“When we choose to be true to ourselves, the people around us will struggle to make sense of how and why we are changing. Partners and children might feel fearful and unsure about the changes they’re seeing. Friends and family may worry about how our authenticity practice will affect them and our relationships with them. Some will find inspiration in our new commitment; others may perceive that we’re changing too much - maybe even abandoning them or holding up an uncomfortable mirror.” —
- Brene Brown (via theangrytherapist)
the exact conversation I had with my sponsee yesterday. the reality is that relationships change when you change. I find it really fascinating and interesting how much mine have changed. sometimes you grow together, sometimes you grow away from someone only to come back around to them once again, sometimes you grow apart for a long period of time, sometimes a short period of time, some friends don’t grow at all and you have to leave them behind. In the beginning it was really upsetting, but over time I have come to realize that if my relationships aren’t changing then I am not growing. Nothing stays the same forever.
Phew, there are some seriously emotionally charged posts on tumblr tonight. I FEEL EVERY SINGLE ONE. I am so there with you guys. I just watched the lip dub proposal video and cried because I WANT THAT. ALL OF IT. Love, life, kids, a mate, friends, a life I can be proud, something that I built that is all completely mine.
I have been obsessed with work over the past year and it’s been the most painful year of my life. The obsessive worrying, constantly planning and plotting my next move to get up the ladder. Like I have put all of my energy and serenity in it and gotten nowhere. NOWHERE. No promotion, no raise, just more responsibility and someone else, always someone else gets all the credit. It is soul sucking. I am so dead, just completely emotionally dead. I couldn’t sleep on Thursday night and had a meltdown on my way to work on Friday. I didn’t even care who saw it, I was sobbing at my coworkers desk in the middle of reception for about 15 minutes as she talked me down off the proverbial ledge.
I thought I wanted this really great career, but every time I try to make any kind of move, I get smacked back down. by anyone and everyone. I am dying, I am mentally dying. I feel like I literally have nothing left to give and sometimes I wish they would just put me out to pasture so that I didn’t have to spend every single day miserable. This isn’t how I want to live my life. I want to be happy, I want to enjoy my life. I don’t want to spend my entire paycheck on rent. I don’t want to be broke anymore. I want to be able to take vacations and to garden in my yard. I want to jump in my car and drive through the country. I want to have dinner parties and sit on my porch in the morning sipping coffee.
I can’t figure out why I am doing any of this anymore. The person who chose to move to New York doesn’t exist anymore and the person I have become in that place can’t figure out what I am still doing here. This is a city for a certain kind of person and I am not that person. I have hit my breaking point and I don’t know what to do next. I feel so confused, lost, and a little bit abandoned. I am terrified of making that next jump.
So I feel you. I feel every single little thing but as they say, I am exactly where I am supposed to be. I want to do something great with my life and my biggest fear is that I won’t, my concept of greatness is changing every single day. All I have to do is let go and let the universe figure it out for me.
A couple of weeks ago, I went out to a bar where I had once had a couple of “epic” nights. Except as I was sitting around the place, I started observing the other drinkers and parties at other tables and they were clearly not having an epic time. They were having a lovely civilized pleasant somewhat classy time. It made me wonder what if those epic nights in actuality were kind of lame (or nice and mild) and maybe what I mistook for “epic” was really my inability at that time to shut the fuck up. I have noticed that drunk people tend to provide a verbal narrative when you are out with them (and I say this with much love as I am constantly entertained by that narrative). However, I am almost a hundred percent positive that maybe my verbal narrative was somewhere along the lines of “this is such an epic night, wow, I can’t believe we are having an epic night”. When in actuality, it never sort of was and I was kind of too gone to notice.
Today, we had a fun discussion of how these drunken nights of glory get retold and exaggerated until the original event is completely lost under delusion and self-aggrandizing. I will use an actual story from my personal history to illustrate.
For instance, the story as I used to tell it:
I went to a movie premiere after party at the four seasons and the owner let me dance around in the fountain while Richard Gere and Diane Lane sat in the corner. I went up to him and asked for his autograph for my mother, he was very nice. Then, we drank expensive wine and partied all night long.
