Like I said earlier, the term codependency really pissed me off. Even still after realizing that it is something that I certainly struggle with, and that I readily and finally admit that I exude. (in fact they gave me a whole new understanding of myself that was super liberating.) in my research I came across this man Ross Rosenberg who talks about it in a different light. For those of you who are learning about this for the first time just like me, this may be a more acceptable understanding than the seeming harshness of the term codependency. He discusses the fact that there are two types of people who come out of traumatic childhoods, codependence and narcissists. I believe you can insert lots of different types of parents including alcoholics, negligent self-absorbed, compulsive, mentally ill, etc. that create these types of children who turn into adults. That said, here’s a podcast introducing the term self-love deficit disorder.
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/mentalhealthnews/2016/10/06/ross-rosenberg-what-is-self-love-deficit-disorder

Also, here’s a song that I’ve written and many of you have not heard. I wrote it about a year and a half ago. Sometimes I feel like it’s full of shit and sometimes I feel like it’s the essence of life. Giving into Love, whatever that looks like…

​​ 

I walk through the garden alone

where the dew is still on the roses…

After a couple of days of pondering, I’ve come to a place that feels like a developing cocoon, beginning to realize the depth of which I will be journeying in the following unprescribed amount of time in therapy.  A question was posed to me about my blogging in depth (in the way I do).  I thought about it, hard.  Many questions arose:  1. Why AM I delving so deep, so publicly.  My original answer?  ••I realize how many other humans in my life, in this world, have experienced the same kinds of pain, unexplained behaviors and abuses.  There are serious reasons why I want to run for office in the future, the main one of which is that sexual offenders and predatory behavior needs to be brought to the bright light of justice.  It will be one of the top things on my agenda when I  am elected – whenever that is.  The shame, guilt and bullshit silence that we are pressured into feeling, the solitary nature that tells us we are all alone is a perpetuated code of conduct that needs to be broken.  Only by being public can we begin to change this.

My other answers: ••After reading about codependent behavior (or self-love-deficit-disorder) and realizing that it is developed BECAUSE of (it’s not my fault, I wasn’t born this way!) erratic, unpredictable, treatment from abandoning parents (for whatever reason: addictions to all sorts of things, substances, gambling… you name it – perhaps your parent is/was codependent themselves, mental instability… ETC ETC) I realized that my own codependent behavior was coming out in unexpected ways now that I’m in this therapy.  I’m now living alone with my cat, back in a community which fosters me, along with being just right down the road from my grandparents.  I KNOW I am not alone.  I know that there are those who would and could do the right thing to protect children from being abused and me from choosing to go dig a hole for myself.  I have a few VERY close friends who check up on me and really want to love me all the time, for who I am.  Nonetheless, those closest often don’t get the deep stories about what’s going on with my therapy until after I’ve shared it with the world.  When I write, it helps me to process.  When I write, I feel like, in an eloquent way, I am describing my experience while acknowledging myself as the experiencer.  However, after pondering this week, another truth has surfaced.  In sharing this journey so publicly, having an unexpected outpouring of response and support (so grateful), I am repeating something that I really don’t want to repeat.  The need for external validation.   In thinking about social media, encapsulating our lives to snippets and things we choose to share, I think that Facebook has imprisoned some of us to use it as a coping mechanism to feel love from others in an increasingly isolating world.  “Who’s liked my post?  He didn’t like my post yet… They love me, look how many people have reacted to my post! ETC ETC ETC…”

I am torn (as this Pisces usually is…) between sharing my intimate journey with myself with all of the people who care to read it, and not sharing it, yet.  The decision I have made is possibly more difficult than anything I’ve done so far since beginning.  In order to, as a dear friend put it, “sit with the discomfort” in order to learn my own truths about what is going on here, I am going to put on hold my week by week sharing and do what I need to do for myself.  Like my friend RN said, she is working on a book dealing with this stuff.  Perhaps I will be interested in doing the same? Perhaps I’ll make a monthly post, carefully chosen and with love of my political intentions of helping my human community feel brave to conquer their own hurtful pasts/presents.  Maybe it’ll only come when I feel like sharing.  To be honest, I feel like sharing all the time, but I am beginning to wonder for whom.  IS it for me? Or is it for everyone else? a perpetuation of codependent behaviors learned as a child that my needs and feelings go on hold for the benefit of everyone else in order to feel needed and loved…. (I know that’s hella round reasoning…)

I haven’t come to a solid decision about what to do.  I don’t have to explain myself – I could just drop off the face of Facebook and blogging with no explanation at all.  But I don’t want to do that, specifically because there are those of you who read this and do feel like you can relate.  You are the reason for this explicative post today.  I care so deeply for the ones whose pain I share, because I empathize and love all of you.  So, I don’t know what’ll happen, but here’s to the cocoon.  Here’s to the butterflies who emerge, in their own time.

It’s unlike anything I’ve ever done before.  It’s hard to describe.  It was hard.

