Still need to work through early trauma

[Gaining Strength]

Moonlight - thank you for guiding me there.  I am  very excited, very hopeful.  Your encouragement  is so wonderful and appreciated.

[Gaining Strength]

The cause of the symptoms are unprocessed memories that are stored in networks that govern both the non  conscious and conscious.

[Gaining Strength]

The memory pain is very great today.  I think it is in anticipation of my work on Friday. 

I am flooded with images of my father's clenched jaw, disapproval, controll.  As a child I thought he was all knowing and that  I was wrong and would understand later.  I processed everything as "I am wrong."  My stomach would turn in knots.  When the image of  kind, powerful father comes up my father's image usurps.   I am dousing this power with love - which I falsely attributed to him all along.

This is very slow but I will succeed.  I will not give in and not give up.  I believe.

Yesterday I was thinking about this imaging of love.  It feels a little weak for me.  But I will think of it like a muscle or like meditation.  Practice, without doubt, relentlessly and then one instant it will be powerful.  Don't give up.

[Gaining Strength]

Reversal of Desire

Bring it on
I love pain
Pain sets me free




From Phil Stutz and Michel's  "The Tools".  Wondering if I can do this.

[Gaining Strength]

I had a brief window of relief last night.  So welcomed.

A window in which I experienced a sense of empowerment.
Then difficult dreams.
Now time to grow the feeling from last night.

Counting the days to Friday while trying to live in them as well.

[Gaining Strength]

I'm going to build on that tiny speck of empowerment today.  I can . Find the courage.

[Gaining Strength]

So when I wrote in June that I had cut through shame I indeed had but I cut through an outer layer, the most pervasive which tied me down each moment of every day. After that I was hit hard with streaming memories of friends and senses of belonging that had once been mine but lost.  It went on for days and weeks. Some days I functioned fairly well, some weeks I did not.

My child got sick the end of August, beginning of September and I took another hit.  But I have persevered, never given up, slipped but not completely fallen.

Last night I stepped through some small opening, small and subtle.  I can't quite articulate the insight or vision, nothing that could be expressed in new terms but a shift in perspective showing me how I'm continuing in the shaming and condemnation and fear from childhood which gives me a hint of how to adjust my mindful thoughts of encouragement.  

I see it all as a mind/brain problem with a mind/brain solution.  I can keep my thoughts in order. That opening I stepped through helped me right a small tilt.  It was just in time.  I was hit by two friends having significant struggles and losses at the same time.  Then as if life weren't enough two other people have started asking me for help that I don't have to give.

One is a workman who has helped me around the house this month and to whom I gave a broken down car.  Now he and his girlfriend are calling and texting several times a day.  Then a poor man who befriended my mother had a broken down car and I offered to help round up a posse to help. After I made the first call about getting his car towed and PMed a couple of his FB friends he sent m e a long message saying if he only had $9k he could get out of his shack and into a house.  People think I have money because my family did.  It is such a drain. I told him " one thing at a time."

I am not keeping my own self afloat.  I really don't have it in me to help these strangers.  I need to help myself and my friends first.

[Hopalong]

Small love is powerful.
Small love, repeated, like the tiny cellular pulses of the green sprout that wants to grow,
just push it up through the crack in the sidewalk, eventually moving the earth.

Your small love moments are not inadequate, they are everything.

And nightmare-father will lose his power. It will happen.

I think of how easily I came to understand the notion of "mothering myself" or my inner child.
How easy that warm, nurturing, comforting self-love can be once I realize how to do it.

I wonder if some of the challenges of the external life--like organizaing, being orderly,
setting goals, changing the physical and financial world--might be related to learning
to "father myself."

To get to where THAT is experienced as nurturing, too.

I know you can, GS.
Nightmares are release valves for fear.
Painful, but they make good space.

(My week is wonderful--relaxing, sleeping, no agendas, friends...bliss.)

love
Hops

[Gaining Strength]

Hops, thanks for the encouragement. It really helps.

I'm so glad to read that you had a great week.

GS

[Gaining Strength]

 In one of my dreams last night I walked into my childhood home with a childhood friend. I noticed that there was a moat like trench of water around the house and there were many turtles in the water.  We went out of the back door and the house we walked out of was my family's river house.  The moat was there and even more turtles.  We talked about what the hungry turtles eat.