What probably actually happened and the story I now tell (embellished for special effect):
I was wasted, I drunkenly went on and on about the fountain and how much I wanted to splash around in it until finally the owner threw me in it to shut me up. Then I proceeded to get completely black out, danced around wasted until our mutual friend threw me in a cab. I vomited somewhere between midtown and the manhattan bridge in my bag and I called in sick the next day.
Man, I am really starting to forget this stuff. Ah, good times. Unfortunately, there are stories that I can not absolutely embellish because I was really that stupid and super happy good time fun party girl. Sometimes I miss her, especially on days like today. However, the scars of my former life run pretty deep, there are some wounds (done to myself by myself) that I am not sure any amount of time will heal. A wise man forgives but never forgets.
people with rather large egos are “universe-al” losers. There’s really no other way to put it. I have started to find them immensely amusing as opposed to the gut wrenching “why are these assholes in my life and making decisions that directly affect me?”
The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty. And in the grand scheme of things, there is really no such thing.
My sponsor is my own personal hero, she is a piece of my puzzle. When I am melting down, in the middle of hell, she is the first person I call. She knows every single things that I have thought or done or not done. She has literally gotten down in the gutter with me and pulled me out and set me back on the path to myself. I couldn’t do any of this without her, she shows me the good things about myself that I can’t see. Last night, she sent me this video and told me to start watching at 28:00 mins. This year has been the roughest year I have ever been through and Glenda Baily from Harper’s Bazaar said every single thing I needed to hear- need to hear on a daily basis.
We only have one life, we need to be mindful every day of how we are living it. As Louise Hays wrote in Heal Your Life, “What we think about ourselves becomes the truth for us. I believe that everyone, myself included, is responsible for everything in our lives, the best and the worst. Every thought we think is creating our future. Each one of us creates our experiences by our thoughts and our feelings. The thoughts we think and the words we speak create our experiences. We create the situations, and then we give our power away by blaming the other person for our frustration. No person, no place, and no thing has any power over us, for “we” are the only thinkers in it. When we create peace and harmony and balance in our minds, we will find it in our lives.”
Trust your gut, honor yourself and do the best you can every single day even if today’s best includes a pint of ben and jerry’s and grey’s anatomy.
Strangeland: PTSD and suicide -
http://www.metanoia.org/suicide/ptsd.htm
A remarkably large number of these conditions are common among people with long-term histories of suicidal pain:
- Problems with memory. Persistent, intrusive, and vivid memories concerning the traumatic situation. Events of daily life may trigger distressing memories related to the trauma. Memory lapses for parts of the traumatic situation. Many suicidal people are troubled by strong images, such as the feeling that they have bombs inside their bodies or a knife over their heads, and in recovery continue to be bothered by the memory of having had these images.
- Avoidance of things associated with the traumatic experience.
- Denial on the seriousness of the experience.
- Persistent anxiety.
- Fear that the traumatic situation will recur. The trauma is often an event that shatters the survivors sense of invulnerability to harm.
- Disturbed by the intrusiveness of violent impulses and thoughts.
- Engagement in risk-taking behavior to produce adrenaline.
- A feeling of being powerless over the traumatic event. Anger and frustration over being powerless.
- A feeling of being helpless about ones current condition.
- Being dramatically and permanently changed by the experience.
- A sense of unfairness. Why did this happen to me?
- Holding oneself responsible for what happened. Feeling guilty.
- The use of self-blame to provide an illusion of control. Sexual assault survivors often blame themselves: If I hadnt been at that location, worn those clothes, behaved in that way, then it wouldnt have happened. This pattern is also found in the survivors of a completed suicide. If I had only done x, the suicide would not have happened, can be used to try to cope with the fear that suicide will happen again in the family—i.e., it is preventable if I just manage things differently. The suicidal are often full of self-blame. As in the other cases it is partly due to an internalization of social attitudes that blame the victim or family, and also due to the effort to gain mastery over the situation. To imagine we could have done more is more tolerable than total helplessness.
