Today I noticed an old thought pop up.... it used to be a very familiar thought, one I came nose to nose with for many years....and it was stomach flipping in the beginning. So close.....like it was in the room with me....or I was inside a little box with it. So close..... it was happening over and over again.....like it was IN the present and it WAS real, bc my thoughts made it so. It's interesting the mind actually believes thoughts are real and happening to us without understanding they're in the past. The brain and body perceive it as happening in the present and biochemical hijacks follow. Those pathways get stronger, thicker and faster till they're lightening fast and outside one's awareness..... that's where things got really tricky, IME. When was reactivity outside my awareness. I didn't think that would happen to me. I didn't think it could. I thought I was strong enough.... I thought I could keep my children safe enough through anything,but I was wrong and that's an unhinging place to be driven to, IME.
Wrong again.
The upside..... happy places work the same way as trauma in our brains. We can go to the happy places and our brains believe we're actually there.... our chemistry adjusts and flows into calm and safety. Amazing, how powerful that is. Amazing it's not taught in every grade at school : /
Today it crossed my mind to scream my 2nd husband's name..... I used to scream it inside my head daily, but this time it felt very far.... very distanced. It appeared and then it was gone, reminding me how much spaciousness has been achieved.
What i do know is..... I haven't screamed him name in my head in a very long time. Sometimes it's there....but it's over there...... always outside my head. Sort of an echo...... nothing real..... an old synapse firing out of habit..... until it does't fire anymore.
And there's finaly serenity around what others have said, thought, misrepresented about me and who/what I am with regard to my understanding and beliefs about who and what I am, have done an am capable of.
I know who and what I am..... without confusion or second guessing.
Reckonings. And acceptance. Knowing.
Not dangerous but a definitive danger to threats and people doing harm..... without doubt or hesitation I know what I'll do and there was a time hesitation ruled me.
My brain turns off when I've been injured and the will and intention to do trauma, with years of training to DO those very things, steps up.... that's my amygdala and what it does when my frontal lobe is shut down, has almost always done... except that one time when it really mattered. I just shut down and there was nothing in me to protect myself. Nothing. It didn't even cross my mind, which disgusted and alarmed my Martial Arts instructor, but you don't really know what you'll do. You don't. Once he had to be dragged out of a live firefight during a training session by an instructor,bc he froze. There it is again. Judgement. Just not helpful, IME.
I don't know if responsiveness in survival situations can be trained without being thrown into pits to build agression, as Army Rangers train. I think it happens in the pits and is worried about outside the pits, IME. That's my two cents on it.
Those days of worrying are gone. I hardly recognize them when I think of them, very rarely... they're pretty much absent. DD20 has asked to do some edged weapons training..... basics and that pleases me very much. I want her to know and understand and have that inside her skeleton and amygdala, just in case. I guess I'd feel better if it was installed inside her Nervous System... and I'm not gonna judge it. I would appreciate it if nobody else judged it on the board either. Opinions are welcome, but judgment... not so much.
My fears, my worries were..... wrestled away from me.... taken. Taken by people pointing at me as a threat and eventually they turned me into someone who could do the things, easily, they feared. Funny how that worked out. Ironic.
There's power in understanding what and who one is during a crisis........ what happens to the brain and body..... not be thrown by it. Heck, in 2009 threat and crisis actually slowed my heart and head, like they say it happens to psychopaths..... and the thought of meeting acts of violence didn't move my biochemical needle..... it actually brought some relief....... "finally." The thundering heartbeat, tunnel vision and increased respiration was absent, maybe bc my adreanals were shot. Maybe it was simply the end of waiting for the worst to happen. I can't know what it was, exactly, but maybe I'll figure that out if the writing gets to that place.
The book STRONG ON DEFENSE by Strong goes through real life situations of survival and it's not always the people you'd think who do what needs to be done to survive. It's sometimes the least likely and those who survive are the ones who follow the guy out of a shot up McDonalds through the plate glass window another guy ran through to escape while the shooter reloaded.
Lord knows we spent years training for lots of situations in martial arts, but for me it was something others had to drive out with a blowtorch (fig.) Pushed and driven into survival/fight mode..... and it was real and it came in waves, after freeze and fawn...it just kept coming, thank God. I had zero understanding how it worked..... even as I experienced it and understood getting out of fight or flight was harder and harder till it was just where I lived. Home. A terrible place to raise little children.... a place I never thought I'd live. Like getting pulled away from the shore, over and over till I was so far away I didn't know how to get back and..... understanding actually made it worse. Watching everyone watch it happen, while shrugging and going on about their lives was as upsetting as what the bad actors were doing. There are no zero tolerance policies with interpersonal terror in the home or in the courts. WTH?
It's...... a very effective and accepted tactic. Starving out children, traumatizing them, terrorizing parents and leveraging them with their childrens' safety.... is just how things work. Better to accept it and get on withi strategizing to overcome it....which seems wrong. It seems like it should be stopped and changed into something else..... consequences, perhaps....shockingly harsh consequences, maybe, for the bad actors. Yup yup yup.
What;s left is responsiveness, without hesitation, in present moments I know I can count on, bc it's what I am. Not what I'd do. Strange to turn and face things, with acceptance, that used to create so much fear. Part of that's about my children being grown and capable and understanding so much. Part of it's going through experience and application of knowledge I never wanted to use, but accessed when pushed and shoved.
Today my DD20 made light of her father being taken out BEFORE he could do real damage to her and her sister... and she thanked me without any judgment.... just as a fact in her life. An undrestanding based on stories she's read and heard from her peers and in the news. Where there once was a 7yo asking for a new Daddy... one "like Jack Black, who'd carry her on his shoulderns and not hurt her".... is now a woman who might one day be a protector, herself.
We were discussing her grade, her intelligence and the fact she hand't been crushed by "bad parenting" then she said we were
"unicorns in a unicorn family."
We got enough in childhood and now she's back in the world, socializing and horrified by her peer's generational traumas........she's grateful and I'm blessed and surprised again to receive another layer of spaciousness and serenity I couldn't see coming.
Lighter
