#I don’t get why this episode is so intensely somatic

[prozach27]

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[traumasurvivorshelpingsurvivors]

Tw - about flashbacks and SA and little details of SA

Looking for: opinions but also just venting.

Call me Jaguar.

I don’t even know WHAT SOME OF MY TRIGGERS ARE!!! I LEGIT HAVE TO GUESS. I think certain things revolving around night time had triggered a certain somatic flashback before so I try to make sure to avoid what I think triggered me?

I haven’t had that particular flashback in awhile so maybe I can self trigger and see if it is what I think it is… I’m scared thinking about experiencing it again but I wanna see…

I can’t pin triggers at all. Never know where it comes from, some triggers are obvious like seeing abusers in person.

Some episodes I get idk what they are or if they’re just depressive/other episodes. Like I can get into intense depressive episodes that make me feel odd emotions I can’t describe. Idk where they come from or why they’re there. It’s like an intense sadness mixed with feeling dissociated and out of place, gross, in a way. Idk what this even is!

There are flashbacks I haven’t had in a long time and I’m really trying to figure out was it even a flashback? Why did they show up and why haven’t I seen them in a while? I was told it was a somatic one because of the SA hallucinations and how real they were on my body… the things I felt were obviously SA I thought someone was in bed with me but nobody was. One of those flashbacks was SA of vaginal somatic experiences…

…Was I triggered by thinking about the trauma memory from my childhood? Bc it was on my mind at the time the somatic flashback hit me and I was contemplating certain details from the memory…I typically avoid all memories even though they intrude on me.m but it had me thinking…

was I triggered by certain things revolving around night time? Bc I am avoiding those things atm in case it is. I think certain things about night time trigger me so I don’t go near it.

But I seem to have no experienced particular flashbacks in awhile?

I had to rearrange my room and do so many things differently at night to not feel so depressed or awful which has helped with bad episodes like that.

I really don’t know what these experiences even are. I don’t know how to label them. Or if it’s just a type of depression, Idk…

Hey Jaguar,

Please know that it's normal to not fully know what your triggers are. Sometimes our brains will recognize something as a threat that, on a conscious level, we aren't even aware of. While it can be helpful to try and figure out what your triggers are, self triggering is a dangerous way to go about this.

It's possible that the sudden onset of intense emotions could be an emotional flashback, which can be described as a rush of intense emotions related to a past traumatic event that occur without any visual memories or images. Alternatively, experiencing a flashback in which you can physically feel certain sensations related to the traumatic memory can be a somatic or sensory flashback. It's important to distinguish this from a hallucination because a hallucination is typically a perception of something that is not present in reality, while a flashback is a vivid and involuntary recollection of a past event or experience. There is some overlap, but I think that distinguishing flashbacks from hallucinations can be validating.

It's possible that things such as thinking about traumatic childhood memories or certain things about nighttime could've influenced being triggered at that time, but it's ultimately up to you to make that determination.

If you can access or afford it, a mental health professional such as a therapist can help explore your trauma in a safe and controlled setting, as well as navigate these flashbacks and collaborate with you to construct some healthy coping mechanisms that you can take with you along your healing journey. In the meantime, I do hope that I could help name some of your experiences, and please know that we're here for you if you need anything.

-Bun

[aanlaiias-s]

affective structure is what points the attribution into already-distributed directions

affective structure of racism, for instance : irritability turned out from the white subject and dumped onto a racialized subject, through whom the bad affect may be vented without any risk of damaging a circuit of social exchange — dissociative structure of racism?  — yet irritability, at once crawling over the surface of the skin and coloring an outlook on everything, seems like a switchpoint where embodied sensitivity and something like a psychic disposition cross over one another, multiply or amplify or keep one another in equilibrium — so in that sense we shouldn’t jump too quickly to an operating concept of dissociation as a withdrawal of psyche from sensorium — a retreat into fantasy as that which frames (and thereby cuts off) the flux of sensation — rather, given that irritability hovers/bleeds from organic (nervous) response to perspective or psychic attitude, as a form of dissociation it actually depends on the association of one with the other —

anyway i’m thinking about irritability / irritation vis-a-vis euphoria through Kierkegaard (canonical bedfellow with Schopenhauer) — the state of euphoria can switch over into a scene of irritation — its fragility is the impossible / inevitable consequence of the speculative endlessness projected by the buoyancy it lets the body believe will last forever — until the bubble bursts euphoria rules irritation out — any possible irritant is absorbed seamlessly into the overall effortlessness of doing anything — it’s an attitude or mood that saturates everything one sees, everyone one may run into, any issue that may arise — yet for Kierkegaard it’s this infinitizing mood that makes the state of euphoria vulnerable — because when something does go wrong the unhappiness-cause (as Ahmed would put it) cascades and can wreck everything — a wedge / leak of irritation can blossom into dysphoria — something in your eye can make the asymptomatic cloud of good health (all body processes aligning) dissipate

it seems as though, unlike the abrupt/awkward/disjunctive interface of the tactile and the attitudinal in irritability (thus a switchpoint), the state of euphoria is one that dissolves the interface — each touch is immediately a pleasure or it doesn’t impart any pressure at all because you’re flowing and streaming through the world with such minimal resistance — a cross-dissolving

it’s perhaps the susceptibility of euphoria to collapse (ruin, crash, offloading, panic, cascading divestment of the body’s ease in relating to the world as something nobody needs to possess) that differentiates it from happiness — not just because euphoria is a more extreme version of happiness (though perhaps we can see an inherent fragility in happiness too, its minimal difference from being ok — but it’s not as dramatic, more ordinary — though maybe euphoria isn’t so drastically set off either — it can be ordinary in the way an episode is ordinary — esp. if you like getting high) — but also because that extremity is posed as an excess or inflation — feeling too good — over-optimism, over-confidence — happiness corresponds to a sort of reconciled finitude, whereas euphoria infinitizes that relation and takes its idealizing tendency (which can bypass fantasy, sometimes, it feels so good) past the reality of the situation and thus lapses into unreality — maybe happiness and euphoria are on a sort of spectrum — but how can a spectrum run from the finite to the infinite? their magnitude is different, or we should say that one can be sized up and the other can’t, exactly

just to squeeze one last drop out of this passage: intensification as accumulation of intensity — again, this would suggest that we can see euphoria as the accumulation of happiness — if it’s just an intensification of it — but it’s more like where happiness goes wild, goes off the rails, comes ungrounded — and thus no longer feels happiness as an accumulated disposition, but just something that radiates from everything or suffuses the flow that puts one in everything — i think i’m interested in that always displaced threshold : between the finite and infinite, a non-space / not a liminal space because it’s as if there’s no in-between — yet, in an ordinary way, euphoria pulses into happiness as an episode of unconditionality —

on foxy Rue says “I’m so happy” — she cries happy tears, which are also cosmetic affects: scintillating glitter -- as if in their sheen (Renu Bora) the tears betray the gravitas of her underlying depression — pathos — i’m skeptical of that reading, though — in part because it tries to get out before it’s too late — that is, prematurely — as if to say: not to burst your bubble but this is actually really sad — this plays out formally in a really graphic way — Rue evicted from the scene by overdose, spewed out of the entactogenic seclusion and slumped into a numb, cold dissociation — blanket of intimacy ripped off — to restore that condition i think fails to take the episode seriously as a narrative/affective enclosure — or rather it’s necessary but it’s important not to just read the immediate boundaries of the vignette but also to look back to Rue’s fantasy / premonition about what taking foxy would be like — notably, though, she doesn’t anticipate happiness — Jules and Rue don’t take the drug to find happiness, they just think it’s cool —

