Nine Things I’ve Learned

September 25, 2018 / MJ / 3 Comments

I used to write a lot about trauma and the nature of it largely because I was in the middle of dealing with it. For me, I would try to get outside of my own traumas and inspect them as if I were looking at a car I might buy.

“Where do I begin?”

That works for a while–the distancing. It restores to you a sense of control, and for people who have been traumatized feeling in control is meaningful. It brings a sense of empowerment, and that makes a huge difference when you’re doing “trauma work”. But, what about those things called “triggers”? What happens then? Honestly, it feels a bit like this:

Eventually, however, we have to take a meaningful look at what traumatized us. That is what many of my trauma-related posts are about–trying to live a meaningful life while also stuck in the “glass box of emotion”.

But, what about life after the trauma work? What do I mean by that? Well, I can tell you what I did during the trauma work. I shut my life down because I had no energy to power it. Metaphorically, I had a small generator, and that only kept necessary systems online. I withdrew from almost everything that involved socializing because I did not have the emotional energy to interface with other people. I was too sensitive at that time to deal with the normal flaws and foibles that characterize the human race. I could barely reach out to my friends. I was just trying to stay afloat. We are talking about surviving here. Getting out of a serious domestic abuse situation is not easy. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

I lost friends in the process. There are people who will not understand, not believe you, or who who will shame you for taking the actions you did. It all contributes to a very rocky healing process and extenuates the grieving. Alas, after the initial shock, the therapy, the fallow period in which you feel utterly broken, and the slow ascent out of the pit of despair and pain, you can and do emerge. You will be “remodeled”. You aren’t the same, but you are still you. So, what now? Three years after my ex-husband moved out, what have I learned?

If you commit to a process of therapy, you will heal faster. I was in therapy for two years. It contributed to the healing process for me post-divorce in ways I couldn’t have accomplished on my own. I am a die-hard believer in therapy although you need the right therapist. A bad therapist will create more obstacles, but you will leave his/her office with interesting stories.
There will be moments when you will feel discouraged about your life, and that’s normal. When you are living in an abusive environment, almost all your energy is spent trying to adapt to it. You are focusing entirely on your abuser or negative circumstances in order to anticipate what s/he will do next or what will happen. If you have children, you will also be trying to protect them. Your health and emotions matter little. If you sustained physical injury as well, you may try to brush it off as quickly as possible while pretending it never happened. That was my M.O. When the perpetrator of abuse is no longer present and the circumstances change, the first thing you feel is a wonderful sense of relief and joy. I was elated. My therapist warned me that the years of trauma that I had packed away in my body and psyche would come forward as soon as I felt safe. I said, “Nah…no way.” I was so wrong. I spent over a year processing that pain, and it was extraordinary. Basically, I was ugly crying in my bedroom every night wishing I would just die. Eventually, that stopped, but it won’t stop until you finish the process. So, commit to it with all you’ve got. Then, move forward feeling much lighter.
You might be afraid to meet new people, or you might feel the opposite–stoked to get out there and meet everyone. Initially, I felt so raw that I struggled to socialize. I was also blamed by more than a few people for being abused with very typical victim-blaming statements (ex. “I can’t believe a person as smart as you would let something like that happen.”). I simply didn’t feel like trying to make new connections. I also didn’t want new people meeting me in the context of such a transition. I felt defective somehow, and I think that feeling is normal considering how often people imply it however wrong they are. This does fade as you heal, but it is okay to stay in the relative safety of your safe space until you’re ready to get out there again as long as it doesn’t become a prolonged exercise in avoidance. Then, you’ll have new things to discuss in your therapist’s Hot Seat.
There comes a point when you come alive again. At some point in your healing process, you reignite. I do not know if any singular factor acts as a catalyst, but I do know that an energy returns that wasn’t there prior. For me, it was when I went back to school. That was an external manifestation of a shift in my beliefs. I reached a point where I believed that I could start over. I wanted to build a life that mattered, and I wanted my daughters to see what a woman was capable of–what it looked like to get up again. I found my worth again and believed that what I wanted mattered. I started to acquire hope. This is a very good sign. Go with it and see where it takes you.
You will love and be loved again. This was something that only resided in the realm of fantasy for me–even when I was married. I felt so overlooked and worthless during the last years of my marriage. Everything revolved around what my ex-husband would and would not do. I deleted so many parts of my emotional and intellectual repertoire to stay that I hardly knew who I was anymore when the marriage ended. I couldn’t answer basic questions like, “What is your favorite kind of music?” or “If you could go on a vacation, then where would it be?” We could only listen to his preferred music, and we never talked about vacations. I never had an iota of privacy, and he mocked almost everything that I liked. So, I lost myself. Meeting someone new was a glorious surprise, and I’m still surprised by it daily. I did not think that it was possible for me. I know that it is common to say, “If it is possible for me, then it’s possible for you.” It is true though. It is possible for you.
Let yourself be happier than you believe you deserve. This is still very hard for me, but I try. I, therefore, anticipate that it may feel difficult for you at times. There have been moments in the past three years when I have felt a limitless sort of happiness. When I feel it, I want to dampen it because fear is on its heels. I have never experienced sustained goodness in my life. Ever. This is often the case for people from abusive or dysfunctional families and/or circumstances. When you begin to believe that your environment is safe or you begin to trust those around you, circumstances and people often turn against you. You can’t relax. You can’t trust. You can’t believe. You can’t rest. You must always be on edge, read the people in your midst so that you know how to react, and be ready to fight or flee. Happiness or joy can never become something you truly want. Surviving is the goal. This is the reality of a trauma survivor, but it need not be your reality for the rest of your life. So, I suggest allowing yourself to feel happiness and/or joy when it comes and then allow it to stay within you longer than you are comfortable with it. The anxious thoughts will no doubt partner with your happiness–“What if _______ happens?”, “What if _________ dies?”, “What if _________ turns out to be just like _________ and hurts me?” There are myriad distorted anxieties that the brain throws at you when you begin to relax into happiness. That’s okay. Allow yourself to feel happier than you believe you deserve to be in little bits. Eventually, you can sustain it for longer periods of time, and that state of being will normalize itself.
Getting triggered isn’t as bad as it used to be. I experienced a triggering event yesterday, and it came out of nowhere as triggering events often do. Initially, I didn’t even know why I was upset. I thought I was overly sensitive and felt foolish. When I finally came to the reason, I felt oddly grateful and somewhat annoyed. I realized that I still had emotional work to do around some of the emotional abuse in my former marriage, and, admittedly, I’m tired of the subject. But, the recovery was relatively fast, and I could see it more objectively than I once did. I didn’t get sucked in and stay triggered for hours upon hours. This is progress! Triggering events are still painful, but they are now more representative of data points. I can use them to gain traction now rather than sink to the bottom of the emotional Laurentian Abyss. It does get better and easier, and you come to see yourself not as a victim of something but simply as yourself. That change in self-definition is a huge turning point.
You will eventually become more interested in your future than your past. This can be a hard thing to grasp, but it’s akin to a paradigm shift. When you endure a lot of therapy, you are naturally past/present oriented because you spend all your time sleuthing for past problems and traumas that affected you in the present. This is useful to a point. Eventually, we must begin to see our lives as present/future oriented, and that can be extremely difficult for people who have endured trauma largely due to the little talked about symptom of PTSD called a foreshortened future. What is a sense of a foreshortened future? Essentially, it means that you cannot plan for yourself because you cannot imagine your own future. You simply can’t see it. Some therapists define it as a person believing that their life will be cut short and define the symptom as an avoidance symptom in PTSD. I think that they’re wrong. I rely on neuroscience for this one. The brain relies on our past experiences and narratives to construct future narratives and make plans for us. An extreme example of this is an amnesiac patient. Patients with amnesia cannot make plans for their future. Why? They have no memories of past experiences so their brains cannot tap into past experiences to project possible narrative outcomes when planning for the future. So, people with traumatic experiences and PTSD have narrative experiences characterized by traumatic experiences. If all a person has done in their lives is adapt to trauma, then all of their time and energy is spent focusing on and adapting to someone else (a perpetrator) or to traumatic circumstances (poverty, war, highly dysfunctional or abusive circumstances). Never have they learned to plan. They have only learned to adapt on the fly usually around someone else’s behaviors or circumstances. Planning is a skill. Learning to “dream” about a future where good things can and do happen to and for you is also a skill particularly if you have never once experienced that. It must be learned in a safe place where one can be taught how, and where once can learn to practice it. The future doesn’t exist yet. We help to create it, but this idea is elusive at best when you perceive the past to have ruined your present. You must embrace the idea that your future is yours even if you can’t feel it or see it yet. It is yours as surely as your past is behind you. This one takes time, but it is possible to learn this skill.
You will recover your resiliency. This is a big deal. We are all resilient creatures. Humans can survive almost anything, but we can also reach breaking points. The point here is that you can come back from that. There are days when it will feel like you won’t or can’t. Don’t believe everything you think or feel. That is folly. Getting up again after setbacks, no matter how bad, is what resiliency is all about. Developing grit and shifting your self-definition from one of a victim to a person who can and will get up again is where the rubber meets the road. Changing how you view yourself in relation to the people who hurt you matters the most right here. For me, my personal statement has been: “I will not let people of that quality take the best out of me. I will get up again.” Remembering this has given me the fuel I have needed to keep going when I have felt truly overwhelmed. At some point, you will turn around and look back taking in how far you’ve traveled. You will see that you did indeed get up again and walk miles. No one said that the healing process was easy or felt good. I will tell you that it hurts profoundly, but it does not hurt forever. There comes a point when you something shifts. You will begin to feel more peaceful than you feel anxious. You will discover joy and feel that more often than you feel fear. Fear and anxiety can become habitual states of being. They are familiar, and we know how to feel like that. Joy and peace? Not so much. Those must be cultivated and invested in. And…fought for. The culture we live in does not value joy, peace, civility, and kindness. If you want that in your life, you have to cultivate it, fight for it, and stand guard over it.

