Still need to work through early trauma

[sea storm]

Dear Gaining Strength,

I am so touched by your story and the pain that you feel. Your courage in looking at the cruelty and rejection is breathtaking.

I am convinced that just as you were wounded to the core, you also have a capacity for joy. There is such life in your words although the pain is there and it feels unbearable.  You are freeing the capacity for joy at the same time. It will creep in quietly and you might not notice but after the tears of rage and sorrow, you will feel more alive.  Watch for it.

You keep going. It seems  a miracle that you could survive that childhood.  i am so sorry that your caretakers were deaf, blind, selfish and cruel. You survived under very difficult circumstances. I hope you can share some of your journey here.

All I can say is that what happened to you was wrong. And I care. Remember you are loved and loveable. Anything else is a lie.

Lot of love and blessings

Sea

[Gaining Strength]

Peter Levine writes in Waking the Tiger Within that the path to healing from PTSD is empowerment.  I am painfully aware that I am living in that psychological place from childhood of dependence.  I am waiting, longing for a parental or authority figure to lift me out, to help me.  I have actually been aware of this for quite a few years.  I may have made some progress in moving forward but not much and certainly not enough.

I hope, I believe that exposing these binds to my consciousness is the first step.  I do not know what the second step is but I hope it reveals itself to me.

I think I need to write more about receiving no help in my earliest incarnation.  Looking back I see that both of my parents for different reasons saw my needs as a burden that either enraged them (father - clearly a wounded N and more) or bounced off of the wall they erected so that they chose to be blind - total neglect (mother - very passive aggressive.)  For very complicated reasons, my mother's supreme neglect and utter lack of empathy or even acknowledging my struggles or triumphs engendered such frustration and anger in me.  Sub-consciously I tried to get her to affirm me until her last day.  This healing process so clearly requires that I do that for myself.  I just don't know how.

Each chore before me stirs up the dust of that pain.  Something has to break through and start the healing.

[Gaining Strength]

Sea Storm thank you.  I am so touched by your words.  I am encouraged and touched.  I thank you deeply for your generous acknowledgement.  It is like a life-giving nectar.  I am thinking that I came back here as part of my healing.  I am so thankful that Dr. Grossman has allowed it to stay up.  I am definitely in a different place from when I first came here. I know what I need and I am able to sort through what is helpful and receive that while letting the other fall aside.  In days past, I took it all in and needed it all to be salve, to be understanding and accepting.  My being was so raw, my wounding so extreme, I grasped at everything within my reach. 

I tried to bare my soul, my wounds but I could not discern the healers from the wounded and I nearly drowned again.

[sea storm]

There are breakthroughs on your path. You are equipped for this  and it is very clear.  I think the way will unfold for you in its and your own time. You might think you have to unearth it all but that is not the case. The psyche is mulitdimensional and works through body, mind and spirit.  There are signs that show you the way and they come in a language that is different from psychological terms.

For people who are seriously mentally ill with brain chemistry that is impossible to balance without drugs the journey is very different. They need the drugs I think.

Otherwise there is a way that your instincts lead you along if you remember body, mind and spirit. Sort of the medicine wheel of tending all areas of your life. The vulnerability of reviving the ghosts and bodies of the past can swamp a person easily. If images and events come to surface they can pass like a log jam unleashed into a river.  We are built to do that through dreams, writing and sharing with PEOPLE GOING THROUGH THE SAME THING>

Looking back I can see that I went to some clueless therapists and some good ones. The good ones completely accepted me and did not push.  The good ones also used hypnotherapy and EMDR.  One person I went to said he knew EMDR but he didn't. He was just a very inadequate psychologist who didn't know how to really connect with his clients. You are absolutely the best judge of who is good for you.

Therapists used to think that the key to feeling joy in life again was to unleash the dogs of rage and depression.  Some of that helps for sure but only with the guidance of masterful therapists. I think that you need validation from yourself first.  You are the expert in you. Be kind to yourself and reparent your hurting inner child. Stop pushing yourself to meet unreasonable goals, do things you hate, be nice to people who are nasty, eat food that is good for you and that you don't like.  Be kind to yourself before you head for the bad experiences mind shredding . Listen to tapes that say you are a gift from the gods and that love is radiating from you and is a blessing. The loudest voice is you own and you can drown out the stupid mean inner critic.  Who wants to hear more from the blood sucking zombies of the past?  Not me.  I KNOW they were mean and nearly destroyed my spirit.  I get it.

This is what I think. You might not agree at all. I just don't thing you deserve to suffer anymore. The war is over.