- An inability to experience the joys of life.
- Feelings of being alienated from the other people and society in general. I am different. I am shameful. If they knew what I was like, they would reject me. I dont belong in this world. Im a freak, an outcast.
- When people with PTSD try to return to normal life, they are plagued by readjustment problems in the basic elements of life. They have difficulties in relationships, in employment, and in having families.
- A lack of caring attachments. A sense of a lack of purpose and meaning.
- Some chronically traumatized people lose the sense that they have a self at all.
- Veterans report the feeling that they never really made it back from the war. Formerly suicidal people feel they never really made it back to normal life.
- One Viet Nam veteran with PTSD said, I dont have any friends and I am pretty particular about who I want as a friend.
- PTSD was aggravated for Viet Nam veterans because they returned to a country that had negative attitudes toward them. For sexual assault survivors, stigmatization is the second injury.
- When Viet Nam veterans returned home people were angry at them. They had shamed the country, they had done something wrong, they were potentially harmful to others, it was dangerous to be with them. Sexual assault survivors may receive angry responses—on the grounds that they have done something that shames the family. Suicide attempters often experience great anger from family and care providers.
- A deep distrust of co-workers, employers, authorities.
- Left with unexpressed rage against those who were indifferent to their situation and who failed to help them.
- In personal relationships there are problems of dependency and trust. A fear of being abandoned, betrayed, let down. A belief that people will be hurtful if given a chance. Feelings of self-hatred and humiliation for being needy, weak, and vulnerable. Alternating between isolation and anxious clinging.
- Trauma often causes the victim to view the world as malevolent, rather than benign.
- No sense of having a future, or, the belief that ones future will be very limited.
- Feel that they belong more to the dead than to the living.
- The feeling of having a negative Midas touch—everything I get involved with goes bad.
- Loss of self-confidence, and loss of feelings of mastery and competence.
- A resistance to efforts to change a maladaptive world view that results from the trauma.
- A mistrust of counselors ability to listen.
- People who suffered traumatic experiences as children, teenagers, or young adults may simultaneously become prematurely aged and developmentally arrested. A part of them feels old. Another part feels stuck at the age they had when the trauma occurred.
- PTSD can be worse if the sufferer experiences the trauma as an individual rather than as a member of a group of people who are suffering the same situation. Unlike earlier wars in which units went overseas together and returned together, in Viet Nam each soldier had an individual DEROS (Date of Expected Return from Overseas). This reduced unit cohesiveness; each soldier experienced the war from an individual point of view. Suicidal people experience their near-death situation with extreme isolation. They see their conditions as being completely unique - terminal uniqueness. They have no sense of identification with others.
- The severity of PTSD symptoms tends to increase with the severity and duration of the trauma.
- The use of alcohol or drugs to cope with the PTSD symptoms.
- Attempts to do things to gain a feeling of mastery over the traumatic situation, e.g., become a volunteer on a hotline, prostitution
Gang’s all here! I had most of these symptoms for most of my life. ”Disturbed by the intrusiveness of violent impulses and thoughts.” I found this one in particular to be worthy of note. This is extremely normal if you are a trauma survivor. I actually wrote down and told my therapist and sponsor every violent thought I had ever had. It was extremely cathartic and when I started connecting with other survivors, I found out that I was not alone, that this was actually pretty common for trauma survivors. We get exposed to these extreme circumstances and it fucks us up. One bad thing happens and all bad things happen, we become the bad things. I used to think that there was something seriously wrong with me and I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t control my thoughts. The minute I started verbalizing them, they stopped happening. It was like magic. For the most part, I don’t really have to deal with these symptoms all that much anymore. The work I have done has been AWE INSPIRING.
That doesn’t mean that things don’t still pop up for me. Today, I had a mini meltdown because someone verbally attacked me at work. It sent me screeching over the edge. I can go very quickly into that victim mentality if something extreme happens. But I have tools, I was able to talk it through with people and reground myself. Right now, I feel pretty raw.
