Strange Star

[amy4k]

:hug:

I am so sorry you are having to go through everything at one time. A couple of years ago we lost both of my husband's sisters to cancer in a six month period, and my step-father was diagnosed with alzheimers and we were experiencing horrible financial stress to the point of those foreclosure notices. But I wasn't also trying to work on my issues, I was still stuffing. It is even more important I think to try and find a few minutes for yourself in the middle of all of this.

I will be thinking of you.

 

[Hope4Now]

Last night was hard, and this morning it continues. I am in a strange place, emotionally. I'm not dissociated (I don't think) and I am managing to do some of the things that need doing, but it is an extreme effort. I'm pretty blended up with the little kid parts of me and am feeling like I want to just curl up in a ball in some safe place and disappear. But I'm forcing myself not to disappear because I know it is not healthy. Yet I can't seem to get myself to move...physically or emotionally. Sat in a chair for over an hour last night doing nothing. I guess I am going in and out of semi-dissociated states, except I am aware of it. I just have a very hard time dragging myself out of them.

I'm really stressed. My mind is racing, but I am moving in slow motion. I feel like things are falling apart. They are, sort of, but it isn't anything that is desperate really. Although I'm not even sure about that. How do you know? Usually, I don't consider things desperate until death is involved, but I suppose that is my usual extreme thinking. I FEEL desperate but also frozen. Stuck. Like I can't move.

I have completely screwed up our finances. I'm screwing up my work like crazy. I'm having a hard time really being there for my kids...I'm trying though.

Went to church to hear my son deliver the sermon at Youth Sunday and give end of year gifts to his students. It is so odd and wonderful to see him in the role of teacher to this small horde of 5 and 6 year old children who adore him. It makes me so grateful that he has found/created a sustaining community for himself at our church. People adore him. And even though his mentor and friend died suddenly this year, several other people have swooped in to fill that emotional hole. Later, I read and commented on the newest short story he wrote. He is a very good writer for a 17 year old kid. I planted morning glories with my daughter in the afternoon...and more basil and other herbs. I took her to see Maleficent. Together, we ordered her summer reading books and some clothes that she wanted before she goes to camp. I did manage to get her into a camp and mail off the forms this week. I'm trying the best I can, but I am exhausted.

My soul is tired of trying so hard, but I am terrified of giving up and letting go.

The movie was tough for me. Maybe because I have been in such a weird mode this weekend, and had just heard about my mother-in-law about 5 minutes before the film started. My daughter chattered about it all the way home, so I didn't have to say anything. Although the movie wasn't very good artistically, it raised some emotional issues in me that were uncomfortable. The obvious one being that she relaxed into trusting someone and he betrayed her and stole her wings in violent way. The other obvious one being that she herself became this very confusing mix of angry and loving simultaneously. Too much sort of mixed up versions of my parents. The most bizarre thing for me was that the character I most identified with was the raven whose life she saved and who became her servant. I think that's what set me most on edge. All the other characters in the film transformed in some way, but he was just the servant at her mercy at worst and on her sidelines at best. Not clear why he stayed with her, other than a sense of duty.

I forced myself to try to sleep last night...did okay with lots of waking in between. I had very strange dreams. Another house dream. This time I was one of my child selves in a room. There were many other people (selves?) in other rooms, and I was very aware that all of us were profoundly wounded and in dire need of help. There was nobody there except all these hurt people. There was no violence or evidence of violence though. Everything was white and silent. A bit like the aftermath of a disaster once things have been tidied up. I am realizing as I write this that the dream is perfectly analogous to my life right now. I need to bring on the healing and try to help all these parts of myself.

Now it is time to get ready to go to see my therapist. I don't even really want to go. But I will make myself do it.

I wish I knew what to do. There has got to be something beyond this slogging through, feeling like I'm fighting my way through each moment like swimming in quicksand...knowing that the more I fight, the more I get pulled down, but not knowing what to do differently. It feels like even when I can rest a little and just "be" lately, that's when the flashbacks come on hard.

