Messages

Dark.Art.Girl,

That was a profound comment: When you're feeling well mentally, you try to control other aspects and get scared or agitated.

I'm going to ponder this one for a while. Good food for thought

Also, I just figured out a few minutes ago, that empowerment is a fear-buster. I've been in situations where to help someone else, I needed to go into the worst parts of town unarmed. During those times, I wasn't even remotely afraid. I was one of the helpers. I felt empowered. The more empowered I feel, the less fear i carry. I guess that makes sense, right? Empowerment is the opposite of afraid.

As I age, I lose more and more feeling of empowerment, so therefore, the fear grows in the spaces where the empowerment vacates.

Food for thought.

Thanks for the love from you, and also from StartingHealing.

I'm getting better and worse at the same time.

As I age, and participate in every CPTSD therapy I can afford, I'm getting better and worse at the same time.  I'm mentally healthier than ever. I can find firm ground in most situations now. My EFs are fewer and shorter and less frightening than ever. Meanwhile, my real-world fears are getting worse and closer to the surface.

I live in a community that has a newly formed family of very large bears in it. I have not yet seen one, but all my neighbors have. And I've had to pickup piles of their skat from my yard only feet from my bedroom window, and I've had to clean up my garbage can mess a few times. As Climate Change dries out the berries in the surrounding forests, these bears have moved into town and are now living off our garbage bins like smorgasbords. It's a community of mostly elderly people or beachgoing cabin owners. These elderly people walk the streets with tiny dogs on leashes at all hours of the night and day, and so far, nobody's been hurt by one of these 400-pound bears. But yesterday, I tried to go for a walk. I left the house, got to the end of the driveway, looked up and down the street. Nobody was anywhere. This is a very quiet community built in the woods just off the beach. I was too scared to take my walk. "It's autumn: Bears are in hibernation mode, fattening up for winter, and I'm all alone out here." I own bear spray, but don't trust it will stop a 400 pounder. So I went back inside and started inventorying all the ways I'm changing my life because of growing fears of everything that moves.

• The bears have made me afraid to walk or ride a bike in my neighborhood.
• My evil sister, the most abusive human I've known personally, moved to just a few blocks away from me and now I'm afraid to be in my own yard in case the old monster drives by to check on whether I'm home or not.
• I hide in my house now. I'm afraid of people casing my house, so I'm always hiding my car in the garage with the garage door always closed so nobody knows if I'm home or not.
• I'm afraid of criminals, ex relatives, bullies, trump supporters with guns, ICE, (and I'm not even an immigrant).
• I'm afraid of getting shot at in road rage or malls or public places.
• I'm afraid of bears and racoons.
• I'm afraid of the government.
• I'm afraid of the phone when it rings, or the doorbell.
• I'm now becoming afraid of eating food made in restaurant kitchens.
• My beautiful, quiet, woodsy community was wiped out 325 years ago by a tsunami and now they're really driving in the fear of another one coming at any time. So now I make peace with life each night at bedtime just in case I wake up under water.

I'm getting scared of everything.

I'm changing all my behaviors because my surface fears of survival are all heating up. Meanwhile, I'm getting healthier in other ways, so I'm confused. Am I getting better or worse? I think both.

I suspect some of my newer fears are not that uncommon for those of us who are getting older and less able to defend ourselves. (As a younger man, I would have believed I could outrun a bear. I couldn't, but I would have believed I could). I now know the reality of all the people dying in severe weather or geological events, car crashes, mall shootings, road rage, animal attacks, political attacks... My fears used to be of not being accepted or of being humiliated or insulted, or expected to do things I don't want to do. Now my fears of real-world dangers that are swarming around me more than they used to.

Some animals will go off and hide when they get sick or injured because they suddenly feel less able to defend themselves against their own herds. That's how I feel now. I'm hiding behind locked doors because the world outside is scaring me like never before. I'm afraid of my own herd and my own environment. My knees hurt so I can't run. I'm weaker than when I was younger so I don't know if I could even fight for myself. My reflexes are slowing, strength is waning, and my ability to know what the heck is even happening around me is dulling.  So I'm getting more scared as I age.

