Tag: #cptsd

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The Simple Things

My daughter brought me coffee in the bath this morning and I literally burst into tears. Funny because I had made one but it just wasn’t that good, and she shows up with a “special coffee”, and takes the other off my bath tray and says, “we’ll just get this out of here”. And she was happy and light and that is worth everything in the world.

It’s been a year of scarcity, a scarcity I never wanted my kids to feel. And yet their connection with me, the intimate one, has felt scarce much of their life I think. Because in my mind I was lost, and I had a belief system of how to fix that and stuck carefully to that line.

That connection is healing. I’m watching it bloom like the magnificent magnolias out my bedroom window that comfort me daily. It’s giving me a security and push to be more of all I already am. I didn’t know I could have love like that with my children. I only knew the way I was doing things. Compartmentalizations. I got my needs from a partner and provided their needs as best I could, but actual connection… I never realized how terrifying that was for me based on my model.

We use templates and apply them over experiences and it can be so damaging, but it’s the way the human brain works. My template for mother child relationship and parent child relationship in general is absolutely devastating. It’s such an area of anxiousness and I can only see now how it’s been operating in my life, distancing me from my own children.

The truth is I never felt worthy of a connection with my children. I believe in earning our relationships not by titles and I perhaps made it harder than it needed to be. By never owning that I’m their mother for giving birth to them. Mine gave birth to me and never became a mother. It makes sense I made life more complicated than it need be, because life was always complicated for me. I wanted to make myself safe and secure before I involved them in my needs. I knew instinctively I would have taken from them in a way that was unrealistic. So I tried to meet those needs in the adult realm and preserve their childhood. That’s what I chose.

That relationship was never safe, mine with caregivers of any kind. It was so unsafe it would stagger you. I think you would cry. When I talk about it, it’s automatic that it feels I did something wrong. I must have, or that maybe I’m making it up, maybe it was all me. I was a difficult child, it was me, and the story gets twisted and I tremble with anxiety.

To remedy this I just put it all the way out of my mind. It’s too difficult to reconcile, and yet unexplored it was operating constantly in my life.

Sometimes survival looks a lot like selfishness.

These are the crossed wires of my existence. My critics landed on a story about me, and that was their experience. I scrambled for love and belonging and I had full good intentions, and a wholly unexplored self. You would think if you knew me this would be impossible, but I, just like anyone else with experiences like mine, constructed reality to be barely bearable, to even survive.

I’ve been categorized as selfish and putting myself before my children and criticized and judged primarily by the one person who actually bore witness to some of the horrors. He is one of the only people I know who met the empty gaze of my terrifying mother, and saw my grandparents all but offer him a dowry to take me off their hands. Just wow.

Any man that came around was an opportunity to unload one of the evil stepsisters. (Their daughters) and then me. They offered my father money to take my mother off their hands, and tried to push me on him, making me a burden rather than his daughter.

When I was young I was Tom boy and against the grain I liked Ninja Turtles rather than Barbie. I got a ninja turtle camera that imprinted a little insignia of Michael Angelo on the bottom right corner. I took a bunch of pictures while visiting my dads home. Of his art because it was so different than my grandparents. There was a half naked woman wrapped around a snake. I remember it vividly. I thought I was being a photographer. I was using my imagination.

What happened from that is that my grandparents saw how much money he appeared to have based on my photos and I became a spy from them and associated with my mother. No matter what I did as a child I kept doing something wrong or bad. I was wrong with my grandparents by sabotaging their efforts to get my father to take responsibility for me (someone had to), and I was wrong with my dad for guilt by associating and being a spy.

I was being an imaginative child. To be misunderstood in this way was devastating to my self in so many ways. I’ve spent the rest of my life feeling I need to work so hard to be seen.

These things were my fault. I was shamed for my behaviors, all normal for someone not being invested in or merely even wanted. He disappeared shortly after this. He would blame my grandparents and my mother for us never having a relationship. That’s what you did then I guess. Start a new family and not look back rather than be attached to crazy. I was a casualty and when I look back I see that at that time I was the perpetrator somehow.

I was the problem.

So when someone does something nice for me in this half of my life. Doesn’t matter how many years later it’s incredibly emotional, and also unearths tons of unworthiness and I better do something right back, or I will lose them. A normal process becomes intense for me, and I am shamed for being intense. Sometimes it’s so emotional that I freeze and the person is left feeling less than fulfilled by my response. They don’t know me enough to know it’s locked inside and it means more than they know.

Every little thing means more than you can imagine.

This also makes the bad things amplified. I have less room maybe than your average person for harsh. I’m fragile in certain ways and up til this point I’ve made myself wrong for that too.

I am on the brink of owning who I fucking am and excavating my identity out of the ashes of the lives I keep burning down because I didn’t know any other way.

The brink is an exciting place to be and it is also a terrifying one. Pleasure and pain and when those things get out of balance it can threaten an entire soul. Particularly an already tired one.

It’s almost too much responsibility To be whole on ones own. Am I worthy? Someone easily would reply yes, my loyal travelers would. But that is not so easy for me to come to terms with. It is almost too uncomfortable to be comfortable. The story of my life. The restless takes over like a tornado ready to upturn the crops I’ve painstakingly planted.

I am working on it…..

This morning I will enjoy my coffee, my delicious coffee with love in it. I’ll let it lighten my step and give me energy to face the trials and the beauty of the day. Sometimes those things are equally difficult.

It hurts to be human…..

