Strange Star

[Hope4Now]

I'm glad you asked. I did post in your other thread, but I'll say more here. I seem to be sort of hyperlexic these days.

When she is "unblended" can you feel what she feels, or does she describe her feelings to you? The work of IFS therapy seems to be to unblend, but it seems to me that there is some value in blending too.

First, I want to say that I completely understand your desire to blend with that part of yourself. I feel the same way. But I think the initial work is to unblend first...to make sure that other parts aren't going to interfere with your relationship with the part you're trying to deal with. This is the hardest work...trying to contain all these parts. Ultimately, I think, the goal is to integrate that traumatized part of yourself into a narrative in which she exists in you, as a part, but she is not you. She is not your core self. She is a part. Blending too early runs the risk of your losing ability to access to your core self. As I'll describe below.

With regard to this child part of myself that I described above, it is hard to explain. But I'll try.

I "see" her clearly only because I have a photograph of myself at that age. She seems like a child that I'm responsible for. There are a few memories that overlap, but fundamentally she seems separate from me. From all I've read, this is not at all unusual. I feel FOR her, but I don't feel her emotions as if they're mine...it's more like empathizing and feeling compassionate. However, even though this is how I see her/feel for her when I'm taking the time to focus on her, something else also happens.

When I first "encountered" her, it was in a therapy session. I have been working a lot on trying to "contain" two energies that overwhelm me all the time and against which I fight. One is fear, the other is this nasty, toxic inner voice that overlays everything. I managed, with the t's help, to get it to recede a little. Then, we were working on the toxic part and my physical reactions to it. Then, I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but suddenly I was very terrified, almost cowering where I was sitting, and the t asked, "What part of you is responding to this energy?" I must have said "a very young part." I was feeling very vulnerable and afraid (but nothing else). He asked several other questions re how old is she, what is she feeling, etc. I was able to answer him, but it was as if he was distanced from me. He asked, "is this little girl right there now? are you this little girl?" and all I could do was nod. He explained that she was blending with me, and that I needed to work with her, ask her to give me some space so I could get to know her. Over the next few days, I was able to do that. So, although she is very separate from me, she is also part of me. My job is to keep her separate from me so that I can get to know her without having her overwhelm or "flood" me. (Another trauma-speak word).

I think what this work is doing is using dissociation in a healthy, controlled way. When parts blend with us so much that we completely lose access to our core selves, we just get retraumatized, and sometimes self-destructive. Using containment to keep some of these parts separate from us, is a sort of voluntary dissociative technique that allows us to take manageable steps toward healing.

does she describe her feelings to you?

Not really, as she is very young. But her feelings are pretty clear to me, though they are not my own. She's angry and terrified and ashamed and very, very sad. I am feeling compassionate and loving to her (when I can get rid of the toxic energy). Sometimes I am afraid of her though (that's the fear energy I work to contain)--for example I am very afraid of her when she gets quite insistent on showing me her drawings...that's my fear energy trying to protect me from getting overwhelmed by what she has to show me...and we haven't even gotten to the feelings!). So, I'm just working on spending time with her. It's like creating a relationship with her...coloring, playing with cars, etc. It is hard to describe and seems so fictionalized to me, but my therapist assures me that this is really important work to do. When she gets to be too much, I have to ask her to wait--really, in the same way I have to navigate and negotiate with my own children in my life now. It's not that I'm abandoning them or not loving them, but sometimes I need them to give me some space because I have other things to do.

Another child part of myself...a little older-4.5 maybe, does describe her feelings. I have done less work with her, perhaps because her trauma (a near drowning while mother sat by reading the newspaper) I clearly recall in real memory. Even though I clearly recall it, and I remember the terror and anger and shame I felt in that situation, I am removed from it now emotionally. It is as if I am watching a film of it from two perspectives...I see it from her eyes, but I also see it from my eyes now--the whole situation. When I tried to do the work with her that I am doing with the other little me I describe above, it did not go very well. It was much earlier in my therapy, before I had done some of the containment work (and, I think, before my therapist realized how much stuff was really going on with me). I got to a point of being able to visualize her and invite her to "sit" with me. In the visualization, we walked down to a river where she was going to "throw into the river whatever feelings she wanted to get rid of." It started off okay, but then got bad, with her completely suicidal and screaming for help from me at the same time. It was awful and I was abusing myself (toxic part) for not being able to help her. At the therapist's suggestion, I "took" her to a safe place (a room I imagined), and left her there with another part of myself (my caretaker part) to keep her company. I look in on her every few days and let her know I'm thinking about her and I care about her and I will be with her soon, but I am not interacting with her right now.