But I don't think nature is the only reason> I think a life of living in the trauma of fear is catching up to me. I've always been scared, but I've also felt stronger and faster. Now I'm still scared, but I feel vulnerable and unprotected.

I don't like this. Life is hard enough to enjoy without phobias, fears and suspicions. Adding those to an already stressful existence is making me scared of being scared.

I'm a phobia-phobe. I'm afraid of fear itself.

What's scaring me now is wondering, where does this road lead? Will I just keep getting worse as I get better?

Hi San,

I hope you continue to feel better and better. And I'm inspired by your decision to write to your senators. You are right, it feels good to do something, even something small. I haven't begun to do much politically yet, so that's why I'm saying you are inspiring to me. I'm letting the situation scare me into my hole. You're peeking out and doing what you can. I can see how that feels empowering. And empowerment helps with CPTSD.

Impressed.

Papa Coco.

Bach, and Little Bach,

I'm so sorry to hear of the long EF. (I just made a connection: We call periods of emotional flashbacks EF, and that's also how NOAA measures tornadoes, as EF 1 through 5). That's one of those anomalous coincidences that I think are helpful, because of what you said, that you don't know what brought this EF on, nor why it's hanging around. I've always thought of these EFs as weather fronts, which helps me a lot to not take responsibility for them as if I wanted them. After a lifetime of people telling me to "just get over it" and asking "Why do you keep letting it bug you?" I now see these EFs as storms that I didn't decide to have. I don't always understand where they come from, I don't know how long they'll stay, and all I can do is hang on until they subside and I can assess the damages. To me, EFs are storms, and we don't always know what causes them.

I'm very sorry to read that you're in one of those storms now. I hope you continue to lean on the forum for comfort. By the comments I'm seeing, you have a lot of friends here on the forum who care about you. I care about you also. I hope knowing that helps ease the frustration of the storm.

PC

Hope,

Good to hear you are getting things done today and that it feels good.

That's Interesting how AI helped you assess the notes from your mom. That AI is turning out to be quite a global gamechanger.

Enjoy getting things done! That is a good feeling.

PC

[Self]

Hi SH,

I am rereading An Introduction to IFS by Richard Schwartz. The more I understand the various personalities that live within me, the more I am able to love them. And as I love them, I somehow feel more love for myself now too. Actually, I should write it as my Self.  It's said the adult learner retains 15% of what we are taught. So, I figure that if I read the really good books 8 times--with breaks between each read--, then I'll retain 100% of the content. Sounds like a joke, but it works for me.

Once I'm done rereading Intro to IFS, I'm going to reread The Others Within Us by Robert Falconer. Falconer does a really good job explaining how these rogue parts can move about between people and how actual exorcisms done by actual therapists actually work.

We do seem to have similar interests and understandings. To me, quantum physics are bigger and more real than the Newtonian physics that define the Mechanical Universe are. Like Newtonian physics are a smaller subset of the larger universe.

Studies on ancestral trauma are fascinating. And on Organ transplants, and on twins separated at birth living nearly identical lives without even knowing the other existed at all. Paranormal, and energy studies are fascinating.  We are all connected.

This is fun stuff to talk about and ponder and it seems to be becoming a lot more mainstream reality than it used to be. I think more people DO believe in the paranormal things like ghosts and aliens now than don't. As for me, I've seen and experienced enough inexplicable things that it's all just becoming normal to me now. Which is good. We accept what we are able to accept. So the more I learn about the unseen realities beyond Newtonian Physics, the more increasing capacity I have to learn even more.