I sat down, we discussed my starting point – one of the most painful memories – a quote from my mother after first being molested by her boyfriend’s son, “If it happens again honey, let me know.”  This was the moment, at 7 years old, that I first became consciously aware that I was on my own.  That no one was there for me and that God didn’t exist.  This was the moment that now, looking back, my mother failed me.  She not only was going to ALLOW this to happen to me again, but she didn’t DO anything about it RIGHT THEN.  I had no justice.  My feelings, experience and trauma wasn’t worth acknowledging.  I wasn’t worth it.  She didn’t love me, and therefore I was sentenced to feel I didn’t deserve love.  How about that for a realization of thought pattern..

I thought about and felt that memory, all the details flowing back, as per usual, this time I was to pay attention to the bodily sensations and all the energy I could tune into.  My throat was blocked, like the way it feels when you want to cry but something won’t let you?  The way it feels holding back crying – that’s the body’s reaction to invalidation for me.  I freeze and stifle my feelings and experience, ignore them and perpetually invalidate myself.  I followed the therapists fingers back and forth with my eyes, for several seconds, then she said to take a deep breath, and to let it go.  This process was repeated, through several memories, feelings and sensations that arose during the session.  Some surprising things came up.  I became cold and then oppressively hot.  When I became hot, we turned on the fan in the room and as soon as the breeze hit my skin, I immediately was transported back to the room where my step-father first molested me.  The memory was not during, it was what I felt afterwards.  I was pretending to sleep on the couch under an old blanket, a knit one with large holes.  I could feel the fan blowing in that room, through the holes in the blanket, touching every single skin cell on my body.  I felt dirty and incapable of moving.  It amazed me today that just the breeze from a ceiling fan can transport me back to that moment.

I told her the memory that arose and she did something I will never forget.  She said, hold on one moment, I’ll be right back.  She came back into the room with a giant, handmade Wonder Woman blanket.  She said, “Would you like to use this?” I put it over me and the cold went away.  She said, out loud, “See? There are no holes here.  You’re safe.”  It meant the world, but it also made me uncomfortable.  I have a very hard time with someone else comforting me.  Hugs when I am upset make me feel very uneasy.  It’s almost like even those who do care and trust I have a hard time letting past a certain place before I hole up inside.  I have tears in my eyes right now just typing these words.  At the end of the session, I said, “I’m feeling like I need to check out.” It just happened to be time to do so.

Today was supremely new, difficult, and intense.  Afterwards I still feel uneasy, a little wobbly, and like I need to be careful with myself.  These feelings have spaced out throughout the day.  I wish for calmness.  I decided to cook snacks this afternoon and spend my time in the kitchen after I finished my work with Democracy Matters.  Today is also my first day back on the job.  I have about 30 students who are or will be starting school soon.  I’m glad I’m putting me back together so I can do my best at what I love.  

I’ve been reasoning that if I play it cool, being open to all this, magical things will happen.  It’s started.  Life in general has started over again and I’m seeing more clearly.  Things are falling into place and I am grasping ahold of something solid within myself.  Here’s to that.  Here’s to the learning and dedication.  Here’s to todays first EMDR therapy session.  I’ll keep this posted.  If I implode and crash into a million pieces, I know a couple of people who’ll help me sweep it up.  That’s a lovely feeling.  Thanks ya’ll.

If I stay like this

Maybe I’ll disappear

Maybe this isn’t real

It’s been so long, these few seconds

If I can find you

I promise I’ll care for you

Please don’t hide too well

Because I’ll need help

In my delicate search

There’s so much to tell

You can step on this body

I can’t even understand

In fact I can’t see you

Faces drifting through fingers like sand
Once teeth gritting and a frozen spine

Succumbed to what you took from me that was mine

Frozen, frozen solid, perfectly still.

Well, today was also a continuation of preliminaries. (again thank you for the candles and well wishes.) Today I took a test on potential dissociative behavior. I had to answer about 15 to 20 questions related to how much I check out in terms of daily life. She asked me questions about when I’m driving do I ever arrive somewhere and not remember how I got there. She asked me if when I’m talking to people and forget what they say or check out while they’re talking… going off in a daydream of something else. I do that sometimes for sure… There were a lot of questions like that and in the end I asked her what exactly she was trying to figure out with this test and she said that on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being highly dissociative, I’m about to five or six. That means that I have the ability to put on a face when I need to because I had to in situations to survive.  Sometimes people’s traumatic experiences create the need for whole other personalities… Interestingly, I just had to deal with that over the weekend, putting on a face when I was just about to break open inside. Insert Tori Amos song here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EHa2GQUhoLw

So here’s some comic relief… Because I am such a verbal processor, we didn’t get to the EMDR therapy today, because I am verbose.. At the end of the session she said, please don’t take offense when I interrupt you and stop you’re processing, it’s not me being disrespectful, it’s that this process really doesn’t need explaining, it just needs for you to feel it. I have no idea what that means, I guess I’m such a verbal processor with what’s going on inside my mind that this is going to be a whole new experience for me.

So now that I’ve gone two weeks without actually starting the therapy and going into the office thinking that I would, there’s even more anxiety about it… Ha ha funny not funny. At least this week I don’t feel like I’m soft as a peach and about to splatter all over the floor. I feel pretty guarded right now and curious about what’s going to happen next. What’s going to happen in the next couple of hours is it I’m going to lay down after taking a walk and then I’m going to come back home and make pickles. That’s what’s going to happen in the immediate future. I’m going to put some love into some pickles.