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It's as if when I think about her and try to get angry, the anger just evaporates.

I am working on it too.  Intellectually I know that I learnt quickly when I was a baby that to feel angry with my mum was a dangerous thing to do.  But that translates into a weird emptiness when I try to direct legitimate anger towards her.  I can get angry with my son for stupid stuff but I can't get angry with her for the neglect and the abuse.  And I really want to.  Grief I can do but anger no.  Good luck with your work and please share your progress.  It's really helpful to me to find others struggling with the same issues.  It is such a long and tortuous process.

Yes, exactly! For me, anger = physical abuse, so it's quickly redirected now.

As I work through various levels of hurt with my T, we talk about what might have happened to the people as a child that would make them act that way to generate compassion for them. She's shared with me that she finds this compassion freeing, knowing that the way that her mother treated her actually had nothing to do with her, and helped her regain self-love.

This past week, I told her that I don't think I can do that work side-by-side with anger, as I find it results in the anger being trapped and tamped down. Since high school, I have made up stories about my mom to account for her behaviour. Things like her dad had a bad temper and treated them worse, so she's doing the best she can, etc. But all of those things have just led to more repression, not release.

I don't want to end up in a place where I am trapped by anger and overall I wouldn't want her approach to be any different. But I think that maybe at this stage, I do need to see things as more one-dimensional to release that anger or it will remain repressed. And for me, that leads to things like self-harm.

I'm chatting with my T on Saturday, so may have more to share after that. Thank you for sharing back, it is extremely helpful to not be alone in this.

Hi, johnboy, & welcome! 

I can relate to much of what you've written - the abuse, anxiety, self-harm, self-hate, shame, avoidance... It sometimes feels like that list is never-ending, doesn't it? I'm so glad you can see that you are capable of love. I also want to tell you that you are worthy of receiving the same love you give.

Whatever the reason that brought you here, we're certainly glad you've come.

Welcome, Waterfall. Your story really called out to me. I think you'll see a lot of what you've described here in regard to triggering events and blocked memories unleashing.

In addition to what C has suggested, I think you might find the Inner Child board helpful. What you've described, the "weak as a newborn kitten" is a very accurate description. Despite all of the layers of protection and defences you developed to survive the trauma in childhood, your inner child is still very young, vulnerable and calling out to you. When you can make that connection within, you will find a great source of love and peace.

Best of luck in your journey - we're here for you.

If each week of our life had a chapter, I think I would call this one "Emotional Swirl." Although there are likely others that could also use that same name!

Still feeling burned out. I've messed up on a few things at work - small things, but noticeable. I've also had some strong successes but of course it's the misses that stick with me.

There's going to be a talk next week Thurs by the same facilitator of the workshop I'm going to May 8 - 10. My T sent me a note about it b/c she thought I might like to go. I pointed out that I wouldn't be able to as I have to be home by 9 for the kids, even though it's my ex's night. She suggested inviting him and both going while hiring a babysitter. There's no specific theme for the talk that I know of, but it would be good to be on the same page as co-parents.

I didn't think that he would say yes if I invited him, but he did. On one hand, it would be great to see a change in him (even though I am not responsible for him making that change). On the other hand, all of my fears arose: anxiety about talking about intimate things while he was in the same space as well as anxiety on what sort of stories he could/would make up to smear me afterwords. Combined with work stress & fatigue, it was a lot of strain. I told my T that I didn't think I could do it, and she was understanding. I'm waiting a few days to make the final decision.

I've also just been out of whack with other things. My T & I often talk about understanding the motivation behind actions that are hurtful, and trying to hold a place of compassion for those actions. But this approach has not sat well with me since our last session. I'm trying to work on anger (currently repressed/not there) and I feel like working on compassion simultaneously just serves to trap it and/or tamp it down. I've shared this with her.

And overall...just feeling really, really burned out. Which of course catches up in home life as well as work life. I wake up every night in between 1 - 2 am and am up for an hour-2 hours, despite how tired I am. It's become a cycle. I've booked an appointment with my ND and am hoping she'll have some suggestions. Wish I had a week to sleep. Wouldn't that be a dream?

Stella - your T sounds like a smart lady to me.

Oh she most definitely is - I am so lucky to have found her.  I am resistant to hearing this because I find it easier to be angry with myself than compassionate and I find it really hard to be angry at my mother.  I want to be angry with her but end up being angry with myself. 

I am exactly the same with anger & my mother. It's as if when I think about her and try to get angry, the anger just evaporates. It's really challenging and an area that I'm working on right now.

I am feeling very quick-tempered today. Everything and everyone is getting on my nerves. It's taking everything for me to not yell at the kids, especially when they are fighting or whining. Not a good feeling, at all.

