Tag: #memoir

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Burning down Co-Dependence (the house)

Burning off co-dependency often feels like burning alive. It would appear that it’s sitting with yourself even as you want to crawl out of your skin with the not doing of it all. Sigh.

I got lost…… a little song to accompany the post.

Admitting addiction is probably one of the hardest things anyone will ever have to do. It means you have to take responsibility for your own destructive patterns. Yucky. I’d much rather craft my representative (as Glennon says) and live like that. It’s much more “fun”, but is it?! Or does it just look better on the surface.

Be still and know.

Glennon and Abby are both addicts. I wonder if their love helps them manage their addiction in a well balanced way? If their shared goals of raising a family helps keeps their destructive energies focused. If their love gives them strength to fight it. About all the things you don’t see. I’m sure it’s not easy. The media makes things like that look easy and gives people a false sense of the amount of work it really takes to make things work. If you have read both their memoirs you can see that a tremendous amount of self reflection and growth preceded their love. One could even say invited it. Created space for it. Tik tok would call it manifested it.

Balance ?

Easier said than done. The rationalizing and justifying that life is short and running out and all of that. How does anyone find balance anyway? It’s an elusive concept to me right now. Even more evidence to get still with me.

I have all the tools and books surrounding me…. but the truth is I’m afraid. Really afraid of the weight of taking responsibility for myself. Funny since in most ways I’ve been doing this my whole life. What a funny thing to fear.

What looked like taking responsibility for myself was really survival, nothing was motivated from a secure place. If I didn’t have one I would make one, and hence the birth of my co-dependency.

I am working Melody Beattie Co-Dependent No More. Exciting stuff. It’s not. I want to hide it on the shelf, take off City of Girls, book a trip to Aruba and indulge. Again where is the balance? Like it’s outside of me and not possible or something. Sometimes I am ridiculous.

“We’ve ignored our own needs and wants and then get angry about it.”

“Just feeling urgent and compulsive is enough to hurt us. We keep ourselves in a crisis state.”

Set yourself free. Know the difference between a reaction that needs to be changed and one that despite its swiftness is still leading you in a direction that will correct the above.

What are my own wants and needs?

Excavations continue.

What I have learned is being out of alignment with them causes anxiety and suffering and no peace of mind. So I will get still in that place and not move from it until I am firm in those things. I don’t need to compromise those things to feel self-worth any longer. This new is scary. New is scary. It’s also exciting and lonely and sad and so many things.

I’m going to copy a post from a website. I do not remember the original poster but there’s lots of good stuff in here regarding the difference between love and a trauma bond and how to know.

“How do you know the difference between a trauma-bond and love? As the person with possibly a trauma-bond.”

Great question!!

Trauma bonding is a major part of abusive relationships. While in the trauma bond, it may be impossible to notice the difference between love and codependency. During trauma bonding, you may be bonded to the way the person (abuser) makes you feel —intense, fulfilling in some way, even attractive, indispensable.

If the trauma bond has gone for very long, you may be believing that if there is something wrong in the relationship, you may be the cause of it; that’s a consequence of emotional abuse directly. And you may be trying really hard to be better for this person “to love you back” but by then, love and codependance are the same to you.

Thinking that what you have felt for that person (the emotional manipulator) is not love will invalidate you completely, years of your life, and your sense of self.

Most people in trauma bond relationships are proud of how much they can love. They feel that their love is so sincere and accepting that makes them feel better about themselves because of it. That’s how they compensate for staying in such a relationship.

Since most people in this type of relationship are victims of trauma from before or some sort of emotional vulnerability, they may have low self esteem, low sense of worth, and may be easily manipulated in feeling grateful or in debt to the abuser.

Oftentimes, the abuser will have their own serious mental health issues, which lead the person being abused to feel the need to care for them or protect them. The abused individual will go up against other people who speak out against the partner and often push people away who aren’t supportive of the relationship in the name of the great love they have for them.

I have noticed that the abused in this type of relationship may have directed their emotional needs to feel compassion for those that suffer. That’s be a compensation for what they didn’t receive, probably in childhood. So, by caring a lot about those that suffer, they keep afloat, since compassion is a great source of resilience.

Narcissists love this behavior and will often reinforce this in the person being abused by showing them love and affection following an act of protectiveness.

