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NK, I have so many issues around food that it never occurred to me that there might be issues related to having sit-down meals with my family.  My mother was ragingly eating-disordered, had a terrible relationship with food and hated to cook, while my stepfather had previously been married to a gourmet, so I can well imagine that there was subterranean stress around dinners with my family when I was living with her.  I'm pretty sure that dinners with the family when I lived with my father and stepmother were better, but it's hard to remember.  I've always assumed that my problems with food stem from malnourishment as an infant, obesity as a teenager, and spending my early life observing my mother's aforementioned raging eating disorder, but there probably IS more to it than that.  What do you know, another set of mysteries to grapple with!

Feeling good feels unsafe.  I'm trying to rewire that.  Not much opportunity to work on that today, I'm afraid.  I didn't sleep well last night and today I'm low as can be.  That's probably a backlash from yesterday's conscious effort to nurture the positive feelings and stirrings of optimism that I experienced a few times in the past week, but I will not allow it to discourage me.  Even though it hurts.  Even though everything hurts. 

Thank you for the hugs and good wishes, friends.  Lately it feels like every day is a tough day, but I wanted to share that I felt good for a little while this morning after I worked out.  It didn't last for very long, but it was a distinct feeling of happiness and optimism.  I think it went away while I was eating breakfast, which makes me wonder whether a supplement I'm taking or something I'm eating for breakfast isn't agreeing with me.  I'll have to pay some attention to that going forward.  In any case, I want to make sure that I take notice when I have these clear moments of positive feeling so that I can hope for them with remembering that they do happen. 

 

Bach, my experience is that somatic work can very easily be triggering. And sometimes violently triggering... I've been working with vagus nerve and parasympathetic stimulation for two years now. For me it's working. Here's a good introduction if you're interested:
Pradip Jamnadas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irn3cFHmK-Y

Just a suggestion, ignore it you don't think it's a good idea for you.
 

Chart, thank you for sharing this video.  I've been doing vagus work for a while too and finding it helpful, and this video had some techniques in it that I was not familiar with.  I have a very limited attention span for videos, but this guy was pretty fun to listen to.  I'm going to check out his stuff about gut health because that's also something that I struggle with.

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After my success on Saturday night, I had a very good day yesterday.  I felt better than I have in ages, and was even able to acknowledge and appreciate that feeling without fear.  That was amazing.  I was hoping it would last for a while, but I had bad dreams last night and woke up this morning in my usual low state.  Disappointing.  Still, though, after a long period of no good feelings at all, yesterday showed me that it's still possible and gave me a touch of hope that I've been lacking.  I'll take it.

I'm in a flashback and I overstimulated myself with physical and somatic exercise because my body is so unbearable to be in right now.  I did those exercises sort of frantically because I had such a strong urge to try to "fix my mistake" (an interpersonal communication that I didn't handle well), which would 100% have made the situation worse.  The exercises did conquer that urge, but the flashback is still happening in my stomach and I have to just tolerate it for now because I must neither overpush the buttons nor automatically turn to a pill.

Life feels absolutely unbearable today. I feel worthless and miserable, an irredeemable screwup. I'm so tired of being me. Last night I went to sleep sincerely hoping that I would not wake up this morning. Though I knew I would, of course, and of course I did, too early and insufficiently rested.  It took me ages to get out of bed, but eventually I did.  Now I want to take mass quantities of klonopin and go back to bed, sleep for a week like I did after 9/11/01, but even if that was an option, it wouldn't be an answer, and even if it was an answer, it wouldn't be an option.  There's no escape from myself.

Have to stop whining and do some work. 

