Hello Friends:

Wow.  It's been a while since I read a title for a blog post that had me actually nauseous.  Here's the one that got me - "How is your love life related to your Mother?"  Oh.  Ewww.

Zoh, tell me about your muzher.

Remember that "Mom" is a real hot button topic for me in general.  I'm estranged from my parents, mostly because of my mother's unresolved and untreated mental illnesses.  Don't get me wrong - I have a great deal of sympathy for anyone suffers from mental illness; how could I not, given I am in that position myself?  But protecting my boundaries means only interacting with people who want to get better; who want to be treated.  My mother is not in that category.

So the idea that my past (or present) relationship with her reflects in my love life is utterly anathema.  Even though it has to be true, of course.  Our relationships with our parents form the basis for how we relate to almost every other person we meet.  But love life?  I reiterate.  Ewww.

The other blog post says, "If you felt you didn’t get enough from your mother, perhaps you also feel that you don’t get “enough” from your partner."  Fortunately I have a spouse who has been willing to work with me for many years, addressing both my issues and his, and we have a very good marriage.  It takes plenty of effort, but it has really paid off for us.  So I guess my first point is this - past (or present) events may have an influence, but they do not have to rule us.  We can make changes in our current lives, through therapy, meds, meditation, or whatever, as well as through working with others on relationships.  Difficulties are not a forgone conclusion.

The post goes on with a few other phrases that naturally get me going, but also get me thinking.  Here's one: "Rejecting our parents only brings us suffering."  I'll mention that rejecting them has brought me a lot of peace, and was the only way I was able to carve enough of a safe space to truly being healing.  But that isn't really what the poster means - they mean a deep sense of rejecting them on all levels, not just not being in their physical presence.  And I agree with that to some extent.  Not being able to accept our parents for what they are is very painful. 

The post goes on to say, "Even our bodies will feel some degree of unrest until our parents are experienced inside us in a loving way."  This is tough for me.  I will not actually be able to experience my 'real' parents inside me in a loving way.  That attachment was not made.  I can wish for loving parents, caring parents, real parents, outside of myself, but that is not a wish that will come true.  Instead, the parent I have is myself.  I am now responsible for being what I didn't have, and what I need, then and now.  So perhaps this idea of 'experiencing parents inside myself in a loving way' is something I can do with my own inner parent.  I can stop wishing for something that does not exist, stop wanting them to be what they are not, and instead look to myself for what I didn't have.

How do you relate to your parents?  Are you a parent to yourself?  How do you think that reflects in your primary relationships?

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image credit/info: photoxpress.com woman hides face 

Learning How to Say Goodbye

Hello Friends:

There on my sidebar of blogs is "Toddler Planet."  It has not been updated for year because the author passed away one year ago today on Feb 6, 2012.  I haven't yet been able to bring myself to remove the link, but I think the next few days will finally see that happen.

I've been watching it slowly fall lower and lower on the list, wondering why I couldn't remove it.  Wondering if this was me in denial, or some kind of weird homage, or what.  Grief is a strange thing.

Sue died of inflammatory breast cancer, and left behind a husband and two children, as well as a legacy of friends, coworkers, her blog, and much more.  It is so cliche to say 'inspiring' but if you take a look at just the last few posts on her blog, you'll see what I mean.

She had a very realistic view of chronic illness that I'm sure a lot of us understand all too well.  She didn't candy coat the difficulties, the pain, the sense of loss.  But she was able to maintain a sense of healing and hope that resonated with me.  We know how tough it is to be sick, but the truth is that healing is always there, even up to the very last minute of the very last day.  There is healing that happens.

I am daunted by the incredible flood of responses she received both towards the end of her life and after she passed.  It brings the pain and loneliness of illness into stark relief.  Mental illnesses (say depression in particular) drive us into isolation, away from friends, and into our homes and sometimes bedrooms, not to emerge for who knows how long.  We desperately desire to know that there are others out there who still know we exist, and still care, but we lack the ability to reach out.  Sue's life poses a challenge to keep trying even when the pain is severe - it is inspiring, but the challenge remains daunting.

It is my only real homage to be able to say to her that I still think of her, and that how she lived, and died, makes me want to keep on trying.  I do think she'd be honored by that.  I would be honored should anyone ever be able to say that of me.

