Why it takes so long to heal early trauma

Posted on March 14, 2020 by jenny

I’ve been reading my journal for last year and came across this piece.  It’s a possible way to understand why sometimes reassurance works right away, and sometimes it takes longer.  One thing I’ve suspected for a long time is that the earlier the trauma, the longer it takes for the brain to recover healthy self-regulation.

From my journal for August 14, 2019

I was thinking how Dulany tried to reassure me after we had got as far as we could dealing with the scam.  But I did not reassure.  Sometimes I’m able to feel better as soon as I’ve done something successfully and sometimes I’m not.  I go on feeling scared for several hours.  I’m not at all sure why it works sometimes and why it doesn’t.  I suspect it depends on how deep the trigger goes.  If it’s very deep, then I think first the cognitive layer has to relax, and then that will help the next layer down to relax.  If it’s very deep, it will take a long time for each layer to reassure the next, I suppose the younger layers may fall into a default of anger, making themselves or the younger layers wrong — I can see that it would be a complicated business.  Not possible to work on it cognitively.  I suppose one could do a voice or gestalt process, identifying each of the triggered ones and ask them what’s going on.

I was thinking I could try letting different little Jennys speak as I did once before, but some part of me feels heavy — I want to do something else, something with color and shape, maybe a real puzzle.

 

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“Announcing your place in the family of things…”

Posted on March 13, 2020 by jenny

I went to the 6th month reunion of Kindred Spirits.  From my journal:

Reunion was utterly amazing.  The first night was mostly housekeeping, maybe we sang a song or two to connect.  That night I didn’t sleep at all, and was very dazed and lost and wobbly in the morning.  In the morning we did a breathwork exercise led by Penny.  She talked about kinds of connection: eye contact, touch, and energetic contact.  I was too tired to make any effort, except to breathe as instructed, and fairly soon I just lay down with my eyes closed.  Did make some effort to connect energetically and then just let go.  

I started feeling much better after lunch, enjoyed Sue’s group singing, and Mick’s life-shop on friendship.

Saturday evening, sitting around singing, I had such a wonderful sense of the group as a whole.  Some way we were all connected by love, woven together by notes of voices and familiar songs.  I was totally enjoying other people’s enjoyment. 

Sunday morning we did a healing circle.  Everyone got 4 minutes to ask for what they wanted from the group.  At first I thought about talking about death & aging and realizing that I’m losing physical fitness and won’t get it back, what will I do with the time and energy left.  But somehow, what came was to talk about building Neskaya.  Something I’ve never done before, except to people who have been there.  I told the story of “Let’s build it!” How we got the name, and the geometry.  And my prayer to the Spirits of the Notch.  I didn’t mention dancing in the trenches with Sibyl, chanting to Kannon while the foundation was poured, the feeling in my heart when the steel got connected.  Somehow sharing that brought a complete flowering of joy.

On Sunday when we were packing up, I often sat alone, hearing snatches of conversation and feeling connected even though I wasn’t talking to anybody.  I had a couple of deeper conversations with two women, in which they both told me they had been beaming love to me during the breath work, and one of them said everybody was.  I was not aware of the love then, but I realized that was why I started feeling so much better after lunch.

I think that I finally have a feeling/experience/understanding of what love is.  It’s that sense of connection in community.  Not some nice thing that you feel, something deeper than that.  But not just some hard thing that you do — the “hard thing” is the practice.  The love is that deep knowledge of connection.  That’s what I felt the last day at Kindred Spirits Camp in 2018, as we were cleaning up, and that’s what I felt the first day at Neskaya Dance Camp in 2018, as I was sitting with my tea, and others were doing meditative dances.  The sense of being surrounded by love.  In both cases I felt it when I wasn’t interacting with anyone.

Elizabeth Goudge says: “Love is not some nice thing that you feel, but some hard thing that you do.”  This was very comforting to me because I rarely feel that gush in the heart that lets me know I love someone.  This deep sense of connection is something new.  Not an emotion, but not just a thought.  Maybe a realization, something is made real.

This morning, as I walked Mocha in the rain, I heard that strange croaking call.  I looked up and saw two wild geese winging northward.  It brought the lines of Mary Oliver’s poem to mind:

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

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The Demon’s Mirror

Posted on March 5, 2020 by jenny

From my journal:

Wednesday, March 4

I’m feeling very sad and very lonely.