I think that a lot of this is work pressure. I really miss the slower pace of being off from work. Came to that realization this weekend. It's funny, I'd never pictured myself as a stay-at-home mom. But having had those few months, I can totally see myself getting into the rhythm. Sadly, it is not likely to be a reality.

On top of which, I've been grieving on and off for the past month...no, more like the past year...for the third child I'll most likely never have. It's strange because I thought I'd never understand how some people "know" that they want one more or that their family is complete. I was starting to feel the urge for a third about six months before I discovered my ex's infidelity. We had touched on it lightly but not had a big discussion. Although it's not impossible, I feel like the chances of it are quite small. And so I grieve a child I never had.

So that's me today: angry, stressed, sad. I just want to curl up with my kids, but instead I'm on my laptop working. Reminding myself that this will pass, is a blip in the long run. But also trying to acknowledge all of these feelings and understand the purpose behind them.

  

This is part of why I don't agree with "disowning" the part of the inner critic. It's super important to identify that the message being sent is incorrect. But I think a more powerful way of turning that message around is to give it lots of love. I know that I get all twisted up inside if I start to try to shout it down, etc.

to you and your inner kid.

This weekend I'm feeling fatigue hit me pretty hard. I took yesterday "off" and didn't touch housework. I'm not sure if I'm seeing the return I'd hoped for. Although I feel stronger mentally, I still am waiting for the physical aspect to catch up.

There's always that balancing act of spending time with the kids, taking care of the home and taking care of me. And then fitting work in somehow too. When I'm feeling that I've * up an area, it's easy for resentment of my ex to bubble to the surface. He gets to be a teenager again without responsibilities and I carry everything. But what I need to do, really, is find a way to re-energize myself. I am thankful for the gifts of all I have and moving to blame sucks energy.

I need to find way to bring play into everything more instead of moving into distraction and avoidance. And I think this is a matter of simplifying instead of over-trying. Reminder to myself here to put on music. I've been forgetting lately, likely because of time pressure. But I know that music can help a lot.

Off to tackle the kitchen. And listen to music. And play!

Finally feeling like I am in the space to begin a journal. For the longest of times, I didn't want to journal. It felt that it was making it too real.

I may come back and delete this all at some point. Not out of fear but for catharsis. Like writing words down and then burning them to let them go.

It feels strange to try to go back and reconstruct everything from the beginning. So I'll begin in the middle and let chronology work its own way out.

I'm glad that landed for you, C and Emily.

I've been thinking about this for the past couple of days, both from the perspective of loving the part that is criticizing you vs. minimizing it. For me, I think both are true.

I believe we need to strongly identify what these mistruths are - even recognizing that they are mistruths is a big step to take! And we need to turn those mistruths into truths that are reality. e.g. some of the phrases in my sig line. But I agree that the part of us that is saying these things still needs to be listened to and accepted while this work is going on.

When I think about how many parts of me I cut off to survive for so long, I believe it's critical for me to embrace all parts. If there's a part of me that's telling me I'm not good enough or that I deserve pain, that part is telling me that and holding that negative judgement for a reason. The talk track is wrong -- I am enough and I deserve love -- but that part needs to be healed to release the emotion that is driving that negative judgement. Is it fear behind the anger? Feeling invisible? Not worthy enough? Etc. And so what goes through my head is what can I say to that part in order to love it better.

Anyhow, I'm feeling like this is a bit of a ramble. Stella - your T sounds like a smart lady to me.

This article does not call out cptsd but is right on the money in many ways.


Sarah, 27, who is about to finish graduate school with a PhD in engineering, hates to call her mother...and does so, dutifully, and with dread, every week. Saturday mornings come with a call that her father always picks up. "Hi Dad, how are you?" She's not close with her father, who has never seemed that interested in her. "Well," he says, "Retirement is better than not. Doing some golf. Things are going ok," this being a version of what he always says before, "Oh, here's your mother. Be well." She wishes him well as her stomach knots and her mother gets on the phone. "Hi, honey." "Hi, Mom, how are you?" "Well, you know, it's not easy getting older and your father is watching too much TV, and your brother never calls. I just can't believe how he can treat his mother that way. His mother! I'm glad you're such a good daughter..." Sarah goes silent as her mother complains and gossips about her life, until Sarah, after an hour of little speaking (and not being asked about herself), reaches that dreadful moment: "Mom, I have to get going," and then the silence, the pause, and the, "Oh, really? So soon?" Sigh. "Well, I guess you have your own life." This plays out each week, and the few times when Sarah couldn't call were met with the basic message of, "What, are you like your brother, selfish and cruel?" And the other time or two when Sarah has challenged her mother to be more positive, or to recognize her own needs, have been met with, "You need to just listen to me and stop being so selfish, critical and judgmental!" Feeling no win is possible, Sarah has sunk into resignation.

