Finally ... an understanding of self-injury that makes sense.

... like a shattered knee or a scratched cornea, relationship ruptures deliver agony. Most people say that no pain is greater than losing someone they love ... Psychiatrists often see people who deliberately injure themselves in minor but stinging ways -- like making shallow razor cuts to the forearm or cigarette burns to the thigh. These individuals have garnered a multiciplity of polysyllabic labels over the years, and their self-destructive bent has been ascribed to various convoluted motives: a desire for attention, an attempt to manipulate, a turning of anger against the self.

Most of them have one thing in common: an exquisite, lifelong sensitivity to separation's pain. The miniature losses contained in a rebuke, a spat, and other transient relationship rifts can arouse in them an unbearable blend of despondency and grief. Then follows an episode of self-harm -- a prick, a burn, an incision into the skin. Beneath and within the abused epidermis, palpitating pain fibers send their drumbeat signal to the brain, warning of damage. These messages release pain's counterweight: the blessed, calming flow of opiates, and thus, surcease of sorrow. Chronic self-mutilators [and addicts of all kinds, I think] provoke the lesser pain to trick their nervous systems into numbing the unendurable one. (Italics mine.)

Less drastic routes abound: warm human contact also generates internal opiate release. Our lovers, spouses, children, parents, and friends are our daily anodynes [= pain relief; analgesics], delivering the magic of forgetfulness from the twinging ache of mammalian loneliness. Potent magic indeed.

(from A General Theory of Love, by Thomas Lewis, MD, et. al)

Case in point: me, with my beloved namesake, Jaliya.

Heart is the name of the house that I restore.

(Mir Dard)

The homeword journey from dissociation ...

... is in association ... making sense of something.

At the hospital I've been in residence at, there's a grey meeting room that several of my sessions and classes are held in. The room is often crowded with people; it tends to be stuffy, airless, and hot. The two windows are difficult to access.

There's also an office that a social worker conducts her conversations in. That room is grey, too. Against one wall, behind a couple of chairs, there's a vault.

One day, about a month ago, I had a class in the grey classroom, then a session in the social worker's grey office. The whole world seemed grey that day -- outside, fog and drizzle seeped from the sky; most of the humans I encountered were scowling and ruminating about our latest endless Canadian winter, eh?

I felt the shudder of nascent panic while sitting (and twitching) in that ugly grey classroom. Why the hell is everything grey in a hospital, I thought ... Later, while cooped in the social worker's office with four other patients for a "trauma recovery education" session, I spoke of the fear that crawled along my neurons whenever I was in any of those grey rooms. H~, the facilitator, asked me what it was about grey rooms ... and I couldn't discern any pattern. I just knew what I was (barely) containing.

At the end of that class, when we all rose to leave, I noticed the vault in the wall behind the chairs that everyone had been sitting in. CLICK! -- a link! Memory opened its eye and I recalled a vault -- a whole room -- in the basement of a house my family had lived in when I was five. On occasion, for punishment, I was locked into that vault. Once or twice I was forgotten, or deliberately left alone, for several hours. The vault was grey, lit with a single overhead bulb, and lined with thick wooden shelves. I image it now and think of a barrack ... a prison.

CLICK! The grey; the vault; the crunching of consciousness into a fist of fear. The dispersing of presence from now back to then.

I stood in that office and stared at the vault; I pointed and started to speak. I remembered; I storied; I told a tale of the big white house with the black shutters and the grey-walled chamber ... and I ended up laughing, not at my fear, but with delight at a pattern perceived, a grey mass dispersed.

In these moments, when we are launched on a fast track from dissociation to association, a whole person comes together and realizes a thing for what it really is. We come home to meaning and sense ... to a clear, coherent connection between then and that and here and now.

Sweet relief!

SPRING!

Nothing heals like compassion ...

Somewhere there is a basket
that contains all of our failures.
It is a big basket. It wants to know
what to do with these.
Mercy has no use for them.


(Stephen Levine, from "There is an elemental love")

Sculpture: Heather Cole, "Compassion" ... http://heathercole.com

Contextually hilarious ...