At this point on the road, this is where I’m at. I’m sure in a year I’ll be somewhere else, but it is reassuring to know that we don’t have to stay where we are now. We can get up and move. As always, I wish you all great peace and…

Keep going.

Generalized Anxiety vs. PTSD Anxiety

July 14, 2018 / MJ / 2 Comments

I have devoted a lot of space on this blog to writing about PTSD, C+PTSD, and healing from trauma. I’ve been honest about my own journey towards wholeness. What I share here is an attempt to elucidate the emotional experience behind C+PTSD in specific the anxiety experience.

What I can say for certain about healing from C+PTSD is that it is like a disease that remits and exacerbates. I can go a year and not devote any time to thinking about the man who abducted and trafficked me, my time in captivity with him, or the events that happened to me therein. I rarely think of my father or stepmother. My mother doesn’t come to mind much either in the context of her abusive behaviors. The domestic violence I experienced in my former marriage is no longer foremost in my mind. It’s not the people or specific events that dog me now.

So, what is left after you deal with the details and process the events? What is left after therapy because there is something left?

I’ve had a hard time defining the quality of what remains until a friend sent me a link to this article yesterday:

We Can’t Keep Treating Anxiety From Complex Trauma the Same Way We Treat Generalized Anxiety

Vicki Peterson, the author of this article, writes:

“No one gets a prize for “worst” depression, anxiety, trauma or any other combination of terrible things to deal with, and no one should suffer alone. With that in mind, there is a difference between what someone who has Complex PTSD feels and what someone with generalized anxiety or mild to moderate depression feels.

For someone dealing with complex trauma, the anxiety they feel does not come from some mysterious unknown source or obsessing about what could happen. For many, the anxiety they feel is not rational. General anxiety can often be calmed with grounding techniques and reminders of what is real and true. Mindfulness techniques can help. Even when they feel disconnected, anxious people can often acknowledge they are loved and supported by others.

