Tag: #cptsd

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Celebrating a Life Gone Too Soon….. and One Just Beginning

Wrote this a week ago and just getting around to posting it….

When I’m gone I hope you play Bette Midler’s The Rose at my gathering…..

It’s always a new day one of some sort. Something to quit, to begin…..

All you gotta do is walk….. Griff

After three long years I was finally ready to give City of Girls the attention it deserves, the attention I deserve. I was not disappointed. How do you do it Liz and can I be like you when I grow up?!

When will that be…..

And all you gotta do is walk….. my song of 2022…

What Liz Gilbert manages to do with her writing is grant permission for you to be who you are, and have the issues that you do.

People are who they are and all of it is beautiful. Choice is beautiful. Stories of monsters and demons are for fairy tales and Netflix.

I used to ascribe to the idea I could bend anything to my will, until life bent me, and I finally got the lesson.

Surrender. A full surrender.

My little prince turned 21 yesterday. He’s all heart. He’s exactly as he should be and yet in all the wisdom I lacked, I showed him everything he isn’t, because of what I learned during my survival. How to push hard and harder.

I am unlearning THAT.

My son’s friends flew his rose out here to surprise him for his birthday and we all banded together to pull it off. He was happy on his birthday. Satisfied and knowing he is loved. There will be many other kinds of moments throughout his life, but these are ones we will always treasure.

He can receive in the moment. All really is NOT lost. Thank you Leslie Charles.

I see boats and sunrise and water. I smell water and salt and Sunday.

I will be gathering today with those who loved Karen Sahler in Greenwood Lake New York. So many memories. I always said I hated funerals, all those emotions in one place. All that discomfort congealed into a suffering pudding inside my sweaty flats.

Today I understand. I am looking forward to it. To being given the space to feel my feelings with others feeling theirs. To have and to hold. To remember.

Grace and Mercy.

Now I can understand the conflict inside of me worrying it means something about me that I won’t attend my own mother’s funeral. Thank you Liz. Thank you life and thank you death.

And most of all thank you love, which is the force that makes it all worth it in the end.

I’m not some cold dead thing inside who wouldn’t go. I found this love I didn’t know existed. It’s just there. You can’t make it or unmake it. Don’t misunderstand me, it does take work and discipline to maintain a self that is capable, especially when it wasn’t natural for me.

Could that finally be ok??! Could I finally stop analyzing myself for flaws?! I think it’s time.

I’m not angry with her like I used to be. She wasn’t made to be a mother and became one anyway. Liked the idea of the attention it provided her, but never got any further. And I don’t really know the ins and outs of what happened to her, or if it’s a wiring thing. And you know what? Somehow it matters so much less to know

Because it doesn’t mean anything about me. People could have said that a million times, but I had to live my lessons. Just like you.

And love exists in its purest form as so many things. Love is there in the person that smiles at me on my walk. Love is petting my dogs. Love is walking, running. In heat and cold.

And all the love I’ve ever shared is valuable and valued and has accumulated to make my steps in this world a little lighter.

Love is a friend who remembers a version of you, you forgot. Sometimes love is persistence and sometimes it’s letting go.

For me…. Now…. Love is no longer the confusing manipulative thing it began as. And I thank whomever for that. The windows and the walls and the ceilings and the floors.

And today on this beautiful Sunday love is a mother who has died too soon. A woman who made those around her feel her love. A woman who gave my kids and I family events that I never had before. The only mother who will have seen me in a wedding dress probably, lol.

The gift of love is that I still have all of these moments inside of me. I didn’t know. It’s natural for me to keep myself out in the cold when I don’t have to be.

I am still learning ….

And I am warm…..

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It Was Always Going to….Be a Lifelong thing….

I hope your soul is changin’……

Healing

I think I’ve seen this film before and I didn’t like the ending….

Happy Sunday from sunny Florida. Tiny lizards are cute, palmetto bugs are nope. Humidity is death, the bath still brings life.

Hot. Cold. Sweaty. Calm. Breathe, just breathe.

Be still.

My whole life I ran. I ran and I didn’t know I was running. I thought I was just living with gusto and a strong will. Where’s there’s a will there’s away would have been my motto. Until I hit a period where will was not all that mattered, a period that brought me to my knees. Kesha Praying.

Will could only take me far, and take me far it did. I’ve been marveling lately at all the life experiences I have, they have grown me. I wouldn’t change it, and that’s new because my ruminating signaled that I lived in a swamp of regret. I’ve visited don’t get me wrong, but it’s not a place I could ever live.

I’ve been so hard on myself for every single thing I didn’t ask for, and judged me for how I coped or didn’t, all the while not even realizing how much coping I was doing, because I didn’t call it that. That signals there’s an issue right ?!

Yesterday we watched Pieces of Her, not the series that was very good by the way, the movie with Shia Labeouf (had to look up how in the hell to spell that). Spoiler alert ahead.

The movie starts with an intimate birth scene, very well done I might add. Raw. Beautiful. I was nauseated during it, for her, but of course I was. The movie took me on a ride of emotions. I was experiencing it. Few movies do that. Recently the Starling also did. The fact these move me the most is no surprise to those close to me.

Anyway this movie! Things I noticed in the beginning. Sean, her partner, stayed calm, was a rock for her, strong. Inside of me twinged with the wanting of that, back then. I didn’t know I didn’t have it, and frankly I know my memory is so fucked up. But the idea of a man who knows himself, is strong in that, for better or for worse, already through recovery at that time. So he had that experience and owned it, and worked at it.

They hold their baby for the first time…. It’s gorgeous. Shortly after the baby turns blue and well I can’t even say it.