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Magnolias and Scripts

Love my smoothies by the water and the magnolia trees in bloom right now. Simple pleasures when life is so complicated.

My boundaries suck. I fancy myself to be someone who strives to be impeccable with my word and yet my trauma threatens to undermine me in this area all the time. I resent my codependency. Do I really deserve to suffer like this the rest of my life? Like a trap I can’t get out of. See the codependent victim right there.

Telling everyone else what they should do with their life, when I’m not getting paid for it 😉 No Christina. Here’s what I’m responsible for my boundaries, how I feel, and sharing that clearly and concisely after I have sorted it, and the most important part following through and sticking too. That’s my fucking job right now.

The stakes on my recovery are too important so I shall continue to be transparent about my struggles and leave other people to theirs, unless I’m getting paid for it.

How much can I actually modify about this rabid out of bounds “fixing”. That’s frustrating. Lately when I’m quiet it’s because I don’t trust what will come out of my mouth. That I won’t go on and on in my process until I stick my foot in my mouth, or burden others with responsibility for my emotions by sheer panic of it all. 🙁 ugh! Charlie Brown! I’m a block head.

Say what you mean and mean what you say and take time to think about it before you say it are words I’m living by right now. And follow through. I can preach it but I find when I’m most frustrated it is because I’m not in fact practicing it. Humbling.

A comfort I can find right now is I’ve finally become strong enough to sit in these realizations without excusing them, etc. if I stay in them, stay acknowledging, then shifts are being made. Shifts are being made and it’s exciting. But it requires me to keep leaving behind things I once loved because it doesn’t work. And previously I would have just tried harder and fought and now I’m forced to let go if we don’t meet up naturally with where we are in our work.

That sucks !

I’m grumpy today. This overly heavy period with an impending medical procedure to remedy it, doesn’t help. I’m anxious that at any second I’ll be in a very uncomfortable situation, and I’m exhausted as a result.

I’ve been doing administrative work today and that never puts me in a good mood. It’s that itself that may shift me in a different direction career wise at least with how I structure my operation. I do not want to be beholden to anyone and I want to create my own way of doing what I do. I’m not sure yet whether this will require RE branding or what I will need to do to figure it out. But the winds of change are blowing.

I already have my own way of doing what I do but I don’t have any structure into explaining what that is. I don’t know if I need to, but it’s probably delicately intertwined with my writing and the next direction of my life.

I’m worried about my health insurance, worried about all the up in the airs right now. I have literally no idea about a lot of these things and I have lots of steps to take for right now. Financial advising, because there are lots of answers I don’t have with regard to what I have and where I need to put it to be secure. What I can allocate to where. I’d say this is a good problem to have considering the scarcity I’ve been in most of my life made that not even something to worry about because there weren’t those choices or options.

The paradox of choice… the more we have the more overwhelmed we are. And overwhelmed and I are not good bed fellows. No one likes it but for me being overwhelmed on an already overtaxed nervous system puts me over the edge so easy. I resent that. More grouchy.

Recently in my own therapy a topic is how to share with my kids some of what my life was like in a constructive way. My therapist has suggested I rehearse the following until I can say it without becoming emotional. I resent being asked not to become emotional about such things, but she knows I don’t want to dump my emotions all over my children so they feel they have to carry them.

So I am to recite the details clearly and concisely like this. My mother was mentally ill, my father was a little in and out until he wasn’t (with no explanation just a lot of speculation), I was Dcf involved and removed, I was put into the care of my grandparents who didn’t want to be raising anymore children, and was frequently reminded of this fact. I spent the rest of my life trying to find somewhere I could belong and be safe and that process was not easy.

As a mother I’m still trying to figure this out and my role. What I have done and been committed to is providing for you as best as I could while figuring this out and having only good people around you. Those were my primary focuses while I’m trying to find out where I belong and who I am in all of this.

Well when you put it like that.

Say that without feeling any emotions or going into the details to try and recover my feelings. Sure. Easy peasy. I’ll get right on that Rose.

Well if my mood was going to be helped it would not be from that, but I’ll keep reciting it and doing the work and looking for glimmers. The little things that shine through that show the work is working.

Work work work work….

Trying to not feel shamed or a victim for the things I chose to focus on to survive.

It’s not easy…..

Nothing good ever is….

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Running on Empty

Some dreams you take down, and some dreams come together unexpectedly. I’m hopeful for the latter.

In this period of utter groundlessness I’m sifting through mine.

I had a dream a little over a year ago to become a foster parent. If you have ever seen me pursue a dream you might chuckle, but for those who haven’t I’ll describe it. It’s a sprint. My mind is quite effective when focused so within a few months of the idea we had a crib set up in our room, bunk beds in another one of the rooms, and the mounds of paperwork were being cruised through.

I set the scene swiftly and effectively. There’s a gift and a curse in this way of doing things.

For me it takes much longer to dismantle a dream (particularly if I’m not ready to let go of it) than it does to try and create the conditions for it to exist. Perhaps I heard the Wendy’s commercial of Dave whispering “if you build it they will come” one too many times in childhood. Once again my entire life shaped by the television.

Anyway my family and I took cpr classes and we attended the foster classes and that’s when I realized so much of me was still the child rather than someone capable of steadfast patience in the face of a child that can’t regulate. I saw myself in the videos and vignettes of children experiencing abuse, and I wanted to look away, but I didn’t.

I remember avoiding the call and exit interview of the class teachers who thought we were the perfect candidates. I could not face that down at the time. I couldn’t face a lot of things.

