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Continued healing
Gaining Strength:
This gift just fell into my lap. It is a path marker, confirming I am headed in the right direction. I am thankful as I just made a difficult decision in making a commitment to neurofeedback with qEEG with a specific doctor at significant cost. While I was working with this doctor far from home I made in depth notes about the work. I made notes about a few other related concepts and one article I wrote about in depth was methods for supporting the Vagus nerve. Then comes this article tiring those two things together along with Jon Kabat Zinn's Mindfulness. It is though it is written for me.
https://healingfromthefreeze.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/the-vagus-nerve-and-the-difficulty-with-mindfulness/
This morning I was remembering how the veil of resentment was lifted from me late last spring. It was such an amazing experience and a time a tremendous new insight. That memory came just after receiving a bit of a reprieve last night from the present layer of wretchedness. I take it as a signal that relief or release is on its way. And then this.
I needed this article. It relieves me of the shame of having been stuck all these decades. Oddly, the article hints that it is about "freeze" but then never addresses it directly though I understand it so clearly. I wonder if I can find this author. I wonder if I would be welcomed.
The foot on the brake is the anticipation of freeze. It is equally as bad as the freeze itself and usually triggers the freeze. For some reason I can seem to get around the freeze a bit. Easier than the anticipatory freeze. I am wondering about which release will come first, how it will unpack. I am imagining living free of "the dread" or what life will be like without waiting for the other foot to fall, without the fear expectation of being rejected, of failing of being frozen. Just the ability to wonder is new, and now to nurture the image of it, to imagine the feeling of it. For all the years I could not make those leaps but was stuck in the image of someone outside of me opening the door for me. So this is a huge transition and it is of course empowering because I am no longer waiting for other, other who does not exist, who cannot rescue me. And that other was "mother" who I waited for lifelong to show me the way and nurture me to the point of function and set me free. That mother nurture of the baby bird learning to fly, bits on its own, returning to the nest, trial after trial until it is able and then on its own. Having missed that natural process I was locked in search for it but somehow have found my way through.
Gaining Strength:
Ah Bones
--- Quote --- There's a special place in hell for abusers.
--- End quote ---
We know that all too well don't we Bones. It is a sorrow that cuts so deep.
Gaining Strength:
Thank you Hops.
You know they live inside my head. My favorite line from my favorite Zinn's meditation says something about releasing self hatred. Every time I hear it I am stopped in my tracks and hear myself think, "I don't hate myself but I have internalized their hatefilled, hateful messages." The difference is subtle but significant, because it is easier to let them go than to reform my self image. Suddenly I know I don't have to change my being but I have to release their grip on me, release my fear of their internalized condemnation, my anticipation of their cruel belittlements and rejection. It is separate from me, just internalized.
Thank you for your encouragement!
Gaining Strength:
With this new perspective, I am learning. Yesterday, I began to differentiate the regular anxiety from that of the anticipation of encountering an anxiety trigger. The second is the one the keeps me from moving the first, tends to shut me down or trigger frustration or anger, it is physically painful.
Today I am shut down (avoiding) but seeing the difference and not triggering anxiety by not getting anything done. Yesterday I was able to get things done without triggering. These things will slowly sort themselves out.
Gaining Strength:
I have had two difficult and strange days. I see space between my normal state of shame/anxiety and fear/anticipation of a trigger. That space gives me room to breath, to process. I experienced something like this a year ago when my lifelong state of resentment cracked like an eggshell. Things looked different, the light changed. I saw the present but more importantly, the past in very different light. I felt different. Initially, there was a period on mourning, for all that I had lost by being in that state. It was a heavy, heavy loss.
I feel the same kind of shift in light, new vision, and deep grieving. I've lost so much but I still have life in front of me and that is where I must focus. Off and on, yesterday and today, I noticed that normal triggers are not triggering. It is so bizarre - welcomed but unsettling. Subconsciously Waiting for it to return and then checking, as if to be sure I have my phone or keys, only to remember the dread has slipped away, my, previously permanent shadow has faded away.
Every now and then, over the past two days I have felt a great sorrow wash over me, from head to foot, a sorrow, a loss, a memory of excruciating rejection and loss. Memory after memory, in no order, without warning. It comes, waves over me and goes. I'm sure there is more to come but I am not afraid that it will be too much. It would have been too much pain earlier but no longer.
There is, however, at least one more large segment still to be processed and that is the one about failure. Had I predicted the order I would have thought all the rejection I have experienced would be the most devastating and so the last to process. Rationally, failure seems to be a product of that profound rejection, sabotage and humiliation by my father and passively, tacitly by my mother. But that is what is still there, still paralyzing, at least the fear or expectation of failure is. But, I'm going to start pushing back against it. It is very, very scary for me. I can do this. I can emerge from this freeze after all of these years and still have a life.
Give me strength.
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