So, to answer your question, since love is so difficult to define, I’d say that most people in trauma bonding situations have access to their heart, which most probably the abuser doesn’t. So, in a way, the bonding is a combination of a good/open heart and a acute emotional need of being loved, seen, appreciated, and cared for. In a way, vulnerability is the condition of opening the heart, right? The co-dependant is much less guarded than the manipulator. That type of vulnerability is a defense; loving makes them feel strong internally, even when externally they may be prone to abuse.”

Its abusive both ways because no ones needs are met and further the energy that is so vital to purpose and for our families is taken. Impossible without treatment.

Relapse is a part of recovery and admitting addiction is the first step.

Hi I’m Christina and I’m a recovering co-dependent. *waves*

And I’m committed to not doing things that make me feel like shit. No matter how good they may feel at the time. Not giving over my peace of mind for anything.

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Hopes, Dreams, Blending, Magic

It’s Sunday and if you know me you know that Sundays are for blogging and for finishing books respectively. Or starting them, or just having them sit near you in a stack like the best friends you’ve ever had.

Always there for you…. always there for you like the magnolia trees, the Sunday grocery shopper who loves me, my found family new and old. Always there for you like coffee and notepads and spring time and fall. The latter fleeting but they will always return and you will appreciate them more because they are temporary yet consistent parts of your existence you can actually depend on.

I’m finishing up Words on Bathroom Walls the book today and it’s making me think of so many things. The way we can find parts of ourselves in the stories of other people. Mirrors. Stories can be mirrors. We can take what helps and leave the rest.

Maya has just yelled at Adam for not letting her choose for herself if she can handle “his crazy”, and told him she deserves more than a crappy email, and does he love her…. well then she gets to decide.

Adam shows me how important belonging is to a human being and how hard it feels to accept belonging when you come with things that could be perceived as making life more difficult simply by existing.

Adam and I share a lot in common, and I’ve gotten lost in terms of believing in my value and sticking to that, accepting less than I deserve and being hard on myself for things that are normal and natural to ask for. I’m working through that now and staying with myself, my needs and wants.

The right things will show up naturally and be safe and secure on their own without having to work so hard. Like Adam and Maya. Just the two of them and seeing one another and accepting them as they are. It works and feels good, and the only complication is each battling with their worth based on their own struggles, regardless however they choose one another and they show up. There’s a power in that. It’s something I look forward to.

My latest homework from my energy healer was to essentially dream from the now versus getting lost in old stories of things I’ve been through. I get lost in the pain and story and go back there. I’m not going back there. I’m going forward. I have worked so hard to arrive to the point where I can go forward. I will not hold myself back in the name of these old thoughts and this old self.

What are my dreams and letting them take shape! I’m getting there.

This morning I watched a video with Abby and Glennon Doyle Wambach and Abby is distressed that her nail clippers are missing. She emphatically states how things have a place and she keeps them there and she lives with Glennon who is haphazard and comes with children. And I sat and thought about how it’s ok, she isn’t going to leave because the kids touched her nail clippers. And how many years I’ve spent not realizing I could have what I want. That someone could have their stuff but that it doesn’t threaten the relationship.

She can express herself and they can laugh it’s not an immediate threat. What a world to live in. I have felt threatened by everything so much of my life. Mostly scarcity, being a burden, that what I want doesn’t exist for me, too much. I’m afraid of being too much and she’s afraid of not being enough.

Fear is the great separator. I refuse to be separated from my priorities, my dreams, my future, my self, love, and everything else I want. It’s not an option for me.

It’s not an option for me.

My world is calm today. I had to nurse my way back from nausea, body pain, a migraine, and sadness this morning. My little comforts brought life back into me and hope. I keep moving and that gives me hope. When life brings me to my knees I get back up and keep going. And I admire the hell out of that. There’s a lot worse things and ways to deal with things than facing them head on with courage and truth, despite all the triggers and scar tissue.

My nose is cold like a puppy. I just warmed it with my hand. I breathe into it and the warm air cupped in my hand surrounds it in warmth. The magnolia trees are smiling at me from the backyard. I know they won’t be with me long, that this beauty and friendship is quite fleeting, and I know they will be back next year, and perhaps with each passing I’ll value their presence a little bit more.

