State of Grace

Summer of YES.

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.

How EMDR has worked for me.

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.

The Misinformation of Trauma and the Battle of Recovery.

I am posting about this in hopes that someone finds this helpful.  Yesterday, I had the honor of sitting in a room full of social workers who were having an honest and frank discussion of trauma recovery.  I went because I was curious how much of my own personal experience, my psychology background, and understanding of trauma matched up against today’s professionals. 

I should preface this by saying that I was a psychology major in college and pre-med for a number of years.  Like most majors, I was initially attracted to psychology because of my own issues.  Unfortunately, I went through 14 years of misdiagnosis because trauma and ptsd simply weren’t studied, taught, or taken that seriously when I was in college.  It was literally a paragraph in one of my textbooks and it was about combat soldiers.  We discussed early childhood development but not childhood trauma. 

In fact, that was one of the topics that came up yesterday- the belief that latent memories don’t form before the age of 5 and therefore early childhood trauma is often false memories.  As a survivor of severe and complex childhood trauma, I can say this is without a doubt, 100 percent not true. My memories were not only vivid but often played in the back of my head like a movie on repeat for years with no control.  I could remember tastes, smells, and textures.  It actually affected the way my brain processed other information and memories as well.  (to share a personal victory- recently I realized that I can’t remember how my first bf ever broke up with me. I used to be able to play it on repeat and today I can’t remember the sound of his voice!  It’s amazing!)

However, through a combination of psychotherapy, emdr, meditation,and cognitive behavioral therapy, I can say I have managed to not only reprocess my earlier trauma but to forget it as well.  What I have found in my own personal experience is that I have had to use several different treatment therapies, not one worked on its own.  My therapist is amazing, but there are so many quacks out there who honestly don’t know what they are doing and shouldn’t be allowed to fuck with someone’s mental health. 

It was amazing to sit in a room full of professionals who were actually questioning the existence of trauma and ptsd symptoms.  I can’t even begin to tell you how many times my hand shot up.  I didn’t disclose my trauma but I brought up effective treatment therapies and different successful cases. 

It’s very distressing that a room full of social workers would treat a serious mental disorder with such disdain and incredulity.  I work with other trauma survivors and while each of us have different stories and symptoms, our trauma was indeed very real.  Lately, I have been toying with the idea of going back to school and doing this for real.  When I started this path, I had to do it alone and it took me a lot of stumbling around to find my way.  I love passing on what took me years to find.

Half the battle is being taken seriously, but there is honest recovery from trauma.  I can’t pass this on enough.  I still struggle from time to time with symptoms, but today I can take a step back from them and use simple grounding techniques to bring myself back into the present.  A good start would be here, this book changed my life.

Concert-eve

After two months of three rehearsals a week on top of Sunday Service singing, our choir concert is tomorrow night.  I haven’t performed in over 12 years and I am somewhat nervous.  It’s been a rough month, I am going to be very happy when it’s all over.  Because I haven’t had a social life in over a month, I didn’t end up inviting any friends to the concert.  However, the amazing part is that I have made a lot of friends within my church as a result of my involvement in the choir.  People start to get to know your face and they randomly invite you to brunch, it’s the most amazing thing.  

Six months ago, I would never have been able to do something like this.  I could barely stand up on Sundays for longer than 15 minutes at a time.  It’s a testament to how far my recovery has come and for that I am extremely grateful.  There’s also something amazing about 900 people sharing this spiritual experience together.  You can almost feel the love when you are up on that stage.  Sometimes I like to pick an audience member and send them all of my love and good energy.  It helps me feel connected when I get nervous.  

In 24 hours, it will all be over.  I find that extremely comforting. 

Fifty Shades of Grey Trilogy

I finally finished this trilogy and really felt the labor of love the author put into it.  It was sophomoric at times but I didn’t really mind that.  I read all three books in two days and today, I finally feel like I am coming up for air.  Last night after I finished the third book, I had this strange feeling that I was meant to read this.  Like it answered so many questions I have had about myself.