For those who have experienced trauma, anxiety comes from an automatic physiological response to what has actually, already happened. The brain and body have already lived through “worst case scenario” situations, know what it feels like and are hell-bent on never going back there again. The fight/flight/ freeze response goes into overdrive. It’s like living with a fire alarm that goes off at random intervals 24 hours a day. It is extremely difficult for the rational brain to be convinced “that won’t happen,” because it already knows that it has happened, and it was horrific.

Those living with generalized anxiety often live in fear of the future. Those with complex trauma fear the future because of the past.”

This is absolutely true, and most therapists don’t seem to have a clue that there is a difference. Perhaps this will help someone reading this…

I live with a smoldering anxiety that never leaves me. It peaks when I’m happy. Oddly, it ebbs when I’m too busy to pay attention to what’s going on around me, and I suspect that trauma survivors try to stay so busy because it prevents them from feeling this particularistic type of anxiety. When I’m struck with the evanescent beauty of a moment, fear creeps in like a thief and begins to steal my joy. I do not know how to escape any of this. It might be strange, but I’ve tried to make friends with it. I’ve wanted to understand it in an effort to defuse it.

As Ms. Peterson has said, I don’t fear because I’m generally anxious. I do not have an anxious personality. I fear because of what I’ve known. Because of my past experiences. When the worst-case scenario has already happened to you, then who’s to say it won’t happen again? Yes, I’ve survived extreme sexual torture, a kidnapping, human trafficking, and years of abuse in my family of origin. I was duped by my ex-husband for twenty years and sexually assaulted by him. My former therapist told me that I could clearly survive anything. My brain fears that I will have to do it again. Over and over again. This is the flavor of anxiety that belongs to trauma survivors. This is the nature of PTSD and C+PTSD anxiety.

I do practice mindfulness, but becoming mindful does not shut down my anxiety. It often only makes me more aware that I’m fearful and feeling helpless. It can promote the very hypervigilance I’m seeking to escape.

“The remedy for both anxiety and trauma is to pull one’s awareness back into the present. For a traumatized person who has experienced abuse, there are a variety of factors that make this difficult. First and foremost, a traumatized person must be living in a situation which is 100 percent safe before they can even begin to process the tsunami of anger, grief and despair that has been locked inside of them, causing their hypervigilance and other anxious symptoms. That usually means no one who abused them or enabled abuse in the past can be allowed to take up space in their life. It also means eliminating any other people who mirror the same abusive or enabling patterns.

Unfortunately for many, creating a 100 percent abuser-free environment is not possible, even for those who set up good boundaries and are wary of the signs. That means that being present in the moment for a complex trauma survivor is not fail-proof, especially in a stressful event. They can be triggered into an emotional flashback by anything in their present environment.

It is possible (and likely) that someone suffering from the effects of complex trauma is also feeling anxious and depressed, but there is a difference to the root cause. Many effective strategies that treat anxiety and depression don’t work for trauma survivors. Meditation and mindfulness techniques that make one more aware of their environment sometimes can produce an opposite effect on a trauma survivor. Trauma survivors often don’t need more awareness. They need to feel safe and secure in spite of what their awareness is telling them.”

Feeling safe and secure, for me, is key. Safety and security in my relationships and environment seem to be the cure. I know why feelings of relief and happiness trigger feelings of fear and, sometimes, emotional flashbacks. My father deliberately cultivated feelings of happiness and relief in me in order to overturn them and further engage in abuse. He was a pathologically cold man. My mother’s emotional and personality disorders caused constant instability in our family environment. As soon as any sort of happiness was achieved, it vanished just as quickly due to her inability to maintain a consistent mood or affect. She also attempted suicide numerous times. As soon as any family member felt relief that she might be doing better, she would attempt suicide again or lash out in talionic rage against someone in the family. Nothing in my family life was ever predictable. We consistently waited for “the other shoe to drop”. I grew up on edge. If there were ever a moment of happiness, I knew that my mother would ruin it. Or my father. That has proven to be true over the years.

Consequently, when I feel this rising panic borne of this nebulous but constant fear that follows me everywhere, it isn’t generalized. It is quite specific, and I find myself saying, “I can’t go back to that. I can’t do that again. I won’t do that again.” And, I feel frozen and terrified as if an old enemy has found me. I feel a strong urge to cut all ties and run away mixed with a terrible almost existential fear that I will live out my life completely alone. And, yet, I know that this will all pass. It is, as I said, like an exacerbation of an autoimmune disease–an autoimmune disease of the mind and soul.

With that said, what is to be done? Well, I have therapized, read, studied, and pursued many roads over the last twenty years in order to answer that very question, and I’ve had a fair amount of success. For the survivor of trauma, however, consistently establishing safety and security in your myriad environments and relationships is the number one thing to do to defuse anxiety and flashbacks related to trauma. This will always be the first and last step. It is also the first question to ask when you feel that familiar fear rise: “Do I feel unsafe or insecure anywhere in my life or in any relationship?”

I hope that this has been helpful to you. Ms. Peterson’s article has been very helpful and validating for me.

As always, keep going…

Shalom, MJ

Reporting Sexual Harassment and Trauma

May 5, 2018 / MJ / 2 Comments

In a state of anxious frustration, I wrote about sexual harassment a few month’s ago. Another student was sexually harassing me, and my school’s administration was less than stellar in their handling of the situation. Well, they really didn’t handle it. The situation is still “pending” in that other women have come forward with similar complaints about the same student. I have learned that this student is a known offender, and the administration had known about his propensity to harass women for at least a year if not longer prior to my complaint. And, they did nothing. What’s more, he is studying to be a healthcare practitioner! Do you want to spend time alone in a room with a guy like this? I do not. Alas, my school seems oblivious to the implications of graduating a predator, and I’m personally very alarmed by this.

I’m profoundly troubled not to mention I have two classes with this person. He sits directly behind me in one them and mouth breaths the entire time.