I guess I'm glad to be going to see a psychiatrist soon. Maybe there is some kind of medication that could help me. I am scared of meds and had a bad experience with one last summer that I hope not to repeat. Others I've been on over the years have done nothing at all for me. But this psychiatrist is supposedly a specialist in trauma and also a specialist in the type of therapy I am doing, so maybe he will have some ideas. I have no idea how I am going to explain to him in an hour what is going on with me. I'm thinking of making a list of all my symptoms, and of all the interventions I have tried or am doing and just handing it to him.

 

[Hope4Now]

I am in a very strange mental place right now. Feeling as if everything I thought I knew about myself is an illusion...that I am an illusion. Parts of me are urging me to run away somewhere and be alone. Other parts are urging me to connect with somebody who can just hang with me and even vaguely understand this complete craziness that has overtaken me. Other parts of me are saying "Cut it out, suck it up, and cook the tofu so your kids can have a decent dinner and at least see the illusion of a capable and loving mother." Probably the last one will win out. It always does. Which is good on some levels, but doesn't help me process all the insane complexity that is causing this massive chaos in my psyche.

I have a poster in my kitchen that reads: "There are things you do because they feel right, and they make no sense, and they may make no money, and it may be the reason we are here: to love each other and to eat each other's cooking and say it was good."

Maybe that's what the meaning of life is all about. Just doing stuff. Whatever stuff we think is right. (That's the hard part though). Not thinking about it so much.

I wish I could turn off my brain for a little while. Get a little break. Maybe that is why I am having a drink and it is only 5:48 PM.

I guess I will water my vegetables and cook the tofu (which nobody will want to eat). Or maybe I should make frappes and cookies for dinner. Then my kids will say, "It was good."

Am thinking of Emily Dickinson's poem today. Am pasting it here because it has been cycling through my head for the past four hours:
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

 

[Pietro]

These different parts may seem incompatible, but they're all still you. No one has just one facet to their personality; that would make for a very one-dimensional person, no? Thus, I think it's perfectly reasonable for you to have a part of you that wants to go relax and talk, and another part that says, "Nope, gotta cook for the kids and take care of a few things before anything else." Each of these parts represents a need within you -- a need to be heard and understood, and a need to take care of your family. Both needs are valid -- you just have to choose the priority of each and how much time to spend on each. But, as I've found-out the hard way, ignoring one need in favor of others usually leads to very unhappy parts. To paraphrase a silly rhyme, "Happy parts, happy life." ;)

 

[amy4k]

Just stopped by to check on you. I've had a lot of rapidly changing dissociative states myself this week and have not been on much. But, I have been thinking about you. I hope things are calming for you.

 

[Hope4Now]

Thanks @amy4k for thinking of me. That makes me feel quite grateful. I am in a very dark place these past couple of days. Not sure where I will land, really. Lots of things turned upside down in my understanding. My therapist wants me to focus on the fact that this means Change and not annihilation. Am working in that but still feeling annihilated on multiple levels. Am in denial about this and just pushing through trying not to self-destruct and hoping rather desperately that this will pass and I will recover the fragile sense of hope that I can live with all this chaos and find some meaning in it. I don't have much left in me to keep fighting this fight to be here.

 

[Hope4Now]

In very uncomfortable ways in the past week or so, something in my system is shifting. It hasn't shifted yet, but it's in process. Perhaps I'm emerging from 50 years of derealization and depersonalization and general dissociation. As I've read more about these "conditions," I am beginning to understand that I have real issues with them. And I just never knew because for me with "trauma," there was no "before" as in a before and after. I simply am what I am. I never thought I had experienced "trauma" or "dissociation." I never even knew what they were, except for some extreme examples I came across in reading or film or my work in the mental health system. I went through years of psychotherapy in college and ended with the belief that I had to just come to terms with the way my unique perspective on my inner and outer life is. So, I just soldiered on. Everyone has their own troubled pasts and presents. Everyone feels alienated and isolated. Everyone is looking for love and comfort and safety. And everyone just needs to make the best of what they've got...right?

