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Wednesday, November 21

Thinking about talking with Erica about starting to tolerate — and even enjoy — the ordinary.  For most of my life I was in too much psychic pain, I needed something fairly intense to hold my attention.  Erica said something about “living on a battlefield.”  Yes, part of me is keyed up, waiting for the next bomb to drop.  Reminds me of that session with Debbie when I became aware of the bombed-out village.  The worst of it is that instead of having people around who are also in the bombed out village, so we can comfort and support each other, I am surrounded by people who are oblivious.

I started working with Debbie Alicen at Umbrella after I had found a reference to cutting oneself being a consequence of childhood sexual abuse.  I pursued the issue, hoping to find out what was stopping me from being able to easily have sex with my husband.  Years of work did not bring up any evidence of sexual abuse — all I could remember was being molested by my father at age 12 — that’s not a big deal is it?

March 17, 1989 Work with Debbie

I told her about the sadness that I had been feeling, even read part of what I had written (and that sad high voice appeared, with some crying.) I also told her what I told Dana, that it felt like being part of a group of refugees leaving their bombed out village, and having to leave behind beside the road those who can’t make it — no time for mourning or burial, just having to walk on, dry eyed, because of the necessity of survival. Debbie said “That’s what your life has been, and now you’ve finally got to the place where you can mourn, and you are also sad that it had to be that way.” At first I felt resistance, no my life wasn’t that awful, and then I realized she was right, in the necessity of survival there had been no time or space for mourning my lost innocence, my crippled creativity, and no room for anger about my sabotaged power.

My memory of this session is that I was so confused when I left that I couldn’t remember Debbie’s name.  So it was a surprise to find that that didn’t happen until six month later.  Now I understand that it took that long for the understanding to percolate downward and become experience rather than idea.

September 8, 1989

At Beverly’s after “emergency” session with Debbie. Having trouble remembering. Couldn’t remember dream to be able to work with it, it became just a bunch of meaningless words. Images from other dreams perhaps floated through my mind and disappeared. I sat in the ruins of my bombed out house and cried. Still baffled. A fragmented

September 9, 1989

“A fragmented session with Debbie” I was going to write when distracted by Beverly…

The session with Debbie was very confusing. I told her the fragment of the dream, but it didn’t mean anything. Other dream-like fragments floated through my mind, but couldn’t be grasped. I felt the whole time like I was in two places at once, massive sense of deja vu — haven’t we already talked about this — then fragments of dreams — or dream-like fragments — dreams, memories of the past? “floating in wide orbits with no center.” When it was time to go I couldn’t remember the date, the year, or Debbie’s name. I felt completely disoriented and fragmented and it persisted for a little while at Beverly’s. But I can’t remember what happened in the session well enough to write it down.

I think what happened was Debbie’s validation of the shift from seeing myself as a monster to seeing that my inner environment is what is monstrous — something I internalized at a very early age, something that felt a lot like living in a bombed out house. No wonder I had all those dreams of the A-bomb falling on our house, it matched my inner environment. No wonder the planes upset me so much, they remind me that I’m living in a bombed out house, a violated body, an invalidated psyche, and I’ve been trying all my life to pretend that’s not true.

The upset about the planes was my extreme reaction to the noise of the small planes towing the gliders out of Franconia Airport.  I suffered from it for 14 years.

Wednesday, November 14

My talk with Erica was really pretty amazing.  She was absolutely delighted that I was really beginning to let myself rest.  She said she had felt so protective of me at the beginning because I didn’t seem to have any idea that I needed protection.  I realized, from the softness and caring in her voice when she says “It’s OK, Sweetie, you need a rest,” that I may be allowing myself to rest, but it’s still grudgingly.  I’m still judging myself for having to rest.  I also was able to understand why the Quaker meeting was so intense, and why I had to leave right away and not talk about it.  She saw me protecting myself against something that really was too much for me.  I see that having been expected to do things I couldn’t do when I was a child, I have always expected too much of myself, and judged myself harshly when I couldn’t do what I “should” be able to do.

