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It's Supposed to Hurt

Never forget that you were wired for struggle. Never forget the lineage before you, the suffering of our ancestors. Never forget that nothing good in life comes easy. I feel awe at the terror of facing all my pain and recovering from what I can. I feel like it hurts too much and I look to something outside myself to help: reassurance from partners, new meds, more research on my diagnoses, a tourniquet of any kind. Nothing works, because it's supposed to hurt. I worry about myself. I worry I will hide from the pain and it will haunt me forever and I will never get better. But that's just a choice that I could make that I won't. Because I'm wired for struggle and I was born to get better. Bring on the hurt.

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Self Dx

Don't demand professional diagnosis. Professional diagnoses are fallible and often inaccessible. Demanding them in order to believe mentally ill people are valid gives the voice of the mentally ill to the mental health system and leaves us all silenced. Self-diagnosis can be a powerful tool, just like a professional diagnosis. Even when our diagnoses are mistaken, they can provide stepping stones to more accurate lenses through which to view our recoveries. We are not our diagnoses. We are friends in recovery. Have compassion and view others who suffer with charity. Why be a gatekeeper for your community when you can be a greeter?

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Paralysis

I just can't do anything lately. A few off days and a fight with my lover and somehow my brain has just gone offline. Retreating to books and many naps. Learning to read tarot cards. Biding my time until I can move again.

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Why do we knock on wood?

Chances are you’ve knocked on wood in the past week. But, really, why? Here’s one origin story:

Knocking on wood is thought to come from the folklore of the ancient Indo-Europeans, or possibly people who predated them, who believed that trees were home to various spirits.  

Touching a tree would invoke the protection or blessing of the spirit within.

And somehow, this tradition has survived long after belief in these spirits had faded away.

What are some other origin stories of knocking on wood that you’ve heard?

From the TED-Ed Lesson Where do superstitions come from? - Stuart Vyse

Animation by TED-Ed & @jefflebars

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Trust

Though at times the divine winds take me, 

and bring me where I do not know, 

I trust in the nature of the course. 

There is an intuition born of this trust, 

this real trust, the kind which words could never imbue with true likeness. 

A faith in being, 

devout and self-driven, 

authenticated by the highest principles of becoming 

in nature and heaven alike, hover over it. 

Green past overbearing like green that was known before, 

it shows itself in faith and due time 

as it ripens in the sun.

-Jerry Harris III

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Asking you to be gentle with my triggers, from years of abuse, until I can overcome my fears and panic and control my symptoms is not making you tiptoe around my “insecurities”…

and expecting me to overcome my triggers it in a couple of months is unreasonable and down right evil

[maybegrayblog-blog]

How to Be Nice?

Non-violent communication is pretty popular in the therapy community. The premise is that it can be very helpful to communicate without (using or hearing) blaming or criticizing. Blaming or criticizing or assuming others are blaming or criticizing you is a violent and ineffective way to communicate.

The solution, as non-violent communication puts it, is to use language that clearly communicates your feelings (or emphatically accepts another’s) without implying (or inferring) blame or criticism. I would love to make use of this proposed solution to promote harmony and understanding in my relationships.

However, I am encountering a difficulty that for me makes non-violent communication feel inherently triggering. I am a trauma victim and many of my abusers have both used reactive, violent, demanding language with me and demanded that I refrain from that kind of behaviour or else suffer even more severe neglect or abuse. (To some extent I note that anybody might do this simply out of imperfection, however, in my past relationships this behaviour was an established pattern with a real goal of shaming or changing my behaviour). Now, even though I have a much healthier partner who is much more trustworthy, I feel triggered when I try or am asked to try to use non-violent expression.

So I have an Ask about Self-care for this Mental Health Month- how can I be self-motivated to improve my behaviours without triggering learned feelings of shame and anger?