As for me on this topic of IFS parts and quantum entanglement:
These teachers are helping me continually shrink my EFs. My EFs don't last as long as they once did, and they don't come quite as often. To me, I was damaged in body, mind and soul. So, I need to heal body, mind and soul. These recent teachings by these trauma therapists are moving that same direction. Falconer says it anytime he speaks publicly, that healing from trauma works best with a spiritual component. Not spiritual only, but all three. Body, mind and soul. Speaking only for myself now, this holistic approach is proving very helpful as I work to gain control over my own agency.  For me, being able to finally accept the possibility that parts can possess us during times of weakness, dissociation, or anesthesia, has opened me up to accepting a lot more possibilities for healing.

PC

Narckiddo,

All I can do is shake my head when I read of your mom's antics. They would be funny if they weren't so sad. I am always impressed with people like you and many of the rest of us who came from similar environments and, rather than becoming like them, we took the high road and learned how to be better people because of them.

I'm glad you have this forum to vent this stuff on. It drives us crazy if we take it personally, (Which I did, and that's why I went crazy and then joined this forum to get some sense of reality to my life).

It's refreshing that you have a good clear eyes-wide-open witness to your parents and their not-so-loving ways. I hope our OOTS body of empathetic souls are a help to your sanity, (as this body of people is a help to mine).

Starting Healing,

Wow, your family dynamic is a bit like mine. I was not adopted, but I had 4 siblings from the same gene pool but so help me I swear we each originally came from different planets. Even our health issues are all over the map.

You said something above that really sparked my interest. You said, "I'm really thinking that perhaps the idea of spiritual possession isn't just lip service." I don't know if you were serious, but if that is actually a wonder of yours, it is brought up in Dr. Robert Falconer's book, The Others Within Us. He teams up with dr. Richard Schwartz, who invented IFS therapy, and expanded on our inner parts. This sounds crazy, I know, but he has evidence from his 40 plus years of providing trauma-informed therapy, to sound compelling. In IFS, we learn that we have many parts within us. Many, many inner children, each with their own influence over our lives. Always meaning to help, but often because of their limited compartmentalized views of life, they end up tripping us up by accident. Schwartz started out talking about them as if they all were born inside of us, but Falconer believes the ocasional IFS part comes to us from somewhere else. He references the religious beliefs of possession and says that scientifically, he believes it's true. I was most intrigued in his book when he said that we humans are sometimes left with our borders unguarded, like when we are under anesthesia, or in a seriously dissociated state, as many of us are during CSA. During the times when we are "out of our mind" our borders are open, and Dr. Falconer believes that's when visiting IFS parts move in. His claim goes on a bit deeper, citing that he believes the world lost a valuable practice when we stopped doing exorcisms. Those of us in western civilizations think this is religious stuff, but Falconer isn't religious, he's an experienced psychologist who says he's helped a lot of people who he believes had other people's IFS parts in them after a surgery or sexual abuse.

I, personally, keep my belief system open. I see the world as a salad of possible scenarios, and, at this point in time, we humans aren't fully able to know which scenarios are real and which are hooey. So I give every theory a voice until somehow one of them proves itself right or wrong. Until proven diferently, I'm a fan of Falconer's writing.

I just wanted to say, IFS part possession or spiritual possession is absolutely not off the table when talking with me. It's as possible as anything else.

My wife had a brother. A sick, narcissistic, severely alcoholic, drug addicted brother. He was my age. He was a huge problem for the whole family. At times he would be "behaving himself" like a decent person for a while, but when he started to become dangerous, we knew it because we could see his countenance change. His face would darken. The word that best described is Jeckyl/Hyde transformations would be Evil. He looked like evil was entering his body. We knew bad things were about to happen. So the idea of spiritual possession as a scientific reality rather than a religious belief is easy for me to believe.

I recommend that book to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of IFS parts and their influence on our lives.

Recently I also read Attuned by Thomas Hubl, and somewhere in his teachings, he stated that adoption doesn't necessarily remove us from the ancestral trauma that comes down through families. Even those who have been adopted into families can find themselves wrestling with the ancestral traumas of the family they were adopted into. 

I like to keep my curiousity turned on full. I like exploring all the possibilities and giving each one credibility when they come from credible sources. Hubl, Schwartz, Falconer...these people have proven themselves to have information that is helpful to us, so...it's entirely possible that spiritual possession might be real, even in non-religious realms.

