{"id":5925,"date":"2018-11-28T10:56:12","date_gmt":"2018-11-28T15:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=5925"},"modified":"2018-11-29T08:11:59","modified_gmt":"2018-11-29T13:11:59","slug":"shell-shock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=5925","title":{"rendered":"“Shell Shock”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wednesday, November 14<\/p>\n

My talk with Erica was really pretty amazing.\u00a0 <\/span>She was absolutely delighted that I was really beginning to let myself rest.\u00a0 <\/span>She said she had felt so protective of me at the beginning because I didn\u2019t seem to have any idea that I needed protection.\u00a0 <\/span>I realized, from the softness and caring in her voice when she says \u201cIt\u2019s OK, Sweetie, you need a rest,\u201d that I may be allowing myself to rest, but it\u2019s still grudgingly.\u00a0 <\/span>I\u2019m still judging myself for having to rest.\u00a0 <\/span>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.\u00a0 <\/span>She saw me protecting myself against something that really<\/span> was<\/span> too much for me.\u00a0 <\/span>I see that having been expected to do things I couldn\u2019t do when I was a child, I have always expected too much of myself, and judged myself harshly when I couldn\u2019t do what I \u201cshould\u201d be able to do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Friends\u2019 Meeting, one woman had talked about being with her ex-husband when he died.\u00a0 <\/span>He was an alcoholic, and they had had difficulties, but she was glad to be with him.\u00a0 <\/span>But she said she reached a level of despair that no one could understand except the hospice people.\u00a0 <\/span>It was Veteran\u2019s Day and one of the men recited the poem \u201cIn Flanders fields<\/a>\u00a0the poppies blow, between the crosses, row on row…\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>I got tears in my eyes, remembering that that was the first World War, and they talked about \u201cshell shock\u201d as being cowardice.\u00a0 <\/span>It wasn\u2019t until Vietnam, that people began to understand that it was PTSD, not cowardice.\u00a0 I identified with the soldiers with PTSD, but didn’t really get that \u00a0I had been traumatized until I read Peter Levine’s book, Waking the Tiger<\/a>, in about 2003. As a consequence of what was said at Friends’ Meeting,\u00a0<\/span>I was seriously triggered by despair, death, and trauma.<\/p>\n

Saturday, November 17<\/p>\n

The session with Erica was surprisingly intense. I think I\u2019ve 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 \u2014 can\u2019t put the book down \u2014 to mean that I\u2019m avoiding something. At least I\u2019m starting to have some trust that the process will continue even if I don\u2019t get actively, cognitively, involved. Maybe there\u2019s also some trust that whatever it is will emerge into consciousness when it\u2019s ready.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Often when I think I am avoiding something, I start searching, desperately, to find it so I can fix things. \u00a0I have to keep relearning that I can trust the process. \u00a0I think of Parker Palmer talking about the soul, how it’s like a wild animal. \u00a0“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.” \u00a0from A Hidden Wholeness<\/a> \u00a0 \u00a0pp126-7<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wednesday, November 14 My talk with Erica was really pretty amazing.\u00a0 She was absolutely delighted that I was really beginning to let myself rest.\u00a0 She said she had felt so protective of me at the beginning because I didn\u2019t seem … 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":[9,11,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","category-present-day","category-trauma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5925","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=5925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5925\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}