I was quite functional...actually successful for years...a good student, an athlete, two graduate degrees, a profession in which I have helped a lot of people in small ways and in which I get some semblance of respect, a solid marriage in which I am a good partner, two wonderful children to whom I think I am a good mother, solid community connections and community service, decent social connections, an involved and responsible daughter and daughter-in-law and neice to my family, a vibrant spiritual life, a passionate (if stunted) creative life. Whatever parts of me have managed my life all these years were quite proficient. I guess maybe they just got exhausted.

The pandora's box of my psyche cracked open this fall, and has been gaping open ever wider since then. In hindsight, there was a proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back," and it was a very minor incident that set off chronic pain and put me on this wildly challenging path I've been traveling for two years now. It is a miserable experience that is just getting worse with no end in sight. Part of what makes it so miserable is that I am keenly aware that I have a good life, and that many thousands of others are struggling with far more fearsome challenges than I. I feel a constant sense of weighty guilt and choking responsibility that I am just too weak and pathetic to get myself together and embrace the life I've built for myself. At the same time, though, I am drowning in my own selfish experience of misery that is not comparable to anything but my own past experience. There's that hideous dual consciousness again. On a note of humor, and as an example, I am currently listening to a mentally ill neighbor in the boarding house across the street from me yelling and cursing at a pair of crows who are making a racket. But there's a different story.

I feel as if I have lost my identity and any moorings (illusive though they may have been) to reality. I feel like someone else hijacked my life and lived it for me, and I am just waking up to the realization of it. It completely flips me out. I am only just beginning to grasp that I have a real problem that is not going to get resolved any time soon. If I wasn't depressed before, I'm a good candidate for it now. I feel like the carefully glued together identity I've created in my life has shattered into a million pieces. I spend all my energy either trying to gather them all back up and fit them into some sort of whole (impossible and overwhelming), or just grabbing onto one at any given moment as whatever seeming crisis demands, and saying to hell with the rest of them.

I don't know what I am supposed to do to prevent my life from falling apart as it is currently in the process of doing. I keep saying this to people, and I keep getting simple answers. The one that makes me crazy is "stay grounded" (whatever that means...really; grounded in what? grounded in who?). Be gentle with yourself (what self?). Listen to what your parts have to say or show (It's hard to know who's listening at any given point and hard to make sense of much through all the cacophony of the bloody internal war). They are good answers, the simple ones I get. They seem to work for people, from what I've heard and read. I am trying very hard to do what I am supposed to do, but I am really, really overwhelmed. The people who know about this stuff say, "This is the work." If this is the work, I wish I could quit. I just want to collapse into a heap and cry because I feel like such a bloody failure. Then I just shut it all down and try to go back to doing what I used to do. But I'm a failure at that too because I can't sustain it for but short periods, and then I collapse anyway.

I feel like some of the kids I used to teach...the ones who knew what to do and how to do it, but couldn't do it unless I was sitting next to them and gently coaxing them through it. I need someone who will do this for me. But it won't happen because it is a 24/7 problem, not just a issue with reading a passage, or writing a paper, or taking a test. That old African American spiritual
Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child keeps running through my mind...it about sums it up for me, except for the "sometimes." I used to listen to the Paul Robeson version, but I like John Legend's version now...

.

 

[Valentino]

This will likely sound quite paradoxical...

But have you considered simply doing what you want to do?

I wish I could quit. I just want to collapse into a heap and cry because I feel like such a bloody failure.

You don't have to fully quit or give up all your responsibilities. Just make some time every day or every so many hours to just retreat and collapse into an emotional breakdown.

When all the techniques and gimmicks stop working or you don't have the energy to remember them or force yourself to do them. That might be the time to simply surrender.