anyway the point of bringing this scene up here is to say that the lightened bearability of a euphoric sensorium in some ways puts it on a spectrum with happiness — such that Rue can say “I’m so happy” — to name the feeling as happiness — when it seems like it’s something else — namely euphoria — which is also the moment getting overcoded by the name of the show, awkwardly — like when they say the movie title in the movie —

yet saying “I’m so happy” (I’m dwelling on this bc Ahmed talks about the  normative transparency and queer opacity of self-reported affect) in that moment is not really an index of a feeling — it’s not really naming what she’s feeling but rather is a substitute or approximation for something she doesn’t even need to say — the ineffability of a euphoric state — (also skeptical of this, btw, but…) — this sort of ineffability is represented in the scene by inarticulacy — nose to nose, Rue and Jules feel each other’s faces and coo “whoa” — as if preverbal (fitting with the thing about queer infinitude — felt as / filtered through / running away from maternal love for infinite plasticity) — and sort of infantile (the blanket tent) — “I’m so happy” is where happiness and euphoria converge, but it’s also where language fails or melts into affective/oral/tactile goo — gushes, without feeling possible insincerity — so fitting that it ends in abjection of vomiting, sure, (too much milk, cloying pleasure) — the abjection of vomiting and the induction of voiceover (acousmatic orality: abstract, at a narrative remove, in a non-scene, an unexposed voice) but also how euphoria separates the senses from a fantasy of happiness — how it recedes from language / the symbolic order of moral/medical consequentialism — recedes into what though? — it’s not enough to say “flux” (infinite plasticity, which is actually no longer plasticity because no form takes), it’s not enough to say polymorphous narcissism swap, it’s not enough to say the senses — maybe in reaching for ineffability i’m reaching for a negative theology — but euphoria isn’t ecstasy — it’s a somatic / neurochemical effect — it’s a phenomenological texture, maybe — or more precisely the texxture of shine, which alludes to texturelessness, unconditionality — in other words what’s important is the effect-as-effect — a technically produced, designed state — a special effect, an effect that makes the moment feel special — this is why i’m interested in Ngai’s gimmick book, i guess — also why i’m interested in ASMR

[phroyd]

A Little Late,  but, ... whatever! - Phroyd

There is this rare thing that will happen in the universe on June 19, when Mercury and Mars oppose Pluto on the same day. According to VICE senior astrologer Annabel Gat, this means we’ll be susceptible to a lot of fighting, power struggles, and generally catastrophic energy—and it could be the worst so far this year, if we're not prepared.

“There are going to be lots of fights breaking out, huge egos, jealousy. It’s going to be all the treacherous drama in Game of Thrones, multiplied by 20. Just imagine everything is extremely confrontational,” Gat says. “Mercury rules the mind and communication, and it’s all about negotiating. Mars is all about taking action, and it’s also the planet of war. Pluto can do both those things to an even higher degree...It’s an overwhelming energy.” In other words: If Mars is a fist-to-fist bar fight, Pluto is the astrological equivalent of nuclear warfare.

Adding to that, emotions have been building through last week and into the full moon Monday: hopes have been dashed, and people have been paranoid or too trusting, she says. Jupiter’s square to Neptune, compounded by Mercury opposing Saturn, brought heaps of rejection and gloomy energy on Sunday. June 19 brings a critical climax with “the moon in Capricorn opposing Mars and Mercury and meeting with Pluto, making emotions especially heightened.”

Rather than sit back and fall victim to whatever pandemonium awaits, or worse—relive those last few episodes of GOT—I asked Gat for tips for all of us on how to prepare for this terrible cosmic weather.

1. Be on high alert during rush hour

Whether you’re on a train or bus, or driving during the morning rush, be aware that the aggressive energy around you could lead to higher-than-usual tension. Think: road rage, people snapping at each other. “The commute is time when people’s tempers are set off very easily,” Gat says.

Along those lines, leaving early will do you some good. If you’re not in a rush, you’re less likely to be the person on edge and you won’t have to worry about delays from the chaos around you. If you have the option to work from home, this would be a great day for that!

2. Avoid your usual caffeine fix

This is a day to calm yourself down, not psych yourself up. “Do your best to stay chill during everyday interactions—that [could] mean swapping out your coffee for chamomile tea,” Gat says. (That said, if you’re a person who is cranky without caffeine, leave enough time to brew a cup so you start your day on the right foot!)

If you want to take that a step further surround yourself with calming scents, like lavender—if you can’t burn a candle, perfume works. This wouldn’t be a bad week to try some meditation, or learn some breathing exercises (one called “resonant breathing,” which has been recommended to veterans and survivors of genocides and natural disasters, takes just a few minutes to learn).

3. Hang out in threes

Having a third party present can be useful for keeping things in check when tempers flare. “When you’re arguing with someone, what they’ll say to you will be different based on whether you’re alone or if a teacher, parent, or boss is watching,” Gat says. “Make sure someone is watching.”

Just make sure that third party is someone who will make things better, not worse. “The best way to deal with Pluto problems is to bring in...an unbiased third party who can help mediate. The worst way to deal with Pluto problems is to cheat on someone or have secrets,” she says. And if no one else is around, “ask yourself what you would do if a parent that you really respect, or your hero, was in the room.”

4. Turn your revenge fantasy into a success fantasy

If you’re feeling an impulse to get back at someone on June 19, remember that revenge is almost always better in your imagination. If you can’t shake the impulse, however, lean toward a healthier version of it.

When they say, “‘Success is the best revenge,’ there’s still a lot of ego behind it,” Gat says. “But it’s a better place to lean into than, ‘I’m going to ruin your life.’” So if you’re feeling fixated with the day’s “relentless energy,” consider channeling that energy toward your own passions and healthy obsessions; tackle some research and let that energy propel you in the direction you’re going with those things.

5. Pick your battles, or at least delay them

It’s generally good practice to pick your fights, but we all have those moments when things that have been building up to be released. Wednesday is not the day for that. If you can’t hold back, save it for Thursday at least—then if you’re still moved to say something, you won’t be as relentless about it.

“Whenever you see Pluto, you always have to worry. Opposition means we can’t avoid things anymore. Mercury has a mouth, and Mars wants to pick fights,” Gat says. You may find you will be “clinging to your ego, refusing to surrender to change. The worst qualities in people can come out—jealousy, obsession, possessiveness and manipulation.”

6. Give yourself permission to be a little fake, just for a day

“Be smart about the battles you pick. You might have to be fake-nice to someone,” Gat says. So you may have to tell a little white lie, or smile at someone even if it’s through gritted teeth. This “might be really inauthentic for you on any other day, but [on June 19] you have to do the right thing in terms of your own sanity, and to keep everyone else safe, too,” she says.

If you can’t bring yourself to pretend, try to practice some compassionate communication. Remember: everyone has the capacity to blow up, even if you’re the most laid-back person you know. “No one is safe from this—we all have the capacity to blow up at each other,” Gat says. “It’s all about learning patience, being able to breath through things, and not acting on impulse.”