Towards the end of the first book, I started to really become emotionally involved in the characters.  The thing is, I didn’t identify with the female, I am without a doubt Christian Grey.  Identifying with the fucked up hero was a first for me.  I don’t feel the same way he does about the darker side of his past.  I have worked through most of that in the past two years.  For me, it’s been about letting go of the last vestiges of the negative energy attached to that trauma.

Simply put, I am a trauma survivor that struggles daily with PTSD.  Will I ever have a normal loving relationship is a question I have asked myself, my therapist, and my sponsor sometimes weekly.  They assure me that yes, someday I will be able to function in a relationship but on bad days like I have had this past month, I don’t feel that same hopefulness. 

It was really fascinating for me to watch these two characters duke out his issues with trauma and ptsd.  I have been told by several supportive friends that someday I am going to meet someone that will show me that same compassion but it’s hard to think that it exists.

The reality is I struggle on a day to day basis with friends-who do I let in, who do I keep at arms length, is this person good for me?  How can I feel safe in this relationship is a question that goes through my mind sometimes hourly.  I think I am getting better.  But the thing with trauma recovery is that sometimes it gets really bad before it gets better and often times there can be setbacks.  Right now, I feel like I am living in one of those setbacks. 

I try not to talk about this stuff on my tumblr but the reality is it’s a huge part of who I am (at the moment, it doesn’t define me) and right now, working it out is the only way through it for me.  I know there are a lot of people that are in this with me who are struggling as well.  I have hope, but sometimes, it’s hard to see the bigger picture when your internal reality doesn’t match the external. 

Healing for me has often meant removing myself from the journey so that I can recharge.  Lately, I have felt that my life is just waiting for me if I only take that huge leap of faith and step outside my apartment.  For someone who lives with ptsd, this is easier said than done.  But one step forward, two steps back is working for me. 

Catharsis

I wanted to give a little update on some huge changes happening in my life right now.  For the past couple of weeks, I have noticed some changes within myself.  I have been feeling more relaxed, happy, and at times almost annoyingly joyful.  I never really thought of myself as an angry person but in truth, the rage was always simmering below the surface for me.  I named my tumblr “feistyred” because I thought it was a cute take on how angry I felt about EVERYTHING.

Since my major breakthrough 12 days ago, it’s like I have become a completely different person.  In addition to that, I also started doing some intense work on my interpersonal relationships.  And the change has BEEN MIRACULOUS.  I feel like all of the anger has drained out of my body.  While I still have residual anxiety, it’s diminished and there are days where I feel as light as air.  Yesterday, I was literally skipping happily around work.  And people in my life have started to notice.  It’s weird, when you start acting differently, people start treating you differently. IT HAS CHANGED EVERYTHING.

My fear of people is almost completely gone.  I have started really looking into the interconnectedness of people.  And come to the conclusion that if I fear or hate another person, I am essentially hating myself.  By treating others, as exasperating as they may be like they are an extension of myself, it’s changed the very way I communicate. 

I feel like all that anger that I was carrying around was literally blocking me from life, from being happy.  I was losing energy every day.  Of course, I was exhausted all the time. Of course, I didn’t want to deal with people.  It all makes sense.  But the work I have done with my therapist for trauma has been life changing.  I can’t recommend it enough.  EMDR has changed my life, it took a year of pain but it’s finally working.  Something that used to haunt me in my dreams is now barely a memory.  I can’t even begin to express my gratitude.

I feel like I have been given a new chance at life.  I still have a long way to go but for the first time since I started this process, I feel like I can relax.  I am ready for year 3 to be about fun.  I have been pushing myself so hard for the past two years, I am talked out.  I have nothing left to be angry, depressed, or sad about.  2012 is going to be about FUN.  I feel like I am ready to rejoin the world again.

It feels really good to not be angry, nothing but love and compassion from here on out.  (a day at a time, to the best of my ability…progress, not perfection…)

Anniversary time is coming!

Yesterday I felt like I had crossed a line talking about recovery.  It really makes me uncomfortable to talk about it on the internet but also it’s a really huge part of my life.  I don’t like to go into it too much because for me it really is a day a time.  I have ok days, bad days, good days, great days, etc.  I have been really lucky that drinking has not been an option for me.  The minute I took it off the table as an option, it ceased to exist for me.  I still get a little nervous about it because sobriety is hard.  Relapse is always an option for anyone who quits and I am really grateful that I haven’t chose that.  If I have an awful day, I eat cake, take a nap, go for a run, cry on my sponsor’s voicemail, call a friend.  Quite simply, I do not go to happy hour.