Being honest with myself about that was one of the hardest moments of my life and everything that came after… the stuff of nightmares.

Lost identity, lost security, lost dreams, lost self, illness, terror…. I cannot even go in further into that.

My 100 yard dash came to a screeching halt and I set out to see myself and the relationships with my own children more clearly. This very difficult task continues. I am humbled daily. I am ill equipped to parent teenagers and the struggle for self love during this time is immense.

Anyone who heard me say ill equipped would laugh I suspect, anyone but my ex husband and a few scorned critics out there. In the traditional sense I’m not, but most often weathering the. “You’re ruining my life phase” and the bite back from rules is extra difficult for me because of my ten thousand triggers. Some newly acquired unfortunately, and many old.

I’m a piss poor punching bag who is simultaneously acutely aware of the need of teens to practice their independence with their parent and the parent still loving them. My off switch is immense. The love is never off but the response is and that breaks my heart. I’m working on it 🙁

Boundaries are hard. I’ve had to create the whole system from scratch. I’m getting emotional as I write this. I wonder if anyone in their whole life has ever tried so hard to become a mother while underneath the weight of their burgeoning painful mind filled with trapped and inaccessible memories that would run their life subconsciously. Now that I wrote that I’m sure many. That makes me sad.

I’m sad most days, which is better than irritable, scattered, panicky etc. Sad is ok apparently, according to my therapist. I don’t want to waste a second of life, but I’d imagine acknowledging and connecting to my own emotions is anything but a waste.

I woke up sad today. There’s many things behind that, many reasons. So I’ll just hang out in the bath where my tears can trickle freely and it’s warm and quiet and safe.

I can barely figure out what I feel like eating lately, and whatever the mood is for does not go well with my stomach. This loss of love in enjoying the art of it all is disappointing, nay, soul crushing. My soul feels crushed by an emotion like sadness and I want for that to have some balance.

On the flip side when I am able to come up for air, everything is new and beautiful. The pink blossoms are blooming on the trees in the backyard, and that alone is a comfort beyond all comforts. It helps me ignore the rotting wood of the deck that needs replacing, and the current state of the pool. And all the other things in my life that are falling apart that are teaching me it’s ok for one thing to come together at a time.

Deciding which thing to focus on always felt like the problem. Little did I know the extent of that. I will abide in a state of surrender and let the problems wear themselves out rather than me wearing myself out.

Surrender. Boundaries. Time.

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If you can’t trust your mind…..

This line stops me in my tracks. Trust my heart?! Have you taken a look at my life lately? But somehow I know it’s true.

I am reading Words on Bathroom Walls. It’s simple style makes me want to think and write that way as well. It just seems so straightforward, so easy, nothing like my mind.

Adam (the main character) and I have that in common about our minds. You never know when your mind will be your enemy or your best friend. One moment you can be so sure of the truth and everything, and the next shattered.

One moment I can have the galaxies of the universe on the tip of my awareness and the second I attempt to capture it, everything goes blank.

Like when I opened this blog post I had a wave of inspiration and in the time it took me to open the app on my phone, poof. Into the abyss. I sit very still hoping it will alight gently on my shoulder any minute now.

Thursday nights are dinner at my favorite restaurant. It’s nice having a favorite restaurant and being a regular. Another aspect of belonging of course. It’s comforting. Last night I felt comfortable in my own skin and confident and not socially anxious and not overly preoccupied with anything, even though I always manage to create something to be overly preoccupied about.

A regular I hadn’t seen in a long time, a tall dark and handsome man (rare for me to interact with LOL) told me that I looked great and asked what I was doing. You know to look so fresh and perky. I’m forty I’m not sure perky applies but we will go with it. It felt nice to be noticed (seen?) those are different I suppose. See over thinking again. Can you really over-think or is that just a way society shames us for using more of our gifts than we should?

Anyway later in the evening my friend who I dine with on Thursdays (friend is such an understatement fellow traveler and family more appropriate, and many others), went to go speak to someone and said tall dark and handsome enters seat next to me. He commented on my posts on Facebook and said he needs help. To clarify I believe he needs light like the rest of us, not exactly help. Light helps you create your own help as an inside job.

Once again the fact he would share that with me, and I’m that person, it never ceases to amaze me, humble me, excite me, and make me feel special in all the ways I never did in childhood. The universe has a funny way of making up for what your earthly coils lacked. It’s one of my favorite things.

I have a doctors appointment this morning. Sometimes it feels like my whole life is filled with them and then I think don’t feel sorry for yourself it’s not like you have cancer or something. And I toggle back and forth between validating and invalidating my experience. I just summed up how I spend most of my mental energy. Funny and not funny at all.

I’m dreaming about vacation lately and trying to get a vision for what that looks like. The toggling happens here too, a lot. Can I use those resources when there are so many loose ends in the air. Should I use it for this or for that. Time and resources apparently feel always running out despite the abundance I’m surrounded with.

Maybe I have more in common with Adam than I thought. I mean it’s not an accident I’m reading the book and love the movie so much. My perception can be completely skewed, and also it can be so completely perceptive to the ends of the earth. If I stayed solidly in that place I wouldn’t wander in my mind, in the ways one needs to wander to be a healer. Hmmm. See during the act of writing this that arose and felt damn true and good too. That’s why I do this.

Deciding how and when and to whom I process to, these days that’s a whole other matter. It’s more of a sacred decision than I ever valued it as, but also there’s so many less ways to go wrong (such an intense word) than I originally thought.