Tonight, I went to my women’s circle and stupidly shared my story. I try not to discuss the details, because it physically hurts others to hear and it can be extremely activating to other survivors. For me, because I have lived it, breathed it, talked it out to death, felt it, it has become almost foreign. It has lost its power over me. The funny thing about being a trauma survivor is that I can spot my own kind from a mile away. I can actually see other people’s ptsd symptoms. I have gone up to random strangers on the subway when they were melting down and talked them down. When I went through my own journey, I didn’t have a lot of people to turn to so it’s been really important for me to pass this on. I remember how alone I felt especially when I didn’t realize what was going on and not understanding that I had no control over what was going on. Living simultaneously in the past and the present is exhausting.
Tonight, I couldn’t stop the words from coming out of my mouth. I could see the horror on their faces and once it’s out there, you can’t take it back. We have to be very gentle with each other and sometimes I forget that. Some of us have been through hell and back and if we are really lucky, we find each other and we live.
Being in recovery, one of the first things you learn is how to say No, not now, maybe, let me get back to you, and I will let you know how I feel on the day of. I have become so adept at saying No that I have literally no’ed myself out of a social life. But that was then and this is now. In early recovery, you are forced to change everything. There’s a reason they say no major changes in the first year, it’s to protect yourself from making extremely bad decisions especially as you learn how to navigate what can often seem like a cold and harsh world without your favorite security blanket of bourbon, vodka, or pinot noir.
My first summer in sobriety was pretty ridiculously awesome. I had nightly coffee dates and long walks along the east side highway with random people in recovery. I went to dances, made cupcakes with my sober roommate, and sat in Carl Schurz park meditating. Last summer was probably the worst summer of my life. There were whole days I couldn’t leave my apartment because I was physically, emotionally, and spiritually dead from all of the trauma therapy. I spent most of my Sundays in bed recouping and crying over my broken childhood. Everything was a trigger and the trauma was literally fighting its way out of my body. I was extremely paranoid about everyone and everything as I worked through the worst of my PTSD symptoms.
But here I am, a whole year later, with less than half of my original memories and 6 months from my last PTSD meltdown living every moment as if it were the first and only moment. It’s a pretty awesome place to be and when my ridiculously awesome sponsor told me in November during a crying jag that I would make it here, I didn’t believe her. And now I am ready to rejoin life.
A couple of weeks ago, I decided that no matter what I was invited to I was just going to say yes. I am just going to show up to everything that I can and see what happens. All of my anxiety is gone and I am ready to start building up my life a little bit more. It’s really amazing to experience things sober, I get to observe this layer of life that most people can’t see. I get to see what’s beneath the surface by just sitting and listening to everything and everyone. It’s truly enlightening sometimes.
Saying yes has been really hard. Like most people in recovery, I seem to enjoy my own company more than others. Sometimes I think you could lock me on a deserted island with a fully stocked library and Lola and I would happily live out the rest of my days in peace and contentment. Sometimes, I am angry and resentful on my way to the place but happily a part of the minute I get there. Its been an interesting experience thus far and I have definitely felt a lot happier in the past month than I have in the past year. I am taking it a day at a time and learning a lot about myself in the process.
Here’s to a summer filled with adventure.
Lately, I have been doing research into Narcissistic Personality Disorder because while it doesn’t apply to me, I definitely have attracted my fair share of NPD’ers. It’s so crazy, the other day, someone mentioned gaslighting and it fucking blew my mind. My life made so much sense in that little word.
Anyways, I was thinking the other day why is it that one day a year I become a hateful and annoyed person when this day occurs? And I realized it’s because of the NPD. When every day of your life is about another person, the idea of celebrating them even one more day is enough to make me want to kill myself.
But the good news is that I am starting to realize that it’s okay to let this person go. It doesn’t mean I am a bad person if I detach with love because the thought of spending another day in the status quo is beyond painful. Anyways, I thought I would share in hopes that this might help someone else. Reading about NPD has helped me immensely. It took me much longer than it should have to figure out what all of this means.