Human relations are, to say the least, complex, and one dimension that often is submerged under the more obvious features (e.g., typical arguments, desires, boundaries) is that of "energy." We usually think of energy in terms of physical systems: gas in our car, electricity for our appliances, food for our bodies. But there is also the energy of human relations: does someone induce stress in us by being abrasive? Does a loved one give us a hug or a criticism? Do we feel unsafe with a certain person, and not with another? Does a certain belief system, as enacted in a group, support love and growth, or fear and frozenness? All of these have energy aspects and consequences, which, if we ignore or miss them, can have dire consequences, especially when it comes to depression (see the last two articles: here and here).

So in this article I'll focus not on the healthy version of energy relations among humans-where there's a give and take, a mutuality, and respect of and for each others life energy, and a basic trust that there's enough energy to go around-but on the much more problematic way in which energy can be taken, or stolen, from each other. Two primary ways in which individuals and groups do this is through manipulating guilt and shame.

Shame and Guilt

As short definitions:  shame is that experience of "I am bad" that tells us we are on the margin of what is acceptable to our tribe (here is a past article on shame). Guilt is that experience that "I've done bad," that tells us that we have broken codes (ours/our groups').

Basically, every emotion and emotional state are there to tell us something, and orient us to something. Sadness lets us know we feel we've lost something; anger tells us we are registering our boundary being violated. So too with guilt and shame: they serve to signal us about when we are out of alignment with our group, and to repair relations. Given that we "grew up" as a species in small hominid bands, we had to be tightly wired to each other to survive, both outside threats and intra-tribal conflicts. How our tribe saw us, what they thought of us, and our relative status (determined by the mores of the group) was literally a survival issue. Get tossed out of your tribe for bad behavior and you had hostile tribes and predators to get snapped up by.

However, emotions, as with all communications systems, can break, can go haywire and send too many, or the wrong, messages. And they can be hijacked by others who want to manipulate us towards their own ends. There's nothing wrong with guilt and shame per se, since they give us valuable information about something very important: how am I misaligned with my group, and what do I need to do to repair those relations (restoring safety)? But their problem is that they are very hard to hold as neutral information, because their power in aligning us with our group is in their ability to reach in to our sense of self, our identity, and scorch it. I analogize shame to one of those electric dog collars: when we get too close to the perimeter of what's acceptable, we get shocked (our self is threatened with "badness" and abandonment), and thus we learn to not go there.

Healthy and Toxic Shame and Guilt

That powerful access of shame and guilt to our core sense of self is what makes it such a powerful sculptor of behavior, both for the positive and the negative, for social cohesion and self-growth, as well as for exploitation and predation.

For instance, if guilt is authentic, meaning that the rules we are breaking are actually our own, our core ethics, then to feel guilty is to actually tell us we're out of alignment with our own integrity. Which is pretty useful to know (similar to a chiropractic problem, when we are not aligned with our core, it throws our whole system off). Or with shame, as the philosopher Ken Wilber points out, if we don't have it early in our development (regardless of our age), then we don't have the information we need to be a functioning member of our group, knowing the rules and able to integrate, and can get stuck at a "pre-moral" stage of development. Which is miserable for everyone involved.

However, these same useful (if painful) mechanisms can be turned against us by others who know (usually unconsciously) how to exploit them, and serve to drain off our own energy for their use. Guilt can be, then, inauthentic, like a computer virus, which hijacks our own circuitry for its purposes. Or shame becomes triggered not when we are doing something inherently anti-social, but rather when we are doing something that runs against the particular needs of an individual/group/family to have us hew to its rules, in order to have us accessible as an energy resource. In other words, the shame is not signaling that our behavior is anti-social (against social connectedness and cohesiveness), but rather is a chain that's being yanked to keep us in line with another's needs.

Sarah and Mom:  A Case of Energy Theft

Take the vignette with Sarah-how is this "energy theft" happening? Well, Sarah, as evidenced by her dread in calling each week, does not get much out of the calls to her mother. Her mother, on the other hand, gets to monopolize her attention (attention is a form of energy for our nervous systems), and download her complaints and discontents into Sarah, which frees up energy, like offloading heavy packages to someone else. Which is not a problem per se, except that it has not been negotiated on the basis of respect for Sarah's energy (which would sound like, "Sarah, do you mind if I vent for a while?" and then Sarah gets accepted whether she says yes or no). I.e., it's not consensual. Instead, the access to Sarah's attention and energy is maintained by threats to her sense of self. Basically, Mom has learned to hold a dart gun to Sarah's self, filled with the toxic versions of shame and guilt; if Sarah moves in a way that Mom doesn't like-meaning that makes Sarah less available as a source of energy-then Mom pulls the trigger, leaving Sarah writhing in guilt and shame.

