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From my journal for April 24, 1996

Driving over to Danville, Lynelle asked how I was doing, and I said I had been anxious until I got to the underlying sadness.  When I can feel the sadness, the anxiety goes away.  She asked if it was anything specific and I said it was feeling bad for Dana that he had got stuck with me.  The tears well up as I write that, as they did in the car, but I see now that I’m sad for Dana, but not for myself.  What I feel toward myself is anger that I’m such a failure, unable to love him back in the way he deserves, unable even to relax and open and let him love me in the way that he wants to.  The pain of that is so great, that I mostly don’t let myself feel it, I’m afraid I would die of the feeling, or that it would go on forever.  So there we have fear and grief and anger all tied up in a big tangle, and the anger is directed at myself for being a failure rather than outward toward the parents who failed me and damaged me.  Well, I don’t know what to do with that.  I’m caught in the same bind that Lynelle is, I’m angry at the part of me that’s damaged as though it were a moral failure instead, as though I could have done better and am perversely refusing to.

So painful. I’ve heard so many other people say similar things: can’t let myself feel it, afraid I would die from the pain, it’s my fault not my parents abusing me. But I remember that at first, when I was a child, I thought I was defective, and that everything that went wrong was my fault. I didn’t understand that I was wounded until I was 42 years old, when the Children of Alcoholic information came out. I still had a number of years to go before I understood that my inability to have sex with my husband was due to early trauma and not to some choice of mine.

From my journal for April 17, 1996

I’ve been thinking how out of touch I feel with that experience of spaciousness I had last year.  It’s as though it happened to a different person.  I feel like I’ve had all these experiences, many of them wonderful, and very solid feeling at the time, but somehow they haven’t stuck, I haven’t integrated them into who I am.  It’s like I captured them briefly in a net and then they dissolved and disappeared.

Reading the books on infancy does suggest that most of my recent experience is related to infancy, somehow I’ve lost contact with the more adult parts of myself — like that notion of the descent of Inanna, leaving all her adult coping strategies behind as she goes down into the most ancient wounded place.  I had a different image — I saw myself as though engaged in a task of assembling something and one of the first steps had been done wrong.  Therefore, the whole thing had to be dismantled, painstakingly, so I could readjust the pieces of the foundation.  I see myself setting aside “spaciousness” and “creativity” and other pieces as I work my way down to the bottom.  When I finally get the bottom “put together right” will I then be able to reclaim all the other pieces?  It’s an interesting analogy/paradigm for the functioning of psyche, but it is accurate?

I’d been reading books by D.W.Winnicott and Daniel Stern. Lots of interesting ideas about the psychological dynamics of mothers and babies. I think my intuition is right on, that there’s something important right at the beginning of my life, “one of the first steps had been done wrong.” Yes, I was traumatized before the age of three which is when the brain matures. That means that my brain matured under the influence of trauma. There is no actual term for this kind of early trauma.  Bessel van der Kolk proposed a diagnosis of DTD — Developmental Trauma Disorder, for children traumatized before the age of three. But so far the people in charge of the Diagnostic Categories have only allowed CPTSD — Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder — which covers a number of different conditions.

Yes, I had to actually go back and deal with the foundations, with the consequences of that early trauma, before I could begin to heal from my childhood. The work with Erica, a specialist in trauma and attachment — my earliest relationship with my mother —has finally helped me get down to the bottom.

I love that my scientist asks of my idea “Is it accurate?” I had no way to know until I understood about the early trauma.

From my journal for March 1996.  Eleanor is my friend who was badly abused in her family of origin. She was herself dealing with PTSD, and kept trying to convince me that I was too. At that time, I thought trauma was caused by violence, I didn’t know about its dependence on the ability of the organism to process the event. My parents were alcoholics, but they weren’t violent.

Eleanor said she thought I was much better now than when she first met me.  She said that I used to just stay upstairs, I didn’t go out, I dressed in miserable clothes.  She said she was shocked by the state of our house when she first met us: no proper bathroom, no windows.  She said I didn’t have the capacity to make a home, but now I do.  I said that was all external stuff, she agreed but said it reflected my internal state.  She said when she first met me she could see that I was depressed, but that I was very defended, she says now I’m much more open and vulnerable.  I said that was probably true and as a result I was much more scared.  Eleanor said terror was better than depression because it moves.  She reminded me that when she first met me I was immobilized by the depression to the extent that I wasn’t doing anything for myself: no therapy, no workshops, none of the stuff I’m doing now.  (In fact I think it was Eleanor who told me about Kripalu, gave me a catalog.  I know it was Eleanor who dialed Debbie Alicen and handed me the phone.)  Eleanor said Dana said I was much worse in the black cloud/candida days, before she even met me.  I checked with Dana, he said I was sick all the time, couldn’t walk farther than Gaudette’s, was struggling with brain fog.  I’ve been feeling that the 1984 depression was a piece of cake compared to this one, that I had to go back to 1970 for something as bad, but perhaps I’m wrong.  It sounds like I’m much more conscious now, in 1984 I was deep in denial.  Well of course, that was the beginning of the Children of Alcoholic stuff.  Before that, I had no way to understand my misery except by seeing myself as inherently defective, lacking in will power, “wanting to be miserable.”

Debbie Alicen was a therapist I saw for a while.  Gaudette was a family who had a house partway down a road across from our house.

Another time we were walking with the dog and Eleanor talked about how she saw life, about how wonderful and sacred it was, how that was why she didn’t kill herself, because she could see that life itself was so precious even when her own life was so painful.  I didn’t say so, but I envy her.  I wish I had such a vision/ knowledge/ experience of life.  I think sometimes when I’m in my objective scientist mode I can see “life” as something enormous, mysterious and magical; I think of the time when I was returning from the Observatory at Wellesley and suddenly became aware of the uniqueness, complexity and preciousness of trees in contrast to the simplicity of stars.  A star is easy to make, it’s just a ball of gas.  A tree requires a long and complex process.  (This makes me think of Dana saying that he sees the physical world as just the tip of the iceberg.  I’m continually feeling trapped in the physical world, as though it were all there is.)  I have all the lovely images from Chaos Theory and Complexity and the plasma theory of creation, and there was a time when these ideas helped me imagine a universe I could feel at home in.

But I don’t feel that way now.  I don’t have that sense of reverence for “life” that Eleanor has.  What keeps me from committing suicide is the fact that Dana would be very unhappy.  So how do I see “life”?  I imagine this huge machine, something like a steam roller, a garbage compactor, a chipper.  It rolls over me without concern for my uniqueness or individuality.  First it flattens me, then it chews me up and spits me out, all mangled.  It gives me assignments that I can’t fulfill: I’m to be independent, strong, I have to take care of myself, I mustn’t bother anyone, but I’m supposed to enjoy and appreciate and be grateful for whatever happens to me.  That sounds pretty awful, and it also sounds like what mother did to me, on both the emotional level (when she flattened me, chewed me up, spit me out deformed into whatever mirror image her narcissism demanded) and the practical level, where I was given many messages that I had to take care of myself and not bother the adults.  She was my first experience of life.

Still, I think Eleanor’s first experience was worse, so how does she get her sense of reverence for life?

Question never answered.