now, part of a circle, a container.  No longer the leader on point.

Woke OK!  The session with Caryn really helped a lot.  We made a map of my life in which sadness had a part but was not the whole thing.  It clarified and filled out the sense I had with Karen of being in a neutral place, where it was OK to do nothing, and looking at all the things I might do, but didn’t have to do.  There was: the Jizo statue and shrine, the celebration of my life, the Forest Path, Dancing and Decorating Neskaya, allowing positive feedback to reach me, the energy of healthy anger, creating deeper connections with community, and NVC.  There was also a place for sadness and grief work, and a place for resting.  Caryn said I might have to rest for months to recover from pushing myself unmercifully for most of my life.

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Somatic Experiencing

Posted on April 8, 2010 by jenny

(Written in May 2009)
Feeling pretty bleak.  A tough and painful session with Caryn.  I cried, screamed, roared, writhed, pounded my knees, pushed with my feet.  I even banged my head against the wall.  She stopped me, asked where the impulse was coming from – my chest – then suggested I imagine doing it.  So I did, and after about 6 times the impulse faded.  After more crying and writhing I just stopped, feeling like what good was it.  Caryn wrote down some of the things I had said while expressing my grief and rage.

This is too hard
Is anybody out there?  Does anybody see me?
Does anybody care?
I just want to die

Caryn said your feelings have been expressed and witnessed.  Now we have to break it down into managable chunks so you can discharge the energy.  She pointed to the first one “This is too hard” and I felt a plume of activation rising in my chest.  I used my hands to cut off a smaller blob and push the rest down.   Then I sat with the blob and the weight in my butt, and my shoulders shook, and I yawned — all the usual discharge.  I did it several times.  Then she had me look at the words again.  No charge with “This is too hard” — it’s not too hard if I can break it into manageable bits.  “Is anybody out there?” Caryn’s here and she can see me.  I kept doing the process, I hope I’ve learned it well enough to be able to do it on my own.  And I have been able to do it since I’ve been back.

Driving back I felt completely, totally bummed out.  I was able to cook and eat lunch and be in a conference call about my taxes.  Thank goodness that was easy.  I didn’t feel any satisfaction, but I did it. (Good for me!)

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Invisible Heroes

Posted on April 7, 2010 by jenny

Belleruth Naparstek wrote Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal.  It’s a book that I have found ENORMOUSLY helpful.  One problem of living with PTSD is that most people don’t have any idea of what that’s like, so they often say things, meaning to help, that are very painful.  I remember one woman telling me “fear is a choice” when I had been in a spiral of hypervigilance for months.  Her telling me that just made it worse.  After a lot of thinking, I realized that fear is not a choice if you have just narrowly escaped a car accident. The only choice is how you deal with it.  On the other hand, people do scare themselves with stories of an imagined future.

Here are some quotes from Invisible Heroes:

“I think heroes are people who do good or necessary things at great personal cost.  Heroism must be judged by the courage and grit required to do what needs doing.  That’s why trauma — that great terrorizer — produces heroes.  No one has to override fear the way a trauma survivor does.
“Sometimes the heroism looks like nothing at all.  When a phobic rape survivor makes herself go to an evening PTA meeting, even though her heart is pounding with terror and her body is drenched in sweat — that’s a form of heroism.”
From the Introduction, p. xv.

“Boston psychiatrist and groundbreaking trauma expert Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery, writes, ‘The survivor is continually buffeted by terror and rage.  These emotions are qualitatively different from ordinary fear and anger.  They are outside the range of ordinary emotional experience, and they overwhelm the ordinary capacity to bear feelings.’
“Most psychological description (Herman excepted) is too pale and flat to communicate the roiling emotions of a survivor with post-traumatic stress.  The intensity and severity of the feelings involved are better described by poetry, drama, and fiction, or with first person accounts…   Those who haven’t experienced these things may suspect these stories are tainted with melodrama or overstated in some way.  They are not.  This is how it is.  People who have suffered similar experiences immediately recognize the truth of them.” p96

