Tag: #triggers

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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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No Turning Back

I’m on the brink…. Of turning around and never looking back. I can’t hurt like this anymore. No man left behind is not working for me. My attachment system is failing my health and wellness. I’ve done this before and it’s how I got out alive. It’s time to do it again.

I need to stop sifting through the wreckage of my old life and accept that it’s time to focus on my new relationship with myself and what is head, rather than what is behind.

I would do anything to make things work, all on my shoulders. I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough. Another wave of grief when will they stop. Sometimes nothing helps. No amount of tattoos, distractions, good moments, nothing helps. Sometimes you just sit in it. For me it feels like it will swallow me, but somehow I’m still here breathing.

I’m just so tired of these waves of grief, the price of love, and trying for something. I’m starting to not punish myself, so that’s good. But I’m real tired of this grief. It’s relentless. Pulling me under. Taking the oxygen out of me. There’s no where to turn for comfort.

I’m reading Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club and there was a part yesterday where she talked about planning to run away and it included the rest stop bathroom she would live in and how she could afford a corn dog a day. It flashed me back to my own childhood and a memory long forgotten about my own Taco Bell budget for running away and how often I planned it. I didn’t stop planning it and at 17 I executed. I never looked back.

I remembered the playhouse that was my mom and aunts and falling apart and how in my mind I made it a palace, which is what I did with every bad memory. I just turned them into what I would do differently so my life wouldn’t be like that. I took for granted that someday it would all catch me and add up in my functioning. That the cracks would show. No matter how hard I work the wounds are there.

And this relationship with myself that at one point kept me going is now abusive and must give way to something much more vulnerable. I am raw. I am scared.

I think about how immobilized I become with decorating. I think of how no one was ever excited about anything to do with me. So I didn’t have my own things, that I liked. I was just put wherever I could go, and I had to make my own happiness out of my imagination. To constantly go somewhere else in my head.

I sat in that scarcity yesterday. And connected it to becoming frozen now when asking myself what I like. How that’s still such a process and how I’d still like to outsource it due to the sheer overwhelm I experience when trying to make a decision in this area.

Why does it feel life or death or impossible. Just pick up the phone and schedule something. Just fill out the forms. Just make that phone call. Why is it harder than it should be. Why can’t I just accept what happened to me and the outcome of that? Because accepting feels like surrender to all this lack. All or nothing.

I’m in so much pain all the time. And the thing I believe that makes it somewhat bearable is connection. And for me that connection needs to be consistent, safe, and someone who sees me. That connection needs to be with me, but how to even maintain with no fuel.

Running on empty, trying desperately to fill. Tired of how intense everything feels.

I just need to rest and stop involving myself with things that hurt. No matter how much I care. Just when I think I’m getting somewhere I keep getting plucked up and back at the starting line. I know Melissa would tell me right now how far I’ve come, how far from the starting line I am. And I know that’s true.

But I mean specifically with connection. That is empty in terms of partnership, and please don’t try and tell me I have it all in all these other areas. I know and I’m grateful, but that doesn’t stop these holes from bleeding.

I’m tired….. and the suggestion that both are feeling the same so why can’t they just be together is abusive as all hell, when one was always loving and caring, and the other was not.

When the truth teller and the golden child fall in love the gates of hell burn with excitement because everyone is going down.

When the truth teller and the rescuer fall in love it seems like all can be fixed, until the bubble bursts. It’s equally as painful because a rescuer is no more emotionally available. The rescuer rescues everyone but themselves.

I’m not that anymore. And I can’t go forward, and I can’t go back. But I am going forward.

The truth teller just needs to make sure to maintain all by herself because nobody likes the truth. Nobody she knows anyway, certainly not the rescuer or the golden child.

Here I am lost in all these feelings again…..

I’m not abandoning myself this time, and that’s a new kind of lonely, and a new kind of hell, for now.

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Having your reality denied as a child/adult…..