The rest of the movie shows the various ways they cope and don’t. How they take it out on each other. How one shuts the other out, and the choices they both make. Suddenly all of the things that happened aren’t such a mystery.

The family dynamics were so interesting, but at least they each said their truth. How they really felt. What is that even like? Not a family who you could cut the tension with a knife, all covered in pretty outward smiles with gnashing teeth.

I’ve been clenching my teeth at night. This is a new phenomenon for me. Of all the ailments. Sigh. Clenching so hard. Despite being more healed than I’ve ever been, and sleeping very well.

Last night there was a little girl in my dream, it was vivid. We had a pleasant interaction, it was warm, and one of her mother’s was accepting, not forgotten, but forgiven. Life moves on and I felt peaceful by it, not tortured. A whisper that everything is as it should be. I felt warm.

In my own life there are fires. One of my girls will be leaving for the other coast and the other family. There was no middle ground to meet on, so it’s not the best of circumstances and that’s creating an unbearable pain.

A difficult labor is quickly forgotten once the child is in your arms and you’re more than occupied with the many new tasks at hand. A fractured relationship of this magnitude that can’t get any oxygen and is turning blue is a different kind of hell.

One at the moment I can’t find my way out of, or see a way to just distract myself. It’s excruciating. And two months ago I didn’t know it would be this way. I didn’t dupe anyone. This is real and it’s mine and I get to be allowed to feel how I do without dismissing or distracting, and while still loving and supporting myself.

This is new. A new relationship with myself, where I don’t pressure myself, and stand up quickly saying, I’m ok. Where I don’t force myself, or get lost in unhealthy coping mechanisms. This is new.

I’m not ok. I’m scared, and locked down, and in this. And it’s going to take a little adjusting, and healing.

Who knew being a mother was so important to me. Everyone else. The problem is I didn’t regard myself in that way. I couldn’t see myself as anything more than her daughter. There was no myself, No herself. A Martha Beck reference from Diana Herself.

Here I am and I’m fiercely showing up, and I’m not ashamed. It’s a new look for me, and it’s going to take awhile for the training wheels to come off, and to rub the cobwebs out of my eyes to get a clear view in the mirror.

It was always going to happen..

My grief and my story are real, and what I’m realizing is that healing from the beginning let alone now is a way of life. For me it is, and that has to be ok. Not heavy or unfun, just real. It will ebb and flow. This creative heart recovery there will be periods I’m under, and periods I’m out, periods I’m dancing and playing, and one’s where I’m stuck to the floor.

Because this is what life is like when you feel it all, and take it all in, and learn to keep some of it out. This is a whole story of becoming whole, from the pieces of her.

This movie rocked me. It made me remember my birth stories and what was going on at that time, and how did you feel when you held your babies the first time….

Probably not just romantic, probably I was scared shitless too. And I get to be that! Because that is what’s real, and I felt that way having no idea what I’d actually have to face to be a good enough mother.

I had no idea the lengths I’d need to go to to not be triggered, to not use my children to comfort my emotions or take them out on. To keep them safe, even from me, when I didn’t know how unhealed I was, but I did at some level.

Intuition trauma blocked.

What’s a gal to do besides study and heal and study and heal and heal and heal and heal. It takes a village and daily practice and lots of support. It is happening though and for that I’m the most grateful.

That I am able to feel things as I am. I could just be numb. And there’s nothing worse. My dear friend is struggling with this just now, and I’ve learned, am learning, to judge less, and love more.

I’m learning a lot…..

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Penetrating the Defense Mechanism…

I remember it all too well….

I wanted to say membrane for artistic quality, however it’s way to thin and tame a word for our subject matter.

Word salad, bread crumbs, generalities, banalities, poppy cock, and balderdash. That’s what the defense mechanism speaks. It wreaks of bullshit. Activated, deactivated. My friend calls it morphin time. Spoiler alert he’s a pink ranger fan.

The very fact he can speak about it as if it’s a choice shows the healing work that’s been done. The thing that brings hope and life to life.

I’m walk/run writing which means I’ll probably end up motion sick and nauseated. That’s old hat for me anyway. Are you kidding?! Stringing together beautiful words that never really say anything at all.

The water is low, very low. It smells that way. Peeeee ew. Blech. Death will eventually turn to life though…. And so it goes.

I hate lying and manipulation with a fiery passion these days. I somehow never seem to have less of it in my life. It seeps through. I can do all the work in the world and it still wafts through the air. I pick up on it like a bloodhound, get called crazy for my troubles, and become spun like a top.

Then it’s my reaction to the abuse that becomes criticized. How I save myself. Acts of violence even after all weapons have been put down.

A full surrender…..

Untangling myself from the mess of misperception. The very place I seek help from only becomes another source of misunderstanding. This I’m told is frequently peoples experiences in counseling.

Some counseling misunderstandings cost dearly. Those are the people meant to protect. We trust them more.

Thank God, the windows, the walls, whatever, that I finally learned that lesson. Those legs are still wobbly but they stand firm, shakes and all.

Listening to a counselor try to reason out why it’s difficult to apologize, rather than get a layer deeper to understanding. Don’t try and fix it, that’s ego, try and understand it and find the art to show the inhabitants of that magical safe space, the one space they are committed to listening, that’s safe enough.

Wouldn’t it just be easier to apologize?! What must it be like in a family without being able to do that?! Gee, you think?! Maybe first check what kind of family the person came from 101. Then add their experiences. These are not excuses they are understanding.

To help someone understand themselves by being understanding and compassionate. That borders on the miraculous.

Understanding is salve and balm. Cooling and soothing to the burning hot infected wounds. The disease has metastasized by now. I fall to my knees.

