Of Shame and Snowballs

Today I’ve been considering snowballs.  Snowballs?  Yes, snowballs.  You see, snowballs usually begin their lives as pristine objects formed in the hands of eager little children, but as the children roll the snowballs across the ground and as the snowballs gather snow and grow larger, they also gather little rocks, dirt, and all sorts of debris.  By the time the snowball is large enough to be the base for a snow person, it has incorporated into itself an assortment of dreck, garbage, and it is no longer the pristine object it was before beginning its trip across the lawn.
 
The snow person produced by the little children, then, bears the scars and blemishes of its journey.  As it melts, it sags and droops and shrinks until finally nothing is left but a puddle filled with pebbles, chunks of dirt, twigs, and perhaps even the droppings of a neighborhood dog. Such is the fate of this snow person made by the hands of little children.  He or she, unlike a living human being, has no control over her inner life—in fact, she has no inner life to control.  The upside to being a snow person, of course, is that snow people feel no psychic pain.
 
The downside to being a human is that, unlike the snow person, we do feel psychic pain.  All the nasty little bits of emotional garbage we collect and internalize as we roll over our life’s path do their damage.  What are these nasty little bits of garbage?  They are all the toxic, devastating bits of emotional fallout from abuse and neglect.  They are the hurts inflicted on us by adults when we are children, the hurts inflicted by our peers, and the hurts we inflict on ourselves.  All these hurts do their damage, some damaging us more than others.  Recently, I have stumbled across one of these bits of toxic fallout that has affected my own life more than most others.  So what is this toxin called?  It is called shame.

For decades I had read about the damage that shame does, how shame can affect self-esteem and cause a human being to feel worthless.  However, no article I had read had given me much information that I could actually use to help myself.  The articles told of the devastating effects of shame on a human being’s psyche, but they did not discuss possible origins of shame, the dynamics of shame, or give any clues as to how one manages to shed the toxic effects of shame.  Furthermore, I did not identify shame as being one of the specific factors that had eroded my self esteem from the time I was a child. 

Also, because I remembered being told by my mother innumerable times that I should be ashamed of myself for having done this or that, I reached adulthood believing that shame was tied only to certain acts that I had committed in childhood and later in adulthood and was not one of the more generalized but deeply-rooted poisons that interacted with other psychic poisons to produce my low level of self esteem, the belief that I was utterly worthless and completely unworthy of being in the company of other humans. Thus, until last week, I rolled over the path of my life largely ignorant of the role shame has played in perpetuating my C-PTSD.

If I ever had doubts about the value of therapy, my doubts evaporated last week!  Why?  Last week I met Shame head on and decapitated it, rendered it powerless!  How, suddenly, did I do this? 

First, a conversation between me and my therapist caused me to connect to some of my earliest childhood memories.  I remembered when I was about three asking my mother at various times if I could sit in her lap, and I remembered that she always said “no” and always had a reason for her “no.” Sometimes she said no because I was “too big for that”; sometimes I was “too heavy”; sometimes she was too busy or too tired, and sometimes she wanted to smoke a cigarette and I would be in the way.  Each time she turned me away, I felt sad.  When I was an older child and clearly too physically large to sit on her lap, she complained about having to touch me or touch my hair when she got me ready for school.  I remember her cracking me on the head with the hairbrush one morning when I squirmed, and I remember hearing her say, “I hate touching your hair.”

By then I must have achieved the “age of reason” because I remember thinking to myself, “Then why won’t you let me get my hair cut?”  She hated touching my hair, yet she wouldn’t grant me my request to have short hair that I could brush without her help.  I was smart enough to keep my question to myself; if I had asked her the question, she undoubtedly would have cracked me on the head with the hairbrush.  Why did she dislike touching me, and why didn’t she seem happy to be with me?

As my childhood turned to pre-teenage years, my sadness grew, and accompanying the sadness came a new element, a feeling of not being good enough and a feeling of being ashamed because I wasn’t good enough.  I felt angry at myself for being such a failure as a human being. If I had been good enough, I reasoned, my mother would have wanted to touch me and to let me sit on her lap.  Mothers of my friends liked touching their little girls, letting them sit on their laps, and holding them close. And if I had been good enough, my mother wouldn’t have cracked me over the head with the hairbrush or frowned at me all the time she was getting me ready for school in the morning and at other times.  She was never happy when I was with her, or so it seemed to me, because I was not the little girl she wanted.  I was a chipped Spode teacup she had bought on sale and could not return: she was stuck with me, and she was not happy about that!

When I was a child, I was never able to come up with a specific answer to “What’s wrong with me?”  If I had been able to answer the question, I might have tried to change whatever it was about me that my mother didn’t like. But I didn’t know what was wrong; therefore, I didn’t know what to change. By the time I was a young teen, I had given up on my mother, our relationship, and on myself.  I had concluded that I had come into the world “wrong,” and there was nothing I could do about that.  My shame was so overpowering that I often couldn’t look people in the eye when I spoke to them or when they spoke to me.  When somebody hurt me, I didn’t fight back or complain because I felt I deserved being hurt.  When my husband abused me, I felt I deserved his abuse and did nothing to stop his behavior.  For the past thirty years, I’ve been on my own, not living with anyone who has been abusive, yet I have continued to feel unworthy, ashamed, unable often to look at people when they have spoken to me or when I have spoken to them. 

All this has changed, however, in the past week.  Suddenly I realize that there is nothing inherently wrong with me, and my sense of being undeserving and unworthy is simply gone.  I don’t know where it went, but it’s gone.  Just like that!  Gone!

What brought about this change?  A sensitive interaction between my therapist and me, for one thing.  Also, shortly after this important therapy session last week, I typed something like “origins of shame” into Google and found an absolutely amazing article by Richard G. Erskine titled “A Gestalt Therapy Approach to Shame and Self-Righteousness: Theory and Methods.”  (See link at the end of this essay.)  And there it was—a description of how shame originates in a child, starting with a feeling of sadness that, like a snowball, develops into a sense of being inadequate and worthless as the child rolls along her life’s path.  Not only does Richard G. Erskine describe the development of shame in a child, but he also describes the process by which shame lowers a person’s self esteem:

“Shame also involves a transposition of the affects of sadness and fear: the sadness at not being accepted as one is, with one's own urges, desires, needs, feelings, and behaviours, and the fear of abandonment in the relationship because of whom one is. The fear and a loss of an aspect of self (disavowal and retroflection of anger) fuel the pull to compliance - a lowering of one's self esteem to establish compliance with the criticism and/or humiliation.”  Erskine  [Italics and underlining are mine.]

All I could say to myself when I finished reading the article was, “Wow!  He sure hit the nail on the head!  Thank you, Richard G. Erskine!”  For in that article, I recognized the process that had taken place within me, the process that began when I was very little and was told by my mother, “No, I want to smoke a cigarette” when I asked to sit on her lap and continued on when I as a wife allowed my husband to belittle and abuse me because I felt I deserved the treatment. 

A dear friend of mine has told me repeatedly, “With awareness comes change.”  How right she is!  And now that I am fully aware of shame and its toxic effect on my psyche and my life, I feel change taking place.  For one thing, during a family gathering on Christmas Day, I let a person in attendance know how I felt about her childish, rude, disrespectful behavior.  Others had felt as I had, but I spoke out.  I don’t know whether I made a difference by speaking out, but I know I felt better because I called the situation as it was and didn’t consider myself unworthy of speaking out.  That was a first!  The New Year, 2012, is almost upon us, and I’m wondering what the “second” will be—and the “third,” “fourth,” . . .   

I feel that as a result of my newly-found awareness of shame and its effects on my life, I have leaped over a gigantic hurdle on my way to healing.  I’m getting there!  And so will you!  If you are in therapy, take it seriously and work hard.  If you are not in therapy, find a competent and compatible therapist who is skilled in treating clients with C-PTSD and PTSD.  You are a human being, a person, and unlike snow people, you are capable of change and healing.  See how many hurdles you can jump and how far down the road to healing you can travel in 2012! 