In Friends’ Meeting, one woman had talked about being with her ex-husband when he died.  He was an alcoholic, and they had had difficulties, but she was glad to be with him.  But she said she reached a level of despair that no one could understand except the hospice people.  It was Veteran’s Day and one of the men recited the poem “In Flanders fields the poppies blow, between the crosses, row on row…”  I got tears in my eyes, remembering that that was the first World War, and they talked about “shell shock” as being cowardice.  It wasn’t until Vietnam, that people began to understand that it was PTSD, not cowardice.  I identified with the soldiers with PTSD, but didn’t really get that  I had been traumatized until I read Peter Levine’s book, Waking the Tiger, in about 2003. As a consequence of what was said at Friends’ Meeting, I was seriously triggered by despair, death, and trauma.

Saturday, November 17

The session with Erica was surprisingly intense. I think I’ve been a little troubled that life has seemed so boring recently, and that I have been addictively buried in reading. I take my addictive reading — can’t put the book down — to mean that I’m avoiding something. At least I’m starting to have some trust that the process will continue even if I don’t get actively, cognitively, involved. Maybe there’s also some trust that whatever it is will emerge into consciousness when it’s ready.

Often when I think I am avoiding something, I start searching, desperately, to find it so I can fix things.  I have to keep relearning that I can trust the process.  I think of Parker Palmer talking about the soul, how it’s like a wild animal.  “If we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out.”  from A Hidden Wholeness    pp126-7

I usually type up my journal a month later.  Yesterday I typed this.  One of the things I’ve been learning in the work with Erica is how deep the trauma goes.  This description of feeling so alone and disconnected is pretty much how I felt as a baby when my mother left me alone for too long.

from my journal for October 10
Read over the notes I made from the phone session with Erica.  I was very upset, not feeling connected to her.  I cried and cried, sometimes in a very high voice.  I said “Someone is supposed to come!”  Erica kept being soothing and reasonable.  “I’m here with you… stay with the feeling…  how do you know that you are disconnected?”  I hated that she was reasonable.  She sounded detached.  Didn’t she care?  My heart was heavy and my belly empty of hope.  Looking back, I can see that I was feeling grief and despair and anger.  I started hitting my leg.  She suggested I hug a pillow.  That seemed so stupid, so artificial.  But I figured “What have I got to lose?”  So I got the pillow.  It helped a little.  She asked about the doll I had made, would it help to hug her?  No, she doesn’t need comforting.  Then I thought of the little dog I got at the silent auction.  He’s a beanie baby so he’s a little squishy, and his expression is one of longing.  Very easy to want to comfort him.  I think it must have been at that point that I switched from upset baby to comforter.  I wanted to write, but I needed to hold the phone and the puppy.  Erica suggested I put him inside my shirt so I did, and that felt good.  Comforting for both of us.  I think of Mother using me to comfort herself because Dad was away.  At some point I began to feel my whole body.  “How does that feel?”  I feel my skin — my whole skin — and then I feel myself filling it.  I finally stopped crying/ screaming/ whimpering.  I felt totally drained.  Erica said something about a big wave, but I didn’t feel like something came to a natural end, just that I had got too tired and despairing to keep crying.

Song in my mind:
“after all the tears are finally cried
and I am finally clean inside
the gentle winds will come and they will dry my mind…
and all that will be left for me to do is die.”

When I find a song in my mind, I look for the message.  I had to look up the exact words.  They are from Pandora’s Golden Heebie Jeebies, a song from 1966.

Just as Erica and I were getting ready to hang up, I heard the call waiting sound, and after we hung up the phone started ringing and it was Christine. I was so glad she called. I cried for help and somebody answered.

From my journal for September 26

I was so tired yesterday I didn’t do much of anything.  I did take a short nap, went to meditation, walked Mocha in the rain.  I had planned to do things like call the dentist, but because I was so tired, I let myself off the hook.  I notice that when I was so triggered about the lying about sexual abuse situation, I did practical things because resting quietly was impossible when I was so triggered.  That must be how I lived a lot of my life.  That’s why I balanced the checkbook every month to the last penny.  That’s where “false urgency” comes from.