I took a walk this afternoon.  When I take a walk by myself, I have a tendency to walk very fast and get wrapped up in my thoughts.  I noticed that yesterday when I went for a walk, and I made a conscious effort to slow down and feel my body instead of escaping into my head.  I made an effort to take note of how the sun and the wind felt on my face and body, and how the ground felt under my feet.  It wasn't very comfortable, and I really had to focus to do it.  I had a moment when I was thinking about turning left to extend my walk instead of right to go home.  I had a destination in mind, not an important one, just one to keep me moving for a while longer.  My mind, fixated on the idea that more exercise is always better, very much wanted to do this, but I felt a faint protest from my body, a sort of "Yeah, you can drag me around some more if you want to, but I'd really rather go home."  So I listened to my body and went home.  Then today when I was out for a walk, I noticed myself walking fast and being wrapped up in my thoughts, and I realised that I do this because being in my body is difficult and uncomfortable for me, and I'm trying to escape from the difficulty and discomfort.  That made me think back to my childhood, how my mother was very big on walking, and how I was always having to keep up, an enormous and seldom pleasurable task for an unaccommodated child whether in the huge, busy, noisy city where we lived, or on endless mountain trails when the family went hiking.  So again, I slowed down, made an effort to feel my physical self instead of hurrying along, and to take in my surroundings with curiosity and openness instead of turning inward to my thoughts.  The result was better today.  There were no conflicts between my body and my mind regarding the route or duration of my walk, and I even felt some stirrings of pleasure.  This makes me feel a little bit hopeful that maybe it really is possible to unprogram at least some of what was programmed into my body so very long ago. 

My whole life, I've done everything wrong.  I really wish that it could just be over already.  I'm not going to do anything to purposely end it, but wow am I tired of everything.  Tired of dealing with everything.  Tired of the pain.  Tired of trying and failing.  Tired of trying and succeeding only for the briefest time before sinking back into failure and hopelessness once again.  Tired of feeling old.  I'm tired of my bowels not working right.  Tired of therapy, tired of drugs, tired of advertisements, tired of social media, tired of false hope.  Tired of politics and of everyone going crazy.  Tired of the general lack of hope in the world today, at least the parts of it that I'm exposed to.  I'm tired of worrying about money.  I'm tired of having to figure out what's for dinner.  I'm tired of waking up in the morning wishing I could just go back to sleep.   

I'm tired of living with having been born unwanted.  Tired of all the things I don't know happened.  Did my mother really break my leg when I was an infant, or was it some mysterious freak accident involving the bars of a crib?  Did she really try to suffocate me or was it a near-miss with a pillow or blanket or crib bumper, because those were the days when people didn't know any better about that kind of thing?  I'm tired of thinking about it all.  I'm tired of blaming her.  Blaming all the adults that failed me.  I'm tired of having to live only barely as my present self and mostly as 8 or 9 or 10 year old unwanted unnurtured me.  I'm tired of not being able to let it all go. 

I'm tired of so many things, I could go on and on and on.  But now I'm tired of this ranting, too.  I really, really, really REALLY wish that I could just go to sleep and not wake up. 

Today my therapist made me talk about why I'm angry at my parents.  I wonder if that's why I spent the whole afternoon feeling like I have nothing to live for.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to be patient and take good care of Left Hand who wants to do ALL THE THINGS, NOW! but gets tired quickly and will burn right out if I'm not careful.  If I don't watch out it will be like when I tried to learn how to play bass guitar in 2020 and trashed my pinky after about a month or so of compulsive overpractice.  I was making real progress, but I never got back to it after my pinky healed because that's kind of how I am.  The thing I'm best at is disappointing myself.   

This is what Left Hand says:

I'm scared.  Afraid of success, afraid of failure.  Freeze isn't fun but it's SAFE.  I love you Left Hand.

Left Hand also drew a picture:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/31314134@N06/shares/sQ6Jz574Ya

I thought I was having signs in the past week of coming out of the extended EF, but I think what's happening is that I've shifted to a different part of my history.  A different younger me.  Perhaps the one who survived being strangled and then suffered the recovery from that flu.  That seems right.  It makes the assumption that my invented timeline is right and the flu did indeed follow closely the strangling incident, but even if it didn't happen exactly like that, I'm quite certain that the strangling incident changed me. 

