Strange Star

[Pietro]

Yesterday...a published poet who also read at the open mike handed me a copy of her newest book inscribed: "Dear T, I loved your poems." This made me feel amazingly good

Fantastic!!! I bet these kudos made you feel good. :)

It's a bit like when you have the stomach virus and feel like you're going to vomit and everything in your mind and body tries to make it stop, even though you know it's probably inevitable.

Yes, yes, yes! That's my analogy for this! You're the only other person I know who's come-up with the same thing! :)

Here are some choice mom quotes from the conversation that followed.

Here is the sad but likely truth: there's no point in trying to reason with her, explain things to her, and, worst of all, count on her for real support. You're never going to get from her what you seek, because she's incapable of providing it. Which is, of course, much of what underlies our issues -- parents that didn't provide unconditional love, who refused to allow us our independence and help nurture our individual identities.

This is a harsh thing to come to terms with, and took me a long time to reconcile. I think I'm still in mourning over this realization -- to find-out that my mother has the emotional maturity of a six year old with regard to much of her life and her thought patterns. She was a child trying to be a parent, and, as such, could never have thought beyond how everything impacts her.

Essentially, you end-up having to parent your parent -- drawing firm boundaries, keeping some distance, and being calm but firm when they cross boundaries. It's difficult to do, because parent/child relationships are extremely emotional, but it's necessary for sanity.

The "part" I discovered is the part that believes I have no business existing.

Yeah, I have a part like this also -- but I haven't gotten nearly as close to it as you seem to have. Mine is very good at hiding.

Shakespeare wrote PLAYS. They are meant to be PERFORMED

Funny. I never got Shakespeare until, one year in college, a group from Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company visited my school. They went to English classes and did improv with the students. And, then, because I was friendly with the drama geeks, I got to hang-out with them (they were wicked cool :D ). But, one night, they performed As You Like It. They used no props, no stage decorations -- just the actors in black clothing and a stage. I LOVED IT. Despite the difficulty of the language, I understood the play well because of how well they performed it.

All this to say that you are absolutely right -- you don't learn Shakespeare by dissecting the individual words. :) Unfortunately, I think that this is a common pedagogical approach for literature in general. They remove the "art" from it in order to make it an "academic" subject. Blech.

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Hope you're looking forward to a good weekend. I'm looking forward to sleep, first and foremost. We'll see about anything else after that. ;)

 

[Hope4Now]

Here I am, 12:06 AM. I am sitting in bed with my husband sleeping next to me. I'm completely wired, but I know I should try to sleep.
It used to be that if I didn't get at least 7 hours of sleep, I'd be a basket case for the next two days. Since all this PTSD stuff, I'm getting 4-5 hours on average...2-3 on the really hard nights. I'm physically wrecked, but in a very different way than before. I have no real understanding of the difference. Perhaps I'm just so riveted by my internal psychological processes that it is keeping me stimulated. Ha! How's that for self-reflexive?

Tonight I finally watched a movie I've been wanting to see, August: Osage County (with Meryl Streep, Sam Shepard, and lots of other terrific actors). It was quite different than I thought it would be. It hit me hard. It sure got some stuff going in me. Streep played the mother and Shepard the father in a wildly dysfunctional family. While very different from my own, there was enough resonance that it was uncomfortable to watch. Streep's character reminded me of my mother when her "filters" are off (which is often). She brutalized her daughters without ever laying a hand on them physically. And, there was a scene in which one of the adult daughters got into a huge fight with her drug-addict mother and went searching the house for stashes of pills to dispose of. It triggered memories of helping my mother hunt down all my dad's stashes of booze and dumping them and smashing the bottles, and the aftermath of that. And, it triggered so much more. Probably not the best movie for me to have watched tonight.

I'm really struggling with how to cope with my mother. She has been in prime form for the past two weeks or so. It is killing me, and the "bat cape" is only vaguely effective. I simply do not seem to have the psychic tools to save myself from getting sucked into her vortex.

Here is the sad but likely truth: there's no point in trying to reason with her, explain things to her, and, worst of all, count on her for real support. You're never going to get from her what you seek, because she's incapable of providing it. Which is, of course, much of what underlies our issues -- parents that didn't provide unconditional love, who refused to allow us our independence and help nurture our individual identities.

You are absolutely right, of course. I KNOW this, but I can't accept it. I get sucked in at every turn, naively believing that maybe, finally, she will get it. Not only will she not "get it" (meaning I don't know what), she will continue to treat me the way she always has.

How do we ever fill the holes left by parents who couldn't love us well enough? I do feel like I have a huge hole in some center of my being that I have spent all my life trying to fill. But, ironically, I can't fill it because I feel that I don't deserve love. Yuck. This is what screwed up childhoods do to us...damned if you do, damned if you don't. I hate this. All I really want is to love people and to feel loved, without all the garbage that mucks it up.

