A post-cynical seer

Don't give up.

2012-01-16T16:01:00.000-08:00

When you imagine the universe

vacant, and shorn of stars,

do not give up.

When you sense your skin

withering on your bones

like leather left to rot,

do not give up.

Give in. Give in

to the stars merging

inside you. Give in

to the skin that withers

for moisture, for a touch

as soft and ecstatic

as the silk

of a milkweed

pod

Give up?

No. Give

in. Be the silk

you long to touch

Lay your own hand

upon your own skin

Rest in the warmth

that will come

if you remain

with yourself

in the giving.

Complex post-traumatic distress and autoimmune disease ...

2012-01-11T09:38:00.000-08:00

(image source)

... do they mesh somehow and become one and the same, with different avenues of expression? I wonder this today, after more than three weeks of intense, constant activity (for me, anyway) ... and a novel (as in: new) surging of inflammatory alarms.

The ordinary is often overwhelming for people who have experienced trauma ... so the ordinary effects us in ways that can seem utterly bizarre.

I shared a beautiful Christmas with my cherished relatives ... and I seem to be paying for it now. Last summer, I consulted with a haematologist and received a diagnosis of thrombocytopenia -- a loss of platelets in the blood. My platelet volume is about a third of what it should be; this, along with other bodily anomalies that have been arising, have made me wonder about a link between chronic post-traumatic distress (CPTD -- my own acronym for the injury) and autoimmune / inflammatory illness. My intuition quickly and immediately linked the two ...

One of trauma's tenacious aftermaths is a hyper-aroused central nervous system ... and autoimmune illness is, in one way, considered a body at war with itself. The immune system is hyper-aroused and loses its power to discern what is truly an invader and what is not.

The brain, thus all the body's regulatory and moderating systems, functions in CPTD in a constant state of alarm.

I've asked two doctors, both of whom I like and respect, if they believe there's such a link. They both said "No."

Intuition tells me otherwise.

Reader, what to you think?

Things I say to myself ...

2012-01-02T21:43:00.000-08:00

Housework is holy ...

Everything is healing all the time ...

Beloved, love one another ...

Enough now ... Enough.

Love is contagious ...

All images found at and linked to

A Woman Taken by the Wind

(... a haven of sensory quietude ...)

Regression can be fun!

2011-12-29T12:21:00.000-08:00

Case in point: Christmas 2011. The scene: my cousin's house. The generation: mine -- pushing fifty, sixty, and a little bit more. We are parents, grandparents, aunties and uncles several times over, and we are falling out of our chairs at dinner-table fart jokes. We are stealing the grandkids' presents -- this year it was a 'Spy Master' set that includes sunglasses with little rearview mirrors in the frame so you can see behind you. My cousin shoved a pair at me while I was walking through the kitchen; she said, 'Put these on and look behind you!' I did, and there she was, flipping me the bird and pretending to pick her nose. We fell over laughing. Nearby elders and elder siblings rolled or closed their eyes while snickering behind their hands; our children's generation either looked at us like we were nuts or loved us to pieces for being so bonkers, and the grandkids shrieked for more.

Our generation -- basically, the Boomers -- can be a blast at family gatherings. We not longer get roaring drunk -- just tipsy enough (on cocktails!) to get even more garrulous and silly than usual. One branch of my extended family hails from Newfoundland, another from Scotland, so the same stories and jokes get told over and over again -- Themes and Variations on hilarity. We get high on the little ones' joy ... and on dessert. I myself overdosed on shortbread cookies that were loaded with chocolate chips. (Butter and chocolate: two of our main food groups, right?)

(I dare you to look at this image and not drool.)

Those of us who survive our midlife crises start to regress into a second childhood and we no longer care that we look like fools. We wear battery-lit flashing Christmas-light necklaces and keep our cracker party hats on through the entire meal.

... Come to think of it, we didn't have crackers this year! This just struck me now. Somebody had a big brain fart and forgot the crackers (That would have been several of us, hee hee). No one complained, though ... because no one recalled that we had no Christmas crackers! No one brought a Whoopee cushion either. I will have to secure these items for next Christmas ...

(This makes me giggle...)

As I was saying about our generation ... I recall a conversation I had with one of my best friends over a decade ago. We were imagining decrepitude -- seeing ourselves reclined in La-Z-Boy wheelchairs, blissfully soused / stoned on warmed cognac / cannabis tea / chocolate croissants, ear-buds in place and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon cranked straight into our brains. What a way to ride into eternity! ... This beloved friend died nearly eight years ago (!!) and if there's any sort of afterlife, I want him to be my guide into it!

... Whoops, I digress. About regression: in trauma-talk, we tend to consider regression through a terrorized lens, and call it flashback or flipping out or dissociation. It is those things, sometimes. It also can be pure goofiness -- the fart jokes and spy glasses -- and it's good to remember that. Regression can be fun ... especially when it's shared with people you've known all your life ... people you've shared a childhood with.

(All images are linked directly to their sources.)

2011-12-18T15:25:00.000-08:00

via Simply Isis

"If I understand it, I will heal it."

2011-12-16T22:41:00.000-08:00

December 7, 2011:

Western medicine says Nada, 'til you're really sick. There's nothing we can do now.

I don't accept that response as final.

December 16, 2011:

Good thing I didn't! I received blood lab results yesterday that indicate a small turn for the better. I didn't wait with dread ... I simply waited. I didn't know what to expect ... so I expected nothing. What a refreshing, relieving place to be in!

What's the point of expecting anything? We simply cannot know with complete certainty that anyone or anything will do what we want them to do. Half the time, anyway, we're not sure of what it is we do want. We are paradoxical creatures ...

... but I did feel certain; a pure resolve arose in me last night while I stood at my kitchen counter, waiting for my tea to steep. For the first time in my adult life, I'd received hard biological evidence of a condition that could be fatal, and six weeks later, more hard biological evidence of ... !! ... a change for the better. It is the most significant, positive medical news I've been given in nearly four years.

What have I done? -- It was that resolve. Four nights ago, while I was sitting at my desk, I despaired. I was still waiting for the lab results, and given the decline I've experienced over the last year, I wondered if it was all downhill from here on ... like an avalanche. Was my life on a threshold of irrevokable illness? My skin crawled with dread and I wondered if this Christmas, like my grandmother used to declare every December 25th from her place at the head of the table, might be my last.

I recall grabbing the edge of my desk, jutting my head to the left, and growling. Raw and low in my throat, thinking No. There is such seduction in a thought of suicide -- Rest, at last.

No. As I clutched, my heart did something it's never done before. It ... banged -- once -- with brutal force. I doubled over. I'm in my fifties now, so there's no fooling around with a banging heart.

Heart attack? Stroke? What -- I've laid both palms over my chest and I press -- inward -- holding it in ... holding my heart and saying Live. I Want To Live. My heart had sounded -- It was a jolt -- inward -- inward to out -- Listen up! -- like a great drum, struck next to the ear --

... It went like this: A moment before the banging heart, a swell of mourning blew up from the depths and I thought, God -- I feel like I've just begun to grieve ... Life, into the second year after a catastrophic loss, is a continual absorption of the way things are now ... Everything ... changed --

The phantom-pain of amputation comes on ... the very real pain of the phantom who was you, before the loss ...

No; no more of this -- Too much hurt -- urge to be done with it; to die -- no other way out of this kind of pain --

BANG!

The heart explodes ... remains intact. Body doubles over the chest; both hands press and press to the sternum and solar plexus.

The growl, from deep in the throat: feral, furious. A voice: I WANT TO LIVE!

Words, and deep, solemn breaths: I want to live. I want to live. I want to live --

Sylvia Plath comes to mind -- fragments of a poem -- I listened to the old brag of my heart / I am / I am / I am --

Then my voice again, or the voice of Life within me ... I have to cry -- I have to cry -- I have to cry -- I have to lie down -- Holy shit, that was my heart --

... but before I can lie down, there are things to be done. I have to pee (and I do so, later, twice) and that means getting the cat off my lap, and I have to clean the litter box and feed the cats ... get a glass of water -- and check the cats' water bowls ... bring some toilet paper into the bedroom for my cry --

I end up bringing the roll of TP to my bedside before I pee, so once I'm seated on the loo, I realize that I've got no TP here and now. Pants up, grab the roll, back to the loo. My cats come in and nag me for food, for pats, for me to stay alive. I give in to them, like I always do.

By the time I've done everything to ensure an uninterrupted cry, I no longer feel the need to mourn. I've become too engaged in other things, in the usual minutae that saves my life ... again.

I'm hungry ... so I eat. I lie down on my bed ... and one of my cats settles down on my chest. He kneads and purrs ... and I soften. We melt. I feel warmed, soothed, slowed, tended, quieted.

More words come to mind: Release my trapped heart, from a Christian psalm ... Cup your hands around my becoming, recalled and tweaked from Rainer Maria Rilke ... Anointing rhythms ... the warm palm of mercy ... gentle, gentle ... and suddenly, from I don't know where: We have an inner bell -- the tapping of the heart!

I turn onto my side, cradle my heart, and cry ... in release ... in resurgence.

Art credit: 'Fire heart' by arghus, via deviantart.com

More musings on mercy

2011-12-07T17:08:00.000-08:00

Art: Lisa Ballard, 'Mercy and Me'

I keep arriving here: at the warm, open palm of mercy. Someone who once loved me gave me a directive that I've not heard before or since: 'To thine own self be merciful.'

That was a potent hit to the head of the existential nail, one of the sanest things anyone's ever said to me. To thine own self be merciful.

Is any work we can do more imperative? If we can't live in our own skin in a state of truce (at the very least), how can we live with one another?

No wonder mercy is such a visceral challenge. As a principle, mercy is often overlaid with religious overtones -- it's seen as a saintly state that few, if any, of us can attain for more than an instant at a time.

Is it a saintly state? Is mercy at all natural to our makeup? Are we 'hardwired' to salve, rather than savage, ourselves and other beings? (Are we hardwired to do both?) Can mercy occur independently of injury -- does an injury always have to be inflicted before mercy is bestowed?

Mercy makes me sweat. To thine own self be merciful ... I dare you. Mercy demands that we look long and deep into the mirror of every being we encounter ... beyond apparent appearances, into the depths of a life ...

Sometimes I think that mercy is the opposite of madness. Mercy is lucid -- lucid like the noon sun without the burn. Sees all; denies nothing. Sees into and through.

I wonder about mercy in relation with kindness, compassion, altruism ... and I hone in on what makes mercy mercy.

It's the quiet ... that warm, open palm. Whenever I imagine and recall my own experiences of mercy, I know touch. Skin meeting skin with loving intent ... and we soften. The whole body sighs ... We are safe; we surrender.

A warm, open palm ... a belly, a cheek, a shoulder ... a hug, a spoon, a palm spooning a face ... a nuzzle, a snuffle, a laying-on, a gentling, a rest.

Mercy reaches and receives the core ... and warms us there.

Mercy says, Been there, done that, lived it -- without the cynicism. And then: I dare you to be kind ... to yourself.

Realizations

2011-12-06T11:00:00.000-08:00

One of the very few benefits of a 'mental illness' diagnosis is that medical practitioners tend to leave a person alone from the cranium on down. However ... can such a diagnosis be authentic if the body -- and the whole person -- is routinely ignored, or if embodied symptoms are judged as imagined, 'made up', supposed proof of a person's 'craziness'? Can such a diagnosis be true if a label is ascribed without the physical enquiries that accompany suspicion of a condition that can be affirmed through examining a person within -- blood tests, scans, biopsies, etc.?

I think, No. I've long known -- and finally, my sense of 'something more' is being validated through monthly blood scans and other concrete, examined evidence of bodily distress -- that the psychiatric diagnoses ascribed to my situation are at best incomplete, and at worst, false -- for they do not reflect my entire embodied experience.

One of the psychiatric labels adhered to my situation is 'major depression, recurrent.' Depression is considered a 'mood disorder' -- and I know it most deeply as a metabolic disorder. It's been said that the brain is our 'master gland' -- and if we suppose that 'mood disorders' are based in the brain, we might ask ourselves:

Where is this 'mentation' that is evidence of a mind ... and where is this mind that a diagnosis of 'mental illness' derives from?

In the brain. And what is the brain?

An organ.

Where does the brain reside?

In the body.

What does this 'master gland' do, all told?

It regulates ... everything.

I'm not a medical or scientific professional. I am a scholar and a person whose professional background is in the field of psychology and psychotherapy. I am also a person who knows in my bones that every diagnosis given to a person's condition reflects, in its part, a facet of one's entire embodied experience.

I think of diagnostic enquiry as a teasing-out of truth ... and the dear human body cannot tell a lie. Bless the body for the irrrefutable truths it reveals ...

During my own diagnostic journey, I've not wanted to pile 'wrong upon wrong' -- It is no joy to be confronted with grave medical facts, such as I have been given over the last several months. It is a relief to have my embodied experience and knowledge of same finally validated. New information gives me something concrete to work with ... and it raises the bar of the quality of medical care that my condition receives. I don't want to be known as a constellation of symptoms ... and those symptoms, once confirmed and validated, offer information to learn from and to work with in my everyday life.

The 'mental illness' recedes in importance. The brain, master regulator that it is, does not. The body -- this home in which my entire person resides, is the nexus of truth, and will not be ignored in the entire person's quest for understanding.

All images found at brainharmonycenter.com

An irrefutable truth

2011-12-01T21:39:00.000-08:00

"Emotional access to the truth is the indispensable precondition of healing."

~ Alice Miller

... and what is the truth to you, dear reader?

(Wordplay: The truth ... as contrasted with a truth ... my truth ... one truth ... or simply, truth ... )

I do know one thing, incontestably. I do know this to be true, and the truth:

Love keeps us alive.

"Emotional access to the truth ..."

Not intellectual access, cognitive access, spiritual or even somatic access.

Emotional access: pulses of truth in motion: feeling: felt sense.

Some thinkers have considered emotion as energy in motion. I add: energy in motion in us ... through us. Pulsing motion, pulsing truth embodied: heartbeat.

Love is hearts in sync.

"Love changes molecular structure."

~ Jeanette Winterson

Whose molecular structure have you changed?

Who has changed yours?

Here's a Christmas / Solstice gift we all can give:

Change somebody's molecular structure.

Love someone, heart to heart.

(The image is that of a 'vibrant healthy cell.' I'm using it in my meditations ...)

Trauma, transforming: volitional paralysis and dissociation

2011-10-25T18:28:00.000-07:00

Art by Lisa Ballard, "Child State"

A sudden startle: an epiphany about my instinctive habit (hardwiring?) of being as small, still, and silent as possible; a Voice from who knows where says,

It's not being lazy. It's having been frozen.

It's not laziness, not sloth.

It is volitional paralysis

and your cage and its bars

are flimsy as withering lace --

November leaves

Photo by Michael Dibari

Question: What brought you back from dissociation?

Response: An idea, and the writing, then the writing of it.