From my journal for September 28

I think of the tremendous effort I made on Saturday and Sunday not to let my mind ruminate on the issue of abuse and lying.  

Notes from talk with Erica on October 30

She says it’s a big transition to the support of having people around.  It’s hard work to make new friends. I say “I shouldn’t need to get all this rest.”  She says “You were running on fumes before you moved to Kendal.”

She says I’ve been really really really tired for a really long time.  Now I’m starting to recognize collapse: after the long worry and effort when Mocha was sick, getting me up in the middle of the night, then the vet and medication, she started getting better and then I collapsed. after teaching dance last Sunday — I enjoyed the teaching, was my enthusiastic self — and then, when it was over, I could feel how totally exhausted I was.

Erica says I’m getting familiar with my limits as an organism.

Maybe I’m starting to feel safe enough to collapse.  All those years that the “tough little drip” kept going, and going, and going…   I used to say I got through depression like you get through a blizzard.  You know if you lie down that you’ll freeze to death, but you’ve forgotten why you can’t lie down, you say to yourself “now put your right foot forward, now put your left foot forward..” and just keep moving.  But it wasn’t just depression I got through that way, it was my whole life because I did not know how much pain I was avoiding.  “The erasing of the abuse was worse than the abuse.”  If you don’t know the reason you are having a hard time, you think it’s because you aren’t trying hard enough, so you push yourself.

more from my journal for Tuesday, October 16

I read some more in Krista Tippett’s book.  It is so amazing.  A lot of it feels totally beyond my poor brain at the moment.  Maybe because so much of it is about the social engagement system, which I think, is currently offline.  That makes sense of why I’m isolating.

Got up to make my second cup of tea and realized how unbelievably tired I am.  Just sitting here with my head propped on my hand.

I wanted to write down about Trisha saying that she has a hard time doing yoga exercises and she blames it on not wanting to give up her story of being a victim.  Is that what I’m doing?  For me I think it is about taking care of myself.  Things that are basically taking care of myself — yoga stretches, meditating, even doing laundry, but especially ones that require being alone with my body — are very difficult to do.  It’s so painful to have to be with myself in that way.  Maybe there’s a lot of grief and anger that I wasn’t cared for by someone else when I was supposed to be.  I want to spend my time doing something of consequence for the world, something that matters.  If I can’t be doing something like that why take care of myself?  No motivation at all.  I’m not worth taking care of.

Third cup of tea.  Still tired, but I feel totally washed out and finally ready for some kind of new beginning.  Maybe stop apologizing for not being more effective in the cumbersome bureaucratic details of living.

Three moments of beauty noticed and savored: last night, walking Mocha, all the lamp-lit windows made rectangles of golden orange; this morning, standing behind the couch, a little sun coming in the window, sun at just the right angle to make a beautiful pattern of darks and lights of trees, grass, buildings; walking Mocha, enjoying sun, blue sky, fall colors, fallen leaves.  I notice that the sun is not making me feel like I have to hide, which is how I’ve felt for the last couple of weeks.  Comforted by grey sky and rain.

I wonder if the end of a process of struggling (but I keep doing this same one over & over) and potential for new beginning and extreme tiredness is a result of spending most of yesterday working on the blog piece.  Which was also working on the whole issue of am I a failure at living? or have I done a good job with a very tough assignment?

I took notes in my journal while I was talking to Erica,  I’ve edited and expanded them here.

Talk with Erica.  I say “I’m overwhelmed,” she says what’s happening in your body?  — heart squeezed and all the tissue around it being pulled into the squeeze, torso diffuse, arms shaking a very little bit, then there are tears, and then I start to cough.  Sometimes the cough has meant that I’m angry.  Erica suggests that coughing while I’m crying may mean it’s not OK to pay attention to what’s happening in my body.  There’s a traffic jam, anger going in different directions.  The cough interrupts a state of profound flow, I went from “overwhelm” to tears, which happened because of my attention to my somatic experience.  Erica’s language is almost too much for me, so I reformulate what I have understood: “I’m not supposed to pay attention to what I’m experiencing — what’s going on for me.”  