Or, he turns around and stares directly at me glaring in a menacing way. Either way, it is uncomfortable and disconcerting. Knowing now that the school administration lied to me about his history of harassment fires me up. I am taking action, but, at the same time, I feel tremendous anxiety about doing so. And this is where the rubber meets the road in terms of how both men and women must deal with social injustice in institutions.

Why is it so difficult and fear provoking? When faced with taking on an institution like a corporation or a college, why do so many people weight the costs and decide to absorb the inequity of the injustice?

The first reason is because institutions tend to exist well after complaints are made against them largely because they have almost infinite resources compared to complainants. They often have a fleet of lawyers on retainer compared to the sole advocate that a complainant brings to the table. This alone is often enough to deter a person from pursuing a complaint. Institutions have financial resources that dwarf an individual’s bank account, and they have the will to go the distance in terms of the legal process. Most individuals don’t have the time, energy, or money to devote to that process.

The second reason many people don’t pursue complaints against institutions is fear of retaliation. People need their jobs, and students need to finish their degrees with the favor they’ve earned from their teachers. Filing complaints can often obliterate favor, provoke bullying, and get you fired. I was once fired from a job after I lodged a complaint of sexual harassment in my workplace. The harassment was prolonged and severe. A man in my office actually locked himself in the women’s bathroom with me and forced himself on me and engaged in forced sexual touching. The company was in the middle of an IPO. Rather than fire the man for harassment, the company fired me for saying anything. This culture of gender discrimination is common, and it has become evident the world over what with the cascade of revelations following the Weinstein Effect and the #metoo movement. So many men and women tolerated the intolerable for fear of retaliation.

I filed an official complaint with a governmental body that oversees colleges and universities, and I’m very fearful. My fear is based in past experience with sexual trauma, and this is the third reason people often don’t report sexual harassment. It provokes latent feelings of fear associated with past trauma that were never fully resolved. In my case, it is so difficult to resolve the original trauma. It is known on my blog that I survived human trafficking. I was abducted when I was 18 years-old by a neighbor who masqueraded as a real estate agent. In reality, he was a participant in an international human trafficking ring. He was wanted by Interpol and other international law enforcement agencies. I was taken across the country to a port city to be sold at auction. Yes, there are super-wealthy men in the world who actually get together and bid on women in order to buy sex slaves. If you’ve seen the movie “Taken”, it was startlingly similar to that except Liam Neeson didn’t rescue me. I ran for my life and succeeded against all odds. It was by far the weirdest and worst experience I’ve ever had.

I never had a chance to accuse my perpetrator in a court. I did, however, live in fear of his finding me and taking me again for years. He became the amorphous fear that haunted me. He became the ultimate retaliation. My escape and survival represented the complaint. I was convinced that he was going to rain vengeance down upon me for staying alive. Consequently, I learned to stay hidden in my life. Don’t complain. Be quiet. Swallow mistreatment. While my experience is extreme, it’s not difficult to make a comparison to other experiences. When we have experiences in life that cause us to feel fear in terms of speaking up and self-advocating, we may discover that absorbing mistreatment is the better path if only to get us through the moments. This might be adaptive in those moments, but, later on, this can become a habit. This habit can become maladaptive later causing us to become victims of mistreatment and abuse. We lose our ability to self-advocate and even begin to invite mistreatment largely because we lack a standard for how we should be treated. We will tolerate anything because we are too fearful to say ‘no’. And the fear is no longer valid. The original object of our fear is long gone. But, the fear remains, and the fear is no longer purposeful. This purposeless fear is what I feel today. It’s real, but it serves only to limit me. It is purely trauma-based.

This is why I’m such a fierce advocate of healing trauma. Our post-trauma brains served us once. We survived our traumas, and that’s brilliant. We should feel proud that our brains and bodies did that for us. At the same time, post-trauma responses often become self-limiting because they do not serve us once the situations that cause trauma pass. We must learn to deactivate the mechanisms in our bodies that keep us locked into Trauma Brain and Trauma Body so that we can do what must be done like report sexual harassment or advocate for those being victimized and not get triggered while doing so.

I do not know what will happen now that I’ve made an official complaint. I’m not happy about this situation, but I did the right thing. That has to be enough for now.

Healing Past Trauma in The Present

February 12, 2018 / MJ / 1 Comment

I have been trying to find an appropriate way to write about a particular “emotional” experience that I have endured for years. I wouldn’t blog about this were it not for the fact that most survivors of trauma seem to experience something quite similar. What is it?

It isn’t exactly the Foreshortened Future experience, and it isn’t the “catastrophizing” thought distortion either. One could say that it is a combination of both. It is somewhat unique unto itself. Essentially, it is a fundamental feeling of dread that something terrible is going to happen. It usually comes out of nowhere most often when nothing terribly stressful is happening and particularly when you’re feeling happy. It almost feels like you’re being watched, but it’s not paranoia. As if Life Itself is watching you. Waiting to destroy your happiness. To inflict something torturous and terrible on you. It is the emotional experience of “the other shoe is going to drop” x 100.

It creates fear and panic. An anxiety extraordinaire. And no matter what I’ve done in terms of CBT, DBT, EMDR, and therapy, this flavor of terror has stubbornly stuck around. I’ve grown so tired of it that I generally don’t discuss it when it strikes. I live with it until it passes. It is so familiar to me. I cognize myself out of it, and my therapists praise me for that. I don’t feel good about it. I feel exhausted and somewhat defeated. This just doesn’t feel good enough.

In the midst of one of these unusual “anxiety attacks”, a friend suggested I try breathing essential oils. There are some oils that are particularly good at crossing the blood-brain barrier and affecting the limbic system. I had those oils on hand. I gave it a shot, and it was effective. I was pleasantly surprised. She then suggested that I introduce some cognitions while smelling the oils the next time. This experience felt very similar to EMDR using essential oils (and I do not recommend doing that if you have a lot of unresolved trauma because it was remarkably potent).