Photo via The Thesis Whisperer

Selfwithness

2011-09-08T21:16:00.000-07:00

Yes, illness and injury can evoke a deep selfishness in us ... a necessary selfishness: the will to live and the need -- the urge -- to be well and strong and vital. What also can come: selfwithness ... an evolution in our capacity for empathy and tendresse ... calm/ing, composed and courageous response to illness and injury, rather than contemptuous reaction against them --

For every one's experience is a mirror of all ... and practical, respectfully applied compassion -- a genuine response to what we find in the mirror -- is the one medicine that never, ever fails --

Shelter ... in a song and in a dream

2011-08-06T14:56:00.000-07:00

I'm singing this song to my own good soul today:

You will shelter me, my love

I will shelter you

Love is our shelter ...

especially the love we give to ourselves.

I had a helluva dream this afternoon while napping. Long story short: a stalker-man came into my apartment while I slept (in the dream), taping screeds of "love" onto my walls. I saw the sheets of paper (one was orange) and started to scream. I screamed at my neighbours to call 911; I screamed at my former husband (who was living across the hall) to help (he didn't); I screamed the stalker right out of the building when he showed up at my door. I even gave the police officer (when she finally showed up) a piece of my mind when she acted more like a perky 'life coach' than a cop. "Dust for prints!" I told her. I was enraged.

This dream's an evolution. The theme -- being stalked, chased, assaulted -- has been constant for about 27 years. What's changing is my response to the threats. I'm feeling terror, yes ... and anger. I feel furious at the invasion, whatever it is. I feel furious at other people's cavalier and nonsensical reactions to my calls for help. Fury is becoming my friend ... and I am becoming my own shelter.

I wonder if I should allow myself out with a stain on my shirt.

2011-07-25T22:45:00.000-07:00

Photo from Fabulous Mommy

A few years ago, one of my dear friends -- call her Faith -- had a one-time assessment consult with a psychiatrist. My friend, who is a mother and grandmother, wore a blouse that had a stain on it to the interview.

She later received a copy of the report on her perceived human condition, and the stain on her shirt was remarked on -- as a sign of mental illness. Of degraded capacity, care and concern. "Whatever!" she told me, ironic --

One would think the equation is simple:

One mother/grandmother + one stained shirt = DUH!

There are so many ways the shirt could get stained: Maybe Faith's daughter and infant grandchild are out in the waiting room during the consult, and the wee one spat up on Nana's shirt before the inner door opened. Maybe it's an old coffee stain, embedded. Or ketchup, grape juice or ink. Maybe the shirt is her daughter's; maybe it's mine! Maybe Faith spilled coffee on it in the car on the way to the appointment (she does love her coffee!) ... maybe it's a shirt she feels safe and embraced in ... or it was the first thing she pulled out of the closet today. Who knows!

I used to work as a therapist. My teachers modeled respectful curiosity in their work; their questions invited response in the people they were in dialogue with. (They also taught that dialogue means, in one sense, a shared search for meaning.) When they asked a question, it was crafted with care; pointed yet gentle in reach. Three of them, especially, asked their questions in a state of wonder, both as clinicians and persons.

What a joy to receive a beautiful, baffling question! One that cuts to the quick of things, but without doing harm. One that often arrives toned with merciful humour. A curious question, asked with respect, slid subtly into the space between us ...

Asking the right question can halt assumption in its tracks ... and hearing a response as one thread in a story, rather than as something wrong with a person, changes the entire atmosphere of a dialogue.

I can tell you, I'd be all over that stain on the shirt in a one-time consult -- in silence, in a page of my mind, the question awaiting a moment emergent for the asking. I probably wouldn't ask the question as a question; it'd pop out, perhaps, if Faith mentions a grandchild. "A baby?" I might say ... and sometime in there, it might seem right to chuckle softly and wonder out loud about the stain on her shirt, noting its colour -- if it's purple and I've learned that the child is old enough to drink grape juice, I might simply ask, "Grape juice?"

A whole story could live in that stain, and I have no idea what the story is until Faith or I draw our focus to it, and Faith tells me whatever she chooses to tell me.

Just the word "stain" is loaded -- as many words are. Meaning, metaphor, myth. Cascading layers of theme and variations -- all from a stain on a shirt.

Story or symptom? -- Maybe it's both, and then something else.

... As it was, Faith and I howled with laughter at the assumption. "I've got a stain on my shirt! I'm fucked!" she roared. We laughed ourselves stupid, Faith and her friend.

Dreams, heat, betrayal, and dignity after the end

2011-07-23T08:49:00.000-07:00

Amazing how our dreams will acknowledge and announce whatever we cannot / will not during the times we are awake ...

This heat! -- It definitely affects one's capacity to think. Both my thinking and my speech stutter when the heat is so grinding that I catch myself panting like a dog. It's gotten me to wondering about people who live in regions that are this hot most or all of the time -- and people who are making war, suffering war, in those places. The atmospheric heat is added to by whatever people are firing at each other -- bombs, missiles, Molotov cocktails ... I wonder if bodies that exist in perpetually hot places come to act like they're running a fever ... and I wonder what the heat does to their brains.

I wonder about soldiers whose uniforms pretty much seal them in; soldiers who bear the weight of all they must carry ... soldiers whose helmets heat up their heads.

Inescapable heat -- does it craze a person; make his blood boil with rage?

Wondering if exposure to relentless heat becomes a traumatic injury to the body, the blood, and the brain. Trauma, in part, is an experience of 'no escape' -- and we know that excess heat can derange, exhaust, and kill a person --

Betrayal = relational treason. The harm done is tidal, demolishing a person's relational capacities with one strike to the heart. All that one has known as home: presence, protection, loving enfoldment, the sense that one matters ... All of it axed by another in an instant. Betrayal is a killing thing unless the one betrayed can quickly do the same: amputate the betrayer away from his or her life. There is no return after betrayal ... There is only a world, bereft of that other primary presence; an alien world, where a beloved has mutated into a predator. The one betrayed must cut off his own heart from the one who betrays -- a double, possibly mortal blow. Heart hacked at by a loved one, and then by oneself -- paradoxically, in order to survive the first blow.

How can one go on after betrayal? By loving oneself: ferociously, protectively, in extremis, no matter what the harm done. Betrayal attacks our essence: our soul. We are seen and treated as worthy of naught -- and if we believe in that sight, if we believe that we are here to be contempted by others, we will die to all good; we will die to relation; we will rot in our skin.

Dignity in the ruins of belonging: this is what saves us. We must see the wreckage as sacred, and rebuild ...

In an Unspoken Voice: Peter A. Levine's magnum opus

2011-07-11T17:50:00.000-07:00

Though broken, we begin

to repair, again and again,

the dawn

that insists

on our rising

Imposed helplessness -- entrapment without hope of release -- injures a whole person; all of the organism's resources grab at survival, and if survival is under threat and remains under threat, the human organism eventually collapses into a state of submission, overwhelmed not only by whatever threatens it, but also (mercifully) by its own innate capacity for sensory shutdown.

The glitch in our innate urge towards self-preservation occurs if we are unable to escape what endangers us ... and in the face of mortal threat, we also cannot escape the chemical cascade within that is every body's reaction to immanent extinction. If we don't actually die, we vacate to whatever extent that we can. We don't become zombies -- we are still biologically alive. We do become absent to presence ... exiles, in a way, from Life itself.

Peter's forty-plus years of experience, scholarship and therapeutic practice culminate in his marvelous book; for me, it's a lifesaver. He understands trauma to its core ... and his understanding and work are proof that we can return from the near-dead. I've been returning for nearly 30 years now, after having experienced grave trauma from a six-week premature birth through childhood abuse, sexual assaults, and other violent losses. I've decided to write my way through Peter's book, chapter by chapter, in concert with what I have learned through my life. In this journey I will intersperse chapter highlights and summaries with my own experience, intuition, and learnings.

To reach out ... this is one of the primary ways that we save our own lives. I am learning, over and over, to reach out ... to imagine that there may be a loving hand at the end of my reach, a hand that will touch my own, and hold on. Peter's book is such a hand.

Peter Levine ... a gentle sage

Here is the truth:

2011-07-11T12:46:00.000-07:00

A child cries,

I'm just trying to be good!

Life, in response:

You are good, just by being.

This I believe, and this I am.

2011-07-09T16:09:00.000-07:00

Artist: Michael Leunig

The vast majority of the race ... are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves.

Mark Twain wrote those words; I concur with them. Perhaps the 'aggressive and pitiless minority' among us now are the people who are touted as the 'top 1%' -- the billionaires ... and those who aspire and aggress themselves to that most insular club.

I am not 'secretly kind-hearted' -- The few who have known me know also that I don't have it in me to behave with cruelty towards my fellow humans. Occasionally, I've wished that I did.

We all have an 'aggressive and pitiless minority' in our lives. What do you do in relation with yours? Do you bide them? Run from them? Do you ever fight back? Have you ever returned contempt with contempt? Or do you heap the tar you wish you could fling at another onto yourself?

Gentleness is the antidote for cruelty.

Those words are Plato's. I wish I could agree with him. There are some who use another's gentle nature as an accelerant for malice; perhaps, if there is anything humane left in them, they must inflict agony upon others so they don't feel their own.

A gentle will, alert and measured respect, and intent to be harmless -- these choices usually evoke the same in our fellows. When they don't ... the gentle are maimed.

There is a secret person undamaged in every individual.

(Paul Shepherd)

Yes, there is. How, though, does one decide to keep that 'undamaged person' a secret? What are we that we make such a choice ... and how is it that so often, we inflict the damage done to us upon others?

And what of we who keep our damage in secret?

What of us is humane, and what merely human?

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.

(Willa Cather)

I will continue to be kind. I know, in my bones, no other way. I cannot help but wonder, though, if my gentle nature will be my undoing. Predators scent the blood of those they perceive as weak; human predators feel glee when they know they have prey in their sights. We tend, I suppose, to be more deer or more lion in nature ... more dolphin or more shark.

How can we live beyond predator and prey? Does kindness really have a place in human concourse ... or do we always and only use others for what we can take from them, whether or not they have something to give? Is it possible, to paraphrase Franklin D. Roosevelt, that

... kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free person. A person does not have to be cruel to be tough ... ?

When a need for rest becomes an urge to obliviate consciousness

2011-06-20T13:11:00.000-07:00

At around noon today, one of my beloved elders phoned me. I'd just tucked myself into bed with a book and was realizing that I was too sleepy to read. I told my elder how dopey I felt, and she said, "Too much partying last night!"

No. Not "too much partying" (those days are long gone!). Too much ... simply too much. Yesterday was a banner day, full of beautiful surprises -- a Father's Day phone conversation with my Dad, who estranged himself from me many years ago and yesterday not only picked up the phone when I called, but listened to me blather "I love you" several times; a dinner invitation from a dear friend (BBQ'ed steak!) who'd also invited two other friends from out of town -- They'd come to visit me just the day before, so I got to see them two days in a row. These friends had also brought me a bounty of nourishing foods -- veggies, fruits, cheeses, bread, juice, frozen spinach pizza -- so my belly and heart were overflowing by last night. I felt full of all the best gifts of Life.

I was overstimulated by it all, and didn't fall asleep 'til about 4:30 a.m., so a few hours after I'd originally arisen later this morning, I needed to sleep again. When my elder phoned, I began to experience the closing-in of panic -- simply from holding a phone receiver to my ear and absorbing the sound of another human voice. I couldn't get off the phone fast enough ... and this elder is someone whose stories I usually love to hear.

In minutes, I was asleep. I was down for a couple of hours -- until the phone rang again! I chose not to answer it ... and as I was waiting for my tea-water to boil, I got to wondering what is happening inside me when this desperation to sleep comes on.

Survivors of trauma (trauma being helpless entrapment + terror) can turn on a dime from functional human beings into maddened primal creatures. Once overwhelmed nearly to death, a person's nervous system tends now to be overwhelmed by the ordinary. It's simply too much.

I've worked for decades to moderate my inability to tolerate much sensation, and have integrated an 'underwhelm list' to the point of habit. The first imperative on that list is to keep my senses operative in the present moment. I'll focus my eyes on something nearby, name it to myself, and notice it. Then I'll scan around the space I'm in, telling myself where I am. I'll hear the word Breathe... in my head, and I'll do it. Right down to my belly, if present tension allows it.

There are more imperatives on that underwhelm list like Move; drink a glass of water; stay warm -- but those first few are the most important. If I don't or can't orient myself to the immediate moment, I'm quickly lost. I feel trapped.

One of the ways that I escape panic, I realize, is to relieve myself of consciousness. This is what any creature does when consciousness itself becomes too much -- a prey-creature, brought down and unable to escape, will become numb to sensation and dumb to sense itself -- in effect, its body begins to shut itself down. This is Nature's mercy when death is immanent.

My body, because I experienced trauma at birth (if not before), seems to have a basal set-point of shock and immanent shutdown. As a neonate, I was born six weeks early and went into cardiac arrest three times in my first three days. Imagine the scene of an ER trauma suite with an adult body on the table, being intervened upon by the lifesaving invasions of a trauma team.

Now imagine all that bearing down on a newborn who weighs less than two pounds.

No wonder ... no wonder, I thought as I stirred my tea, all these years later.

There's almost a need to not be that overcomes me when even ordinary experience becomes extreme. It's not what I know as my old 'suicidal imperative' -- There is no urge to do myself harm; there is no rage, no despair, no intent to bleed out the pain. There is no emotion, really, but fear in its purest form ... and then what fear becomes when even it is exhausted.

If the body can't escape, then the consciousness will.

A primitive central nervous system, like that of a newborn baby, cannot differentiate among degrees of danger, or discern any sense in what the body can only know as a threat to its life. And when a person of any age is dangled over the edge of death, the animal within us begins to shut itself down. Nature's last mercy.

When we're yanked back to full existence, we're shell-shocked.

... So there I am on the phone with my beloved elder, hearing her launch into a story, and my nervous system cries out, Escape! I think she felt miffed that I ended the call, having decided that I'd engaged in "too much partying" last night. It would sound strange to a person who hasn't experienced the extremes of sensation that I have, to hear the panic quickening my voice during an ordinary conversation, and my insistence that I need to sleep now -- goodbye!

I'm feeling the urge to sleep again as I type these words. Lie down; go under. Not to die, but to rest.

I think there's a differentiation we need to realize here, between the desire for escape from consciousness and the urge to kill oneself. I'm going to sleep on that thought for now ... More later.

Rejection and the harrowing path to relation

2011-06-16T13:10:00.000-07:00

I've just finished reading a beautiful story -- Jamesland, by Michelle Huneven. William James, the philosopher and one of the fathers of modern psychology, is an overarching presence in the life of his fictional great-great granddaughter, Alice, and her small tribe of friends and family ... all of whom grapple with the universal question, How do people live in this world?

One character in the story, Pete Ross, is a broken man who once commanded a magnificent restaurant in Los Angeles. His entire life has shattered -- his marriage, culinary and social skills, and ability to relate in harmonious tandem with other people.

His character resonates deeply with my own ... especially in his mother's dispossession of him. My own mother conceived me only about eight months after my elder sibling was born; she didn't want another child, and had suffered several miscarriages. I 'stuck' ... and was born six weeks premature. Several factors conjoined to make it impossible for my mother and I to bond; this existential rupture has hounded me my whole life.

