Strange Star

[Hope4Now]

Oh, lol, those are just a small selection. @shimmerz maybe we should design some ANPicons. My hostess one is now engaged. (Hmmm...big smile, and a wine glass? Nah...I'm a whiskey drinker.) Husband invited someone for dinner. Ugh. Welcome home, dear.At least he's cooking. No gender stereotypes in our house.

 

[shimmerz]

:banghead: <<< ANPicon when EP's come out to play.

 

[Hope4Now]

Sigh. I've a long journey ahead.

Hard evening last night. Destructor got involved so I'm all bruised up. Just couldn't stop. Slept though...first time I've had 5 hours straight for a LONG time. Woke up in activated state. Calmed eventually. Did normal things for a bit, getting ready to write script 2. Then, bam, out of nowhere...massive awful shift. Went to bed shaking and flashing and slept until my video crew called to see if we wanted to cancel because of snow. I said no. Why the hell did I say no? WTF. I'm desperate to cancel. I'm not finished writing. It is now 9:38 PM. Just came home from celebrating sister-in-law's birthday and hearing about the family funeral in Wisconsin that we bagged on. Bad family members that we are. Ugh. Husband in weird mood so will have to hang and process with him. Which I would much rather do than writing scripts. Will try to get up at the crack of dawn to finish writing.

When do you know when it's time to cry "Mercy!"

Sometimes I think I will just keep pushing until I die from the effort. Other times, I think I ought to be gentler with myself. It's a constant war. I can't seem to find any balance at all. I've always been too intense. Too extreme. I hate being me.

I feel sick and exhausted and demoralized and very, very, very vulnerable and sad.

 

[Hope4Now]

The problem with ME and this forum is that I can't remember what I've said to whom. Between my head, my journal, this forum, my therapist, and my husband...who knows what in the world I've said?! I certainly don't. I am forever saying, "I don't know if I told you this..." :sorry:

It has been a tough day. Am thankful that my husband has rallied enough to care about the finer points of my daughter's presentation on the Battle of Saratoga (which is FINE but she doesn't think so). I didn't think I'd be able to get out of bed this morning, but I did. Dressed in record time and got kids to school on time. Went to work late because I was noodling around on the forum. There was a sort of guerilla war going on about whether today would be the day I gave up on work.

It wasn't. I went to work and did stuff. My boss must have some sense of my total overwhelm because he a) released me from doing the second part of a big project I thought I'd have to take on because a colleague was too overwhelmed to handle it...same reason this current filming project is in my lap :banghead:. He's put it on another colleague. She will need a lot of my help, but at least the buck won't stop with me. And b) made me promise not to work this weekend to finish another project that was supposed to be due on 3/6 but can technically wait. I told him I'm working anyway because I have to fly to NY for a few days for a special conference at which I am making a presentation...but it was kind of nice to have someone tell me, "Stop."

I kind of wish my therapist or psychiatrist would tell me to stop working for a while. I can't seem to do it for myself even though it is becoming obvious that I am going to crash if I don't. When I don't have to do something else, I come home and lie in bed for hours until I drag myself up to do dinner with the family. Very important. Then again, I totally cannot afford to not work as long as I can make myself do it. We are in so much debt now (because of me!) and have a kid going off to college in the fall :wideeyed:. Oh. Yeah. I have to do the financial aid forms tonight. Due March 1. Sigh.

It is all too much. Even the smallest things swamp me in overwhelm. I am fantasizing that I am somewhere safe where nothing at all is expected of me and someone kind and gentle is taking care of me and protecting me. I know I am supposed to create that island inside of me, but I just can't do it. I need help. I'm not sure anyone realizes how desperate I feel. I think I'm telling them, but they just keep encouraging me to keep doing what I am doing, so I do. But what I am doing isn't working out too well on the inside. I mean good things are happening in my system, I know that, but it also feels like I'm coming to some kind of crisis point. But I don't know what it is.

I felt something like this around 10 years ago when I had a kind of weird breakdown after a crisis on a sailing trip. For some reason, sailing is very triggery for me, especially when bad things happen. I just don't have enough umph to deal well with them. I have the journal I kept intermittently around that time. I know my system was telling me things then that I chose not to listen to :banghead:. But I went on and continued my life just fine, generally. Now here I am in a more severe situation that is lasting much longer. And I'm scared. It is starting to feel realer all the time. And I don't know what to do except try to keep doing what I am doing. :(.

