At this point in 1995 I had no idea I was dealing with PTSD. From my journal for November 10:<\/p>\n
Second cup of tea. … and nothing to say.\u00a0 <\/span>I feel cold.\u00a0 <\/span>There\u2019s the ache in my stomach and heart that feels old and dead, the \u201cwhat\u2019s the use\u201d feeling.\u00a0 <\/span>I suspect that I\u2019m dealing with a complex tangle of rage and grief which is why neither feeling comes clear in a form I can discharge by myself.\u00a0 <\/span>I have wondered if the grief I unloaded with Robin wasn\u2019t grief about being so depressed \u2014 that\u2019s why I felt better for a day, but because it didn\u2019t address the underlying cause, I\u2019m still feeling bummed out.\u00a0 <\/span>I can see that suffering the symptoms of chemical depression \u2014 being unable to make decisions, etc. \u2014 leaves me unable to go on with my life in a way that I feel good about, so of course I feel a lot of anger at myself about that, and a lot of grief for my poor lost wounded life.\u00a0 <\/span>Well at least this confirms my decision to see Dr. Stoll and explore medical help.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Robin was a body worker I had been seeing.<\/p>\n
Yesterday in the work with Karen I tried to cry, and vocalize, and pound on things, but mostly what happened was I kept arriving at the place of grey frozen hopelessness.\u00a0 <\/span>Karen said \u201chopelessness is a concept, not a feeling.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>But I don\u2019t think it, I feel it.\u00a0 <\/span>And what I feel is numbness and lack of energy.\u00a0 <\/span>I said I felt like I had been up all night, crying all night, and I didn\u2019t feel the relief of a good cry, instead I felt exhausted, and didn\u2019t know what to do next, and didn\u2019t have any energy to do it with if I could think of something.\u00a0 <\/span>I sat there staring blankly at the pillow too tired to do anything, too uncomfortable to lie down.\u00a0 <\/span>Finally Karen suggested that I had frozen some part of myself because it was too painful to feel those feelings.\u00a0 <\/span>She kept saying that it was unfair that my mother had left me alone so much when I was a baby, but this didn\u2019t bring any answering spark.\u00a0 <\/span>She thought perhaps the anger about such treatment was one of the things I had to numb.\u00a0 <\/span>She also said that I had spent a good bit of my life running away from this sense of numbed hopelessness.\u00a0 <\/span>I felt comforted by the idea that the numbness was something I had done to wall off some part of myself that actually might be of value to me: the part that gets angry about injustice and is colorful and passionate.\u00a0 <\/span>And I see that trying to run away from the numbness, or jack myself up out of it, are not the same as sitting with it and allowing it to thaw so I can recover that part of myself.\u00a0 <\/span>I find it interesting (sarcastic inflection) that having decided to spend the hanging out with the numbed part of myself, I promptly get quite sick.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
My description of numbness and frozenness I can now recognize as symptoms of trauma: when you can’t fight or flee, freeze is the default. Standard forms of psychotherapy are not designed to heal trauma. Not until I start doing Somatic Experiencing will I begin to address these symptoms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At this point in 1995 I had no idea I was dealing with PTSD. From my journal for November 10: Second cup of tea. … and nothing to say.\u00a0 I feel cold.\u00a0 There\u2019s the ache in my stomach and heart … Continue reading