Bonded relation is a sense of home within a person ... a sense that I have scrabbled to cultivate and mature. Michelle Huneven writes Pete's character with a depth of empathy that had me weeping and diving for my pen; I've inscribed several passages into my journal. Pete's experience of self has so often mirrored my own in his

... oldest, deepest personal hell, the wastes of his mother's indifference and his attendant self-loathing. "It feels like I have to die," he said, meaning exactly that: the discarded infant starves to death.

I have noticed, in the wake of my former husband's desertion of me, that my body's basic regulatory rhythms and powers have threatened to shut down several times. Sleep, temperature regulation, vital energy, appetite -- all have been thrown so far out of balance that these basics require constant tending before I can accomplish anything else. I know that I was a 'failure to thrive' baby; that I had no instinct to suckle; that my heart stopped three times in my first three days of life. My mother, given the times (late 1950s), was not allowed to hold or nurse me. Through my childhood, her own anguish and escalating addiction to alcohol made it impossible for us to ever bond. I was a discarded infant ... and struggle mightily to believe that I am a worthy person now. I am adept at discarding myself and unconsciously provoking others to discard me; it's what I learned to do before I knew what I was learning.

Pete sometimes grokked, of course, that his own devout self-loathing was born in her disappointment and rage at having had him, at his very being -- deadly emotions that he'd assimilated and internalized, possibly even prenatally ... Pete had not been welcomed warmly into this world. And the result? As Freeman, his psychiatrist, scrawled so succinctly on his chart: personality incompatible with life.

... personality incompatible with life. That's the line that brought on my tears. Is my personality incompatible with life? I really don't know. I would love to ask some people I've known and loved -- some former mentors and therapists, a few relatives, several friends. One aunt, about 15 years ago after I'd re-engaged with my family after a sanity-saving six-year separation, chided me as I was leaving her home at the end of a gathering: "We're not poison, you know!" I felt slapped, said nothing, and beat it out of her house, realizing what I'd have said back if I'd been able to speak: "No, you're not -- I am."

This is my confession: I've always believed that I was poisonous, toxic ... filth. It's a belief that is inscribed so acidly into my core that I can't seem to extract and discard it. Love tends to bounce off me as if I'm made of repellent. The man who was my husband loved me, cherished me -- until he couldn't any more. When I could love him, I gave everything I had, which was more than I thought myself ever capable of. When my health broke nearly to a killing point three years ago, it was all I could do to merely breathe. It's been a long and harrowing road back from the brink.

Pete Ross returns from the brink, from the "slow churning of a black, tarry plasm with the occasional nauseating freefall." By the end of the story, he recognizes a "first hint of pity" for his mother's ravaged soul ... and he begins to apprehend that the insistent thrum of love is, indeed, pulsing within him. The story closes before we can know if Pete comes to feel affection for his mother; my story still unfolds, and I did come to love my mother, as much as I could. It ended up being not a willed love so much as an inevitable love -- the imperative, I suppose, of being her child; the helpless (?) familial thrusting of my heart towards hers as I came to understand who she was and what rubble she had emerged from. In the end, she did what we all do: the best she could with what she had. It became enough for me.

I hold to that loving thrum in myself, even when it doesn't seem real. It is, and that's one belief that I will never relinquish, even if the existential shrapnel in my being continues to pierce. Some wounds don't heal completely, but the person around them can ...

To sleep, perchance to soften

2011-06-11T14:17:00.000-07:00

I've just awoken from nearly twelve hours of sleep ... My first thought was, "To sleep, perchance to soften."

Soften what? -- Tension. The tension. The tension that rides, riddles, and cages my form. Sometimes sleep is the only relief.

I remember when I had a full-time job whose expectation of constant speed, hour-by-hour quotas, and results, results, results! jangled my brain and body for eight hours every day, five days a week. I felt like I was trapped inside an alarm clock that wouldn't -- couldn't -- stop clanging. Worse, I had to sit for those eight hours, even as my nervous system buzzed with a frenzied need to run, run, run away and keep on running. No wonder 'working stiffs' often fall into inertia when there's finally a break from the imperative of speed that somebody else imposes. Excessive tension hijacks our ability to soften ... so we obliviate ourselves somehow, in order to release and relieve the jangling within ... to shut off that damn clock.

Reader, does this ring true with your own experience? Do you sometimes find that sleep is the only good medicine for excessive tension?

When a quote hits home

2011-06-08T13:11:00.000-07:00

All it takes for evil to triumph is for a good person to do nothing.

~Edmund Burke (paraphrased)

A good person lies down, gravely exhausted, and does not get up again. She might still be biologically alive, but something of her essence has vacated. Psychologically and relationally, she's gone. She's broken, and her life force is seeping from the crack.

I've come to think of post-traumatic stress more and more a state of existential and metabolic depletion -- To be shocked almost to death is to return from the nearly-dead with something truly missing.

The exhaustion of having survived and prevailed over a threat to our life makes us both exceptionally strong and vitally spent. Evil has not triumphed ... and good has very little fuel to run on. Sometimes, the good person does 'nothing' because all energy is being used for further survival, for the body and soul to remain alive.

I consider it heroic that I am a kind person. My character is heroic because I've not done to anyone what was done to me. I've lashed out, brutally, twice in my life -- once as a child, once not too long ago. In both instances my life was under threat. I have never, though, gone at another person deliberately, with specific intention to hurt that person.

No medals are given to those of us who quietly stay alive in horror's aftermath. Often, we go into hiding and remain there. What do we most want? -- Rest, and peace. Quiet. Space to breathe. Warmth. Sleep. To be left alone.

We want to be left alone ... primarily, left unmolested; left to haul our broken body and soul-parts back to home base so we can repair them. We go into hiding in order to survive the assault, and to nurse ourselves back to full function, if we can. Every creature does this. Yes, we want to be left alone ... but not left alone. There's a huge difference between those two tones of 'alone'.

But the only creature that commits evil on others is the human. The most shredding injury that a human being can experience is to be targeted for attack by another human, especially by one with whom we would naturally be, or thought we were, in safe, bonded relation with.

If I appear to be doing nothing -- believe me, I'm not.

Dispatch from between the jaws

2011-06-03T10:34:00.000-07:00

I was awoken this morning by a ringing phone; a robo-call was reminding me to complete my census form, which I submitted online several days ago. My federal government wants me to know that I count.

I cancelled my phone's answering service a few days ago because it's become too expensive. I'm becoming afraid to eat because by the time my essential bills and rent are paid, I have about seven dollars a day to live on. That's for everything -- food, water, food and care for my two cats, medicine, household supplies, clothing, emergencies.

A few weeks ago, one of my relatives drove in from out of town to take me to lunch. This relative, I'd heard, has been "worried" about me. The lunch cost about as much as I would spend on two weeks' worth of groceries. It was delicious, and I was grateful for the meal. Other than that, this relative offered no help; I left this person a phone message later that day to express my thanks, and heard nothing in return.

Yesterday, an old friend from college came out of the blue to chat with me on a social network -- We laughed ourselves into jelly with stories, jokes, memories ... That old friend helped me to stay alive for another day. I told her nothing about my situation other than I've been very ill, was recently abandoned by my mate, and am working hard to regain my vitality.

Today it's my cats, and some ferocious, small flame within me. This is a day of pure blue sky and birdsong ... and when I step out to my balcony, I see a road-roller parked halfway down the street, and construction signs erected near the machine and at my end of the block. Seems that this summer -- the second season in Canada, next to winter (but that's changing rapidly with the climate) -- my street is one of the lucky ones that'll be repaved, and residents of my street will be inhaling tar fumes and hearing machines that scream all day for who knows how many days.

I'm close to feeling like 'I can't do it anymore' -- and I must. Two small, cherished creatures depend on me for their survival. It would take very little for all three of us to turn feral; I am one monthly benefit cheque away from being turfed to the street.

On whom do I depend? -- No one. My original family is broken beyond repair, and those who do offer help do it sporadically, when they can. The people who have given most are those with the least to give of money and material goods. I have no relatives nearby, and my local friends -- several of whom offered sanctuary and presence during the early months of my marital desertion -- seem to have fallen away, back to their usual lives. Many of these friends live with struggles similar to mine ... and a few live with much worse. I am presently of little practical use to anyone; perhaps that is my downfall.

I am constantly reminded to ask for help ... and I do ... and phone messages, emails are not returned. I recognize a threat: my own reluctance to ask for help in the first place, and a thought that other people may be seeing me now as a burden, as someone who always calls in need. I make sure to express as little need to others as possible -- I've pared down my requests to a once-monthly drive to my doctor, and a weekly run for big-item groceries. When this much appears to be too much, how can I continue to ask anyone for anything?

We live in a society whose ethos has become increasingly cruel, contemptuous, and competitive. "Ordinary" people are strapped. I can only ask for support for so long, until the number of unreturned calls and my old, old paralysis of will combine to shut down all initiative. It is a heartbreaking conundrum to be told again and again to reach out ... and then to be told "No, sorry, I can't" much more often than "Yes." Very few people are reaching out to me ... and when enough noes come my way, I stop asking. I find it abhorrent to be considered a weight on someone else's life. I struggle with the thought that I've become a beggar -- always asking.

How do we stay alive when there is almost nothing left? The walls of my house are crumbling; my father, who disowned me from his heart several years ago out of his own lifelong agony and predatory beliefs, is dying. I can't afford train fare to travel to his home, and he would reject me at the door. Even when my own strength is ebbing, I want to love ...

Today I don't know what to do anymore. One of the road machines has started up its engine; can I bear the noise? How much can one person bear before she simply lies down and doesn't get up again? This is not 'suicidal ideation' -- I have wrestled that demon to the ground. This is primal exhaustion duking it out with an ebbing life force. I won't give up -- I have given my word to several people I love, to my two cats, and to my own good soul.

My intrinsic gentle nature simply doesn't know what to do anymore.

A question about eating ... and falling asleep

2011-05-30T20:28:00.000-07:00

I've noticed something: that after I eat a meal ... after that lovely warm, flush feeling of food in the belly, I often experience an urge to sleep now. It can be overwhelming ...

My sense is that with my body being so currently depleted, the energy required to digest food is taking just about all that I have. I'm sleeping a lot -- like an infant -- and the need for deep sleep is overriding many other intentions.

There are other factors here -- chronic weight loss, metabolic exhaustion, an as-yet undiagnosed form of thrombocytopenia (a lowering of platelet volume in the blood). Continued fallout from having been divorced. Being a person who is both quite ill, and being the 'primary caregiver' to myself. All of it: exhausting ... or perhaps my body simply is depleted enough right now that there is only so much vital energy to go around.

Readers, have you ever had a similar experience?

Waking up, asking questions = a good sign

2011-05-30T09:09:00.000-07:00

I know I'm getting well when I awake in the morning with a mind full of questions -- speculative questions that aren't about my particular human condition.

This morning:

Do we help one another evolve, in function if not in form, when we are in loving relation with them?

Is loving relation itself a 'cure' of some kind for various aspects of illness?

What does love conquer ('Love conquers all')? Is 'conquer' the right word?

Is there such a condition as relational illness?

Onto something in trauma awareness?

2011-05-18T21:31:00.000-07:00

I've revisited a post that I wrote five days ago, and wonder about the relation between holding my breath and habitually tearing at my cuticles (with fingernails) and the inside of my mouth (with teeth). I've just noticed tonight how the two go together ... and how often they occur in concert.

Holding the breath and creating a sensation of pain. Seems paradoxical, doesn't it ... but it may be that the sensation of pain is what keeps me aware and alert -- does it prevent consciousness (thus the capacity to be aware, and to act from awareness) from shutting down?

Pain, to a point, sharpens awareness; there's a location for the mind to hone in on, even as the holding of breath threatens to shut everything down.

I consider briefly the 'chicken or egg' question, then set it aside. The two events -- shutting down and heightening sensation -- ravel one with the other in a continuous loop. Numbing and paining and numbing and paining ... and awareness.

I wonder if there's a link between these two-as-one, years-long habits, and my experience as a six-week preemie who required invasive medical interventions from birth through my first three months in the outside world. The agony for a premature infant ... I tell myself that I can't imagine it, even as numbness begins to spread down from the crown and sides of my head, into my temples and cheeks ... Pain accompanies this cloaking: sharp, piercing pain in the back of my neck and the region over my eyebrows. Was I drugged, I wonder ... and if so, did I fight the effects?

I say that I can't imagine it ... and off goes my body, doing just that. Sensory imagining. The dear body remembers it all.

I feel like I've been triggered both into awareness and dissociation -- another seeming paradox, and an exhausting conundrum where the lifelong habit of dissociation meets the gradually-acquired habit of applying awareness into the process of dissociation as it occurs. It's exhausting because it's so novel, so different -- a seeming clash between two ways of being. Directive, enquiring intuition probes an edge of a maladapted instinct for survival (Holding the breath per se is not going to keep me alive unless I'm underwater, or in some situation where holding the breath for a time must be done).

The impulse to act in habit is strong ... Right now, the inside of my mouth, at the cheeks, seems to itch for the bite of my teeth; the nails of my two middle fingers want to dig into the already broken skin of my thumbs' cuticles.

Strong urge for sensation -- particular and painful pain (though small and local in scope). Why pain rather than conscious awareness? Is pain more familiar; does it keep me more aware and awake, more alert?

Again, I think on the agony of the premature infant, circa 1960. The agony that I cannot describe -- I'm sure that nobody can, since the infant's brain is yet devoid of language. I recall learning, in my therapeutic training, that there is no way to directly recall in words the human experience before the age at which a child begins to speak and make sense of the relation between words and experience.

The body says it.

Sustaining sensical awareness is hard work, when my fingers want to cut and my teeth want to bite. I want to sleep, too ... Is this my body's bid to shut off consciousness, or a feeling of being spent after a bout of hard work?

And so to bed ... Perhaps my dreams will reveal a response.

Noticing swings in vitality and stamina

2011-05-15T21:38:00.000-07:00

Whew! What a rush the last eleven days have been ... sort of. Half rush, half ungh.

It seems to be a pattern nowadays that for every 'unit' of energy my body puts out, I have to pass an equivalent amount in rest or sleep. Half-and-half is a huge improvement :-)

Maybe each 'unit' of rest also requires the equivalent amount of activity ... I've never seen it this way before ... I get urges to walk, dance, stretch ... to move ... especially now that Spring has (finally!) come on.

I feel like a first-grader in some ways -- 1 + 1 = 2; this goes with that -- the absolute basics. Breathe, eat, drink, rest, move, relate ... and then figure out some basic math about it all.

My body's demanding this ... and part of the work right now is in discerning when rest means rest and not stagnation. (Major depression will do that to a person...) Sleep does not mean blotto for eighteen hours; it means six to eight hours per night, and an afternoon sleep if needed.

Physician, heal thyself.

... My cats show me how it's done. After they eat, what do they do? They rest. Boomph, they're down and asleep for as long as it takes to digest, assimilate, and metabolize their food. Then they're up -- oh, how they're up -- and they're badgering me for their next meal.

I think the wise human makes an early-to-mid-afternoon meal his largest -- even larger than breakfast. Too much brekkie makes us want to fall back into bed, doesn't it? Sunday's the day for that kind of treat ...