A human walking talking defense mechanism, who struggles inside her own life, and clears up misunderstandings for others, because of the knowledge she’s gathered. This process was not trivial.

A light warrior with a constant stream of dark thoughts about herself. That’s how I’ve kept my humility, it’s kept me. Trapped. Prisoner of war. I’m working on a different kind now. A kind with a wise guide rather than a harsh task master.

The war rages on.

A tear slowly drops down a child’s cheek. They know better. They know war can be replaced with love. But some people will always love war, more than peace. And some have a constant battle within. It’s those that know the value on peace. And there are those that never will.

One priest who couldn’t control himself all those years ago would ensure my abuse continued throughout the span of my life. One depraved religious crazy has had such an impact on my life. That’s what happens when you damage a child. You fucker. There’s a special place in hell for you.

I would never protect the adult over the child’s pain, it’s something I need to stay mindful of in my office because it’s easier to do than you think. We don’t want to be uncomfortable, don’t want to believe in monsters.

Counselors are constantly faced with the truth they are alive and well living right among us. The rest of the population would prefer to cover it’s eyes, and to create routine and distraction. Live your best life. Not everyone has that privilege.

I may serve the literary muse, but even a romantic heart knows, that’s the biggest ruse.

How can you damage a child? How can you break their trust and spirit before they even begin. The nausea turns to sickness. I can’t watch this shit because I’ve lived enough. Their spirit won’t be free again until death. When they can dream again.

Even I know some things break beyond repair and I’m in the healing business. And I’m not God or whomever. I’m just a person with a lot of knowledge that didn’t consent. It feels that way when I feel angry. But according to Julie I did exactly that, and those lost children did too?!

I don’t know.

I don’t care how much meaning can be made from suffering, breaking the spirit and trust in a child, watching the playful go out of them. It tastes metallic. I clench my jaw until my teeth press into my gums with the pain it being locked down inside somewhere and continuously misunderstood.

Because one human couldn’t control his cravings. Because he believed he was living as God intended. Incorrect belief systems in the hands of the wrong people keep the war waging. And hedging your bets is the biggest sin of all. Manipulating both sides. Agememnon.

I need an Achilles. With maybe a few less hair tosses lol. His destiny was his justification to fight mens wars, so perhaps not. He had to be arrogant. Does anyone have to be? One foot on earth, one with his mother. See, even Achilles has mommy issues.

When you’re locked down in a trauma mechanism it sure feels that way. Education, time, commitment, and determination help.

Can you break threads of destiny (would you want to) or are we all just deluded puppets after all.

I’ll leave it to the great philosophers, for I am just a good enough mother down on her knees praying to be forgiven for what she didn’t know, and still doesn’t.

One more circle around the block, then my coffee, my reward. My journal, my oxygen. Then clients. Then a soft safe space to rest before it all begins again.

Green light…..

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Something I’m Learning is You Learn a lot about Loving from Death

I remember it all too well and Taylor Swift’s Clean were on repeat this morning.

Despite the repeated migraines, nausea, joint pain, and other afflictions, I had to get out and walk this morning. To move some energy. My thoughts were dark and intrusive. I’ve been clenching my jaw and tossing and turning.

There’s a combination of distressing things happening currently, and all around that is regular every day life. Life that I love. The distress threatens to swallow, but it can’t with this spirit. It’ll never break my spirit. Et Lux Intenebris Lucet.

An ex lover and partner’s mother is actively dying. In one year’s time cancer has ravaged her. I had no idea how something like this would feel. The memories it would walk me through. I’ve never been so close to death before. I never realized how entirely I love, and that no longer being connected to the people never removes it. It just exists there.

It helps me to experience myself as loving and I need that right now with everything else I’m going through. The threat of parental alienation is real. I was programmed to always believe it was me, that’s bad, wrong, causing things. And while I’m by no means perfect my perception of myself has been the biggest battle in my life.

It’s plugged right in. People have plugged right in to my trauma and taken over where the previous left off, and the worst part is it felt like home. Love that wasn’t love at all, but a mask for insecurity, a bizarre attempt at control, a lot of things. But not love.

The impending loss of this woman who was a mother to me, one of very few, surrogate mothers. Who cried as I wore a wedding dress. Who loved my children and I…. sits like a stone in my stomach. I am heavy, foggy, and struggling with focus.

I burst into tears to her and her husband when I asked permission to marry their daughter and I meant it. I meant it. I didn’t mean to be the way I was, to not have room for anyone else’s feelings to exist. To be consumed inside my mind. To not stay. Those I didn’t mean. There was a lot I didn’t understand much less meant.

She is happily married now to a person who is well suited and she’s happy. She still loves my children and her partner holds that connection sacred. So they visited a few weeks back. I was nervous and they handed me their little one. Welcoming. Another baby I wasn’t able to have with a woman.

They are about to have their second, any day, while any day the glue and the matriarch will take her last breath. Vibrant, laughing, alive, kind, loving, Karen. It is unthinkable. I cannot even think it because what comes with this will be all manner of intrusive thoughts of myself or my loved ones going like this.

I stare numbly at the wall.

It’s almost show time. The time I show up for my client’s and give all I’ve got until I run out. My energy, focus, love, wisdom. What meaning would my life have without this exchange. It is not a question, it’s a statement. It’s everything. The sharing of knowledge that could make a moment of passing even a tiny bit lighter. I hope..

I hope for the family who is saying goodbye that the new lives beginning, at times provide temporary anesthesia for the pain.

Mother daughter relationships are complex. I’m struggling immensely in my own right now. This morning my mind is busy sending it’s energy to my former lover and friend because I know what that connection means to her, and what losses she’s already endured.

