Voicelessness and Emotional Survival > Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board
Still need to work through early trauma
Dr. Richard Grossman:
Izzy: Thanks! I'm glad my words resonated with your experience.
G.S.: I hope my post (above) doesn’t discourage you from posting. Many here care about you, value you, and want you to feel less alone. Some of us have been through the same thing. We get it.
Richard
Gaining Strength:
Dr. Grossman, thank you for your post. I definitely have lacked a positive loving attachment but never thought of it in those terms. I keenly understand the ability of the brain to rewire through neuroplasticity. Your train analogy is clear and helpful. I do have a great therapist but have not been seeing him lately because of money issues. But your comment has me rethinking that.
I have been struggling with something that you wrote, struggling to put it in perspective. I'm working on how to articulate it.
I was quite touched that you would reach out and post a comment. Thanks again.
Gaining Strength:
Dr. Grossman, I love Peter Levine on trauma. I understand him to write that surviving trauma can be done by feeling empowered in spite of what happened. That sense of empowerment is particular to each person in every incident. But I also understand him to say that we can go back in memory and rewrite our experience in a way that is empowering.
I want to neither dwell in the past nor be controlled by it. I don't think I am dwelling in the past (though that could be argued) but I am certainly controlled by it. So my strategy is to be in touch with the source of my struggles, the obstacles to my moving forward, and by being in touch, to take these debilitating, triggering experiences and rewrite them, (and thereby rewire the brain), that's my theory and my goal.
The thing in your post that stops me short is the concept of "exposure". Jeffry Schwartz, MD, whose writing first introduced me to neuroplasticity, was put off by exposure therapy when he was a resident. His 1st step in overcoming OCD is to identify what is functioning (the OCD or in my case the anticipatory fear), name it and acknowledge that it is not based in present reality.
The next step for me is to go back in memory to the place where the wounding happened and then in that memory transpose it from powerlessness to an empowered reaction. I hope that with time it will get easier and the outcome will be healing.
Gaining Strength:
Rejection, abandonment & a gas lighting kind of sabotage .
You get what you deserve.
Learned helplessness. Achievement is punished with derision or silence.
Not good enough drives determination but constant critism grinds it all to a halt. Praising others for the things that garner me belittle meant engenders resentment.
Avoidance - avoiding the pain. Frozen until the steel door goes down - the released to move ahead pits punishment.
Gaining Strength:
I have struggled to articulate and bring into consciousness but it goes something like this - given an expectation but not enough resources to accomplish task, then belittled for failing.
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