So tonight, Anne Lamott's post about Mothers' Day came up on my facebook page. It is worth reading. I do not like Mothers' Day (or Fathers' Day, for that matter). Here's her commentary: http://www.salon.com/2010/05/08/hate_mothers_day_anne_lamott/

Sometimes I think I babble on way too much in this diary thing and I get self-conscious. I am going to stop now. Maybe try to go to sleep. Tomorrow, small goals. I am getting a much-overdo hair cut, planting my half-dead peas and beans in the garden, hosting a cousin and her daughter for a tour of our small city and dinner, and then going to see the show my son is directing (which scares me a bit...about two traumatized people at different points in their lives...I read it an already got triggered by it). I would like to get through the day without a flashback, and staying present in my own body. That last is the real goal.

 

[Pietro]

I do feel like I have a huge hole in some center of my being that I have spent all my life trying to fill. But, ironically, I can't fill it because I feel that I don't deserve love. Yuck. This is what screwed up childhoods do to us...damned if you do, damned if you don't. I hate this. All I really want is to love people and to feel loved, without all the garbage that mucks it up.

Yup, this is the ultimate catch-22 -- we desperately desire love, but don't feel we even deserve it. The is the fundamental negative feedback loop that makes everything so difficult.

As we learn, over time, to be more compassionate with ourselves and our histories, we hopefully start to feel better about ourselves, and, then, start to work towards doing the things that make us feel loved and appreciated and worthy of life, ultimately converting to a positive feedback loop. But the only way to make this happen is through sheer force of will, working contrary to our innermost feelings that tell us how unworthy we are and how futile any of this work is. This is the hardest part, because this is the part that saps our energy and motivation, raises all manner of doubts, and chastises us in myriad and conflicting ways. Crazy-making, if you're not careful. ;) And sometimes even if you are.

You'll get there with your mom. At some point, somewhere within you, that emotional switch will finally trigger that says, "I am not required to take her crap anymore, and this does not make me a bad daughter or bad person. I am entitled to my own identity and desires, despite what she or anyone else thinks about them. And I am independent, mature, and capable of taking care of myself and others -- I don't need her to support or parent me anymore."

 

[Hope4Now]

Here I go again. Compulsively writing. Yesterday my therapist told me that PTSD falls on a continnuum (I knew that) and that I have a pretty severe case of it (I didn't know that). Maybe that explains why I am living in this perpetual state of overwhelm and utter confusion and what feel like a constant ebb and flow of flashbacks. I'm getting so tired of hearing myself "talk" in writing. Yet, my journal and this forum are one of the only things that keep me focused on the emotional work I need to do.

I think maybe I am going through an actual existential crisis that's just complicating the PTSD. I seem to have so many wounded child parts screaming out in crisis that I cannot even figure out who I am in all this mess. I seem to be just a huge energetic mass of chaos.

I am struggling with how to balance the amount of time I spend on my own healing vs. doing things for other people. Part of me is terrified that by doing all the things I'm doing to get better, I am becoming a profoundly selfish and overly self-involved person...narcissistic. The idea horrifies me. I wish I could go back to where I was a few years ago...treading in a soupy but manageable pond of vague unhappiness and dissatisfaction, but doing good things for my family and the communities to which I am attached. But I've unwittingly opened the Pandora's Box of my own psyche, and I can't shove everything back into it again as much as I would like to. Every time I try, I go spinning into bad places.

I'm flailing blindly looking for some path to follow that isn't an extreme of, on the one hand total dissociation from myself for the sake of doing for others, and on the other hand the total self-involvement that healing this thing called complex trauma seems to require.

Even the spiritual path I've been following leaves me in this quandary. I don't know how to practice lovingkindness to myself at the same time I am practicing it for others. It is a huge crisis in terms of how I am supposed to live my life.

 

[Echo]

@Hope4Now - I hear you. It is so hard. I just hope we finally emerge out of the painful, hideous fog and see what amazing progress we have been doing with all this spinning of myriad plates simultaneously.

PTSD and therapy seem to unpack everything at once or fast and furiously, but the integration bit - when does that arrive? It is very hard to live in this unpacked state with no anchors.

What does your therapist advise about how you could approach living your life?

 

[Pietro]

Funny... I was going to say something about the fact that, as you start to assert your own identity, needs, and boundaries, you start feeling like the most selfish and narcissistic person in the world. :D Which isn't surprising, because we've always learned that doing anything for ourselves was sinful.