Big afternoon meal ... then a rest (Siesta's such a lovely word...), then back to the daily round. What we moderns don't seem to apprehend is that an afternoon rest is part of the daily round. Is it any wonder that we're so zapped by dinnertime (if we even have a dinnertime anymore)?

OK ... enough of sounding like everybody's grandmother! The thing I wanted to say before I went on my tangent is this: I seem to be at a point where two things have changed: One, that rest and activity are coming into close balance, and two, that my body just seemed to (how to say this; the awareness is new) ... up its energy a couple of hours ago. I was standing in my kitchen, knowing that I had to feed the cats, feed myself, and wash a load of dishes. I also have letters to write, people to call and talk with, a bed to change, vacuuming and laundry to do ...

Whoa, girl! Back to the basics! Right in that moment, what did I need to do? Feed the cats and feed myself. First things first. Other things in their time and when my body's ready to do them.

Just directing myself into that one direction -- feed the cats; feed myself -- seemed to accompany the surge of élan vital ... The surge itself was a surprise, a delight ...

The consequences for overwhelming myself can be dire. Blotto for eighteen hours ... or three days running (funny expression, that -- "three days running" -- when all I am is soggy-pancake flat). When exhaustion comes on -- when it overrides vitality -- I go down and stay there awhile. It's strange to realize that I'm often overwhelmed by the ordinary ... but that is how a survivor of existential injury often feels. How to recalibrate the default setting, so to speak?

By feeding the cats and feeding myself. First things first.

In the simple is serenity ... and a simple meal, simply made, sets the foundation for everything else.

Num.

A very sudden poem

2011-05-12T10:44:00.000-07:00

A buzz ratchets into my aural foreground; my hearing gets antsy and raw. There is an infinity of mowers, whackers and chainsaws out for their first tear-up today ... Any of us who live with extreme sensitivities in our sensory capacity will understand how maddened a nervous system can become when the world outside sounds like War of the Weedwhackers. I stand up and head for the window, spotting two whackers and one mower; my ears pick up at least two more machines farther off. Shit.

I sit down and fume ... then become aware that I'm holding my breath. My middle fingers are tearing at the cuticles of my thumbs, and I'm biting the inside of my cheeks.

Awareness is the bomb, I tell ya ...

... So I stop the biting, the picking, the holding of breath ... and I pick up my pen:

Machine = NOISE = threat

DISCERN.

First: listen,

and breathe.

Tend to the thuddering

heart with the palm,

the psalm

of your hand.

What is being

mown, then?

What, here,

is dying?

Some grass ...

and some bugs,

... some of the

smallest who serve.

Look: you are

safe in your home,

with your pen. Soon

you will scent

the release

of the spirit

of grass,

and your mouth

will fall

open and up

with recall

for a child

who is holding

the grass

to her nose,

and green ... I am

green with it

Now I am

home.

Sweetest relief: to be understood.

2011-04-28T10:17:00.000-07:00

I just hung up the phone from a dear friend whom I'll call Virginia (as in Woolf -- my friend, like Virginia, thinks and composes words in a fashion that is all at once dreamy, edged with startling intelligence, sometimes sardonic, and wise to the core). She and I were going to go out this afternoon to the library, run an errand or two, and best of all, sit down over tea and conversation. I had to renege; my legs are in tremors and deep, stabbing pain all of a sudden, and I know that I need massage, a bath, and flat-out rest in order to calm this muscular storm. I called Virginia and in her soothing, gently ironic way, she suggested that my guilt take a hike. We made a date for tomorrow afternoon, and BONUS! -- she'll be with another woman I've not seen in close to 20 years, someone very wise in the ways of healing (I'll call her Gaia).

Phew. I hate to renege on a visit with someone I love, but the people I love and the ones who love me: we understand one another. Sometimes we crackle and briefly butt heads ... yet at these moments, butting heads is what we need to do in order to arrive at understanding! (Interesting phrase, that -- butting heads -- Think of massive, antlered animals ... OUCH ... We never say butting hearts, do we? Hearts don't butt ... They buff and bunt like blissful cats ...)

To share understanding ... What a relief it is. To know that someone doesn't expect or need explanation, other than to be assured that you're OK to take care of yourself right now, that it's time for some Physician, heal thyself ...

Many -- no, I would say all of the people I hold most dear have been through their own versions of extreme experience, and though our stories are unique as our fingerprints, we live primarily from a deeper and more universal Story: an awareness of our common humanity, and a mercy of character that evolves from it. A very practical form of kindness, often spiced with laughter after essential well-being is assured and we know that we can ride out the choppy tide.

I so love the choice to understand. It is always a gift.

Now I must bathe. My dear legs need to ease. I had visitors yesterday, you see ... Three other dear friends, and a reunion of sorts. We shared a huge pot of homemade soup, crusty bread, salad, wine, pineapple cake made from scratch, tea, and hours of astounding conversation. My autonomic nervous system, which invariably perceives any long run of activity (over two hours at present) as a signal to knock me out, kept me revved for as long as it took to clean up the last remains of our gathering; then I hit the bed ... and couldn't sleep. Nightmarish, twitchy night. Urgh.

Softening that nervous system ... It seems to be my major challenge right now. God, it's exhausting. (A brief aside: when I last saw my dear physician a few days ago, he suggested that my experience of avalanching collapse with very little stimulation could be considered chronic fatigue syndrome* ... although he said that *CFS is not in wide medical use any more because it's understood as a baseline symptom of many serious conditions. Excessive fatigue, if I remember correctly, is the #1 concern that brings people to their doctors. ~ Amusing aside to the aside: About 22 years ago, when I was just beginning my work with my physician, I told him that another doctor, who specialized in CFS (aka CFIDS -- chronic fatigue and immunodeficiency syndrome, which rounds out the clinical picture more fully), had given my symptoms that diagnosis. My doc said, "It's a clinical nonentity." Isn't time a great maturing agent on how we think ...?

Yes ... that sense of being utterly spent -- I call it metabolic exhaustion and I think it's a newly emerging variation on the theme of excessive stress ...

Can't wait to see Virginia and Gaia (I hear she's a garden goddess!) tomorrow!

I'm curious ...

2011-04-24T18:40:00.000-07:00

... How would you describe your experience of post-traumatic stress in one or two words?

A reminder of Love

2011-04-16T10:58:00.000-07:00

Our need

to be in relation

soars

from the core of us

from the shrine

we have made

of our heart

from the altar

of light

where we tend

our furling

hopes, who

wait without waiting

for what is always,

already

there

Multiple triggers: Uh-oh

2011-04-14T20:46:00.000-07:00

This is going to be a raw, honest post. I'm experiencing a state of near-panic, brought on by a raft of mostly auditory triggers that barrelled over me all at once.

I know I'm in a bad way when I can't stand to hear even music. My music ... like Amos Lee singing "Black River," which is a song that usually makes me melt.

The kitchen tap dripping ... my two cats chowing down on their dinner ... thumping bass coming through the wall and floor from next door ... kids yelling out in the street ... the damn toilet plugged up again and for no good reason ... me wanting to soak in a bath and there's no bloody way I'll bathe near a plugged loo and I feel exhausted, again, after simply cooking and eating my dinner, which was a good one -- a sole fillet and some Italian wedding soup. Not bad for someone who on her worst days can barely ingest a cup of tea.

Being triggered so fast doesn't make sense after a meal full of protein ... Dammit, right in these moments, nothing makes sense ... er -- let me correct myself: nothing much makes sense -- I need to give honour where it's due ... and I salute myself for getting to my keyboard and giving my fingers something constructive to do after stooping down to clean a smear of cat food off the kitchen floor, attempting to flush the damn toilet for the third time, and making a snap decision to consider suicide while my fingertips gallop and twitch across the kitchen counter. What good am I anyway; I sit around most of the time picking at my cuticles and keeping my ears tuned to the threats I think I hear around me. Fucking PTSD.

I turned off my music (sorry, Amos) and -- Mother of all miracles -- the thumping died down next door. Etc. I'm here; it's now, and I want my bath. Dammit, I'm tired. Tired of feeling, most of the time whether I 'show' it or not, like a small feral beast, alternately in some frenzied, Icarus-high state of arousal ... or utterly spent; out of thought, out of breath, out of vitae. No wonder my husband left me -- I'm a monster -- too toxic to be with. Crazy thinking.

Right now I hate this chaos inside. I hate that I've been subject to it since my existence began. I'm sick of being sick in this way. Right now: Fuck all the slogans; fuck all the cheer. Screw "recovery." Veterans of war and other extreme experience will understand this depth of rage. It will pass, as all storms do ... and I figure that those of us who have survived being dangled over Death's edge have more stormy weather happening in our brains and solar plexes than people who have not been so dangled. Luck of the draw.

How does one adapt well to living in an oft-stormy place, I wonder ... and here my thinking shifts: a slight release, a subtle coax towards curiosity. A chill from Winter's tail end furls in through the window, over my head, over my hands and my face. A sensory truth: It's cold outside, and I like the wind on my skin. I sigh, twice. Let fall my hands to my lap.

Phew ... I'm through it.

Living an intention, one step at a time

2011-03-26T19:41:00.000-07:00

An intention is meaningful when it is accompanied by immediate action that indicates a self-directed change in behaviour.

Those words came to me just a few moments ago; I tweeted them under the tag #intentionality. I then thought to myself, OK then ... do it yourself -- Make an intention meaningful -- right now. Begin, and complete, a blog post.

I've begun so many over the last few months that I've lost count.

So it goes in my life right now: many, many small steps taken; then, usually, stoppage. I could call them 'false starts' -- but then I realize that no start is false. Making that one step is what matters.

It's like the adage: It's not the falling down that counts; it's whether you get back up again.

For a person like me whose essential metabolic systems have been so depleted, one step can feel monumental. But I've taken it.

I notice that I've used the word but a few times ... and it's a but of insistence, of presence, of proof. It's not a but that says, I can't do this.

It's a but that says, Yes I can; yes I have, and yes I will again.

Begin at the beginning, the wise ones say ...

Photo credit: Clare Colins, "one step at a time"

http://bit.ly/dJXgLL

A "useless" veteran of war speaks

2011-03-14T13:25:00.000-07:00

I was going through some older papers today, and found a scrap on which I'd written the following words. They're unattributed; I don't know the source. They look to have been written down about 18 years ago. If anyone knows their source, please let me know. I do sense intuitively that they were spoken -- whether by a story's character or a real person (is there really any difference in the end?) -- by an injured veteran of war ... They are so potent:

"It is so easy to be forgotten," he said. "While we who are used up limp on to our demise, the ones who are still steely, strong, and useful pound past. We drown in the dust they kick up, in the wake they expel ..."

Karin's latest.

2011-03-01T14:44:00.000-08:00

Karin Bartimole is one of my cherished blogging friends, and an artist of impeccable empathy ... Today she offered this painting, "Introvert", at her site ...
(Click on the image to zoom)

Thank you, Karin, for jostling me enough to post. I relate so deeply with this image -- the crouch, the blue, the green ...

One picture is worth a thousand words ... one picture inspires a person to write, even a little bit ... one reminds another of all we are in common ... another is compelled to pass on the gift, and so it goes ...

Be well, well, well, my friend ... and thank you ...

Mercy: a dare

2011-02-16T15:55:00.000-08:00

Forgive me

for becoming

in your eye

a repository

for your botched

lodestar

dreams

a compendium

of your aborted

hopes; the swill of,

apparently,

all your shame;

a talisman

corroded

that you left

to dust.

Forgive me as I

forgive myself

daily

for being

alive

in the way

that I am.

To thine own self

be merciful

you once told me

in a white-gold

cadence

Oh, the mayhem

that dare has left

in the dust

of its tide: it always

returns!

to thine own,

thine own, leave

mercy

in your wake.

I dare you.

The illustration is by Sam Brown,

who has created the amazing explodingdog --

a site where you can offer the artist

phrases and titles

for him to illustrate!

--> http://bit.ly/eQioBJ <--

Psychiatric drugs: doing how much harm? how much good?

2011-01-21T14:14:00.000-08:00

Common Health has posted videos and text about a hot topic of debate: whether psychiatric drugs can do more harm than good. Medical journalist Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic, and Dr. Andrew Nierenberg, director of the bipolar research program at Massachusetts General Hospital, spar over the issue; the debate itself isn't new, but the scope of it is.

I posted a response to the article; here it is:

I write as an adult in my early 50s who has been on a medical leave from work for the last three years, and who has been injured since infancy by C-PTSD, major depression, and chronic sleep disorders (my brain does not go into Stage 3 or 4 sleep). I also worked as a psychotherapist and social worker for 18 years. In relation to the debate about psychotropic medications, I've experienced them as both blessing and bane. After witnessing some miraculous symptom amelioration in two clients who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and were both prescribed a newly available drug (this would have been the mid-1990s), I finally bit the bullet during a horrific marital rupture and allowed my MD to prescribe me an SSRI. Sixteen days after I took the first pill, I awoke with a pervasive somatic and existential sense of a weight having lifted away; that sense remained for several months as a definite marker of change. Also, a few seemingly intractable, decades-long symptoms of deep injury -- uncontrollable rage, self-injury, some compulsions and phobias -- abated for the first time in my life.

I have been on that one drug for over 14 years now, moderating doses as needed (in concert with my MD). During the 2000s I was subject to some extreme, long-term stresses that eroded my health to the point where I was no longer able to work ... At my lowest point, I slept in a stupor of nightmares for up to 18 hours a day; my then-husband was taking care of both me and our home.

It's been three years since I first became ill. I am coming through the miasma, slowly ... and there are many, many active factors in my situation. They have included already compromised metabolic and immune function, violent neighbours from hell, a devolving baseline of function across all variables, a history of severe trauma, a staunchly devoted husband who ended up breaking down himself and divorcing me, a largely useless hospitalization last year, beloved friends, relatives and former colleagues with whom I share loving relation ... and a daily dose of that SSRI that is now appearing to do more harm than good. I have read Robert Whitaker's book -- twice -- and am considering his revelations in the context of my own experience and in all that I have witnessed and learned over the years. Ingesting any substance daily for 14 years will incur cumulative effects ...

I have been experiencing, over the last decade, symptoms that are novel -- that I know instinctively are not related to the original injuries or disorders. I have approached my physician about the possibility that the drug -- 14 years' worth -- is causing difficulties that were not extant before I began to take it. These symptoms include marked declines in both executive and practical cognitive functions, a destruction of my appetite and over 20 pounds of lost weight that I cannot seem to recover, deadened affect, empathy and ethical sense (I do believe, as Peter Kramer stated in Listening to Prozac, that these drugs can cause shifts in our sense of who we are and what matters to us), and further metabolic and blood disorders that began to emerge two years ago. I experience, daily, dizziness, tinnitus, vertigo and embarrassing lapses in focus, task completion and memory. I have lost muscle tone; new phobias have arisen, and I work very hard to regain a sense of volition and a willingness to be in relation with others and in the world. I don't know if I will ever again be 'gainfully employed.' I experience frightening deficits in sensory integration and tolerance; like an animal I panic in the face of stimuli that many others tend not to notice. I cannot follow conversation for long -- sensory / perceptive overwhelm causes all input to become jagged and jarring, like static at high volume and velocity. Composing this comment has taken me over three hours ... I come and go with activity, according to my present limits of tolerance and ability.