Grief group was painful.

Talked to Erica about how despairing I was feeling about what’s going on in the world.  She was supportive, did not try to contradict me.  In fact she said “None of it is arguable.”  What is there that I can still do?  When I ask myself that, it becomes clear that the most important thing for me to do is the practice of self-compassion.  The first time I tried it, a while back, it went well, I felt compassion.  But then it didn’t happen again, and I didn’t really persist in the practice.  Except to recite the words.  Erica said to recognize my good intention.  Yes, and I feel the softening toward myself.  I am so harsh on myself.

I continued to read last year’s journal, but am finding it boring.  No clear trajectory, a lot of ups & downs, a lot of daily details.

3rd cup. coffee.  I’m pretty totally bummed out.  It’s warm & windy, white clouds flying in blue sky.  Last time it was like that, it lifted my spirits.  Today I just feel sad that I can’t enjoy it.  Reminding myself, I feel compassion for my inability to enjoy instead of anger.  I suppose it’s a worthwhile practice.

Thursday, March 5

Yesterday was one of the worst days of my life.  I don’t remember ever feeling that level of despair.  I felt absolutely alone, absolutely without friends.  I felt totally hopeless for the world, the planetary life support system, the mass of suffering humanity.  It’s too late now to reverse global warming, though I think there is still a chance to slow it down.  I tried to find compassion for my despair, and discovered that I’m really angry at myself for “giving in” to despair.  So then there was nothing I could do but repeat the prayer “May I be held in compassion.”

Later today, I realized I had been angry at myself under all my efforts at self-compassion.  I also had in my head lines from Loreena McKennittt singing Yeats’ poem The Two Trees.

The changing colors of its fruit/dowered the stars with merry light
The surety of its hidden root/ is planted quiet in the night…

All things turn to barrenness/in the dim glass the demons hold
The glass of our utter weariness/made when God slept in times of old…

The two things that were most significant were recognizing that under the despair was anger at myself for being so useless, and that the words of the song were powerful: “The surety of the hidden root” and the demons’ mirror.  Thinking of what they meant I saw that the hidden root was in the “real” world, but the barrenness was in the mirror.  So when the lines about barrenness started in my mind, I made the effort to change back to “The surety of its hidden root..”  I had to keep making the effort over and over.  It felt like it was the only thing I could do, and I had no sense of anything real happening.

Telling my friend Elizabeth about this, she reminded me that the demon’s mirror was my mother, who totally mis-represented me to myself.  That helped break the spell, and then I can see all kinds of things.  I believe that if I can’t “feel” compassion, my practice isn’t working.  I fail to see that the practice is working just fine.  That’s what a practice is.  Something you repeat, not asking that it make any difference, trusting that your good intention is what’s important.  How easy it is for me to be angry at myself for something I can’t change and not notice it.  “You just want to be miserable.”

The old old beliefs that are still my “default” setting.  God is “Capricious, malicious, and willful.”  If I can’t do it, it won’t happen.  I don’t deserve to live.  Of course I’m angry at myself for not being able to do something I actually can’t do — because “My expectations of myself are reasonable, and I am bad if I don’t carry them out, and if I don’t do them right I will be cast into outer darkness” … or, “Sent back to Sears & Roebucks.”

Added today, March 6: I read this over and see that it fails to convey how lost and disconnected I really felt.  In fact, now that I’m out of it, I can’t even remember what it was like, but reading my first words “very sad and very lonely” I wonder what’s the big deal.  I feel like that a lot.  But this was not like anything I’ve ever felt before.  My best guess is that I’m experiencing what it was like to be left alone when I was an infant, without words, without the ability to move my body across the mattress in the crib, unable to feed myself or take care of myself in any way.  That level of despair is a terrible blankness, there’s not even fear.

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Creativity and Mental Illness

Posted on February 29, 2020 by jenny

Writing my journal this morning, I struggled with scattered thoughts, lots of odd, confused ideas.  Then the universe connected me with an interesting piece of information.  It was on Brainpickings, by Maria Popova.

She quotes Nancy Andreasen’s book The Creating Brain.