Today I read a FB post with a photograph of a turtle.  It read:

"Don't ever let those who give up on their dreams talk you out of giving up on yours."

As though it was written to me about my dream and my family.  I've never had  a message come to me about a dream before.  Very odd and fascinating.

[Gaining Strength]

Morning - looking for that "switch" to move from avoidance, fear, memory to action, life.

[Gaining Strength]

After a lifetime of fighting a wretched feeling I have been learning and coming to understand so much that is behind it in these past few months.  That understanding alone has not freed me.  But I believe the work I have done in the past 15 years has prepared me to move forward now. 

Early in the summer I thought things were popping quickly and by summers end I would be walking in freedom.  That didn't happen.  But  I am more aware of the right work to be done.  While I walk a razors edge teetering above a depressive abyss, I am finding myself able to stay above.  I see in profound clarity how my mindset has trapped me.  I have several sets of tools for shifting my thoughts out of condemnation and rejection but it is not as simple as flipping a switch.

All night long I awake with some kind of dark dream and all night I work to shift those thoughts.  It is during the day that I had developed a practice of avoidance.  I hate that place but I have to keep my perspective that it took me decades to even come to see that it is avoidance of severe psychic pain that is at work in this wretchedness of paralysis.  Having that insight has given me yet again a renewed hope of overcoming it.

First I am thankful for this understanding. It goes towards lifting the self-blaming which carries its own costs.  With this understanding I am able to more easily work towards hope.  When I face this  avoidance (over and over throughout each day) my unconscious reaction is to feel hopeless but now I am able to remind myself to reject that.

I am working hard to shift my constant being into a state of feeling love and acceptance.  It takes an inordinate amount of effort and is not always successful.  Yesterday I realized that this lack of obvious progress has caused me to give up for years.  But now, because I believe that shifting my thoughts and bringing myself into a place of ole is the way, I am able to renew my focus over and over and over again.

I do not have this muscle yet.  I want to develop it.  And so I work on it without cease.  I have nothing to lose.

A year or two ago I saw so clearly how I was trained to think darkly about myself.  Now I am training my mind to think in a different way.  I have already had many successes.  I keep these in mind to help encourage myself. 

I would like to figure out how to set goals so I can mark my achievements as I go along.  I'll be thinking about this, something tangible like monitoring weight.

Of course I wish this were faster but honestly I am thankful for my progress - for the understanding I have developed and for the work I did for so long that has given me techniques to use to lift myself up.

[Gaining Strength]

Even though I know what is causing this paralysis I still get stuck.. 

While I am looking forward to my EMDR appointment tomorrow, I see that I must work diligently at developing my mind muscle.  I resist it, I'm not sure why. Perhaps the evidence of progress is not there.  That will cause me to  feel hopeless.  That hopelessness is a double bind.  I absolutely must commit to work harder.

[Gaining Strength]

I have used these thought experiments to shift myself out of victim hood.  That is no minor achievement.  I was really stuck there and for years I knew it was not good but seemed impotent to shift.  So that is an important, recent achievement.  My awareness continues to expand.  That is good. 

I believe words have great power, so in times like now when I dont seem able to latch onto the ability to find the right frequency I am falling back onto the right words. 

I am becoming increasingly aware of how subconscious memories work at putting me into a feeling of rejection and failure,  it is very subtle and very painful.  The pain is experienced as a constant irritant but when I look into the source and connect with it it is enormously painful.  In the past week or so I have bee bombarded with memories of great pain from my 20/s.  This is related to the way anxiety got attached to everything.  So this pain is attached to everything.  I see it replay like a nightmare.

To work on reducing the intensity of the pain is my initial goal.  Let it emerge, no longer repress it.  Talk to it. 

When the pain occurred I processed it as evidence that I was a total failure and then I repressed that fear and became desparately.  So now it is my job to talk to it, to recognize that that was a lie.  It would have helped to have had someone who loved me help with that message but now I do have me.  I finally have me to give that message.

[Gaining Strength]

Two things: I am able to deal with the pain fairly well when I am not "doing" anything, while in the state of avoidance.  That sounds of no value but actually it is.  So one step I can take is to begin to be willing to be present to the pain rather than watching tv, surfing the internet, etc.   that will be a strengthening exercise.  With a bit more strength I can be present to the pain when facing the tasks.

Second, in the midst of pain it is time to face, it, examine it, and challenge it.  Bit by bit.