Blessings and everything good to you in the New Year. 
Jean

(URL for Richard G. Erskine's article:  http://www.integrativetherapy.com/en/articles.php?id=30)
 

Before Shame

“Que Sera, Sera” and the Manifestation of Right Brain Material

For the past several weeks, I have felt extremely nervous each time I have gone to my therapy session.  Since I have been seeing this therapist for over a year and a half now, I noted the nervousness, noted that it seemed odd but determined that it probably was not related to the relationship between my therapist and me, and then figured “Que Sera, Sera” (roughly “what will be, will be”), as Doris Day sang on Your Hit Parade, the weekly radio program that my friends and I followed religiously in the 1950s.  Knowing how I process material in therapy, normally from my right brain to my left brain, I figured that whatever trauma information was lurking in the right side of my brain that needed to manifest itself was getting ready to do that.  However, I had not figured that the manifestation would be so upsetting and so horrible! 

My therapy appointment is at 1:30, so I caught my bus at noon yesterday, knowing that I would easily make my appointment with time to spare for my crossword puzzle.  I like to center myself in the waiting room by working on the puzzle printed each morning in the Portland Oregonian.  By the time I arrived at the bus transfer point, however, I was feeling “odd.”  I wasn’t feeling dizzy or sick or in pain; I was simply feeling “odd.”  Because I still deal with occasional PTSD symptoms such as spaciness and flashbacks, “odd” doesn’t alarm me, so I sat down in the bus shelter and hoped the feeling would pass quickly. 
  
Bus 8 arrived, and I knew I needed to get into it, but I had a problem, very likely the same problem Alice had when she drank from the bottle labeled “Drink Me”:  the world I saw through my eyes was not the world I normally saw.  The lines that normally are parallel to the earth were slanted and actively tipping, like a teeter-totter, and the lines that normally are perpendicular to the earth were leaning, tipped in all directions.  I looked at the bus, saw it tilted oddly, and tried to figure out where to put my feet.  I did my best to put my feet where I needed to put them in order to get on and find a seat, and then I managed to tumble onto an empty place.  After I had sat down, I looked around me at the other passengers, wondering if any of them had noticed my awkward entrance, but nobody had. 

As the bus progressed toward my stop, I had a chance to breathe deeply and get myself calmed down.  I was not dizzy—the world was not whirling around in my brain.  My memory was intact, and I knew perfectly well where I was and where I was going.  And slowly the “Drink Me” sensation went away.  Then I remembered that in the past I had had episodes of what psychologists call “derealization,” times when reality doesn’t seem what it is supposed to be.  The world outside my head does not look like it should.  In fact, Lewis Carroll did such a great job of describing the sensation of derealization in Through the Looking Glass that I sometimes wonder if he suffered from trauma! 

During my session, I described this experience to my therapist.  She suggested that I use colored pencils and paper and see what evolved.  Since I have learned that I can easily access the memories and emotions lodged in the right side of my brain if I write or draw with my non-dominant hand, I sat down, took a red pencil, and began to write.  What I wrote absolutely blew me away!

If you have read my website and my blog articles, you know I was violently sexually assaulted by the neighbor woman when I was between four and five years old, 1943 or 1944.  I effectively repressed this memory until 1980, when I had a flashback and remembered the basics of the assault.  Over a period of twenty years, I remembered more and more until I thought I had captured the whole awful memory.  Boy, was I ever wrong about that!

What I wrote with my left hand on Monday in my therapist’s office horrified both my therapist and me.  My message said something like this:  That woman told me that she had magical powers and that even when I couldn’t see her looking into my bedroom from her kitchen window, she could still see me and watch everything I did.  She could tell by watching me if I was telling anyone about what she had done to me, and if I told, then she would find me and kill me—dead!  And what would my parents do with a dead little girl?  They wouldn’t want me at all, and they would put me in a box and bury me in the ground.  So I had better not tell anyone!   And for forty-some years, I didn’t tell.  Anyone!  Not my parents, my Godparents, my friends—not anyone!

Wow!  Did this explain a lot!!  I remember as a child always having the feeling of having “butterflies in my stomach.”  That feeling made me antsy when I was awake and busy, and at night, I had a hard time sleeping.  Even my kindergarten teacher noticed my nervousness and noted it on my report card, although she dismissed my nervousness as “growing so fast.”  I was scared a lot of the time when I was a child, but I never really understood why I was scared.  All I knew was that I had that feeling of being scared and had nothing to cite as a cause for my fears. In junior high school, every time the teacher closed the classroom door, my stomach would lurch, and I would run to the bathroom to be sick.  I had no idea why I did this.  I learned, however, that I could walk out of school and simply go home without consequences, so I did this frequently.  Nobody ever said anything to me about skipping school, and I never told.  I was so happy to be home by myself where I could have peace and quiet with no doors shutting, no kids and teachers, and no people to notice my discomfort.

I grew into an adult diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.  Nevertheless, I coped with life and took no medication for my anxiety.  I graduated from college, survived twenty years of spousal abuse, raised two kids to adulthood, survived the divorce process, earned straight A grades in two graduate programs, retired from community college teaching, and here I am, a senior citizen getting help for Complex PTSD and writing about the experience.

The memory of this experience, awful and horrible as it is, is an essential ingredient in my healing process.  Now, for example, I understand so much more about why I have always been afraid of confiding in most people and why I trusted nobody, not even my parents, when I was a child.  Even yet, today, as a senior citizen,  my trust level is low. That’s a fact.  And the feeling I have had of not fitting into the world may be at least partially explained by this experience.  After all, a child living and reaching adulthood with such a monstrous untold secret truly would feel marked, like a leper in filthy rags wandering in a world full of shiny, unblemished holy beings.  That is how I have felt all my life! 
 
Why am I telling you, my reader, about this experience?  Because I want you to know that it is important to have faith in your brain’s/mind’s ability to heal itself.  If you truly want to heal from trauma, you will.  But if you do not have faith in your own healing powers, the process will take longer.  Your mind is the vault where your healing powers are located, and this same vault contains the materials upon which your healing depends.  If you have faith in your mind’s ability to process these materials and heal, then your healing will follow its natural course.  It will happen.  That’s the way we humans are made.  Your therapist can support your process, and your therapist can support you when you get frustrated with the process, but you alone have the key to your own healing.  It’s up to you to unlock the memories as they need to be unlocked.  If you are patient, attend to the still, small voice of your intuition, and have courage, healing will happen. 

Therapist Appreciation Day: Have You Observed This Day?

My therapist and I have, in my opinion, a good working relationship.  We have had our ups and downs, but throughout this process of dealing with my C-PTSD, I have tried to be honest with her and have had the courage to tell her how I feel about how things are going between us—from my perspective, at any rate.  This past Thursday, however, as I thought about my session, I realized that perhaps I have, at times, failed to let her know how much I appreciate her and to include her in my process.  I intend to apologize to her for this lapse when I see her on Monday.

You see, I have hit a spot in my therapy where I feel as if I’m in transition from one phase to another.  However, I’m not sure where I am going or what the next phase truly is.  I feel a tension in my therapy, as if I’m dangling over a crevasse and don’t know which way to jump—should I jump back to where I was comfortable or should I jump to the other side, unknown territory?  As you may know, the unknown is sometimes scary, and at times it’s a lot more comfortable to stay in the territory that is known.  That was—and IS--my dilemma.  I don’t know which way to jump!

I am, however, highly motivated to get through the process of recovering from Complex PTSD, and my dithering frustrates me no end!  I get angry at myself, and I browbeat myself, knowing all the time that this activity simply makes the situation worse.  And then I say things such as, “If I have time, I’m going to get through this all by myself this weekend” or “I know I could do this on my own if I just forced myself to do it.”  That’s what I said to my therapist on Thursday.  And then later, when I was riding the bus home and reflecting on my session, I remembered what I said, and then I remembered something else:  I’m not in this process alone!  She is there with me!
 
As soon as I remembered this simple fact, a peace settled over me, and I resolved to make this coming Monday my personal “Therapist Appreciation Day.”  I am not in this alone.  I have a companion on this journey, and I need to include her.  She can help me make this transition.
 
