Running on empty

[Dalloway]

Hello everyone,

I´ve just finished reading a book called Running on empty by Jonice Webb and I wanted to share my experience and maybe start a discussion on a topic that is very important to me and what I struggle the most with.

So the book described emotional neglect in childhood and it´s impact on our behavior later as adults. The topic was not entirely new to me, but it helped me to reinforce the fact that I´m not a weirdo for having odd feelings I can´t explain, I´m not "fatally flawed", as she named it, because everything I feel has a reason. I found myself especially in those parts where she describes that emotionally neglected people often feel empty inside, as if they were just looking at the world and people from the outside, the inability to really feel the emotions, to identify them in themselves and in others.

One of my biggest struggles is finding a clear purpose and a goal in my life that I can follow. I would like to do something, but I don´t know what my calling is and when I look inside for answers, I find nothing but emptiness and silence. That´s why this book resonated with me so much. It opened up a gate that was inside me, that needed to be opened, but didn´t give me clear answers on how to change the things I want to change.

So I wanted to ask you if you have any experience with working with the sense of emptiness. What did you find useful in the process of finding your way out of disconnectedness? Personally, I find it very hard to look for something that isn´t even there, cause the absence of it is the problem in the first place.

Thank you very much for your contribution.

Dalloway

[rainydiary]

Dalloway, I resonate with this topic.  I struggle with this too and am still finding my way.

Something that has helped me somewhat is working with kids.  That was never my plan (but honestly I never had any idea what I was going to do with myself career wise, didn't know how to be an adult) but it has been a good thing for me. 

It is also hard because sometimes I find myself responding in ways to kids that adults responded to me.  My awareness of this now is a good thing because I can take care to either be in a place where I can interact well with kids or repair when I mess up.

I also feel connected when I am with cats, near water, and in forested areas. 

All of that said, I still don't necessarily let myself feel what is inside my body a lot of the time. I spend a lot of time in my thoughts and it is exhausting.

I'm in a place of wanting to move forward in a way that is more meaningful to me and is not just stepping along in ways other people expect of me.  I'm a bit stuck in figuring out how to do that.

[Chart]

I resonate with this topic a lot too. Thanks Dalloway for the subject and book suggestion. At the moment all I really have in my life is my daughter. She's literally what's keeping me alive (and I'm not being dramatic here, it's the gods honest truth). I live a lot in fantasy. I want to move and imagine a new life in a big town where I can more easily meet people and be accepted. As for purpose however, I'm pretty awash. I am committed to giving a lecture/conference at the town hall in February regarding developmental trauma. My objective is to raise awareness in France and "train" for future lectures. I also want to do this as a kind of "explanation" to people as to why I am the way I am (weird). I almost want to apologize... I feel horribly guilty for forgetting peoples' names and faces. I want to explain why this happens.

Beyond that I've no idea what I want to do with the rest of my life. Getting out of constant depression hardly seems like a life goal, though maybe it should be.

Two years ago I had a relationship and a family. All that imploded and I'm starting over from scratch. The only difference is that now I am "informed". I'm hedging my bets. This new awareness of where I'm actually coming from does give me hope. Things are just as hard as ever (even moreso actually) but the difference is that now I feel like I'm really facing the problem square on. This makes me think that perhaps it can actually be resolved to an acceptable degree. I'm not there yet. Treading water does beat drowning. We don't have too many alternatives do we? I've decided to continue. Already that's a kind of purpose. Anyway, that's my take on it...
 

[MountainGirl]

This may sound kind of "empty," but it is what happened in my case. I'm now 68, but when I was young I had nothing inside me - no feeling, no hope, just emptiness. And then I acquired a business. That business work filled me with anxiety, pride, fear, hope - it stirred up a lot of emotions I had thought were dead. I guess I put myself in a risky position - trying to make a business work out -  and that somehow opened up an emotional response. Now , I have emotions, but they are often very uncomfortable and often they confuse me. But that's what a therapist is for I guess. I do know what you mean about the emptiness, and I bet you are  not alone in that experience. Not at all.

[Dalloway]

Rainydiary, Chart, MountainGirl, thank you very much for responding. 

Rainydiary - I feel that connection with children, too. It´s amazing how kids can effortlessly get close to you and make you feel safe and maybe even heal some of your invisible scars. They have the ability to do that and the genuine interest in human beings. Maybe we see that open-hearted, innocent, child-like part in them that we used to be and that´s what makes us feel at ease.

Chart - I can relate to living in the fantasies only too well. I´m doing that 90% of the time, imagining better, more fulfilling lives, in which I´m taking chances and making friends. To fantasize is sometimes the only thing that helps you through the day. I´m glad that you have at least one person in your life who motivates you and I think it´s pretty cool that you´re planning on giving a lecture, even though your motivation to do so is to "explain yourself".

MountainGirl - I´m glad that you started to recognize and feel your emotions you weren´t able to feel before. I think it´s a big step ahead when you start to focus on what´s happening inside and naming your emotions. Of course there are "negative" emotions that we don´t want to feel, too. That was the reason of disconnection in the first place - the unbearably painful feelings. So it´s hard to allow ourselves to feel everything fully.