I hope this helps more than it confuses. IFS is really powerful, especially for people who can use their imaginations and visualization skills. If I hadn't been doing all this with a therapist I really like and am growing to trust more and more (which is very scary in itself), I would have poo-pooed the whole thing as being ridiculous. The ultimate goal is, I think, to develop and integrated and dynamic system of all your parts that are managed by your core self. The goal is to stay in touch with your core self--it is that ever-healthy, vibrant, peaceful, attuned part that is the beautiful core of every human being, but gets lost in the kerfuffle of life.

Sending you whatever it is you most need right now.

 

[Hope4Now]

I'm in a strange head-space today. Feeling deep compassion for my forum friends who are dealing with so much. Feeling only vague compassion for myself and my situation. Really more frustrated and angry and impatient. Maybe a little self-destructive--not in an active, head-banging, punching-the-wall, cutting kind of way (thankfully for now) but in the more subtle and persistent ways of beating on myself internally, and not working to identify and meet my needs.

My daughter is on a two-week vacation from school and I'm at wit's end trying to figure out how to keep her occupied and away from i-thingies 18 hours a day, while at the same time trying to work (for money) and work (for healing). All just too much. We drove a long way today to come to a family member's ski house that we are going to use until Saturday or Sunday...a good change of scenery (and a profound privilege to have a place like this we can visit). As much as I love it here, I am sad and frustrated because I cannot walk the beautiful woods trails, or go skating, or go x-country skiing or alpine skiing (all favorite things to do up here). I can't even walk the friggin' dog. It just exacerbates how angry I am with this chronic pain, but I know that being angry with it and with myself is just making it worse. Catch-22. And it stinks for my daughter because I can't do the things she wants to do (all of the above).

What I really need is to rest and relax and be away from all people and responsibility for a bit. And maybe to stop talking to other human beings for a while (I like the forum stuff, it's the face-to-face and telephone stuff I need a rest from). I'm frustrated that I can't do that. I ended up inviting a mother and her two kids to join us up here, in hopes that it would be a nice thing for my daughter. Of course, I'm thinking--yay, she and her friends will hang out and I can have some down time. I seem to have neglected to account for the fact that the girls' mother is also coming. I like the mom, but she is also extremely anxious and a compulsive talker and she exhausts me.

On top of this, there's always something that needs doing! I spent 2.5 hours dealing with laundry and cleanup and packing before we left, 4.5 hours on the road, and then another 1.5 hours getting to the grocery store to provision us. Then, we get here and I flopped down to relax and first my mom calls, then my husband, then my mother-in-law (whose house it is), then my sister-in-law...all requiring conversation. And, I didn't do a lick of my paying work today. I'm getting anxious that I will not be able to continue in my job if I keep needing to take this much time off.

I don't really know what I'm saying or why I'm even posting this. I guess I'm just venting. I feel so stuck in my life right now and so unsure about what actions to take to make things get better. I want to run far, far away. To escape all the stuff that's making me so hypervigilant and overachieving and self-destructive. But it is all inside me and I can't get away.

I'm doing good work in therapy but it is so excruciatingly slow. I'm writing some decent poetry, but what I really want to do is paint, and finish my novel. But too much emotional stuff is in the way of that.

I'm just soul-tired.

 

[Hope4Now]

My wonderful forum friends, and my therapist, have been encouraging me to trust myself. This is very, very hard to do, and I am trying, a little bit at a time.

I feel like I am living in a fog. A miasma. A suffocating and mean one that is trying to drag me down, annihilate me. I am working so very hard to sort out all the parts of the miasma. I have this profound fear that once I understand and move the parts away from their enmeshment with one another, that there will be nothing there at all. At the same time, though, in my multi-consciousness kind of way, I AM aware that my deep self is present and guiding me. As my therapist said, "That is what allowed you seek help from me, even though asking for help is so "foreign" to you as you've said."

The two most powerful parts of me at work, always, are the fear part and what I've been calling the tornado part. The tornado part may be a bunch of parts all tangled up together, but basically the tornado is what many people call the "inner critic." That term seems so mild, so grossly understated, for capturing the havoc and pain the tornado wreaks in me. I am terrified of it. Even when it's not active, I know it's there, lurking, ready to pounce.

The tornado feels to me as if it is the worst parts of my mother who somehow violated and appropriated my identity.