Given that I'm currently in residence at a psychiatric hospital, the following image had me just about falling out of my chair:

(a tip o' the nib to yellowdog granny for this one! -- http://yellowdoggrannie.blogspot.com/)

Back to the ABCs, again ... and again ... and again ...

About twenty years ago, I earned a basic certification in First Aid. One of the "mantras" of injury assessment that we learned was a particular ABC: Alive, Breathing, Conscious. Everything in First Aid starts with that, if I recall correctly ...

... and I'm finding that now, in my healing journey, every day starts with that ABC too. In a most rudimentary sense, I'm asking myself, "Am I Alive? (So far, so good!) Breathing? (Am I doing more than an anxious pant?) Conscious? (Lucid? Present?)" Often, I end up smiling or even giggling ... but my path is that basic right now. I came into the hospital dangerously malnourished, clenched to the core with fear, and in a state of volitional paralysis -- too frozen in place to do much of anything, even to make a cup of tea.

A couple of days ago, as part of my goal-setting for this week, I created a list that looks like this:

BREATHE
STAND
SHAKE
WATER
FOOD
WALK
REST

The SHAKE refers to a delightful, freeing movement -- "shaking the bones" -- simply letting different parts of my body quiver like I'm made of Jell-O ... I jiggle, wiggle, bounce around, and shimmy until I feel a loosening ... When I do this, I feel about four years old and happy ...

It's been astonishing, how far down into these basics I've had to go. I've never before lost so much ability to function ... to eat, sleep, and move. I didn't realize how seriously ill I was until my second week here ... and now I'm emerging from the frozen place, the ice-vault, the soul-chill. Sweet relief ... and Spring is coming! I'm going to go for a walk this afternoon ... There is a labyrinth on the hospital grounds ... Surely it will be soggy, boggy and squishy after all the snow ... I will tread into the circles mindfully -- and probably end up giggling at the squelchy, farty sodden-soil sounds ...

Alive ... oh, yes ... and grateful ...

Breathing ... oh, yes ... invincible Spring ...

Conscious ... oh, yes ... and daffy ...

Unable to sleep ... or rest.

It's 3:15 a.m ... I can't sleep -- have been nosing toward rest since 11:30 ... Found an eloquent, urgent essay at Orion Magazine -- "Am I Still Here?" by Anthony Doerr (http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4234/); I read it and all the responses ... Composed my own wee blurb (adapted here), clicked "Submit" ... and lost it (my response, that is ... not the "it" we refer to when we're going bonkers with stress!). Good thing I copied it to Word ...

We humans are insatiably curious creatures, I wrote; the Internet and all its tangents let us move our minds over the web of imagination and thought and opinion ... As with any other activity, moderation is the key (so she writes at 3:19 a.m., hee hee) ...

I've cut back on my online journeys ... I know in my bones the allure and consequences of curiosity's cravings ... and there's nothing sweeter in this world than to turn off as much of the buzz as I can and cuddle up with my husband and/or cats ... or to simply lie down and feel myself breathe.

I'm presently receiving treatment for what I can only call overload ... have been away from my job for 14 months ... am nearly fifty and simply cannot maintain the frenzied pace that's expected of us all any longer. Online access allows me another avenue to stay in touch with my kin; beyond that, my blogs, and some scaled-down news-hounding, I'm giving my mind some space. Online access can only validate a conjured presence (and each of us decides how genuine that presence will be) ... I don't think it can validate a whole person like immediate contact and relation do.

I've given some thought to the experience of "being on speed" --> in the 2009 sense. The rat race; the treadmill; the meat-grinder; the clamber to the (ceaselessly evasive) top of whatever ladder we grasp at in our urge to be seen, validated, rewarded ... whatever.

My own rat race (and some unavoidable events and losses) exhausted me so ferociously that there were a few days last year when I wondered if my body was beginning to die. I'm now beginning to heal and I will not return to a way of living that was shredding my sanity, health, and relations -- It got to a point where I literally could not rest. I've been able to sense -- and attend to -- the startling effects of all that speed on, firstly, my brain and my heart ... There's no doubt about the message I was receiving: "Slow down ... or else."

Ed Swinden, "Supplication 2"