Your Hostess With Neuroses
 
Image credit/info: Susan's avatar picture, taken from her blog "Toddler Planet"

Giving Grief Some Space

Hello Friends:

A question came up on a forum - what have you lost or missed out on in life because of your mental illness?  I usually avoid these questions, because I want to be 'positive' all the time.  Yet I know that some of that inclination stems from a dysfunctional need to avoid the past.  I do not like to allow myself to grieve.  I can't stand the sensation of loss, so I repress loss and grief mercilessly.  I know it would be a good idea to put down what I've lost to MI, and honor that grief.

So here are a few things.  Not all of them, but at least some that I can articulate at the moment:

-   I did not get to be a child.  I was scared every moment of my childhood that additional abuse would come my way.

-   I did not have parents.  There were ostensibly two people there, and they did give me a home and enough resources to survive.  But with my parents both having untreated MIs (esp my Mom) and addictions (esp my Dad) they were not really parents.  (And now, having fully estranged them, I certainly don't have parents.  But that's been a necessary part of setting boundaries.)

-   I missed out on having a good sense of self.  Other people don't hate themselves, and I do.

-   I missed out on more social events than I can count.  Weddings, parties, casual gatherings, everything.  So much.

-   I lost about five years of my life.  It wasn't all at once - it was about 3.5 years during one depressive episode and then another 1.5 in another.  During that time I did almost nothing at all.  Completely wasted time.  Five years, poof, gone.  I was so depressed that except for the pain I hardly even remember them at all.

-   I lost the career track I worked so hard to build.  It isn't impossible that I might get it back someday, but the loss stings.

I feel compelled, however, to mention what I didn't miss.  This might be me being dysfunctional again, already turning aside from the hurting place, but I can't help it.  I found a great spouse, and we've been married for almost 14 years.  I got my BS and then my PhD in the subject I really wanted.  I can't work in that field right now because of the MIs, but I do have the formal background to do it.  I've been able to do a lot of writing, and it's been very rewarding and fun.  I've gone on a lot of business trips to amazing places.  I have a small number of very good friends who are supportive when I need it.  I've been able to develop empathy and a deeper understanding for suffering than most of my peers.

Do you have something you feel you need to grieve, but that you haven't really given the space?

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image credit/info: Girl Young Woman from photoexpress.com

Dealing with Dark Waters

Hello Friends:

I mentioned in my last post that I had a whole dang list of things to write about and what with one thing and another, I hadn't manged to get my act together.  Far be it from me to suggest my act is actually coalescing, yet here is a post.

One of the reasons this winter has been so tough is something that happened early on, in December.  I'm feeling a little better about it, now, having had some time and some tdoc sessions to deal with it.  But I still feel a touch haunted, literally and figuratively.

We went on a cruise for the holidays, and overall it was a great experience.  We left on Christmas Eve, had dinner, did some partying, then went to bed.  We were not asleep.  I remember the moment when I felt something shift in the movement of the ship.  It was just after midnight, Christmas Day.  Then we heard an announcement in the hall using some kind of code.  The feeling was like a tingle of static energy, subtle, but my hands felt cold.  My feet numb.  Part of my mind recognized it immediately as a shock or panic reaction.  The other part said, clearly, to the rest of my mind, "Someone is overboard."

About ten minutes later, there was another announcement in the hall.  I know now that people who were asleep at the time didn't hear it at all.  But we were awake.  I was wide awake, in fact.  This announcement said clearly that there was a "man overboard situation" and the ship had moved into a search pattern.

We got up.  I went out onto the balcony, not because I thought I could see anything from ten stories up in a massive cruise ship at night.  I went out because I felt compelled.  The sea wasn't high, but neither was it calm.  We could see the lights of the coast maybe fifteen miles off, and another cruise ship searching in a wide circle, as we were.  It was hard to get your mind around.  Inside my head it said, "Someone is in that water."  I felt in my heart that the person had jumped intentionally.  It would have happened just at midnight.  The ship was not lurching.  I didn't think they had fallen by accident, although I had no proof or evidence either way.