In some ways this is one of my first. The first up close death of one of my surrogate mother’s, and a loss to people I love deeply.

When love is true it still exists whether near or far. There is so much of that in my heart right now. Love and loss, the full spectrum.

I am learning it’s just still all right there. Ulay Ulay….

I am grateful for my deep connections and all of the love that’s helped me get connected to myself, every thread is honored.

Twin A begins college today…. Twin B prepares to move out West, a one way ticket for now with so many possibilities, my family is changing. It is a beautiful agony. One that I don’t know if I could have ever prepared for.

There will be a funeral soon. Life is just an endless cycle of birth and death I suppose after all, and this clinician is most concerned with the meaning between the lines and what’s beneath the surface. It’s not a bad way to live. It’s not too shabby.

Remembering and forgetting moments all while simultaneously creating new ones, because never give up is something that I live by. For me there is no other way.

Will you hear my heart tearing when the plane takes off, and the last breath is taken? You never know the last time you’ll see someone, hug them, appreciate their laugh. That’s a lot to be with, that reality.

What I do know today however is that real love never dies. It only transforms and is transforming. What a comforting sentiment amidst all of this existential suffering…..

💜

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When Stories are Told in Safe Spaces Shame Dies

All of these lines across my face…tell you the story of who I am, so many stories of where I’ve been and how I got to where I am. But these stories don’t mean anything when you’ve got no one to tell them to. It’s true I was made for you.

Being loved is overwhelming….

This is my realization this morning.

This is why I have chosen partners that were not capable of healthy love in one way or another, and I wasn’t either.

Would I always have unbalanced love outside, and frozen love inside ?

I’m just beginning to be able to see the light at the end of that tunnel.

And it’s scary to be 41 years old, I almost said 42, I always round up. I guess so I’m already prepared. So much of my life is geared around being prepared, for anything. It’s scary to be 41 years old and feel like an infant at times, that vulnerable, because everything is new. I’ve never been this self before.

“I’m not the explosion guy”, that’s my father.” I think of Silver Lining Playbook. The pain that’s involved in families where a member had an unidentified mental illness or personality disorder. The shame and pain that passes through the generations. No treatment. No relief.

No relief. Let those words land.

Just shouldering those burdens trying to look and be normal. Swallowing it down. I get so angry with the injustice of that. The silenced pleas for help in the form of various “negative” behaviors in children and they just internalize and absorb it into themselves and become sick. Which looks like defiant, odd, impulsive, and a whole range of other things.

Then exiled from others because they don’t fit.

Understanding is the salve that heals. I apply it generously in my office. Often while having so many unknowns on my shoulders. Feeling like a small mistake could cost an entire life. Anxiety often weaves that tale. Sometimes the stakes feel so high, and then I have to readjust to “I can only do my best.” That’s been a game changer.

I don’t have peoples lives in my hands, I have their possibility of healing in them. The choices I make can impact their healing, but my role is not enough to stop the results of a lifetime of suffering if the train is already blurring down the tracks. I can’t stop a bullet, but I can apply a vest.

When you grow up feeling responsible for everything, and utterly by yourself it becomes difficult later in life to know what’s yours and what isn’t. A major task of therapy.

A major task of mine…..

I had a 20 k client day yesterday. Sometimes it goes so deep and so heavy, that one day feels like a week. I’m in a daze and don’t even know what day it is.

I do know I bring my whole heart and I lay my energy on the front line daily; and though I may never have a hero’s celebration. Let’s be honest I would probably squirm with discomfort. I need to learn to celebrate myself and what I do, and pause. I can’t always just keep going, but tell my mind that.

There’s a community that lost a teenager to suicide a couple of weeks back, and it haunts me. The pain of those affected haunts me. The intrusive thoughts when I see a sign in one of mine haunts me. The pain of those parents haunt me, and I’m not even first degree attached. But I am a human and I can’t even fathom that pain, or maybe I can.

The threat was always there in my own life. A not so gentle reminder of my trauma. My trauma. The thing I don’t talk about because to access it extinguishes my breathing almost immediately. I shudder and shake with it in the therapy office. I don’t want it spoken. What if I made it up.? I wish I made it up.

And it’s just easier to press forward and pretend it’s something that can be left behind. It can’t. It infects the next generation and the next until it’s spoken, understood, and loses it’s power.

I think my true self inside wanted a simple life. And resents the enormity of this role. I think my therapist would laugh at this. That’s just my whining about the acceptance of the things I didn’t choose. My energy healer disagrees, she believes our souls contract before they entire the body fully knowing what their destiny will be.

Did I sign on that dotted line? Was it inked in blood?

I have stories locked down inside me. Guarded by dragons. Dragons I shouldn’t have had to face then, let alone now. To access my memories. It doesn’t seem fair to go through what I have to do to do that.

I spent a life trying to create something I didn’t have to forget and if I want to heal I need to remember enough to also get that little girl out alive.

Confusion. Exhaustion.

Nobody wants that. They want fun and to believe in happy endings. But what about happy beginnings. I’ve realized lately those really do and did exist in those other people. The ones who don’t shudder when a voice raises.

Those happy people you’ll never be understood by, is how it felt. Separation, desperately seeking belonging.

Desperate.

Now that I’m no longer desperate how do I do life? It’s all new, and new is overwhelming even when it’s good.

Patience. Security. Safety.

A loving self ….

I created one.

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At Home in a Heart that is Warm, and the Heart is Mine

Piece by piece she restores my faith that a person could be kind and stay ….. piece by piece she filled the holes that you burned in me at six years old…..