7. Write down your amazing comebacks, then maybe burn them

Carry a notebook around or have your phone handy to jot things down privately before saying something out loud that you may regret—especially with comebacks that feel justified in the moment. “Mercury is the planet of the mind and it’s currently in Cancer, which is a sign we think of as being really intuitive, but it doesn’t know the best way to ask for what it wants because has been in opposition with Saturn, the planet of restriction, this month,” Gat says. That means “there have been a lot of blocks around communication, and we haven’t been feeling as heard as we usually do,” and if we’ve been carrying something around in our minds we’ll want to just say them.

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But the energy is very impulsive, so if you are going to give someone a piece of your mind, you may as well do it after you’ve thoroughly thought your perspective over (and when the astrological weather is more conducive for problem solving). Then, if you revisit those written thoughts another day, you may find they’re more harsh than you intended. You can also get a lot off your chest by unleashing all your anger out in a letter—and then safely burning it or ripping it up, Gat says.

8. Remember that your intentions don’t always translate

When it comes to communication, we often get hung up on the intentions behind our messages instead of the way they are received. Gat reminds us that during this intense day, lashing out for any reason—even in self-defense—isn’t going to produce desirable results.

“Mars is the planet of action and of war, and Cancer is the sign of the crab, which has a hard shell as its armor. Mars in Cancer has a lot to do with protection and safety, so when it’s opposing the planet of the underworld, Pluto, we really feel we have to protect ourselves,” she says. We may lash out, thinking we’re defending ourselves, not realizing it’s also offensive. We lash out for our own safety but it may not be solving any problems or getting you the closure or result you desire.”

9. Pre-empt miscommunications in bed by setting ground rules

If you don’t already have a safe word with your partner(s), Gat advises that you set them now. Establishing boundaries in advance gives you both the tools to avoid crossing them during sex. She notes that, “if you haven’t been getting what you want in bed due to not knowing how to ask, you will definitely reach your breaking point and will feel pushed to figure out how to request what you have been craving.”

10. Take your anger out on inanimate objects

Sometimes anger just needs an outlet. Luckily, those outlets exist. You could try renting a rage room, or if you have something you can safely smash with a hammer or an isolated place you can go to do some primal screaming, this is the day to do it, Gat says. “Anger has a real place in the world [and] in our lives. But let’s not get into silly fights on the commute, or destroy a relationship over ego.”

In the book "Trauma and the Body,” somatic psychologist Pat Ogden cites a technique where you push against a wall with all your might to release aggression. But if all else fails, a traditional punching bag could work, too.

11. Look for happy, productive endings

“Pluto is the planet of death and transformation and Mars rules knives and swords,” Gat says. “It’s all about severing things, so things are getting cut off.” This could mean an extremely dramatic urge to quit your job, or breakup with lovers or friends; but instead of having a soul-crushing confrontation, why not save it for a calmer day and purge your belongings instead? Get rid of stuff you no longer need, or in Gat’s words, “use the energy of endings for your benefit.

If you’ve thought it over and you really are ready to say goodbye to a person or situation, however, watch out for manipulations and power plays. “If you dump someone on this day in the hopes that they’ll try to win you back because you are testing them, you won’t be in luck!”

The good news is, Mercury only opposes Pluto once a year, and Mars only opposes it once every two years. But Gat warns we are also approaching eclipse season, which will “bring even more shocks and shake ups, as secrets are revealed and changes in power take place,” so there is more turbulence to come (hello, Mercury retrograde on July 7!).

Phroyd

[bloom-agreste-cheng]

This is a dark headcanon but I find it interesting and I wanna play with it a little and give it my own take with a bit of light but maybe slightly triggering twist. I had a slightly different headcanon if I may. And I may. Before I actually watched season 3 over 10 years ago, I had a flawed understanding of Enchantix; that you’d pay a price after earning Enchantix. As in once you earn your Enchantix, you also lose something else or you pay for your sacrifice through pain, either physical or psychological. Sometimes it can be cured by fairy dust, sometimes not. Magic can be flimsy like that. This is why I was excited to read this headcanon because now I finally know how the other Winx would pay for their sacrifices.

Like I said I had a different understanding of Enchantix and I haven’t watched season 3 or read anything about Season 3 (I was barely into season 1 when season 3 and the 1st movie came out so 😜 and in French we have these pink books called Bibliothèque Rose which told certain episodes of Winx Club in novel format for new readers) so I assumed Aisha made a terrible sacrifice for Ligea that nearly cost her life. Thankfully she came out of the water and boom! Enchantix. Except once she finished transforming, she was blind. Obviously, they went to Faragonda afterwards to see if anything could be done. Faragonda hoped fairy dust would work so she bullshitted that answer. Thankfully it worked because it didn’t for her.

After that I assumed that’s what happens to each Winx. Obviously I was wrong but I liked this so I wanted to expanding more on the “price of Enchantix.”

For Stella, I want her price to be related to the fight involving the dragon. So either burn marks underneath the gloves or exhaustion after the first few times she transforms into Enchantix. That one could be worked through which explains why she transformed often that season, to get slowly get rid of the fatigue. Fairy dust helps but only when really necessary.

Musa: i dont wanna the burn on her and I don’t want her voice lost because it’s too close to Aisha… So, I’d give her a new phobia of fire that can’t be erased by fairy dust. She’d have to go to a magical psychologist which is normal for new Enchantix fairies. Usually a magi-somatic approach helps greatly with the situation.

For Flora, I’d either give her a phobia of cursed water but that idea of her coming back up pale and her lips blue pleases me. Let’s say after getting rid of the Trix, she’s rushed back to Alfea’s infirmary because she’s very close to death (new entry to the YouTube video of Flora’s near deaths). Only Flora’s power works on this and no one else’s. Not even Bloom’s dragon fire can do anything to counter new raw enchantix energy.

Tecna… oh Tecna. I think getting sent to the Omega dimension is price enough. When I had the assumption about Enchantix, I thought the higher powers would deem Omega enough a price. But if I had to pick another price, she’d feel the chill of Omega each time she transforms. A pain so cold it hurts. But she gets used to it because she was in Omega for a while. Répèated transformations is enough to fight this. After a year, the cold is gone. She, Musa and Stella bond over this pain. I also read that those three became fairy godmothers after graduating. I thought it was because of their sacrifices were intense and of high calibers so it gave their powers an extra edge, hence the title of fairy godmothers. Anyways…

Finally Bloom. To give her a burn that appears under gloves seems appropriate but an incomplete Enchantix and uncontrollable powers seems enough.

Anyways, that’s just my dumb but treasured little headcanon.

i hc that enchantix is gained not through a “major sacrifice” but death itself. in dying for someone else, their magic resurrects them, stitching their bodies back together, rearranging their broken bones and forcing their soul into a vessel that isnt quite human. the transformation isnt perfect, however- magic can only go so far. at first glance, the fairies look normal, beautiful. but, when they use their enchantix, something seems... off.

aisha’s eyes remain clouded, vision there but blurry and undefined. darkness leaks from her veins, acrid and burning, the tendrils of shadow barely perceptible under her skin. her mouth tastes of metal and she swallows it down.

stella is careful to conceal herself with potions and ointments and glamours, but sometimes when she’s exhausted or nearing the end of a battle, the illusion flickers and rough, leathery scars rake up and down her body.

musa burns like stella does and when she comes back the tension between the two is gone. stella silently hands over a pot of burn cream and shows her the exercises that prevent the bands of scar tissue from stiffening even further.

when flora emerges from the water her lips stay tinged blue and her skin is pale, paler than it should be. when she speaks, liquid gurgles in her lungs. she doesn’t speak much anymore.

tecna is tricky- among the six of them it’s hardest to tell how she earned her enchantix. her skin is the same cool porcelain as always: creamy and undisturbed by the scars and bruises that litter the other girls’ bodies. but when she flies, she carries herself awkwardly, bones jutting out at the wrong angle, spine twisted. this is the body of a girl who has been crushed to death and healed ever so slightly in the wrong way.

bloom claims to have willed herself into her enchantix, insists that’s what happened on pyros. but faragonda sent her to this unforgiving realm for a reason and bloom isn’t stupid. she is the last to achieve her final form but the first to realize you don’t need to save anyone to do so.

when she returns from pyros she blames her raspy voice on dragon roars and volcano smog. she lets the other girls believe she made it out alive. lets them believe that their heroes didn’t send children to die in a war that would never end. she preserves the last bit of hope they have in a system that has failed them over and over and over again.

she hides it well, yes, but sometimes she stretches out her arm at just the wrong angle, tilts her head too far back, and her ruffled collar shifts.

a thick scar runs across her throat.