So much of neuropsychiatry is a crap shoot, isn't it ... I was very lucky in that the first drug I tried, at its initial dose, worked very well. Beyond several common side effects (some of which have remained), I functioned quite well for about five years. When I look back at the last decade, I am dismayed at the erosion of my health and abilities. At the same time, I know that that one drug was a gift when my very sanity was in question, back when I first began to take it.

I want to taper off the drug ... but at present I survive via a disability pension that would be immediately ended were I to attempt a drug withdrawal. I have medical verification that I am presently unable to work 'gainfully'. Right now, my work centers on recovering the capacities that have eroded, and taking consistent care of myself, my little home, my two cats, and my close bonds. Being in loving relation with trusted friends, mentors and kin (including my cats!) is the primary pivot around which my well-being turns. I'm relying on the basics to guide me through.

Believing in neuroplasticity and engaging in mindful practices like walks, baths, writing, yoga -- they are of huge help. I have an excellent physician who treats and converses with me with respect. He doesn't buy Whitaker's perspective ... and he is accepting of my perspective on things, as I am of his; we challenge one another. We've been working together for 20 years. He's prudent, practical, and kind. He also understands -- as I do -- that there are countless variables operating in each person, in each 'case.'

I understand both perspectives -- Whitaker's and Nierenberg's ... and polarized finger-pointing will do none of us any good. Both perspectives have arisen through study, analysis and synthesis of much information. "Anecdotal evidence" -- experiential stories from people who know from the inside out what effects various treatments can have -- is imperative in the conversation as well.

... Readers, what's your experience?

Living in the Otherwise

2011-01-20T14:58:00.000-08:00

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

~ Jane Kenyon

I live now
in the Otherwise.
My legs are strong
enough to carry
the emptied vessel
of my mated self. The rest
of me remembers
on occasion
to eat. Peaches
are many months
down the road, and my bed
is ripe
with an absence
that will soon fall
from the tree. The birch
forest quivers and peels
in patches as I dream.
Two new paintings,
Buddhas, grace
and guard
my bed. Otherwise,
for now, gazes

through me
as I open my
singular eyes. I am turning
with the world.

~ 1/20/2011

Words emerging from a book's heart: the empathy of great writing

2010-12-20T00:34:00.000-08:00

They emerge from the soil of a page, these phrases, like stems whose greening spines respond to the first direct touch of sunlight with sudden, towering growth. They arrive at perfect intersections of time and space: time enough to absorb the words, to read them again and again as if the mind needs a pinch: Yes! This is real; this is true. Space enough away from an event, a person, a date carved on the soul; a singular moment, a realization of change through words that spill from a page which could be your mouth for the truth of those words that could have been inked from the heart and the meat of your life ... They are yours; they arrive now at the light of your eyes and awareness, just as your need for them dawns ...

I found two such clutches of words today; two snippets of stories that said Yes! This is real; this is true. My need for confirmation of experience and communion of thought drove me to a bookstore: for me, a holy place.

Christmas Day is six days off and I have no precedent for this, my 51st (or 52nd?) winter. I have been bereft of my husband and marriage for just over three months, and I have been ill for nearly three years. The illness -- its presence, its seeming ruttedness -- works on me in ways that I can't apprehend until long into the work itself, this strange work that scours away who I was and beckons me to be well ... even while ill. This paradox of being well while ill is ruthless at times, stripping away from my body what my mind and soul long to replenish: vitality, strength, full presence. The word chronicity flares like a marquee in front of my inner eye; it cannot help but be there, a main attraction and question at this three-year mark ...

Along come two books into my hands. One is a novel, the other a memoir. I hadn't known of either of these books before today; one of them, I already know, will become a bible -- a holy book of wisdom.

From each of these books sprang a Yes! This is real ... They spoke to my current state, these oracles of empathy:

... I'm the one apart and hesitant ... sidestepping the tide of those in genuine and deliberate transit ... I drift just outside the echoes and thrums of journeys that are not mine, the endings and beginnings of missions, diversions, pilgrimages, expeditions. I observe lives unlike mine, full of imperative planned destinations ...

... I wear a taint of rationing, that's all. I have the thready, ashamed look of a reduced person who assumes there is a worse reduction to come ...

... If events have halted a life's narrative as utterly as death itself, how do I go on as if I believed in mere continuation, never mind solace and amends?

(Morag Joss, The Night Following)

... No one asks for this, ever, at any age. But what can we do when it arrives as an actuality in our family or in ourselves? How can we meet the calamity of the threat; the loss of everything we hold dear and that most fundamentally characterizes us or someone we know and love? How can we even contemplate the loss of the memories of the near and sometimes also the distant past, of the ability to be reliably oriented, effortlessly and consistently, within time and space, to say nothing of the web of our relationships and purposes? ... How are we called to be in relationship to such a turn of fate when it happens to someone we love?

(Jon Kabat-Zinn, in his foreword to Ten Thousand Joys & Ten Thousand Sorrows: A Couple's Journey Through Alzheimer's, by Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle)

I brought these books home, and hold them close. Ten Thousand Joys ... particularly grabbed me. I've not (yet?) been in close relationship with someone who succumbed to Alzheimer disease ... but on every page of this book, I see myself and everyone I know. The universality of illness and injury, of loss, of death ... and the deeper pervasions of grace, mercy, and love which sustain what is human and humane in us when we are stricken ... One review blurb for the book refers to "the majesty of loving" that is immediately evident in the narrative -- I've only read two pages of the foreword and glanced through the three pages of grateful endorsements that precede the title page, and already this book has affected me so deeply that I weep when I hold it in my hands. I shook while standing in the bookstore, skimming the pages. I weep because the long-married couple whose story this is "made it" ... even though one of them died of a horrific illness. This couple, a man and a woman who always called each other "Honey", remained wedded with one another through the entire experience of one's diagnosis, diminishment, dementia (within a conscious awareness that managed to remain occasionally intact even toward the end) and dying ... The one who remains now has written a testament to their love that evokes my nowhere-to-put-it rage and grief at the death of my own marriage.

I've read the table of contents several times now; with chapters like "You Can't Mess With Bach" and "Get Your Dyin' Done Early", the book is irresistible. Another chapter heading, "The Grace of Diminishment" left me slack-jawed in the bookstore; how perfectly those four words offer me a new understanding of things to aspire to ... !

Being of use within our sphere of influence

2010-12-16T02:27:00.000-08:00

I was talking with a dear friend tonight, one who has experienced a marital rupture very similar to mine. We're both in deep mourning right now ... mourning which is always accentuated by this overarching holiday season; and we're both working our psyches off (so to speak!) to stay afloat during a time of grief that's knocking us both to our knees several times a day. We spoke of how pervasively useless we feel ... Mourning does bring on feelings of futility and uselessness ... and over time, these feelings gradually lessen as a person weaves new designs beyond the hole that has been torn into her life's fabric ...

It's also the feeling of uselessness in the larger sphere of things. I struggle with this deeply; after nearly three years of illness, three years has great import -- it's a bruising awareness of a long time passed -- the longest time in my life -- of injury and illness. I am still not able to "work" beyond the immediate care of my home, my cats, and my own self. I blog on occasion; many longer posts are completed over days, sometimes weeks. I feel a fundamental exhaustion and I wonder if I will ever feel a relatively robust vitality again. I can see myself working again -- I want to work again -- I want almost desperately to contribute again to the larger world. I'm also in a limbo of not knowing what will be possible. I figure this limbo-feeling is inevitable after three years ...

So my friend -- I'll call her Courage, for her massively generous, mothering heart -- and I were relating our experiences of uselessness ... and I remembered something that I tell myself; something I've learned, and thankfully taken in enough times and to enough depth that it sometimes slips up through the depressive depths to remind me of my own intrinsic goodness ... and usefulness.

Courage had been speaking of an old friend whom she's getting reacquainted with after a long spell of being out of touch. Her friend has attained several degrees, is a professor, travels the world. Courage herself has a Masters degree and is one of the most intelligent, engaging people I know to talk with. She's also been a mother for about 15 years now ... a mother of devotion, playfulness, kindness and ceaseless love. One of her children has needed constant, mindful care all along, and Courage has given it.

Courage thinks she's useless.

So do I, much of the time ... and especially now. If I failed at a marriage, I think, what the hell can I do at all well?

Courage and I began to tussle with the word useless ... what does it mean to each of us ... how do we use the word against ourselves ... do our understandings of useless and useful match up accurately with what we can and regularly do --> take care of children (hers), dogs (hers) and cats (mine) ... take care of our homes and our own health ... make sure all the necessities are in place, etc. I figure the only place to start in assessing my "usefulness" is with what I already am competent and pretty consistent with; "start where you are," the slogan goes.

I thought of Courage's friend, the prof who speaks at conferences all over the world. I thought of Courage and her currently very small world ... and of me and mine. I recalled a message from all kinds of wise sources: basically, that we can have the most influence and effect in a sphere of influence that's best suited to our energy and abilities. Courage's friend has a very large sphere of influence ... Courage and I have very small ones.

I told Courage, "Your primary sphere of influence right now is your home, your children, and your friends. You have such a powerful, genuine effect on the people you're in close relation with -- Don't discount that." (She'd been telling me about her teenage son, and what a mindful, musical and kind-hearted person he is. She has a lot to do with his profound interests in matters ethical, relational and musical.)

I told Courage that I know I'm not much practical use to anyone right now; my metabolic reserves are so depleted ... but I can always listen, be a shoulder and an ear, tell someone I love them and that they are good. I can be a warm lap to my beloved cats; I can tend to them well.

"You and I," I told Courage, "do our best connecting with other people and creatures -- our best influencing -- in a one-to-one context. Other people -- like your professor friend -- might do it in a much larger context. [Think of someone like Nelson Mandela for a really large sphere of influence!] We do it best one person at a time ... and that often leaves the deepest impression."

I know there have been times when I have just listened to someone; nothing more. I recall with that sphere-of-influence wisdom that my one little presence can have an enormous impact ... and Courage, who has known my unhusband since he and I first got together, reminded me of the good I have influenced him with. I was so touched by that I bawled. (I've had a terrible time imagining any good lately ... You know how it is when you've lived with a long illness ... You start to think that you're nothing but a burden, nothing but a bundle of needs and weaknesses ... and therefore useless ... Anyone feel that way??)

The sphere of influence ... from one person to another. Every small choice and interaction can count for so much ... and knowing this is a lifeline from desolation to reciprocal relation.

3:19 a.m.

2010-12-10T02:27:00.000-08:00

little grey cat

rests her chin in my palm

sleeping in trust

safe in my lap

my hands

my care

her name is vida

"life"

in a tropical tongue

my name is

nameless

i have been disowned

disavowed

though i've also been

told that still

i am loved

abandoned, though

loved

this is senseless

can love be abandoned?

yes, in its ways

abandonment: rapture

and bliss and the vows

to surrender

to relation

for life

abandonment: rupture,

desertion and fear:

some of the bones

that held and sustained

my life

have snapped

in another's

hands.

left now to winter:

to dwindling

light and food

i was left while

weakened and ill:

predated upon

considered

broken, defective,

unfixable, therefore

trash

used up, so

useless

my last act as mate

to give birth

to the death of a love:

stillbirth:

deliver

this death

and bury it, or

i will die

too

little cat murmurs

in sleep

i remember

why Life

keeps me

alive

let spill

more tears

to the back

of my hand

give vida my tears

to lick

little cat

saving my life

you, in your way,

are my child

i will not fail you

like i have been failed

*Note: all images are linked directly to their sources

Does this make sense? ... a question about where emotions emerge from

2010-12-07T02:16:00.000-08:00

Earlier this evening, I took my maximum dose of my nightly sleepy-pill (usually I take as little as possible -- always looking to avoid dependence) because my sleep pattern has gone KABLOOEY again. One of my main triggers is to be sleeping alone in a place, and since my unhusband left me, I'm back to vampire-time. Up all night; crash at sunrise, lurch upright at around 1 p.m.; useless 'til about four ... then, thanks to Winter's arrival, I'm messed up all over again 'cause it's now pitch-black outside. I'm sick of it.

So tonight, I fell asleep at about 8:00. Woke at one a.m. Tried to return to sleep; couldn't, so I arose and made a cup of tea. The cats were squawking for food (Ah, the few tiny routines that aren't blasted to oblivion by a divorce!), so by the time I took care of them and made my tea, I felt quite awake.

I noticed, then, a funny thing. I felt -- and it's been a long time since I've felt this, if I've ever felt it at all; I had no definite reference points for it -- a certain subtle buoyancy in my belly and torso. I felt slightly lighter on my feet (and since I've lost so much weight, a few more pounds lost might render me airborne) ... like a small stone had been removed from my core. My intuition called it hope. This feeling -- this sense -- was originating in my body --> in my belly; not my mind. It was definitely not an emotion (Do we usually refer to hope as such?) ... It was a sensory novelty that I noticed, went Hmm? about, and later discovered that it had named itself hope.

It came from my body ... not my head. This is difficult to articulate, because it feels so different from what I usually "do" when some felt sense arises. I guess that I don't usually connect it to a specific feeling.

Does this make any sense to you, Reader?

Maybe it's the brief sensation of hope that is strange ... It took a few minutes for my meaning-making systems to make sense of it (Hmm again -- making sense of a sensation?) ...

Does anyone have a clue about what I'm taking about? ... I don't ...

I'm reminded, though, of a dream I had years ago; it's one of those dreams that etches itself into permanent memory and pops into consciousness every once in a while for the rest of one's life ... one of what Carl Jung called "Big Dreams" for their universal themes, archetypal content and their continual resurgence into conscious awareness when "big" questions are being asked.

In the dream, I'm lying on the floor in the kitchen doorway of an apartment I lived in during my early 30s. I'm trying to reach one of my friends by phone, but so many factors impede me -- my body is semi-paralyzed; I can't coordinate my limbs quite into coherent movement. The phone is out of reach, and it keeps moving. It's dark in my apartment, so I can't see very much.

When I do finally get to the phone and think of my best friend W., I can't remember her number. I call an operator with my groggy fingers ... She can't find a listing. I then try to call my friend H., and no one answers at her line. I start to think of some other people to call, but I can't remember their numbers, and I can't find my address book.

At this point in the dream, I feel hopeless ... and furious. The fury is obscured, though, by the semi-paralysis. The hopelessness is pervasive.

Someone knocks at my door, and by the time I've crawled and hauled myself (still on my belly) to the door, whoever was there is gone. A few sheets of paper have been slid under my door ... all blank, except for one or two wrinkly ones that have ink splotches on them -- I'm reminded of the inky mess that can result from a paper jam in older-model printers. Something was supposed to be said here, and the message didn't get out.

I lay my right cheek on the tile floor, and scan underneath my door with my one eye that can see out to the hall. There are more such papers scattered around, all between my door and the door of my neighbour across the hall. One or two do have print on them ... and one leans up against the wall, within my eyesight. Typed in large black letters is the word HOPE.

For most of my life, I believed that hope was out of reach -- hope of any active change in my circumstances. Hope was outside of me, in other people and all they could do. I could see hope in other people through their accomplishments in relation, work, real estate acquisition, status, creation ... whatever. Their hope was personified somehow; made real.