Many personality characteristics of creative people … make them more vulnerable, including openness to new experiences, a tolerance for ambiguity, and an approach to life and the world that is relatively free of preconceptions. This flexibility permits them to perceive things in a fresh and novel way, which is an important basis for creativity. But it also means that their inner world is complex, ambiguous, and filled with shades of gray rather than black and white. It is a world filled with many questions and few easy answers. While less creative people can quickly respond to situations based on what they have been told by people in authority — parents, teachers, pastors, rabbis, or priests — the creative person lives in a more fluid and nebulous world. He or she may have to confront criticism or rejection for being too questioning, or too unconventional. Such traits can lead to feelings of depression or social alienation. A highly original person may seem odd or strange to others. Too much openness means living on the edge. Sometimes the person may drop over the edge… into depression, mania, or perhaps schizophrenia.

Creative ideas probably occur as part of a potentially dangerous mental process, when associations in the brain are flying freely during unconscious mental states — how thoughts must become momentarily disorganized prior to organizing. Such a process is very similar to that which occurs during psychotic states of mania, depression, or schizophrenia. In fact, the great Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who gave schizophrenia its name, described a “loosening of associations” as its most characteristic feature: “Of the thousands of associative threads that guide our thinking, this disease seems to interrupt, quite haphazardly, sometimes single threads, sometimes a whole group, and sometimes whole segments of them.”

Sounds just like me.  I’m reminded that it’s amazing I didn’t end up in a mental hospital, partly because I was lucky enough to have family money, and partly because I was intelligent enough to know that I needed help.  I spent a large amount of that money on therapists of many kinds, and workshops on personal growth.  Also, I was lucky that my brother Jack started me on a Buddhist path.

On the other hand, because I am distracted and overwhelmed so easily, I am probably more easily traumatized than most people.  Right now, I am feeling total despair about ever reaching a point where I can “enjoy life” or even be “grateful for the gift of life.”

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Some Days I Just Want to Leave

Posted on February 24, 2020 by jenny

This describes pretty exactly how I feel today.  He goes on to say that it is his sadness talking, and he still has hope.  It’s much harder for me to find hope.  But today, I find hope in Bernie’s successes in New Hampshire (I voted for him), Iowa, and Nevada.  He certainly didn’t win because he had money to spend.  He won despite all the money that bought ads to defeat him. Especially the ads that promote hate and fear on social media.  It isn’t just Bernie who is winning.  Our Revolution is working to elect progressives in Congress, state and local governments.  Maybe the tide has turned.  The folks in the dirt, the roots of the grass, are waking up and finding that they are strong.

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Looking at the Past

Posted on February 23, 2020 by jenny

From my journal for July 21, 1975

My friend Michele told me that at a party the other night several people said nice things about me: Brook from tapestry class, Carol from dream class, said i was a very warm person, also very genuine.  Since i admire both Brook and Carol, this made me feel wonderful.  I have to accept that this is true, because if i don’t i make the mistake of thinking i am awful.  I’ve probably hurt more people and done more damage through thinking i was awful (i can’t act in this situation; a kind word from me would mean nothing; i am not important to so-and-so; etc.) and therefore needing to defend myself.  On the other hand, accepting that i am (or can be) “warm” doesn’t mean that i can sit back complacently and assume that it will continue.  It is clear to me that what they perceive as ‘warmth’ is produced by constant daily efforts to overcome my cold, reserved, and selfish nature.  So on the one hand you have to assume that you are good, that everything you do is basically worthwhile in the long run because leading to growth and wholeness, then there is no need to be defensive or less than honest.  On the other hand you must try to perceive clearly your faults, defensive postures, constrictions, and any natural tendencies to go to the extreme, so that you can be constantly counteracting, coming back to center.  (The ongoing internal revolution is the only one there is)  On the other hand (third hand?) perhaps this ‘warmth’ is the result of having finally let the Leo-child-self go to act in the world, instead of repressing it as ego-evil-bad-selfish-show-off; and it is through acting out this part perceived as ‘bad’ that i am enabled to become what i want to be (warm, generous, sharing, and also authentic).  Paradox at the heart of it.  To be constantly watching oneself, ‘counteracting’ imagined faults, is to be uptight, rigid etc.  And yet to assume that you are ‘good’ and therefore don’t have to work on yourself, is almost as bad as to assume you’re hopelessly evil.  The moment you express one-half the paradox, you are in danger of going to the extreme; therefore you must express both simultaneously!  Aaargh, the limitations of language!  At least it signifies that i have got beyond the realm of language and into the realm of truth — for so long i was trapped in the limitations of language (‘if you can’t express it, it isn’t a truth’)