[Gaining Strength]

I had dream after dream last night in which I was shamed. I was in a room that was disgustingly dirty and I was paralyzed, unable to clean or I was in a group of people who were all going somewhere together - all except me.  I was so deeply shamed as a child and I have found that shame turns in on itself - being shamed is shaming in itself, it stacks up and is so difficult to cut through, to heal, to alleviate.

I was shamed in order to be controlled.  I was given chores and not given the necessary resources so that I would fail and then was shamed.  When I was teased or belittled and I reacted I was humiliated and further shamed, and on and on.  Now I can take these images and enter in them and be present with that child.  I hope that in time being present will give way to something more proactive.  I am still participating in the first step - naming it.  In time, when naming it becomes natural and happens without thought the next step will come into place.

It would be nice to be able to explain to people what I am going through.  Adults who have not lived the kind of shaming neglect cannot understand why another adult cannot act.  It makes no sense.  And that inability to understand has its own level of rejection, isolation and shaming.  Shame begets shame, it turns in on itself and grows.  Naming it and holding that shamed child may not yet not it down but it does stop the progression.  In time, I will be able to move this thought process into real time.

[Gaining Strength]

Sea Storm - how generous of you to offer your pearls or wisdom.  Let me not be a swine who tramples them.

I am ready for the psyche to unearth what is ready.  I have done so much work for the past 30 years trying to understand "what is wrong with me?"  It took me decades to understand, to name it (not really singular).  I am interested to see how this unfolds.

We are built to do that through dreams, writing and sharing with PEOPLE GOING THROUGH THE SAME THING>

  Sharing gives that voice, that healing voice that each infant looks to its mother's eyes to reflect back. 

Stop pushing yourself to meet unreasonable goals, do things you hate, be nice to people who are nasty, eat food that is good for you and that you don't like.  Be kind to yourself before you head for the bad experiences mind shredding

  You are spot on.  This is so important.  Pushing for this things has always increased the shame and been more paralyzing.  You are so right about this.

You are so kind to share.  How comforting.

[Twoapenny]

I had dream after dream last night in which I was shamed. I was in a room that was disgustingly dirty and I was paralyzed, unable to clean or I was in a group of people who were all going somewhere together - all except me.  I was so deeply shamed as a child and I have found that shame turns in on itself - being shamed is shaming in itself, it stacks up and is so difficult to cut through, to heal, to alleviate.

I was shamed in order to be controlled.  I was given chores and not given the necessary resources so that I would fail and then was shamed.  When I was teased or belittled and I reacted I was humiliated and further shamed, and on and on.  Now I can take these images and enter in them and be present with that child.  I hope that in time being present will give way to something more proactive.  I am still participating in the first step - naming it.  In time, when naming it becomes natural and happens without thought the next step will come into place.

It would be nice to be able to explain to people what I am going through.  Adults who have not lived the kind of shaming neglect cannot understand why another adult cannot act.  It makes no sense.  And that inability to understand has its own level of rejection, isolation and shaming.  Shame begets shame, it turns in on itself and grows.  Naming it and holding that shamed child may not yet not it down but it does stop the progression.  In time, I will be able to move this thought process into real time.

Aw, GS, I do know what you mean, it's virtually impossible to talk about things like this with people who've not been through similar.  But the sense of relief when you do talk to someone who gets it is huge.  It's taken me a really, really long time to be able to work through some of the things that happened (and it's very much still an ongoing process!).  But you are right, naming it and recognising it is a really important part of it.  And I found taking that shamed little girl, holding her, stroking her hair and telling her she did a really good job and tried her best really helped.  I felt very silly doing it at first but it got easier over time.

I have found over the years that I have had to accept that I can't be 'real' with everyone I know, because some people just can't understand how I feel or think sometimes, and as you say, the rejection from that is too difficult to cope with.  So I've found that probably the only person I can be really open with is a therapist, and then I have two friends who've had similar childhoods and get it, although even with them I don't go into too much detail.

What you are doing is so amazing now.  You're so strong to do this and it will all come together for you, I'm sure xx

[sea storm]

I was so touched by your dream.  It was so terrifying and painful. The cruelty of allowing a child to feel that way is so clearly abusive and soul destroying. The narcissistic parents can do this without a second thought. Annihilate. You survived that. That must be some gift from a very sacred and untouchable part of you.