I think of Glennon and Abby and Paul and Adam’s mom and all the blended families that make a mosaic out of the broken pieces and I have hope in my heart. Hope to trust the process and not work myself to death to be seen or understood. That I understand that what is meant to be will arrive and be present and accessible if my work with myself is in alignment.

I’m allowed my wants and needs and I’ll never feel bad about those or who I am. And that awareness that is finally able to be embodied and not just stated firmly with no follow through, gives me all the hope in the world.

My future is bright and hopeful and I have a lot to offer the world and partnership and my children, and my self. And this is not anywhere I’d ever believed I would find myself…..

And that is like magic……

Edit: because I hadn’t finished the book yet and now I have. Now I’m sitting in a puddle of my own tears in a very comfortable spot with aunt Annie’s pretzel bites with the bad for you cheese sauce. Somebody was asking me recently about comfort foods and I missed these little guys.

My daughter and her boyfriend picked them up for me. I can’t believe how grown my daughters are….

They have the real thing I think, my daughter and her boyfriend. The way the talk to one another and treat each other. All the skeptical thoughts want to come in about their age and being realistic. But in this moment I wonder if I haven’t done something really right after all. What if I gave them everything they need to go after what they want and the security to maintain. What if I did something right ?!

They (my kids) are certainly evidence of this. I think I might have actually done what I set out to accomplish with them. Instead of seeing myself how I’ve been stuck doing all these years….

At the end of the book Adam, who is writing to his therapist the whole time, finally tells his therapist what they mean to him. After being sarcastic and pushing away…. he says to his therapist, “I want yoy to know that I get that reading whatever is on my mind isn’t an easy thing for someone to do. It probably changes you a little, having to get into people’s heads every day.” Yes it does Adam.

I felt seen. I feel seen.

Maya helps Adam realize that his hallucinations are a part of him, particularly Rebecca. Maya suggests Adam comfort Rebecca. “Maya she’s not real! “She needs you and she’s a part of you, Maya said simply.” “Stop punishing yourself for something you can’t control.”

And ugly crying….

“You mean stop punishing her.” It’s the same thing remember?”

This is my why of wanting to write. Wanting to commit to the sacred practice of story having the power to show people to themselves and to make them feel things. To create and bring awareness and so many other things.

*where the magic happens* the writing don’t be ridiculous;)

Ps I think I need a nightstand lol. Though I like the simplicity for now. I’ll know when I’m ready for those steps. Right now I’m in between….. and that’s ok.

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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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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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Girls that Run with Foxes

“Don’t take any shit”

For as long as I can remember I have been teased for feeling things deeply or appreciating things that make you feel things. It’s like it makes the rest of the world feel bad that their disinterested sarcasm or repression of all their wants and desires is not the only way.

Corny they call it. Cheesy.

Because when we connect to our feelings it creates power.

I have always known knowledge is power.

What I didn’t know is the power I would have when I connected the force of my heart with the knowledge. I still won’t see the full effects of that because that journey is in progress. It is just beginning in some ways, and has been underway for years in others.

I remember that I loved the movie Foxfire. I minimized this to it indulging my gay tendencies that I didn’t know I even had when first I saw it, but today I realize it was so much more.

The movie is about women standing up against abuse and being mistreated. The struggles that causes with addiction, and many other aspects.

It is no wonder that my first tattoo would be a variation of the flame they each tattooed on one another’s breasts. Again I minimized this to a shallow interest, when it never was. I shamed myself for my corny first tattoo, and this interest as well as many others.

People tease me that my music is always sad. Why do people tease instead of wonder ? Are we that uncomfortable with feeling something ? Maybe it is me who had it figured out, and they didn’t ? What if that was true?

I connect to art where I can feel what the person was trying to say. Where I can feel their experience. If it doesn’t make me feel what was required of them to get it into the world it’s a waste of my time. Don’t waste my time with inauthentic art. Talent without passion and integrity.

I am interested in the brave and the courageous and their stories.

Lately shame is public enemy number one. I will make myself wrong for anything if it helps me to do the right thing when I had no model. And lately I think there has to be a less exhausting way to exist. And lately I know there is.

I would rather leave no man behind than abandon the hope that they too can do the things I have with my healing. I want to make what’s already in my life work rather than trust in life itself.