How could I have forgotten this simple fact?  Well, people with my background of abuse often get through life without a whole lot of help.  If a child learns at a very young age that the world is not safe and that no person, including parents, can be trusted to help, then often that child learns to cope with abuse without asking for help.  If, later, the child-become-adult is abused, then the person still does not ask for help—with anything! Such was my pattern. I never asked for help and never expected any help.  Never, that is, until I realized one day in 1980 that my world was crashing around me and that getting help was a matter of life and death.  Then I asked for and received the help I sought from a skilled, kind, and compassionate therapist.
 
That was about thirty years ago. I learned a big lesson on the day I asked for help in 1980:  It is possible to ask for help and to receive the help I need and want with no strings attached.  And along with the help, it’s also possible to receive a bonus gift of unconditional kindness, understanding, and empathy.

But old thought patterns die hard.  I certainly realize that now!  So, as I said, Monday will be the day I observe “Therapist Appreciation Day.”  Have you observed this day with your therapist?  It can't hurt, and it might help.

More on Complex PTSD

I check my stats page for this blog every day, and when I check, I look to see which articles seem to be most popular.  So far, the article titled “Complex PTSD: Does It Exist?” has been read more times than the others.  When I wrote the article, I didn’t expect it to be this popular.  In fact, I wasn’t sure that anyone would want to read it because it struck me as being somewhat dry and academic.  However, now I know that the topic appeals to you, my readers, and I will do my best to address the topic more often.  In the meantime, here are two articles I found recently which you might find helpful:
 
• http://knowledgex.camh.net/amhspecialists/specialized_treatment/trauma_treatment/first_stage_trauma/FirstStageTT_ch6/Pages/criteria_complex_ptsd.aspx
• http://drkathleenyoung.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/complex-ptsd/


If you read the two articles listed above, you will have a good idea as to the hallmarks of C-PTSD.  You will, at least, have a good idea as to the nature of C-PTSD as the practitioners and researchers see it.  You may not, however, get much of an idea from the articles as to how the problem appears to those who live with the disorder every day—those of us who find ourselves in a C-PTSD cage and are trying to get out and join the rest of the world.

Each person who battles C-PTSD experiences the disorder differently because each person is uniquely different from any other person.  Thus, when you read my description of my experience in the articles I’ve written for this blog, it’s important to remember that my experience of C-PTSD is unique to me.  There are, though, certain common threads that run through the tapestry of each person’s experience of the disorder.

One such thread is the presence of typical PTSD symptoms—flashbacks, dissociative episodes, numbing of emotions, etc.  The presence of these symptoms has interfered with my life to the point where I have long known I needed and wanted to do something to alleviate them.  That’s the main reason why I am presently in therapy, and it’s the main reason why I have attempted to get help in the past.  At present, I can say that I have actually tamed the symptoms to the point where they don’t bother me every day, and I can ride public transportation without being knocked off kilter by the symptoms.  Possibly, if I had the “non-C” PTSD, I would be finished with therapy by now.  I would be thrilled if I were ready to leave therapy because therapy is hard work that takes a lot of my time and thought.  That time, however, has not yet arrived.  I know it will arrive someday, but it is not here yet.

The problem is that C-PTSD is, as the name says, “complex.”  If my parents had wanted me, had been understanding and nurturing and had listened to me with empathy when I was a child, and if I had grown to be a mature adult with all the attributes of an emotionally mature adult and had been raped one night when I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, then very possibly I would have been diagnosed with PTSD.  I probably could have finished therapy a long time ago because I would have had sufficient ego strength to go through a course of EMDR or one of the other therapies found effective for healing PTSD.  I don’t know this for certain, but it’s likely.
 
In my case, though, the factors mentioned above did not apply to me.  I was not wanted, was not understood, was not given the parental attention I needed, was not treated with respect, and was sexually abused and abused in other ways.  When I reached the age of adulthood, I did not have the ego strength I needed to be an effective and mature adult.  And then I married a man who continued the treatment my parents gave me.  So over a long period of time, forty-two years in my case, I endured the sort of treatment that leads to C-PTSD and thought my life was normal, that every woman endured what I endured and that there was no alternative. The threads of prolonged exposure to abuse and neglect run through my tapestry as they run through the tapestries of most others who are trapped in C-PTSD.  The material from which the threads in my tapestry are spun may not be identical to that of other people who have C-PTSD, but the basic threads themselves are present.
 
So what, in my opinion, is the most telling factor, the factor that brings me up short and causes me to recognize and acknowledge the C-PTSD elephant in my own living room?  It’s the seemingly interminable nature of the healing process.  Like Sisyphus, I roll the stone almost to the top and think, “Success!  I’m there!” only to stand with mouth agape in amazement as I watch the stone roll back down and wait for me to roll it uphill again.  I manage to reduce the intensity of my PTSD symptoms, for example, only to discover in the process that I have some developmental gap that I need to investigate, understand, and fill if I am to truly enjoy relief from my symptoms. The process doesn’t seem to end, and that fact tells me that I’m dealing with C-PTSD and not the “non-C” PTSD.
  
If the process of breaking out of the C-PTSD cage seems so interminable and is so discouraging, why do I continue trying?  I continue because as I work in therapy, the bars are beginning to become less rigid and more flexible.  For example, I can sit on a bus calmly and without dissociating now when somebody gets on, tries to avoid paying the fare, and then argues loudly with the driver.  I may become irritated at the delay and the fact that somebody is so crass as to attempt to bully the driver into letting him ride free, but I don’t let the voices raised in anger and the menacing or threatening demeanor of the bully allow PTSD symptoms to take over my mind as I would have done a year ago.  My present response to a situation that in the past would have laid me low for the better part of a day tells me that slowly the cage bars are weakening and freedom is possible.  The little signs of progress comprise the carrot on the stick that causes me to plod along toward my goal, in other words.

What would I suggest a person have available to aid in his or her escape from the cage of C-PTSD?  Here is my list of necessary equipment:

• A realistic VISION of what life may be like without the present constraints of C-PTSD;
• The necessary RELATIONSHIP with a therapist who specializes in trauma work;
• The MOTIVATION to do the job;
• COMMITMENT to one’s self and to one’s goal;
• A RECOGNITION of one’s progress, no matter how tiny the increment;
• The HOPE that springs from recognizing progress;
• A sense of HUMOR to help get one’s perspective back when times are bleakest;
• The FAITH in the process needed to keep plodding along no matter what!
 
The above is my list.  You will have your own list, no doubt, but maybe my list will remind you of something you forgot to put on your list.  And my list above may not contain everything I need, but it does contain the equipment most important to me right now. 

To conclude, I’m no learned expert on C-PTSD.  I’m not a trained mental health professional—I have a graduate degree in adult education and a graduate degree in rhetoric, neither of which qualifies me as an expert on C-PTSD.  I do, however, have something many of the experts may lack, a diagnosis of C-PTSD, and that diagnosis places me on the inside of the cage looking out.  I hope that whatever I say to you as I write “from the inside out” is useful and inspiring and facilitates your rending the bars of your cage and making your way to freedom. 

Another Way to Look at EMDR

On November 14th, I discussed my feelings regarding my “failure” to be ready for an EMDR session.  As you may be aware, I have spent almost thirty years trying to find a therapist with the training and desire to help me relieve my PTSD symptoms.  If you are struggling with the same symptoms, you understand how the flashbacks, numbing, dissociative episodes, and all the other hallmarks of PTSD can disrupt your life and damage your relationships.  Thus, you can also understand why I am highly motivated to do the work now that I have a competent therapist who is trained to facilitate trauma work.  After all, I am seventy-two years old, and I want to get the job done while I have some life left!