Now, admittedly, this is a fairly stark and ugly way of breaking down the exchange that happens between Sarah and her Mom, but if you use this as a template to do an "energy audit" (like the electric company might do of your house) of your own relations, you are more than likely to find instances of this kind of "energy theft." Maybe not as severe, but there. As part of what we humans do, we look for "free energy" and finding a way to secure it, and when we're living under a sense of threat (external or internal), we become less and less ethical in grabbing it. Sarah's mother, for whatever historical reasons, apparently doesn't feel she has enough energy, in herself or in the world, and so justifies herself stealing it from her daughter, through manipulating the behaviorally modifying mechanisms of shame and guilt, and then blaming her daughter.

Ugly as this mode of human relations is (especially among those who are supposed to have our best interests in mind), it has to be seen and assessed if we are to live full, authentic lives.

Energy Theft and Depression

This is especially true when it comes to depression, which (as I described in the last newsletter, here) has an essential function of monitoring our energy levels and, if it sees us not responding to diminishing/excessive energy, will shut us down. If our relationships are perpetually draining, in which there is a theft going on, a taking without giving, then depression will likely come in to balance the equation. Ironically, depression, if actually listened to and studied, will point us (like some kind of gas-leak detection device) to where energy is leaking out of our systems.

Sarah, who has settled into a resigned, and at times depressed, position in relation to her parents and mother, has to learn to protect her own energy if she is to avoid depression. Given how we're built, and the "energy regulating" function of depression, it's simply not possible to keep bleeding energy, or allow others to steal our energy, without triggering depression. Depression is trying to tell us where our energy balance is untenable, and if we don't listen, we will suffer.

As usual, if we don't manage ourselves consciously, depression will do it unconsciously.

(As a final note: this focus on energy and social bonds, and theft, is very complex and multifaceted, with huge issues around culture, developmental maturity, ignorance vs. sociopathy, etc. Who owns an individual's energy is going to be answered differently in different cultures and families. So, not denying this complexity, nonetheless, in relation to depression, we can hold a belief that our family is owed our energy, but if that energy is not balanced by a sense of social belonging, or duty fulfilled, i.e., if there is a net loss of energy, depression usually comes calling. At this level, it's much more an issue of physics than culture.)

http://www.psychedinsanfrancisco.com/energy-theft/

Hmmm...do you think she was maybe just being sensitive towards a time line b/c of the EAP setup? That's the first thing that popped into my mind when I read your entire post. I can totally understand how someone saying you are unwilling to do the work would be triggering...and angering! I just wonder if she was trying to balance speed with what she saw as the top issue. Which may not have been the ideal approach, but maybe what she saw as the optimal solution?

Your feelings are completely valid - don't want you to hear that I'm not supportive. But am also trying to widen the frame so you can see that this is also about her operating within her constraints...and that she's human, too, and subject to making mistakes (as are all of us).

Having said that, glad to hear that you're trying someone else to find the right fit for you.

The attached squiggly line illustrates my process in therapy pretty well. 

Do I think we consciously set up obstacles for ourselves? No. But I do think that unconsciously those barriers are there in the form of protective devices that were necessary survival tools and that it's hard to let go of them even if they're not needed anymore. I can't speak to EMDR as I'm not very familiar with that process.

You're at the beginning of a big journey, Trace. I recall that you wanted to focus on a very specific aspect of that journey, but I've personally found it doesn't work that way for me. Sometimes topics get completely knocked to the side for things that seem trivial, but I trust that it's part of the total journey and will contribute to getting there. There's so much that I didn't even know about me when I started this work. I'm grateful to learn all of it, as I believe that a holistic approach and bringing along all pieces is important for total health.



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Yes, I was very much the same with IC work. My T shared this with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVmqOlcXQ1k

It took me about 5 times to make it through. I was angry at some parts of it. But it got me further on this journey and now that I'm where I am, I can see why I had those emotions.

The other big thing that helped me move along was a shift in perspective. A lot of the work suggests things to do with your inner child - and they were all great and validating. But it wasn't until I shifted my perspective from being the adult to being the child that I really started to feel whole. Being able to feel the nurturing, the hugs, hear the words that I didn't ever hear when I was a child. Wow. Just blew me away.