I have built a really solid foundation for recovery because I was a pretty fucked up person two years ago.  I know what it’s like to go from being completely broken to literally healing a minute at a time.  I can tell you how to do it.  I can tell you that it involves pretty much throwing out anything in your life that isn’t working and starting over.  You have to be willing to do things you simply DO NOT WANT TO DO. Every single day.  If that requires you to cancel party invites, order chinese, and watch silly movies- then that’s what you have to do. 

The party lifestyle is exhausting.  If you are going out 3 to 4 nights a week, drinking God knows what, getting 5 hours of sleep a night for 7-15 years, you are going to be pretty fucking exhausted and crazy when you stop.  Sometimes recovery means doing nothing.  Other times it means pouring every feeling you have ever had out to another person.  I don’t have any secrets today, my sponsor knows pretty much everything about me.  BUT there’s so much FUN to be had in recovery.

So anyways, it’s anniversary time for me.  I want to apologize if I come across as obnoxious to anyone but I am really proud of my two years.  This time of the year is bringing up a lot of amazing things for me. 

Mostly, I can’t believe that I made it this far.  My life fell apart in January 2010, except for a few really nice people (you know who you are), I had no one to turn to for 2 whole months.  February 2010 was a nightmare, A LOT OF REALLY BAD THINGS HAPPENED.  In that time, I did try to quit drinking on my own several times and it was a nightmare.  I was a mess.  Anxiety, depression, fear.  I stopped functioning.  Then I met a bunch of people who were really nice to me, didn’t drink also, and offered me friendship that didn’t cost a thing.

So I have a lot of GRATITUDE for my life, the people who helped me get here, people who told me I had enough even though I hated them at the time, the people who picked me up and fixed me when I had nothing, and the people who are still my friends today.  Seriously, it’s about to get warm and fuzzy around here.

Breakthroughs and Minor Victories…

I just finished the Hot Chocolate 10k in Riverside Park this morning in 1:03.  I feel pretty fucking high right now.  I love the natural highs of life, the euphoria is unlike any substance I have ever put into my body.  

Last night, I had another minor victory.  After a year of major, major, intense treatment for trauma, I got through to the other side.  It was scary and painful and often times I wanted to quit but I fucking did it.  I feel like I could just about take on anything right now.  I am so unbelievably blessed to have such an amazing therapist and sponsor who walked me through this process.  

As I have connected with other Trauma Survivors over the past year, I have come to realize one thing, there are people who have PTSD and there are people who are in recovery for PTSD.  I am so happy to say that I am the latter.  My only hope is that I can be there for other Survivors as they start this long, dark and painful process of recovery.  I still have a long way to go but last night was worth all the waiting and the work.

Sometimes the only thing we have is each other.

Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close

allthedeliciousness:

I fear watching this might bring me to my knees in a bout of full on PTSD, or it might just be part of what is likely to be a lifetime of healing.

I think I’ll wait and see what others have to say. I’ll definitely wait for the DVD, I don’t think this is something I could watch in public.

I found this movie to be extremely triggering.  I spent most of the movie trying not to cry but I also found it extremely hopeful.  Recovery from ptsd and trauma is a very intense and painful process.  Watching this little boy meltdown constantly was a pretty accurate portrayal of what it’s like to deal with ptsd daily.  The phobias, the emotional meltdowns, panic attacks, anxiety, the numbing, the freezing up, etc.  

I think the thing that made me cry most was he felt so alone in his process only to later find out his mother was actually one step ahead of him the whole way.  From a very personal place, I have found in my own experience that a parent can cause more damage when you need them most.  As someone who constantly struggles with a lot of anger for what can feel like a lifetime of letdown, it really brought up a lot for me.  

I constantly find myself asking people, “when does the anger go away?”  And the answer I receive back the most is usually, “I am not sure it does.  But it does get easier.”