Any hopes I had were locked in to my imagination. I always felt so passive, useless, incompetent and unable, that I never dared to activate my own hope in potential accomplishment. Hope never seemed real to me. There were no dreams to aspire to because my mind was overwrought with the imperatives of survival and the urges of self-hatred. How could someone who believed she was a do-nothing feel any hope?

... This sense that I experienced tonight while making my tea ... I did identify it as hope, even while it continued to baffle me. Part of the bafflement is that it came from within -- It began as that buoyant lightness in my upper belly. Perhaps these sensations are simply hope's somatic expressions -- and I am feeling them this way for the first time. Perhaps I am finally, at age nearly 52, making sense of hope -- connecting the concept with actual experience.

I don't feel hopeful in my thoughts right now; that's the funny thing. I don't feel completely despairing either -- but despair is too close for comfort so I have to stay on my guard. The timing seems strange -- it's been only 23 days since my unhusband moved out, and most of my time has been spent (literally -- I feel spent) in crying, sleeping/not-sleeping, and moving very slowly through the necessary routines while still in a state of shock.

That girl, though -- in the image above -- She is in dire circumstance: She's anchored herself on a rock which appears to be surrounded by water ... She is injured? blindfolded? ... and she leans into what looks like a musical instrument (a lyre of some kind?). The instrument has lost some strings; it appears unplayable, yet the woman's curl into it suggests that she hears all the music they've made together moving through the instrument's layers and through her own memory ... Perhaps in this moment it is remembrance that somehow actives the hope that keeps her upright on that rock ...

Hope in the belly of a person who's in near despair ...

Reader, have you experienced hope in this way? A hope that isn't connected to anything specific ... just the presence of it as sensation, as bodily knowledge? Has hope ever felt strange to you ... unfamiliar?

~ Note: all images are linked directly back to their sources ~

Staying in bed all day to see what kind of condition my condition is in ...

2010-12-02T01:06:00.000-08:00

I didn't arise from my burrow 'til after 4 p.m. today. Went to bed last night --er, this morning -- at what -- 5:30 a.m.?

Insomnia -- the hard-core, up-all-night-with-the-lights-on kind -- rules the roost right now. It's been 17 days since my unhusband left our home, and the old, old habit has kicked in. The habit that shrieks YOU'RE ALONE THEREFORE NEVER SAFE SO YOU CANNOT GO TO SLEEP UNTIL THE SUN BEGINS TO RISE! ...

Now it's 2:32 a.m. EST and I'm back at the keyboard with Bruce Springsteen's music keeping me steady ("Human Touch" is just wrapping up) ...

Old, old habits really do die hard ... I wonder if they die at all. I mean the habits that are neurologically hardwired from early, early in life.

Yes, the brain is plastic, resilient and flexible, and we plumb its mysteries only to reveal more mysteries ... and a brain injured early in life is a brain not only mysterious, but baffling ... and something I must be very kind to, and respectful of ...

That includes somehow softening my mind enough to understand that it's safe (relatively speaking) to go to sleep at night, at a natural bedtime ...

Over the decades I've tried just about everything to calm the dread, stand down the hypervigilance, warm the tummy and soothe the body for sleep ... The best sleeps I ever had were when my husband and I were melted into a spoon under the duvet, softly framed by a cat or a few ...

I've been told that this chronic insomnia is one of the "co-morbid" conditions of my own variant of C-PTSD. I hate that term "co-morbid" -- it makes me think "slow killer." Insomnia to this degree -- My brain does not go into deep sleep any more -- does suck the animation out of a brain, a mind, a person ...

I long for the nestling sleeps I used to share with my man. It's a whole other kind of amputation when that one long-known form is no longer beside you in the night. Over time, the scent, the indents, the scatterlings of hair and skin cells all disappear from the bed ... The presence of one who dreamed beside you dissipates completely ...

2:46 a.m. now. I am becoming sleepy ... and like a soldier on night patrol, I cannot relinquish my awareness to rest. I feel the tension ... and wonder about my choice of words: "I cannot relinquish ..." -- There has long been a sense of a constitutional inability to release my hold on waking consciousness ... as if this urge to remain awake all night has been with me all my life.

This urge retreated and quieted for the first time when my husband and I began to sleep together. I've never slept more deeply -- never felt myself truly falling into rest and sleep like I did with my man -- I surrendered to sleep -- felt so safe, contained, warmed, nestled ... Breathing, heartbeat, body heat became harmonized ... Oh, how I sank into the shared, resting presence of two in a bed ...

Now my bed is a vast plan on which moon sheds a flat light ...

I honestly don't know what to do any more with this depth of insomnia, other than to drug myself senseless --which is an option I choose not to exercise. I wonder if a more reasonable course is to accept what has been a lifelong pattern (neurologically hardwired?), and work with it in tiny increments to moderate the extremes ... I really don't enjoy being up all night, and then wasting a day in exhausted sleep ...

Reader, do you experience insomnia to such a tenacious degree? Have you found any ways to really normalize your sleep cycle?

A need to focus on one. thing. at a time.

2010-11-19T12:59:00.000-08:00

I just realized something. Blogging is sharpening and deepening my ability to focus ... to begin with something, remain with it, resolve and relinquish it. In other words, to actually bring something to completion ...

This is difficult to articulate; it arrived as a flash of intuition, and as these things do, it zapped away in an instant.

It also has to do with relation -- I realize that I am in conversation with you, Reader; in dialogue. The word "dialogue" derives from the Greek dia + logos -- it essentially meant, originally, "a shared search for meaning."

That's what blogging has come to mean for me.

Your thoughts, epiphanies, musings, prayers, queries, conundrums, creations, wonderings and wordplays mean so much to me, especially now.

This meeting of minds and souls is very good medicine ... Thank you.

Links: PTSD and bodily illness; a site for understanding the experience of PTSD

2010-11-17T12:52:00.000-08:00

There's an article making the rounds by Kate Johnson that confirms the links between psychological trauma and physical illness. It's about time. When "anecdotal" (experiential) evidence from people who live with PTSD (and other "mental illness") is finally seen to be as verifiable and meaningful as studies and reports of hard science, we might get somewhere. To my mind, nothing trumps lived experience and our ability to articulate it for others who cannot understand it because they haven't been there. The true experts of any experience are those who have lived through it ...

I also found a blog via my Twitter page that focuses on support for people who are in intimate relation with someone who lives with PTSD. It's called Understanding PTSD. It's been composed by a person who has PTSD; the format is question-and-answer; many of the questions come from the blog's readers. Recent queries include how to help loved ones understand the experience of being triggered, how to deal with people whose behaviour is injurious to you as a survivor, and how a loved one might be of gentle help when things go from bad to worse.

Hypervigilance ... over thoughts of suicide

2010-11-16T23:00:00.000-08:00

Ah, hypervigilance. We so often call it a bad thing; a symptom.

It can also be a gift, I realize tonight. Those of you who read my Pushing Fifty Gently ... blog are aware that my marriage recently imploded ... and that the man who was my husband moved out of what was our home three days ago.

Who doesn't think, even in passing, about simply lying down and going to sleep when a great love has been amputated from the heart? Perhaps that urge to lie down and stay down is part of the analgesic and opiate mercies that flood through our body in the wake of shock. Perhaps all other options appear to be nullified when our bodies and minds crave rest upon rest, sleep beyond sleep ...

The craving remains in the mind ... but if the body is still vital enough to resist death, it will hanker for food, or a foot gone to sleep will hurt; some sensory imperative will demand action. How much sensation can we ignore, how much pain can we take, before this imperative to move overrides a withering will to live?

In my case, unfortunately, a lot. However, I also live with two cats. On days like today, they keep me here, here in the world.

So do alarms. Earlier this evening (or was it afternoon -- the days are suddenly so dark), I was collapsed on the couch, sobbing and panting until I was spent. Then ... the fear. The fear that intones Alone and Unguarded and Prey -- a vestibular panic in the aftermath of sudden estrangement. Having been "made strange" -- rejected and "otherized" by another person with whom I'd been in intimate relation -- I was severed of a vital bond; I had been left. To be left -- rejected; abandoned -- is registered by the mammalian brain as a primal threat to survival.

I have to keep telling myself that I still have a roof over my head, that I can afford to pay my rent for now, and that I can feed myself and my cats. I have enough relative health to stand upright and do what I have to do. Yet the internal alarms keep clanging.

One of those alarms, I've come to realize, is a "life-support" alarm ... and I heard it tonight over the siren-voices that were seeping through me in waves that have been attempting to drown me since I was four years old.

Now here I am, nearly 52, doubled over on my couch, sobbed out, and revved out of my fugue by an alarm of pure awareness that shrieked, There's a pot of water boiling on the stove --

Along with that jolt came two others: the phone rang, and my alarm clock went off. My body went haywire, wanting to pounce upon all three urgencies at once. I wanted to grab the phone because I thought it'd be one of my beloved friends, even though there was a pot of water boiling furiously on the stove. By the time I could gather my limbs into one direction -- the phone -- the call had gone to voice mail, and I ended up falling over a chair to get to the damn receiver. I jack-knifed back up and flew to the kitchen. Pot off stove, element switched off, and then a hurl down the hall to the bedroom to turn off the clock whose On-Off button tends to stick. Guess what? It stuck. And both cats were sitting in the doorway, yammering for their dinner.

Life does go on, doesn't it ... sometimes with the help of alarms. My lifelong hypervigilance and sensory disintegrations come in handy when there's more than one fire to put out ... including the tarry fires of suicidal thought.

When I was collapsed on the couch, I became aware of a thought that irked and lured all at once: What is there to do ... What is there to do ...

What is there to do then segued into What is there to live for ... and that's when I caught it: after only one intonation. What is there to live for ... STOP!

You know, it might be that the "Water's boiling on the stove!" alarm kicked in right then, as I was raising my head in realization of the cognitive shift from What is there to do to What is there to live for.

Right then, I was to live for getting the water off the stove, turning off the clock, and answering the phone. My godsend of a body kicked in and did all three ... and then I fed my babies and washed some dishes.

What is there to live for still lurks, like a low tide before a tsunami. Even so, I have sensed today a glimmer of another fire -- Life -- and let myself be led by it.

Friends, may I introduce ... Heather!

2010-11-16T16:28:00.000-08:00

Heather's been one of my soul-friends for over 13 years; she's also a writer of visceral, luminous immediacy ... and she's blogging again! Her blog, Post-Traumatic Paths, reopens after a long hiatus with an invitation to ... Play-Doh!

Please have a boo at Heather's blog and give her a welcome back to the writing life ... She's a gem!

(I found this little one's Play-Doh-sniffing portrait at Scott McKechnie's blog.)

A gift arrives, beautifully timed

2010-11-14T22:46:00.000-08:00

I received an email today from a gentleman named Mike, who was writing to me on behalf of the masters in psychology blog. He wrote that my Post-Cynical Seer has been chosen as one of the "top 50 bloggers shedding light on PTSD."

I am so glad that my work here is bearing good fruit, and being invited to stand in such sage company ... Thank you, masters in psychology ...

Thoughts: neuro-this and that, usefulness, dreams

2010-11-07T11:32:00.000-08:00

I've just had a thought: Neuro-injury is not neuro-degeneration.

Where did that come from? ... I'm not entirely sure; it just swooped through the old grey matter ... I'd been musing on something; forgot what it was ... and then came that fully formed thought, like a sum-up of all the musings themselves.

Now, after the fact, I think this: People tend to treat others who have neuro-injuries like they have neuro-degeneration.

Like we're ... I'm going to write without censoring here, so please bear with me ... like we're hopeless ... morbidly stupid ... lost causes ... a waste of space ... useless ... a burden ... useless.

Does this make sense to you, reader?

It's that word useless that grabs me. Useless like I can't do much, and whatever I do is likely to be done wrong. Or too slowly. Or it's not enough. Or I do it halfway through and forget that I started it so someone else comes upon a bit of in-the-midst-of chaos. Useless. Can't finish what she starts. Forgets what she's doing; forgets how to do it. Yes, sometimes I do. I forget, and then I remember. I'm nearly 52 years old, so brain farts are entirely normal. The point is, I do remember, even if I have to go into another room to "twig" my brain into remembering.

Useless. That's an appalling way to be seen and judged.

The person who labels another as useless is often someone who, I suppose, would have once considered the useless one as useful -- able to fulfill roles, responsibilities, tasks, jobs, commitments ... and hopes, fantasies, expectations ...

I once was able to do those things in the worldly sense, and do them fairly well. I had a full-time job; at one point in my previous working life I had both a full-time job and a small business, with its inevitable adjuncts on the side. You know how it is with a one-person biz -- you do it all.

I have a university degree and professional certifications; I have won some literary awards and when I was thirteen, won a doubles cup competition in badminton. I had a wicked badminton wrist; I had a tiny, coiled and taut little body from gymnastics and volleyball and I could slam a birdie.

I wasn't useless then, and I'm not useless now.

If I can love, and I choose to love, am I useless? Am I demented? Degenerate?

If I can compose a blog post, one of hundreds that I have posted in the nearly three years I've been blogging, am I useless? Am I useless if I reveal that many of these posts took days and weeks to compose because my abilities to focus, concentrate, sequence my thoughts into sensical ideas, and simply sit up to type at a keyboard are inconsistent and patchy right now?

Am I useless if I am presently receiving my entire income from a long-term disability pension for which I bow down in gratitude every day?

Am I useless if I have been injured and ill for nearly three years, but am managing most days to keep my little home relatively clean, take care of my cats, pay my bills and somehow take care of my essential needs from that pension that is barely enough to cover the basics? Am I useless if I am exhausted beyond much action on most days because on the other days, I am doing all those practical things that I can and must do to survive and don't have much left over for anything else?

... All this talk about usefulness reminds me of a dream I had, about 13 years ago ... I'll tell it in the present tense ...

I arrive home at my little townhouse after a trip. I'd hired a young woman to tend to my home and my plants, which were many -- lots of tropicals with huge, glistening leaves ... I open the door to my house and there stands my house-sitter, in the middle of the living room, surrounded by chaos. She's made such a mess, mostly with paper and stuff of her own -- knitting balls and needles, books, scarves, hats, shoes, coats; to my eye, a twister's hit my house.

I'll call her Angie -- Angie sees me and drops to her knees, whimpering, grabbing at the stuff on the floor, frantically fanning her arms all the way around her -- Jeez, she'd like to be an octopus right now, I think, then I step into the fray -- I can't get a word in edgewise because this cowered, quaking, grabbing-at girl babbles I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry like a metronome stuck at allegro agitato ...

Herakut, "Useless Friend"

She's been pulling her stuff toward herself, encircling herself with it, drawing it as close as she can ... and then she bolts up to her feet, arches one knee over the pile and steps over it; the leg that follows plows through the pile. Angie stops, looks down, yelps once and starts to cry. Out come the I'm sorrys again, and now she grabs a huge, embroidered, frayed carpet bag from one of my wingback chairs. Then she's back on her knees, scrabbling, snatching, and stuffing all her stuff into a bag that had to be eight times bulkier than Mary Poppins'!