 

[Hope4Now]

Oh, more and more gets clearer and clearer. Think I'm just coming off of an hour long "insight high." Love that term that Valentino uses. I can now clearly "see" at least one aspect of my physical pain and where it comes from...what the parts are doing and believing that are resulting in the pain. I even listed 3 things that need to get processed to heal these parts' relationships to each other and to my SELF (self both physical and emotional...bodymind). I just don't know how to do it or what I need in order to make it happen. THAT is not at all clear yet. Well, maybe a little.

I think all the physical pain stuff has its roots in when I "exploded" into parts around 3 or 4 years old. I actually have a sensory memory of this happening. But something else happened before that--when I was born and given up by my birth mother and stayed in the orphanage place until my adoptive parents took me with them. I don't know what it was and likely never will. I've had some flashbacks and visions but they're not at all clear. It may have been as simple but profoundly devastating as neglect. I did not attach. I did not develop a solid concept of myself as a body in space...and I still struggle with that. I think what happened later (before I exploded), is that I attached to the dog. I wanted to BE a dog. Probably because the dog was safe. Maybe that's part of what saved me...that I attached to something that gave me what I needed. What I need now is to learn what it feels like to attach safely to a human being, so that I can have a sense of my SELF.

Ugh. So tangled up. Headache.

LOL...this morning as I was talking to my daughter about how stress and fear and anxiety can show up as physical feelings (she is struggling with headaches and stomach aches and body aches...sigh.), and giving her some examples of my own experience, she said, "Mom, do you think you would get better if you stopped working and became an artist like you always wanted to be?" Wow. Pretty insightful for a 13 year old child. She's nailed it.

 

[Hope4Now]

:wideeyed: Spooky enneagram email message today. I am such a 5. This is SO TRUE...
Remember that your mind is clearest and most powerful when it is quiet. Take time to cultivate this quiet in yourself, and do not confuse it with an insistence that your external world be silent. (The Wisdom of the Enneagram, 227)

 

[Tinyflame]

Hi @Hope4Now , I know nothing about enneagrams , but I borrowed a book today about it, it was just 'sitting there'. :wideeyed:

Don't have much to give but hugs for you, :hug: :hug: :hug: .

 

[Hope4Now]

@Junebug, the enneagram is very cool if you are at all interested in personality theory etc. The full assessment is a little like Myers Briggs Personality Test, but much more comprehensive and, to my mind, helpful. I had never heard of it until last January. They have a good website and a free mini-test if the book catches your fancy. http://www.enneagraminstitute.com/ I signed up for a daily email that is matched to my type (like what I posted). I am continually stunned that every email I get seems to match exactly what I need to hear. It has been quite helpful to me through this PTSD stuff too...
And I ALWAYS welcome and return :hug: :hug:. They're what sustain me. Thanks.

 

[Valentino]

enneagram email message today. I am such a 5.

I'm a type 5 enneagram also, and have found that it the most useful of all the personality typing methods that I've explored.

I'm still considering throwing in enneagram models into the structural dissociation thread adding it with Panksepp's work, but it's a bit challenging to create a simplified summary.

On the surface, I like their breakdown of types 8,9,1 as instinctual body types, 2,3,4 as emotional heart types, and 5,6,7 as head thinking types...

Rough connection would be that body types might be using the RAGE, SEEKING and reptile brain type circuits, heart types are more fixated with the PANIC/GRIEF relational mammalian limbic brain circuits, and head types are more intellectual anxiety based (FEAR circuits + cognitions)..

It also might work by identification with perspectives, body types are more 1st person (me) doing/action behavioral perspective (single focus action identified), heart types are more 3rd person vs 1 person (we+she/he+me) feeling/relating and comparing perspective (outer world/relating), and head types are more 3rd person (he/she/it) watching/observing/thinking perspective (inner world/imagination).

 

[Hope4Now]

@Valentino, I'm delighted to connect with someone who appreciates the enneagram stuff! Given all of the helpful things you've posted, I'm not surprised you are a 5. :). I really like your connections with the Panskepp. I need to contemplate this some more if I'm not too fried after work today. I think you're onto something. I love this kind of synthesis thinking :D. My favorite. Actually, it's more than synthesis...okay here's a new term for what it is...dialectical synthesis. Maybe I didn't make that up, but I think I like it. Hegel and all.