[humorepoch9-blog]

Why Worrying about Shaky Bow Just Makes Things Worse (and What You Could Focus on Instead)

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The summer after my sophomore year in college, I flew to Jerusalem to meet some old friends, with whom I’d be participating in a chamber music bootcamp of sorts. An intense couple weeks of daily master classes with musicians like Isaac Stern – and many others whom I never imagined I’d ever have the opportunity to meet.

Naturally, I wanted to make a good impression. But I was pretty intimidated by their presence, and the level of the other students there. I felt like a total imposter. As if I had somehow lucked into a situation that I didn’t deserve to be in.

It was probably the longest sustained period of pressure that I’d ever experienced. So maybe it’s not surprising that about a week into the workshop, in a performance on live national radio…I suddenly had an episode of shaky bow.

This was not the annoying-but-manageable jitters, but the full-blown, mortifying, what-the-heck-is-happening-to-my-arm shakes that make you feel helpless, and only get worse the harder you try to control them.

It got so bad that I ended up having to cut the last note of the piece short (the 2nd movement of the Schubert B-flat Major piano trio , if you were curious), so that I wouldn’t end the movement with an unwritten spiccato.

I couldn’t look at anyone afterwards. But when I confessed to a friend in the audience, he said he hadn’t noticed anything.

And when listening back to the recording, I have to admit that unless I listen for it, it’s probably not the thing that stands out most about the performance.

Which makes me wonder…is it possible that our nerves are a lot less noticeable to others than we think? Kind of like how listeners (and even other musicians) generally notice much fewer of our mistakes than we think they do?

And is there anything we can do to stave off such episodes of shaking?

Fear of negative evaluation

Social anxiety is not the same thing as performance anxiety – but the two share some common ingredients. One of which is the fear of being evaluated negatively by others.

And we know from research on social anxiety, that in embarrassing or anxiety-inducing situations, both socially anxious and non-anxious people have many of the same physiological reactions. Like blushing, an increased heart rate, or sweaty hands.

However, those who struggle with social phobia tend to be more hypersensitive to their physiological symptoms, and worry that other people will think less of them if they are sweating, shaking, blushing, and appear to lack confidence in the situation. Much like how in those final few bars of the Schubert, the only thing I could think about was how the other students would think less of me when they saw how nervous I was.

Put simply, a big part of social anxiety (and I think performance anxiety too) is anxiety about being anxious.

Singing on camera

A 2007 Australian study, for instance, compared the subjective and objective experience of 21 women who were high in fear of negative evaluation (FNE), and 21 women who were low in FNE, as they sang “Old MacDonald had a farm” on camera. A task, that for obvious reasons, made all participants feel pretty embarrassed and anxious.

Subjective vs. objective experience

Not surprisingly, the participants who were most concerned about being evaluated negatively, reported feeling more anxiety about singing than those who were less concerned with being evaluated poorly. The folks high in fear-of-negative-evaluation perceived more of an increase in trembling and blushing while singing too.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

While the high fear-of-negative-evaluation participants may have felt like they were shaking more and getting red in the face, their physiological responses to the situation – i.e. heart rate, breathing, sweating, and facial temperature – were actually no different than those in the low fear group.

In other words, participants in both groups experienced embarrassment and anxiety while singing, but the participants who were more worried about being evaluated negatively, were more preoccupied with their symptoms of anxiety and embarrassment, and experienced more anxiety than those who were less concerned with how they’d be evaluated.

Kind of like how my mind was so consumed with the horror of what was happening to my bow arm, and stressing about how I would lose whatever respect I might have had from the other musicians in the audience, that my anxiety instantly went up to an 11 .

Are shakes actually normal?

The fear of shaky bow stuck in my head for a while. But a few years later, I played with a friend who always seemed to be at ease and in control on stage. Who never seemed to get nervous. Until one day, when performing in a chamber music group together, I looked over and noticed that their fingers were shaking. Quite noticeably.

Of course, you couldn’t tell from listening to them play, and they looked just as engaged and focused as ever. Which made me respect them even more, as I realized that they were probably just as nervous as I was. They just didn’t let the nerves faze them.

But how…?

Don’t try to control your muscles!

Indeed, it seems that thinking about the shakes, or worrying about them in advance only makes us more nervous. Which just makes the shakes more likely to happen. And there’s a ton of evidence which suggests that one of the worst things we can do under pressure is to monitor, or try to control our muscle movements. Which might work ok in the practice room, but disrupts our coordination and timing in performance.

How, for instance, focusing on the trajectory of a tennis ball over the net leads to more accurate shots than focusing on the contact point of the ball on the racket.

Or how focusing on the sound of the piano, leads to more accurate playing than focusing on one’s fingers.

Or how watching a video while running leads to greater running efficiency than focusing on one’s breathing, or the movement of one’s muscles.

Ah-hah! So does this mean that Netflix could be our new practice buddy? Or that we could eliminate shaky bow if we could watch TV while performing? Kind of like the headphones scene in The King’s Speech ?

Ha. I wish.

But then again…sort of, maybe?

Narrative thinking

Imagery is often discussed as a practice tool. A way to augment our physical practice and build confidence.

But it’s something you can do while performing too.

Perhaps this is why some performers find it helpful to engage in “narrative thinking.” Where instead of obsessing about one’s fingers, breathing, or racing heart, you immerse yourself in telling a story with the notes, dynamics, articulations, colors, rhythms, etc..

Likewise, every single minute of our coachings that summer were devoted to exploring the music in more detail. Not once did intonation, technique, ensemble – or my shaky bow – come up.

For instance, we spent the better part of a week working on getting the character and spirit of the opening of the first movement just right. At one point, I remember the faculty debating a range of adjectives amongst themselves, eventually agreeing on the word “panache,” and the image of Cyrano de Bergerac, riding on a horse, as the one that they felt best captured how we should approach the opening (listen to Stern/Rose/Istomin playing it here ).

Night and day

And when you compare our performance on Day 1 to our performance on the final day, the difference was night and day. From our vibrato, to our articulation, bow strokes, bow distribution, phrasing, pacing, dynamics – it was like listening to a completely different group playing.

That final performance was also much less nerve-wracking, and way more fun. Perhaps in part, because I had gotten used to playing in front of these folks.

But I’d like to think that Cyrano had a little something to do with it too. After all, it took a lot of mental energy to bring these images to life, leaving me with very little mental bandwidth to worry about whatever shenanigans my arm muscles and sweat glands were up to in the moment.