“How a parent figure treated you is not a reflection of who you are. You do not need to be a reflection of their unprocessed trauma.” “Trauma occurred when we consistently betrayed ourselves for love, were consistently treated in a way that made us feel unworthy or unacceptable resulting in a severed connection to our authentic self.” “Trauma creates the fundamental belief that we must betray who we are in order to survive.” – How to do the Work by Dr. Nicole Lepera.

This book is my life raft this morning. I’m in a state of discomfort. I experienced a profound trigger yesterday on top of an already profound loss. Any situation that does not leave room for my feelings to exist is so similar to my childhood. A mother whose constant mood shifts, suicide threats and attempts, contempt and jealousy for and of me, and a variety of other things. Her overall lack of maturity, insight, awareness, and any variety of nurturing left me in a constant state of hyper vigilance.

The way I ended up coping with this was by having the capability to soothe and rescue her emotionally. Whether I was always innately good at this or whether that was developed as a necessity I may never know. But I was only able to feel good about my self by how useful I was at being useful. It never freely existed because of who I was and who she was. What every child deserves. In addition to my mother I assumed this role with my grandparents who put their hands up in helplessness. Parented my brother, not well I might add, and then felt guilty about that. I raised me, and him, and my mother, for them. I became a mind reader, a mood reader, a soother. So I feel alive when I am doing these things, they are as natural as breathing for me.

Thus paving my career as a psychotherapist. The seer is rarely seen, until they see themselves properly enough to know what is deserved. At least at work I get paid for it, and I’m beginning to refuse to do this with my precious time that is mine. Becoming protective of my time, peace, self.

The only thing saving me lately while mucking around in all my old stuff are the friends that show up for me. Getting myself out of that triggered state by talking through it, feeling my feelings and employing various self care strategies. Yesterday’s event landed me with a severe migraine and having to cancel my evening. I went to bed at six pm. Medicated and miserable. The toll on my body and heart is tremendous.

Abandoning a loved one in need to save myself from manipulation leaves me feeling distraught on so many levels. I end up feeling bad for the manipulator and that’s not an option. Particularly when my needs always get twisted into something going on with them. In a secure and safe relationship the need would have been met naturally. Asked for in a productive and healthy way, and my needs would have already been being met. Safe and secure. Clear and direct.

“Trauma creates the fundamental belief that we must betray who we are in order to survive.”

My attachment system can betray me at every turn. Obsessive checking/hope for closeness with an unsafe source, regardless of logic. It’s so frustrating. Perhaps a review of what love is and what it is not is in order. A continuous inventory of this and then checked out against the list. Attachment is my proverbial Achilles heal. Once I have attached it’s set in stone, unless that attachment is neglected and then as we have seen I can fly out of it real quick. I am all in or all out, and I’m working on the in between and deciding with much more agency what and whom to be attached to. This is the most important part.

https://www.raptitude.com/2012/11/what-love-is-not/. This article is really good. It highlights the difference between desiring something and truly what love is about.

“Anyone with their own level of unresolved feelings will generally feel uncomfortable with a child’s expression of feelings and may cope by attempting to dismiss them. The child’s experience may activate similarly painful past memories for the parent-figure (these are often unconscious) who tends to push the child to repress or ignore the feelings that are coming up. The problem is that the child was having a legitimate feeling and looking to be comforted and supported; instead they were told the pain was inconsequential. Through repeated similar experiences, a child is taught that their perception of reality and related emotional experiences are not trustworthy.” Page 49. How to do the work.

Love is not being dismissed, redirected, a lack of transparency, manipulation, gaslighting. Regardless of how much the person wants you.

Love shows up consistently and safely always. Love is able to work through things because a solid foundation of honest and healthy boundaries makes that so. Let it be so. Love does not avoid a partners needs for the other partners comfort or avoidance of their discomfort. Love is selfless not selfish.

I vow to have the courage to walk away from love that is not founded in the things I want and need. To remember my ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) and how high that number is. How I’m lucky to be alive and I will not forfeit that gift and all of mine for anything. How capable I am to share my healing with the world, and how important that work is.