2 hours into our first game, we took a photo to resume it next Sunday. I put “learn to play chess” on my list of 5 year goals and here we are. My sponsee was a high school chess champion so she took us through our first game. I was really sad when the game ended because I started really picking it up. As we were playing this game, my friend was very seriously telling my sponsee that I am much more interested in intellectual pursuits than boys or parties. I thought it was really funny; ah, how the times change.
I don’t mind being open with my trauma and recovery, but in my experience, I have found that the people who need to know the most are the ones who can’t hear all the details. That’s the funny thing about trauma, trauma triggers other trauma. Once it’s out there, you can’t unhear it so I keep my story as general as possible because this isn’t a story about my fucked up childhood, it’s a story about a sick person getting well. I started writing this awhile ago because I get asked a lot about my EMDR experience and it’s taken me awhile to really think clearly about it. Recovery is scary, it requires life altering changes but as hard as it’s been, it is so worth it.
The reason my trauma lay hidden for so long is because like most survivors, I was told that I must never speak about it to anyone. And I didn’t for 27 years, it’s like I was physically and mentally blocked from forming the words. Therapists asked me over and over again about my childhood and my response was always, “that’s in the past, I am not supposed to talk about that.” Sometimes, in their attempt to protect us, the people we love and need the most hurt us by denying us the right to heal. And no family wants to hear the truth. In the past year, I have shared my story with hundreds of people and the more I give away of my story, the more I get back of myself. It’s an amazing thing.
I get emailed this question a lot by different people and until now have not tried to write it down because it’s been extremely complicated to understand. But the other day, as I was talking to my therapist, I started to realized how far I have actually come. I am firmly planted in the present at all times, my mind is razor sharp and constantly focused on problem solving and dissecting information in front of me. That’s not to say that I don’t have fun, but for the most part, it’s transformed the way that I think and process information.
It’s a far cry from yester years when the past constantly consumed my thoughts and new information resembling past experiences would either cause me to go into a catatonic state, hysteria, or a hyperarousal state followed by a sort of psychotic breakdown. These episodes began to multiply in frequency when I was 14 and by the time I reached age 29, I was completely cracking up and could not function without alcohol. All the great spiritual leaders say, we create our own reality with our thoughts, our words, and our actions. What if those thoughts, words, and actions were from a different time, a traumatic episode where someone you loved and trusted told you, “No one loves you and you are going to die”? What if you spent your entire life, every waking hour and minute, convinced that you were going to die? Worst of all, what if you thought it was true…
To truly understand, I have to explain what it was like before. Before I went into treatment for trauma, it was like my brain was split in half. On one side, a constant projector show was playing every traumatic event from my past and on the other- I was frantically trying to stay in the present and interpret what was happening in my day to day life. Often, the two would cross and reality would become fantasy and past would become present. I would react to the information in front of me as if I were 4 years old. Regression is a funny thing, I still can’t quite believe it until it happens and I have no control over it. For years, the only defense I had was to disassociate or regress. Because of the memory flashbacks and the catastrophic thinking, I couldn’t process anything that was happening in front of me, so to protect myself I would disassociate. I had no control over any of this and it’s like my brain was literally broken. The walled off traumatic memories made it nearly impossible for my brain to process new memories, therefore, I simply never forgot. Anything. In its misguided attempt to protect me by treating all new memories the same as the traumatic ones, my brain casually ruined my life.
I didn’t realize my memories were different until I got sober and mentioned it to my therapist. Around this time, I also resumed having intense memory flashbacks. My first “conscious” full body memory flashback happened two years ago on the subway, I lost all concept of time and became fully immersed in a past state of mind. It felt like I was entirely somewhere else. While I have always had a razor sharp memory, I didn’t realize that it wasn’t normal that I can remember colors, sounds, textures, smells, and tastes. At any time, I had the ability to pull up a past memory and replay it over and over again as if I were in that day, minute, hour, and time. I was incapable of forgetting anything, even random mundane events. Drinking was a great escape because blacking out enabled a form of escape. I thought that everyone blacked out when they drank and that it was how we forgot. I still don’t remember any of my blackouts so “it worked.” It was the only real coping mechanism I had to forget life and I didn’t start seriously drinking till age 23. My teenage years were practically tragic, but that’s a whole other story I won’t go into at this time.