I was so, so sad.  Am sad.  No matter how suicidal I have ever been, jumping into the sea has never been one of my options for offing myself.  Incredibly despairing and sad, to see a dark, yawning ocean and wonder at the mind of someone who leaped right into it.  I was in pain for that person, and for myself, knowing that feeling of empty grief.  All night long, the ship moved in a large circle.  It made the boat sway in a fashion I had not yet felt on a ship.  For the rest of the cruise, whenever the boat turned, it brought the feelings back up in an instant.

Nine hours later, there was another announcement.  It was at breakfast, and this was how most people learned that someone had gone over.  The Captain claimed that a staff member jumped overboard, and after nine hours, the Coast Guard had released the cruise ships from the search.  You could see helicopters still circling, but the ships were now moving away.  The Captain said that three orange life rings had been thrown over, and all three had been recovered.  But not the person in question.  And that was about it.

The way the incident was ignored on board for the rest of the trip was disturbing.  I was more disturbed by how hard it was to learn anything about it at all, even after we got back.  I ended up on some cruise watchdog sites before I even found the press releases about the incident.  I also found posts from family members of the woman who was lost.  Her family was absolutely certain she would not have jumped - she had a one year old child, was married, her husband was also a staff member on the same ship, they had just been shopping for presents, etc.  Her family was outraged at the 'accusation' that the woman had jumped.  The company was saying they had an 'eye witness.'  But no witness had come forth, and the company was apparently not releasing the tapes they have of everything that goes on everywhere on a ship.  I'm pretty convinced they must have caught it on tape.  The company would want it to be a suicide, since that would absolve them of any responsibility.  The family would want it to be an accident, for a million reasons, of course.

This was the point at which I was finally able to get together with my tdoc (recall I was really sick with a combined ear/sinus infection for weeks).  I still do not know what has come of this situation.  My tdoc helped me to see that obsessing over it, when it was unlikely to ever come to a resolution, was not a really good use of my time, or of my sanity.  But I remain distressed.  First, by the idea that a person drowned on Christmas Day.  Second, and more tangled, is this idea that justice has not been done.  Or found.  Or achieved.  Or something.  Why can't the family get some kind of closure from the cruise company, one way or another?  Why can't I?  How frustrating.

Frustrating that the chance we will ever know what happened is about zero.  And still haunting, that sight of an ocean - dark, abyssal, open caverns of arching waves.  It's another in so many kinds of incidents that ask me to accept and move on.  No answers.  No formula.  No meaning or reason. 

I am really tired of these sorts of lessons.

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image credit/info: Waves by Mados on Flikr via Creative Commons, CC 2.0

Derailed by the Rains of Winter

Hello Friends: 

I had all sorts of nifty ideas for this post.  I've been out of circulation, first for holiday vacation, and then for a month dealing with a combined ear and sinus infection.  Yee haw.  That and some 'fun' times at the pdoc and tdoc have given me plenty to write about.

But I've been derailed.

I've lost another friend to cancer.  Another colleague.  I'm just too sad and angry to write about anything else.  I want to throw up my hands at the universe and say "Enough!"  I know the reality.  I'm not a kid anymore, far from it.  So my contemporaries aren't kids, either.  Statistically speaking, every year that goes by means ... well ... it's obvious what it means.  I just don't want to deal with this fact, that each year more and more people will leave.  I have enough abandonment fears already, okay?

I don't want to rant or harp on this too much.  No point, really.  It just hurts.

Instead I'll say something about how she approached her cancer, and how it gave me some help dealing with my own chronic illnesses, of the mental kind.  She felt that pressure a lot of us feel, that same pressure to put a good face on, to smile, even through terrible pain.  I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.  She made a point of saying that facing an illness with courage did not mean never being sad, angry, or irritable.  It helped me feel more at peace with the idea that it is okay to show the pain and confusion of illness, healing, and recovery.  The process of living with illness is messy, and hiding that fact is a disservice.  Sometimes you smile, sometimes you frown.  That's okay.  That's life.

So I'll say I am not feeling very okay right now.   

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image credit/info: Rain on Window, teresaphillips1965 on Flikr via Creative Commons, CC 2.0

Learning More About Grief, the Hard Way

Hello Friends:

I lost a friend a few days ago.  I had intended to blog about it immediately, but was still sort of in shock.  Or denial.  Definitely denial, since I can feel this "how can this person not exist anymore" sensation.  I had known for several months that she had cancer, something with a bad prognosis.  But the last report just a week or so ago was that she was in treatment, battling hard, still writing papers and grading tests.  And then this.  She was 47, and as full of life and willpower as anyone I'd ever met.