I simply stand through it and witness this cyclone frantically trying to undo what she's done. While she's ducking and grabbing and muscling things into her bag, I glance around my living room and notice my plants ... They look like they've been polished with light is my first thought ... and Angie interrupts; she's hauled that bag of stuff into her arms and a hat onto her head, and she's still apologizing as she retreats, walking backward to my front door. I see this girl, this harried, daffy, sloppy, sad-sack creature; I see the mess she's left my home in, and I see what she's done for my sanctuary plants. I want to tell her about the light I see coming off my plants -- coming from my plants -- and I want to say What is your gift with them? I want to say Thank you and please stay for tea -- the mess is the mess and we'll deal with it but I must know what you have done with my plants. They are singing -- I can see them singing; it's the light ...

... but Angie has opened the door and stepped onto the threshold, still backing away ... she steps down to the doormat and then to the landing; her lavender eyes film over with tears and she says I am sorry as her hand reaches up and pulls the door closed.

I haven't moved anything but my mouth, and that only in twitches. She's gone and I have to tell her what I've seen -- what I've noticed and that I know that the gift is her doing and as for the rest of it, a mess is a mess and we'll deal with it.

I go to the door, fling it wide ... and she's gone. Wherever she is, she's too far away.

Back in the house, I move among my beloved foliage, eyeing, lightly rubbing and scenting, touching soil for aerie moisture ... My plants are in better condition than they were when I left for my trip!

That girl ... I think, She's useless ... but she knows my plants by name ...

Psychiatry-bashing: a conversation

2010-11-05T13:36:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting conversation going on over at David Allen's Family Dysfunction and Mental Health blog -- the focus is on psychiatry-bashing. I've posted a couple of comments; here is my second one:

Over the years, I've educated my doctor in some ways ... I've alerted him to side-, cumulative and withdrawal effects of an SSRI that I take, and done a small part to keep him current on innovative thinking and treatment in the trauma field (I used to work as a therapist and social worker, and part of my own self-treatment for C-PTSD is to study, research and apply the new understandings as best I can ... I also would have probably become a physician myself were it not for that C-PTSD ...). My doctor is willing to listen, and he respects my understanding of things, as I do his. While we sometimes disagree, we fasten ourselves to that respect and our willingness to learn.

My doc and I had a wee giggle, too, over that psychiatrist I saw who decided he knew all there was to know about me after 14 minutes. My cherished physician actually rolled his eyes ;-D

I imagine that doctors who love their work and honour their patients and profession (and the patience their profession requires) are feeling terrible pressure to conform to increasingly rigid directives ... My doctor alludes briefly on occasion to his own struggles. I feel for him ... I imagine he'd be, if he could, a small-town, home-visit, angel-at-the-bedside kind of practitioner. He is *kind* ... and that is what has made me come to love him as a person over the 20 years we have worked together. He is also practical and prudent -- he doesn't make mountains out of molehills or v.v.

I imagine, too, that there must be some real agony for psychiatrists who have studied deeply and conducted their quiet, compelling profession for years -- I think of psychiatrists as the most scholarly of doctors; the internists of mental health -- who are mandated now (as I understand it) to basically toss aside all they have learned, except for the pharmacology and memorized updates from the latest DSM, in order to pill up their patients with all the drugs they, the doctors, are pressured to prescribe ... Physicians who are reading, does your experience feel anything like this?

P.S. (This wasn't part of my comment) -- Bashing of any kind is the ol' Us vs. Them ... Me vs. You ... Me vs. Me ... and here's an example of person-with-C-PTSD-bashing: I've experienced this from another person, and I've bashed myself with it:

"You're a writer -- Why don't you just write?!"

I do ... I do. Where the glitches are is in the fact that it took me nearly two hours to compose that brief, four-paragraph comment. Two hours of sweating for focus, concentration, recall of words and ideas, sequential thinking ...

Depression humour! ~ Yes, it does exist!

2010-11-04T17:30:00.000-07:00

I just had a phone conversation with my cherished friend W.O. ... as in 'W.O. Mitchell'. No, I didn't talk with the author himself ... but he's my friend's favourite author, and she is a wicked good writer, so she's W.O. here.

W.O. had oral surgery earlier today and when I spoke with her, she was feelin' fine! I don't know what she's been given for pain relief, but it's working!

We blathered about this and that, as longtime friends do, and then I told her that I must have photos of our grandkids in this year's Hallowe'en costumes. (W.O.'s their actual grandmother and I'm a sort-of one ... W.O. and I are soul sisters; I don't have any children myself, and I am crazy in love with the whole family ... I'm more of an aunt -- an Auntie -- the kind of Auntie who winks at naughtiness [but becomes very firm if somebody's being nasty], slips you an extra candy or cookie, and falls right down to the floor with you to play as soon as she comes over ... The kids scream out my name and tear down the hall to me when I arrive ... This means more to me than I could ever say ...)

Our little soccer star donned a cape, big chompy fangs, and bruisy, creepy vampire makeup; his little sister, who is three and utterly mad about the colour pink, dolled up as a princess ... with a hat that looked more like it belonged on a wizard! It was tall and pointy, festooned with tiny glittery things ... and it was primarily pink, bubblegum pink, Barbie pink, in-your-face-and-out-there pink, neon pink and a certain Christmas Eve sunset pink that struck me dumb in a mall parking lot less than a day after I'd learned that a dear friend had suddenly died ...

Oops -- tangents are me, it seems ... and November does that to us, doesn't it ... Hallowe'en is the last big party here in Canada before Christmas, and then blech for six months. Winter's aren't much like they used to be ...

Whoops! -- caught myself at it again! That old black magic ... the black dog, the black hole, the black night, the black black blackness ... the tarry slide into whatever it is that depression is and that simple sadness or nostalgia is not.

I've come to see that it takes some humour to survive the tarry slide ... Moreso, to tell the tarry slide to bugger off and have a good laugh while waving it bye-bye from the dock!

... So W.O. and I were blabbing on the phone and as usual, we gushed over the kids. Then W.O. said, "There's nothing to be sad about ...

"... but I'll find a way!"

God above, I nearly peed myself and snarfed my tea at the same time.

We laughed ourselves stupid -- really roaring -- and as I write, I have one of those helpless, jaw-locked, dumbass grins splitting my face. W.O. is a brilliant thinker, and she's one of three people I've known as an adult (heh) who have made me laugh so hard I've nearly barfed. Once or twice, as I've gotten older, I've wondered fleetingly (for fleetingly is all you can do, if you're about to croak) if I was having a seizure or a stroke. I can't help wondering that 'cause one of those three friends has been dead more than five years, and the other I haven't seen or talked with in nearly 15 years. No rupture there ... it was one of those gradual erosions of contact that tend to be a casualty of modern hyper-life ...

Aw, geez -- there I go again ...

God above, I love my friends ...

This is for you, my cherished W.O. ...

Those of us who live with depression are in good company ...

2010-11-04T10:00:00.000-07:00

I just found a strangely heartening post at the Nursing Schools blog: 50 famous artists and thinkers who have struggled with depression. The list includes luminaries like Winston Churchill, Leonard Cohen, Sylvia Plath, and Kurt Vonnegut.

We're in good company, friends. And as Mr. Churchill himself said,

All I can say about the US midterm election is ...

2010-11-03T14:09:00.000-07:00

WTF. I keep thinking of Walt Whitman's words: Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes. America is large and contains multitudes ... of perspectives, opinions, choices, votes ...

After all is said and done, if the nation's people hold for dear life to what's left of its founders' ideals, and live them as best they can ... then America, at its heart, is still a constantly evolving (and sometimes devolving) experiment in human governance and volition ...

From a certain perspective, I understand what the Tea Partiers might be feeling. They're fed up. Despite the filthy money that's stoking the ugly fires of ambition in every party, I imagine that under the veneer of the Tea Party are a lot of ordinary, working and struggling human beings who are feeling steamrolled and fucked right over.

Cartoon source: Evil Editor

That feeling I understand no matter who's doing the emoting. I don't know anyone who doesn't feel pretty much steamrolled these days. The pressure's on all of us, and it's not letting up.

What I don't understand, as an adult, are the tantrums. Are they doing any good?

Showing up, for example, at public events with guns blatantly holstered for all to see. I figure that a human being will do one of two things when s/he sees a gun in close proximity: Agress or degress. Become more like predator or more like prey.

The attack ads. I won't name any names 'cause I suspect they're all spewing them out. Each of us does our own attack-adding, our own spewing of rage in whatever form we spew it. I've been doing a fair bit of it lately, given my unwilling immersion in a divorce. I feel such shame for this reactionary hurt I have caused ... and I understand what my body and brain are doing. As the man who was my husband said just yesterday,

"It's all ... about self-preservation." He said it with such weary composure that I wanted to open my arms, take his head and place his ear over my heart; I wanted to hold him and warm him like one would a child.

He's right, of course. Every self on this Earth wants to live and survive, get what it wants, get what it needs. Self-preservation.

Is self-preservation the first law of life? Some would say that it's not ... Just yesterday I came upon this thought from Joseph Campbell:

Self-preservation is only the second law of life. The first law is that you and the other are one.

Harold Bloom is adamant about our intrinsic unity:

There is nothing, nothing, nothing individual about this universe. There is no such thing as the lone individual anywhere.

... and then there are those who know in their bones that dog-eat-dog is the way it is, and it's never going to change.

I've been convinced that both perspectives can be true. I've experienced both: the do-or-die urge for self-preservation, and a few immersions in mercy that leave no doubt in my body's memory -- in those moments, I was being loved through and through.

Those moments are life preservers. My one little life, being held, cherished, contained ... and given back to me, in pervasive, tender presence; in that rarest gift of all: unconditional love. I'm convinced of that, too. I've been given this cherishment that melts all defences, and I've given it too. This depth of love is surely a feeling ... it passes all through us, and remains ...

So, too, do the vicissitudes of politics ... and this latest round of Us vs. Them appears to be pulling opposites to their extremes. It's been said, though, that when polarities peak, they begin to reverse their course ...

It might be that the 2012 election (Do election cycles ever end anymore?) will see a swing towards more moderate -- simply less extreme -- outcomes. Fingers crossed ...

I always wondered how just being could feel so horrifying ... (Caution: potentially triggering)

2010-10-25T23:51:00.000-07:00

... and how making a sound -- breathing, first of all -- or making a move -- a reflexive muscular twitch, say -- brought on, brought down the predator of my childhood to my bed, my bath, my flesh and my essence, my vital force, my will to exist.

.. and Peter Levine's new book, In An Unspoken Voice, tells me that all my hunches have been correct. I was not only frozen and paralyzed, but immobilized by an outside force. My fury to live and survive -- my need to move -- was squashed at its source.

My premature birth demanded constant, urgent hands-on, hands-down-on restraint and invasion. I call the medical procedures that kept me alive "those necessary invasions." At nearly 52 years of age, I comprehend and understand the facts -- the events, the dangers, the interventions, the consequences ... and yet.

Peter's Unspoken Voice addresses the and yet. The part of me that cannot understand ... anything -- t
he infantile, neonate human ... and the mammalian creature that lives and moves and has its being in me.

"Movement is life," Moshe Feldenkrais (a late master of somatic awareness and neuromuscular re-education) used to say.

Movement is what ends up being a lifelong terror for people who have been traumatized in extremis. By in extremis I mean those experiences in which we experience ourselves as true prey, brought down and held down by a brutally experienced, inescapable outside force.

If that outside force also consciously intends harm to the one who is down, the prey -- the victim -- shuts up, shuts off, shuts down.

Oh God. From toddlerhood on, I was tied down, strapped down, sat upon, harnessed, locked into closets, force-fed and enema-purged, and choked with a scarf ... I was trapped, immobilized and restrained. All this after the first three months of my life, when violent touch (as in, touch that violates) was the necessary norm; The NICU (c.1960) doctors' and nurses' intentions toward me were practical, urgent and intensely focused ... and my premature central nervous system could not make sense of what was being done to my body.

What is left over from this depth of shock is not residue. It remains in situ like a shrieking smoke detector that will not, cannot shut off. There is no end to this alarm for a nervous system so breached.

Any organism entrapped wants only escape and safe-enough space to recover from shock.

No escape = death, or obliteration of all sentience except the body's last-ditch attempts to seem dead to its predator.

... That's the state that people who have been shocked in extremis are stuck in -- a dead-within-life non-sense of rasping exhaustion.

"How dead on our feet do we have to be to survive?" I once asked of Life, and In An Unspoken Voice comes a response that strikes me as the "missing link" in trauma treatment and healing.

Feigning death is an animal's last resort when it has been brought down:

... fight-or-flight could be updated with the acronym "the A, and four Fs": Arrest (increased vigilance, scanning), Flight (try first to escape), Fight (if the animal or person is prevented from escaping), Freeze (fright -- scared stiff) and Fold (collapse into helplessness). In two sentences: Trauma occurs when we are intensely frightened and are either physically restrained or perceive that we are trapped. We freeze in paralysis and/or collapse in overwhelming helplessness ... This collapse, defeat and loss of the will to live are at the very core of deep trauma. (p. 48-49)

So if movement is life, and if one is in a state of enforced, life-threatening restraint, all movement must cease. Everything outside of the most rudimentary life-support organs and systems goes dull, numb and inert. The body floods itself with endorphins -- our own "profound morphine pain-relief system" (p. 50) ... and the mind begins to dissociate ... to withdraw and nullify its capacity for perceiving and sensing.

Dissociation, too, is a biological gift when volition has been crushed; Levine considers it of "adaptive and benevolent value" when one is frightened nearly to death. Perhaps our uniquely human consciousness comes closest to pure animal awareness when our body is threatened with immanent death.

It is fear, in combination with immobility, that both potentiates and perpetuates "an essentially permanent quasi-paralysis in the traumatized individual." (p. 54) This is the "fold" state -- the instinctive submission to irrefutable defeat.

The "freeze" state isn't what we get stuck in -- in a freeze, we're scared stiff, but we still have a chance to revive ourselves and get away from a threat. Freezing can allow our brain and body precious seconds to recalibrate towards another attempt to move. Freezing can fool a predator; frozen (in this new understanding) means motionless on the surface and churning beneath. Folded means exhausted of volition ... given up. In human terms, we might call this state resigned to fate. Threatened and overwhelmed with no seeming hope of escape, we fold, like a collapsing house of cards.

Levine states that there are states of submission, common to all mammalian cousins, that are not smeared over with mortal terror; they include what I see as "the release after the release" of sexual orgasm, and the limpness of baby creatures (like kittens) whose parents carry them in their mouths by the scruff of the neck. I imagine that a warm, swaddled infant feels contained ... yet safe. Immobility: yes ... but temporary and perceived as safe. Fear: no.

It's that linking of fear and immobility -- and their combined effects. I feel like a long-vacant piece of my own understanding of trauma has been resolved, and that the whole of me -- including some lifelong impasses like the chronicity of often inexplicable exhaustion -- suddenly makes a lot more sense. Something in me has come to rest ...

All it takes is one such gem of solid information (Peter Levine's been a scholar, teacher, and practitioner of trauma healing for about 40 years) to entice a pattern-making mind like mine into excitement and coherence. It's such a good feeling to finally understand something that's been racking your brain for years ...