What came to mind, quite out of the blue, during that most particular feeling of dread was an ordeal from my time with trafficking. It came so far out of left field that it stunned me. I said out loud, “What does that have to do with anything?”

I’ll write about it here because I think that it is so important in terms of present experiences of trauma and anxiety that we can experience. I did not receive any justice in terms of the legal system regarding my trafficking experience. I got away and survived it. The man who abducted me was never caught, but he knew where I lived. And, he knew where I was going to go for college. He made threats to find me and murder me when I was in the trafficking environment should I try to escape. Law enforcement agents explained to me that should I see him, I was to notify them, but they admitted that I was vulnerable to “secondary contact”. For at least two years, I lived with feelings of terror and dread that he would find me again. I had nightmares. I looked over my shoulder. I checked and double-checked my car. I wouldn’t go anywhere alone. Whenever I relaxed enough to start to enjoy myself, I suddenly couldn’t because he might show up. That might be the time that he would make good on his threats. It probably took a full five years to stop looking over my shoulder and another ten to stop believing that, at some point, he was going to find me and kill me. My heart still skips a beat today if I see someone who resembles him.

How does this connect to the present dreadful anxiety attacks? I suspect that what is happening today are actually the same feelings of dread that were related to the post-traumatic experience of leaving the trafficking environment, but they have lost their context. Those feelings were never processed. So, they continue to play out until they are processed. I never talked about them. There was no one to talk to during that time. I just had to start college and pretend that none of it ever happened. Those feelings are so strong today because I was in a marriage that triggered those feelings of dread and enlivened them. They are now front and center. They appear as an emotional flashback void of visual cues. The way to deal with them properly is to go all the way back to their source, but, if you have profound trauma, do not do that alone. You need the guidance and support of a trained clinician.

I am always fascinated by how we function. Our brains seem to be fighting us, but they aren’t. We just lack information. What amazes me more is that when we’re finally able to listen and receive information, our brains speak to us. When I finally sat down and asked, the memory came forward clearly. I almost dismissed it because it made no sense to me.

I encourage you to take time out of your day or week to journal or pay attention to what your mind is offering. Some of it is white noise and cognitive distortions, but not all of it.

And, if you really want to look into something interesting, then check this out:

Emotional Release with Essential Oils

Pushing Back against Malignant Core Beliefs

December 22, 2017 / MJ / Leave a comment

I want to talk about negative core beliefs and dissonance–and perhaps a way to challenge them effectively. Bear with me as I get there. I have written a lot about my last two years in therapy with a neuroscientist. I didn’t know initially that he was an official neuroscientist (who taught at the college level) who also happened to be a social worker, but that’s what he was. He specialized in “difficult cases”. I didn’t think of myself as a difficult case per se, but I imagined that my history would qualify me for that label once my full case history was trotted out.

I’ve written before that my most powerful negative core belief is “I am disposable. I am expendable.” It is hardwired. I have processed almost all of my maladaptive core beliefs at this point, but this one is like the final boss in a video game. I can take it on over and over again, and over and over again I lose. It’s not “online” most of the time, but when it’s activated, I fall. I cannot refute it. There is no line of thinking that will stand up to it. No amount of EMDR has defused it. This is why I agreed to continue therapy after my therapist moved. To try to get at this particular core belief.

And then…

As I was sharing my frustration and fear about dealing with this with someone close to me, an idea was brought forth. He commented, “You can’t nullify a person, right? That came up for you early on in therapy. Your sense of morality doesn’t allow you to do that. You view all people as significant regardless of past acts. Is this true?”

Well, yes, I do. Frankly, it has made dealing with my parents a pain.

He continued, “Philosophically speaking, would you find it immoral to view another human being as disposable?”

Yes. I would. Humans are not disposable.

He then asked, “So, would it violate your own sense of morality and personal philosophy to view yourself as disposable? To agree with that?”

“Well, I…uh…”

Why had I not asked myself this before? How had I not seen it from this perspective? I do not believe that I can have a double standard. There are not two sets of rules in the universe. If it is true for others, then it must be true for me. That is one aspect of integrity. How I view and treat other people must also apply to myself. If I view other people as having inherent worth and in no way disposable, then how could I view myself in an opposite way?

This is where the arguments start. This is what I would like anyone who has a profound struggle with a deeply embedded negative core belief to take note of. Challenging a core belief doesn’t change it. You must think of this like a boxing match. Once you find a statement or a strong sense within yourself that you can hold onto that matches the strength of your negative core belief–that matches its energy, then you can throw the first punch. Like this:

Heisenberg: “You are completely expendable. Disposable.” Me: “My morality doesn’t let me believe that so I can’t be. I am not.”

What will happen next? Heisenberg, your profoundly negative, most likely biologically embedded core belief, will get up and come at you with evidence. That is exactly what mine does. Heisenberg is cold, mean, and extremely smart. He uses evidence from my past to prove why I am disposable, and the case is airtight. And, the more you listen, the worse you feel. The more monstrous that core belief becomes. As if it takes on a life of its own until he’s doing this:

Those feelings that you have at this moment are defined as “dissonance”. Why? They are the gap between what you are starting to know is true about yourself or situation and what you feel is true about them. This gap can be shallow or a deep abyss. This is why emotional dissonance can be so dangerous and hard to manage. This is where the spin-outs and target behaviors can happen. I typically freeze and can’t reach out. Emotional eating, cutting, high-risk behaviors like gambling, high-risk sex, substance abuse and emotional dysregulation are all common manifestations of falling into this gap.

Now, a negative core belief doesn’t sound that bad on paper. Why would someone react in such an extreme way? It is a matter of what that core belief represents and triggers. In my case, my negative core belief centering on expendability was literal. I was trafficked. I had a literal price tag put on me and was sent to an auction. Men actually bid on me. It was the most dehumanizing experience that I could never have imagined as an 18 year-old. I was put through experience upon experience meant to rob me of a sense of identity so that I would come to experience my own person as an object void of self. That is the purpose of the “breaking in” process. Once you are no longer a person, you are compliant. The problem for me in all of this was that I fought the process in captivity and left that environment with a sense of self albeit a very traumatized, compromised one. Years later, when there is a trigger, the past becomes present, and I am faced with this old but very effective lie. It is biologically embedded with the actual trauma. This is the neurology of trauma and beliefs acquired with trauma. This is why we suffer so much when we flashback–even with something as seemingly benign as a negative core belief.