I am really tired of people dying.  In the last several years I've lost my father-in-law, a grandmother, a grandmother-in-law, several science colleagues ... it's a bit of a list.  Some were older, and had been ill for some time.  That doesn't help, but facing the stark inevitability of someone elderly passing away is at least vaguely comprehensible.  Some were younger, like my friend.  This is not comprehensible.  Not computing.

I've written before on the problem of grieving past losses.  I know part of the healing process is looking back on an abusive and traumatic past and learning how to grieve what never was.  Not that I'm particularly good at it.  It's just too hard, and seems sort of optional.  Who wants to go digging, even if you know you need to deal with that loss eventually?  It seems ignorable.  Easy to focus on other "more pressing" issues.  And then something like this happens, and grief and loss come and slap you in the face.  There is no escape from this.

You can feel the echoes through your whole psyche - it feels too familiar - and you realize your interior tapestry is largely woven from sadness, grief, and loss.  That past is the fiber inside of you, and this new grief is catching on the threads, caught, tangled.  You have an inclination to grab a pair of scissors and cut it out, every spot of grief and pain.  But you get some semblance of sanity, and realize you'll end up with an inside full of more holes than you already have.  You can't cut your memories away without cutting yourself out along with it.  It is so much harder to try to darn and re-weave, but that's the choice.  Hardly profound, but facing facts is one of those things I'm trying to get myself to do right now.

I don't want to forget my friend.  It hurts, but I want to go on remembering.  It's important.  She deserves to be remembered and her life deserves to be celebrated.

Not that I feel like celebrating at the moment.

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image credit/info: Sky Cries Mary by frantikgirl on flickr via Creative Commons, CC 2.0

Grief and Mourning Part III of III - Starting to Move Forward

Hello Friends:

In my first post, I talked about how I had done some grieving of my losses in the past, but still felt there was more to do. And I didn't want to do it. In the second post, I put up a few reasons why we might resist grief and mourning, and what I thought my own hang-ups might be. So here's the third post, where I'm going to talk about the process of grief, and how I'm starting my plan to mourn and move on. Right. I'm sure it'll be just that easy ...

Anyway, we are all familiar with the canonical five stages of grief, which some people say are more like seven, or twelve, or whatever. The wisdom on stages of grief these days is that there do appear to be "places" one finds oneself, like denial, or anger. We seem to move through these places in one way or another as we grieve, but it is never the same. Some people visit one or two stages, and then are done. Others visit the stages in a random order, back and forth, then around again, up and down, with no apparent pattern. Eventually, they also are done. So there is no real predicting.

For myself, I find the idea of stages of grief a little frustrating, since I want to do things "right," and there is no right. Still, I found a site here that talks about these stages in a way that was actually helpful to me. This page lists seven stages; shock, denial, anger, guilt, sorrow and depression, acceptance, and then engaging with life. I found it most useful for the inclusion of "shock." Interestingly, because of the CPTSD, I sometimes find myself still there, still in shock, feeling as if something terrible has just happened. Creepy. I can imagine how that can be keeping me from moving forward with my grief, although I'm not exactly certain how to move it from "now" to the past.

One of the more useful things I found was an excerpt from a book about how to help someone else with grief. You realize quickly that these are the things you need to be doing for yourself. Rewording, some of the advice might look like this; grieve at your own pace, seek company, seek emotionally safe environments, don't judge what you say or feel, be patient with yourself, try to find some humor in life, honor losses with memorials/rituals, and seek others going through something similar. I find myself finding humor right here, since all this sounds like the whole reason I started blogging in the first place.

I'll admit that sites with any overtly religious content make me wary. But there is a site on 'devozine' that I thought very interesting. This is actually targeted to teens dealing with trauma (9/11) but I read some very useful stuff on their site describing trauma and grief. I thought the description of trauma, below, was insightful.

"What is a trauma? Loss occurs any time we feel restricted or diminished. Trauma is a loss that is outside our world view, an experience that brings up feelings of terror, horror and being out of control. An experience will be traumatic for us if it involves injury or death in ways that do not seem to be a natural part of living. Also, events that have a deep personal meaning for us or experiencing a number of losses may move us into feeling overwhelmed."