I used to have dreams like that for years. Dreams of being shunned. Shunning is reserved for very special victims and is designed to be one of the cruellest forms of punishment. Again the shunning people are some really whacked out bonehead dipshit bottom-feeders.  You are explaining shame to me in a way that makes me really get it. Get what it does to your dreams, your heartbeats, your tears, your guts.Your ability to connect to the very people who could help you in the here and now.
I wondered how my psyche could be so mean when I was hanging on by my fingernails to live. The dreams were paralysing. I would wake up and they had been so huge and damning of me that I could barely get out of bed. To switch into a fast paced life.
Looking back a bit I can see that the fast paced life had something to do with the wicked, soul snatching dreams. This went on for years. Being hounded by my dreams and they told me I was worthless and scorned and excluded.  That is how I felt at work and in my marriage. It became reality.  I just got that now. Whew!

I was recreating my childhood in my worklife.  Teachers are very, very conservative where I worked.  They found me to be inexplicably weird and they were actually alarmed by what I said which was pretty basic for a child therapist. The reality was that I WAS excluded and shunned and I felt terrible about it and felt like I must give off a bad odor or something. I went from school to school and assessed  situations with kids and gave explanations and helped create plans as well as worked with the children and their families. The job was impossible as I had four schools and over a thousand kids potentially to work with. Any crisis was my territory. So you can see that I was just like a ping pong ball in a bad storm.  On top of that my dreams were beating the crap out of me. Scorn, shunning, failure, exclusion. My worst fears and dread.

For some reason I would not get that the job and my marriage were screwed up and instead of believing to my core that what the dreams said were true. Finally, I snapped.  Could not do the marriage, was unable to walk ( really) , my whole body hurt like I had fibralmyalgia, and other things.  I could tolerate no more cruelty and had NOTHING to give.
As an insightful person I think you get my drift. Yup, right over the cliff.  
My life had to change and I was lost.  My body knew what was going on and so did my dreams. I was more terrified of losing the man I loved and my profession. Oh yes, and I was targeted by a narcissist boss relentlessly.  Good god, I don't know how I did it.

So the dreams went on and on for years. What they were telling me was to GET OUT. Run from this nightmare. Don't try to fix it as it is too much, impossible. Just get out. Be a bag lady, join the circus, put up a table on the street with a sign that says free hugs, anything but just get out. I had created my childhood circumstances but I didn't know it. I didn't have to know it maybe.
I did not have the strength or insight to stop being tortured by work, husband, boss, renovations, fish boat, fishing. I might as well of been carrying the fishboat on my back for all the work and money it cost. Oh throw in a philandering spouse who acted like life was set to music. Good grief.  How to you just step away from all that.

Here is how...... your health goes sideways. You have staggeringly awful dreams where you are deserted and shunned and shamed.
Somewhere in there some light has to get in. It takes a series of small miracles.  Something tells me you have had the small miracles too. That place that is your higher power in you, the shy quiet heart like a violet.  You take a step to be kind to yourself because no one else is, you start to write in Voicelessness and read the stories of other survivors. You hear the stories of the trapped ones.  Who gets out and who stays in.  I am all mixed up about which one is you and which one is me now.

I remember those punishing dreams. They were saying that my life was like the dream. Also the dreams described my childhood as an unwanted and neglected child who could not get out and had no escape. I relived that reality in my dreams and they were like punishment from hell.  So I hope you know that I get what you are going through and it is godawful. Blessings to you. I hold you in my heart. You deserved better. You deserve to be loved. If there is no one to love you then you just have to love yourself somehow.  Even in little ways. Go to where people are kind. There is a roadmap in your intuition.  You are here.

I have probably said to much in my desire to help you.  Somewhere in the middle it started to unravell and become my story too. Thank you for opening up so much. You have helped me a great deal with your story. A lot of things fell into place.

Lots of love to you,
Sea storm

[Gaining Strength]

Twoapenny - Thanks for your kind words.

I relate to your point about being real.  It took me so long to understand that.  I think I was hoping to connect, to heal that gaping wound.  I didn't work.  Now I try to hold my cards close to my vest.  It is so tricky to get this healing done. Each person's path is so different so there is little standing on another's shoulders.  But compassion and empathy do go a long way to strengthen one another. 

[Gaining Strength]

Sea Storm -

The dreams were paralysing. I would wake up and they had been so huge and damning of me that I could barely get out of bed. To switch into a fast paced life.

 I think that a fast paced life can take the edge off the shaming.  The body is active and busy.  It is in the quiet, the night, the times alone when the shame that goes to the core comes out to haunt.  That is why it is so important to heal down to the core - so important but so much easier to say than to do.