Erica reminds me that when I was a little kid, crying, I was right in the flow of my experience.  Mother’s response was “go to your room.”  That’s a slap in the face.  She says my whole system is sputtering with shock and bewilderment/disbelief.  I start to wail about how much in me is shut down.  Erica lets me wail, and then reframes it.  She says that right below the surface the flow is fully intact.  My response to someone who’s vulnerable is instant compassion.  “The flow is fully intact.”  I had been seeing my whole life as a desert, but I’ve only been living in a desert of not being able to see the truth about myself.  “We are being with how quickly you move into your responsive flow with your own experience.”  What am I feeling now?  — relief and disbelief —  I didn’t believe my real life is still here (“under the surface”).  I had to disbelieve in my own experience, mother saying “Go to your room” erases me, Jenny.

Krista Tippett’s book is Becoming Wise, An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living.  She quotes interviews with people on her radio show, On Being, who have helped shape her understanding.

The “social engagement system” is a very recent part of the brain, it tends to shut down when the reptilian brainstem is activated by trauma.

“Trisha” is in the book The Education of Will.  I say more about it in my post Struggle with Feelings of Failure.

Sun making me feel like I have to hide.

I typed all that up and made a draft of a blog post.  It took me all day.  I added a part about early trauma affecting the development of the brain, how that makes it harder to heal.  When I managed to get a little more perspective on myself I saw that I had in fact taken some actual steps in a positive direction: finding out how to get the Dan Siegel course material (good for me!), putting up the poster (good for me!), signing up to write postcards (good for me!), and setting a date when I would start teaching folk dance again (even when I wasn’t feeling very excited about it, GOOD FOR ME!).  I actually did those things, despite being at the bottom of the pit of despair, and I did them without using will power to push myself (good for me!)  It’s OK to do something really tiny.  Given the weight of my despair, a tiny action is an enormous achievement.

The Dan Siegel course is in Integration, a function of the brain that is very important in healing trauma.  Introduction: https://www.soundstrue.com/store/journey-of-integration/free-access

I signed up for it, paid for it, but never got any instructions for how to access it.  All I had to do was go to the website, sign in (I already had a username and password, which I had forgotten), and go to the course materials.  But somehow I haven’t been able to “integrate” these ways of negotiating around the web, so I had to call Sounds True, and have a real person walk me through it.  I’ve seen somewhere that a trauma friendly reception area has a human being in it as well as soft lighting and gentle colors.  I can’t deal with recorded voices that tell me which button to push.  Don’t know if this is just getting older, or being traumatized myself, or just being overwhelmed, as highly sensitive people are vulnerable to being.  When I was first learning the computer, things were much easier, and there weren’t a lot of windows popping up on any site I happened to visit.

from my journal for Monday, October 15

I am having a really hard time.  I had planned to pick up my meds between 8-9AM.  I got up at 7, so tired, so hard to get out of bed.  Did usual morning routine as fast as I could up to feeding Mocha.  I planned to take her out, then walk her in & down the stairs, go to the clinic, pick up meds, come back by the café, attach Mocha to a chair outside, get breakfast.  I was feeling too tired & sick to cook.  I set out at 8:35.  At one point it looked like it made more sense to come back here & leave Mocha.  But when I got here it was 8:55.  Too late to do the rest.  Too late to get my meds while the morning window was still open.  So I made breakfast, settled in with third cup of tea — washed dishes while it was brewing — and finished the story of Will and Trisha.

The book is The Education of Will, and it was recommended by my therapist.  It’s the story of a traumatized dog (Willie), adopted by a professional dog trainer (Trisha).  In order to be able to help him, she has to address her own traumas.  She had 3 horrible traumas: molested by her sister’s boyfriend at 15, and soon after, she was on stage with a bunch of other teenagers, and they witnessed a man fall to a bloody death.  Finally, I think it was in her late 20’s, she was raped painfully by a date, and felt guilty as though it was her fault.  Something most of us learn early from a culture which says “She was wearing a short skirt/she smiled at him with a come-on look, etc.”   I think “what happened to her is much worse than what happened to me.”