This site made a suggestion about the nature of grieving, what it does, and how to use it to honor our losses, and then move on. I've taken just some of the sentences here to shorten the piece. "The way we heal our experience of loss is called the grieving process. The feelings and issues of grief help us to understand what the loss means to us and what we need to be healed. Because we don't just grieve for the fact of a loss, but for the meanings and implications of that loss, spiritual issues always arise in grief. Find a symbol. A symbol is an object, word, place vision etc. that stands for a meaning other than its obvious or usual one. Choose a symbol to help your grieving. It could be a color, a piece of clothing, an object you carry in your pocket or anything that will provide comfort."

I really resonate with this idea. I've decided to go ahead and do it. I'm going to choose a symbol that gives me 'permission' to grieve, but that does not require it. I'm going to try to use this symbol to make sure my subconscious knows I'm allowed to grieve, to mourn, but it can do it on it's own time table and in its own way. So this symbol will now be my compromise. I can be sad if I want to, or not, as necessary. Meanwhile I can move on with other aspects of healing.

The symbol I've chosen is the "weeping seraph," above. I'm not entirely sure what it is about crying angels that appeal to me. There is something both sad and soothing about them. One of the things about losing someone that always bothered me was people saying things like, "you shouldn't be sad, they are with God/Jesus/Buddha/in the place with infinite beer/with the angels/etc." I had this idea that heaven was dancing and happy that so-and-so had died. I did not like that image at all. Seeing weeping angels actually makes me feel better. I think the angels do mourn, they don't go straight to the dancing. There is the sad part first. The despairing part. The part of utter despondency, when even the knowledge of future happiness cannot take away the pain. This seems right. Not that I want them to be stuck there, or to be stuck there, myself. But it seems proper to honor the loss. And this image makes me feel more like a loss is being appropriately honored.

I might even buy a small version of this statue to keep around as a reminder. The message is that grief is good and okay, whenever necessary. But it is also okay to keep moving forward.

That at least is the plan for the moment. How do you grieve your losses? How do you honor them? How do you move on?

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image credit/info: http://www.flickr.com/photos/uitdragerij/ / CC BY 2.0

Grief and Mourning Part II of III - Some Reasons Why It's So Hard

Hello Friends:

The canonical wisdom about healing trauma is that a person needs to complete the full, natural grieving process, or the symptoms of trauma will keep reappearing, demanding our attention. Back to Judith Lewis Harris' book "Trauma and Recovery" that says, "Survivors of chronic childhood abuse face the task of grieving not only what they lost but also what was never theirs to lose. The childhood that was stolen from them is irreplaceable."

Seems like a tall order ... and as I said in my last post, I don't really want to do this.  Part of it, I'm sure, is that I have in fact grieved some losses from my past, and don't actually need to grieve them again.  But another part comes from resistance of some kind.  Or many kinds.

Harris' book gives some more insight into why we might have difficulty with the process of mourning. The quotes below are from her book. Anything not quoted is my commentary or synthesis of MANY ideas; including her ideas, things I've gleaned elsewhere, and my own experience. Again, I'm no therapist, so some of this is nothing more than my own understanding and opinion of how this all works. Anyway, a person might experience all, none, or some of the conditions below while they are attempting to heal.  And these conditions can get in between you and your full grief process.

Clinging to Symptoms 

The Issue: "The patient may be reluctant to give up symptoms such as nightmares and flashbacks because they have acquired important meanings. The symptoms may be symbolic means for keeping faith with the lost person, a substitute for mourning, or an expression of unresolved guilt."

What To Do: Recognize what it is in the symptoms that might actually be appealing to you, in spite of how horrible they are. Are you trying to punish yourself? Are you trying to remember someone or something through the symptoms? Are you looking at them as a protection or wall between yourself and other kinds of pain?

My Experience: This one is really hard for me. I didn't realize it, but for me the symptoms have become a reliable source of information. When I am in pain, I know something is wrong, and I can act. What am I without the pain? I have no model for a universe that is not defined by pain. I need to generate a new model, a universe defined by all sorts of sensations, where pain is just one kind. I need to tell myself it is okay to get information from good sensations, too.