The problem is that at times my desire to do the work and to do it quickly makes me impatient and causes me to be a real “Debbie Downer” to myself.  Then I need a couple of days to recover my perspective on the situation.  Usually, I process this sort of thing while I sleep, and this incident is no exception, for I awoke this morning thinking of  EMDR differently from the way I had thought about it on Monday, the 14th.  On that day, I was thinking only of EMDR as a means for reprocessing trauma energy, and I was remembering the horrible reaction I had to an EMDR session during the time I saw my previous therapist (see “Why Take the Time to Prepare for EMDR?”, November 8th).  When I awoke this morning, I remembered that EMDR can also be used to install resources serving to strengthen the ego and help prepare a person for the reprocessing experience.  As I see it now, installing resources is a totally nonthreatening experience, something to anticipate with pleasure.  At least, I anticipate the experience with pleasure—I want to feel better!

How does one install a resource using EMDR?  I’ve read various articles, including one by Shirley Jean Schmidt (http://www.dnmsinstitute.com/doc/rf-emdr.pdf) discussing the use of EMDR to install resources, and perhaps the information that I stored in my brain from my reading somehow connected last night with the questions arising from the distress I experienced on the 14th.  According to Shirley Jean Schmidt, one installs resources by bilateral stimulation just as one deals with trauma memories by bilateral stimulation.  For example, on last Monday if I had drawn a picture showing the satisfaction I had felt at some point in my life when I had succeeded in mastering an important task or skill, then I would have kept that picture and the emotion and thought behind it in mind as I either did the bilateral eye movements or did bilateral tapping on my knees.  In theory, then, if I had done that last Monday, I would probably feel less threatened at a later time by the task of using EMDR to process a memory associated with trauma.
 
To me, therapy is a process, but it is also a task, one that I am attempting to complete in order to improve the quality of my life. While I know that I may not accomplish this task completely before I die, I want to work hard to accomplish as much as I can so that I can enjoy more serenity and peace of mind in my last years.  Also, I divide the general task of going through therapy into a number of subtasks, EMDR being one of those subtasks.  Therefore, to me it is perfectly logical to believe that if I have achieved good results and attained satisfaction when I have accomplished other major tasks at other times in my life, I can at some point in the future look forward to experiencing satisfaction when I use EMDR to reprocess trauma memories. 

So guess what I am going to discuss with my therapist this coming Monday, November 21st!  Right!  I am going to propose that we install a few resources that will take away some of the fear I have of reprocessing a trauma memory via EMDR!  More coming on this topic at a later date.

November 14: Today's Work . . .

As I mentioned in my post titled "Coming This Week . . . ," I needed to deal with my anxiety today, and I didn't get to the EMDR.  Today was hard for me because I had expected to get some significant EMDR work done.  It didn't happen.  So I am disappointed in myself.  However, as my therapist said, my work is just going to take a little longer.  I need to be patient with myself. 

Complex PTSD is just that:  Complex!  And it takes longer to deal with something that is complex than it does to deal with something that isn't so complex.  For more information on this, see the essay on this blog titled "Complex PTSD:  Does It Exist?" 

Knowing the above does not make me feel better about the fact that I didn't get any EMDR work done today, but on the way home, I distracted myself from the feeling of failure by treating myself to a much-needed pair of new athletic shoes--and they were on sale for $44!  So something good happened, and for that, I am grateful. 

Appreciate the little pleasures in life, for they can cushion the bumps and help you keep your perspective.

More news as time passes . . .        

Coming this week . . .

If possible, I'll diary my experience in EMDR, starting later today, so that those of you who may be interested in utilizing this mode of healing can get some idea as to how it works. 

I will admit to being a wee bit anxious about my upcoming EMDR session because the last one was so problematic--see last week's post.  However, my present therapist knows what she is doing and firmly believes and practices the principle of "First, do no harm."  If my anxiety level increases today, we may spend the time dealing with that rather than working with EMDR. 

For a few weeks, then, I'll attempt to diary my experiences so that you can get a sense of how EMDR is affecting me.  We are each different, however, so the effect EMDR has on me may be way different from the effect on you.  But I believe that there are certain common threads that run through each person's experience.  If this is true, then what I have to say may be of use to you.  Jean

Why Take the Time to Prepare for EMDR?

As you know, if you have been following my blog, the goal driving my therapy has been that of alleviating my PTSD symptoms.  About two years ago, my PTSD symptoms, after having lain somewhat dormant for about ten years, came back with a vengeance.  It’s not as if I had been ignoring my psyche and not dealing with the dissociative episodes, the flashbacks, the numbing, and all the other classic symptoms of PTSD for the past thirty years.  Not at all.  Over the past thirty years, I’ve seen a number of therapists and have spent a lot of money and about twelve years of my life trying to do something about the mess in my head.  (For more on this, please read the other articles archived on this blog.)  Unfortunately, despite my efforts, I had not found a therapist who specialized in helping people heal from trauma damage until fairly recently.  Now I am seeing such a person and am getting the job done.

After spending about eighteen months doing ego state therapy work, I am finally approaching the next phase in my therapy:  EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing).  The work in ego state therapy has prepared me for the EMDR, and now I am ready to make the transition.  Of course, I keep in mind the fact that progress in therapy, like progress in life in general, does not run in a straight line.  Progress in ego state therapy has been a dance called the “two step”—two steps back and one step forward.  However, I now have identified the parts that inhabit my psyche and seem to be most influential in their influence on my thoughts, feelings, and behavior.  More parts may announce themselves as I continue in therapy, but the parts of which I am now aware are working well together, helping one another, cooperating, and generally being friendly and supportive to one another. 

Instilling a spirit of cooperation among the parts inhabiting the psyche is fundamental to laying the basis for EMDR work, as is instilling resources or strengths in the psyche.  If this isn’t done, an EMDR session in the afternoon can result in a horrible, awful reaction in the evening. 

My previous therapist had, unfortunately, taken a shortcut with the preparation, having done virtually no ego-strengthening work with me.  One afternoon after I had been seeing her for about six months, she had me do a written dialogue between my left hand and my right hand, a powerful technique used to get in contact with one’s right brain, the side of the brain containing, among other things, emotional memories and memories of awful and traumatic events in one’s life.  After I had done this dialog and had explained the dialog to the therapist,  she clapped the EMDR apparatus on me and left it for a long time.

By the time I departed for home, I felt disoriented and spacey, and after I arrived home, I felt panicked and anxious, two feelings which became more intense as the afternoon and evening wore on.  And then it happened—I had a full-blown reaction, call it an abreaction or a flashback, whatever—and I was scared!  The reaction was directly connected to the material I had generated in the afternoon’s non-dominant hand dialog, and this material was not the stuff of which lovely, wonderful, and happy memories are made.  No, this material was the stuff of which nightmares are made and the stuff which drives some women to escape their husbands and other women to sacrifice themselves and become sexual slaves to their husbands.  Some people still do not believe that there is such a thing as marital rape.  I can tell those people a thing or two about marital rape that might make believers of them!  And on that afternoon, I relived just one episode of many episodes of marital rape during my twenty-year marriage.  The fact that this particular instance of marital rape took place in the kitchen when at least one of my children was present intensified my reaction, I’m sure.

When the reaction had run its course, I was frightened and disoriented, more fragmented by far than I had been before the EMDR experience.  I called my therapist, but she said there was nothing she could do for me.  She did suggest I use self-soothing techniques, but since I had never been taught to self-soothe and was not in the right frame of mind to learn by Googling, I hung up, knowing that the job of getting myself gathered up and re-oriented was mine and mine alone.  This was on Monday.  By Thursday I was sufficiently present in my body to leave my apartment and seek some help.  I found this help in the form of a young Episcopal priest, and by the time I left him, I was ready to take the next step, that of finding another therapist!  Every so often, I think about this experience and wonder if other clients of that therapist are experiencing a nightmare similar to mine. If they are, I hope they, too, find another therapist.

Because I am not easily deterred from a path that I consider essential, I did not give up the search for a therapist who could help me alleviate my PTSD symptoms.  And now, as I have mentioned, after spending about a year and a half preparing for EMDR, I am ready to take the next step and do it!  I know there is the possibility that despite the careful preparation, I can have a bad reaction to the therapy, but I also know that my present therapist will be there for me if I do.  I also know that she will do all within her power to minimize the chance that I will have a bad reaction.  Of that, I am confident. 