How EMDR worked: Through right and left brain stimulation (I preferred the tonal/pulse method), EMDR helped my brain re-process the traumatic events that my younger self was unable to process. I also altered a couple of the memories. For instance, in one, my cat is now in the memory. I can’t remember the event without my cat present. It’s really crazy how this shit works; it was not easy and it took me over a year to work through one memory. It’s hard, you have to be willing to put down everything in your life. I slept a lot last year because the sessions were so draining and through the whole process, I never cried once. I spent a year reliving my trauma and trying to access the feelings attached with it. I couldn’t break through the disassociation for over 9 months, I had to get to a really safe place to allow myself to feel anything good or bad.
Since I completed EMDR in January on my core trauma, my brain has begun reprocessing all of my memories. Not only is my trauma now a fuzzy picture in my head but I can’t remember other memories as well. It’s like they have all started fading and every day, I forget something new. The past is being completely erased and I feel myself mentally sliding more and more into the present. Another side effect, up until this point is that I haven’t been able to cry. The trauma has literally been trapped inside my head for so long that it blocked me from feeling anything. I am 32 years old and I can tell you how many times I cried up to age 29. Since the beginning of April, I haven’t stopped crying. It’s like a dam inside of me has broken and I can’t turn it off. I am feeling every second of every day in a way that wasn’t possible for me before. I am also sleeping a lot and taking a lot of time to heal my brain and body.
A lifetime of ptsd has taken a lot out of me, I am exhausted. At the age of 23, I moved to the worst city in the world for a trauma survivor- just taking the subway to work puts me into a hyperarousal state. Somedays, I want to go live in a cabin in the woods because I am so exhausted. Now that my symptoms are slowly dissolving, I am beginning to realize how much of this really held me back all these years. And it didn’t help that I seem to perpetuate my cycle of abuse by actively choosing people in my life who had the same characteristics of my abuser. Today, I work really hard to break that cycle. Right now, I am in the middle of a massive overhaul of this one area of my life that still persists. Sometimes, in order for me to stop being a victim and to reclaim my life, I have to be willing to let go of everything. And to let go, sometimes that involves getting into a knife fight with myself.
I don’t think my symptoms are completely gone and from hearing from other survivors, they don’t completely go away. I still find authority figures, drunk, and angry people to be extremely triggering. I am getting better at detaching the minute I start to crack up, I know how to quietly remove myself. I also have all these tools and an extremely strong spiritual life. I can’t recommend it enough. It’s not an easy treatment and you need to build a strong foundation with yourself, an hp of your understanding, and your therapist. In order to believe I deserved recovery, I had to believe that there was a GOD that loved me and wanted me to be happy no matter what. For a drunken atheist, that was not an easy path to find. Healing from trauma is more painful than the trauma itself. My trauma was very complex and it might take a lifetime to work through my attachment issues but it’s honestly better than how I felt before. I was so tragically cut off from everything in my life, including myself. I felt a little like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, mimicking my way through life. I felt like an empty vessel desperately seeking anything outside of myself to be filled- men, friends, people, alcohol, running, etc. Towards the end, I felt so consumed by the past that I had no future and I thought about suicide a lot those last couple of years.