Just sayin'.

Dalloway,

Your post touches my heart deeply today. Loneliness has always been my lifelong sorrow also. Being utterly alone in an overcrowded world.

I agree with you that I also know that this isn't my fault. The loneliness has a mind of its own and it stays with me no matter how intellectually I "understand" it as a symptom of trauma. But, like you say, my heart still feels lonely even though my head says there's a reason for it.

If it helps, your entire post made it deep into my heart today. I feel the pain of loneliness for you as well as I do for myself.

I've been on a rampage to learn as much as I can lately about trauma and healing. I've been reading book after book about it. Some of the modern psychologists that we all trust, like Richard Schwartz, and Thomas Hubl are homing in on the loneliness of trauma more than ever. In Attuned, Hubl says It isn't the abuse that traumatized us as children, it was having to endure the abuse alone that traumatized us.

Loneliness is the greatest pain I know. And your post really said it well and really touched my heart this morning. The letter you wrote to your mom at age 10 really hit me hard. I am touched by your sincerity and your desire to connect with other people. When I was a young boy, my mom did say "I love you" a lot, but she didn't behave like it. I was treated more like a chore or a problem she had to deal with. I would occasionally ask her, "Why do you love me?" She would casually respond, "Because I'm your mother. I have to love you."  That answer never made me feel very loved, but it does help me to connect my own drama with yours so that I can empathize and share this moment with you, even if it's over the internet.

One of the conundrums I deal with is I don't like the loneliness, and yet I intentionally isolate myself. I don't feel safe around other people. I feel safe alone. Nobody to criticize me or make me give up my life for theirs. The dichotomy is stressful. I feel alone so I isolate. I want friends, but I get nervous around them. So I bike alone. I kayak alone. I walk alone. I sleep alone. I want love but I don't feel safe unless I'm alone.

I'm following a lot of the current authors who are beginning to turn their attention on our connections to each other. Lack of connection caused our CPTSD. Like it or not, the loneliness became a defining attribute of our lives. So their new tack, as trauma psychologists, is to encourage me to love myself, and love my loneliness, and accept it as one of the things that made me who I am. They believe that as I learn to stop fighting against the loneliness, it will finally begin to heal. Accepting it as something we didn't want, but we got it anyway, gives us permission to start to let it go. I'm in the first week of practicing what they're teaching. I suspect that if I can keep it up, my own dark loneliness will start to ease up a bit. They say that what we resist persists. I resist loneliness so it persists. If I can accept it as a part of me, I can stop resisting it, and it will, in theory, dissipate.



This is the magic of this OOTS forum. We can be alone together. It still hurts, but knowing I'm feeling as alone as you are makes me feel not so alone with the loneliness. That statement probably only makes sense to us CPTSD folks.

Hi TV

I just read through your journal as you worked through the process of going No Contact with your family. I apologize for not being on the forum for a few months and missing all those posts: At one point you asked if others had gone NC with their FOOs and I just wonder if you are still curious about how some others have done this.

I went full NC with my FOO in 2010. It's been 15 years since I've technically not heard from any of them. (Technically meaning: Occasionally, I receive anonymous hateful birthday cards with no return address and I feel pretty sure I know which mentally ill narcissistic psychopath sibling is sending them to me. My wife and I laugh about them and we put them in a box in case we ever need to prove she's never stopped harassing me. I am only EF'd for about a week each time I receive one of those hate cards, but all in all, I feel REALLY GOOD that I don't care enough to let the EF get too serious anymore). I went NC without leaving a note. During a phone call with my aging dad who was screaming at me over one of the lies my sister had told him, I knew it was time to stop putting it off. In a calm, sober tone, I gently said, "I love you very much dad. Goodbye." I hung up, and after about a week of ignoring his phone calls, I simply changed my phone numbers and email addresses. I put mirror film on the front windows of my house so I could see out but they couldn't see in (just in case ANY family friend or relative might come to harass me, I could pretend I wasn't home).  In my particular family, a goodbye letter would have only given them something to bash me with. I took the advice of the authors that teach how to deal with narcissists, and I didn't announce my departure. I just hung up. Like that old joke, "I didn't go away mad. I just went away."