Why, after such a horrible experience with my previous therapist, do I believe EMDR is worth doing?  For one thing, despite the bad experience I had, I know EMDR works.  I can now remember the instance of marital rape I re-experienced that Monday after the EMDR treatment, and the memory no longer carries with it the full emotional charge.  Also, in about 1994 another therapist had successfully used EMDR with me to discharge the energy from another traumatic experience.  So I know EMDR does what the folks at the EMDR Institute claim it does, and because I want to do all I can to prevent sliding back into the pit of having my life disrupted by PTSD symptoms, I will give my best efforts to EMDR therapy. 

For more information on EMDR and to see if it’s something that might help you, please read the material on the official website:  www.emdr.com.

Filling In the Gap

In my last post (Developmental Gap??  What’s That??) I discussed developmental gaps and attempted to define the term as I know it and as it appears to apply to me.  The gap I identified in the previous post is the gap I call “lack of connection.” 

My parents took good care of me, as the owner of a Porsche takes good care of his or her vehicle.  When I was an infant, they fed me, changed me, and, just as the book recommended, they left me in my crib for four hours between feedings and changing.  When I was a toddler, they took pride in my Shirley Temple prettiness and my ability to memorize long verses so I could impress their guests with my recitations.  When I was in the early grades, my parents took pride in my ability to do well in school.  By the time I was nine or ten, however, they didn’t pay much attention to me.  By that time, I wasn’t much use to them, or so it seemed to me. 

My parents continued to take good care of me as I moved through childhood and through adolescence and on into adulthood, but they left me to my own devices most of the time.  I felt little or no emotional connection to either of my parents and regarded them as adversaries.  They had molded and shaped my behavior into that which was acceptable to them, to the people they knew, and to society at large, but we had not connected on a human level.  They didn’t know me as a person, and I didn’t know them.  What’s more, I had the distinct sense that they did not want to know me as a person, and they did not want me to know them.

By the time I left home for college, they had done their job, that of caring for my physical needs, educating me, instilling in me the societal values of the time—yes, they had done everything they were obligated to do, or so they probably felt.  They had, however, left to me the task of learning to develop a sense of attachment to other human beings. 

I have always been aware at some level of my awareness that I have lacked something most of my friends seemed to possess, but only recently have I understood what that “something” has been.  That “something” has been a sense of being “with” other people, of having a connection to other people.  Only recently have I been aware that my old, old perception of me being on one side and everyone else being on the other side may not be an accurate perception.  My therapist is working with me on this, trying to help me bridge this gap.  And the latest brain research says that my brain has retained sufficient plasticity to enable me, at age seventy-two, to overcome this developmental gap.

I have hope that my therapist’s belief in my ability to overcome this gap and the knowledge that my brain is still plastic enough to make this change will enable me to see clearly that my old assumption of life being a case of “me versus them” is a concept with an expiration date, a developmental gap that is within my power to bridge.
  
A psychologist friend of mine frequently reminds me that with awareness comes change.  I have learned through life that this belief is true.  When I become aware of a problem or a condition or a difficulty in my life, then I am usually able to make a change for the better.  Not being taught in infancy to connect securely with other people and not learning to believe that most people truly want to be supportive when they say they do have left their marks on my psyche and underlie my feeling of being isolated, but I need now to “put on my big girl panties” and work with my therapist to repair this developmental gap.  It can be done, and I will do it!  WE will do it!  Together.

Note:  After doing some heavy thinking about what I have said in this essay, I have realized that my reader may get the message that my parents' failure to connect with me is the sole reason for my difficulty as an adult to connect with others.  That, I believe, is not entirely the case. 

Many of us were raised in the first half of the 1900s when behaviorism strongly influenced child-raising theory, and a lot of young parents in this country bought into the same theory my parents accepted.  Somehow, though, many of my peers, women my age, avoided experiencing the "me against the world" mind set that has fed my lifelong feeling of isolation and has made connecting with other people or bonding with people so difficult for me.  

It could be that a lot of parents simply did not take the theory of the times as seriously as my parents did and did not apply it to the exclusion of addressing their children's emotional and spiritual needs--as my parents did.  In addition, the traumatic events of my childhood and the fact that after these events, I had no trusted adult to whom I could turn for help and support no doubt intensified my feeling of isolation. 

For almost my entire seventy-two years of life, the thought of suicide has dogged me daily.  The fact that I'm still here is proof that I have not acted upon the thought, of course.  However, just thinking about suicide has been enough to sap my energy.  I realize now how different my life might have been if I had learned to bond as a baby, if the traumatic events had not happened, and if I'd had a trusted person to talk to when I was a child.  Even if I'd had just one of these three elements, my life might have been different.  For one thing, I might not have chosen an abuser for my husband.

I am, however, a pragmatist, inclined to take the view that the past, damaging as it may have been, is over and done.  It's up to me to do what I need to do to shape my future into what I want it to be.  I have done that in some respects.  I entered graduate school at age fifty when I was finished raising my daughter, had a career which I loved, and then retired.  I now live on the Social Security I had built up and a small monthly annuity payment from the pension fund to which I had contributed. 

I am, however, not finished shaping my future.  Now I am working on repairing the damages resulting from childhood neglect and abuse and from abuses I experienced during the twenty years I was married.  Repairing these damages is a huge task, as any of you know if you have been in therapy and involved in doing the same thing I'm doing. 

I write the articles for this blog because I want to let you know that repairing the damages is possible.  Also, I want to give you information and share my own experience with you in the hope that whatever I have to say will somehow be helpful to you as you struggle.  If, through my efforts, I can help you, then my efforts are richly rewarded.  

What I would like from you, my readers, are your comments, suggestions for topics, and any ideas that would help me help you.  Also, if you have ideas that would help me make my website http://www.jfairgrieve.com/ more useful to readers, please send me those ideas in the comment form on this blog.  In addition, if any of you who have blogs would like a mutual posting of links--I list your link on my site and you reciprocate--I'm up for that!  As the adage goes, "It takes a village . . . "

(More on this topic of developmental gaps as I progress.  My next step in therapy is to start EMDR.  www.emdr.com/  According to my therapist, as I go through EMDR, more developmental gaps will surface.  When that happens, we will deal with them.)  

Developmental Gap?? What’s that??

If you have been reading the articles on this blog, you know that I’m being treated for Complex PTSD, C-PTSD.  If you are not sure what C-PTSD is and how it differs from PTSD, my article on this blog titled “Complex PTSD:  Does It Exist?” will give you information on this topic. In today’s article I plan to give you a bit more insight into the complexity of Complex PTSD. Since I am not a mental health professional but am merely a writer who is undergoing treatment for C-PTSD, I can’t do more than give you a small glimpse into the matter of “developmental gaps” as I become aware of them.  But a small glimpse will lead to a larger glimpse as time goes by, and I will gladly give you more information as I acquire it. 

I was born in 1939, a time prior to Dr. Spock and prior to such big names in the field of child development as Ilg, Ames, and Gesell.  Yes, in 1939 many parents still followed the old “feed ‘em, burp ‘em, diaper ‘em, put ‘em in the crib, and don’t touch ‘em for four hours” school of child raising.  Some parents prior to WWII also espoused the somewhat Victorian belief that children were “things” that did not become fully human until they finished puberty.  A few American parents, including my own, bought into a more Calvinistic belief popular with some parents in Europe around the end of the 1700s and stretching into the pre-War 1900s. This philosophy stressed the belief that “rearing a child was a battle of wills between the inherently sinful infant or child and the parent.” *The child’s will, obviously, had to be crushed if the child was to mature into a law-abiding and responsible adult and a good citizen. *http://www.faqs.org/childhood/Bo-Ch/Child-Rearing-Advice-Literature.html  

Another child-raising belief popular in Europe but also reaching its tentacles into our American culture prior to World War II can be stated as follows: “These first years have, among other things, the advantage that one can use force and compulsion. With age children forget everything they encountered in their early childhood. Thus if one can take away children's will, they will not remember afterward that they had had a will." Wickipedia. (Google “Moritz Schreber” and you will find the Wickipedia article.  In the section titled “notes and references” click on the term “poisonous pedagogy.”  This will take you to the page containing the sentiments quoted above.  If you want to see the above philosophy of child rearing in action, see the film titled “The White Ribbon.”) 

