Are you trying to tell me to get a secret young lover?
:O)
Maybe I need a young secret lover who is a psychologist
Ha! Good thinking.
I will incorporate those criteria into my thinking regarding my secret young lover to be. Who will look like Arnold Schwartzennegger in the movie Predator, and be as brilliant and compassionate as Dr. Ben Carson.
And who will write like Maya Angelou about why the caged bird sings.
We will not mention this thinking to my D H.
Maybe I will sleep with more lights on... I feel dumb being so scared. I have never been this way before. I am realizing that I do not have a lot of control over it. I have been told that I have gone through a very high level of danger for a long time. I wasn't really scared until now. I guess my PTSD is getting better, I hope, because I am not suppressing my fears. I guess I still am though. My mind tries to, but my body won't let me.
When our youngest granddaughter was little, she was staying with us. She had been through some things that were scary, like you have, Feeling. We found a metal Louisville Slugger baseball bat. She slept with it in her bed. It had a good smack to it, but was light enough for her to swing it.
Just in case.
She was just a little girl, but knowing she had something ~ anything ~ that could give her a fighting chance against the things she was afraid of was empowering, for her.
Do you have something like that baseball bat, Feeling? Something you can take right into bed with you?
When we are really scared, especially in the night, it is the fear we need to address, as much as what might really happen. Understanding why this is happening to us, we can take steps to make ourselves as safe as we can, given that we have decided not to run. (Once we start running, where do we stop, right?) So, we will not run, then. We will still be scared,
but we will envision ourselves fighting back. That will make all the difference in how we see our own fear. We can sit with it then, until morning comes.
Here is a quote for you, Feeling Sad.
There was a time when you were not a slave. Remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it ~ remember. You know how to avoid meeting a bear on the track. You know the winter fear when you hear the wolves gathering. But you can remain seated for hours in treetops to await morning. You say there are no words to describe this time; you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that...invent.
Monique Wittig
Les Guerilleres
***
We found a framed picture of a little girl and an angel. We hung it opposite the bed, where she could see it if she woke up in the night, and was afraid to get up and come into our bed. She went through something very like what is happening to you, now. She was beating herself up for not being brave. But just think of that little girl, and all she'd been through, and all she did not understand.
She was eight.
She was not a coward, she was a traumatized little girl.
We taught her a prayer. "I love my mom. I love my dad. I love my grandma and my grandpa. And they love me."
We talked about what we would do, if there was a bad man.
I am so sorry this is happening to you, Feeling.
I would have screamed, too. Then, I would have been afraid to get out of my bed. But with my baseball bat, I could stay in my bed.
I could say The Serenity Prayer, because I have said it so much that just the rhythms of pronouncing it comfort me, now.
I will say a special prayer for you tonight. Maybe, when you wake up and are afraid, you will not feel so alone if you know we are holding you in our thoughts.
As we give ourselves permission to feel, the feelings that come to us are the very ones we went numb to in order to function. So, it's like you are dealing with the very real present moment anxiety regarding your son along with the overwhelming anxiety of the feelings you could not acknowledge at the time they were happening. It's like you are a little girl, fishing in very deep water. The more line you reel in, the more undefinable, and the more frightening, are the shapes of the things attached along the length of the line.
We learned, in the research we have done here on the Family of Origin thread, that present day trauma recalls earlier trauma. In our psyches, everything gets lumped together. When something calls one fear that is real in the present, all those other, long frozen away traumatic events are called up right along with it. We cannot recognize what it is we are afraid of. The fear is intense. Overwhelming.
We cannot reason our ways out of it.
Those are old traumatic events. Maybe, from our childhoods. Things we tried to understand before we had words. I have heard it described as a process of unthawing. As the ice melts, the water begins to run, and the taste of the old fear is in it. The frozen places in our psyches ache, just like our real life muscles ache, when warmth and oxygen begin to course through an arm or a leg we have been sitting on and it has fallen asleep. In time, the flesh is pink and warm and alive, again.
And in our psyches, there too the energy freed in the taste of that water is released, for us to move more beautifully through our waking lives with strength and purpose, and is not locked away from us, anymore.
Our Somewhere Out There gave us the term "emotional flashback" to name those feelings, to put limits and barriers around overwhelming fear
or negativity.
Those horrible names we call ourselves because we are not perfect.
Sometimes, just to name the feelings can help us.
"I am in emotional flashback. I will recognize my bravery, in that time when I was so frightened, or so ashamed. I will hold myself now, and I will hold that little girl I was then, or that young woman I was then, in compassion. I choose this. If I were not strong enough, I would not have released these feelings. I am meant to come through this. I have suffered, alone and afraid, long enough. I choose this. I choose to name and have these energies I have locked away for so long for my own, now. This is only the taste of my fear. I accept. I will have all of myself now, as I come through and incorporate these frozen energies into myself."
I am glad you found us, Feeling Sad. We will all get through this more surely, now that we can post about it and know someone is listening, and is holding us in their thoughts.
You have been very brave in your past, Feeling. You would not have numbed those feelings so you could function despite them, if you were not very, very brave. Hold yourself with compassion for your bravery and your courage, and for all you have been through, for the love of your child.
You are not dumb. You are brave.
There are not so many people who can face fear.
You are.
I applaud you.
This is a very hard choice to make, to feel our feelings when the feelings are overwhelming. Regarding your child, Feeling, we have decided, some of us who post here, to face (or at least, to begin a nodding acquaintanceship with) our own fears ~ with the places we are broken, so that we can be stronger, more balanced, for the sakes of our troubled adult kids.
That is a good way to see ourselves and our kids, I think.
We are learning how to stay present to the awfulness, to the deep, unfaceable sadness, of what is.
We are learning boundaries, and we are learning that in protecting ourselves, we can teach those new skills, that new way of seeing, to our kids, too.
We are learning, and it's very hard, to see our adult children as strong and able to choose for themselves and to learn from their choices. It is hard because we have been seeing them as children.
They need us to see them as capable adults, so they can believe that about themselves, too.
***
So, you are here with us now, and we will all be braver because of it, and somehow, we will learn better ways to help ourselves and our kids face the fearsome shapes that move in the shadows of our subconscious realities.
For those of us who committed to this process not really knowing whether it would help us or harm us, the process is unfolding beautifully. We are stronger, are more comfortable with uncertainty. It has been very hard. It was shocking to each of us, to realize the ways we were beating ourselves up for the pain our children are in.
That was not helpful, that business of beating ourselves up. Not to us, and not to our kids or grands. The terrible things that are happening are unbelievably rotten, mindblowingly frightening things.
How awful for all of us, and for our children, that this is so.
We need all our strength. Those old, fearsome messages and those old imageries of who and how we are cannot help us, now.
So, we are changing.
Step by small step. Little things, little changes in how we see ourselves and our children, that make all the difference in the world.
We are doing it, Feeling. You will, too.
Cedar
Sorry to heap this story on you, I guess I am decluttering my heart and mind as well.
We love hearing one another's stories. That is how we came to be here. To listen, and to witness, and to share our strength so we all will be stronger, together.
The hardest thing is to be alone with it.
That is the hardest thing.
***
I think I am not column dressing this morning, Copa. I am wearing the softest leopard print pajama pants imaginable, and a black shirt, and my hair is all frizzy.
I look pretty cute.