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Self Care Struggles

Today I took more than I was proud of to soothe the feelings of shame. I skipped the jog I was planning and had a nap. I hunted food and gathered it from a drive through window to survive. I would have loved to have had a schedule but I just would have had to fill it with uncontrollable crying, and that's not much of a schedule then, anyway. I am not neurotypical. I am not emotionally typical. I am not behaviourally typical. I do not have a typical personality or a typical soul, and typically, I would probably be labelled 'dysfunctional'. But maybe I'm just diff-functional, like I work different than most people do (not less, not worse). Maybe I'm diss-functional like there is some sort of beautiful, physical logic, to the way my body manifested my dissociative symptoms to cope with trauma in a way it thought it could protect me. Maybe I'm this-functional like this is how functional I am today, on this step of my recovery, and it is not permanent and it does not define me. Thank you so much to all the neurodivergent people living loudly who help me have the courage to accept myself for however functional I am.

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A Note To My Lover At Work

I don’t feel so good and I noticed both the feeling and some resistance to it, like it was being kept at a tolerable but noticeable level.

I know you like the sensations (hungry, achy hands, pain in my back, heavy down the front of my body from my third eye to my root) but I like labelling emotions and I feel lonely. At first I thought I must be carrying things over from yesterday and I should make myself meditate so I could fix the loneliness and be more healthy and productive.

But then that all felt so out-of-scarcity to me. No no! Don’t feel lonely! Don’t skip your morning release! Don’t smoke! Don’t forget your chores! Don’t masturbate! Don’t zone out and do nothing! Don’t be lazy! Don’t stop getting better! Don’t stop doing your best! Don’t waste time! Don’t let him come home to you feeling like this!

So now I’ve decided that maybe I’m just going to be lazy and lonely and watch with curiosity all the silly little things I do to resist being alone and being sad and not feeling good enough. And that makes me cry.

I feel like I don’t deserve the compassion I’m trying to give myself. I wish I was just better and it’s making me angry that I still love me anyway because I want me to just force myself to be better but I know I can’t. My own love feels alien and threatening and I can feel myself waiting with compassion to trust myself. I feel myself accepting the pain and the lashing out at myself and the confusion and the static. It’s hard and scary to be either of us but we both feel grateful for each other.

I miss you.

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Smart Work as Oxymoron

Questions from the third Chapter of Eric Maisel’s Why Smart People Hurt-

1. Can work ever be meaningful? If so, what do you suspect are the necessary conditions for work to provoke the psychological experience of meaning?

I have often found meaning in work. I may be speaking from my own value-based position and not universally but I think the sole criteria for me to find the psychological experience of meaning is a practice of compassion. I could find any work meaningful that I found to be compassionate, to generally ease rather than increase the suffering in the world, to help, even in some small way even a small number of people. Work that was not compassionate or worse, cruel, would feel meaningless to me.

2. What work have you found meaningful?

Most consistently, when I was a philosophy student in the first two years of university, I felt that I was expanding my consciousness and contemplating things of true importance to the world (well, sometimes at least). This provoked for me a profound sense of meaning. 

I have always found performing and volunteering to be meaningful in the way they allowed me to share with my community. I love doing commissioned artwork that will enrich the life of the recipient in a personal way. I love providing emotional support. I love helping someone deliver their personal message in a strong, relatable way.

3. Since much of the work in the service of meaning, like licking envelopes for a good cause, how do you intend to treat boring work accomplished in the service of meaning?

First of all, it would be fanciful to believe that any work is never boring. 

Second, I wonder if personally, I just haven’t struggled much with this yet. I am quite happy to be part of a volunteer assembly line, a call centre agent, a popcorn server, you name it, in service of something meaningful to me. Maybe I’m just a service animal. Maybe I just spent years doing “intersting” work that felt boring and meaningless to me and now doing “boring” work interests me because I get to explore psychological experiences like presence and meaning which are at least as enriching as excitement. 

Ultimately, for those who feel like you are on the losing end of a compromise in your search to do compassionate work, I would advice DEMANDING balance. At the expense of your income, at the expense of what people think of you, at the expense of what you think you can handle. Introspect, decide what your needs are without regard for what’s realistic and then demand it before you get the chance to change your mind. Force yourself to be free. You’ll thank yourself, no matter how hard things get.

4. What new work might constitute a meaning opportunity?

It feels like the possibilities are absolutely limitless. There is so much need in the world. There is so much need in me. I don’t even know where to start.

