Voicelessness and Emotional Survival > Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board
Still need to work through early trauma
Gaining Strength:
So I finally realized that my thyroid is way out of whack. Sadly this exacerbates the worst of my struggles with inertia. Last night the fatigue I experienced was so greT that I couldn't bring myself to get up and take medicine. I made an appointment today. Of course exercise will help but I have to get a bit stronger to tackle that. And the cold weather works against it as well.
So glad to figure this out.
Gaining Strength:
There is a kind of pain that destroys and a kind of pain that gives life. I am not able to describe the difference. I'm not sure I always know the difference, especially when it is my own pain, much like the warrior athlete who sometimes grows from his/her pain and is sometimes destroyed because he/she did not listen. But today I am experiencing pain that brings growth, brings life worth living.
My new book club started by a relatively new friend (whom I'm growing to love) is reading Brene Brown's Daring Greatly. I was not pleased to be reading a self help book. I am drawn to book clubs to read literature. My reading choices lean toward non-fiction. I don't know how to pick fiction or whether to finish it when I don't like the beginning. Plus I am very short on belonging and long in longing for it.
So I stepped into reading Daring Greatly with a chip on my shoulder and resentment in my craw. In the first 20 pages I am scrawling marginalia articulating how she is missing the mark with real human struggle. When she uses an example of resisting vulnerability as her "panic" about being asked to bring her TED talk from her hometown stage to the bigger than life TED stage my pencil went into over-drive. HER vulnerability is about SUCCESS. What a crock! REAL vulnerability is acting when actions lead to SHAME!
But I had not read far enough. Brown does understand shame. Though I handily doubt she has experienced anything like the torment of shame heaped out by N or NPD parents but she does know shame none the less. And she writes about it in a stunning way.
I have only arrived at page 70 and I am already armed with weaponry to vanquish my powerful demons who no longer reside outside of me but only within. There were so many who were external and many are the lawyers and my brothers who made my life a living hell these past few years. They were real and their effects were indescribably destructive to me. But the real damage took place when I internalized them. I had been so weakened by a life of denigration early on that I took the things that happened to me and against me as proof of my undeserving. Even a stronger person would have been hit hard by what I experienced but it lay me low and I allowed it to reflect on my already devastated self. But bit by bit I keep receiving the tools I need to heal and become a functioning member of society, less broken more able to be open to success and failure.
Brown writes about disengagement as the greatest betrayal. "Disengagement triggers shame and our greatest fears--the fears of being abandoned, unworthy, and unloveable." And in that one sentence she explains the source of my fathomless pain from my mother. With this one sentence I know why my mother invoke such rage within my being and yet I could not extricate myself from her. And disengagement is a silent, secret force that destroys in plain sight invisible to others around. Not even my mother's good friends saw her disengagement. Only one person ever let on to me that she saw it. I will ever be thankful.
My mother's disengagement is the source of my greatest pain, my greatest shame. And now that I have this word I finally know why what she did was so much more destructive to me than my father's wretched, soul stealing narcissism.
My parents destroyed my being in front of friends and family and my response to it was all anyone noticed. I was the problem and my shame was self destructive and corrosive and it fuel my resentment and anger which eventually left me outside the world looking in feeling broken, rejected and full of self-pity., unable to see any way forward.
I grasped at straws, coming up with ideas and concepts of projects I could latch onto. But each one was sabotaged by my very own self-recrimination and internalized condemning voices of people who should have loved and encouraged me. And that is the vicious cycle that I have been stuck in for decades.
This past year I have seen earth shaking changes take root for me but ultimately the most critical hurdle, the "paralysis" not only was untouched but it seemed to increase, grow exponentially. I attacked it from every angle I could see but the more I hacked away at it the larger it loomed. Day by day, week by week my mindfulness practice caught shards of light bringing hope. This book brings some more rays.
Bit by bit I continue to find healing and against all odds and all reason and all evidence I gain hope, not finger crossed, "Please, please, please" hope but hope build on a solid foundation. And writing about it here helps me recognize how real it is becoming.
Hopalong:
I gain hope, not finger crossed, "Please, please, please" hope but hope build on a solid foundation.
How real this sounds! A joy to read it.
Kudos, GS, your growth IS REAL.
xo
Hops
Gaining Strength:
I think about what needs to be done. I feel the tension grip my trapezoid and neck. I see my fathers menacing g grimace and sense my brothers' disdain looming behind him. It is unbearable. Then I see myself vowed and shut down. As I do, Jon's voice sidles up next to me and gently speaks into my ear," stay present to the pain. Don't run from it. Your job today is to stay present to it, not overcome it, not 'win.'"
I Can do that. Keeping my focus on being present shuts down that anxiety machine that grinds it out as I fear not being good enough. I know Jon is right. I. An be present to that pain. I have been able to do that from Day One.
I don't know how it works but I know that it does. So I know as I stay present to this pain today that tomorrow I will be present to the pain as I step out into action. How many suns will set before tomorrow comes? More than one but fewer than 30. That's my bet. I'm on my way.
Belonging. Last night I could not sleep and I found myself lost in a tangle of memories and sorrow poising from me. Belongins I once thought had been mine and those that never were brought me such sorrow. I cried tears that have been locked away for years. But when sleep finally came. I was able to see a different belonging for my future. Today I am staying present to this old pain because tomorrow will bring freedom.
Gaining Strength:
Daily I go through at least one of Jon Kabat-Zinn's guided meditations. I see progress through the insights that I gain. I feel no change in the amount of anxiety that so long ago shut me down.
Even now I have errands that. Must run and I'm frozen. BUT I do see that each insight is progress. I skim the residual scum from the pond allowing more to surface and be processed. Each bit of scum is a variant of "unworthiness". It all has the same source and accumulated over my entire life.
Reading Daring Greatly (dragging and kicking) in the midst if this process is like dying a light on the problem and giving me hope at the same time. I know I can do this. I understand more clearly every single day how I got here. I see for the first time that it was not my fault nor because of inherent weakness or flaws (though I was trained to believe it was so). I also see a way out and long for it, though it is flower than I would like.
I am learning to parole myself from the prison of unworthiness. Even if the doors of prison swung open all at once I would not know how to live freely. I am learning and as I do the payroll process brings me closer and closer to freedom.
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