I suspect your work with those children and families was such a god-send to them.  Those teachers didn't get their students - they couldn't have gotten you.  It would have meant they had to own their own weakness which only a strong person can.  It sounds like you bore the pain for them.  As a mother I have seen that children who don't fit the mold are shunned 1st by the teachers.  That kind of shunning costs a child dearly.

unable to walk ( really) , my whole body hurt like I had fibromyalgia

 Our bodies hold our trauma; our bodies, our brains hold it.  I am finding that therapies that go to the body and to the brain, the neurology are more effective that talking.  But there is a play off - the body and brain hold the memories and the adult brain systhesizes, reorders and creates understanding.  But the worst part seems to be that the pain has to be re-lived.

I am all mixed up about which one is you and which one is me now.

  Ha, ha - I so get it.  It can be so topsy-turvy.

[Gaining Strength]

This summer my first priority is healing from the paralysis that has crippled my entire adult life.

Though I have made progress in my healing in many ways and on many levels in the past 3 decades I have not broken through this paralysis and the profound anxiety that accompanies it.  But I don't want to mask the unlying wound.  I don't want to funtion inspite of.  I want to heal - all the way down to the core.  I don't know the way out.  I can only guess based on what I have read, heard and how it clicks with me, strikes my gut.

So, for now, I plan to hold that place of pain in my heart which I tend to that broken child.  It may be very slow going at first but I expect, if successful, that it will blow open at some point.  Why is it so nerve racking?  I think it is because by using this "only way out is through" approach that I must feel that original pain and that is still so indescriabably difficult.  But I am going to do it.  Thanks for letting my share my struggle.  It is so helpful to have a place to share..

[Gaining Strength]

After my husband died, when our child was 7 months old, I needed help.  I needed help sorting out the mess he had left for me, sorting out his estate.  I needed help putting food on the table, keeping my house repaired and the yard kept.  At that time, my parents, divorced, were in their late 60s and early  70s and each were worth a few million dollars and almost $10 M.  They did little to help.  My mother said she was too old to keep my baby.  My father at one time made an offer and sent his man over to help with a few things in the house but demanded it be done to his liking.  I declined. 

Neither helped me financially.  Neither helped me sort out my husband's estate which left me the house we were living in and all of his debts.  Nothing else.  He left his insurance to his former wife (divorced 15 years before his death) and his grown children from that marriage.  It took me years after that to truly understand that my prominent, wealthy parents had abandoned me years before.  They liked to pretend we were family and my mother had been dependent on my since my father had left her a few years before. 

But that abandonment had happened more likely when I was born.  But because they used the language of love and because they led a life that look like a life of envy from the outside even I was fooled by it all.  What do I mean be being abandoned.  Well I mean that they simply were not there for me. they did not advice me nor train me nor provide for me other than what I received by virtue of being their daughter.  For example - at 10 I went away to camp for 8 weeks.  I had been begging to go for two years.  Even at that age 8 weeks seemed far too short to me.  At camp that first year some of the girls had begun shaving their legs and taught the rest of us.  When I went home in August I asked my mother if I could shave my legs.  Her test response was, "It looks like you already have."  That was the most she would offer me about any aspect of the physical or emotional changes of growing from a child to a woman.  When I married at 23 I asked her to give me some advice and again she told me I didn't need any.  And when I divorced I received less help or advice.  By the time I married again I didn't bother.

It would take me years to understand that neither my mother nor my father had ever been there for me.  Unlike the other people I had grown up with whose parents were my parents friends.  The guided and provided for their children.  I was left all alone.  But the most destructive was being expected to do certain things without the resources to complete the tasks and then being belittled and humiliated for my failures.  But not just at the time but for years to come.  I feel certain that those experiences continue to plague me and are a large part of what underlies my paralysis.  the Pain is indescribable. 

I am determined to move forward and figure out how to stand in front of the pain and move through it.  It is so easy to sit and avoid but that leads to its own pain and loss.  God give me strength, courage and healing.

[Gaining Strength]

I think that shame has an energy level that connect with what I thought was love as a child.  This is so complicated and convoluted.  But I think the only connection I got with them was when I was being shamed and as a child that was better than nothing and that was necessary for survival. 

 I seem to get stuck in shame.  Peter Levine describes how a child able to fight is less likely to suffer PTSD.  I did not fight as a child.  I was unaware that anything was wrong other than me and I did try to change me - over and over and over again.  But Levine writes that we can go back to that child and fight for her.I get that. 

[Hopalong]

GS,

How is your beautiful, amazing son?
I so hope he is thriving and doing well in school,
feeling hopeful and positive for his own life.

Hops

[Gaining Strength]

Thanks for asking Hops.  He is doing well - glad to be out of school and so excited about the summer.