5. What loves from your childhood might be turned into contemporary meaningful work?

Everything art. It was dangerous to express my emotions as a child and doing it through art was an escape my parents were never able to squelch in me. I especially love any kind of performance art. I have very little stage fright.

Everything reading, everything learning. Being a little mensa kid (most notably to my parents, in hindsight my aspie nature would be most notable to me), my parents were delighted and provided what seemed at the time like endless educational support. I was always allowed to read and take classes I wanted to take. Until I got older. But it was great while it lasted.

Dancing. I danced for eight years and quit because I wasn’t able to grieve my Dad’s brother’s death. I miss it.

Compassionate communication. I have always been keenly empathetic and eloquent and enjoyed those qualities about myself.

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I need to read this book

Reading about abusive men and the way they think. Very unsettling and an incredible book so far. Here are my very professional notes.

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Smart People Hurt

by Eric Maisel A book I'm reading (read: nerding out on). It was a fourth anniversary gift from my then-boyfriend, a Masters student in Mechanical Engineering. I am reading it now for therapy. The introduction has Chapter Questions 1. What are your first thoughts about the challenges I've identified and how they do or do not apply to you? Maisel talks a lot about the challenges facing different types of gifted children. I fit the stereotype of the gifted child of a gifted family who was identified/labeled immediately. I also relate to his hypothesis that my comorbid mental illnesses could be more simply described as an acute meaning crisis or a feeling of hyperawareness of unbelonging in the universe. 2. Do you agree that a smart person is at a greater risk for meaning crises? I find this to be a difficult question. A meaning crisis is how Maisel describes emotional disease caused by a lack of the subjective experience of meaning and/or the belief that culture/nature is not designed to meet needs for meaningfulness. Therefore, the most charitable I would be with the assertion in question would be to concede that a more intelligent person would be much more likely to recognize a meaning crisis for what it is rather than externalizing the problem or developing physical manifestations due to repression. 3. How do you interpret the phrase "value-based meaning-making"? Making meaning is contrasted to seeking meaning; it represents a paradigm shift from believing that meaning needs to be found to believing that meaning needs to be recognized or created. My preferred description of values draws on Jungian psychology. Jung would suggest that in infancy we create the labels "good" and "bad" to conform to and navigate the world. Values are our highest personal goods (our aversions representing our most loathed personal ills). Therefore value-based meaning-making describes the practices of cultivating meaningful experiences in accordance with your highest personal goods. 4. Since meaning is primarily a subjective experience, what do you suppose you can do to create more of it for yourself? I have found that reconnecting with my body and being mindful of physical sensations helps me to identify activities that authentically accord with my values. I find this to be more effective than the top-down method of introspection. 5. How might the very idea of meaning that you create help you deal with meaning crises? I have found it very comforting to revise my concept of meaning to be much more fluid. I understand meaning more as an aspect of well-being to be experienced rather than some objective truth to be discovered or understood.

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The Days I Don't Write

I am terrible at getting into any sort of routine. I'm working on it but there is some sort of terrible resistance to it ever since I've gotten sick. Maybe it's part of living as a system and constantly juggling the totally separate needs and motivations of four different people. Maybe it's part of having c-ptsd and I haven't recovered enough yet to cognitively handle my own timetable. Maybe it's still challenging for me because I'm coming from a place of desperation. I suffer enormous self-judgement about the way I spend my days. I hate the lack of intentionality and awareness I feel when my days are shattered into fragments of dissociation, emotional deregulation, suppression, repression, depression. I would love advice. How can I get back to having morning and evening hygiene routines, productive and leisure activities, a nutrition and fitness routine, a daily focus for my therapy? How do I stop just riding it out and start taking back some control? Help me. Help the four of us.

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Today I

went to therapy went for brunch cleaned my house did my dishes purged my clothes to swap with friends went through my finances booked an appointment to fix the wipers on my car emailed art samples for a job I'm applying for ordered in dinner skyped with a friend I hope that's good enough.

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Rate My Trauma

I have therapy tomorrow morning and for the first time, my trauma symptoms are going to be reassessed.

I remember it like it was a week ago (it was). My last therapy session was wrapping up and I told my therapist that, although I was struggling with a lack of support from my family, I was doing better behaviourally and in my relationship than I had in a long time. I was happy, she was happy for me, and she told me that in our next session she would have me do some more paperwork to check in on my symptoms. Great. Sounds fine.