Reading this now, I notice several things. One is that I was still using “i” to refer to myself. I started that in 1967, not sure why. I went back to capital I around the beginning of 1976. I describe myself as having a “cold, reserved, and selfish nature,” which amazes me now. I’m not sure it was ever true. But it is still how I experience myself until I give it words. As Erica says “It may be real, but it’s not true,” speaking of the felt sense that something is “real.”  But one of the things that trauma does is screw up the felt sense.  When I’m triggered, I experience the fear as happening now, but it isn’t real.  It’s fear of something that was real and truly fearful in the past, but is no longer happening, there is no longer a reason to be fearful now.

I write that “i have got beyond the realm of language and into the realm of truth,” but I was wrong. Recently I’ve been experiencing that I’m out of the world of language, but what I feel is confusion and lostness, not truth. On the other hand, I have experienced truths that could not be expressed verbally.

This is what I wrote the day after reading that journal, Saturday, February 22:

Feeling very discouraged.  I remember reading something yesterday about people arriving at a certain age and realizing that they are never going to do what they had hoped to achieve.  I can’t think of where I might have read it.  I don’t feel that it applies to me because the only thing I ever wanted to “achieve” was a level of mental health that would allow me to “have a life.”  What would “having a life” look like?  I would have a sense of purpose and meaning, and I would be able to enjoy things.  Looking back, I see that there were times when I had that — when I was writing my book, when I was teaching astronomy, when I was teaching circle dance and creating seasonal celebrations — and I’m sure there were moments of enjoyment.  But somehow they never got built into a foundation that I could lean on, or embody in some way.  I think because there was some level of dissociation that kept me from feeling satisfaction.  That mechanism is what I was seeing in the journal writing where I’m clearly  afraid that if I allow myself to really get that I’m a good person, a person of warmth and authenticity, that I would then become complacent, and not work on all the little faults that I see so clearly.  Looking back, I wonder if this is how I internalized Mother’s “Don’t think you’re so great.”  I see now that it kept me from relaxing and turning outward to get to know people and express my caring.  Instead I focused on myself and my faults and “how am I doing?”

I have to give myself credit for really wanting to be a good person, and to do some good in the world I cared about.  I really did, and still do, care very much about the world, the world of stars, trees, and elephants, and the world of suffering human beings.  It’s never been important to me to be famous, or to have a lot of people think I’m wonderful.  The sad truth is that a lot of people do think I’m wonderful, and I can’t take it in.

So is this PTSD?  Or the result of the attachment wound?  But the attachment wound is the trauma.  They can’t be separated.  I was never good enough for Mother, and I’ll never be good enough for the internalized judge.

I remember that Bessel Van Der Kolk said that “all trauma is attachment trauma,” and go looking for the reference.  I find it in my second blog post.  He is quoted by Maggie Scarf, in her book “Secrets, Lies, Betrayals.”  The actual quote is “The real trauma, and the actual cause of most post-traumatic suffering, is ‘attachment trauma’.”

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“I’ve been working for so long…”

Posted on February 22, 2020 by jenny

Going through my blog for 2017, I came to this post from February 2017.  It’s a journal entry from January 2017.  It pretty well describes what I’m feeling like right now.  The only difference is that I AM in a place where there are other people and meals are prepared.

Thursday, January 5

Feeling a little cranky, angry? unhappy?  No, I think there’s anger there.  The old anger “I have worked so hard for so long…”

I’m lost and confused.  I don’t understand what’s going on with me.  I’m not even sure who I am.

So I sat and paid attention to my breathing for a while.  But I just kept feeling more and more sleepy.  So then I thought maybe I should just lie down for a bit.  Then I thought what’s next is to make a second cup of tea and take the things I have to take on an empty stomach — which are the calcium supplements and the iron — and I just don’t want to do any of it.  Then I asked myself how do I know/decide what to do next?  Usually I just follow my routine without questioning.  Then I thought the next thing is to make a second cup of tea and write about all this.