The first thing that happened to surprise me was: I've always wanted to write the story of my life, sharing the abuse I took for 50 years, but no matter how hard I tried, I could never get past the writer's block. A few days after going full NC with my entire family, including nephews, nieces, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and any family friend who ever knew my family, my writer's block crumbled like an overflowing dam. My creativity suddenly exploded into reality. It turns out that my fear of those miserable, judgmental monsters (aka; my family) were the source of my writer's block. I spent the next several years writing. I wrote three novels. My family had been my curse all along and I just didn't realize how deep their boney fingers could reach into my soul. The true depths of their abuse on my life became obvious when they were no longer a part of my life. That's when I finally began to flourish. It was a shock. A good shock.

The second thing I noticed about finally going NC, was my recurring nightmares of not being able to escape or keep up...ended. Ended. For 50 years I had recurring dreams that my legs were too heavy to move and a vicious animal was coming at me, OR my legs were too heavy to move and all the people I loved were leaving me and I couldn't keep up. (My trauma is defined by my sense of abandonment. I always feel unprotected and unwanted). Those dreams which were almost nightly for 50 years simply ended when I went NC with my FOO.

After 15 years of Full NC I have not experienced so much as ONE single thought of ever reconnecting with anyone. I have not only been glad I walked away, but I've been sorry I didn't do it sooner. I was 50 in 2010. I spent 50 years being their whipping post. I couldn't go to college because my traumas were so intense I couldn't complete a course. My life turned out okay, but it felt like it wasn't my life. I've retired from a lucrative factory job, but I never wanted to be a factory worker. I can't complain, because things turned out okay, but I'll always wonder what life would have been like had my FOO not dictated every moment of it for me. To me. At me.

I hope your experience with NC gives you the peace that you hope it does, or, like with me, I hope it even exceeds your hopes. My writer's block breakthrough and the end to my chronic nightmares were bonuses for me. I hoped I'd feel free from their lies. I got that and so much more.

When anyone asks why I went NC, I say "Because my family finally got so ugly that even I couldn't love them anymore."

Desert Fower,

I agree with Narc and SO: Very powerful. And clean. Good power. Good closure.

My life changed dramatically for the better at the passing of my parents. I didn't wish them gone, but when they left, the world just felt different. Better. I hope the changes in your FOO end up being good for you also.

I just went back to Oct 12 and read your post about the trip you took on the train. Wow. I can really sense the frustration of that EF. You were so right when you said that these triggers come out of nowhere at times. I'm glad that day is a week past now. I'm also glad to hear your friends helped guide you back home during your dissociative EF.

I hope that the new family dynamic is helpful for you as you move past your mother's passing. there is a lot of wisdom in how you're processing everything, so I'm feeling confident you're doing pretty okay with all this stuff.  (PS: I live 15 minutes from the town I grew up in and I still do everything I can to avoid revisiting it at all. Too many triggers. So your triggers last week made total sense to me).

SH

Your thoughts on your manipulative nephew are impressive. I can't think of a way you could hold a more appropriate and proper attitude around him.

Very inspiring!

I'm thinking about you as you deal with the death of your mom. Having that vein of manipulative abuse in the family makes Mom's passing more complicated than it needs to be. I don't know how you see yourself in the mirror, but what I see when I read your posts is a person who is doing all the right things to put closure to a lifetime of uncomfortable relationships. I would call you a particularly strong person with a very caring core.  Good combination to be. Strong and kind at the same time.

[Sense Organ,]

I am gaining a whole new respect for the healing power of sharing and empathy. For years I've believed empathy is the greatest healing power in the world. Now, I believe that with even more certainty.

I'm so grateful to have thought to share my distress on the forum yesterday because the inflow of empathy and compassion has helped me to feel a lot more grounded today.