Highly sensitive people spend a great deal of time trying to find how they are wrong so they can fix it, presumably because their major intent is the betterment of humanity. Betterment of humanity detriment to themselves. Is it always that way for healers or just when you’re out of balance!?

What kind of healer am I? Was psychotherapist just the beginning? I mean it felt like the total destination and I already have a purpose. So what now? I’m always on the brink of something. I suppose that makes me an adventurer.

That felt nice to write. Not crazy and bad? No Adam we are not crazy or bad. We that invaluable shared experience with another that can also be found in books and movies and just so happens to be there when you need it.

I had a client share with me yesterday that the yucky depression voice is barely hanging around these days and maybe it’s just coincidence (see we all want to minimize our accomplishments), but that they noticed.

Something in the book that struck me is how Adam gets to know Maya, and the things he notices about how she operates and who she is. He knows her very well, the light and the dark and this happens slowly over time. Have I ever allowed that? Leaps and bounds subsisting off crumbs, existing primarily alone. I see myself so different now.

But I have no idea what that will mean going forward. That sort of groundlessness used to plunge me into pathological loneliness so easily and it would take days to recover and it would always be a patch job.

I’m sailing a yacht now and the compass and all the equipment is working and that in and of itself is terrifying. It’s a lot of responsibility, our own happiness. Much easier to play out templates and patterns from our upbringing and be in a part that is rehearsed rather than breaking through to our own.

I’m scared of my own abundance and my gifts and power. I’m actually scared I can’t complain or default ? Wow.

Who will I be outside the story I make up for myself daily to create relief. Outside the story what is real and what isn’t? Could it be possible that real is whatever I perceive and create and that’s ok?! That feels too simple and too complicated all at once.

I only have a few more pages left on my journey into Adam’s journey. Who’s will be next and what will I learn ?

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Getting the Story Straight

This past year for me could be best described as transformative. The passage has been filled with discomfort, anxiety, severing, breaking, death and rebirth, and a whole host of other things.

It is in helping others that my own wounds became visible to myself. Having constant companions on this journey has been invaluable. Having made this my life’s work is something bordering on the miraculous. I now believe in miracles and magic.

So I wanted to run through and summarize some of my process with this. Re-claiming an identity, while simultaneously forging a new one that is integrated. Becoming whole.

How does one become whole ? In my case I broke over and over and was unable to default to self betrayal coping mechanisms, and boy did I try. I worked hard, desperately even, but without a few very important ingredients. One being vitamin L as Ross Rosenberg calls it. You can listen about this here Self love recovery.

My first tool in this recovery was the morning pages. This is a tool by Julia Cameron that consists of writing three pages of longhand upon waking each morning. I created a sacred ritual of connecting with myself. Know thyself. That is the mission here.

The closest I could get to a relationship with myself was anything someone else mirrored about me, but I was then dependent on that, without it I would fall apart. I was arrested in this childhood phase of development. Having never had a parent figure to successfully mirror kept me locked in this developmental phase. I developed coping mechanisms, but never reached the root.

Maintaining Morning Pages even with ebbs and flows as a discipline was a great beginning, but I had a lot more to go. I was able to create a secure relationship with this activity for over five years now.

The next step was healthy relationship boundaries, and the way I found the need was by realizing a very hard lesson about having none. So creating healthy boundaries is essential. People not raised in a healthy family system struggle immensely with their own right to exist without having to do something to earn it or feeling guilty for everything when there was no wrong doing.

I couldn’t sit with myself without wanting to crawl out of my skin if I wasn’t being loved or touched in some way nearly every second. So most of my energy was spent trying to obtain that source but not being able to maintain a healthy relationship and healthy relationship behaviors. Since it’s expected at my age you be able to do that much shame ensued.

The reason I love being a counselor so much and an advocate is sitting with people as they turn shame into understanding of their own experience so they can grow into who they always were and who they deserve to be. I created a career that has kept me not alone on that journey. And my gift of being able to easily connect, while probably born out of need, has served me to be able to create real and genuine relationships around me as a mooring.

Becoming an earned secure out of frightened attachment and terror has been a daunting journey. It has been one I’ve needed to manage while also needing to prioritize the care of others and achieving enough financial security to even be able to.

Battling all or nothing, battling the desperate need that comes from operating from the wound. I lived my life operating from wounds and coping mechanisms and the struggle with myself was draining me constantly.

It has been my life’s art to develop the tools to get my story straight and to excavate myself from the ruins of my childhood.

I spent the last year investing in myself, it wasn’t an option, it was necessary.

I was often called selfish by the people that I chose to invest in the most. It is in fact all about you when you’re trapped in childhood. This created more wounds and I don’t know how I ever got out. It’s still a work in progress but I’ve come so much further this year.

It is the people that see me through all of it that have saved my life. The new ones and the old. Some old have arrived on the scene anew, some new have departed in shattering ways.

This is the portrait of a life lived courageously. Not right or wrong, good or bad. Just a human story being lived.

My education was another secure relationship. Something no one could take from me, though it did not come without being criticized that I put that before my children. When we needed me to have an education for many reasons.

It’s interesting to see people who live out a more normative timeline. They have babies once they are secure to do so and that process looks so different. I was a baby who had babies, but I was determined to become a mother I did not have. It has taken me most of their lives. So I hope I get enough years left to enjoy the fruits of my labors. To be able to play and create family traditions with the ability to do so, while now not flying or freezing with terror.

Shame is an enemy I battle daily, and I am healing every day.

It’s hard to be steadfast when you are creating a self and reclaiming one. I tried to do everything all at once, because it always felt like I was running out of time. It always feels like I’m running out of time because I am awake.