I woke up grumpy this morning. It’s a long day ahead, many bills to pay, many admin issues that need addressing. Ones that are intimidating. I’m tired. My b12 has been low, and I’m getting weekly injections. All of my therapies while deeply helpful, leave me gutted of energy by the end, and that leaves me fallen behind in other areas.

I’m mortal after all, not a God.

My tone inspired by the finishing of The Song of Achilles this morning.

Then as I’m in the bath attempting to rejuvenate my spirits and soak my sore body, I hear twin B singing of all things. I’m just a small town girl….. living in a lonely world…

It immediately lifts my spirits. I smiled from ear to ear. Then even more she texts requesting some time with me. I know it is backwards to need love from your children, (or is it just human all too human) but they are my only flesh and blood connections, and the only ones that have been my motivation to fight so hard against the dark experiences that marked my beginning.

I was waiting to enjoy them…. Wish I knew I didn’t have to wait. But I did. I had to connect with me first and that was nearly impossible.

We have had a turning point in family therapy. And even if it’s just a glimmer of hope (I think it’s more, that this is real), I am overjoyed with it.

Finally all being clamped down in our own story, corners, and pain…. It is relenting…. The icy grip releasing.

Could this thaw too?

It must Christina. You did. So how could it not? Remember what it took to get here.

The pool is getting fixed in the next couple of weeks. If nothing else to preserve the value of this home as improvements continue. A trip to a hot tub store in Milford last week ended in us getting the motivation to clean the thing out. I’ll have to post some before and after shots as I learn how to make the pictures blog sized and not make the whole post not work.

I can’t believe we cleaned that thing out. It has sat for four years and I thought there was no hope. That sounds familiar. Then you give a little time and attention and look what happens.

Look what a little presence does…..

Magic

Not a story, with intensity and a movie like script that must be followed or it can’t develop but everyday magic. These little moments….

I’m watching my kids become me in certain ways, and also them of course, but seeing my strength in them is exciting, and of course that I have not done every single thing wrong. The tale my mind so often weaved. Painful. Excruciating really.

Sometimes it really is all in your head. And that doesn’t make the difficulty any less or it any less real.

I spent my whole life running from my pain. Willing it away by just good ol’ elbow grease. I’d create a family. It’s just that easy. I was naive and foolish and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I had ideas, ran with them, then those ideas crashed and burned painfully. Being redirected was not my strong suit. I would stand defiantly arms crossed and be stubborn against my own behalf and not even know it.

It’s interesting to think now that all my rushing for self work was exactly what I needed to be doing because I could have missed out on connections with my kids. I think I just barely made the boat. On real live ones, not trying to figure it out cognitively, but feeling them in real time.

I have come back from the dead. I was dead inside. All the feeling parts. Maybe not fully dead, almost dead, almost lost, only a small part of human left in there. I had to fight myself, my mind, all while simultaneously figuring out how to support myself, to have healthy relationships, to choose a family for myself of people who show up for each other well.

I had to do the opposite of what I was… to slow down. To show the pain, so it could be seen, so I could be helped. Masking was suffocating me.

Last family therapy session I feel like I breathed for the first time ever. My first breath of oxygen as a flesh and blood human, not a robot who just works constantly and can’t feel.

It’s the most beautiful thing, but I’m also the most exhausted I’ve ever been and the most emotionally raw. And this of course coincides with a busy client schedule with some major shit (shifts) going on in the world, that people are feeling.

And some are not making it. Children taking their own lives, and how to hold space, but also not get trapped in the enormity of that reality.

To just smile at dinner or focus when earlier you sat in this pain with someone and your mind is beckoned to go there, and to the possibility of that happening to you.

I thought I knew what heart break was until I recognized how the very thing that saved me was keeping me emotionally distant from my children. That is heartbreak.

I just expected myself to exist without my story attached, without even speaking of it. I didn’t want it Or me, or my mother to hurt them, but It was always going to pass down to a degree. I held it back with everything that I have. Carried it really. Until I recognized the heaviness was crushing me, and that wasn’t serving anyone.

Now that I’ve set it down I don’t know that I’ll know what to do, how to be. I’ve been existing this way a long time. In reality I’ve been setting it down piece by piece and I’m getting to the part where I’m starting to feel naked without it. To shiver and shake with the new.

When it comes to new and trauma survivors, good or bad doesn’t matter, new has a high threat quotient.

Settle…. Stay…..ground

You’ve worked so hard to be here

Home in a heart that is warm despite the amount of cold it has felt….

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May You Have the Courage to Face Reality As Is

All of these lines across my face… tell me the story of who I am… so many stories….

I did EMDR last night. The first session I made all the way to an installation apparently. I didn’t know that. That all my talking and planning what I’ll say, and having things to say, could have sometimes been avoidance. I’m getting closer to acceptance within the grief process.

My intellectualizing, while quite functional and productive even, also an elaborate form of denial. Denial and avoidance are being confronted abundantly lately.

Within the many grief processes. It’s like once I began why not just keep piling them on. How did I get here? Well I didn’t get myself here alone. I know that.

Last night I focused on permitting myself to fully estrange myself from “my family”, those people I grew up around. How is it possible to spend time agonizing over what will happen when I get that call someone has died. The reality is to go there, to that place, even the thought of it gives me rapid and horrific physical symptoms.

This is my reality.

How would I feel if they didn’t call me? Abandoned all over again? Not belonging. Without any mindfulness of if I want to belong there, and why or why not.

Radical acceptance …. Any acceptance, perhaps radical sets the bar really high.

Another reality is that so much in life I have used a copy paste technique to make big decisions in my one precious life. Never having learned trusting myself or anyone else, why not just default to a faulty system. It felt sound at the time. This works over here, let’s try it in my life. I don’t know what I feel anyway. Why not. Plus look how great it looks.