Which in hindsight, was probably the entire point of the workshop. And an enduring lesson that has stuck with me. And maybe narrative thinking won’t eliminate shaky bow entirely, but maybe we don’t have to let it define our performance either. Because at the end of the day, I suspect performances are a lot like what Maya Angelou once said about people: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

References

Chen, V., & Drummond, P. D. (2007). Fear of negative evaluation augments negative affect and somatic symptoms in social-evaluative situations. Cognition and Emotion, 22(1), 21-43.

Duke, R. A., Cash, C. D., & Allen, S. E. (2011). Focus of Attention Affects Performance of Motor Skills in Music. Journal of Research in Music Education, 59(1), 44-55.

Maddox, M. D., Wulf, G., & Wright, D. L. (1999). The effect of an internal vs. external focus of attention on the learning of a tennis stroke. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology,21, S78.

Schücker, L., & Parrington, L. (2018). Thinking about your running movement makes you less efficient: attentional focus effects on running economy and kinematics. Journal of Sports Sciences, 1-9.

Source: https://bulletproofmusician.com/why-worrying-about-shaky-bow-just-makes-things-worse-and-what-you-could-focus-on-instead/

[kidsviral-blog]

How I Learned To Be OK With Feeling Sad

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/how-i-learned-to-be-ok-with-feeling-sad/

How I Learned To Be OK With Feeling Sad

It wasn’t easy, or cheap.

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Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed

The first time I didn’t feel sad about feeling sad was on Sept. 17, 2013. I was in my therapist’s office. More specifically, I was lying on a table, faceup, in my therapist’s office. Maybe it sounds simple, but it was a trick I’d spent years practicing and trying to learn.

I do not mean that I take sadness lightly. Four and a half years ago, after a work-related immersion in sexual violence, I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Subsequently, I was diagnosed with comorbid major depressive disorder. Comorbid to all that, I was diagnosed as alcoholic and suicidal. More than $20,000 worth of treatment later, I am no longer those things, but, as an evaluating psychiatrist put it in a report last year, I have “chronic,” “recurring,” “residual psychiatric symptoms” serious enough that she ruled me permanently disabled. I’ve been an emotional gal since always — “She has a lot of feelings,” my best grad-school friend would chuckle by way of explanation when I got worked up about some topic or other in front of strangers — and my emotions now are enormous. Frustration over a failed attempt to buy a sold-out rug online ends in so much yelling and foot-stomping that my neighbors complain. The intensity of a pop song lands like a blunt punch to my chest and explodes any grief nestling there; the very day I’m writing this, Nicki Minaj made me cry in my car.

Sincerely: I do not take sadness lightly. But after a lot of retraining, I do take it wholly, life-alteringly differently than I was raised to, and than almost anyone else I know. Now, sometimes when I’m not sad and I think about sadness, that thought is accompanied by this startling one: I miss it.

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Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed

Pre-therapy, this is the only thing I was ever taught, implicitly and explicitly, about sadness: It is bad.

You do not want it. If you’ve got it, you should definitely try to get rid of it, fast as possible. Whatever you do, don’t subject other people to it, because they do not like that.

Sadness can be legitimately problematic, absolutely. If your sadness comes from seemingly no place or even an obvious place but keeps you from participating in life or enjoying anything and refuses to abate no matter how long you go on letting it express itself, you of course can’t keep living like that. But culturally, we aren’t allowed to be sad even for a little while. Even when it’s perfectly sensible. Even when, sometimes, we need it.

This is reflected in our entertainment. Watching Bridesmaids, I shake my head over how Melissa McCarthy slaps Kristen Wiig around and tells her to stop being sad, though she has recently lost her job, her savings, her home, and her best friend. (Miraculously, this solves Kristen Wiig’s attitude problem.) In the third episode of MasterChef Junior‘s second season, judge Joe Bastianich tells a contestant who has ruined her shepherd’s pie and possibly her dream of winning, the biggest dream she’s had up to this point in her life, “When things are as bad as they can be, you gotta pull it together. Wipe your tears.”

The contestant has been crying for mere seconds. She is 8 years old.

What does it say about our relationship to sadness that Joan Didion — who we can all agree is a pretty smart, educated, and worldly cookie — had to write an entire book about trying to learn how to grieve? This ethos was fine for me when mostly nothing bad happened and if it did, the accompanying sadness didn’t linger for too long. But post-trauma, it turned out to be a massive impediment to my recovery.

I had a lot of symptoms. They all alarmed me, but equally so the most straightforward one: sadness. Sometimes I cried from uncontrollable, overwhelming, life-swallowing sadness. And all the time, the sadness and crying itself freaked me the fuck out. I would start crying, and then immediately hate myself. Why was I crying? Why couldn’t I get this sadness to go away? What was wrong with me?

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Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed

I got into therapy. I’d gone before, casually and occasionally, for support with some huge changes — a new city and new job and fresh divorce years earlier. Now, it was a therapy emergency. I considered myself decently good at self-care in general, but sure, I let it slip when I got too busy, when work was too demanding, when there were things I had to do that I knew I was getting too burned out to but did anyway. But taking care of myself was not optional anymore. As a matter of survival, I had to make as much room for it as it needed.

And so, I started intensive treatment — during which my therapist had to spend incalculable amounts of time trying to convince me that it was OK to be sad. The alarm I experienced over my sadness was another terrible feeling on top of my already terrible symptoms. The energy I spent panicking that I was sad could have been better spent on coping with the sadness. It was true that I — like many people, people with clinically depressed, never-ending, or life-threatening sadness — needed a lot more assistance than just a big philosophical hug, but if I could accept sadness, my therapist kept suggesting, I would be able to experience it (long and hard as that may go on) and then it could pass. The alternative — being sad, plus condemning yourself for being sad — only heightens the suffering. And, likely, the time it lasts.

“Sadness is a legitimate emotion,” my therapist would say. “There is an acceptance you can get to with it where it’s just a sensation, and without judgment, that sensation can be exquisite.”

“LIES,” I responded to this sometimes. Sometimes I called her a hippie. Nobody accepts sadness. Everybody knows that crying girls are silly and weak. Hysterical, and overdramatic.

But as much as I didn’t — I couldn’t! — really believe her, I still really wanted to learn how to do that.

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Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed

I can’t explain, in a tight little essay, how I finally did it. It would take an entire book for me to describe how I got even most of the way there. I can sum up that it took three years to the DAY after the events that started my symptoms, and that it cost a lot of money, and time, and time off, which cost more money, and was so painful that the very memory of how painful it was sometimes makes me need to go lie down in my bed. I can point out that most people are not given the opportunity to go through this process, even if they desperately want to. Unfortunately, healing is a luxury in our society, not a right; so many who could benefit from treatment simply can’t.

And I can tell you about the moment, that September. It was sunny and in the 60s. I was in my therapist’s office in San Francisco, which had fairly bare walls, industrial carpet, and windows that let the light in. I was lying on a massage therapist’s table, because that was normal in my somatic therapy; the treatment addressed the physicality of one’s symptoms, the places and ways trauma lived in one’s body (last year, a hero of my therapist’s, the very brilliant Bessel van der Kolk, released a book about this called The Body Keeps the Score), which was often explored with eyes closed, lying down. The first umpteen number of times I got on the table and was prompted to breathe, to feel into where my tensions and disconnections were, I resisted the falling apart this awareness and reconnecting could lead to. I feared starting to cry and never stopping. I feared never being able to put myself back together, ever, sometimes metaphorically but sometimes literally writhing and kicking and screaming with my resistance to just relaxing. Feeling. To be clear: Sadness was far from my only issue. But by Sept. 17, 2013 (around which point my insurance tallied it had so far given my therapist $18,000), I was taking feeling it in much better stride.