Learning, determined, and awake….

My next tools have been understanding the effects of being raised by a family that has a narcissistic/co-dependence dynamic and how that lends itself to not being able to trust myself or my own reality. I would try and moor and then stumble chaotically out of port the second there was a disruption in the fabric. It’s hard not to shame myself, particularly when you can see the effects this has had on my own children. My God it is hard.

But shame never heals anything, it only wounds. Love and understanding and mercy and grace and compassion are the antidote.

I stand humbly before the world asking what service I may be of to my fellow humans, because it is there that my most profound healing exists.

I commit to living bravely and vulnerably so I may be of service to others, and so I never betray myself again.

Moving from being the storm to becoming the lighthouse has required getting my story fully in alignment with my being.

Et Lux Intenbris Lucet

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There’s no place like home

It kills me how your mind can make you feel so worthless, so before you go…..

Before You Go…..

The girl who tried to figure out her life from the movies. Who tried to learn about healthy versus unhealthy. I’ve been teased my whole life about a variety of things. I’ve often wondered what has made me such a target for that. Do I wear a sign?

“The music you listen to is always so sad.” Teased about my romantic comedies or watching movies, listening to songs, on repeat.

The truth is those were my friends. That’s how pathologically lonely I was. Those were the closest things I had to connection. Just another 80’s kid raised by the boob tube. That was my most innocuous “parent”.

So this morning I’m thinking of how certain movies shaped periods of time in my life and how they represented what I wanted most and many aspects of who I was, that I didn’t yet know. Like an archaeologist trying to discover myself and create myself.

And with the movies came the music, Pink, Lewis Capaldi, Andy Grammar, Calum Scott, XX Ambassadors (I can’t tell how many times I’ve listened to Unsteady) Kelly Clarkson Piece by Piece and so many more…..

2016 was characterized by a few main movies. Stuck in Love. The Vow. Julie and Julia. The Holiday. And Me Before you. These movies represented what I wanted that I didn’t feel I had, and who I was that I didn’t know as well. Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci, graceful in their love through thick and thin. I wanted to have that and I wanted to be it.

“We don’t talk to each other like that”, the Vow. So much in there… a woman who left her family for its toxicity and found healing in love and then tragedy hits them anyway, and can they find their way back to each other. After a traumatic brain injury she forgets why she left her family and that’s of course what she seeks comfort in, what she goes back to, and why she left and her love with her husband is lost with the accident. Will she find her way back? He has to watch her knowing why she left in the first place and his only choice is to watch her have to figure it out herself, as he stands there having lost everything.

Stuck in love, a young writer feels everything so much. He’s sensitive and different and falls in love for the first time with an addict and the pain that is involved in that. While his writer father and sister navigate their own stuff.

Me Before You. Can a person with a special spirit and zest for living even while having very little, help a quadriplegic who never wanted for anything reclaim his will to live when he can’t live the way he used to. Can he help convince her there is more to life outside her little bubble. Live bravely Clark.

The Holiday. Cameron Diaz tries to be able to cry (this was me at one point) to be anything but a workaholic, while across the world Rose McGowan travels the perils of unrequited love and her brother tries to navigate being a single dad and feeling if anyone could ever love all of them as a package. They cross paths and learn and try for love amidst the wreckage. People finding themselves.

So much pain inherent in the human experience.

I watched from the outside, nose pressed to the glass of the proverbial fish tank. The screen of a television. Are the answers in there somewhere? How could the answers for my life be in someone else’s? But where else was I supposed to learn from.

So considering I patched together an identity loosely from anything I could get my hands on. Tv, watching people, my thoughts, but never anything consistent. There was never anything consistent except fear. Anxiety was my other companion. Movies, television, and anxiety. And I watched everyone and everything to try to crack some code. How to survive?

Looking back I did it well I think. But in it, in it I was always wrong or bad. Always running from the bad inside me that must have been to not have connections like other people did. Why did they have them and I didn’t? I was bad by default. I begged to be seen and loved, and then the world came along and asked me why I tried so hard. And told me I was too intense, too this, too sensitive. Too little of this and too much of that. I was always wrong.

Always trying to prove I was good, I wasn’t a burden, I was worth loving. God it hurts and then shamed on top for every behavior I ever used to survive. I think that’s the worst part.

So my movies of 2020 (the end of 2020 most of it I didn’t watch anything). Five Feet Apart. The Greatest Showman. The Secret Life of Pets. Silver Linings Playbook. Mermaids. And Life Itself.

The 2016 movies were what I wanted to create for myself, what I longed for. What I tried to make. And when that all fell apart without my own solid identity, the 2020 movies were part what I needed…

Touch, to believe in what I was capable of accomplishing, to accept myself the way I am as is (“can you say the same fucker, can you love all your dirty parts”), to be adopted to belong, and that when life brings you to your knees, when you’re lower than you think you can ever go, if you stand back up, you’ll always find love.

I needed to find mine. Because I was just existing to be useful, and I was never going to create my own destiny or write my story unless I could be connected to myself.

I didn’t even know anything about that. But the world expected me to. It’s a given right? It wasn’t for me, and rarely does anyone truly see that about me.

And when you try to figure out your life from the movies that feels insane and bad and wrong. I was supposed to have my own identity and since I didn’t I must be fucked up right ? Missing some important thing that other people just seemed to have. So much shame.

How could I do that to myself for the things I developed to make it out alive.