Just like PTSD, self-attention falls on a continuum as well. Too little self-attention results in no life for yourself, and too much results in narcissism. Both of these situations are possible results of trauma. Finding the balance, that happy middle space where you can recognize and cater to your own needs, while not becoming so self-absorbed that you become indifferent to everyone else around you, is the goal. But, really, given the point where we're starting from, narcissism would probably be a very, very difficult thing to attain. :)

 

[Hope4Now]

Oh, my God. My son would have had to be the director of THIS show. It was amazing and powerful and left me fighting to regain some sense of reality so we can host the cousins from Australia for dinner tonight. Gruesome Playground Injuries. A one-act play that follows two very damaged and suicidal people back and forth in time through their relationship over 30 years, and always centered in an emergency type of place. It engages with internal, invisible damage and injury (she cuts and pushes people away) and external damage (he is "accident prone" and loves her desperately). It is about people falling into each others' pain as well as their own, and not being able to extract themselves. It was my son's final exam for his play production class. The nasty theatre lady who runs the program better give him an A.

I think the next thing I watch is going to have to be those unbearable sit-coms or something.

 

[Echo]

Yikes!

 

[Pietro]

Wow. If nothing else, you can be extraordinarily proud of him. If, at his age, he can pull-off directing something like that, he has the potential for one hell of a career ahead of him.

You should also be proud of yourself for enduring the play, as difficult as it was. :)

 

[Hope4Now]

I am sitting here at my desk on Monday morning. I cannot seem to rally myself to go to work. I do not understand this. Part of me feels quite capable of it, knows what needs to get done, knows people are depending upon me both for financial support and to do my job, but I am just stuck. It's like someone has poured cement into my body and mind and it is just too heavy to move. I suppose this is what my son feels like on those so many days when he is too "sick" to go to school.

I feel awful. The pain has been excruciating for two days, and yesterday I thought I would collapse while helping to pack up the cars with boxes as we clean out my mother's condo which will start being shown today. I finally came home and lay down for two hours while my husband and kids did the bulk of the work. I feel very guilty about this, but I simply could not carry on physically.

After the rest, I went to see my mother for mother's day. I bought her flowers and fudge and a card on which I put a short note, thanking her for being my loving and caring mother. Because she was and is--just simply could not provide the kind of nurturing love that would have helped me become a whole person. She is a terribly unhappy person with no insight into her life and total unwillingness to take any responsibility for her own fulfillment. She liked the flowers, complained for like 30 minutes that she would get fat if she at the fudge (which she tried to give back to me, then started eating anyway). She was obviously disappointed by the card, too. "Oh, is this all you wrote?" she said. I had actually kind of expected this reaction, so it didn't upset me too much...but it was just another confirmation that whatever hope I'd held out that she might someday change is just dead.

Maybe this is a healthy realization for me. It is, perhaps, time for me to "give up" on having any nurturing relationship with her. She has never been able to give me what I've needed, and I've never been able to provide for her what she needed. I don't know what it is in me that has tried for so long. The same thing happened with my father...at some point a few years before he died, I just gave up trying to be close in the way I wanted to be. He was just too sick in so many ways. It is a sad place to be when you find yourself in a relationship with your parents that is based only on pity and responsibility. I suppose I need to think of my mother as a social service project. Perhaps I will be able to get to a feeling of compassion for her on a more consistent basis. That would help.

After leaving my mother, I went with my husband to visit his mother and step-father. I didn't want to go, but I'm glad I did. I had a really good (but concerning) conversation with her. She fell down the stairs in January and has been dealing with chronic pain ever since...she is sleeping a lot, depressed, etc. We talked about her husband who she feels drinks too much (he does), and her daughter (who has MS and many many problems) and family...they are a completely dysfunctional family (fine on the surface for the most part, but broken when you look closely) who we have been trying to help and support for many years with no success. My younger niece has thankfully escaped to boarding school, but my older niece who is on the autism spectrum is really at loose ends. She graduates from high school in a few weeks and there are no plans at all in place for her because her father is in denial and her mother is incapable of doing anything other than being mean to her. Anyway, I urged my mother-in-law who is suffering tremendously from all this stress, to see a therapist. She seemed open to the idea (she saw a psychiatrist for like 20 years in the '70s and '80s).

I don't know why I am writing all this. It just seems as if I am surrounded by people who are falling apart too (although my kids seem a little bit better in the past month or so). I continue to feel my husband is in a bad place. He seems so very angry for the past 8 months or so (not at me...just general anger at the world). I feel deep concern for all these people I love, and my fix-it for them parts get all activated...but there's just no energy to fix anything because I guess I know I can't.

So my 17-year old son made a mother's day card for me (I don't know why my kids made cards because we don't celebrate mother's or father's day...I think my husband urged them). He wrote one of those poem things where you usually write the person's name vertically and words that begin with each letter. I have no idea what to make of what he wrote. Instead of my name, he made a poem out of the word PTSD:
Persistent
Tender
Sweet
Determined

 

[Pietro]

I don't know what it is in me that has tried for so long.