Today is the final day of the Thomas Hubl 7 day trauma summit and I just finished watching the final live interview with him and Richard Schwartz, who is the founder of the IFS movement.

This summit had about 40 authors in it, many of whom I've been following and reading for the last year or two. I noticed that these authors are banding together with a more advanced message now that the entire world is in trauma, and we as empathetic individuals truly CAN help heal the world by healing ourselves while simply intentionally sensing our connection to all other trauma victims. They are teaching that we don't need to do anything for this other than simply be aware of the global trauma as we work through our inner parts, especially our inner Exiles. (I think of Exiles as the IFS term for the parts of ourselves that we try to avoid being in contact with, but who keep our Fight/Flight/Fawn/Flee response in high gear).


Sense Organ, You reminded me of how valuable it is to be a witness to my life rather than a victim of it. I tend to get caught up in my trauma-drama and forget the things I actually knew. And I needed to be reminded of the relief that can be felt when I stop attaching to the problems, and just be a witness to them. It's taught in pretty much every ancient religion, to detach emotion from witness. Detach. Be in the world but not of it.

Emotions lure me in like a moth to a flame. Detachment is something I need to be reminded quite often to do.

After reading your response I turned on the TV and watched again my favorite TV Documentary saved in my Prime account called, Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds. At one point, the narrator says,

From: Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds
    "Vipassana Meditation or insight meditation could be described as self-directed neuroplasticity. You accept your reality exactly as it is - as it ACTUALLY is. But you experience it at the root level of sensation, at the vibratory or energetic level without the prejudice or influence of thought. Through sustained attention at the root level of consciousness, the wiring for an entirely different perception of reality is created.
    "We have got it backwards most of the time. We constantly let ideas about the outer world shape our neural networks, but our inner equanimity need not be contingent on external happenings. Circumstances don't matter. Only my state of consciousness matters. Meditation in Sanskrit means to be free of measurement. Free of all comparison. To be free of all becoming. You are not trying to become something else. You are okay with what is. The way to rise above the suffering of the physical realm is to totally embrace it. To say yes to it. So it becomes something within you, rather than you being something within it."


Desert Flower, my Partner in the Part Time Urban Monk/Nun world, , Your suggestion helped a lot also. After feeling so tangled up in my own head, I took your advice and went outside and did something physical.  Here is where I need to add a caviette about my own self-care needs: Going outside to distract from my inner shame and sadness, has to have a purpose or it won't work for me. Exercise, walking, lifting weights, swimming, bike riding: Anything I do that is for me, won't help. For me, raised to be the world's savior, I HAVE to find a distraction that lets me feel like I'm doing something for someone else. That's when the physical activity calms me. When it's for someone other than myself. In this case, It helped immensely. The 24-foot-long wooden wheelchair ramp that the previous owner had installed leading from the garage to the house's back door needed it's annual pressure washing because rainy season is coming and the slimy mold on the wood becomes slick as ice in the rain. People other than myself use that ramp when they come to visit me, so I can't even imagine the irony of some visitor becoming disabled by slipping on my wheelchair ramp for the disabled. (HA HA!). The hour with the pressure washer helped. Going outside and doing something physical doesn't work for me if it's selfish, relaxing, or exercise, but if it's a chore that NEEDS to be done, then it's very relaxing. Doing something outdoors that truly needed to be done to protect others really helped my mood. Didn't cure me, but what really does, right? At least it helped. I came back in and took off the wet shoes, made myself a bowl of hot soup and felt a bit calmer.