Just a final note on this: I had a therapy session yesterday and we talked about this topic. My T asked me if I would like to try to feel in my body what´s happening at the moment (we were talking about the pain I felt about my lost childhood). I tried to feel that and I had a very profound experience - I felt pressure in my head, my chest and my throat and suddenly I realized that those were all the painful and suppressed emotions that want/need to be released, but I can´t let it happen yet. So maybe when I´ll be ready to feel those emotions that are buried now and face them, the emptiness and void will fill up with life and maybe I´ll realize that the emptiness is not as empty as I thought. It´s definitely a long way ahead of me.

 

[SenseOrgan]

...One of my biggest struggles is finding a clear purpose and a goal in my life that I can follow. I would like to do something, but I don´t know what my calling is and when I look inside for answers, I find nothing but emptiness and silence.

This one is hard to work with. I wrote a blog entry about this elsewhere and will go through that again and try to distill what I penned down at a later moment. I'd really like to discuss this with you.
I hope you are well at the moment.

Much love

[SenseOrgan]

I'm not sure if you wanted to close the discussion with your "final note on this". If so, I apologize for barging in here. I'm going to hazard it and share my thoughts...

I remember Bessel van der Kolk saying that trauma keeps people from dreaming, from envisioning other possibilities. It makes sense to me that dreaming is something like a luxury for a system stuck in survival mode. Existing in an ongoing unsafe environment at a young age limits the bandwidth in which our development takes place. Survival then becomes who you are to a great degree.

Purpose, meaning, and belonging are interlinked, I think. They are about our identity, our place within the bigger picture, and how this connects us to our environment. Physically, emotionally, spiritually.

Trauma is fundamentally a disconnect. From our authentic self, and from the world around us. I'm inclined to think that purpose, meaning, and belonging are like properties that emerge when we dissolve more of the layers we wear to protect who we are. I think a lot of us had to dissociate our authenticity, and as a result, that which has meaning to us. The more we allow ourself to feel how it really was for us, the more authenticity we reclaim and the greater the connection with what has meaning and purpose for us becomes. This is in line with your experience in therapy, isn't it?


I used to have reasonably clear goals in life. A long story very short; I failed at most of them (which is not a problem). Trauma would not permit me to fly, so to speak. The big dream I did end up realizing taught me this was not the answer to the despair I discovered I had been trying to escape with my drive. A lot of survival energy was mixed in with what I was trying to manifest in the world. A good part of it was a desperate attempt to create purpose and meaning. The underlying existential despair erupted in my awareness and I realized the answer was nowhere to be found outside of me. And inside I had poured in all my effort my whole adult life before that, eventually concluding there was nowhere to get there. Fortunately I did look inward via another route and this changed.

Later I realized that I'd been perceiving "purpose, meaning, and belonging" through the eyes of a very young, desperate child my whole life. The world could never provide what he longed for so much. Nothing ever came close. Everything appeared meaningless. My unprocessed, unfulfilled needs act as a distorting filter between me and reality. I have been through enough of it to conclude that when this changes, everything changes. It's hard to imagine pursuing something more rewarding, meaningful, purposeful than this. Even though it often does not feel like it.

I'm rather aimless without my drive to get stuff done in the world. Without that carrot to run after. It's liberating, yet it's very lonely to be dealing with this internal stuff in isolation and without something that brings me joy. I've been looking for some sort of middle way for quite some years. Thus far, not much luck with that.

[Dalloway]

SenseOrgan,

your thoughts on the topic I started are very much appreciated and welcome. Thank you for sharing them, your words radiate a clear sense of what you think and feel - maybe I´m wrong but this was my perception. I agree with you that trauma totally distorts our view of who we are and what are we doing in the world. At this very moment, I´m having a hard time saying or thinking anything positive about how the things are for us, trauma survivors. I´m going through something very heavy that I cannot fully describe or name. I feel like I´ve been looking at the things the wrong way all my life. Like I was looking at the tree, but didn´t see the forest - or the other way around, I´m not sure. And maybe this resonates with what you wrote about the inner child looking at the world - maybe what I feel is what the child was feeling all the time and it just cannot coexist with my adult self anymore. It´s hard to find some meaning in the suffering and pain.

Those layers that come to light gradually with inner work and therapy are at this moment (still) invisible for me. I feel like this heavy burden is omnipresent and everything else- the books, the therapy, the healing journey - is just running on a parallel path with this heavy stuff. Or more so, these things are just small marionettes playing around, but behind the curtain, there is the main attraction, the monster that everyone came to see. Like nothing can conquer or beat it. It´s made of darkness and all the pain I ever felt. It´s the dragon I have to kill before I can save the princess. Or maybe I don´t have to beat or fight it at all. Maybe it´s not made of darkness and pain, but of me. Maybe it´s the survival energy that makes me feel like I have to fight myself through my life. It´s a blur right now.