I read the acknowledgements and saw how many many friends she had.  I saw that she had built up a business working with difficult dogs and succeeded.  After two failed marriages, with her third husband she built a life that works for her.  I feel jealous, and then I feel angry at myself for not doing better.  

She talks about working with a yoga teacher who taught her a lot.  He gave her exercises, but she wasn’t able to do them at home.  She said it was because she didn’t want to give up her story that she was a victim.  I have been finding it increasingly difficult to do the physical things I know will help — long walks, a few yoga stretches, meditating, going to back and balance classes, adding in aerobics…  I periodically feel exhausted, see that I’m trying to do too much, and give myself a break, but I’ve been wondering if I’m being “lazy,” not using will power to make myself stretch, meditate, etc.

After I finished my third cup of tea and the book, I found myself virtually paralyzed.  I couldn’t think what to do next.  I just wanted to sit there and do something distracting.  So I got the poster that I had just brought back from Staples where it was attached to foam core.  I saw that there was room to put it in my window, so I made a document that said CIRCLE DANCE and LET US JOIN OUR HANDS AND HEARTS TO BUILD A BETTER WORLD.  I printed it out, cut the paper into strips, taped them to the top of the poster, and put it in my window that faces the covered walkway.  I see that I did this instead of something more distracting — playing computer solitaire — or something more “productive” — sorting mail — because it fed my heart and soul.  To take something I love and profoundly believe in, and put it out there in a way that it can reach those people who want to be reached.

So am I lazy? am I a failure at living?  I don’t think I’m lazy so much as exhausted — I still find it hard to tell that I’m exhausted and to validate that I have good reason to be exhausted.  “What do you mean you’re tired?  You haven’t done anything.”  Mother’s voice.  What if there had been someone to say “Of course you’re tired.  Why don’t you rest, and I’ll bring you some milk and cookies/cup of tea.”  I’m also without motivation.  Everything I look at — that has to be done, like washing dishes — or that I want to contribute to, like standing with survivors of sexual abuse — just looks too hard to do, or there’s no group of people near enough to join, and trying to start something is way beyond me.

Having written and typed all this, I ask myself if I can look at myself from the perspective the work with Erica has given me.  First of all, when I look at Trisha’s sexual traumas, I compare being molested by my father at 12 and raped by a date at 17.  That’s “much less” than what happened to her.  I’m failing to acknowledge that I was also traumatized at the very beginning of my life by being left alone too much.  It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but for an infant, who can’t get out of its crib and go find something to eat, the truth is that it will die if someone else doesn’t come and bring food.  The moment the reptilian brainstem concludes that the baby is going to die is when trauma happens.  The baby can neither fight nor flee, so it adopts the instinctive default “Freeze.”  In my case, this happened often, and I wasn’t always fed when I was hungry.  In fact, those were the days when you were supposed to feed your baby every four hours, and not pick her up when she cries because she will be spoiled.  For my mother, that was not only expert advice, but an excuse to ignore me when she didn’t want to be bothered with me. 

The fact that I was traumatized before my brain and nervous system had developed, meant that traumatic reactions were built into my system in a very deep way: an overactive amygdala, the fear detector, and a smaller hippocampus, which may have to do with memory processing, especially emotional memory.  If it weren’t for neuroplasticity, I would have been stuck with a system fixed in trauma.  Fortunately it’s possible to heal.  Unfortunately, if the trauma is that deep, it can take a long time.  I really can forgive myself for not getting better faster, for being a “failure at living.”  People who have some idea of what I am up against have said to me “What you have done is HUGE.”  But I still find it very difficult to believe it.

Most likely my sense of helplessness and despair are a result of being totally exhausted, by the political idiocy, the environmental madness, and the fact that my dog was attacked and got a bloody nose, and her behavior was very different, probably “shocked” for many days afterward.  I also have to give myself credit for: signing up to write a personal message and send already addressed and stamped postcards to people who haven’t voted very much and encouraging them to vote, going ahead and scheduling a time to teach folk dance here, and making the poster into something I could put in my window.