I’m paralyzed, where are my feelings, I no longer feel things I know I should.

I’m on an NF and Brandy Carlisle kick right now. I want to read her memoir and Matthew McConaughey Greenlights I started on Audible last night. His voice is something other worldly soothing. In a fantasy he could have been my father. Just like Elizabeth Gilbert could have been my mother.

My reality is so much better than fantasy…. And yet the dissociative patterns of old run deep.

I just keep challenging stories, that are just that. The kind my mind creates. I would rather keep it busy reading others subjective truths about their lives as they recall it. Than ricocheting between certainty and doubt in my own mind as a means to keep myself sharp and honed for any impending disaster.

The ever present dread. The illusion of safety it creates. That soothing bastard.

The reality is my want to be in attendance of a funeral for a connection I never had would be one again to prove some worthiness to some unknown diety. I see others do this or that with their grief and wish to emulate rather than trust what I need.

What I need……

(Selfish) you’re selfish. It’s all about you)

Last night in emdr I scratched the surface on the truth of what I need. It was introduced. Progress. Because normally that wouldn’t have even been in the program. It would have been what I need to do. And the why is always to be accepted or belong. (This is why my parent focus is what the kids need to do, rather than on an emotional connection, that breaks my heart. I’m inside of here (her) trying to get out. I’m right here in the upside down.

The proverbial carrot always being dangled over my face. (belonging)

I don’t have to live that way anymore. I accept and belong to myself, and if you know how hard won those words are to be uttered authentically, then you know.

In Emdr I made parallels between families and not feeling understood or wanted. Mine and my ex husband’s. The two starter families. I combatted the story that I abandoned them, and was able to realistically list the ways I was the abandoned. Not in a victim sense. In the way that one must do to confront reality as it happened and not how we wished it to happen.

I wish when I got that call it would be different. That it’s not something that would make me sick. That’s not the reality. The reality is people will judge and hold their own reality when I cut myself off.

Other people stay. Look their family’s are together. Look they go and attend the funeral. But at what cost to them?! If it’s a scrabble toward worthiness, that battle is already lost.

(May I only stay where I am nurtured and valued consistently. May I nurture and value consistently those I love and have responsibility for and to.

These are my vows

May I recognize and have my eyes open to a relationship being abandoned and not nurtured or engaged in so I may never have to be so cold to myself again.

May I notice if I have grown cold or abandoned. And have the courage I need to breath life back in, if the cause is worthy. )

Maybe it doesn’t have to cost for them, but it does for me. I must permit myself my own truth, rather than dissociate from it for anesthetic value.

Trust and Permission

The only way to feel a sense of wholeness and worthiness, especially if the roots weren’t naturally provided, is to be understanding and accepting of yourself. So others can do the same. Or that’s what I’m finding anyway.

Want to be understood? Take the time to be understanding to yourself, of yourself, for yourself. She, they, her, him, must be included.

Must belong

I was never loyal to myself. I was loyal to even an idea of a healthy family. I kept trying to see what ingredients would create one and kept trying. Like a mad scientist, only to be misunderstood further.

Mirages

Until my vulnerabilities got used so thoroughly against me I became forced to learn how to have a relationship with myself.

I was staring the abuse and neglect in the face until I dis identified and realized it was not my self. The self was preserved on ice.

Heart throbs, heart melts…. Heart beat easily 120 bpm on so many days. I didn’t even know my own post traumatic stress. I didn’t know that’s what it was. It was my fault like everything else.

It was tricky at first…. A clumsy dance. This relationship with me….

This is how scattered and shattered my brain is. It blanks and grasps at a memory or a thought, even as a trap door lies right beneath my feet. Or a panther lies in wait guarding the memory. Can’t get the good without the bad Christina. Evil laughter.

What if it’s not real….

What if it is…

This is what the work looks like for me

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We All Become Our Parents in the End? I Don’t Think So

Christina Aguilera Just a Fool is todays angsty song …..

Random thoughts before I begin my client day. I’m out walking around the green. Looking longingly at benches to read on. Longing….

I’m contemplating words of an ex partner, some of the worst that could ever be said to me. We all become our parents in the end was the gist of it. I vehemently disagree and in my case I’m no where close, but being accused by scorned lovers when the relationship died was very unpleasant.

I went to lunch at Edge of The Woods yesterday. Their wraps have really gone down hill since the pandemic. The experience was lovely though. Exploring and finding new things.

I’m in the midst of discovering and becoming, finding the kind of adventures I want. Without that being daunting and feeling filled with land mines.

The sun beats down on my skin….. sweat drips down the small of my back and my neck and I love it. Primal.

Peaceful and primal is possible? I should think yes.

I bought a gardens something protein powder yesterday and I’m excited to make a smoothie with it this morning, even though it never tastes like smoothie king. Oh well. Drip drip….. sweat.:.. music…. Movement…: dreams!

I’m craving and pursuing health in all matters and as a human that’s hard. Consistency is hard, but I love the fruit of this labor. The flavor melting in my mouth. Descriptives.

So I wrote this the other day and didn’t post it. And now I’m in Asbury New Jersey. Joisy. Sun, sand, walks, reading, kiddos (little ones not mine), and just observing life.

And now this is weeks later again and I’m home on another adventure. I have a date with twin A today. My eighteen year old beauty who loves horses, and has a gigantic heart. We are getting lobstah rolls and then let’s be honest probably icecream. Mmmm.

It’s a Friday, therapy in the mornings, often a client or two peppered in to offset the ending of financial support from the other parent, and then an endless span of hours that’s usually filled faster than they can unfold. Today is pest control (mice ick), and notes, many many notes.