Revenge Fantasy 

The Issue: The 'patient' may harbor a fantasy of "revenge on the perpetrator(s)" of their trauma, hoping to find some way to 'get even'.

What to Do: It is important to realize that getting even isn't actually possible, since even if one visits the exact same trauma on the perpetrator, it does not take ours away. And in the end, perpetuating the cycle of pain is damaging to ourselves, and simply lets the perpetrator win by keeping their maladapted ways of interacting with the world alive and well.

My Experience: I didn't have a lot of issues with wanting revenge on anyone who caused my trauma. I still have a few dark fantasies of doling out a couple of swift kicks in the shins, but this was never a big issue for me. I don't really have any desire to hurt anyone, not even these f#&%ers.

Miraculous Forgiveness 

The Issue: The traumatized person may have a 'forgiveness fantasy' where they believe they can "transcend their rage through a willful, defiant act of love."

What to Do: This one is difficult for people who believe that having bad feelings about someone, even someone who hurt them, is wrong. It seems like it would be ideal to simply and suddenly love the people who hurt us. In reality, this can be damaging, since it short-circuits our own natural coping processes. We are by no means called on to hate people, but we are called on to honor our own needs, and what was taken from us by the trauma. The rage in our hearts has to be dealt with gently and respectfully, not ignored. "A goal is to transform anger into righteous indignation." Not sure what that means, exactly.

My Experience: Well, I never really thought I was going to just forgive everyone outright. I thought I was supposed to, and felt bad that I couldn't conjure up any feelings of forgiveness. Maybe I never will. I've decided that forgiveness will happen when I'm ready, and that trying to force it isn't showing myself much courtesy.

Demanding Compensation 

The Issue: A "prolonged, fruitless struggle to wrest compensation from the perpetrator or from others." Note that phrase "or from others." One of the problems with looking for compensation is that, once it is clear it cannot be gained from the perpetrator, the 'patient' concsiously or unconsciously starts looking for it elsewhere. From family, the government, the medical establishment, or what have you. This need "may represent a defense against facing the full reality of what was lost."

What to Do: "Mourning is the only way to give due honor to loss; there is no fair compensation. The wish for compensation ties the survivor's fate to the perpetrator's and she is then held hostage." This seems more clear to me. I understand this theory that by constantly looking for compensation, a person makes it so they can't move on until something happens to or with those associated with inflicting the trauma.

My Experience: At first I didn't think I had a problem here. And now I see that in some ways, I do. My continued rage at my parents ties me to them. More importantly, it ties my healing to them. I want them to admit they blew it. I want them to see what they did wrong and apologize. And then I want them to get therapy. These things are not going to happen. Waiting on the actions of those who hurt me puts me at their mercy, still.  I need to find healing without this.

Trauma Memorial

The Issue: "The survivor may wonder how she can possibly give her due respect to the horror she has endured if she no longer devotes her life to remembrance and mourning." In this scenario, the person who was traumatized continues to live a life of mourning, remembering, anniversaries of trauma, and more. This isn't a case of focusing on specific symptoms, like flashbacks, but instead focusing on behaviors and actions. Shaping our lives to be a constant, living memorial stops us from completing the grief process, and instead stalls us there indefinitely.

What to Do: "She will never forget. But the time comes when the trauma no longer commands the central place in her life." We have to take that step back and realize, just like the desire for compensation, that there is no way we can create a memorial with our lives that actually evens up the score. At some point we need to allow that we've given due honor. Give ourselves permission to go live now. As life goes on, some trauma will resurface, and old issues will be revisited. But again, we need to allow ourselves to create new centers for our lives.

My Experience: In many ways, my trauma still defines me. I identify with it, and shape my life around it. My symptoms of PTSD, OCD, GAD and others are still so strong that dealing with them is a day to day struggle. I don't feel stuck in mourning. I think I might not be far enough along to get stuck there. Still, I can see how I could create a 'center' for myself that was all about trauma, instead of about actual life.

And there you go. A few ideas for what might be causing difficulty with moving completely through the grief process, and maybe a thought or two for how to address them. If any of it rings true for you (or not) drop a comment.