I even remarked later to a partner about how this would be the first time I had ever *not* been terrified be reassessments. The trauma centre is different, I tell him, and I trust them not to reduce my services if I start doing better. So this time I definitely won’t subconsciously self-sabotage my recovery over it this time.

Well not until the day before I guess. Now I’ve convinced myself all the things I said last week about how I wasn’t going to let my parents’ judgement hold me back. Today I feel restless and depressed and suicidal and low and a part of me laughs knowing I thought this wasn’t going to happen.

I will try to let my mind rest as the one who laughs. I will try to see this aching as being funny and fleeting just like the happiness was. I will try to be here fully for myself while my subconscious tries to hurt me in its bizarre attempt to keep me safe. Love you, my weird self. Feel better xoxo

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The Perils of Happiness

The last couple of days have been terrifyingly happy. Happiness is pretty foreign territory to me. I would say that during my childhood I found myself disconnected from the things that made me feel happy because they were not "good". Being "good" was more important than being happy, because I needed my parents to love me to keep me alive and being happy was dangerous if it was "misbehaviour" which risked their affections. In platonic and romantic relationships throughout my life, from severely unhealthy to relatively (if not exceptionally) healthy, I have repeated this pattern. I have confused praise and acceptance for happiness and self-worth. My earliest memories of being happy, by the way, were moments where I was full of pride in my ideas, my emotions, myself. I remember being called "stuck up", "bossy", "obsessive" and "naive" and thus developed fear of having self esteem, being assertive, having passions and trying new things. My earliest memories of self-love trigger my earliest memories of judgement and abandonment. Especially as I became an adolescent and a young adult, pleasure was replaced by the anticipation of pain. Pain, in comparison, felt stable. Safe and familiar and functional and low. I suffered an extreme fear of emotional heights. I imagine it's unsurprising that developing a resistance to positive sensations on top of our evolutionary aversion to negative sensations created an exhausting, distressing and ultimately suicidal downward spiral. I have endured many treatments and continue to focus my life pretty entirely on a number of therapies. One of which has specifically addressed and challenged the tendency I share with many others to resist emotions, even those that are "positive". I have been studying a spiritual transformation program by a Swiss pick up artist. Yeah, sounds like a bad idea. Even worse when I mention that it's Julien Blanc, whose career exploded in a sexist media scandal. But Jesus Christ, the son of God, was just a man too, and Julien Blanc puts out his content in videos using millennial slang so I don't have to navigate a respectable spiritual text. I digress. It is very common due to the trauma inherent to childhood that many of us harbour a subconscious sort of shame. A limiting self-concept that whispers "you don't deserve what you want." So, although consciously you may allow yourself to set goals and progress towards them, there may appear to be a sort of spiritual asymptote. A level of well-being you will approach without accepting that you will sabotage if it gets too near. Blanc describes his as the "struggling artist" who needs to be lost and miserable to be relevant. I dreamed since I was a little girl of being the "damsel in distress" who needs to be saved by some outside force because she is helpless to change her own lot in life. In order to break our dependence on these self-concepts, we need to embark on a journey of radical self-acceptance so we can endure a greater level of well-being without feelings of shame or guilt. Today I got to model. I had my hair and makeup done and I posed naked and in lingerie and felt beautiful and amazing and safe and passionate. I was collaborating as an artist. I'm an amateur, so I haven't gotten paid yet, but it's worth it just to open up more opportunities. My partner is seeing a trauma therapist while I sit and write this in the coffee shop next door. He goes there as a caregiver because he loves me, and they teach him how to help me with my recovery. He is an incredible listener, an incredible learner, and we have a deeply meaningful spiritual connection. We have a relationship that is committed and loving and deliberate, yet still respects our polyamorous sexualities and my bisexual orientation. It excites me to be in a place in my life where I have so many things I never let myself hope for and the possibilities for adventure and passion and growth in my future seem to stretch out endlessly. And I am so happy. I am so happy about who I am and what I am doing with my life right now and the courage I have found in myself. I am in love with my partner and I am giddy about new connections I am making in this new life he and I share together. I am so happy to be young and undergoing a spiritual awakening and remembering and openness and humbleness about myself with which I can face this adversity with more grace. I am so excited to be seeing myself more clearly, even if I don't always look better for it. It wasn't that uncomfortable to write that. I remember a time when it would have been. A time when any self-affirmation felt forced and the idea of liking myself from a place that was authentic seemed impossible. So I see that I have grown. But there's a strange nagging feeling now when I am being photographed in perfect lighting in a hand-bra or when my DMs are unanimous that I'm a "total babe" or when I'm feeling Iike maybe things are going to be more than ok, more like amazing. When reality starts to double down on my newfound self-esteem it makes me woozy. The nagging feeling says "you can't maintain this", "you didn't earn this", "they will see through you and they will take the love away", "you will lose something and without it, you will not be enough." And so even as I am so extra-terrestrially happy, I am worried about how I am taking time off to do trauma therapy instead of getting a job right out of leaving university. I am worried about if maybe my diet has been not great and I'm not so active since it's been winter and what if maybe I gain weight soon. I am worried about what I smoke and what I drink and what I buy and what I do today and what I plan for later. I am worried when I'm tired. I'm worried when I'm horny. I'm worried when I'm not. I am looking to make myself wrong. I am looking for the pin that will pop my happy balloon this time. Because there has always been a pin, and I have always tried to find it. And of course there is a pin coming. I am not experiencing anything at 23 years old that is going to be so enlightening and transformative that I land myself in a state of permanent transcendental bliss. Thank god, because it would make me totally not relatable. I am going to be happy for a while because I am breaking patterns that held me back and I am seeing new heights and I am daring to experience them as fully as I can. I am daring to let the worries go as quickly as they come and return to my childish, giddy, arrogant, joy. I am daring to know there is a pin and not look out to brace myself for it. Happiness takes balls, friends. Be brave with me.