I was thinking that I have lost myself, fallen out of the story of my life, and wouldn’t it be possible to meet the day as a new thing and start to explore what my life is now?  A fresh start.  But it doesn’t feel like a fresh start.  It feels like I’ve crashed and burned and am just lying here in the ruins — no, that’s not the right metaphor — flung from the vehicle as it crashes and burns.  Now, how do I pick up the threads of my life?  What do I want?  What I want is to have some sense of central flow, or a path or a direction.  What would that feel like?  I would feel like I was being carried by something bigger than myself, and that there would be clear guidance for what to do next.

Thinking about my sister reading the 4th July monologue, and going through old pictures with Christia and finding the one of all of us on the terrace for Dad’s 70th birthday, and showing her the Torah of Jenny — thinking of the things left out of the Torah — marriage, divorce, dad’s death…  I see an image of stuff being shaken up, shaken loose, stuff from the past, that’s been all packed together, being shaken up, shaken apart, so I can decide what to keep and what to get rid of.  It’s a time out to deal with the past.  There’s a way in which I never have dealt with it.  I have no positive memories of the past, no good places to revisit.  I’ve always pushed on ahead, trying to get away from the pain, trying to find a life that worked for me, trying to heal those early deep wounds.  I see that I want/need a container, a hospital or a nunnery, where there are other people around, where meals are prepared, so I can stop fighting the daily battle and turn my energy to integrating the past.  I see it as being like traumatized memory, undigested fragments and chunks, no coherent story.  So my job is to construct a meaningful & coherent & usable narrative of my life.

After breakfast.  I see that I took a break from my life by really losing myself in books, but on emerging I don’t feel rested and refreshed, I’m still tired and lost.

What do I want to do.  A question I ask only rarely.  Usually it’s what do I have to do, what’s next on the schedule.  If it could be any way at all?  I’d be part of a group of people, and I’d be OK.

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Defective vs. Wounded

Posted on February 20, 2020 by jenny

Written in my journal on January 20.  I was typing it up today, and saw something I need to remember.

Looking back, I see that a week ago Monday (the 13) was a good day.  I woke happy, was able to “cosy in,” enjoy the falling snow and reading Rosamund Pilcher.  Things fell apart on Tuesday.  Reading over, I see that if I feel myself as defective, my heart hardens toward myself.  If I feel myself as wounded, my heart softens.  Without my verbal intellect I feel really defective, it’s the only thing I could count on for a lot of my life.

What I see from this is how important my rational verbal intellect is to my sense of confidence.  I’ve spent most of my life learning that there are other ways of knowing, and practicing them.  But when the chips are down, I turn to my rational intellect.  “Not knowing” what’s happening, what to do, what I did wrong…  has always been a trigger for me.  I realize that recently, I’ve been able to be OK with not knowing what I wanted to do next.  But when my brain jams, seems blocked and stuck, I panic.  I know that my intellect was supported in school.  The assignments were clear, and the grades clearly reflected my performance.  At home, it was never clear what my parents wanted, and what was OK (i.e. ignored) one day could be criticized the next.  I never got praise or helpful feedback.

Mother telling me she’d “send me back to Sears & Roebucks” left me with a lifetime fear of being kicked out on the street if I did something wrong, out where I would not be able to take care of myself.  I didn’t realize that this fear was still with me, until I got accepted here at Kendal despite the statistics that said I would run out of money before I died.  There’s a fund to cover people like me.  It’s true that the statistic is low.  Nevertheless, I was surprised to see how safe I felt.  It let me know that even as I got older, and told myself it must have been a joke, I still felt the fear of being abandoned.  Well, that was the trauma, being left alone when I couldn’t possibly feed myself, much less take care of myself in any other way.

The other thing I notice in this passage is that if I see myself as “defective” I judge myself as a useless, worthless person.  I only began to see that was wrong when I was 42 years old and the information about children of alcoholics came out.  Then I saw that I had learned dysfunctional behavior.  But it takes much longer to change a belief, even when you see it’s wrong.  I realize that it’s still very easy for me to think I’m defective, in fact it’s automatic.  There was a time, when I’d catch myself giving myself a hard time and I’d “take a big step back,” see how much this person had been hurt, and often, not always, start to feel compassion instead of judgement.  Typing this piece that I wrote a month ago, I see that the judgement that I’m “defective” is still my first reaction, and I still have to work to feel compassion.