How could one trust in something that keeps leaving them in situations that are harmful? (I created the situations so I could heal my trauma) My only choice is to believe everything happens for a reason and trust the process and more importantly myself because being a victim is boring, even when one is actually a victim and not creating a story to comfort themselves.

Either way it does not lead to a courageous and full life. Something I have always been determined about.

Now can I appreciate how I am capable of loving and stop running any outdated narrative about that?

Can I claim my power and rights ? Enjoy some of what I have created without latching on to sources that wish to take rather than to give.

Can I walk the walk, not just talk the talk?

Can I choose that when it means giving up all that once felt comforting to me.

Comfort hasn’t been comforting in a long time Christina. It was an idea.

Now that it doesn’t it’s excruciating this place between selves. I can’t go back, and I was resisting going forward as well. Being loyal to an idea of something that never materialized and letting go seemed more painful than hanging on.

An intricately designed web.

That makes me think of No Doubt and their song Spiderweb. The song lyrics are actually very appropriate. Walking into spider webs

Abuse recovery is no joke ladies and gentleman. The way it RE-wires you. Changes connection forever. You’ll always look over your shoulder. You’ll never trust the darkness, the light, or anything you can’t see. Until you’re ready to face reality and your own healing work.

Unhealed draws in unhealed. A valuable lesson from 2020.

20/20 vision, no more rose colored glasses, or little white gloves.

Only survivors

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No Matter What

No Matter What by Calum Scott

This song was in my head this morning. Seemingly out of no where I kept singing it. So I decided to watch the video. So many tears. This kid was me on the playground. But instead of a parent guiding me I grew up amidst psychological warfare that I tried to fix for everyone. I tried to hold all their pain and mine. I was comforting until I could no longer take that burden anymore and cut the cords and attached to something else.

A husband. I needed a father not a husband. But I didn’t know that and perhaps he didn’t either. Young and naive we embarked on a journey. Seven Saint Bernard puppies and two adults in the back of a Ryder truck with all our belongings for Moses Lake Washington.

I was so dissociated I hardly remember myself in that time. Impulsive, brazen, curious, warm without any good reason to be. I remember that I just acted, I didn’t feel in the moment. I felt later when I could think about things. I created a sense of busy that had me never think about all the pain I was in.

I set to making a life. I looked at others and tried to piece together what mine should look like. I wanted the family pictures on the wall and that feeling of security that never existed inside or outside of me. That’s what I was searching for and love seemed the only way to create that.

So I kept trying for love, which kept leading me to shame. How can you be proud when you’re getting a divorce and hurting your children? I never got to be proud. I got more shame.

I put on a strong front to try and protect myself, but inside was an ocean of shame.

Unlike Calum I never got the I love you no matter what moments. By the time I came out it was another situation to internalize negativity about myself. Divorce the one thing I set out not to do. And hurting someone I loved, everything I stood against. And hurting my kids unthinkable. From that moment on I became cast in my own story as a bad mother, and something awful.

Therapists, friends, loved ones would try to ease this burden at times, but I shackled myself under my own burdens. Punishment.

I’ll never forget when I finally told him. I had tried so many indirect ways to try and keep my security, but finally I couldn’t keep it under wraps anymore. I told his family too. I wanted them to still love me no matter what. And I think they tried really hard which would be against the typical family system laws of protection. I didn’t love me, so I pushed them away in shame.

No matter what is never a condition I had or created for myself. I am working on that now for myself and my kids. Unconditional love from the inside not seeking from the outside.

I didn’t realize until now how much shame I have harbored underneath this tough exuberant exterior for being gay. Because mine was intermingled with hurting people when I was supposed to be a responsible married adult.

I was a scared child. I am more often than I would care to be a scared child. It feels embarrassing and terrifying to be aware of that, and yet that’s the only thing that can help me create something different.

All my relationships after were always going to fail, because I had no relationship to and with myself. None. I rejected her.

And this latest period of my life forced me to learn to have a relationship with myself so I could determine my boundaries from a place of love and protection, not merely a state of emergent need.

Dear Christina,

I vow to love you from this moment forward no matter what. Only to allow good actions into our lives. To have your back and always pick you first for my team, even when you make mistakes. I will love you fiercely. The no matter what parent you didn’t have.

Always,

C