Part of battling it out in the therapeutic process is identifying that which you solidly believe to be true with someone who can parse your language. When someone gets to know you, they can often help you discover your values and truths–the truths that you take for granted. This can prove to be quite useful when you can’t see what’s true anymore staring up from the bottom of your dissonant abyss.

What is a better strategy? Don’t fall into the abyss. Well, that’s brilliant. How do we avoid that? Go back to that moment when Heisenberg is giving you the finger. In the past, I didn’t have anything that could adequately refute the case he made against me. I would fold every time and free fall. Now? I still feel the onset of panic when that profoundly negative belief comes online, but I honestly know that it cannot be true because it does not line up with any of my beliefs about humanity. How could it be true? Once I sat with that, I let it go further. If I’m not expendable or disposable but a person treated me as if I were, then who in that situation had acted badly? Me or the other person? Clearly, the other person. This is an easy conclusion, but it is a very difficult idea to internalize when you grow up under gaslighting conditions or presently experience them:

“We treat you like this because you are bad.”

The truth is this:

“We treat you like this because we are bad.”

Change one word in that statement and the meaning is completely different. Gaslighting is very common: “You are the problem which is why we hurt you. You are the problem which is why you were sexually abused. You are the problem which is why X happened to you.” What perpetrator is ever going to admit, “I have the problem which is why I hurt you”? Nary a one most likely.

So, there you are staring down Heisenberg. He’s coming at you with your terrible belief, triggered by something that you can’t control like a phone call from that person, something a person said to you, a feeling you had when something happened that made the past present in an instant. It could be anything. When this experience is beginning to crescendo, do not try to change how you feel. Do not try to change Heisenberg. He never changes. Bring in your own strength–your own hitter. I figured this out because I realized that some of our very malignant core beliefs do not belong to us. They originated in our trauma and are not natural to our personalities or nature. We may have held onto them because they helped us navigate extreme and painful circumstances, but they no longer help us. They hinder us. This is the definition of ‘maladaptive’.

This is what a solid refute will do to your Heisenberg:

These malignant core beliefs are designed to paralyze and limit. Whatever you put in front of them, they will naturally push up against.

Your challenge will become the wall to your Heisenberg. Heisenberg does not stop showing up when stress shows up. Your neural connections have created a fantastic pathway for him. The more you use your challenge against him, however, the more you weaken his pathway until there are potholes in your neural connections. It will look something like this:

He still comes for you, but now he trips on the way.

After a few months of challenging Heisenberg with the same new thought that might be one of your beliefs: “I can’t be disposable because it violates my own personal sense of morality,” my personal Heisenberg is starting to do this:

He leaves before anything serious starts.

In my mind, I thought for years that dealing with negative core beliefs was all about changing them, but then I realized that a negative core belief was a lot like Heisenberg of “Breaking Bad”. Heisenberg, much like Dr. Jekyll’s Mr. Hyde, was an evil alter ego. A negative core belief is a negative alter ego of a functional, adaptive thought. It’s a thought gone rogue. It served a purpose, but its present existence has long outlived its original purpose. Now it just keeps on comin’ because that’s what it does. Like a cancer.

I can try to kill Heisenberg or strengthen my other thoughts in order to overcome him. Where is the effort better spent?

So, the key here is finding the right challenge. That is the most important part of the process in taking down a malignant core belief and arguably the most difficult. I would assert, however, that the prior work done in therapy, which included EMDR, laid the foundation for present insight.

The other strategy I have used in the past and model in this post is externalizing and naming a toxic feeling in order to separate it from yourself and your identity. I have identified my most feared maladaptive core belief as “Heisenberg” in order to differentiate every idea associated with it from myself and my identity. This draws a distinct line between me, my own thoughts, my hopes for my present and future, and what I would like to think about. This is highly effective for dealing with negative emotions.

For anyone experiencing the abysmal free fall or struggling with repetitive negative thoughts rooted in malignant core beliefs, there are strategic ways to deal with them and eventually defeat them. It takes time and consistency, but it is possible.

Keep going.

A Timely Ending

December 7, 2017December 7, 2017 / MJ / 6 Comments

Jack the New Therapist aka the FNG will be no longer. It has become a failed collaboration. That is what my reasonable self says. My snarky self is pointing at this:

The Resting Bored Face

Jack has one of the worst Resting Bored Faces I’ve come across. There are three places you never want to see an RBF: 1) on a date 2) while you’re speaking publicly 3) on the face of your therapist while you’re sharing something. He doesn’t mirror or even change his facial expression very much. He is extremely low affect. He rarely smiles. It is strange. He is putting the clinical in clinical psychologist.

It’s more than that though. He won’t actually therapize. He just expects me to sit and talk ad nauseum, and I hate doing that. That is too client-centered for my taste. He rarely asks questions. When he does he says, “Do you mind if I ask a question?” Sweet fancy Moses, please ask a question!! If I mention a past traumatic event, he looks visibly jarred by it. He then says, “I’m just really angry that you experienced that. That shouldn’t have happened to you.”

I’m way beyond that now. Of course, that should not have happened to me. What I need is some kind of insight into resolving remaining emotional dissonance, and I now see that he can’t offer that. He can’t get past the nature of my past traumatic experiences. He’s hunting for something. An explanation for something. It feels as if he doesn’t believe me on some level. I present how I present, and he continually refers to studies that show that I should be a mess. So, the questions that he has managed to ask are not meant to help me. They have been probing questions.