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image credit/info: "Arcadia Child" D. Sharon Pruitt CC 2.0 

Grief and Mourning Part I of III - Taking Another Look at Recovering from CPTSD

Hello Friends:

I've been thinking about mourning, lately.  I have this idea that I should be mourning more, even though I don't want to.  I've only really mentioned grief and mourning once in this blog.  And since it is such an important issue for healing, I figured it was time to put a little more of my oh-so-coherent thoughts down on 'paper'.

If you can help me sort through them, that'd be cool.

The book "Trauma and Recovery" by Judith Lewis Herman (that I've mentioned in previous posts i.e. here) says that the second stage of recovery is "remembrance and mourning."  I want to recover, and so I'm looking for what I have or have not mourned from my past.  It feels strange, and it is by no means obvious to me what I've mourned.  I'm also secretly hoping I don't find anything since I don't want to "waste my time" mourning.

Mourning to me has always meant feeling bad, crying, lamenting, saying "why me," "poor me," "life is so unfair," and things like that.  I don't have any time for those emotions.  It seems outrageously self indulgent and a waste of energy.

But I also know I have been programmed to think that way.  When I was a kid, I never knew if I would come home from school and find things changed or missing.  Often, I'd show up and find my room completely rearranged, all my stuff sorted through, and a bunch of it thrown out.  I didn't mind so much when too-small clothes were pitched, but it would often be toys, old school work, souvenirs from trips or cheesy carnivals.  You know, the sort of general items kids collect as they are growing up.  Except that our collections were routinely decimated.

At first, I expressed sadness and anger when I found things missing, but this was so early in my childhood I only remember it vaguely.  When I expressed these feelings, they were shot down in one way or another, "You are too old for that toy,"  "You don't need that anymore," "Why are you upset, it's just a 'fill in blank," "Don't be upset with me, if you had put that away I wouldn't have thrown it out," "If you knew how to take care of things you could keep them."  And the classic, "Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about."

So developing attachments to anything was a bad idea.  I ended up not attaching to much stuff at all if I could help it, and the few things that really mattered to me caused me pain, since I was never certain I would be allowed to keep them.

This has had some positive coping effects.  I don't have a strong materialistic streak.  If a cup breaks, even a nice one, I'm likely to spend just a few seconds feeling sad I lost it, and then I'll shrug and think, "Well, better to use them than stare at them in a china cabinet.  And if you use them they break.  That's okay,"  I'm rarely so bound up in things that I can't see beyond to what is really important - the people.  So this is good.

What is bad is that, as I said, I am now programmed not to really mourn losses.  You lose something, you just move on.  Doesn't matter what it is, really.  With small things, as I said, that is a functional attitude.  But with big things, even medium things, you can't simply ignore it.  In my life, what I am experiencing is that if losses are not mourned in the usual course of events, my need to mourn sort of waits around to break out at a bad time, to transmute to something that does not look like mourning, or to go into my body and cause pain.

So in spite of the fact that I feel like I haven't mourned a lot of major losses in my past, as I look back, I realize I have mourned quite a bit.  I just didn't do it in good ways, for the most part.  One example is this.  After my hubby and I left a friend's house one time, I realized I'd left my favorite jacket behind.  We were on a road trip and were already two hours away.  Going back was not an option.

I was already feeling a little depressed on that trip, anyway, so I wasn't surprised that I started crying.  What surprised me was how hard I cried.  I was utterly inconsolable for an hour.  I could hardly breathe.  My hubby had to pull off the road at a restaurant and let me sit in a booth with my tea and get it out.  He was as surprised as I was, since he knew I never got that upset about losing something.  But I was devastated.

It was half way through dinner before I realized what I was actually mourning were all those lost things from my childhood.  And more, I was mourning the fact that my childhood was built of loss.  That I could never hang on to anything.  Took a while and we were able to get back on the road.  I tried to put it behind me.

Three days later I get a package - our friends had found the jacket and mailed it.  I was ecstatic.  And again, it wasn't merely because I had my jacket.  It was because this act of kindness was in such contrast to my past.  And it was an act that gave the lie to the idea that you always lost; that nothing was retrievable.  Some things do come back.  And there are some people who care about your losses.

This was almost seven years ago, and it is only now that I'm beginning to see how profound that experience was.  I have no desire at all to feel that incredible devastation again, about anything.  I certainly won't call it up intentionally.  But my eyes are open enough to realize that if I do experience it, I'm probably not upset about the present.  