I talked to her on the phone this morning. From an objective point of view, we had our usual sort of conversation in which she projects all her anxieties and anger and need onto me and expects me to solve it and make her feel better. It makes me sick to my stomach. Recently, it was such a powerful reaction after I had dinner with her that I was up in the middle of the night vomiting for 2 hours when I wasn't even sick. She triggers me at ever turn. Even when I'm not interacting with her or getting ready to, she is there in my consciousness.

Today, she was in a dither about the fact that it is snowing, and that I am far away where it is snowing even more, and she is very worried about me because of the weather, and why didn't I just stay home, and what in the world am I going to do up here, and why didn't I invite her to come with me (bingo...that's where the anger is coming from). No big deal, really. I'm used to fending off this stuff. Maybe, though, because of what I've been going through recently, or maybe because I'm just starting to learn what some of my emotions feel like...I don't know why, but after the conversation, when I was in the shower, a vague sense of something overcame me.

Whatever happened to me at a very young age that I've blocked out was done by a woman. I don't know what it was. I don't know when it was. My brain seems to play tricks on me. All this could be from infancy--perhaps something happened before I was adopted. Perhaps it was the babysitter. (What's missing from my memory seems just as significant as what's there. For instance, for the first six years of my life, I had a 2x week babysitter who was also the housecleaner. I remember absolutely nothing about her except her name, Bertha, and that she dressed differently (she was a mennonite).) In the shower today, I had the almost overwhelming sense that it was my mother. It's possible that it was just her lifelong violation of my physical and emotional boundaries and my inability to escape from it, or that she knew something and did nothing and minimized it (that would be no big shock). It's possible that it was something else.

My mother is the person from whom I have always desperately wanted to escape, even more than my father. I used to fantasize that my parents were killed in an auto accident and someone would swoop in to love me right and take care of me. But even after my father had a suicide attempt when I was around 9 or 10, as terrifying as that was, I distinctly remember being horrified that I would now be left with my mother (and then feeling deeply ashamed for this reaction). My mother has always inspired in me this completely paradoxical mix of pity and terror. I have always felt overpowered by her. She is the one person in my life with whom I have never been able to empathize in a way that inspires compassion. I fall into her stuff, but it is far more toxic than when I fall into other people's. Something in me violently recoils from seeing the world through her eyes. I dissociate to varying degrees even thinking about her.

I had to write this here, today. If I didn't, I would not be able to believe I was thinking and feeling this. Need to stop now.

 

[Hope4Now]

I feel like I am dissociating this afternoon. I mean, I guess that's nothing new. I've had this pain stuff going on for a long time, and I know now that it is some sort of dissociation. I also know that I get other kinds too. Today, it's not the spacey-staring into the void kind, or the floating away kind, or the compelled to hurt myself kind, or the lost-in-a-book kind, or the lost-in-fantasy kind, or the not knowing where I am kind, or any of the other ones I've been learning to tune into. It's something else.

I know I am here. I just spent several hours digging my car out of its plowed-in state (Finally, and thankfully, the plow came). I was driven by the desire for relief from feeling trapped here. (That was a bad feeling...the old claustrophobia oddly visiting me here in this wide-open to the woods and mountains kind of place). My pain forces me to know I am here in my body at the same time as I push it away in order to get things done.

It was odd though, and a red flag, that I did not feel the cold from the snow on my jeans and in my boots and down my neck and from the air (10 F here). But I do know where I am, I know I'm typing this. I know I talked to my uncle today about my PTSD. I know I've just begun another poem. I know I've been involved in the fabulous memoir I'm reading, but not lost or triggered. I remember what I read today.

I'm just feeling a bit dead. To the present at least. Not totally dead (as in Monty Python..."I'm not dead yet!"). It isn't a bad feeling, but it's sort of disturbing. I'm here but not here. I just don't know where I am in the part that's not here. My one friend with whom I've talked just a bit about my situation, and who "caught" me dissociating one night, asked me later, "Where were you?" I don't really know. That's the problem. It's different from the emotional feeling of the fog or miasma that I talked about before. It's just nothing. The void.

Is it possible to dissociate but also to realize you're dissociating? Calling all you philosophers of consciousness out there. I'm going to have to start obsessively reading about that again. I actually brought with me the book called Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul. It's a very cool book, though I'm not sure of its underlying assumptions/arguments. Maybe answers will be there.