Hope. Optimism. A positive desire for the instinctual human need of love and acceptance. All of these are good things, things that make you a good person. :) Whether your mother can meet these needs or not doesn't invalidate these needs, nor the sincere effort you've made to connect with her.

 

[Hope4Now]

It is Wednesday. It feels like months have passed since Monday. I have such a whacked-out sense of time these days. I always have, but it seems to be getting worse. I think it is because I am somehow living my whole past over again at the same time as I am trying to live my life now. It is surreal.

Today, I make the tandem drive to Maine with my Uncle to begin cleaning out his condo that has been sold. My mothers is done and listed for sale (much thanks to my husband as I seemed irrationally unable to help with much at all but randomly throwing things into the trash and collecting pictures from the walls). The same thing happened when my parents moved from their big house to be closer to us. I was unable to go down there for the final move. My husband did it and I was so grateful. I think that house was just too fraught with memories for me...and everytime I went there, I ended up in a strange state of suspended existence...like I couldn't do anything but sit there.

This was true of cleaning out my mother's condo too. It is hard for me to go in there, still, because of the memories of arriving there before the ambulance came to take my father away. I think maybe I need to go through some sort of ritual cleansing while I sit in that room and see if I can't get rid of the lingering energy that swirls around that night. As horrifying as those moments were, what was worse was that all the past memories and emotions stuck onto that one and made it even worse.

Today will be tough too. The Maine condo holds most of my positive memories about my childhood and my family, as well as the memory of the transformative weekend I spent up there in March. I will never forget that. It's a funny place...the old town post-office converted into two condos...big wraparound porch, across the street from my favorite beach. I will miss the place. It will also be hard today because I can't get a sense of where my uncle is emotionally. When I was growing up, he was the closest thing I had to a safe-haven, although I didn't see him much. As an old man (he's 80), he's turned more hard and harsh, and is battling many of his own demons so he can be difficult to deal with. I am going up only for the day, and trying to get "centered" and prepared for whatever the day will bring.

Last night was a horrible night. My husband and I were planning to go out for dinner. I asked him to go up to talk to our son and let him know. He said something about homework that sent my son into an irrational rage of name calling and giving the finger to both of us. It stunned both of us. Made me sick to my stomach. Sent me into a kind of low-level flashback that often happens when there is a lot of anger around me, and especially when someone is angry with me and I don't know why. Over the next few hours, my back and leg pain became excruciating, and I finally decided to lie down on the floor which sometimes helps to calm it down.

That was a surreal experience. No sooner did I lie down, then I started having the most intense and complex involuntary body movements I've ever had. I mean, I've had periods when these get intense...mostly in my torso and neck...but last night was like full body involvement...shaking, violent twisting to either side, head movements, facial expressions, arm and hand movements, leg and feet...I was aware that it was happening. I don't know if I could have stopped it...I probably could have calmed it down by getting up, but I felt so shaky and wobbly that I just lay there. Yet through all of it, there were no images, no memories, not even any voices except a vague sense of "no" "no" etc. I was trying to fight something, not very effectively, trying to get away I think. The only emotion was a kind of dread...but I don't know if this was part of the body memory, or something I layered on top, knowing I was experiencing a body memory that makes no sense to me. I took a sleeping pill last night, so I slept, but I am still feeling pretty shaky this morning.

I don't know if these movements are metaphorical or reflective of something real that happened. I really have no idea. It could be my body burning off the energy of so many years of being trapped and feeling helpless and defeated by my parents. It could be energy linked to any other number of traumas I've had as well...because the list of those is long...some big T traumas, some little t traumas, but as a whole, a lot. I guess I'm sensitive to being traumatized. Or, it could be a body memory of something I don't remember...like birth, or like physical or sexual abuse. I wish someone could watch this kind of flashback happen to me and tell me what it means. What it looks like. Somehow, though, I can't imagine lying on the floor in some therapist's office and allowing someone to witness it. Maybe I should videotape myself. That seems kind of creepy though.

I do hope, at some point, all this surreality will somehow weave together into narrative. Some part of my system obviously thought I was ready to start dealing with all this...why it cannot just show me what I need to heal, I don't understand. Perhaps it is waiting for me to trust my own strength and ability to stay associated. Perhaps it is waiting for me to trust my therapist more. Perhaps it is waiting to make certain that I have surrounded myself with enough trustworthy and loving people to provide the support I need. (I don't have that right now...am surrounded by people, but the ones I'm close to are all dealing with such crises of their own that I don't feel like I can lean on them the way I need to, and the others are people that don't feel entirely safe to me).

Well, here we go. Off to Maine. I've got excellent music, a good cup of coffee. I've unfolded my bat cape. Hopefully it will keep me safe from whatever threatens to fragment me or flash me back today. One step at a time.