When I'm Stronger

NOTE: This is an extraordinarily long post and delves into more detail in ugly places than normal. Don't feel you have to read it.

My therapist and i talked about journaling at my last appointment, referring to my last blog post and the epiphanies that came to me while journaling early one morning. Michele suggested I continue to journal when I first wake up because your mind is still open then; it hasn't put up the usual barriers it does once you get up and start your day. That was Monday. (We had to meet out of order due to Xmas, and we'll meet on Tuesday next week due to New Year's.)

So I started on Tuesday, two days ago. In less than 2 pages, memories of Mom bubbled up in my mind. These memories promptly turned into ones that hurt and disturbed me, memories I have shunned and shunted away, memories I don't feel able to deal with. i want to be able to deal with all my memories of Mom during the few, short months leading to her death with acceptance and equanimity. The set of memories that came to me Tuesday morning hurt. They scared me the way the events I remembered scared me. My stomach is tight just remembering my reactions on Tuesday. I cried a little, but held myself back from full immersion into the emotions those memories contained. I was strong enough to hold myself back from that. I tell myself I'll deal with those memories when I'm stronger.

Today, after I'd been home for about an hour and a half (I spent Xmas with other friends), I took a nap. it was a wonderful nap: a gentle sinking into unconsciousness under a warm, fluffy cloud of a comforter with the sun shining through the window onto my face. Then lovely vague dreams, and waking up feeling soft, pliable, and happy.

Somehow, ideas relating to my past rose up inside my mind. I remembered a memory from when I had to be nine months old: I was lying in a cool, twilight-dim room and knew I shouldn't cry or make a fuss, just wait for someone to come get me out of bed. I know I was 9 months old because I knew who was my regular babysitter at the time (I checked with Mom). It was my Aunt Nita. She and her sons always seemed kind of tense and unhappy, for very good reason: Uncle Jack was a drunk. He wasn't just an alcoholic — he drank himself into a stupor, drank himself into the gutter, and, when brought home by my father and/or his other brothers and put to bed, would promptly climb out a window and go back to yet another bar. As an infant, I was completely aware that I shouldn't cry, shouldn't upset that household, should wait to be picked up from my nap.

That memory came to me as a corroboration of how I could remember that my cousin's molesting me started when I was two. How can a two-year-old remember anything? How can a nine-month-old? But traumatic events can set memories into stone.

Anger and Compassion

Dangerous

My housemate Sabine is a very angry person. She is also kind and generous. But as someone living with her, I would not agree with "sweet" the way those who do not live with her (or are not married to her) think she is. Because when she gets angry, she uses her anger like a sledgehammer and woe to him, or her, who gets in her way.

Unfortunately for me, I have issues relating to anger, particularly to other people's anger, whether it's directed toward me or not. I want to cower, I want to hide, I want to run.

My friend Julie would say this is one of my Life Lessons. My therapists would all say I can use this as an opportunity to deal with my issues about anger. I'd like to tell them all to jump in the lake, but that would just be petty. Especially because they are right.

I wish I could help Sabine. I think she needs therapy, but she is not someone I can suggest that to. There is always a wall around her that I think no one can penetrate, except maybe her mom. Not even her husband, Griffin, gets that close.

And, basically, the only person we can fix is ourselves. That's another lesson I'm learning.

Flake

I have a confession: I am a flake. Iffy. Dodgy. A really good liar and undependable in work and play. Torpid. Stubborn. Lacking integrity, untrustworthy, and afraid of commitment. Basically, I kinda suck. I don't much like myself and I'm still working on loving myself.

I didn't used to be this way. Before I fell apart in my mid-30s, when an overwhelming depression washed over me and pulled me into deep, dark water. Before my ex-boyfriend — the one who'd changed his mind and decided he didn't want to get married, have children, or buy a house with me — got married and asked me how I used my 401K to buy my house. Before my insecure boss made me so diminished, anxious, and crazy-feeling that my psychiatrist prescribed not one but TWO mental health leaves within a six-month period. Before all that I was not perfect, but anyone could count on me to do what I said. Friends, family, and employers could trust me. I was active, flexible, creative, and committed.

I hate the way I am. I hate that I'm not the way I used to be. I hate that I can't seem to find my way back, after nearly 20 years. Twenty years is a long time to be disgusted by the person you've become.

"Ah, the sun is blindin'
I stayed up again
Oh, I am findin'
That that's not the way I want my story to end"

Death and Life

It is a matter worth noting that not once that I can remember this last week did I wish I were dead or dying. This fact is both happy and sad: happy because, hey, I didn't want to be dead, and sad because, wow, during enough other weeks I have?

Here's what I posted on the ReFab blog about this:

Some weeks, just getting through the week without having even random thoughts of how it would be easier if the Universe just casually bumped me off is a good thing. It’s not that things are rotten, just that they are hard and I’m still unemployed and I feel afraid about my future, never mind my present. So, I’m counting it as a win for this past week that I didn’t even wish I were dead, even for a moment.