Also when you try to figure out your life from the movies as it turns out you can act like you’re in one and live in short snippets characterized by dramatic changes and never realize the full impact.

I figured that out this past year. I figured out a lot of things besides just how to not chew spearmint gum while wearing a mask and sunglasses, and how to survive the apocalypse. After my life it’s going to take a lot more to do me in.

I’ve been searching my whole life for consistency in connection outside myself, when it was there with me all along. This blog post is probably incredibly disjointed just like my mind. When I think it it’s beautiful and organized and poetic, when it comes out through my shattered parts, you’ll have to make a mosaic…. just like I have.

Click your heels three times Christina, there’s no place like home.

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The Dynamic of Transcendence

Heaven and hell is what exists on earth depending on the choices we make.

I remember as a child listening to the song that says ooh heaven is a place on earth, Belinda Carlisle. I liked that song.

I am thinking this morning in my 40th year, how many decisions of my life I’ve made based on trying to ascertain what was good or bad.

What was good or bad inside of me, who is good or bad. I have a lot of awareness about where this came from, but I focus more on that than how it affects my decision making now.

I was raised very religious and it has taken me a long time to decide what of those lessons I believe, what I don’t.

It’s all very overwhelming.

Here are some of the things I am realizing. All of the constructs in the Bible are all lessons or rules to be applied to humanity.

All portrayal of evil in horror movies or in the Bible respectively, the battles of good and evil, are battles of human beings in an attempt to transcend their own humanity (for whatever reason lies within their belief system), their own wounds, patterns of behavior and conditioning, and the fault lines laid down before they ever had a choice in the matter.

Later in life I attempted to ascribe to an integrative approach, light and dark, parts work. This is certainly more effective, but harder to stay consistent in because it is less rigid and defined.

Angels and demons, Good and evil, are all just stories about various human experiences in the ways we choose interpret and respond to them.

Heaven and hell are both places on earth, they are state of existence depending on our choices. To trust oneself is heaven, to perpetually doubt oneself is hell.

To be in a trusting loving relationship with mutual respect and good communication is heaven. To be in a relationship filled with manipulation and deceit, circular argument of which the goal is to be in control or get one’s way, is hell.

To have an exorcism, is to remove from oneself The patterns of thinking and behavior that cause a person to exploit another for their own benefit.

All the horror movies you have ever seen are literally just graphic representations of lost battles between a human being and them self. They lost the battle for discipline and to work hard at changing the things in themselves that could make them have a better existence, and they settle on low vibrational behaviors that harm others.

There are three sides to every story is an interesting phrase. Yours, mine, and the truth. Supposing there is one objective truth that could be figured out. Reality is that each person’s lived experience is their own story, and life itself is truly the unreliable narrator.

I have spent so much of my life trying to figure out what is right and wrong, what is my own reality, and having such a struggle in doing that, so much resulting anxiety. I state out loud firmly a desire or intention and then try desperately to live it. All good intentions, but I had poor attention to the details that mattered most before I made these statements.

If we boil it down to qualities of character, a strong character interested in the greater good of those involved with them, and seeking the truth at all costs of comfort, not exploiting anybody else in the process, is something I can be satisfied with.

To move forward I had to find a level of satisfaction where there was none. There could be no satisfaction amidst heinous acts and betrayal.

I have betrayed myself so many times to try and be accepted, Found to be lovable and loving, and to belong.

The unmet needs bubbling underneath the surface from my childhood threatened to always undermine my dreams. This is the battle I have always fought.

In the process of this fight I have emerged an advocate for myself and others. While I still do not know the breadth and depth of this work, it is emerging as a result of the process.

Today I close this book of the first half of my life, and I open a new one with a fresh pen and paper, and thankfully perspective.

I set forth with a realistic set of expectations for myself and others, and strive for people to have safety and warmth when they are near me, and that I am able to find those things in the assessment of my self.

I haven’t been able to capture my story on the page yet, anymore than here, as if that is not enough. Because I am the living story, and well life may be the unreliable narrator, however I choose not to be an unreliable character in it.

This is taken the most work for me. To say what I mean, and mean what I say, and organize myself so I can be satisfied with my existence while I have breath in my lungs.

I am currently reading the book the language of emotions. 

The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You https://www.amazon.com/dp/1591797691/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_6HX4BF6V14NAZGYQ2JE7

It is like listening to my self talk. I have just begun and I am reading it slowly and digesting each part before moving onto the next thing. Something I was never capable of doing before. I am treating my body with the respect and love it has always deserved, listening to what it needs, and slowly and carefully making those changes. This alone has increased my comfort and confidence inside myself, in the world.

All or nothing never was sustainable or accomplished any of the things I was so determined toward. Determination is important, but it needs to be balanced by consistency and discipline. 

I am learning those one step at a time…

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Victims and Perpetrators

“There are three sides to every story”, makes me want to throw up.

https://medium.com/the-ascent/in-an-abusive-relationship-there-are-not-two-sides-to-the-story-dc833dbc3af5

Who would’ve thought that taking responsibility for your own joy and happiness could be so difficult.

Who knew that it’s much easier to place it in the hands of others. (I think of Iyanla and myself before I came across her saying a relationship with others is only a reflection of our relationship with ourselves, ok good so a pervasive lack of self trust and some major attachment shit? Fun) Easier in the moment and more difficult in the long run.

Story of the ultimate human battle: discipline over satiation. Long term satisfaction over immediate. Well when you don’t think you’ll even live to see the next day now it all makes sense.