Sometimes I wonder, in a chicken vs. egg kind of way, am I making up trauma to explain my multiple consciousness and existential crises (am I just too weakly pathetic to handle what so many other thinking people simply deal with on a practical level), OR is justifying my being states by turning to philosophy just further denying the reality of my trauma that has caused me to be this way?

Something tells me I need to take some quiet time away from reading and writing to connect with any of my young parts. But some part of me is getting in the way. Afraid of what I'll see and feel.

Oh when will I be able to shake this fear. It is the equivalent of the pain. In fact, I'm pretty sure the pain is its manifestation. How do you fight fear? It's a bit like when Bush declared a "war on terrorism" (ugh, can't go there it makes me so mad). The point is, how the hell do you fight an abstraction, even when it is embodied in various forms? I know I need to see the fear as a part of me, a part that is trying to protect me from something. I need to open my heart to it, ask it what it is afraid of. But I'm afraid of it. (Okay, thanks FDR..."The only thing to fear is fear itself). Ugh. It is so layered. It's fine to say it, but when you live fearing fear it's like existing in an infinite and inescapable loop.

 

[Echo]

@Hope4Now - just a quick response on the fear front. When this first all started happening to me, the CPTSD thing, that is, I was living in a state of perpetual terror. I had no therapeutic help and I was being triggered left, right and centre. For some reason, I suppose rather obvious now, I had always felt lacking in fear. I could always happily live on my own, in the middle of a wood, walk in the dark, etc. I was always the one fearful people came to, and I never understood their fear. Then I met a man who unaccountably made me feel safe. He was just a neighbour; there was nothing 'going on' at that stage. But then there was. And then he left. And that kick-started, in part at least, the PTSD, though there were multiple elements to it. Since he left though, I cannot return to that fearless state.

Anyway, I went away to my now frequently visited safe place, and I was even more terrified that usual. It felt like an evil, black and solid around me. I couldn't sleep with the light off or with the window open. It took me back to being a little girl. In the end, I had then been living in this state solidly for five months and it occurred to me that there was nothing in the present, in that cottage to be afraid of. I don't know how I did it; it was just a thought; but I suddenly stepped to one side of the fear and decided I would leave it be and live alongside it, or even at times within it, but not let it engulf me like that anymore. And I have not felt that kind of fear again.

I know I am living in a heightened state of anxiety and the fear is inside me, though it is of a different quality and more diffuse, but in the end, I think all these things are an act of will in the end. Okay, fear, go and stand in the corner; go and take a hike, or whatever. First you have to know what the fear is about, I think, then refuse it access to the present. It has to come up out of us and be acknowledged and then we can walk through it into the void, which turns out not to be a void but a place where fears just falls away. I believe if you face fear, it ceases to exist, because you have looked it hard in the eye and then ignored it, and gone on to do what you were fearful of anyway. I know it is different when the past infects the present, but in a more complex way, I think the process is the same. It is a kind of Gestalt thought process, I suppose, something I learned in brief many moons ago.

I wanted to approach my parts in a Gestalt kind of way; it is very natural to me now, to take some pain or whatever out of me and sit it on a chair and talk to it, etc. But my therapist cautioned against it with these traumatised parts. I do though still use the process for smaller aspects of things. Maybe rather than exiting your body, you could try exiting some of it. Just a bit at a time. If you can visualise it, you can do it. But to be on the safe side, ask your therapist or your cranio-sacral healer, because you do need to assimilate it at the end. I haven't explained the process fully here - deliberately, because I don't want to mislead anyone who should not do it.

I think my point is really; is there another way of regaining control? I am experimenting anyway. I have spent years shifting energy around and bringing in the light, and funnily enough my therapist keeps suggesting I do the same, though she doesn't really know about this aspect of me. Maybe you can define the edges of your fear, alternately, and see it in perspective that way. All mind over matter.

I apologise if this seems like an opaque rant, but given what you have said about complementary therapies, I thought it might mean something to you. If not, just ignore entirely.

 

[Hope4Now]

I apologise if this seems like an opaque rant, but given what you have said about complementary therapies, I thought it might mean something to you. If not, just ignore entirely.

It does mean something to me. Not a rant.

t has to come up out of us and be acknowledged and then we can walk through it into the void, which turns out not to be a void but a place where fears just falls away. I believe if you face fear, it ceases to exist, because you have looked it hard in the eye and then ignored it, and gone on to do what you were fearful of anyway.

I have this sense, probably from my core self, that if I can just let go of the fear I will discover that the void isn't a void...it is a place of possibilty. But so much stands in its way. Sometimes I can do what you say--for brief spans of time--and it gives me hope that eventually I can get through all this, or at least learn to manage it all better. The concept of processing it all is rather foreign to me at the moment.