“How do you feel?” my therapist asked.

“Sad,” I said. I was extra sad that day because I was in the middle of a no-fault eviction, and it was turning out not to be practical or affordable to stay in the Bay Area, where I’d lived for a long time. “I feel sad because we have to move.” I cried as I talked about this. I loved California. “I have to grieve a state.”

I cried harder. “It’s a bummer.”

My therapist was very calm. “That is a bummer,” she agreed in soothing tones. She told me to open my eyes and when I did, asked me what sensation I noticed. Instantly, I pictured a kid lying in a yard.

That’s me right now, I thought. A kid lying in a yard, feeling sad — but not feeling sad about feeling sad. It was what it was. It was fine. It was a peace. Me, or a kid, being just what she was: alive.

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Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed

“I’m not bummed out about feeling bummed out,” I said.

The significance of this moment was clear to us both. My therapist was speechless for a second. Then she smiled — we were often smiling, because we joked through even the hardest and ugliest moments together — and said, “People pay a lot of money for that, Mac.”

“They should!”

They shouldn’t have to. I hadn’t panicked over being sad every time it had happened in my life, say over a breakup, but I had never had that level of acceptance of it, peace-spreading, unrushed, cell-deep, certainly not as an adult. And as a person with PTSD, I had completely lost any trust in my own emotions, fearing them constantly, sadness included — or perhaps especially, as it was the most persistent. Now, I was finally embracing it.

Which is how I could come to be in a position to miss it. The interestingness of it. The difference of it from other emotions. I remembered the sensations of it: the weight. The way it slowed things down and took the space of everything else up. It was exquisite, objectively but also as evidence that I could feel, that I was open and not shut down, capable of having a whole gamut of emotions rush in, and maybe overwhelm, but move through and move me. Not everyone can. Or does. I am occasionally jealous of people whose emotions come more softly, or quietly, or less often. I assume they have more time and energy, with those not being taken up by sensitivity that makes even the widely considered “good” emotions like joy feel like they’re making their heart explode. But for the most part, I’m not. Some people are born, and then they live, and then they die, one of my doctors told me once, in an effort to comfort. You, you die and are reborn sometimes 10 times in one day. Lucky.

The next time I felt sadness after I missed it, I was reminded why it was so hard to feel it all the time. Oh yeah, I remembered. It hurt. It was difficult to work. To cook, to eat, to play. To take care of others. Exquisite it may have been, but painful, and not invigorating, and quite tiring. Still I trusted that I needed it at that time, that it was expressing something necessary. I didn’t hate or judge it. I did not feel silly or weak. They say it takes a big man to cry, and I think — unfortunately, given our collective feelings about sadness — that’s true. But it takes a bigger woman still, to feel the strength of a sob, without apology or shame. With pride. I’m the biggest I’ve ever been, the way I let my emotions run, sadness included: the way it cleanses me, tears washing my face, resolving me to continue to feel with abandon.

***

Mac McClelland is the author of Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (out this Tuesday, February 24th) and For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question. She has written for Reuters, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the New York Times Magazine, and the New York Times Book Review, among other publications, and has won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Sidney Hillman Foundation, the Online News Association, the Society of Environmental Journalists, and the Association for Women in Communications. Her work has also been nominated for two National Magazine Awards for Feature Writing and has been anthologized in the Best American Magazine Writing 2011, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011, and Best Business Writing 2013.

To learn more about Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story, click here.

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Flatiron Books

Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/macmcclelland/not-feeling-sad-about-feeling-sad

[2centsofsilver]