“Survivors oscillate between very intense feelings and their opposite: numbness and internal deadness.  This is the emotional counterpart to the wildly oscillating hormonal shifts happening at the bioneurological level.  People feel as if they are sleepwalking, barely alive in these periods, and as time goes on, it’s the numbness that tends to predominate, taking over more and more days and weeks.
“Summoning up great courage and energy they don’t feel, people with chronic PTSD haul themselves from task to task, somehow getting through the day without a shred of interest in it.  One survivor says: ‘It is like walking in a fog.  I walk the fog walk.’” p 106

Invisible Heroes:survivors of trauma and how they heal, by Belleruth Naparstek

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“Holding on to Pain”

Posted on April 5, 2010 by jenny

(Written in March 2010)
Prompted by Bobbi, I’ve been reading Eckhart Tolle, The New Earth.  I’m at a section where he’s saying that people hold on to their pain, and I think that’s garbage.  Some people do, I’m sure, it’s a way to manipulate and get what you want.  I think about Mother and how she would look on sourly as we children were having fun washing the Christmas morning dishes, and how she resisted accepting that other wives might accompany their husbands when they were in the hospital. But I certainly don’t hold on to pain and it makes me furious when somebody suggests that I do.  Do people “hold on to” a leg that’s broken?  I’ve been living all my life with a brain and nervous system damaged by trauma which is essentially frozen in the body.  My pain holds on to me, I don’t hold on to it, I’ve been trying to get rid of it (which doesn’t work) for years until I found Somatic Experiencing and the possibility of “re-negotiating” trauma so it can be integrated and heal.  My identity certainly doesn’t include depressed person, I feel like I’m only really myself when I’m not depressed or terrified.  The story I tell of PTSD is not to support an identity as trauma survivor, it’s mostly to help me forgive myself when I’m having a hard time.  Not only do I not hold on to my pain, I’ve been doing my damnedest to heal, and I’m really grateful that I was born in a time when Somatic Experiencing was available.

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Somatic Experiencing

Posted on April 4, 2010 by jenny

(Written in January 2009)
The session with Caryn was very helpful, though we had a little trouble at the beginning with her cell phone cutting out.  I told her about the diagnosis of Bipolar 2 and how helpless & hopeless it made me feel.  The phone actually cut out while I was telling her the story which made me laugh & let go of it.  When we finally connected again we worked on resourcing: my butt on the couch, etc.  I told her about asking for help and people being delighted — How does that feel in your body? — a sense of relaxation and warmth, a very subtle sense of being held.  Also about being comfortable doing ordinary things with people I don’t know very well — which is different — I used to feel more like I did last night at the opening, depressed unless I was engaged in fairly intense conversation.  Caryn said that my ability to receive the warmth, and to be comfortable doing ordinary things with ordinary people, was a sign of healing on a deep level.  That I was beginning to connect with other people, instead of being lost in the intellect, in “Thought Land.” That doing ordinary things with ordinary people was a resource for me.  When I was pretty thoroughly resourced, she suggested we return to the psychiatrist — immediate activation.  Put her at a distance, put up half closed venetian blinds, still a little activated.  Finally I made a strong wall and that cut her off.  I told Caryn that the diagnosis made me feel like there was no way I could heal.  Caryn said that was wrong, it was just her interpretation.  Caryn saying there were signs that I am healing was more useful.  With the doctor cut off, I worked on resourcing.  Bits of activation came up, I gave them attention, they faded.  Then there were some big VERY SLOW waves of something heavy tired discouraged and maybe a little fear.  Staying with it my shoulders jumped a little and I started yawning.  There began to be cold on the surface.  Later the cold went deeper — it came in waves too, very slow ones.  I began to feel extremely tired & finally let my torso bow over my knees.  Then there began to be shaking, my whole upper body was shaking, but it was very subtle, I’m not sure it would have been visible to an observer.  Caryn said this was discharge on a very deep level.  It went on for a while.  Finally the cold began to leave, very slowly, and we ended the session with me feeling pretty solid.

Caryn McHose is my trauma therapist.  See her website.

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