I called my therapist tonight after much crazy debating. Then, when he called back I missed him because my dog was (still is) freaking out outside...I think there is a bear or some other large mammal that she senses out there in the dark. It always feels like something just gets in the way of my getting what I need. Your post really helps, though. Both for the sharing of your experience from which I learn, and also just knowing there is someone out there who understands. Thank you.

 

[Hope4Now]

I want to remember this thread. https://www.myptsd.com/threads/breakthrough-with-my-3-year-old-self.40646/page-2#post-661497
I want to remember the insight I just had, too, so I'm copying what I just wrote. I need to sit with this for a while...

Let's just say that I'm far more able to take physical risks than emotional ones. The fear is still profound. The reckless courage required still feels overwhelming even though I know the odds are pretty decent that I'll come out just fine. But it's different. Perhaps I've been practicing all my life for the real dangers--the emotional ones.

It started very young, when I learned to ride a bike at 5 and graduated immediately to riding with my feet on the handlebars and no hands. My father called me "blue lightning." I crashed a lot. Then he called me "bloody lightning." Somehow over the years I've managed to talk myself into doing scary things...convincing myself that I can face my fears. But really they have all been quite calculated risks, like going off the high dive (not long after that story, I learned to dive from it, then do double flips). Jumping and abseiling from high places, sailing in small boats on gale-ing seas (well, the gales weren't planned but are always there in potential, and often in reality), kayaking island to island across open water, skiing double-black diamonds, galloping bareback on high spirited horses through open fields. All these and more feel life-threatening when I'm doing them, but I feel little sense of accomplishment when I have survived. Perhaps because I know it will never be enough. Enough to prove I can face my real fears.

I've just had the insight (thank you--your question about the diving board did it) that perhaps the reason my body is now preventing me from doing any of the physical things I've always done is because it's time for me to confront the real risks that I've put off for all these years.

I think I'm going to copy this whole thread into my diary (that was such a good idea you had @Bedbug...I'm stealing it). My memory gets so foggy that I want to go back and see what I've said and what others have said, but then I can't find things.

 

[Eleanor]

Thought I'd pop over here to answer this.

I have been "fearless" for most of my life. For a long time I said (with total honesty) "I don't scare." Even when I was stuck on the ski slope I didn't really feel scared. It was a bit of a shock when I realized that when my H is really bad and angry I am scared of him. I was not quite so into physical danger as you, but close enough. Calculated risks. Exactly. Do people feel accomplishment after these kinds of things? I think I just like the "rush."

perhaps the reason my body is now preventing me from doing any of the physical things I've always done is because it's time for me to confront the real risks that I've put off for all these years.

And now, you are ready to do it. Wow. If your body thinks you are ready, I'd go with that. Emotions are physical after all.

And emotional pains are different because in the other cases you merely risked pain (how often do you crash and burn?) but in this one, it is going to hurt, so it is different because you have to be in a place where you can just... hang out with it and let the storm pass. It is related to the neglect thing I think, in this way - that if we don't have someone to hang out with us in a friendly way when we are little and in distress, it is much harder to learn to do it with ourselves. It takes a certain confidence to endure pain/discomfort without resisting and making it worse.

I try to do this with my daughter, and I am amazed at how quickly she processes stuff now (at the ripe old age of 7.) When she is tired and upset, old stuff comes up too, but less often.

 

[Hope4Now]

I want to remember this thread too. I wrote way way too much on it. https://www.myptsd.com/threads/the-impact-of-childhood-sexual-abuse-on-my-sexuality.40678/page-2

 

[Bedbug]

What you wrote helped me way way more than I could have imagined when I started the thread.

It just occurred to me that you might have meant the above comment to mean you wrote way way more than you are comfortable with having shared. I hope not. :cautious:

Are you OK?

 

[Hope4Now]

@Bedbug I am sort if ok. Am weirdly dissociated right now. More on that later maybe. I said I write way too much because I am hyperconscoius that I tend to write 10x more than other people. I'm wanting to talk much more about all this stuff.

 

[Eleanor]

@Hope4Now , stuff comes up when stuff comes up. Maybe you write more at the moment, and next week may be different. Or not. What you write is of value for others, not just you, so you are not "taking up other people's time and space" or anything even remotely like that. Everyone knows that it ebbs and flows. That's just the way it is. You are perfectly normal. :alien::);)

Talk away!