Maybe allowing the torrent of old emotions to flow through you is Catharsis (emotional purification & purging)?

In psychology, the term was first employed by Sigmund Freud's colleague Josef Breuer (1842–1925), who developed a "cathartic" treatment using hypnosis for persons suffering from hysterical symptoms. While under hypnosis, Breuer's patients were able to recall traumatic experiences, and through the process of expressing the original emotions that had been repressed and forgotten, they were relieved of their symptoms. Catharsis was also central to Freud's concept of psychoanalysis, but he replaced hypnosis with free association.

The term catharsis has also been adopted by modern psychotherapy, particularly Freudian psychoanalysis, to describe the act of expressing, or more accurately, experiencing the deep emotions often associated with events in the individual's past which had originally been repressed or ignored, and had never been adequately addressed or experienced.
-- wikipedia

Here's a NLP technique that could bypass some of the need to be fully conscious during extreme emotional suffering. Make a video recording (preferable) or audio recording of yourself while having an emotional break down or cathartic experience. This allows you to review the experience at a later time, to help integrate it into your consciousness and also works as exposure therapy.

But if you have good mindfulness or consciousness skills, here's Adyashanti's description of the process:

Experiencing the Raw Energy of Emotion - Allow your suffering to speak
Our suffering consists of two components: a mental component and an emotional component. We usually think of these 2 aspects as separate, but in fact, when we're in deep states of suffering, we're usually so overwhelmed by the experience of emotion that we forget and become unconscious of the story in our minds that is creating and maintaining it. So one of the most vital steps in addressing our suffering and moving beyond it, is first to summon the courage and willingness to truly experience what we're feeling and to no longer try to edit what we feel. In order to really allow ourselves to stay with the depth of our emotions, we must cease judging ourselves for whatever comes up.
...... Once you touch a particular emotion, allow yourself to begin to hear the voice of suffering. To do this, you cannot stand outside the suffering, trying to explain or solve it; you must really sink into the pain, even relax into the suffering so that you can allow the suffering to speak.
Many of us have a great hesitancy to do this, because when suffering speaks, it often has a very shocking voice. It can be quite vicious. This kind of voice is something that most people do not want to believe they have inside them, and yet to move beyond suffering it's vital that we allow ourselves to experience the totality of it. It's important that we open all the emotions and all of the thoughts in order to fully experience what is there.
..... What you're looking for is how your suffering, how the particular emotion you are experiencing, actually views your life, views what happened, and views what's happening now. To do this, you need to get in touch with the story of your suffering. It is through these stories that we maintain our suffering, so we need to speak or write these stories down -- even if the stories sound outrageously judgmental or blaming or condemning. If we allow these stories to live underground in the unconscious mind, all the painful emotions will continue to regenerate.
--- Having a complete experience
In the face of a difficult emotion, we often turn away from the experience by either repressing it or impulsively acting it out; we do not in fact experience what is there all the way through. We have learned to do this over many years as a way to cope with unpleasant emotions and thoughts as they flow through our lives. Whenever we turn away and avoid what is there, however, we generate future suffering for ourselves and often those around us.
These coping strategies arise in our minds in an attempt to explain the events that happen to us. When we experience painful emotions or feelings, our mind will immediately and sometimes frantically start telling itself a story in order to construct a scenario that will explain why we feel the way we feel. As this process unfolds, we usually go more and more unconscious. By "unconscious," I mean we don't really experience what happened in a full and open way. We contract and pull away from the experience, which is actually quite normal. Nobody wants to feel bad, so it seems quite natural to contract and pull away. But anytime we contract from direct experience and spin a story, we have gone unconscious. As soon as we go unconscious, whatever emotion that happened at that time will be locked in our system. It will stay there and regenerate itself over and over again until we find the capacity to experience that emotion without going unconscious in any way.
Even though our stories about what happened may seem very justified, the important thing to remember is that they actually cause us to go unconscious and lock suffering into our bodies. Instead, what we need to do is to find the capacity to feel what we feel without creating more thoughts about it. When you start to experience a difficult feeling, you see that it's often associated with a memory. As you replay that memory in your mind, if you allow it to be there without a story or conclusion, you start to feel the emotion releasing itself from your system. It may not do this immediately; in fact for a time the experience of suffering may even intensify. But this is only because you're now experiencing it in a conscious way, not a numbed or a disassociated way. You are becoming very intimate with the moment-to-moment experience of your suffering.
----- excerpt from "Falling into Grace Insights on the End of Suffering" by Adyashanti