I bought a microphone, the one doctor Ramani has, lol. On Amazon Prime day of course. Will it be another item in my collection to dust, like the video camera and pulse oximeters to do Gottman therapy with. Sigh. Will I have a podcast? How can I choose just one thing?

Where is there room for me in my life. It’s all about you, the critic from past relationships gone bad chirps. Everything is always about you. Nothing was ever about me. Cognitive dissonance. Trapped, in the past, in the future, inside a coping mechanism.

Caged

Free

All or nothing

This is me….

I was talking to my therapist the other day about how I had imagined my life. As it turns out my first divorce still haunts me in the form of how that has effected my children’s lives. The way things were dealt with or not dealt with.

Anyway, I was telling her I had always had a dream of being with that one person your whole life. Knowing them in a way where you know all their selves. Where you grow together. I was devastated by divorce and realizing I was gay, it was a betrayal of everything I had dreamt of and everything I set out to do.

(Everything after became a dissociated blur in so many ways. In such a hurry to correct. To still have that with someone while my kids were little. And all the rushing was always the thing that made life the hardest. I had no discipline or no secure foundation to know that. To know there was another way. I didn’t know. Can you forgive me? Can I forgive me. Please.)

Which was to create a family that stayed through it all.

Now I just try to find where I fit ….into life, into my self, into another person, another family…. It’s often overwhelming, it’s often beautiful.

Mostly lost, a little found, inside a life where insecurity used to abound. There’s a budding security.

She reflected that I had that with my kids, but it doesn’t feel like it, because I was always desperately searching for my lost self.

I was

And desperately seeking to be loved, and more to be understood, when I didn’t understand myself.

And maybe that means they were searching for me…. That’s heartbreaking, but when I go back and look I held, I read, I snuggled, I was right there. I had the privilege of being home with them their most formative years. Do their little bodies remember? Will my painful mind?

What do I do with all of this now?

I get up and try again…. To be more loving, more present, to listen and hold space. To believe it’s not too late to be the mom I dreamed of having and being. It’s much more difficult now as I have to translate this to a template where they have their own lives and need me differently.

I want to go back and also I don’t….

I keep moving forward….

Being the change

At the conclusion of this post, which is now, I’ll be full circle to where the post began. Feet hitting the pavement….. pounding.

Walking my way through recovery.

Dancing my way through life….

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You’re Giving me Nothing but Shattered Dreams

Darkly Dreaming Dexter Drastically Disturbs Dramatically Dulls
Pain

https://open.spotify.com/track/5DHQKZCOZhGNTbYBCekWx0?si=ZcId9_tnTA2BqYgKLU85ag&context=spotify%3Aartist%3A6fOMl44jA4Sp5b9PpYCkzz

Good morning! From the bath, because where else would I be on an easy like Sunday morning…

There’s a new Dr. Teals and I’m enjoying it. The house is cleaning person clean (something I never imagined having), and I’m trying to find ways to keep it that way. They carve a path and make a special reset, and we scuttle around attempting to emulate.

Do you want to emulate or carve a path?

The girls are being celebrated (Graduation) in upstate New York, with beloved friends and family. Just us chickens here. Chickens ha. A phrase my grandparents would say. I remember more these days, about the little things that weren’t as terrifying as the others.

Speaking of terrifying, the other morning I was driving to an early morning appointment in New Haven. Just relaxing and driving on the highway. Right lane around 55 mph, slow for me 😉 and Bang….. my drivers side window explodes. I mean explodes. So dazed. Looking for a bullet hole. Confused. Pull off the highway onto some exit and into a laundromat liquor store combo near West Haven. I think.

Parked across two spots, door open, standing. What does one do when each movement risks a cut, never mind getting home. It’s natural for me not to panic in panicky situations, I save that for nearly all regularly daily situations. Backwards in every sense of the word. The panic tried to mount when I realized I had an ass full of glass literally. And as I tried to wipe it away began to cut myself and my back.

Still looking for a bullet hole that shock prevented me from feeling. Thinking when I’d lift my shirt up there would be glass lodged into my back. A wound matching the emotional distress I was under that made sense of it all.

I’ve been looking, hoping maybe even, for that visible wound my whole life.

I wandered into the liquor store at 8 am…. And they sent me next door to the laundromat where there was a dirty bathroom and a gentleman on a folding chair drinking a Corona. Didn’t have the bandwidth to worry about that. Was not however going to ask for assistance with glass removal. I’ll do that myself. Normal for me.

Got the glass out of my pants, though scratchy parts within the waistband would remain. Went back outside and used glovebox napkins to break out the rest of the glass so it didn’t hit me as I was driving home. It’s all down inside the door and sounds like a box full of broken glass when the car down is open or shut. Tinkle tinkle.

Came home made calls, Google searched and attempted to understand. The most interesting aspect of this for me of course was my response of trying to figure out how I felt about what happened. Not surprisingly I didn’t know.

As I observed myself throughout the day my focus was nil. Just very out of it. Like it hadn’t happened. By the afternoon I began to entertain the idea it was real and did actually happen and imagine getting in the car again and hearing that noise and began to shake.

Finally it registered that one of my favorite and safest places, sacred to me had just been changed probably forever, at least in some small corner of my mind. Forever is a long time. I’ll always wonder now if that will happen or could happen to one of my children. I’ll always wonder what would have happened it trauma hadn’t given me military like training to remain completely calm in a situation like that.

I should have been in an accident. Swerved. All sorts of things. Instead that typically dissociative reaction took over. Silver linings, am I right ?!

By the late afternoon I ached so bad and couldn’t hang on another second and canceled my evening. I broke down in tears as I allowed myself to think about the lack of safety I had just experienced and to entertain it in reality Vs the dreamlike state our brain tries to keep us in when unthinkable things are happening.