I felt to be legitimate I must be chosen and belong to a human and their family. That feeling is like heroin for me. However I was never choosing myself enough to be choosy about that decision. Abundance over scarcity. I intend to live with an abundance mindset and attitude for the rest of my life. I watched a friends wedding video the other day, and no wonder I romanticized this. Such a belonging. And I had fallen into such scarcity that my last wedding was done in secret with none of those ingredients. I am still trying to sort out why that was a thing. What I need and want and how to stay that course……

The result of this work is a presence in my daily life that can rarely be stolen by preoccupation these days. It’s an absolute work in progress but most days I am loving it. Even the ones where I have to nurse myself back to health and acknowledge without catastrophizing, the lasting and major effects trauma has had on my body. Rather than doom and gloom this I’ll decide to keep it a motivator to steer me away from unhealthy things and continuously towards the horizons of my dreams.

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What ever happened to Lisa?

grief2

I’ve fashioned myself into the therapist, and left behind the survivor. I wanted to move past, beyond, ever away from my own trauma. It is only recently that I realize how much it is still with me today. I am reading the article “Touched by Trauma” in the most recent publication of Counseling Today.

I tend to move so quickly through life that I see the magazines on the desk, but rarely read them. Why wouldn’t I read what others are saying in my field? I wonder if I avoid it because of realizations like the one I have had just now? It can’t be that though, because I read many many books and articles on such topics, but I tend to ignore magazines, perhaps I regard them as more a waste of time like tabloids, People Magazine, and Entertainment Weekly.

Perhaps I am so hyper aroused all the time that I can’t focus for hardly a second. Perhaps this is not your garden variety ADHD, and something a lot more sinister. That requires a lot more attention that I have ever given it, because then it would become more real. And the fear is always that suddenly you will fall apart, or become swallowed by the associated feelings. They are too big, and there is no way to properly control how much of it you feel, when you are recalling. 

I never connected how much my Crohn’s Disease is probably an effect of my trauma. Instinctually I know, have read and seen how much cortisol, the stress hormone is bad for you. The article says, “Counselors also need to be mindful of the accumulative physical toll of long-term trauma. Research has shown that experiencing trauma- especially when it is prolonged and repetitive- rewires the nervous system in ways that cause hyperarousal and persistent anxiety. This continuous stress causes the body to release cortisol, which can cause chronic inflammation. Over time the inflammation leads to negative health effects. To help counteract this cascade of neurological and physical damage, practitioners can teach clients skills for calming their nervous systems. The treatment should be tailored to the individual client.” 

I’m still peeling back layers of my own abuse. 

When I read this I made an immediate connection. I have been inundated with physical health issues for the last 10 years of my life. I had problems as a child, asthma, and I’ve always identified as a hypochondriac. I was in and out of the hospital often. For awhile youth and enthusiasm to get away from my painful past kept me busy and disassociated from physical symptoms, but as soon as I realized I was not in the right marriage for how I was made and who I am I began to have a lot of problems.

It all began with heart palpitations. These sent me to the Emergency room several times, it actually took me years to realize, or have suggested to me that I could have anxiety, and it was not done kindly ever. It was more like I was too sensitive, making a big deal out of nothing. Anxiety was suggested to me as a personal flaw, not something that required further inquiry and comfort. 

Right now my family is out in the living room playing Trivial Pursuit. I can hear them and they are having fun, and to be fair so was I until my stomach began to bother me and I had to excuse myself. Once I read that and made a connection I went away to the place I so often reside, somewhere in my head trying to figure it all out. I’ve made the mistake of trying to figure it all out at once, because then the idea is perhaps I could be free of it. What it? I didn’t know what to call it. When we don’t know a language for something we tend to automatically internalize some fatal flaw within us. 

I just had a severe ringing in my ear, it happens sometimes, it came on suddenly. I have read more on symptoms and health than the average person probably ever will. My first thought as it happened was that my blood pressure is at some bad level and something is going to happen to me. I probably think about myself or someone I care about dying or suffering some terrible fate no less than 100 times a day. I can’t ride in a vehicle without jumping at any unforeseen occurrence. I am only now at 38 years old connecting so many of these dots.