A few years ago when I was exploring the idea that I have younger selves, I defined the self who emerged after the strangling as Middle B.  Still a child, almost the same as Little B, but with a sense of fatalism.  I think my intrusive thoughts of "I want to die", "I wish I was dead", "Pretty soon I'm going to kill myself", "Why do I have to be here?", "Why am I even alive?", "Why do I have to live?" etc., originated with Middle B.  I think that I sensed that my mother wanted to be rid of me, and that wanting to die was in a weird way an attempt to please her.  I think maybe my EF situation is that I'm moving from Little B to Middle B, which is why for several weeks I was full of anxiety and preoccupied with being banished or abandoned, and now I'm just feeling broken and inert and not viable as a person. 

Yeah, I guess I should stop banging on about that incident.  I suppose it sticks in my (mind? body?) so much because it's the one thing in my history that I can point to and say "THERE.  THAT was wrong.  THAT was abuse that I didn't deserve."  Because everything else was so covert.  It was being neglected, being ignored, being brushed off, being made fun of, being discussed as a problem as if I was a thing and not a living breathing child who was RIGHT THERE hearing about how I was (insert various criticisms and putdowns here).  A lifetime later, I still can't get away from it.  I've had some moments in the past few days of feeling like I was coming back into sanity, into my adult self, but they haven't lasted.  I don't know whether I'm on the verge of a great step forward, or of falling off the cliff entirely.

There was an incident when I was a child in which my mother put her hands around my throat and squeezed until I started to black out.  Then she pushed me away and left the room.  I remember falling down onto her bed and lying there for a few minutes, and my most enduring memory of it is the feeling of tired resignation I had when I was lying there, like this was something familiar.  Something to be borne, to disregard as much as possible, to accept that I had survived and get on with my life (These are of course my adult words for child feelings that at the time I did not analyse or attempt to describe, but I'm pretty sure they're accurate). 

Based on emotional flashbacks, I have my theories about why that experience felt familiar, but I have questions and doubts about the usefulness of believing things that I can't know for sure occurred, and so I've chosen to dismiss from my mind any idea I have that I actually know what happened to me in very early childhood.  This incident, though, I remember with as much certainty as I remember anything in my life.  I don't remember exactly when it happened, and in particular, I don't remember what provoked it.  It could have been something I did or was doing, but it might not have been.  I might have just been existing in the same space as my mother at the wrong moment.  I wish I did remember the exact situation, but at the same time, I know that it doesn't matter because there can't possibly be ANYTHING I did to deserve that.  Still, though, I wonder and wish I knew.  I also wish I knew whether it happened shortly before I turned 10 and precipitated the terrible flu I had during the week of my 10th birthday.  I think that it might have, because I can look back over my history and see a pattern of suffering a trauma and then getting sick. 

That formative week.  Staying in my room when the family was home so as not to infect them, bringing my quilt out to the living room to lie on the couch under it and watch cartoons and game shows during the day when they were all out of the house.  Feeling safe because I didn't have to deal with the world either in my home or outside of it.  I still remember how I wanted to get better because who wants to be sick? but also did not want to get better because it meant going back to my regular life.  I'm afraid I kind of still feel that way.  I would really like to stop having to suffer over things that happened 50 years ago. 

I thought I was coming out of it. But I'm not. Have to survive this somehow  

Friends, all of you, thank you for the support.  I love you all 

I wrote elsewhere that I'm feeling my body in a new way.  Something I learned recently is exactly where in my body the worst of the crazy lives.  By "the worst of the crazy", I mean the obsessive thoughts of death and suicide and not being worth the resources that keep me alive.  And by "where it lives", I mean, as in, there's my body keeping the score for little/Middle B.  I pinpointed exactly which physical symptoms correspond with those unbearable thoughts, and have identified some practical physical things I can do to alleviate them at least somewhat.  This is  a major breakthrough for me, especially in light of all the frustration I've felt lately with knowing all the WHY I'M LIKE THIS without being able to figure out WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT.  I finally have something of a weapon against my trauma.  The tricky part will be not overusing it, because that's exactly the kind of thing I do.