 

[Hope4Now]

@Valentino thank you for your posts. These are great. Really. I still struggle with being able to do it though. I can read and read and read...and I have. It all makes sense intellectually. I know what I am supposed to do. I know the strategies. I do them. Regularly. But I just seem to get more exhausted and dissociated. Am completely frozen and stuck in the healing process. I'm not asking you to resolve this or offer further advice.

It's just that there is some key piece missing...has been for months now. Parts of me urge me to run away from everything and start anew, but I'm also aware that those are not healthy parts. Parts of me urge me to just end the whole f-ing thing. Obviously those are not healthy parts. I suppose am just not willing to accept that TIME is the missing piece, and that if I keep doing what feels like useless things that make everything worse, then perhaps eventually it will all process out of me.

 

[Valentino]

Can you describe what you think this 'missing piece' feels like? Is it really simply just 'Time'?

Time doesn't make much sense though, because your future can hold infinite amounts of time. There is no lack of time. Maybe it's more of an impatience issue?? There's a rush, urgency, immediacy, etc. underlying. Maybe the emotion of raw panic?

With your IFS therapy have you gotten in touch with your larger self, the core Self that is supposed to lead all your parts? Can you identify your different parts, like: exiles, managers, firefighters, etc.?

Can you describe this weighty, choking feeling more?

I feel a constant sense of weighty guilt and choking responsibility that I am just too weak and pathetic to get myself together and embrace the life I've built for myself. At the same time, though, I am drowning in my own selfish experience of misery that is not comparable to anything but my own past experience.

Are you having a tough time breathing? Is there a weight on your body or chest? Are you under water or in an environment that's lacking air? Or are you at high altitude where the oxygen is thin?

 

[Hope4Now]

@Valentino, I'm not comfortable responding at any length to some of your questions, although I deeply appreciate them...feels a bit too much like my therapy session but in a public forum! They're great questions. Do you do IFS therapy yourself or do you just know about it? Yes, impatience is an issue. It makes me upset when I've been at this for 9 months very intensively and people say, "Oh, you are just at the beginning stages of the therapy." And yes, I'm very aware of my parts and how they are all working. On the other hand, access to core self, in its embodiment in time and space is one of the stuck areas I'm working on.

 

[Valentino]

Nice solid and clear boundary you set, recognizing and stating the limitations of your comfort level.

I have found that questions a vital tool for self-discovery. The capacity to be curious, inquisitive, and open allows insights, knowledge and realizations to come through. However that starts with a foundation of being comfortable with not-knowing and uncertainty.

Or more simply put, understanding the purpose of confusion. I saved this explanation shared by Eleanor from another thread:

As a teacher of philosophy I am something of an expert in confusion.

One of the things that often gets in the way of my students learning is their impatience with/intolerance of confusion. What I have observed is that whenever we really deeply learn anything (mental, physical or emotional) we go through a stage of confusion. Things get all mixed up (con-fusio - "poured together") and then they get sorted again in a new order. Really, confusion is a most hopeful state, and the harbinger of new understanding and skills. The disorienting part is that while we are re-ordering stuff old skills and knowledge fall apart for a time. In school, this means that when students are assimilating new knowledge they tend to forget how to use commas and that a single sentence shouldn't have three subject and as many verbs. So I am often heard to say in a cheery tone of voice "Confusion is good!"