Do I trust that my male therapist won’t be sexually inappropriate with me if studies show that our first experience with a man–our father–becomes our template? (Yes, he actually asked me that.)
How am I able to form solid relationships with men or women since both my parents were abusive? How has that even been a possibility for me since studies show…?
How am I able to experience any kind of sexual intimacy with a partner after being sexually brutalized since studies show…”

Do you see a theme here? This wasn’t therapy. This was some kind of inquisition, and I don’t say that in cynical way. The Spanish Inquisition was an inquiry into whether or not a Jew who converted to Christianity was, in fact, an honest convert. This felt like an inquiry into whether or not I was “fronting”. Was I really stable? Was I really recovered or effectively recovering? After all, studies show that you can’t fully heal after trafficking, childhood sexual abuse, and longterm exposure to traumatic environments in childhood and adulthood. Studies show that you struggle, your hippocampus shrinks, and you remain fragile in some way for the rest of your life. Well, I never liked those studies. Excuse my language, but fuck’ em. I don’t want a smaller hippocampus or a lifelong struggle. He wants me to provide evidence that how I appear in his office is true in my life.

No. I don’t have to do that nor should I have to in a therapist’s office. For all his training, he should have known better. There are healthy ways to gauge the state of a client.

All that aside, I think this experience has answered my question: Do I still need intensive therapy?

I don’t think I do right now. I’ve been at this since March 2015. My favored therapist saw me through the dissolution of my marriage, the fallout, and the processing of the trauma associated with domestic violence. He saw me through the process of “getting my shit together”. He was one of the best therapists I’ve ever worked with. Perhaps it was good that he moved out-of-state. It allowed me to assess myself and see that I didn’t need the Hot Seat anymore. After everything that has happened since mid-2015, that’s a weighty realization as I head into 2018.

And this is where I must say that the unimaginable is possible. I don’t want to sound “inspiration porn-y”, but I do want to be honest. I could not have imagined my life in January 2015. I knew that I was miserable and despairing. I knew that I was getting sicker and sicker. I knew that I no longer loved my husband. I was starting to figure out that he was abusive. I knew that I was living a life that I hated. I wanted so much more for myself and my daughters, but I didn’t know how to get there. It all felt out of reach for me and them. Impossible. How do you start over in mid-life?

One step at a time taken with great anxiety, however, and my life changed little by little. Your life does not change overnight. It changes with sometimes very small steps made by you. And, truthfully, it all depends on how much you want it. How badly do you want to be free of what is keeping you from something better? For a while, you have to be single-minded. Tenacious and relentless. You must get used to the idea of uncertainty which human beings tend to disdain. More than that, you must dislike your present circumstances more than you dislike not knowing what will happen. Once that tips, it becomes a lot easier to make big changes. The outcome becomes less important to you than making the necessary changes even if those necessary changes are ripping out the foundations of your life.

Currently, I would say that the hardest part of the past two-and-half years has been learning to live with uncertainty. It hasn’t been the loss of a marriage. I had a bad marriage. The grief associated with the loss of a dream or an idea hit me harder. The trauma that occurred within that marriage was very painful to process. The things that he said to me infested me in ways I didn’t know until they came creeping out when I was alone at night. That was very difficult, and I have cried harder and longer over the past two years than I think I have in my entire life.

And yet I can say now that it was a deep cleansing. Sexual violence can leave us feeling defiled in a very particular way. I was sexually brutalized for days in a drug-induced haze when I was in the trafficking environment. When I left that place, I felt utterly shattered and desecrated to my core, but it didn’t feel personal. Human traffickers are criminals. They are doing what they do–the job they have chosen. In that way, it was easier for me to heal. While I experienced shame, it was somehow easier to deal with because, while I felt for years that it was my fault, it didn’t land or fester in certain areas of my identity.

After the sexual violence in my marriage occurred, I was brought low into a place of utter desolation. My husband raped me. More than once. And then he blamed me for it. He tore my hip apart. He herniated the muscles supporting my pelvic floor. I required two corrective surgeries–one requiring months of rehabilitation in which I had to learn how to walk again and the other requiring a stay in the hospital and weeks of no driving, no lifting, and sitting on pillows. It was humiliating.

I will probably not discuss the nature of the domestic violence in my former marriage again, and I do so now with a reason. What I have realized now that I have some distance is that it feels harder to overcome trauma endured from a friend. From an intimate. Brené Brown suggests in her latest book that it is harder to hate someone close up. To counter popular and anonymous hatred, we should then move in. What if that hatred comes from someone close to you? From someone who promised to love you? The opposite of love isn’t what most people assume. It isn’t throwing candelabras and screaming while stomping around and launching invective. No, that’s not hatred. That’s rage. Hatred in an intimate relationship is complete disengagement to the point of treating the former beloved as if they do not exist, and, when the beloved continually seeks out some form of validation that they do indeed matter, lashing out in violence to make the point that they do not and will not.

This is the opposite of love, and it is extraordinarily difficult to heal from. Why? This kind of treatment erodes your ability to retain hope and trust. As much as I wanted to believe that someone I loved wouldn’t do to me what my ex-husband did, I could not. When someone said, “But, I love you,” my mind would simply counter with, “That is what he said.” If your partner could hurt you so profoundly while saying he loves you afterwards, then how will you ever know what is true again? It is this uncertainty that has nearly undone me. It is this uncertainty that has done the most damage to my ability to trust myself again and my ability to make good judgment calls.