I am able to do so because of this career as a counselor. 

I can still help people, in fact I am very good at helping people, AND it distracts me from my many anxious thoughts. This dispels the myth that you have to be fully healed in some capacity to be a healer. You just need to be healed enough to not unintentionally harm others. You have to be aware, and a good deal of the way towards acceptance of self and others, otherwise you can use someone else for your own needs. 

It has never occurred to me before this article and this point to be upset I have this disease, and a weakened immune system due to the trauma I have endured. I have worked so hard to keep myself separate from my beginning. I moved across the United States to get away. Another life and another me. I disconnected myself from it so much, that when I had a difficult time maintaining relationships all I experienced as a result was shame. There was no one to help me connect my triggers, behaviors, and anxiety related impulsivity, attachment fractured impulsivity. There was no one. Mostly I have lived marinating in shame and self-abuse as a means to shame myself into a new way of being. it never worked. 

I have so many thoughts to untangle about this. But the one this evening most prevalent is what in the hell happened to my mother and to her sisters to cause the type of toxic sibling rivalry that permeated my childhood. Who was the evil villain and how evil were they? Who is at the root of this, and how much damage has spread through the family tree? They worked so hard to look different than whatever hurt must have occurred, but my childhood felt terrifying in a variety of ways.

I have tried to minimize. I have tried to make myself responsible. I have tried to convince myself that it’s me who made all of this up. It’s unbelievable even to myself. I want to say I dramatized it. How can I trust any of those memories after all. But some of the memories I do know for sure. I know the gist. I know how I felt. And I know what I struggle with today…. and most importantly that this is not my fault. 

I can’t even say that and feel connected to it. It feels dramatic. My intense feelings have always been shamed. ALWAYS. By family, friends, and loved ones alike…. validation is not something I’ve had much of. I’ve often wondered why nobody saw me, why they didn’t notice a good heart, with behaviors that didn’t make any sense. So many people rarely look beneath the surface for answers. 

Where was that one person to come forward and help everyone make sense of it? 

People suffering from complex PTSD without being noticed are wounded warriors with no decoration. They have no percentage of disability, no purple hearts, and in fact are mostly invisible until they find their way into a Counselor’s office. Probably they will spend most of their life plagued by terrible thoughts that something bad will happen either to someone they love or to themselves. Running horrific scenarios through their heads. It will be difficult for them to travel or live any kind of a normal life unless they are disassociated enough to appear functional, but inside is a whole other story. 

My daughter came in to be snuggly and I was intense and in my head as usual. I want to erase this out of frustration. It will be seen as deep and dark, and no one wants to be seen like that. The kind view is no one should have had the experiences that cause them to feel this way on such a regular basis. With your kids you are supposed to be the parent, and present, and none of this is really something they can understand. So I only appear like I don’t care, or I am not present, then I feel guilty for being this way. Then I am shamed by my ex-husband, society, parents of the partners I dated before I connected any of these dots. Seen only for my behavior and my flaws. 

I want answers. I want to know what happened? I want to know if it’s fair to be estranged from my mother to protect my mental health, or if she too was a victim of some trauma I don’t know about and something could be done to heal it. The hope is always there that something could be done. With me healing was possible. What is the difference? Is it in the wiring? Could she have been wired from birth for narcissism, or was she so damaged a health self could never emerge, and if that is the case how can I make sense of any fairness behind all of my feelings towards her.

Where can I place this accountability if not always in myself? What if she never stood a chance? I never did either, but somehow I thrived and turned things around. Is the difference between us the severity of experience or the wiring?

I need to know. 

I don’t want to know.

I need to know.

I don’t want to know.

I distract by staying in the present, but we are never free from trauma that forged our entire nervous system.

I am a prisoner inside my own body is the dark side.

And I am a warrior of light and a protector.

If that isn’t confusing I don’t know what is.