I'm only somewhat familiar with IFS therapy, but their concept of 'The Self' and goal of 'Self-leading' is very similar to how other psychological therapies ultimate goals, and it's very similar to the approach used by many spiritual realization paths.

This excerpt below is written by Richard Schwartz Ph.D., the developer and founder of Internal Family Systems, the method described feels very similar to the approach that I shared from Adyashanti (a spiritual teacher) in the excerpt "Allowing Your Suffering to Speak".

To experience the Self, there’s no shortcut around our inner barbarians – those unwelcome parts of ourselves, such as hatred, rage, suicidal despair, fear, addictive need (for drugs, food, sex), racism and other prejudice, greed, as well as the somewhat less heinous feelings of ennui, guilt, depression, anxiety, self-righteousness, and self-loathing. The lesson I’ve repeatedly learned over the years of practice is that we must learn to listen to and ultimately embrace these unwelcome parts. If we can do that, rather than trying to exile them, they transform. And, though it seems counterintuitive, there’s great relief for therapists in the process of helping clients befriend rather than berate their inner tormentors. I’ve discovered, after painful trial and much error at my clients’ expense, that treating their symptoms and difficulties like varieties of emotional garbage to be eliminated from their systems simply doesn’t work well. Often, the more I’ve joined clients in trying to get rid of their destructive rage and suicidal impulses, the more powerful and resistant these feelings have grown – though they’ve sometimes gone underground to surface at another time, in another way.

In contrast, these same destructive or shameful parts responded far more positively and became less troublesome, when I began treating them as if they had a life of their own, as if they were in effect, real personalities in themselves, with a point of view and a reason for acting as they did. Only when I could approach them in a spirit of humility and a friendly desire to understand them could I begin to understand why they were causing my clients so much trouble. I discovered that if I can help people approach their own worst, most hated feelings and desires with open minds and hearts, these retrograde emotions will be found not only to make sense and have a legitimate purpose in the person’s psychological economy, but also, quite spontaneously, to become more benign.

I’ve seen this happen over and over again. As I help clients begin inner dialogues with the parts of themselves holding horrible, antisocial feelings and get to know why these internal selves express such fury or self-defeating violence, these parts calm down, grow softer, and even show that they also contain something of value. I’ve found, during this work, that there are no purely “bad” aspects of any person. Even the worst impulses and feelings – the urge to drink, the compulsion to cut oneself, the paranoid suspicions, the murderous fantasies – spring from parts of a person that themselves have a story to tell and the capacity to become something positive and helpful to the client’s life. The point of therapy isn’t to get rid of anything, but to help it transform.
----
from "The Larger Self" By Richard Schwartz, Ph.D.
http://www.selfleadership.org/the-larger-self.html

My recovery path included a ton of meditation and self-inquiry, those practices develop 'Presence' or 'conscious awareness', which Dr. Schwartz also observed in his article 'The Larger Self':

Though they used different words, all the esoteric traditions within the major religions – Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam – emphasized their same core belief: we are sparks of the eternal flame, manifestations of the absolute ground of being. It turns out that the divine within – what the Christians call the soul or Christ Consciousness, Buddhists call Buddha Nature, the Hindus Atman, the Taoists Tao, the Sufis the Beloved, the Quakers the Inner Light – often doesn’t take years of meditative practice to access because it exists in all of us, just below the surface of our extreme parts. Once they agree to separate from us, we suddenly have access to who we really are.

I have also found, however, that the most important variable in how quickly clients can access their Self is the degree to which I am fully present and Self-led. It’s this presence that constitutes the healing element in psychotherapy regardless of the method or philosophy of the practitioner.

So I think developing 'Presence' and 'consciousness' (in IFS terms: finding your core Self, and allowing the Self to Lead) is a foundational step to healing and recovery.

Otherwise in IFS terms, you're simply having a 'parts' battle between managers and fire-fighters, with random exiles popping up with their exposed wounds.