NarcKiddo and Blueberry, I'm forever grateful for knowing you as well. Thanks for the badly needed pep talk and the encouragement. You're right; We don't need to write books and give seminars and become therapists just to help people. That's my TRAUMA trying to keep me in the impossible situation I was taught to be in: Save the world or die trying seemed to be the role I was taught to live by. It's a false message given to me by people who couldn't stand to see the innocence in me. (BTW: I believe that a high percentage of us on this forum are highly sensitive people who were born with a special kind of innocence that the narcissists of the world just can't help themselves from attacking). These are not just words: I believe the more sensitive we are, the more prone to CPTSD we are. I'm proud to be a part of this community of kind people. We help each other just by loving each other as fellow humans. If I attach myself to the new, growing trend of trauma therapists trying to increase our energy by meditating together and unblending our IFS exiles together, then by simply remembering I'm part of a movement while I'm working on my own exiles, then I AM helping the world.

This forum is such a blessing for me, because when I reach out for some sense of stability, people of like mind and thought resonate with me  and increase the healing for all of us.

I hope I don't sound too crazy with all this talk of energy and collective trauma. It's what the experts are moving toward and I'm a believer in the power of empathy and people working together to heal the world by putting on our own masks first and then reaching out and sharing our compassion with others.

Feeling a bit better today because I'm choosing to remember the things you've all reminded me of: 1) Healthy Detachment helps drive inner peace, 2) Distracting from ruminating provides a healthy break and slows or stops my tailspins, and 3) We help each other by just loving each other, and we CAN help save the world by saving ourselves. So I don't need to feel the pressure to write another book, take a college program to become a therapist, or sell all my possessions and give my money to the poor. That's all overkill.

We're all in this traumatized world together, and we're all stronger together.

Sense Organ,

Wow I can really resonate with so much of your Oct 16 post and your EF. I rejoiced a bit for you when you said that you are a little bit better at accepting compliments than you used to be. I do also totally understand how, after you'd enjoyed having been complimented, the EF came back to bite you anyway. We are healing slow and steady, I guess. I see the period of positivity from the compliment to the EF as a win. You had a few minutes where you were able to accept a compliment. That's HUGE!

It sounds, by your writing, that you logically know you have nothing to feel shame over, but there's that relentless Trauma coming in to rain on your parade anyway. Trauma truly does have a mind of its own. In Attuned, Author Thomas Hubl teaches that trauma has an intelligence of its own. It sure feels that way to me. I suffer when times are bad and then, thanks to trauma, I also suffer when things are good.  I feel shame when I accept praise from people for doing things I'm clearly good at doing. Like you with your garden. Obviously, you are good at making beautiful gardens, so people compliment you, and trauma comes along and says that we don't deserve or even trust compliments.

This morning you wrote that you're feeling a little better. I'm very glad to read that. In my own life, I find that the EFs don't hang around as long as they used to. I hope that's what's happening with you also. 

Progress, I guess. If I'll stop trying to be cured, maybe I can enjoy the journey as I enjoy any small steps in progress that I can make.

I hope your day continues to improve.

PC.

Rough week this week. It seems that EF's always find me in Autumn every year. This year is no exception.

I'm crashing but maybe that's not such a bad thing.

I get obsessed with learning how to overcome trauma. OBSESSED! I am like a racoon that just won't stop going after what I want, and what I want is inner peace, but I can't find inner peace while I live with all these booby-trap triggers constantly cocked and loaded for anxiety all day every day.

Lately I've been spending all day in the books and online at seminars and YouTube training sessions for how to meditate my trauma into peacefulness. The stuff works, but I'm so overloaded now my brain hurts.

I need to stop learning for a few weeks. I need to sit back and just enjoy being the broken soul that I am. I need to just say "life sux and that's just the way it is."

I feel like a snow globe that needs to stop shaking so the snow can settle and rest.

I feel like I've been drinking from a firehose.

I feel like I've eaten a year's worth of food in a month, and I need to let it digest. Digestion is where everything I've learned gets a chance to settle somewhere in my body and do what it does. My inner world is just like my outer physical world. I take vitamins but they don't work while I'm swallowing them. They start to work after they've digested. Some vitamins go to the eyes, some to the blood, some to the stomach. Others to the bones or the liver or the spleen. They can't do this until they digest. In my inner world, everything I've been learning is stuck in my throat begging me to stop feeding it so it can digest.