As you may imagine, by combining the Calvinistic view of raising children with the view that children “forget everything they encountered in their early childhood” as quoted above, a determined parent could effectively insure that a child’s development was as full of holes or gaps as a leaky collander—if the child lived to reach adulthood.

When I consider the beliefs described above and compare them with the child-rearing methods I’ve seen in the post-Spock era, I can see how horribly skewed the pre-War beliefs were--skewed on the side of adults to the neglect of children.  By that I mean according to much of the literature of the times, children were not believed to be anything other than clay to be molded into creatures destined to fit the personal and social templates espoused by their parents. And since my mother espoused all the beliefs described in the quote above when she raised me, why should I be surprised that I’m being treated for Complex PTSD?  Rather than regard me as a human infant who had normal human infant needs such as the need for parental nurturing and connection, she believed the official "wisdom" of the day and thought she was doing the right thing by treating me as an adversary, a creature needing nothing more than to be forced to conform to behavioral norms, hers and those of society.  When I think of all the other people my age who were also raised by parents espousing the official child-rearing wisdom of the time, I shudder! 

Furthermore, my mother never hesitated to pass on this “poisonous pedagogy” to the young mothers in the neighborhood.  The women would regularly bring their infants and toddlers to our house for kaffeeklatsches, and my mother would pass on her wisdom as they listened eagerly.  I was around the age of eleven when I heard her utter the following: “If you pick him up just because he’s crying, then you will have a spoiled baby who thinks he is boss.  You need to break his will.  If you do that, then he will be a happy baby.  You don’t want him to be boss!”

Since I was about six when my brother was a baby, I can remember watching her apply these sentiments as she cared for him.  I remember her fighting with my baby brother as he sat, a captive in his highchair, at mealtime.  When he didn’t want to eat what she put on the spoon, for example, she tried to force the spoon into his closed mouth.  When he refused to open, she slapped him and yelled at him.  This caused him to cry, and then she was able to shove the food into his mouth.  A victory for her!  She had broken his will and had shown him she was boss! The struggle continued through the years and through all developmental stages. I could only assume that she applied these same principles as she cared for me when I was a baby. 

Now, as an adult, I can understand why throughout my childhood and adulthood I regarded my mother as an adversary and never as an ally.  I also understand why I learned to live a double life, one with my compliant self on the surface and my authentic self beneath the surface where she couldn’t reach me.  Where was my father in this battle?  Couldn’t he have helped me?  My father left child raising to my mother.  Sometimes he was the parent who did the punishing, but other than that, he did not participate in parenting me or my brother.

So how does the above discussion of child-rearing relate to the matter of developmental gaps discovered in adulthood?  I can speak only from my own experience, but it’s possible that my experience will resonate in the hearts of other people who were born prior to WWII.  My mother found her child-raising wisdom in a book published in the 1930s and distributed by the U. S. government.  You can find information about this publication on the following website: http://www.faqs.org/childhood/Bo-Ch/Child-Rearing-Advice-Literature.html   The stated purpose of this booklet was to provide parents with the information they needed to raise children who would grow into adults especially suited for working in our highly industrialized nation at the time.  The following sentence from a paragraph on this site is particularly relevant to understanding the prevailing philosophy:  "[John B.] Watson explicitly criticized 'too much mother love,' advising parents to become detached and objective in their child-rearing techniques so as to develop self-control in the child."  For more information on the nature of this “wisdom,” please see the note at the end of this article. 

Unfortunately for me, being raised “by the book” did not instill in me a sense of connection to other people.  I remember when I was about eight years old saying to myself, “It’s me against everyone else in the world.”  That’s the way life seemed to me, and that’s the way I have lived my life.  Luckily, my children were part of “me” when I was a mother and not part of “everyone else,” at least until they were on their own as adults.  Only in the past few weeks have I learned that my childhood attitude of “me against the rest of the world” is an attitude held by many children who have suffered neglect and other kinds of abuse and indicates that some aspect of learning how to connect with other human beings was derailed in babyhood and/or in childhood.  In other words, I have discovered within myself a developmental gap.  (End of Part I.)

Note:  Here is the paragraph from the website cited in paragraph seven that contains the Watson warning concerning “too much mother love”:
"The behaviorism of JOHN B. WATSON and others provided the scientific psychology behind most ideas about child rearing in the 1920s and 1930s, though Freudian and other psychoanalytic ideas also enjoyed some popularity in these circles. Both approaches considered the first two or three years of life to be critical to child rearing. The behaviorist approach assumed that behavior could be fashioned entirely through patterns of reinforcement, and Watson's ideas permeated the Children's Bureau's Infant Care bulletins and PARENTS MAGAZINE, which was founded in 1926. As historians and others have observed, this approach to programming and managing children's behavior suited a world of rationalized factory production and employee management theories rationalizing industrial relations. Watson explicitly criticized 'too much mother love,' advising parents to become detached and objective in their child-rearing techniques so as to develop self-control in the child."  (I’ve underlined and bolded what I consider to be the most important point in this paragraph.) 

Coming soon:  More information on this topic.  I hope those of you who have discovered this particular gap or other gaps in your own development will find encouragement in reading this account of my own experience.  With awareness comes the possibility of healing.  Therapy helps!   

Denial and the Danger of Butterflies

  
In 1981, I attended a Life, Death, and Transition workshop held by Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross at Corbett, Oregon.  In one of her lectures, Dr. Kubler‑Ross talked about touring the German concentration camp sites shortly after World War II and her surprise at beholding gorgeous butterflies drawn on the walls of camp barracks.  The prisoners, she said, drew those butterflies so they could deny the danger and the death inherent in their everyday reality.

As I listened to Dr. Kubler-Ross describe the butterflies, the concentration camp barracks, and the possible mental states of the prisoners, I felt a sort of deja-vu sensation.  What Kubler-Ross was saying about the prisoners and their butterflies resonated within me. I realized, then, that my daughter and I had been prisoners in our own concentration camp, and I remembered my own butterfly.   

At the end of summer in 1978, my family and I returned to Centralia, Washington, after having lived for two years in Germany. We bought a house and proceeded to settle in. The following few years was a period of new beginnings.  In 1980, our son went away to college, our daughter started sixth grade, my husband began a new position, and I began a job as an insurance clerk.  And along with these beginnings came the beginning of stepped-up sexual violence in my marital relationship.
 
Now, some thirty years later, I can see the text-book dynamics of domestic violence at work—my isolation and lack of female friends in whom I could have confided, my fear of displeasing my husband and triggering his violent temper, and my inability to see that I was being abused.  In 1980, I knew my life at home was not what I had hoped it would be when I married in 1961, but because I had no idea as to what behavior took place in the bedrooms of other women, I had no frame of reference, no way I could evaluate my own experience.  Although I did not know it at the time, my mental state was much the same as that of the Jews described by Dr. Kubler-Ross:  I denied the danger inherent in my situation, and I waited, expecting my situation to improve.  To help me wait, I, like the Jews who drew on the walls of their barracks, painted an imaginary butterfly on my bedroom ceiling.

My butterfly was merely a piece of ragged wallpaper on the bedroom ceiling, but my imagination added details and glorious colors to that gray, torn bit of wallpaper until it became a beautiful Monarch. As I lay in bed, I would stare at the ceiling, willing my self to fly from my body and become one with that butterfly.  As the months passed, I became more and more skilled at flying.  I reached the point, in fact, where I flew to the ceiling whether I wanted to or not.  My body could be making the bed, changing clothes, or doing whatever it was expected to do, but I was on the ceiling the whole time, velvet wings flapping, watching from above.  One day, however, I caught myself in mid flight, understood where I was going, knew why I was going there, and realized that my flying had to cease.