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Distress Tolerance for Triggers

Letting triggers happen means letting them last so much fucking longer and hurt so much fucking worse.

“The only way out is all the way through.”

I’m supposed to try to accept the feelings at their fullest without trying to resist or fix or change or understand them. They say feelings get locked in your body when you repress or suppress trauma but they want to be re-experienced and released and your body will help you do that if you let it.

The process is self-compassionate as much as it is hellish so that skill is being built up very well. And meditative. Still waiting a bit to see if distress tolerance will turn out to be more effective than, for example, meds (which I’m not on) and talk therapy (which I do have).

It is very painful. My stomach locks completely and my hips clamp shut and my hands lose control and I scream. I feel shame and panic and rage and grief and fear and suicidality. This time I could still control my feet and that comforted me so I pedalled my feet to help me through the rest of my body shutting down.

And then I hit false walls of numbness that if I tap in the right place the break back into the waves of pain. Gotta do that or something irl will and you don’t want to continue this panic at this intensity mid-conversation later today.

I couldn’t do anymore and asked for my weighted blanket because I wanted a real calm not like the false ones and now I am ok except I feel like I was in a car wreck.

It has taken many years and many different psychiatrists and psychologists to convince me to accept that distress tolerance was an important treatment for my triggers. Because it is so painful as to be unacceptable. My body says “this amount of pain can’t possibly be tolerable to her” and sends me urges and thoughts to end it. I have been trained, finally, to just do it anyway because I lost everything I cared about in my old life. My university boyfriend, my university degree, my university aspirations and expectations and praise, all gone.

I lost the things I had believed were going to fix how I felt. I couldn’t save any of them in the end, and if I could have, it wouldn’t have helped. Now, there’s just my life left to be saved, and all the things I meant to save it with are lost, so I guess this is about my last shot. Probably the only real shot I’ve taken, too, honestly. Honestly, and alone, because inner monsters can’t be faced with our sidekicks.

Recovery takes completely embracing the version of yourself you are most afraid of and least proud of and it’s terrifying and I wish someone had given me permission because I took almost five years to give it to myself. These feelings are the ones that you pool in the bottom of your stomach where your brain won’t think to look for them. Distress Tolerance is about accepting that you feel them, even if it feels horrible, so that you can let it go.

It seems like there’s no other way out, or frankly, I’d take it.