So with those thoughts in mind, I'm going to take a couple more posts and consider some of the barriers to mourning, what the process can look like, and ways to help it along and keep healing.

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image credit/info: photoxpress

Healing Feels Weird

Hello Friends:

We all want to heal, of course, however we individually define that term.  But as you may know from personal experience, or the reports of a friend, healing can feel ... weird.

The post yesterday on one of the regular sites I visit for PTSD was Can We Plan for Healing PTSD?   The issue in question for that post was - healing can be strange, so how we can anticipate and plan for it so that we have a smoother transition?  This reminded me of a few things I've read recently about the out-of-kilter feelings that healing can bring.

From my perspective, this sort of parses into three different issues, which I think are all related.  The first is that healing itself feels different and therefore weird.  Nothing feels 'right' even though you may now feel 'right' for the first time.  The second issue is that fear of 'losing' the healing.  We might not know how it was we really started feeling better, anyway, so what's stopping it from going away?  Third issue is the identity crisis.  We often identify ourselves with our feelings and our experience.  So if I'm not the person feeling angsty all the time, then who am I?  

In Prozac Diary, the author Lauren Slater recounts her early experiences with the drug.  The sense of things feeling more right, and therefore 'wrong'.  She says to her doctor, "I don't feel like me.  I mean, I feel more like me in some ways and less like me in others.  I'm scared.  I'm really worried."  I resonate with that sentiment.  I now have transient times of calm and peace.  Which last until I realize I'm not worried about anything.  But that's too weird.  Feels wrong.  So even though I don't want to, I immediately spin my wheels looking for something else to worry about.  Shouldn't I worry about something?  I'm always worried about something.  Apparently I don't know how to ground myself without worry.

The 'fear of losing the healing' thing is one of my favorite anxieties.  Or at least it should be if statistics alone determined 'favorite'.  The author of the post above, from Heal My PTSD writes, "I didn’t believe this relief would last. I expected it to go away at any minute. I waited for it to abandon me."  Yep.  Whenever I am happy in any way, I have to stop and try to figure out WHY.  I need to know what caused it, and how I can keep it.  Which is folly, since nothing lasts forever, and a lot of the time there is no 'reason' we are happy.  Like any emotion which can come and go, sometimes you are happy or not and you have no idea what's going on.  Also, if you haven't been happy much, the feeling of happy is like a drug shot right in the vein.  Wow.  The need to grasp it and hang on to it is intense, and so with it the fear that it'll slip away.  Which is exactly what it does when you start obsessing about it ...

As for identity.  I've seen myself as a combination of the tortured artist who 'feels deeply' and the crazy-clever scientist who 'knows things'.  I learned how to use some of that mangled and crazy energy to produce writing and work.  Well, some of those feelings are gone now.  I just don't feel quite so drama-queen anymore.  Again to Prozac Diary, where the author asks, "Do you think (Prozac) can take away your creativity?"  I happen to think the answer to that is no - I've been plenty creative since I've been coming through this last depressive episode.  But the tenor has changed; the nature of the creative urge.  I'm not very tortured or crazy right now, and so who am I, exactly?  Tortured artist is cool.  Occasionally put-out or moderately miffed artist is not so very cool.

So this brings me to my point.  I think.  (Did I have a point?)

What I think it means (at least for me) is that there is, in fact, some grieving of past self to be done here.  Oddly, I think I'm actually sad for those parts of me I've managed to heal.  In order to make the continued journey on the healing path less scary for myself, I need to acknowledge that I need to grieve for what's gone.  For example, I need to accept that I can't be a tortured and bleeding artist at the same time I'm a balanced and mindful meditator filled with equanimity.  Doesn't mean I can't make good art anymore, but it does mean I have to find new avenues for channeling my creative energies other than a downpour of emotional screed in the form of ink on a page.  So I need to grieve that loss.  The requirement for that change.  The need for that adjustment.

But as I've said before, change is good.  I love change.  Something new and different.  I'm a little tired of constantly unearthing new things to grieve about, but I suppose the act of doing that at all is already a change for the better.

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image is 'Hand to the Ether' from Orin Zabest on flikr via Creative Commons.