How or why did I suddenly recognize the reality of my situation?  I can only surmise that the fact I was in therapy had something to do with my sudden insight.  A few months previous, I had begun seeing a therapist because I felt so fragmented that I had to talk myself through my daily routine in order to function effectively.  Each step of the way, I had to tell myself aloud what I was doing or what I was supposed to do, including during my job as an insurance clerk. Luckily, other than my boss, who was out of the office much of the time, I was the only employee, and normally not many clients came in person to take care of their business.  When somebody came in, I was able to greet the person, converse, and do what was expected.  When I was alone, however, I was forced to resume my dialog in order to do filing or other paperwork.  After living for about six months in this condition, I knew I needed help.

Thus, when I entered therapy, I believed that my increasing inability to think or reason effectively and clearly without talking myself through my day was a sign that my cognitive abilities were breaking down, but I did not connect this with the abuses I endured in my marriage.  I worked hard in therapy, and my therapist was supportive and concerned.  As time passed and I became more trusting of my therapist, I found myself beginning to think more clearly without having to talk myself through daily tasks.  In addition, as thinking became easier, I became more and more aware of the chaos outside my head.  In the bedroom, I flew to the ceiling less often, and I became less and less tolerant of my husband's rages, of his violence in the bedroom, and of his verbal abuse.  I began telling him when I didn’t like what he was doing to me. 

In addition to becoming more aware that I was being abused, I also let my husband know that I would not tolerate certain of his practices with our daughter.  For example, rather than cringing in fear when he stood our daughter in the corner after dinner, shouted multiplication problems at her, and then cursed at her when she failed to give the correct response, I let him know that his behavior  was abusive and unacceptable and had to stop.  Although he did not completely stop this behavior, the after-dinner sessions became less frequent.  Perhaps in response to my newly-exhibited assertiveness, his behavior changed—at least, that was my thought.  He threw fewer tantrums, spoke more respectfully, and generally became less violent.  He even asked me to buy our daughter some pretty dresses, something he had never done before.  I happily assumed that our relationship was improving and that my husband was trying hard to control his volatile temper.

The change in my husband’s behavior caught me off guard.  I relaxed around him and became more trusting.  At this point, life looked good.  My husband’s behavior toward our daughter and me was improving, so I thought, and I allowed myself to hope that in time, we would become a stable and loving family.  Like the Jews lured into the gas chambers by promises of hot showers and clean clothing, I was seduced into believing that my husband’s outwardly changed behavior was an accurate indicator of his intentions.  Thus, the truth of our situation hit me like a sucker punch when I walked in on him one spring evening in 1981 and caught him in the act of using our daughter for his own sexual pleasure.  

Shortly after discovering the abuse and when I had my first chance to talk to my daughter without my husband being present, I learned that after we returned from Germany, he had begun grooming her for the abuse and had begun the abuse in earnest right after her eleventh birthday.  Each time I left the house to shop or to run errands and left her home with him, she became his prey.  And because our daughter had spent the first three years of her life being bounced from one foster home to another, she was especially vulnerable and eager to please him.  She had no desire to displease him and risk being sent back into the foster care system.   

Because her father had told her that if I learned of the abuse, I would be jealous and wouldn’t love her, my daughter was reluctant at first to give me any but the most general information regarding what had transpired between her and her father.  After I reported my husband, however, and she realized that he and not she would no longer be living in our home, she gave me details of incidents.  As the details emerged and I became progressively more horrified at the abuse she endured, my anger intensified.  How could my husband have performed those atrocities on an innocent child, a child who had spent the first three years of her life in the foster care system, a child who needed so intensely to feel our love as her adoptive parents?  How could he have been so, so selfish?  How could he have been the person I was married to for twenty years?  My anger and those questions swirled around my mind as I tended to the practical matters involved in establishing a new household, one in which I was the head and the sole parent of my thirteen-year-old daughter. 

Thirty years later, I still can’t answer those questions.  My daughter is grown and married.  According to her, her life now is okay.  I admire her.  She is a good person, kind and loving despite the abuse she suffered.  I’ve been on my own since that day in 1981 when I reported my former husband to the police.  And since then, I’ve had no need for butterflies on my ceiling or for flying to join them. 

Time Out

Got to take some time out from writing and keeping up this blog.  Enjoy reading the articles already posted.  More coming toward the end of October, after I'm relocated and settled into my new apartment.  Here are the URL and a short paragraph describing my new living arrangement: 

http://www.bridgemeadowsapts.com/
Bridge Meadows is an innovative community designed to bring together three generations to support families adopting children from foster care and an opportunity for elders to have a sense of community and purpose.  (Copied from Bridge Meadows website.)

Now I need to start packing!  I'm not sure how I'm going to function in my one-room apartment with all the packed boxes, but one way or another, the job will get done.  See you toward the end of October!  Jean

Why Trust Your Intuition?

I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, and for most of my life, try as I may to shake them, many of my views of myself as a woman have been based in that era.  If you have ever watched re-runs of “I Love Lucy” and “The Honeymooners” and even the old “Lassie” series, you will have seen some of the gender stereotypes that were implanted into my psyche.  For the most part in this era, men were family heads and were regarded as being the strong partners; women kept the households running but were regarded as members of the “weaker sex.”  I can just hear the guffaws now from those of you who are in your forties, thirties, and younger! 

One of the human qualities that took a big hit when I was young was what we knew then as “feminine intuition.”  Men had common sense—most of the time!—and women had “feminine intuition.”  The problem was that at the time, feminine intuition was an attribute that the general public and my family of origin did not seem to view with much respect.  Thus, I reached adulthood with typical values for the times:  common sense and the ability to reason well, logically, were “in,” and intuition, the ability to arrive at conclusions through hunches or through some mysterious, indescribable process originating at a spot in the brain far from common sense and reason, was “out.”

During my twenty-year marriage, this attitude of valuing common sense and reason over intuition prevailed.  During discussions with my former husband, if I could not back up my opinion with hard facts but relied instead on my intuition, my opinion was worthless, unworthy of any consideration at all.  Because I had learned as a child and as a young adult that others were much smarter than I and that my hunches and intuitive knowledge lacked validity, I made a wrong decision about midway in my marriage that I would not make today if I could take my present wisdom with me and travel through time back to the 1970s.  “If I had it to do over. . .” is trite and tired, I know, but if any of you, my readers, can benefit from hearing about my mistake, I’m willing and happy to tell you about it.

At some point near the midpoint of the nineteen seventies, I began waking up in the middle of the night perspiring heavily, heart beating wildly, and wanting to run, just run as fast as I could run to get away from my home.  I didn’t understand why this was happening, and I didn’t tell anyone about it.  I didn’t run, however.  I stayed put.  At the time, I had been married for a bit more than ten years and had two children, a twelve-year-old son and a seven-year-old adopted daughter.  My husband was a professional who earned a good living to support us, and I had a teaching certificate and was a substitute teacher.  Our home, while not fancy or modern, was decent, and we had a small parcel of land on which we grew vegetables and sometimes pastured sheep or cows.  We even had a barn, home to a flock of banty chickens.  Life was good—as seen from the outside.  


Life as experienced from the inside, however, was not so good.  Because I had grown up in a home where I had learned to walk on tiptoes around my parents to avoid riling them, especially to avoid riling my father and provoking one of his tantrums, I thought that walking on tiptoes around my husband was normal.  My children learned to walk on tiptoes, too.  So there we were, all walking on tiptoes so as not to provoke the head of the family and cause him to “blow.”  When he “blew,” he was dangerous, more dangerous physically to the children than to me.  He didn’t hit me, but he hit them and said they needed to learn their lesson.  When I intervened, he hit me verbally by shouting obscenities at me and calling me names. During his tantrums, I lived in a time warp, paralyzed; trapped somewhere in my mind between my father’s violent tantrums and my husband’s violent tantrums, I was unable to distinguish “now” from “then” and do what I needed to do to ensure my children’s safety or my own safety. I understand now that PTSD does that-- it causes people to mistake one reality for another reality, and the inability to make decisions or the errors in decision-making that result can be fatal.  For some victims of domestic violence, the decisions made during times of violence have been fatal. 