Today, I am beginning to understand a richer and fuller life. I am totally not there yet but I take it one day at a time and try to live each day or every other day to the best of my ability. If I want to get through this, I can’t be hard on myself. I have to be willing to let go of all of my rigidity and for some of us, that is all we know. But there is hope and there is recovery. I hope this was at least a little bit helpful and if I know you in real life and you bring up a funny thing from the past that I can’t recall. Trust me, this is a very good thing. It’s a beautiful miracle. If you want to know more, please email me.
tomorrow is my bday and while the past three years of my life have been nothing short of epically hard, I feel like I have climbed a mountain. I conquered my return of saturn. I am ready for a much easier year when it moves out of my sign in October. It’s actually extremely fascinating when you really read about, Saturn forces you to take a long hard look at your life and to make changes accordingly. And it stays for 3 years to enforce those changes and make sure that you stick to them. It came in my life in November 2009 when everything in my life started unraveling and I was forced to change every single thing.
At 29, I wanted to die. I remember thinking maybe I will die young and I won’t have to do this anymore. At 32, I have much bigger dreams- I want to be a doctor, a friend, a writer, a mathlete, a sister, a daughter, a singer, a runner, a ballerina, a nonprofit expert, a sponsor, and a sponsee.
Tomorrow night, I am going to Carmines with my sponsees. Lately, they have been my rock as I have weathered some really tough times and I feel so unbelievably grateful that I met these women. I thought when I became a sponsor that I was going to get to pass on all my experience, strength, and hope but instead it’s the other way around. It’s such an honor, yesterday, one of them was literally changing before my eyes. To see someone filled with despair find that path back to themselves and begin to see the beauty in life is beautiful. That’s been better than any birthday gift I could have ever received. And to be present for it, that’s the real adventure.
That being said, I wouldn’t mind at least one easy week/day/month. Pretty, pretty, pretty please, Universe?
My birthday present from my sponsee, a ink painting of Lola
Today instead of buying a razor, I spent $1.39 and bought a black sharpie. Instead of cutting my thighs up from the shame, anger, and disgust I felt from my flashbacks I decided to write down every word that continued to repeat and trigger my suppressed trauma. I couldn’t find the right word to describe the feelings I felt. It took me almost an hour of trying to figure out what words, feelings, actions, and sacred thoughts to write on my body. The words that helped me the most were usually violent actions. Writing down the word “choke, slash, force, etc” made me feel the equivalent relief of cutting my skin. I think thats why I cut, because the feelings preceding self-harm are usually memories of violence. And because these memories of violence haunt me, I try to battle the violence with even more violence as a response. I honestly feel like this was a better option than cutting because now I can see directly what triggered my anger. It’s much healthier and constructive than self-harm and at the same time you are expressing yourself. Doing this exercise will help you understand what words and their connotations are triggering your emotions.
Some of the words I wrote included: devil, lust, hide, violate, assault, choke, jam, force, molest, penetrate, cry, heavy.
Now do it again and replace those words with ones of love. Reclaim yourself.
on Sunday, a friend told me that I had the power to heal my body by treating my body differently than I had. She suggested that I create a ritual on a certain night of the week where I focus on a specific body part. She used bath salts and lotion and said loving soothing words as she gently washed the part of herself she hated. She did this for a full year, once a week.
The problem with trauma, especially sexual trauma, is that we allow the person who harmed us to own our body long after they have left us and moved on with their lives. We carry it around and poison all of our relationships with someone else’s view of us. The point in recovery is to reclaim and make whole that broken part of ourselves. and to make whole, we must first realize that we are already whole, we are not really broken. Recovery is that return to wholeness.
Those words are not how you define yourself- they came from a source outside of yourself. I find my own criticisms are actually not even in my own voice. They are from a voice I heard long ago, a voice I trusted as a very young child. Go within to find the truth, your truth. Because the reality is you are a beautiful young woman who someday is going to look back on all of this and realize that because you went through this horrific and painful thing, you can now impart to others your experience, strength, and hope.
Beneath all that pain is love, keep digging. In my experience, it got much worse before it got better and it felt like an exorcism. It forced me to tear down every false belief I have ever had about myself and to slowly rebuild by replacing all that hate with love. It GETS BETTER.
For some of us, true courage comes in loving ourselves in spite of everything that we have been through.
(via yousetyourlimits)
EVERY SINGLE EPISODE OF THE GOLDEN GIRLS. -
This is how I made it through this week.