 

[Hope4Now]

Surprisingly powerful and wonderful session with my therapist today. I am happy about that. I wasted the appointment on Monday. Couldn't get out of a part even though we were both aware of it. It was just too activated. But today?! Yay! In SELF mostly.

We had a REAL conversation at the beginning...like REAL people connecting as equals...talking about BOTH of us. I like it so much when he is him SELF and doesn't get all therapist-y and uber-professional. It is okay sometimes, but hard to build a relationship with only one of his parts. My psychiatrist is very psychiatrist-y mostly. Although he did sit sideways in his chair and put his feet up on Monday. That was so odd. I was pretty scrambled up and I think maybe he was trying to put me at ease by showing me how relaxed he was himself. But it didn't seem real, so it didn't work. Just confused me. I don't know him very well yet. Can't quite figure him out. But I've only seen him 4 or 5 times.

So today, unlike most times, I went to therapy with some specific things I planned to share. Couldn't do it. Although it all made sense in my own head, and I had written it all in my journal, I just couldn't organize the language to get out what I wanted to say. So I jumped to attachment and started talking about my earliest memory (which had been a small part of a bigger, more complicated story). Before I even realized it, we were doing some processing...not trauma per se, because the specific memory was a happy one even though it connects to traumatic ones.

For the first time ever, I actually experienced AND remember what re-processing memory feels like. I was present and feeling the young toddler sensory feelings too. Several times, other parts started coming in, and other memories started sticking to this one and threatened to overwhelm, but my therapist caught them and helped me re-focus and I was able to get everything else to step aside for a bit and really connect with that baby part. It was so amazing. And it taught me something about how my usual memory loops get in the way of processing. I am so encouraged by our meeting. I want to do more like this. I AM LEARNING! HOORAY! FINALLY!

And. Tah Dah! @Pencil , you will be proud of me...I told him that his long hugs were the most healing things in the world for me...and we talked about touch. A lot. I said kind of a lot. I think he was glad I was talking about it. And, the world did not end.

 

[Hope4Now]

:wideeyed:. I just re-read my last post. I rarely re-read anything I write. Perhaps I should more often. I remember the appointment on Friday. I remember it was good. But it feels like a million years ago and as if it happened to somebody else. Definitely not me. I wonder if this feeling means that I am in a part, and not in SELF.

I simply do NOT understand how I can, on one level, be aware of so much and recognize intellectually that I am one single person, but at the same time have so much disconnected experience. It is excruciating. Like one of those awful nightmares where you know you need to run or scream or do something, but you are incapable of sound or movement. It is as if, most of the time, most of my parts are living in this nightmare, while one part is in control. When that happens, I am not aware of the other parts in the nightmare. But sometimes, when I am "scrambled," it is as if a whole bunch of parts are out and on the battlefield vying for control. That's when I'm aware. It's happening now. I have like 8-10 parts that are all expressing different and conflicting things.

Go to work NOW. No, take a shower, you have to take a shower. No, keep writing in your journal because you need to sort this. Stop being lazy. Get your shit together. Go to bed and get warm and rest because you're exhausted. No, you're imagining all this. You're crazy. Yes, if you don't go to work NOW you will ruin your whole life. Stop being irresponsible. Run away. No don't. That would be bad. Hide. Yes, better. Where? How? No place to hide. You're going to explode if you don't pull yourself together. Hurt yourself. Yes. That would help. No it wouldn't. Stop it. You have choices. You're nothing. You don't exist. Give up. No. Go get another cup of coffee. Smoke a cigarette. Call in sick to work. Take care of me. I'm scared. And on and on ad nauseum.

I am so very tired of living like this. The SELF that peeks through knows this will pass, and I will go on, and things will work out one way or another. That I am one person. That this is my life. That self also knows that I need to take the wheel and make some choices about where to go and what to do. But there is so much friggin noise in my system that my SELF doesn't know how to listen to everyone all at once. And sometimes I'm not even sure who is at the wheel...so whatever decisions I make may be parts decisions and not SELF decisions. I am driving myself crazy. It takes hours and hours to sift through it all. I am a slow processor. And I don't have TIME to slowly process. I exist in crisis mode. Must act NOW. See, I KNOW this is a part, but I can't seem to get it to settle. Ugh Ugh Ugh.

Sometimes I think I should just flip a coin about decisions. I begin to understand the pathology behind people who toy with russian roulette. They have parts battling...stay alive/kill yourself. I'm not going to kill myself, but I get it now. I never used to.