Then one day in 1975 or 1976, my husband came home from work and announced that we would be moving to Germany.  He had made this decision without asking for my input.  This would be the ideal time, I knew, to make the break—if a break was to be made.  But I simply could not justify leaving my situation.  I tried to see the situation objectively, through the eyes of an outsider, and I did not see that leaving was warranted.  Our situation was not that bad!  Perhaps if I had not grown up in a home where people tiptoed, I could have seen the situation clearly, could have identified it as an abusive situation, and then would have taken my children and left.  But that was not the case.  I didn’t see the reality of our situation, and I could not justify uprooting my kids simply because something deep inside me told me that our situation was not what it should have been.  My intuition told me that the tiptoeing and the violence were wrong; none of us, including the person we tiptoed around, deserved to live like that.  But I had no faith in my own wisdom, and I allowed my children and myself to be bullied because there was no hard evidence, observable evidence, to show that we were, indeed, being bullied. 

In addition to not seeing that my children and I were living in an abuse situation, I stayed because I did not believe I would be supported in any way by either his family or my family if I took the children and left.  In fact, I was afraid that my husband’s family would use their finances to prevent me from retaining custody of the children.  It would be a nasty fight, I determined, and did I want to put my children and myself through that?  I decided that I did not want to do that to them or to myself.  We went to Germany in September of 1976 and returned in August of 1978. 

Once back in the U.S., we returned to our home town, and my husband returned to his former place of employment. I found a job in a dry-cleaning establishment to supplement our income, and my son and daughter went to school.  Again, from the outside, our family life must have looked good.  I noticed, however, that my husband did not spend much time at home.  At first, I did not pay a lot of attention to that fact.  He worked about forty-five minutes from where we lived, and I felt that if he wanted to spend time with co-workers after he finished work, then that was his privilege. I had friends in our town with whom I could socialize, but he did not.  So I understood his need to socialize with his co-workers. 

As time passed, however, he returned home later in the evening, and he seemed to spend more time drinking.  I also noticed that one female co-worker called more frequently, sometimes in the middle of the night, asking him to return to work to fix one thing or another.  We spent very little time together, and that worried me.  One day I confronted him with the fact that our relationship seemed to be in need of repair and suggested we go for marriage counseling, but he would have none of that.  When I suggested that I might go by myself, he reacted by shouting at me, denying that there was a problem.  I kept any additional thoughts on the subject to myself, but I knew I had struck a nerve.  I did not, however, know what to do with this information, so I did nothing.   Again, I lacked confidence in my intuition and my capacity to make decisions.

I did nothing, that is, until the spring evening in 1981 when I caught him in the act of using our daughter for his own sexual gratification.  Then I blew the whistle on the entire domestic mess, and just as with Joshua in the Battle of Jericho, the walls came tumbling down, revealing a domestic mess as toxic and stinking as the contents of a cesspool.  So why was I able in 1981 to do what I was unable to do in 1974? 

In 1981, rather than just having a sense that something was awry in our relationship, the intuitive suspicion I had in the mid-1970s, I had a specific piece of information that gave me all the reason I needed for putting paid to our domestic relationship. I had a hard, cold fact—the look of terror on my daughter’s face.  And then when I had a chance to talk to my daughter and confirm that I had perceived the situation accurately, I had further support for my case. Yes, by the time I called the police and reported my husband, I was confident that I was doing what needed to be done, severing my relationship with my spouse.

The tragedy embedded in these events is that at some level of awareness, I’d felt compelled to wait for specific, hard evidence, the discovery of sexual abuse, before feeling justified in severing my relationship with my spouse.  If I had trusted my intuition in the mid-seventies, the time I was waking up at night, heart pounding, and wanting to run, my daughter would have been spared the experience of being a victim, and my children and I would all have been spared some years of being the objects of my former husband’s rages.  We could have stopped tiptoeing.  I know that now.  I didn’t know it then.   

We Are Wondrously Made, Indeed!

As I near the end of my present phase of therapy, I am awed by how we humans are constructed.  When I first began this round of therapy in April 2010, I was skeptical.  My therapist told me that Ego State Therapy would, if I hung in there, give me relief from my PTSD symptoms, but I was still skeptical.  Well, over a year has passed; I’m getting close to the end of this part of the process, and I can say with conviction that I am no longer skeptical.  I’m a believer! 

When I saw my therapist on Tuesday, I asked her about the brain/mind connection.  I told her that I was amazed at the progress I’ve made and amazed at the effect of all my hard work.  She was not surprised.  And then we talked about the human brain and its ability to heal itself from trauma damage. 

In generations past, scientists did not believe that the human brain retained its plasticity past a certain age, and they believed that at a young age, a person’s brain became more or less static, possibly incapable of doing the healing necessary to recover from trauma.  Now, however, scientists know that the brains of many adults, even those in their senior years, are capable of working with the mind to heal from past trauma. Here is a link to an interesting article on brain plasticity:  http://neuron.typepad.com/neuron/2007/07/brain-plasticit.html 

According to what I have learned from my therapist and from my reading, the human brain and the mind are programmed or constructed to heal from trauma if given a chance.  Therapy is the appropriate “chance,” usually. Here is a link to an article that expands upon this concept: http://healingresources.info/emotional_trauma_overview.htm 

As you will see if you read the article cited above, what was deemed impossible by scientists a generation or so ago has been proven possible by today’s scientists.  Furthermore, I have proven to myself that I, an older person at age seventy-two, can use my mind to heal my brain.  At least, I’m most of the way there now.  Soon I plan to be all the way there.
 
So what is my proof of this healing?  All along on this blog I have been giving you information to document my progress.  In one of my first articles, “How Do I Know,” written on Tuesday, June 14th, I discussed the alleviation of my PTSD symptoms to that date, most notably my ability to ride public transportation and stay in the present rather than dissociate when passengers acted out.  More recently, in my post of August 26th, I said, “. . . I feel more ‘together’ than I have felt in a long time.”  Thus, because I no longer experience PTSD symptoms with the intensity I have experienced them in the past and because I feel more “together” and less fragmented, I can say with conviction that my mind is healing my brain. 

For me, therapy works!  Does it work for everyone?  According to the literature, it works for a lot of people.  EMDR, for example, is endorsed by the Veterans’ Administration as an effective therapy for veterans returning from war and who are suffering from PTSD resulting from their experience in battle.  (http://www.emdr.com/)  Other therapy modalities such as Lifespan Integration Therapy (http://www.lifespanintegration.com/) and Ego State Therapy (http://www.inlpa.com/index.cfm?CFID=4275&CFTOKEN=13895182&a=10071) have also worked for many people. 

Is going through therapy easy?  No, it’s not!  Is it worth the effort?  For me, it certainly is!  As the old adage goes, “There is no such thing as a free lunch!”  In other words, if you want relief from PTSD symptoms, it’s up to you to make that relief happen.  Your therapist can show you the way and guide you, but he or she cannot do the work for you.  My therapist is a facilitator, a person who accompanies me through the therapeutic process and who helps me make my therapy possible, but she cannot do the work for me.  If I want the payoff, I have to do the work to get it. 
 
As my therapist and I talked last Tuesday about the mind/brain connection and the human ability to heal from trauma, I was awed by the wondrous way we are made.  We each possess a miracle-about-to-happen, whether we are aware of this or not.  And I’m convinced that as time passes, scientists will discover more and more about the mind/body/brain connection.  It could be that in our grandchildren’s time, people will cure themselves of many physical maladies by tapping into the amazing resources that lie within their own minds.  I can foresee that in the future, doctors may possibly steer more people to appropriate therapists than to pharmacies.  I won’t live long enough to see if my thoughts on this are on the money, but I hope they are. 

In the meantime, if you are living with PTSD symptoms, try experiencing for yourself the rewards of appropriate therapy.  Find a therapist experienced in helping trauma survivors alleviate their PTSD symptoms.  Commit to your healing, and see for yourself how wondrously you are made!