Why have I felt different this past week? I have no idea. Could be we are getting somewhere in therapy (but I'm not aware of it; however, wouldn't be the first time). Could be due to the slight medication change (but we didn't start that until Wednesday and the past few days I've been kinda dizzy when I got up, so maybe the med isn't such a great thing for me). Could be the full moon (full moons make me happy). Could be, as was pointed out by responders to my comment, I know there are people who would miss me and be in pain if I died. I might as well flip a coin to decide what factor has made a change. Unless it's just a mental hiccup and I go back to occasionally thinking about how much it wouldn't hurt if I weren't alive. (Yeah, a bit of pessimism and wariness, plus discomfort about change even if it's for the better …)

Just FYI: NO! I am NOT thinking of hurting myself. Just want to be clear on that point so no one worries.

Feeling, Detaching, Continuing

I haven't written in wow — 10 days! I know I usually write about my therapy, but last week, I just couldn't.

Last week's therapy ended up being very emotional and very raw. We started talking about what I wrote about in my last post and pursued it far into my mind and my feelings to see what is behind this desire to reconnect with my past. At the very base of the vortex, we found abandonment and being completely alone. Intellectually, I know that my family did not abandon me and I am not completely alone (besides that fact that we are all basically one on one level). I have people who love me, both locally and scattered across the country. But, at the heart of the matter, those are what I feel.

I cried some. Not as bad as most of the times I cried in Karen's office, but the first time I've cried in Michele's, and the first time I've cried in a while. I really don't like to cry, for numerous reasons. Even more, I don't like to cry in front of someone else. It exhausts me. And when I experience a strong emotion, afterward I detach from emotion for some amount of time.

We ended the hour with a long imaging session. Imaging, visualization, creative imaging: whatever you want to call it. Michele led me and helped me find my way through it and discover things. I'm not going to describe it because it's intensely personal and there are very few people I would be comfortable sharing it with. Hell, I'm barely comfortable sharing it with myself!

Thus, whenever I thought about writing for the blog, I kept thinking about writing about the session, then about how I didn't want to write about the session. So I didn't write, and I didn't write.

I had therapy again today, and after I finished chattering, I told Michele about how I didn't write about last week's session and why. Which in turn led to my emotion/detachment pattern.

I don't want to have this pattern. Last week, on the way home, I left the radio off so I could stay with the feelings from the session and the imaging work. I wanted to ride that emotional wave to the end, the way Michele encouraged me to do. And I did ride it, all the way home. Then, exhausted, I took a long nap. Afterward, I didn't return to thinking about the therapy session or my feelings or the work we'd done and ended with. I didn't do so again until today's therapy.

Melting the Ice

When I get stressed in my personal life, I don't fight or fly — I freeze. This is why I've had to struggle so to accomplish things during very stressful times in my life, such as right now as I prepare to move. It's very odd because when work becomes ordinarily stressful — deadlines looming or changing completely, new features being added to projects at the last minute — I fight and win. It's only in my personal life that I come to a standstill.

"So what is that about?" my therapist and I were asking this week. It comes down to fear. It's like when I don't leave my home because if I stay inside, nothing bad can happen. Well, if I don't move off the couch and do things, then nothing bad can happen either. Talk about distorted thinking! My therapist called it "trauma survival thinking." Everyone has different survival mechanisms they've developed over their lives, some in response to trauma, some simply in response to everyday living. And the thing about many survival mechanisms is that they make you think that they are helping you to survive (and perhaps they did at one point in time), but they do not help you to live.

Simple survival generally eschews taking any kind of risk, yet to live fully you have to take risks: learn to ride a bike or drive a car; speak to that person you find attractive; apply for that job; move halfway across the country. So my survival mechanism of freezing is definitely getting in the way of my living a rich and fulfilling life. It's getting in the way of being my authentic self. Hell, it's getting in the way of my cleaning the apartment!

So what do you do with a survival mechanism that you no longer need or that simply isn't working for you but against you? You have to use those cognitive therapy skills to learn to think differently in the situation that causes the mechanism to function. When I get stressed and start to freeze, I have to remind myself that freezing is getting in the way of my living the life I want to live, that I don't need that survival mechanism, and that I want to act instead of freeze.

This process isn't going to be immediate; I've had this mechanism since I can remember. When I was a child, I would occasionally wake in the night, filled with terror over a specific imaginary situation and I was certain that if I moved, I would die a horrible death. Therefore, I would hold myself as still as possible, even to the extent of breathing very shallowly, until I fell asleep (or maybe passed out from a lack of oxygen). This freezing has accompanied various stressful situations off and on throughout my life and only as I became older and found myself feeling helpless during times of great stress and/or depression did it become overwhelming and go on for long periods of time. I am tired of it and more than ready to be rid of it. I am very motivated to do the cognitive work needed to be rid of it.

I invite you to help me come up with a better and more succinct way of phrasing my anti-freezing statements. It would be nice to put them into a form that is easy to remember and say. But even if I don't come up with something more succinct, I am going to state them because I truly do want to act rather than freeze. I want to be powerful rather than helpless. And I want to begin to truly live my life.