Sorry if I lead this conversation away from what you wanted to share, but I wanted to reply to you in a way I see these things right now.

Dalloway

[SenseOrgan]

Dalloway
I'm sorry you're in such a dark place at the moment. Thank you for sharing from this vulnerability and committing to authenticity. I have no way of knowing for sure what you describe is the same or similar, but it looks very familiar to me. For many years I was in such a state. It was clear to me that a very deep process was going on, and that something incredibly dark and heavy inside me was infinitely more powerful than any therapy, book, or support. Omnipresent is exactly the word that describes that. But what it was exactly I could not articulate. I just knew it made life impossible. Everything about it. The pressure from CBT type therapists to cognitively re-frame it made it even worse. I experienced it as an invalidation of an ongoing overwhelming experience of existential emptiness. Something completely untouched by a narrative sauce poured over it.

I would have done anything to deal with the root cause, but to my great frustration and despair, I could not get there, whatever I tried. When I finally did get there (with psychedelics), it was clear why I had not been able to "get there". What was then undefended was so awful, I could never have willed myself there. Temporarily ending up in the middle of that brought a lot of insight into my defenses and what healing is. I saw that I had built a highly sophisticated defense structure around a heart that was hurt very badly. A great part of it was so subtle I had no idea it was there. No bla bla or my sincere wish to deal with the dark stuff inside could get though it. The defense structure was almost the entire way I was. My behaviors, my convictions, my isolation, and so forth. I had carefully constructed all of this to survive. And in order to survive this survival, the I that I thought I was had to be deconstructed. It kind of started to crumple on it's own after that. But that's a different part of the story. My point is that what needed to happen was as profound as I had felt all this time. I've heard that when you're suicidal, something about you needs to die. I can confirm this was the case for me.

What had essentially led me to take this step, was that I took my inner voice seriously. Just like you, I somehow knew in all the overwhelm, confusion, despair, and frustration, that what was inside was made of the darkness and all the pain I ever felt. There was no living around that possible. No making it bearable with more bla bla or insight. If anything were to happen, it had to happen at a deep level. Looking back, the sense that something very seriously needed to change in order for me to feel better had always been true. I now see it as my unconscious signaling to the conscious. Like a big, red, blinking light on the dashboard. I am still alive because I did not take the red light for the problem, but for the signal that it always was. It never was my enemy. It were younger versions of me desperately asking for my attention. Something started to change at a deep level only when I felt their pain. When I found a way to remove what kept it from entering my awareness.

It's hard for me to assess whether I could have eventually ended up breaking through my defenses via another route. I'm tempted to say no, but I can't be sure. In theory a lot of modalities are aiming for this too, in much gentler ways. That would be preferred if it works, I think.

Obviously my issues weren't solved after this breakthrough. But the omnipotence you mentioned never came back. A fundamental shift was initiated and it never stopped developing. In some ways I feel like I've only had six years of life without "the omnipresence", which is the time that has passed since this happened.

I hope what is currently happening to you is part of a deep transformation for the better. Everything you have put into healing could be starting to pay off, even though it feels awful now.

Much love. 

[Dalloway]

SenseOrgan,

thank you for your kind words, I appreciate it very much. I agree with you on many levels. First, the sophisticated defense mechanism you describe, is me. It´s all I´ve been doing since my early childhood to survive somehow the terrible things. And it´s still me, even though some years passed, because it´s not something you wear and then get rid of, it´s in your molecules, in your blood, in the air you breath in and out. It´s the trauma that gave me those horribly distorting lens I am seeing the world through right now. That´s why I feel its omnipresence and omnipotence.

Healing needs to be something transformative then. Not some aggressive way of killing or fighting something inside me, more like listening to that inner voice you mention, to the signals it´s giving you. Maybe that´s what I´m feeling right now, I also thought about this option. I´ve been ignoring my inner voice, my authentic self for so long that it cannot be ignored anymore. Maybe I came to a point where being inauthentic is not a healthy option anymore. In fact, it never was, but it´s not manageable anymore to pretend it´s OK.

I´m sad and glad at the same time. Glad it´s happening, cause it´s a proof that there is something inside me that loves me so much it´s able to fight for me and if I don´t respond, it can only use pain and discomfort to signal me. But it´s also sad to know that so many bad things happened to me that it created a false self, a false personality,  an uncomfortable second skin I want to get rid of all my life.

I´m still young and I feel like it can also affect my perception of the CPTSD in my life in general. I don´t have much life experience and I know that I´m only yet to learn many things. Nothing is stronger than what you experience on a personal level. It stays with you much longer than anything that you learned in an "artificial" way-- we know it well, we are carrying CPTSD with and within us all our lives.

I´m not as confused as I was a few days ago, but I still don´t have the know-how of the change that needs to happen. Or maybe I do, I only have to learn how to recognize and understand it properly. I´m grateful for your kindness and compassion. This forum and people here are the reason I don´t feel so isolated anymore.

Dalloway