I need to live for a few weeks with what I've learned so I'll know what stuck and what went over my head. I need to experiment with all that I've learned so I can see what works and what is not of any value to me.

We learn by first absorbing information, and then by letting time and experience prove out what we've learned. In the training world we understood that 10% of knowledge is taught to us in books and words and classrooms. Another 30% is taught to us through coaches and mentors who stay with us while we're absorbing and settling with the information, and the final 60% is taught to us through experience. The longer we use what we'd learned in class the more skilled we become. After a semester in the driver's ed classroom at age sixteen, I was a very bad driver, but I got better with practice. That's where I am now: I've been learning all about how trauma and karma interact together. I've learned that stuck Trauma/Karma is what makes us live our lives waiting for something to change so we can get what we want. In other words, we trauma survivors feel like something is standing between us and our happiness and we keep waiting for it to let us find joy.  I've been learning that I can access my ancestors to help them help me work out our shared stuck traumas/karmas, like from the books It Didn't Start with You and Attuned. I've been learning how to empathetically sense people in my body rather than just think about them in my head. I've been learning that all I need to do is love people and that is how the healing power of empathy passes itself around the world. I NEED TIME now to exercise what I've been learning without shoving in more knowledge. Some of it will stick and change me, some will be dismissed as bad info and some will go to the back of the line to resurface when I'm more ready for it.

For now, my brain is all tangled up. I need a vacation from learning so I can find out what stuck and what made sense and what did and what didn't prove itself to be good intel for me.

I didn't sleep well last night. Too much obsession with learning. I'm literally learning myself into madness. Trying too hard.

This EF is slightly less painful than those of the past 60 years, so I guess all this exhausting, relentless work to try and find peace in this world has been helping me with a little bit of progress.

My wife says I'm a much easier person to live with now than ever before, and she actually thanks me for working so hard to get better, because my mental health affects hers, and I'm healthier than I've ever been.

But I still suffer. It's SO EXHAUSTING to be a human in this world. Everyone is traumatized. There are three types of trauma in most of these writers' books: Individual trauma, ancestral trauma (like in It Didn't Start with You) and Collective trauma. Our individual traumas come together to make for an entire collective trauma of the whole world. Even our entire world is traumatized. This life isn't easy for anyone, and I'm really in need of resting for a few days and letting the world just be as messed up as it is for a few days before I feel the pull to buy into another book or another teacher or another podcast.

If I don't slow down and stop obsessing over getting better, I'm going to drive myself mad. I just have never been able to accept that this is all there is. I have this raging hope in me that keeps thinking if I try just a little bit harder, I'll find inner peace.

Well...there's SOME truth to that. Moderation, I guess. Learn at the proper pace. I need to keep searching for answers, but I have to stop trying too hard at it.

This week I'm participating in an online summit where a lot of the authors we talk about here on the forum are giving presentations every day on how to help the world's trauma and hopefully start to help heal the world by using our empathy. I'm jealous of these authors, many of whom I've read their books. They have all had rough lives, but they've succeeded to rise up to a point of self-love that they can now teach. I'm still in the grinder. I haven't risen to that level of healing yet. Many people have asked me why I don't write more books or why I don't become a therapist, and my reason for why I never could become a therapist is because I never felt like I handled my own trauma, so I am not qualified to help someone else with theirs. In Attuned, Author Thomas Hubl teaches and teaches that trauma therapists absolutely must get control over their own traumas so they can connect with their patients and not become caught into EFs of their own. I can't do that. Your trauma still puts me into EFs with my own trauma. So I can't become a therapist. Now I'm getting too old to even consider starting the process of getting the proper degree and a license.

Today I just need to let myself off the hook. I can't be a therapist so I need to stop pushing myself to try and overcome my issue so I can help others. It's time for me to put my own oxygen mask on first before I even attempt to put one on another passenger. Time for some self-love and not this obligation I've always felt that I need to fix the whole world.

I just need to find some peace for my own life. I really need to love myself more fully before I can pass that love on to others.