The legacy of the trauma survivor in so many ways is being sentenced to only live life in the current moment, and at times inside their own imagination because that is the only safe route.

Momentary safety overrides all other mental processes.

I’m thinking a lot about roles and boundaries lately. This makes sense as I am parenting teenagers, or as I like to call it herding cats 😉 Pema would say trying to get all the frogs in a bowl, and nobody likes a bowl of dead frogs lol. Fail, fail again, fail better she says.

Am I failing better these days or sentenced to life without parole inside my pattern? Stay tuned. I am failing better, but the fall is no less hard. I am angry at the fault lines inside of me laid down without my consent. Angry!

It’s lonely right now and yet it’s not. It’s lonely in a new way. A secure loneliness perhaps is taking over a desperate one, and maybe that will make all the difference in the world.

My thoughts are ahead of their time and I’m always ahead of myself. That’s a lot to come to terms with.

The proverbial cart is always before the damn horse. “How did you get the beans above the frank”, I’ve turned silly now. There’s Something About Mary reference and I suppose no better metaphor for the situations I get myself in could be had, no less painful.

There is no greater pain than to not be able to trust oneself and reality. This is a suffering I wouldn’t wish on anyone. In a matrix of my own making. I guess when you lived alone with only your imagination and your initiative this makes sense. And frantically looking for answers outside, rather than anyone helping. And worse being used and manipulated. It’s worse than I thought….

The benefit of childhood wounds directly at the surface is the opportunity to RE parent and become steadfast and solid. Not the same thing as boring and stagnant but they can often be confused for the other.

No black and white and there isn’t 50 Shades of Anything. A ridiculous fantasy. There’s just one foot in front of the other and I intend to taste and be the damn rainbow. Whatever that means. Like I said stay tuned.

The chronology of me…. another potential book title. Throw it in the pile with the rest as my attention threatens to betray me at every turn.

Just when you don’t think you can’t handle any more betrayal ….

I betrayed myself. And there’s nothing worse than that.

It’s a long way home…

And then she danced….

That’s been the longest running book title.

It and I are a work in progress that currently resembles a pile of raw meat. Shredded. Pulverized. The perpetrator and the victim and there is no reprieve.

Pema would say lean into the raw vulnerability. And I would cry out I’m exhausted of that, and some other voice from far away would say, hush Christina, you are just beginning, not ending. Why won’t you see it. You’re the only one who doesn’t.

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If I had it to do over

If I had it to do over… an open letter about the effects of my trauma on my children.

Lately so many things are clear and it’s left a lot of truth that’s difficult to sit in. College planning meetings for my Junior twin daughters is illuminating certain things.

I feel like I’ve been holding my breath for my whole life and lately I’ve been letting it out, cautiously.

I never realized how much anxiety I had and how much of my life was governed by trauma. I thought I was the boss of me. I was but as it turns out not such a nice one. When you are your own parent, for me I made a harsh one to keep me out of what I came from. That’s the best I could do.

My own parent and then their parent has me exhausted in ways that someone never should be, and all of that has impacted them. For better and for worse.

I wake up and realize my children all took honors classes and did well. They have all earned the ability to go to college and the privilege of spending some years just discovering who they are. My heart hurts at my own pain of this line, and also the pain I’ve caused.

I am humbled and I’ve been forced to stop shaming myself because ultimately it’s not productive and not the only way to get myself into action.

The song From Now On from the Greatest Showman, has been my go to lately. One right step in front of the other. Full presence with myself and my children, and the rest will figure itself out.

I cry a lot lately. There’s a lot of grief in here.

The piano tuner, a friend of my teacher, will be here at 9 am. I’m excited about that. Maybe it will get me to practice. And I’m going to have lunch with my son.

What has emerged once I finally stopped scrambling wildly in panic is someone who does want to be present and focused on her kids. I always did. Just the best I could do at the time was supporting them in all the other ways, emotionally I wasn’t available to myself. So afraid of being a refrigerator mother or doing something awful like mine I stayed frozen, away from their love too and joy even.

Over the years I’ve been thawing. If you pull someone too quickly from the ice they brought down through they will die. You have to let them adjust slowly.

My thaw has been excruciating. I’ve been living in this pain all of this time and still functioning and I’ve hurt people along the way, especially myself. And I’ve done a lot of good too. My heart is always in the right place but my god I make mistakes.

And right on cue Andy Grammer comes on singing I will fight for you. Watching Five Feet Apart resonates lately because I too have been fighting for my life, to get my spirit and soul back and connected to my body. To feel safe. But it wasn’t visible. So painful.

So I can really take in how beautiful my children are and this life is. What even is that to be privileged to see life this way? To think calmly. My eyes well up as I write this.

All I can do is show up. That’s what I’m doing right now. Not talking about it doing it, because it’s the right thing for me, because I feel it. I had to show up for me first, not the act of selfishness it can appear. It was something else. Something hard to explain or understand but real nevertheless.

Showing up, one interaction at a time with presence, support, warmth, attachment, encouragement. This is what the reduction in panic has given way to.

I am here and I’ll love you fiercely. I had to claim me first and I had to figure out how to do that.

I will be here the rest of your lives cheering you on and watching you.

I am your biggest fan…..

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Becoming a Goddess of Love

And when you react intensely and immediately to each happening it clouds judgment and vision. Sigh. An example of a Goddess of love is Pema Chodron.

Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one. – Bruce Lee

My clinical work for today is thinking about what things “narcissists” (deeply entrenched patterns of behavior) and trauma survivors have in common. My legacy was always being afraid I was or could become the destruction I came from. So I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to sort this. But I couldn’t do it with only my head. I had to journey through to get my heart open first. A hero’s quest.

If you saw my human mistakes you would smirk at the idea I’m any kind of hero.

Knowing my heart how could I have so many behaviors that showed a lack of empathy when I in fact have so much?

Well as I untangle I realize my wires were crossed/ my narrative was confused.

The problems I have are primarily regulation which deeply impacts my decision making systems.

Decision making systems and belief systems are both deeply ingrained. My coping mechanism became act quickly because the second I Doubted myself in my situations at home and got too much empathy for my family members it was like a bright shock of pain.

I got so tired of that white hot pain that I developed a cut off mechanism and fast forward movement. It was deeply ingrained. The problem was there was no data for best practices. When to use this and when not to. So that led to a whole heap of trouble in my life.

I can shame myself for it or figure it out, or better yet use understanding to adapt a better trait. This last example requires resources and a sense of security though.

A sense of security. Something I’ve lived most of my entire life without. I might as well have been deprived of oxygen and have an only partially functioning brain. But since what I got was an over functioning brain, in over drive. The only conclusion was shame.

I was smart enough and strong enough, but having not ever been safe enough, even once I was I couldn’t perceive it. And perception is everything that we intend to operate from. What can actually happen however is we can and do operate subconsciously. Unless the effort has been made to bring into awareness our operators. And bringing into our awareness is exactly what a trauma survivor can’t access.

I won’t even say avoids because that’s too much responsibility for what we have been through. However once you know you know and then have the option to use accountability to change.

You need a motivator, a desire, a will, and also discipline. Try to get a once abused child to accept more discipline even from themselves and you’ll see a tantrum that could rival a child being plucked from an amusement park against their will.

Arrested developments and over developments have plagued my days most of my life. Trying to manage this could be a full time job without any others and no one is going to come along and understand that. You’ll be sized up and judged by the standardized operations of society, and more shame will become internalized.

Shame is an ocean I swim across. But no longer will I become my own jailer. At one point during my course of therapy I was told that I kept myself in my own cage type of deal. The child in me rebelled against that painful notion because all she heard was it’s your fault. But really what my therapist was saying is that you have the power.

I heard it’s my fault about everything, but never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d find a place where I could believe it’s within my power. My capabilities. My awesomeness.

I am reading Diana Herself by Martha Beck. The whimsical tale of how a dumpster baby who was unwanted realizes she is…. actually I won’t spoil it…. someone wanting their ego to know the ending versus having the experience would probably figure it out much faster than me.

Ironically enough I’m less interested in figuring it out than I am learning from the journey.

So my conclusion about myself on this gorgeous Sunday is that I correct my mistakes. Once I know and can connect to how it feels the impact I have on people I change those things even when the tank has been bone dry for years. This line triggered a memory from Paulo Coehlo …. the thing that’s magical about a desert is that somewhere it contains a well.

I submit for you another Andy Grammer song for today. I came across this for the first time today and what a title. I wish you pain isn’t this everything we try to avoid as a human?

This is the cornerstone of Buddhist teaching and why it resonates with me so much. The double bind of a trauma survivor is that they quite literally cannot handle any more pain. So even if they were born with a spirit for journeys and legends they become hijacked by an override, and the resulting pain at being held behind the gate when they have so much living to do.

See how I slipped out of first person there? It’s a trauma survivor habit. A subtle way to dissociate is to begin to generalize. This and many more behaviors, mechanisms are the beginnings of narcissism.

To undo narcissism you need to get the story straight, feel the burn, and use behaviors and language that use accountability but don’t spill over into shame. It’s a tight rope walk for sure, but it’s not impossible.

You can no longer use a story to comfort yourself and that will feel like dying over and over again until you come back to life with an open heart.

That has been my pilgrimage. The road I have been walking without even knowing it because I was clouded by the conventions of society and a thick swamp of toxic fucking shame.

Shame is the root of all horrible behavior and as I see it the only thing to be ashamed of is if you know better and keep doing it anyway. Then you deserve any shame that you have regardless of what has happened in your life.

We do have a choice. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like a choice. For me the choice is to hold myself accountable enough to be responsible in the lives of others, to walk gently with my fellow humans. And gentle is not something I had ever been taught much about.

Nature and loving people who stay are who taught me about being gentle. I tried to be ever so gentle with others, but vicious to myself and that didn’t work either. I had to start all the way back at the beginning as a baby. Wobbly legs and learn to walk gently.

I only knew how to run. Today I kiss my tiny hand and begin to practice grace. That I know will be a whole other journey, it is not the destination.

So what do trauma survivors and narcissists have in common? Impulsivity and the ability to disconnect from their actions and the consequences.

Where do they differ which is perhaps the more important question. The differ in their choices to take accountability for their own healing. A trauma survivor has a genuine desire to better themselves, a narcissist has a genuine desire for things to be better and they will do so at all costs.

Self reflection is the primary key to all healing, but it isn’t enough, it must lead to actionable changes so that the shift can be embodied.

Most people will never do this work it’s far too painful. They would rather ping pong back and forth inside their own story with their own narrative and act from that place. A place of fear.

Not all bravery is good and not all shame is bad. That all depends on the story.

Getting the story straight when you have been scrambled a thousand times over is nothing short of a miracle.

It’s a good thing I’ve always believed in miracles …..

How does one become a Goddess of Love? Suffering through the painful realizations of their own shortcomings and story and using that to become better.