Processing Trauma - Black And White Thinking?

[Abstract]

Thank you Junebug Franciemarie and Blackbird.

I had convinced myself that the stuff I don't remember (during the big black hole in my life) did not happen but after posting here had a terrible nightmare and it was full of stuff that is linked. Not too thrilled about that as that particular topic had settled for a while now. It's possible it never happened and it is symbolic only.

I hope my ridiculous tiny steps aren't offensive to anyone. I see everyone ploughing through trauma work bravely and it seems wrong to be discussing such little things. I just needed to say that.

I have more or less decided that my difficulty with this issue (accepting that I have done some trauma work - argh, just saying that is not good) is that things are still even more compartmentalised than I think they are.

In my mind it isn't an onion and is rather me on a road that winds this way and that and that I have been travelling along. In the far distance to the right and over the hill is an onion. It lives in another land with other people. There is a solid transparent wall between me and that land. I think that I am in that land sometimes but really I don't believe it.

Saying I have done just a little trauma work means that I have taken a nibble out of that onion and that means the country is real, the onion is real, and I have really visited it.

Accepting that the onion is part of me and the winding path is part of the whole story makes me feel like I am coming apart.

If these are defence mechanisms I am tired of them. I just want to be going in one direction or the other. I am much more stable in certain ways and should be able to take a bigger step forward now. I have reigned back on direct exposure for a while now to see if that helps unstick me in the stuck areas but I think it is time to do some more direct pushing again and see what happens. Tired of treating myself with kid gloves. In fact it sickens me to have to do so.

 

[rightkindofme]

Hey, if your baby steps are offensive to someone that is THEIR problem, not yours. Take care of you. :)

 

[Abstract]

Thanks Rightkindofme. :D

 

[Venusian]

Everything we do causes ripples in our world. If you start thinking of healing in a quantum way maybe that is what we are doing. In quantum theory you affect a particles state of being just by observing that state. Once you see it, it will become something else, be somewhere else. Quantum theory also allows for particles to be entangled, two or more particles become mirror images. This means that something that affects one particle can affect the entangled particle wherever it is. If you look at trauma work the same way, if you analyze it, it is changed forever, hopefully for the better. If processing the trauma for the better all the stuff, the anxiety, the flashbacks, the emotions "the guck" that is linked to that trauma are changed too, even if slightly. Therefore the opposite is true to, anything you do to help "the guck" will help the trauma. If you look at trauma work like this, it is all the same thing.

 

[Abstract]

Venusian, that is a great concept. Thanks you for sharing. I like seeing science in healing or life. I have divided every aspect of my life into neat little packages for too long and rejected many of them. Even the small step towards taking it all in are fairly demanding. I know I am not alone in that.

 

[Abstract]

I think I am just going to put down as much as I can even if it is very small.

What started me thinking of this was reading some of the threads on body work. I certainly haven't done any advanced trauma body work. What I have done is changed many things in the relationship I have with my body and almost all of that has significance in other ways to me and has brought up links to stuff as I have gone along.

Part of that was dealing with my long term ED. I am not going to be too explicit but being able to eat and nourish my body appropriately linked to other things in certain ways, physically. My clothing was also way to big (my jackets were actually double the size number wise than they should have been) and learning to wear clothes that fit made me feel sure I was being looked in inappropriate ways by everyone and was going to be attacked. I would have waves of such intense fear and paranoia that I would be paralysed.

I didn't ever wear make up. I felt too much self hatred for myself to but it was also a part of rejecting all femininity. I dressed myself in a way that made me less attractive and avoided anything that could have shown off my femininity. I come across as feminine regardless and there was part of me that seeked out male attention whilst the other part would do anything to avoid. It felt dangerous.

Learning to allow myself to dress in an appropriately feminine way and in clothes that fit and grooming myself in a normal way made me feel very unsafe and "triggered" and I had to work through that in order to tolerate it and it took a long time. The same with managing to be a "normal weight". To tolerate a normal weight. I had to process a lot of stuff to manage to get there. It meant having a woman's :yuck: body and without either nothingness or fat to buffer that. I still have waves of the feelings and have to hold onto not going back to old ways of dealing with that. Being triggered/having intrusions or flashbacks etc and not under any circumstances resorting to my most long term and entrenched means of coping and one so wound up with trauma for me was and is a major issue and which involves underlying stuff. I suspect we all have our most entrenched, symbolic(in relation to trauma) and destructive means of coping with trauma.

I had no attachment to my body. I did not feel it and had very few body cues. Not cold (I would wonder around in freezing weather and not think I was cold), not unwell - not knowing I needed treatment, not hunger and satiety or a number of other things. I hated it with a passion and wanted nothing to do with it. It was a foreign body.

Being able to learn to deal with basic health issues, nourishment, clothing and number of other things involved accepting I had a body and in some way creating ownership. All of that involved processing many feelings of fear and other stuff.

Although I certainly cannot say that my body and I are good friends and always attached I am a hundred times closer to that than in the past. My body sometimes doesn't feel like a weapon or a danger to me and others any more or at the least in less general, all consuming ways. I feel many things physically that I did not in the past and as much as despise that most of the time I know it is probably progress. There is more but it is too difficult to discuss.

I can bare to do things such as put body cream on etc whereas in the past the self disgust and feelings of being dirty were too overwhelming to manage that.

The way all of that changed was by facing it in various ways. There is much more in there but that will do I think.