Unthinkable things…..

My nervous system is shot, it was already shot, and pardon the metaphor.

So anyway that happened. The window will be fixed, just like new …. Maybe? But will I ever trust a car window again!? One more layer of jumpy, like the cherry on top. Just what I needed, ironic it’s a Cars song I enjoy.

Am I being dramatic? The question we women particularly are trained to ask ourselves. The answer of course is always yes. Programming is powerful stuff.

Dark humor sticks a toe in the water and I’ve thought of why do you keep me walking on broken glass. A fave old Annie Lennox song. I’ve been nostalgic lately.

Once you have become unsafe enough even when something breaks you lose the ability to feel about it. Desensitization. Therapy is at times RE sensitization. It’s hard not to get all what’s the point about it, when one realizes how quickly safety can be shattered, seemingly, again…. And again.

I spent a couple of years in the shards of shattered dreams. Every where I turned, everything I would touch, tiny cuts. Tinkle tinkle. Oh another song …. https://youtu.be/hVNBC1LI8hs. I will never get tired of the 80’s. Johnny Hates Jazz.

Am I being dramatic?

Today it’s a relaxing Sunday. There is no glass. Going for a nice drive and to see James Taylor this evening. Wading in my dreams in the bath this morning. Gentle. Warm. Safe.

Preparing, always preparing to enter the harrows of the world again.

What dangers may lurk in a typical mundane concert filled evening…..

Stay tuned

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The Guards Don’t Relent, They are Their own Machine

“Every soul is like a minnow, every mind is like a shark.” Leonard Cohen

I am preparing for family therapy tonight. It has felt like preparing for battle, and it never should have. That’s inside of me, I tried to never let it out. That wasn’t an option. It leaked and poured out the seems and the more aware I was, the worse I felt.

The worse they felt….

The battle was always inside of me, and it would always create one outside. It began before I was born, and it’s my task, not my burden. Though if you caught me on any difficult day, I would tell you it was.

My battle is my task, trauma as a task to absolve. Is that the right word? I damn sure know it doesn’t dissolve, because that’s such a tame word, and it doesn’t.

Feral, tame, feral, tame….. battle battle battle….

To see things clearly and with safety is the ultimate privilege anyone could ever have.

Don’t cry for me, don’t hold me…. Just see me. Show me you see me. The guard goes down just a little, but he never takes off his armor. It’s stifling inside of here, this suit of metal. Once you’re hit so many times it never goes down.

All of the intensity of not receiving support fired straight at my kids. The truth is unbearable at times. I want to change out my suit of armor for robes. Even choosing an outfit is exhausting. I’d like to simplify everything. Maybe it will help. The Buddhist principles. Maybe they will help.

Can anything help?

Is it better to be a tortured soul than a lost one? Are those my only choices ? Most of my life it’s felt like it.

Is this the hill I’m going to die on? The best they could say is at least she never gave up. I guess that’s something for them, and everything for someone like me.

“All I ever wanted was some support that was unconditional. I tried to find that in partnership and failed every time because that’s not an unconditional relationship.

I had to give up me to have security.

Who would I be without my guard. I never let it down anywhere or with anyone except in the bath maybe is where that began.

I ache that I didn’t give you a better family life. That I “failed” every time and became more ashamed.

I ache at the word selfish. I never had a self to enjoy. Everything I looked like I was enjoying I was just trying at, trying to learn it.

I was trying to protect you and that backfired.

That I couldn’t just create a loving and warm mother out of thin air. That I didn’t keep my focus on you because primarily of resources emotionally and financially.

And then to shame myself for it, and then to be shamed for it.

Is agony…..

When I feel I have no support I run around like a feral animal, lashing and biting. I run scared all the time. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone and I’m sorry for the amounts I gave to you.

So many parts child still…

My trauma is also yours…..

I’m sorry

It takes an act of god to access my feelings, let alone show you. So I try to bridge the gap with writing because I can safely access myself there.

I’m like a human machine for detecting patterns and behavior because I spent my life trying to make sure I could keep you safe from me (my trauma).

You just wanted my time and attention and I did too. Everyone was in scarcity.

Now we could have this thing and I don’t know how to let go.

To find the balance of not being walked all over, but also having respect for myself and being able to love you.

I’d like to love you. To have and to make room to be loving. Please know that I need help with this, it wasn’t naturally given to me.

And I also need to be your mom to teach you and have boundaries etc.

This is often out of balance. I’m desperately seeking balance.”

Desperate causes so much harm. The feeling alone.

Desperate my whole life.

I’m running out of that energy and will I land at the bottom of my own inner well (sacred space) defeated in a puddle of my own shame and self loathing.

Or is it possible to rise out of something like this. ?

Balance

If my guard lets down at this point in my life will I just drop lifeless to the ground? It’s all I have ever known. This is my truth.

It took years to turn a sensitive, loving, creative child into a sentinel.

How can you ask me to undo that?

A major rule of therapy is you cannot strip away someone defense mechanism or reveal them to themselves without first replacing that with something more functional. You have to make a safe landing space first.

I’ve been this for countless people in my office, and often times the opposite for my children.

I will need to live with the balance of this truth, with forgiveness and mercy in my heart, if I am to live without constant suffering.

Atonement

How did I even get here? I’m not even religious :p That all caused me so much damage, repression, shame… it was in the wrong hands of course. Are there wrong hands ? Or just incredibly broken ones.

The questions are endless…..

“Suffering had led me to wherever I am, suffering has made me rebel against my own weakness. – Leonard Cohen

“What Happens to The Heart.”