The Next Version Of Me

[paul72]

  thinking of you Bach.

[Hope67]

Dear Bach,
Sending you my support and care, plus a hug    I hope you're ok and that you're managing things little by little, in whatever pace feels best.  Thinking of you, and hoping you're ok.

Hope 

[Bach]

rainy, Armee, san, Cactus, phil and Hope, I so appreciate your thoughts and support.  I am less afraid to speak than I used to be, but so much fear is still here.

I'm trying to get better at tolerating fear and anxiety and other uncomfortable feelings.  I have spent my whole life either leaning into uncomfortable feelings or trying to escape from them, both of which ultimately make them worse.  I realised today when I was talking to my therapist that my body and my brain are constantly at war and kind of hate each other.  She asked me why I hate my body, and I realised that the meaning of "hate my body" has completely changed since I was younger and thought that I was defined by being fat and ugly, and that I was fat and ugly just because I was a pig with no self-control (It hurts to even type that out!  How unfair I was to that poor girl!).  I wish I could remember the conversation better because it feels like I came up with some really important stuff.  At one point she asked me whether it is because my body is the source of the unpleasant feelings.  This led to a discussion of how I lack a feeling of connection between my body and my brain.  I literally feel like my body is a separate entity from my brain, and that it sort of co-operates with me, but that I really have very little control over it, and we're certainly not friends.  I don't want to feel that way about my body.

Earlier this week, I heard a lecture on the Internet about havening.  Here is Wikipedia's basic explanation of havening:

Havening, is an alternative therapy developed by Ronald Ruden and his brother Steve Ruden; it relies on "amygdala depotentiation" that purportedly can help people with psychological problems, particularly those related to phobias, post-traumatic stress and anxiety.

"Havening Touch" is claimed to elicit delta brain waves and to act directly on receptors in the brain where trauma is believed to be stored, to down regulate the emotional charge, mostly while the client is distracted. This means the client does not have to stay in, or talk about, upsetting events or feelings.  Havening shares features in common with another alternative therapy method, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.

It sounded very interesting, and I remembered seeing a reference on the Internet somewhere a year or two ago to "self-havening," so on Saturday I googled that.  I found a video (link below if anyone wants it) that showed me how to do it, and tried it.  As with most of these kinds of things, my initial reaction was to get antsy and want to stop, but I persisted through the whole video, and thought I felt something positive from it.  On Sunday, I did the touching technique casually several times throughout the day, sometimes with affirmations and sometimes not.  I don't know that it makes me feel better in particular, but it definitely does something.  Both on Saturday night and last night, I had very upsetting dreams with themes of rejection and abandonment in the face of my neediness, which is more-or-less my ultimate fear in life.  It's terrible to have those dreams and wake up feeling disturbed and not safe, but the really interesting thing is that it's a child feeling of being unsafe.  It feels familiar, but it also feels completely different from how I usually feel in response to the same kinds of thoughts and fears in the present day.  So this makes me think that maybe havening really works, and really does release the stored trauma from the body, this concept I've heard so much about and which I've had some little tastes of but which has mostly so far eluded me.  I have strange feelings right now that may be more awareness of my body.  They are incredibly uncomfortable, but they are not building, and they are not intolerable.  So...A new hope for healing?  Or a new false hope that will end up backfiring by stressing me into all my old familiar sick-making maladaptive coping methods?  I guess I'll have to wait and see.

https://youtu.be/IQXbZmuSbFs

[Bach]

I was supposed to see Other this weekend, but something is going on with him and I don’t know what it is.  This morning when I texted him to find out what the plan for the weekend was, he was short and snippy and left me hanging on an “I don’t know”.   I know that there must be something going on with him that has nothing to do with me and that I must have inadvertently triggered him.  In the past when this would happen, before I knew about CPTSD and triggers, when he would turn like this I would seek to appease and get reassurance, and that would inevitably cause the situation to blow up into a major conflict, so I’m leaving him alone to work out whatever he has going on by himself.  Being ignored or shut out or left hanging triggers me and makes me absolutely crazy. Everything has been good between us lately and I know I haven’t done anything wrong to earn anger, enmity or exile, but I am unable to stop worrying.  I’m in bad enough shape already.  If I’m in for another summer of tension with his stupid bum I don’t know how I’ll manage. 

[Blueberry]

 

[Hope67]

Hi Bach,
I hope you don't get a summer of tension - I hope that you have a pleasant summer with some nice things happening in it.  I really like the flower in your profile picture - beautiful. 