12/18/17 Email to Amy 7pm Klonopin .5

Hi Amy, I am emailing to request a 2nd session this week because things are really bad right now and I feel I need extra help this week. Before seeing you tomorrow, I’m hoping it’s ok I email you. This entire weekend was really bad and I’m so overwhelmed with terrible emotion that I just don’t know what to do with myself. I am constantly going in and out of hysterical crying spells and panic attacks where my body shakes/convulses and I can’t stop crying. The physical sensations in my body during these times is so overwhelming that it feels like immediate action is necessary and that I’m in an emergency episodic state of disaster. I’ve been giving this lots of thought and feel it aligns with what you refer to as somatic body reactions to trauma. There is so much going on right now contributing to all of this: -Peak PMDD time when most severe anxiety occurs -Really severe Seasonal Affective Disorder which I’m deeming worse than most years (in my personal writing I refer to the depression as feeling like “frozen dead ice” -Onset of Klonopin Withdrawal: Dr. Stern constructed a plan entailing I gradually wean down for the next 3 months. I saw her around Thanksgiving and that’s when we planned this, but I haven’t started yet, given the circumstances of what’s been going on with friends, I didn’t feel the time was right yet. But I began weaning down yesterday. It includes 1 month of alternating between .5 and .25 mg every other day. The next month is .25 every day. And the last month is .25 every other day. -This klonopin withdrawal is yielding the most severe anxiety and it’s only been 2 days -What’s going on with my friends is causing the most trauma for me right now. It’s been going on for 1 month, but getting worse and worse, day to day, minute to minute, to the point where I don’t know what to do with myself and feel literally on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I went to graduation on Sunday with some of me and Max’s mutual friends and watched Max graduate, along with some other friends. This triggered a lot for me. I saw Savannah. I congratulated Max who said hi to me and thank you. -I feel generally disliked by these mutual friends (Brendon, Erica, Anna) and unwelcome among their group. I think if they took the time to get to know me they’d realize I am actually a really cool person and funny, and we could all have a good time - Everyone is having Christmas/holiday parties and I know I’m not being invited to them -I can tell I’m being lied to by Brendon -I am constantly imagining what everyone’s doing right now, what they’re thinking, if they miss me, if they’re coming back -I’ve always believed I have this power where I can feel other people’s energy and the momentum of this energy is extremely intense. It has to do with being a spiritual empath. But I convinced myself years ago that I have the ability to communicate through energy with people in efforts of getting them to come back to me, especially in dreams. It’s complicated and sounds crazy, but we should talk about it at some point in a future session. -I hate myself for how disorganized this email is. My mind is just racing and I’m trying to handle the emotions my body is going through. At what point do you feel a person is “bad enough” to take themselves to the psych hospital? Do you feel that person is me and if so, what do you think they’d be able to do for me? I go through these episodes where I feel so “on edge” that I just need to FLEE. I go frozen and want to die because I don’t have any other way out besides driving really far away and not coming back, but I would just be bringing all my internal issues with me. The “flashbacks” as you call them are happening so regularly, that I’m in them literally all the time. Every second of every day I’m thinking about my friends Gabe and Savannah, feeling like they must be on the verge of contacting me, but they never do. I’ve been so extraordinarily exhausted the last few weeks that all I do is sleep. I’ve been trying to immerse myself in art and I signed up for a ceramics class for January. I’m trying to distract myself, but I feel so out of control in “emergency-level-panic” that my impulse is to reach out to people. I feel I have done a good job of not resorting back to my old ways of contacting people repeatedly until I scare them away. I feel I’ve learned so much about respecting space and boundaries that I am doing a really good job. But when I force myself to not contact ANYONE at all, it’s like I’m bursting at the seams. I have to talk to someone. So I reach out to people like Brendon, Alyssa, Rachel, Logan, other people I have here in this town in desperate attempts to have someone to talk to and not feel so isolated. They almost always respond, but then I remember I can’t go overboard. I feel restricted/forced not to share personal matters with friends anymore. Some of my friends know I’m currently struggling with this problem and will actually send me your way instead: “Maybe this is something you should consult with your therapist about. Maybe you need to go to the hospital. Try and practice self-care. You can’t keep thinking about these people and depending on others to make you happy” - and then I go back into somatic shock all over again because they just don’t get it. Since receiving the C-PTSD diagnosis (was it a “diagnosis?”) I have felt better, but also trapped and restricted because I’m able to watch everything I do and question whether all of my thoughts, patterns, and behaviors are products of the disorder and things someone with C-PTSD would do. As a result, I feel like I can’t talk to anyone when I’m in crisis or just in general. I feel like people don’t believe me that I’m a good person. I’m legitimately concerned about my ability to stay in Ann Arbor long-term for grad school and stay in the SSW program given I now have friends here who no longer want to be my friend. It’s too hard, embaressing, and agonizing. This was supposed to be a clean-slate time in my life. I don’t know if I have what it takes to wait until school in August and then see Savannah, someone who meant so much to me, all the time at the SSW, still potentially dating Max, who I’ve caught word may end up sticking around with her to pursue a PhD. I contacted Savannah today asking if we could schedule a time to meet before 12/23 (when I’m supposedly going home for Christmas). I haven’t heard anything back. My friend Shelby was supposed to see me before she moved to Nebraska today. I was supposed to buy her bed yesterday. It was all set up, but she never got a hold of me. It just reinforces the fact that no one here likes me or considers final goodbyes of prioritative value. I have plans with my friend Alyssa tomorrow who has offered emotional support which I need, but I am scared of my tendency to tell her too much. I don’t want to lose another friend, but I do see our friendship going somewhere. Rachel barely talks to me at all anymore, but I can’t stop envisioning the night I had with her. It’s a good memory and I try and keep myself sane by wallowing in the good memories. My friend from Grand Rapids who never  visits Ann Arbor, sent me a snapchat that she was in town today. I asked her if she wanted to hang out and she said she couldn’t. If she couldn’t hang out, then why even tell me she’s here?  Nobody wants me. My friend Erin recently got into 2 car crashes, but is doing much better she says, and we are supposed to hang out over break. Everyone I’m friends with at the SSW is important to me and Erin is one of the special ones. The hard part is a lot of people are going home for the holidays and I don’t know when they’re coming back so it feels like I have little windows of time to meet with people or talk with Savannah and Gabe. I want to try and arrange things with them while Max is home in Chicago, but then I remember Savannah is going to the U.P. for Christmas. So I’m just sitting over here straining my brain to guess when they might be able to get together. I’m working so hard inside my head and if people knew how much pain I’m in, they would come back I think. I don’t feel the string of mistakes I made with everyone is worth actually losing friends over. Certain things in Max’s email still bother me so much I feel I’m breaking. I don’t know what to do, but one thing I don’t understand, is how people keep telling me none of this is in my control. It’s 100% in my control. I’m willing to understand how it’s not, but I don’t know how I’ll ever get to a point where I realize and am okay with that. I’m mad at myself because this email feels like an unorganized blog entry and I’m a writer. It bothers me that Max felt like my letter was gaslighting when I’ve dedicated my whole life to being an author one day. I wrote that letter to them so conscientiously based off everything I’ve learned in therapy about not acting on emotion and staying respectful/neutral when dealing with lots of other people’s personal feelings. I wanted to email all this because I still really want to talk history tomorrow. The next part of my history beginning in 10th grade influenced my life so significantly going forward that I never fully recovered. It influenced my career choice and many of my passions in life. But it destroyed me from the inside out. I personally feel it was far more traumatizing than what was going on with my dad at the time, but the way my dad handled it didn’t help me. You asked for a timeline of events in my life, so I’m going to work on writing that up and either emailing it or having it in person tomorrow. Thanks for your support and see you tomorrow, Katie PS: Day 2 of Klonopin Withdrawal: .5 mg 

[sarahburness]

Healing from Abuse: How I Stopped Hating The Man and Learned to Listen to Myself

“Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.” ~Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

We’ve just passed the year anniversary of an event that has greatly changed our country. The shock of the election results last year sent waves of powerful emotions rippling through our nation.

Personally, I felt the effects as intense and immediate grief. It was as though I had just lost my dearest companion.

I had days of shock, despair, feelings of intense cold with physical shaking and episodes of vomiting and nausea, followed by weeks of sleepless nights, spontaneous sweating, nightmares and feelings of imminent danger. Everything felt like a threat. Everything felt like an unbearable reminder. It was all so devastating…and so embarrassing.

I was ashamed of how deeply I registered the experience and found it difficult to talk about even with those I loved. I was confused as to why it felt so intense, why I felt choked when I tried to speak of how I was feeling, and assumed it was something wrong with me. I was the living example of the liberal snowflake.

As I began talking to others I realized that I was not alone in this experience and I began to be curious as to why it registered so deeply with myself and some others, and yet did not in some of my friends who had similar political ideologies. They were still disappointed and disgusted with what had happened, but it did not register in such a visceral way.

Personal and systematic abuse shaped us all in invisible ways. The answers I found to why I related so physically to the event go back very far into my personal history, and if you believe in such things, my ancestral history also.

As a small child family gatherings held a sense of dread for my sister and me. While we enjoyed the food and presents usually involved, there was also the regular ritual of uncle Joe.

Uncle Joe would call us floozies and comment that our legs were too skinny, our knees looked like washerwoman knees, and no one would find us attractive.

There were also the sneak attacks of him grabbing us and holding us down and tickling us while we screamed for him to stop. It was always in the middle of the room with everyone watching, and him narrating the scene, saying how much we really loved it, how silly we sounded screaming stop because we were laughing, and everyone could see we enjoyed it.

At the beginning and end of gatherings he would demand a hug and kiss, didn't we love our uncle?

I remember feeling helpless, humiliated, and ashamed for my tears. It was expected for us to swallow our feelings and put on a happy face. We needed to be polite.

If any adult came to our aid or defense I do not recall it, and I'm sure if anyone did they would have also been told that they were being too sensitive. He was showing his love for us, and why didn't they appreciate it? We should feel lucky to have an uncle who loved us so much.

This kind of story is so commonplace, so ubiquitous, that many may read it and still question what was wrong with that situation. But this is how the very damaging abuse called gas lighting works.

The perpetrator takes advantage of someone weak or vulnerable. They deny the victim from having a voice in the story, then re-center the story to be about themselves, about how great and wonderful they are or, conversely, how they themselves are being abused in the situation. And they mostly are not even aware that they are doing it.

Even in writing this down I feel the tension in my body rise. I feel the tremors involuntarily start in my limbs, y breath gets shallow, and I have trouble even wrapping my head around the words to adequately explain the experience.

In Psychological Harm is Physical Harm Nora Samaran writes of how this kind of abuse shapes the brain and how someone can react to this behavior for the rest of their life. The systematic silencing of one's voice and denial of one's reality can cause someone to become incapable of talking about it.

Uncle Joe was not the only person in my life who behaved in this way. It was everywhere, from the doctor who told me that it didn't hurt when he burned off my warts with dry ice, to my father who told me to quit crying or he would give me something to cry about, to the teachers who seemed to always ignore my correct answers, but hear the boy behind me who repeated what I just said as if it was his own idea. It was on television, in movies, in the music I heard on the radio.