Seeing myself as “wounded” on the other hand, calls for very different behavior.  Creating safety, protection, fulfilling needs for outside caring and nourishment, and patience to allow the natural healing process to take place.  All things that I’m still not very good at.

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Guidance

Posted on February 15, 2020 by jenny

Dear Guides & Guardian Spirits, I have been having a confusing time with this new part that’s waked up in me.  It seems clear that integrating her is my job for now.  But I’m uncertain.  I’m afraid it’s too “self-involved.”  Please help me.

Dear Jenny, “self-involved” is not a problem.  You are not “self-involved” when you are studying cosmology, or teaching circle dance.  It is not having yourself as the object of your attention that is the problem with “self-involved.”  The problem is being self-involved to the exclusion of everything else, of making yourself the center of the universe, of seeing everything you come in contact with in reference to yourself only.  This is what your mother did.  It is not what you are doing.  Jalaja said your work in the depths of psyche has more benefits to the larger world than you can imagine.  You are treading a difficult path, it’s no wonder you make an occasional mis-step, or get confused or feel lost.  Sometimes you have to be unconscious to take the next step as you did on Tower Peak.  Sometimes really protecting yourself gets sabotaged by old patterns.  But you are actually doing rather well with a difficult path.  This is your part of the “Great Turning” that the whole planet is going through.  Keep on just as you are.  You are doing fine.  We are so proud of you.

Thank you.  I feel much more solid, but on the edge of tears.

Jalaja’s comment: “The work you are doing is a gift to all beings, a blessing that will bear fruit in ways you cannot see or even imagine.”

When I was on a Sierra Club trip we climbed Tower Peak.  At one point, the trail went along a narrow ledge, and there was a gap about a yard wide that we had to step over.  Before I got to it, my mind shut down.  After I was on the other side I realized that my thinking shut down so I wouldn’t be disabled by fear.

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A New Part of Me

Posted on February 14, 2020 by jenny

I haven’t posted for a while, because I’ve been having serious trouble verbalizing my experience.  It’s been about developing a relationship with a very early fragment of myself.  It started with recognizing that the non-verbal, scared experience that I’ve been having for a couple of months, is not some new phase of aging.  That was my biggest fear, that my loss of confidence and verbal skill meant that my aging brain was beginning to malfunction.  Now it looks like what was going on was the awakening of a very early part of myself.  My experience, over the last couple of months, has been largely that of an infant, probably who I was before I got traumatized.  I say that because it was my first intuitive feeling once I got that this was not me now, but another part of me from the past.

Driving home from grief group, suspecting she was a very young part of me, I tried reaching out to her.  I felt my way through what felt like very dense, almost solid, fog.  pushing through layers, I finally came to a crack in the rock.  I started in, it narrowed to something impassible, but there was a sort of shelf to the right, a small cave broken into the rock.  I reached in and found the baby, and started swimming home with her.

Once I got back to my rooms, I found a baby doll I had used in some of my early work with an inner child.  I got her out and sat with her tucked into my chest, next to my heart.  I could feel she was afraid, so I said to her “It’s OK that you’re afraid.  I wish you weren’t, but I’m not going to push you away.  I’m here, and I’ve got you.”  When I had to get up and do something, I put her in a box, cushioned and wrapped up in silk and flannel, with the box partly covered so she was hidden, but could still see out.  That’s how I’ve felt the safest.

I’ve started to have the odd, uncanny experience of feeling like I was new here, seeing things for the first time.  Also experiencing more beauty and richness.  Once I even had a sense of the gift of life, something I’ve never felt before.

Now, as I go through my day, I say the loving kindness prayer like this:

May I be held in lovingkindness.
May we be held in lovingkindness.  (meaning both me and the baby)
May all beings be held in lovingkindness.

Sometimes I have the sense that I’m holding a newborn.  Sometimes she looks out at the world with delighted curiosity, sometimes she buries her face in my chest.  I feel a lot of love.

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