{"id":5174,"date":"2016-05-26T11:53:19","date_gmt":"2016-05-26T15:53:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=5174"},"modified":"2016-05-26T11:53:19","modified_gmt":"2016-05-26T15:53:19","slug":"continuing-the-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=5174","title":{"rendered":"“Continuing the Journey”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cContinuing the Journey\u201d of Journey Into Courage<\/a>. \u00a0This program was put together by Tracy Penfield of SafeArt<\/a> in Chelsea. \u00a0It was presented on May 6, 2016. \u00a0Bess O\u2019Brien<\/a> spoke, short sections of the video were shown, and three other women shared their stories.<\/p>\n

This is what I read:<\/p>\n

I joined Journey because I wanted to make the point that alcoholism of a parent is abuse of a child, even if there\u2019s no overt violence.\u00a0 What I did on stage was re-enact cutting myself with a razor blade<\/a>.\u00a0 At that time, 20 years ago, I didn\u2019t really understand why I cut myself.\u00a0 Now I know that it was because I was in a lot of psychological pain that I couldn\u2019t acknowledge, that was somehow invisible.\u00a0 Cutting myself gave me a real physical pain that had an obvious physical cause and that somehow helped.\u00a0 It was OK to feel pain if you had been cut.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t get on anti-depressant medication until 1997, and normal brain chemistry was a revelation.\u00a0 I had never<\/span> felt like that before.\u00a0 I see now that I had no normal to compare my pain to.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t until 2001 that I realized that I had been traumatized in infancy.\u00a0 I had made the common mistake of thinking that trauma depended on the violence of the event.\u00a0 It has much more to do with the ability of the organism \u2014 brain and nervous system \u2014 to process the event.\u00a0 Peter Levine, an expert in trauma, says \u201cAn infant can be traumatized by being left alone in a cold room.\u201d\u00a0 Learning about the physiology of trauma has been an important part of my healing.<\/p>\n

When we were doing the drama exercises that led to Journey, Bess would ask us to remember a time when things were really bad, and then she would ask questions like:\u00a0 What were you wearing?\u00a0 What time of year was it?\u00a0 Were you inside or outside?\u00a0 What was going on in the world?\u00a0 I found it fascinating, it gave me great objectivity about what happened to me.\u00a0 One thing that I remembered was that the Vietnam war was going on during the time when I was cutting myself, and that turned out to be very significant.\u00a0 I identified with the soldiers, even before I realized that I had been traumatized in infancy and had been living with PTSD.<\/p>\n

One book that has been extremely helpful is Invisible Heroes by Belleruth Naparstek<\/a>.\u00a0 I would recommend it highly to people suffering from PTSD and friends and family of someone suffering from PTSD.\u00a0 She describes what it feels like to be a trauma survivor.\u00a0 She talks about all the different modalities that can help people.\u00a0 At the end she has a list of the things trauma survivors have done to heal, things like doing one form of what she calls \u201cAlphabet Therapies\u201d EMDR, SE, etc.\u00a0 having regular bodywork, journaling, etc.\u00a0 She also recommends guided imagery, and has a number of helpful CDs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cContinuing the Journey\u201d of Journey Into Courage. \u00a0This program was put together by Tracy Penfield of SafeArt in Chelsea. \u00a0It was presented on May 6, 2016. \u00a0Bess O\u2019Brien spoke, short sections of the video were shown, and three other women … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,16,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-present-day","category-story","category-trauma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}