What is to be done about it? How does one heal from it? For real? How? Well, this is what I have done and continue to do:

If it is not true, then do not believe it. Or, at least acknowledge that you intellectually do not buy into it even if you emotionally agree with it. Beginning to separate the two is the beginning of the healing process. It also helps you begin to discern what’s driving your responses.
If you aren’t sure whether it’s true or not, then ask someone, like a therapist or close friend, to help you figure it out. Trauma weaves a strange web, and sometimes when something causes a flare-up or exacerbates PTSD symptoms, you just can’t discern what’s true anymore. Call someone who knows you so that you don’t fall down the rabbit hole.
It is okay if your emotions are not catching up with what you know cognitively. It takes time to bridge the gap (this is called dissonance). An example from my own life is this thought: “I am disposable.” Cognitively, I know that this is false. Emotionally, it feels so true sometimes. How do I merge the emotional belief and the cognition so that the dissonance is resolved? This is where EMDR comes in. This is why seeing a therapist who specializes in trauma and EMDR is so vital. When it flares up, I have to make a choice, and sometimes I can’t. I must ride the wave of pain that always passes.
Build a squad of people who are good to you. Those people should see you as you are far beyond what has happened to you–your identity is not tied into your trauma. More than that, who you are is in no way reflective of how your former abusers saw you. That goes a long way into bridging dissonance.
Take a look at what you are letting into your imagination. When you leave an abuser and an abusive environment, you get to choose what comes into your mind and imagination. You finally have say. What will you read? What movies and shows will you watch? What forms of entertainment will you consume? What music will you listen to? How will you rebuild your brain? This matters. Will it be dark and mournful or hopeful and beautiful? Empowering? Or angry? Passive? Active? What helps you feel better? This is a time to begin to think about your tastes, your likes and dislikes, who you were, and who you are becoming.
Take some time to try to imagine your future life and do something in the present that your future self will thank you for. This might sound cheesy, but this actually helped me make the final decision to go back to graduate school. When I took into account the time that it would take me to complete my graduate degree I winced. But, then I realized that the time would pass anyway, and I imagined my future self thinking, “I’m so glad that I did this.” I knew that I wouldn’t regret my decision.
We must all banish the idea of “arriving”. There will never come a time when life will be easier. We will never be happier when X happens. I promise. I once thought that I would be happier when I lost the “baby weight”. I did. I wasn’t. I then thought that my life would be perfect once I finally had meaningful sex with a man who really loved me. I did. I won’t lie about that one. That was a marker of my life vastly improving, but I was still me. I still struggled with finances, thought patterns and habits that I disliked, and my disdain for that one tooth I don’t like. And, I’m still an introvert.

Lastly, be kind to yourself. Be very, very, very kind to yourself. This is probably the hardest thing to do out of everything. It might, however, be the most important.

We are in the holiday season now. If there were any time of year to show yourself patience and kindness, then it’s now. With that, I wish you, my readers, the deepest peace and restfulness that you are probably wishing everyone else through your holiday greetings and well-wishes. May it truly be so for each of you.

Shalom…

Big Ideas in A Little Poem

September 7, 2017 / MJ / 2 Comments

When you are a parent, partner, and all-around Make It Happen person, it can feel like there is no room for “flow” or peace. When the buck stops with you, you never stop running, anticipating, planning, deciding, problem solving, observing, fixing, and repairing. That’s me. I’m the Make It Happen person in my life. In my home. In my domain.

Does anyone relate to this?

If there’s a problem, then you have to fix it.

If anything needs to be done, then you do it.

If anything needs solving, then you solve it.

This was generally clear to me when I was married. This is now crystal clear to me now that I am not. If I even see a potential problem, I can’t just let it be. I am compelled to fix it before it becomes a real problem. I define hypervigilance.

I never shut off. Burnout, anyone?

Consequently, I have little to no hobbies. I don’t read for pleasure. I’m studying, but I used to almost solely read nonfiction because I was, once again, attempting to solve some health or circumstantial riddle. Any free time I might have my children manage to sniff out and find creative ways to fill. I don’t know how they manage to do that.

So, when I came across Rev. Safire Rose’s poem, I had to read it more than once. Twice. Ten times.

She Let Go: A Poem

She let go. Without a thought or a word, she let go.

She let go of the fear. She let go of the judgments. She let go of the confluence of opinions swarming around her head. She let go of the committee of indecision within her. She let go of all the ‘right’ reasons. Wholly and completely, without hesitation or worry, she just let go.

She didn’t ask anyone for advice. She didn’t read a book on how to let go. She didn’t search the scriptures. She just let go. She let go of all of the memories that held her back. She let go of all of the anxiety that kept her from moving forward. She let go of the planning and all of the calculations about how to do it just right.

She didn’t promise to let go. She didn’t journal about it. She didn’t write the projected date in her Day-Timer. She made no public announcement and put no ad in the paper. She didn’t check the weather report or read her daily horoscope. She just let go.

She didn’t analyze whether she should let go. She didn’t call her friends to discuss the matter. She didn’t do a five-step Spiritual Mind Treatment. She didn’t call the prayer line. She didn’t utter one word. She just let go.

No one was around when it happened. There was no applause or congratulations. No one thanked her or praised her. No one noticed a thing. Like a leaf falling from a tree, she just let go.

There was no effort. There was no struggle. It wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad. It was what it was, and it is just that.

In the space of letting go, she let it all be. A small smile came over her face. A light breeze blew through her. And the sun and the moon shone forevermore.

– Reverend Safire Rose

Let go. Let go? Let it be? Let it all be? That just sounds anathema to me, and yet it also sounds appealing.

How do you feel when you read this?

What comes to mind for me is that hypervigilance is adaptive when you’re living in an intense environment. It works well. It helps you survive. Being a troubleshooting go-getter is a good quality. Knowing how to survive the most complex of circumstances is great. But, at some point, we either bring that adaptation down from DEFCON 2 to DEFCON 4 or even 5 so that it doesn’t become maladaptive, or we continue to live our lives as if we are consistently under threat–even when we are not. This destroys relationships, jobs, health, and hurts the people close to us.

So, what about that “letting go”? What would that look like? What about just stopping? Giving up the need to control everything? No consulting friends. No journaling. Just…doing it. Well, that sounds unappealing, but it feels freeing at the same time, doesn’t it?

At the moment, I’m not sure what it would look like, but I can tell you that I will be thinking on it. And if the idea of letting go feels too hard, then perhaps change the idea to something like this: “Loosen your grasp on things that you are trying to control.”

How does that sound?

Doable?

Maybe?

Shalom…