I am sending you a hug Bach, I hope that's ok 

Hope 

[sanmagic7]

thinking of you bach.  'havening' sounds interesting.  i'm going to do some research on it, learn more about it.  thanks for sharing.  love and hugs, and i hope things go smoothly for you.  sounds like you're making a lot of progress.   

[Bach]

So much going on.  So hard to write about anything.  My brother brought my nephew over from Australia to visit, and made the ill-considered choice to stay with our mother for two weeks.  I knew that wasn’t a good idea, and he pretty much knew it, too, but allowed himself to think it would be okay.  It was not okay.  It taught my brother once and for all that, yes, it really was that bad for us as children growing up with her, and it temporarily traumatised my nephew.  I say temporarily because my nephew is imperfectly but very lovingly parented, and he’ll have loving adults with whom to talk about it and work through it.  My Person and I did our part by having them to our house to rest and recuperate for a day and a half after they left the house of horrors, and I feel very good about being able to support them that way, but it was incredibly hard on me.  I visited with them at my mother’s house a few times while they were here, and I did a good job of protecting myself from her in the direct contact during those occasions, but hearing about my brother and nephew’s experiences staying there after I picked them up on Sunday late morning, and it being a recurring conversation until they left today at 6:30am has left me with a toxic dose.  I’m dealing with it incredibly well, all things considered, so there’s good news there, but ugh.  Sick, sick sick.  I hope that soon I will be able to write about what they told me and how it all fits together with my current life and my past experience because the information and insights are potentially very useful, but it’s too much right now.

Sweet friends, thank you for your replies to my last post.  Still no word from Other, no answer to sporadic texts, phone call, email, which doesn’t help, but at the moment is truly the least of my problems.  I know he’s alive because I can see that he’s been on Telegram regularly, and he’s done this before, so I can only assume that eventually he’ll be back and table any further attempts to communicate with him until such time as I can be properly ****** to care enough to risk being ignored yet again.

[rainydiary]

Bach, I am glad you could support your sibling and nephew and did your best to self-protect.

[sanmagic7]

bach, sounds like one emotional mess after another.  so sorry this has all been happening to you, especially the behavior of your Other.  i hope things get resolved quickly and smoothly.  on your side w/ all this.  love and hugs

[CactusFlower]

Gentle hugs if you want them, Bach. That's a lot to deal with. Hoping you feel better soon, our emotions can definitely affect us physically. peace and healing.

[paul72]

gentle hugs Bach 

[Bach]

rainy, san, Cactus, phil 

Okay, so here’s the thing that I learned fully from my brother and nephew’s experiences during their ill-advised stay with my mother:  My mother is a psychopath.  Literally a psychopath.  Not figurative literally, and not hyperbolic literally, but a simple, cold, factual use of the word.  Psychopath.  My mother is a psychopath.  She’s not just a bad parent, a crappy person, or a mere narcissist.  She’s an actual true-colours dyed-in-the-wool literal no-exaggeration hardcore psychopath. 

She is EVIL.  I’ve never wanted to say that.  I’ve always wanted to give her some tiny benefit of the doubt.  I’ve always wanted to think that she didn’t really mean to hurt us, she was just too bleeped up by her own crazy mother to understand.  But the passive-aggressive and mostly plausibly deniable disregard she showed for the basic needs of my brother and nephew while they were staying with her even after they called her out on it proves to me that the way I remember it really is the way it was.  I think I need to detail in writing the things she did which demonstrated that to me, but I can’t yet.  I did manage to say it all to my therapist during my session yesterday, that was really hard and included a lot of stuttering and gulps and frequent loss of volume control, but it was good.  It helped me define a crucial understanding of the difference between a bad parent and a psychopathic one:

Not taking care of her son and grandson = Regular crappy parent stuff
Covert passive-aggressive obstruction of her son’s efforts to take care of himself and his son and overtly insisting on continuing to do the things that were hurting her son and her grandson despite explicit dialogue = psychopath stuff.

I feel a little sick now, and like I might hurt myself.  I won’t.  I will ride out that feeling, but I’ve got to hit Post now before I chicken out.

[paul72]

I believe you are right Bach ... it's a hard thing to say... harder to live through (which you miraculously did)
Sending as much love and kindness and you'd like 

[Blueberry]

Oh Bach. May I send some gentle caring    If safe for you that is. It did me so much good to read what you wrote about your M. I'm sorry that you have suffered so much and that your brother and nephew have as well.

But it did me good to read it because it gave me words for the antics of the whole of FOO versus me. So, sorry for hijacking a little. But also I'm glad you left it up. It deserves to be said and read and heard. Please don't hurt yourself.