I internalized the patterns and found myself over and over in the same frustrations, the same endless arguments, the same feelings of invisibility.

I sought out the dynamic in my relationships, sometimes in more obviously abusive partnerships, but often in the subtle and almost invisible forms of minimization. I felt like I was talking, but the people I was talking to didn't seem to register what I was saying.

It was like being caught in a nightmare, where you are trying to speak but what comes out of your mouth is unintelligible. You know what you are trying to say, but what my partners heard was something altogether different. It was crazy making.

Because of the systemic normalization of minimizing and denying the feminine perspective, I came to deeply distrust my own mind.

I did not have to even be told my perceptions were not important; it was done in the subtle shrugging off of my suggestions, the deep sigh that made me feel my words were ridiculous, the automatic response of the males in my life to say “yes, but…,” “ I don't think you get what's going on,” “you are misunderstanding,” even when I was describing my own feelings or experience.

And the many years of work I did getting a handle on my own anger issues and automatic reactions made me super sensitive to the claims that I was the one being too aggressive, making too big a deal out of something or just being mean.

I automatically took on the blame and responsibility of any argument. I was being irrational, I was not being clear enough, the words I used were hurtful; therefore, they were invalid.

Mathew Remski discusses this quite eloquently from the male perspective. He talks of the behavior of minimizing being so embedded in his make up that it takes continuous concentrated effort to even notice when it is happening. And that it also takes the help of his partner continuously pointing out when it happens.

It is a lot of work to be constantly vigilant monitoring our behavior, and it can feel almost impossible to overcome. I know because I, and most other people who have had the experience of personal or systematic marginalization do this every day with our own behavior. The constant rewriting of our own experiences to fit within a system that cannot accept our true feelings, which center the collective narrative on a cis, white male perspective.

When the campaign happened, the behaviors I had deep visceral reactions to became public. Instead of being hidden away in the most intimate relationships or invisible private conversations, they were being played out on a very public stage.

I felt myself reacting to them all as if they had happened to me personally (because they had, just not by this particular person).

When one of the most powerful positions in the world was given to a person who was so blatantly abusive and disrespectful, who openly mocked his victims, who rewrote every story so the blame was scattershot anywhere but his direction, who played out the usually hidden abuses so many of us feel intimately on a scale so huge it permeated the globe, it felt to me that the years of hard work I had done to reclaim my identity had been wiped out in a single night.

It validated the claim of every person who had told me I didn't know what I was talking about; if I was uncomfortable it was because my expectations were not reasonable; if I felt abused, hurt, ignored it was hurtful and unfair to the person I was accusing; that pointing out my pain or the pain of others was downright impolite and my behavior. The mere fact that I had a perspective of my own, was intolerable.

I found relief through somatic therapy. Somatic therapy works directly with sensations of the body and translating them into the emotions that we may be storing there. It requires one to become present in the now, opening to the deeply buried layers that bubble up from the subconscious when we have knee-jerk reactions and strong emotions.

Translating the subconscious reactions we have into conscious and conscientious actions creates the space to make our hurt, and the hurt of others visible. To do this I had to dive into the depth of the grief to see where it stemmed from, not just place it was most recently triggered. This was a place that made every fiber of my being long to run away, numb out, cease to exist.

But the leaning into the pain instead of running away allowed me to recognize and accept my own feelings and reactions as tools of learning. I had to relearn to trust my instincts and see myself as a reliable source of information. I learned that I am valid, my feelings are important, and I have a right to be heard and to take up space.

I saw the ways I was complicit in my own harm. I had given up the right to my own perspective, internalized the doubt that my experiences are real, automatically responded to my strong emotions as unreasonable, and I had agreed that the feelings and needs of others were more important than my own.

When I saw that I had agreed to these things subconsciously, I was finally able to decide for myself that I did not want to do these things and could make the choice to stop.

It was and continues to be hard work. But now I listen when strong reactions come up, and instead of automatically silencing them I ask, what they are here to tell me? My anger, fear, guilt, depression, despair, all have a message they are desperately trying to get me to hear.

With deep listening my reactions can be transformed into conscious actions. Actions that let my voice be heard, centering my own story and needs, and allowing others to express what they need to express as well. It also gives me a very low BS tolerance threshold.

In claiming my own story I suddenly found it intolerable having it minimized in any way and could no longer be silent when it was.

This is a deeply inconvenient perspective to have. Going against the grain of society and allowing myself to be impolite while remaining as compassionate as I can muster leads to many awkward and uncomfortable conversations. It leads to conversations where I have to put my personal safety on the line in order to stand up for my personal integrity.

There is also the need for great delicacy and diplomacy. You cannot hope for others behavior to change when you make them the enemy. We all have the capacity to hurt; we all have the capacity to heal. I am the victim of abuse in cases related to my gender, and at times, my age, but have also been the perpetrator in cases where my privilege, be it from my white skin, my middle class upbringing, my citizenship etc. have blinded me to the ways I have contributed to the minimization and abuse of others.

Learning to have compassion for myself and my own tender emotions also requires me to have compassion for those who have harmed me. In the cases of my intimate circle, these are people I love and respect, and I want to be able to still love myself and need to allow for others to love themselves. I see the great hurt many of the people who have treated me this way carry around, you do not abuse without having first been abused yourself.

Unfortunately the abuse of toxic masculinity (the culture of oppression, patriarchal values, or the many names this behavior is known by) has become so embedded in our culture that we do not even recognize it as abuse. It is the norm; it's just the way it is.

It is invisible to the unconscious eye, until we make it visible. We are all damaged by it, but some are made to pay a dearer price, and some are allowed to gain privilege.

Those that gain privilege may have less of a motivation to change the patterns and a harder time seeing the ways they do harm and the ways it benefits them. It takes a lot of self-awareness and the ability to make yourself vulnerable. Accepting the responsibility of having harmed others and making amends is a very painful truth to accept, and so many will avoid this at all costs.

And this responsibility is passed down through the generations. If one generation cannot make amends for the harm they caused, the pain, guilt, and responsibility are handed down to the next, only the further it goes from its origins, the more subconscious it becomes, and the more difficult it is to bring the surface and recognize it.

But this is also the way it is healed, once and for all. It is not appealing work to dig deep into the ugliest depth of our suffering, to name the ways we have suffered, the ways we have caused suffering, the ways we have allowed both things to happen. But not doing it makes those part of ourselves most in need of tender care the least visible.

So in this year when all I really wanted was for this guy, who made all my alarm bells go off, to shut the hell up, I was moved to look at all the ways I had let this weak and damaged person, and so many others like him, convince me I had to shut the hell up. I lovingly listened to my own story and convinced myself to speak up instead.

About Dr. Lisa Klieger

Lisa Klieger is a Five Element Acupuncturist (MAc) and a Doctor of Medical QiGong (DMQ China). She uses decades of clinical and personal experience to bridge ancient wisdom with modern sensibilities in order to guide sensitive souls to trust their innate wisdom and embody resilient self love. You can visit her on Facebook and at lisakliegeracupuncture.com.

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The post Healing from Abuse: How I Stopped Hating The Man and Learned to Listen to Myself appeared first on Tiny Buddha.

from Tiny Buddha https://tinybuddha.com/blog/healing-from-abuse-stopped-hating-man-learned-listen/