... and I'm only on page 82!

Look, Mommy -- a Muslim!

2010-10-23T10:10:00.000-07:00

I'm reposting this piece from 2008 'cause I just came across a witty blog called Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things (http://muslimswearingthings.tumblr.com/). Seems that some people who aren't Muslim are freaking over people who are Muslim and aren't instantly recognizable by their "Muslim garb."

Well, here's a shocking image: a Muslim on a swing! What's next, I ask: a terrorist takeover of the jungle gym? Oh please, ignorance: give me a break ...

The original post:

I came upon this photo and smiled, launched immediately by memory into my own high, happy swings. Then I read the caption: "A Bulgarian Alevi Muslim plays on a swing during the Ederlez festival in the village of Sevar."

That's a big mouthful to describe a kid on a swing!

I know a little about Bulgaria; a fair bit more about Muslim culture and history; nothing about the words "Alevi," "Ederlez," and "Sevar," and what each represents. I'm curious: what do they mean? I'm going to explore...

I have to admit that, in this age where people of Muslim heritage are considered the most despised "Other" in the West, I'm delighted to find a photo of a happy person in full swing during a festival. The person happens to be Muslim.

How many images do we see of Muslim people doing ordinary things, like swinging in a park? Wow, someone viewing this shot might think, They're allowed to do that? They have festivals?

I'm reminded of the collective astonishment that swept the world in the 1990s when it was revealed that gay and lesbian people do all the ordinary things that "normal" people do, like brush their teeth, cook casseroles, mow their lawns, and (gasp!) have babies. The photo here might look incongruous to someone who sees Muslim people only as terrorists and religious fanatics.

Open your eyes...

The question is not what you look at, but what you see.

(Henry David Thoreau)

Journal-snippets

2010-10-20T17:17:00.000-07:00

~ I haven't got the focus these days to write much; I've never before felt so weary, so spent. At the same time, my thinning body is hard as a tank. "You're so self-defended," Pure Pisces told me when she attempted to massage my shoulders a few days ago. Still in shock, I thought, and hard as nails 'cause I have to be right now.

~ Our human nature, at its basest extreme, is predatory, feral. Understanding this lets us aspire to ferocity's opposite: mercy.

~ Skin-to-skin surrender: belly to belly ... ear over heart ... neck-nuzzling, hair-snuffling ... mouth to the breast, to the radiant flesh ... this kind of touch keeps us so much more than simply alive, in existence ... It places us into relation's pulse and brings us fully to life ...

(I think we can only feel bliss if we know we are blessed.)

~ Mind-blowing quote: Hell hath no fury like a noncombatant.
(Author unknown ... and YES!!)

~ Contradiction in terms!! =>"invisible illness"

~ from a recent I Ching divination ... Hexagram 51, SHOCK, changing through Line 4 to Hex. 24, RETURN --
* Forced to take a hard look at things
* Unsticking through shock
* Turbulence. Heaven and Earth: Storming!
* Stuck in the mud, and quaking. Unstick Thyself!
* Intense obtrusions from the outside (I can't resist: No shit, Sherlock!)
* The threat of concomitant destruction pervades each moment. (Sounds like much of life for someone who has C-PTSD, eh?)
* ... and then I tell myself that another way of seeing "concomitant destruction" is that it opens the way for RETURN ... for Spring ... for new life.

~ From an episode of CSI: "Everybody lies; all we can count on is the evidence." (Grissom, of course ...)

~ Self-care is so often labelled as selfishness ... Whatever, retorts a voice in my head (!). How about self-WITHness ... self-withness. I like it. The phrase rolls gently ... a moor in bloom. Selfwithness: TLC for the only person you will never leave and who will never leave you. Selfwithness: right now, it means that I post a photo of a man who plays a character whom I've got the hots for. Num.

~ Being in a state of peace is not living in la-la land ...

~ From Player One, by Douglas Coupland:

... I personally worry that maybe I'm nothing more than my medical condition. If I didn't have my brain anomalies, which others seem to perceive as damage, maybe I'd be a normal person instead, whatever I was actually meant to be like, something better than just a broken woman.

Matthew Shepherd (a poem ...

2010-10-15T13:56:00.000-07:00

... written for Matthew and every other gentle, gay soul so battered ... no matter how they died, they were butchered by contempt ...)

I've never met you

~ and I have, in the shimmer

of budding

men

with eyes of deer

Had I seen your head

bowed in awe

at some wonder

pooled at your feet,

I'd see the bend

of your gentle neck

as a sunning flower

sighing

on its stem,

greeting every

pulse

that passes

I cannot reconcile

this image

with the

mashed

pulp of you

skewed

on the desolate

fence,

your face

a bleeding

rose

More scrawled thoughts and aphorisms ... Trust, shame, heroes ...

2010-10-14T09:27:00.000-07:00

~ Moshe Feldenkrais said, "Movement is life." (In the simple is the true.) In stillness, in quietude, lies awareness of all the subtle movements that keep us alive: breath, heart's pulse, blood's flow ...

Stillness and stagnation are not the same thing. Stagnation sets in through a habitual freezing of body and being -- one becomes stone ... Stillness is loose, at ease: a happy body and being, feeling safe.

~ Trust: it's an animal thing; it's instinctual. My cats have shown me the raw truth about trust, and its lack. Our little Aja came to us at ten weeks old, three weeks after he was found smushed up against a street curb by a merciful soul who took him to our vet. Our baby was starving, had been attacked by some predator -- there was a huge gash in his throat that was crawling with maggots (which our beloved vet told us were there, paradoxically, to keep his wound clean), and his whole body was infested with fleas and mites. He was a day away from starving to death. Our vet took him in, healed his wounds, patched him up in every way ... and sent him home with us. He crawled underneath the bed and stayed there in a quivering panic for four days, rigid against the wall ... Now, three years later, I come upon him ... He's snoozing on a soft chair. I coo his name; his eyes remain closed ... his paws begin to curl, and he rumbles with purrs. I sit down beside him and slowly snuffle my face into his tummy, exhaling a warm rush of breath -- he loves to be breathed and hummed into.

This is trust -- a whole body and being's Yes to what is. My mouth, full of teeth, rests against this little creature's belly -- and he rolls open, his legs sprawling, giving me more nuzzle-room. This is trust: mercy's consequence, and mercy's gift ...

~ Injury and illness are not failures. They are inevitable in these ships of flesh we live in:

That which blossoms
falls, the way of all flesh
in this world of flowers

(Kiko, Japanese Death Poems)

We all have a weakness ... a wound.

~ We are admonished to let go of the past ... but does the past let go of us?

Fridge magnet:

~ We are the self-conscious species ... This is our bliss, and our bane ...

Shame is a crushing force in people who have been existentially injured. Shame's antidote is mercy; mercy is simply the application of kindness.

Torture rapes a whole person and leaves only torment ... When torment is exhausted -- for the moment, usually by some form of altered or obliviated consciousness -- torpor sets in like a freak winter fog.

~ Relational rupture is our road to ruin ... and recognition, respect, and relational reverence are the best medicines we have.

Who are your heroes and heroines of relation?

Here's one of mine ...

She's my Baka, my guardian eagle, my third-eye spy, my ethical mentor, my spiritual mother:

... ten women in one
the sleepless breadwinner with
an iron heart

(Michael Fraser, "dog days")

Our relational sages are proof that survival and sanity are possible ... that mercy is real ... that love is a choice.

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.

(Khalil Gibran)

A blog that's blowing my mind ... with relief and gratitude

2010-09-30T13:46:00.000-07:00

I've just come upon In Sickness and In Health: A Place for Couples Dealing with Illness. I was searching for an image of despair that illustrates a post I've just written at my Pushing Fifty... blog. What I found, beyond the image that I lifted, is a treasure trove, a lifeline, a voice that peals with empathy, understanding, and practical know-how-to-get-through-it.

Thank you, Barbara Kivowitz.

Go now; link, read, connect and pass the gift on:

http://www.insicknessinhealth.blogspot.com

(I've finally clued in to how to post images ... links are still beyond me ...)

Aftermath Aphorisms

2010-09-22T10:03:00.000-07:00

The only good in having gone through many severe shocks and traumas is that when you're smack-fracking-dab in the middle of a fresh hell, you know how to survive it ... and you do.

Possibly the most shredding of injuries that we humans can inflict on one another is to dole out contempt, in meticulous, infinitely patient doses.

When your life is falling apart, you come to realize how quickly you can fall together.

An ornery post about labels.

2010-09-08T09:29:00.000-07:00

Sheesh! The ironies just keep on comin'!

Let me explain.

For some reason, the diagnostic label "PTSD" (especially the acronym!) has gotten under my skin like a plague of bedbugs and the itch is pissing me off! (I also feel -- funny, that -- about 14 years old as I write, thus all the !!s!)

PTSD. It's gotten to sounding peevish. And everyone's got it, or has had it, because "legitimate" writers are getting away with publishing tripe like "Harry Potter fans traumatized by series' ending!!" in supposedly intelligent media. Well, there you go. Another irony, eh?

How about the kids who are "traumatized" by not getting their most coveted present at Christmas ... the ladies-who-lunch who miss out on the fabulous sale. And don't forget the celebs! Give your local library a boost -- head on over and check out the back issues of whatever tabloid has made "magazine" status. See who's on the cover ... and check out the breakage therein! Diet woes! Boob jobs gone bad! The three-week Love Of A Lifetime has up and vamoosed! Everybody's got a trauma, you betcha!

I like feeling fourteen and pissed off. Pissed off is clean and specific; pissed off is lucid. Pissed off roars down like a four-p.m. storm at the end of July ... and then it's gone.

There, I've spewed; now I'll speak.

I'd like to suggest a new catchall for legitimate trauma, for shell shock circa 2010: Stressed Beyond Endurance. No acronym; those three words say it all. Beyond endurance is the key.

Of the clinical monikers that this condition has been known by, shell shock is the name that rings most true. I'd like to see it used again. It's an experiential term -- it's visceral; it's real. Shell shock: your shell's been shocked, your defences breached and battered down. A predator's gotten you -- whether a bomb, a bullet or a fisted hand -- you've been broken into; the house of you, the temple of you pillaged. Dr. Richard Mollica, author of Healing Invisible Wounds, calls it an existential injury. Richard's term is another I can happily live with. Richard gets it. An existential injury shoots through the core of a person. Some wisdom traditions speak of "soul loss" ... Yes, that comes close ... but the loss remains in the wake of a soul that's ejected when mortal terror has struck.

Whoever survives a mortal shock is scarred beyond sight, beyond pitch. If bodily injuries heal, existential injuries may not. Existential shock does stop the heart ... and then a life continues, if the body survives. If the body survives, the presence has shot itself far out of range; this is a pillage that forces the self to vacate. If the body can't get away from assault, the consciousness will.

PTSD is a diagnostic frisbee -- pretty much everyone's tossed it around at least once.

We've got to stop tossing this label around like a toy.

True trauma threatens your life. Full stop.

Shock occurs in degrees; some we recover from quickly. I recall my summer-camp days and the swim tests that came at the end of August. Inevitably, test-day was cold, cloudy, and scudding with winds from the north. Swimming badges were highly coveted at camp, so the competition was fierce. We were also swifting through the water like eels to stay alive. Man, that water was cold!

My summer-camp days lasted from the mid-1960s 'til the late '70s, and believe me, the climate was not like it is now. There were occasional mornings, starting around the 8th of August, set subtly ablaze with frost. We'd tumble out of our cabins, snaked into heavy scarves and stuffed into ski jackets and tuques. We'd tear up the hill for flag-raising at 7:45, quaking in our boots for breakfast.

Swimming tests were always conducted in the morning. In late August, we'd stagger up the beach from the slate depths, blue as bruises except for our feet ... they were yellow.

We always got a heroes' welcome from our friends, who stood with towels flung wide, waiting to wrap us and lead us into the lodge for hot chocolate.

The water had shocked us, iced us, and we knew how to stay warm. We moved. When we were done, we were warmed and given nourishment. Then we'd all shower, dress in wooly layers and troop up the hill to the dining lodge for dinner, stories and a singsong.

The shock came; the shock went. Traumatic or existential injury, on the other hand, remains ... sometimes for life.

Learn your labels; come to know them inside out, and decide, based on your experience, whether they fit.

Saul Bellow gets it

2010-08-27T18:22:00.000-07:00

The next time someone is at odds with you about what it takes to return to life and vibrance after having your soul snatched away -- whether by earthquake or fire, predation, attack ... by injury or illness ... however Death visits and glances off you for now ... you can quote Mr. Bellow:

And now here's the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought you were going around idle, terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moiling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself? Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.

I just might get these words embossed on a stack of business cards, and drop them about ...

I trawled the web for ages, seeking a perfect image for this passage ... I found Robert Joseph Donaghey's "Dark Night of the Soul" and immediately felt that synergistic click of wedded meanings ... Thank you, Robert ... and readers, give your eyes the gift of Robert's art.

... I found another creation of Robert's that immediately opened my heart, my inner eye, and an urge to celebrate the astonishing lack of fear I felt last week when the two balcony-painters showed up out of the blue (see my last post) to restore some lustre to our old building's exterior. I felt a surge of elation; I felt like this --

Robert Joseph Donaghey, "Sequoia"

Odds & sods ... some links and a small triumph

2010-08-26T10:17:00.000-07:00

My husband and I live in a small apartment building; our floor, the third, is the highest. Today, soon after I woke up, I heard the kind of beep - beep - beep that big trucks make as they reverse. The beeping got closer ... closer ... closer. This kind of tone usually drives me into a panic in about five seconds -- I have an excessive auditory sensitivity to certain sounds and tones.

I walked out onto our balcony, thinking, "Damn! Construction work starting on our street" -- and about the old joke: "In Canada, there are two seasons: Winter and Construction." I came nearly face-to-face with two men, painters, who were beeping their way skyward on a platform. They were here to paint the balconies. One was older, a wiry, grizzled character who had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. The other man, in his 30s I imagine, spoke with an Eastern European accent (always a beloved sound to my soul: my cherished Baka is Yugoslavian). There they were; there I was, with barely a half-cup of tea in me, and my husband gone to work. At least I was dressed ... and had a bra on.

You know the drill, PTSD survivors ... Strange people; noisy machine; sudden in-your-face presence. IMMANENT ATTACK! -- It's Trigger Time!

To my amazement, my brain didn't short out; I didn't panic; I even said hello to the two men. I offered them coffee, which they declined until I actually made a pot and told them the brew was on. Then they accepted ... and I have to admire their courage, because I told them that I don't drink coffee, my husband always makes his own, and I sure hope I haven't made a pot of black tar. Turns out the coffee was a little strong ... but the painters drank it while they stood on my balcony and in their "cage" to scour away corrosion and apply new coats of colour. I felt alert and aware of their presence; every few minutes, I'd stand up from the keyboard and wander around my home, peeking out at these two men who were working and slurping away. When they were finished both painting and drinking, the elder man called out, "Thank you!" and I popped outside to retrieve the empty cups (Brave men!) and say a "Thank you" in return (Brave me!). Then they beetled off in their machine, which is still beeping as I write.

I'm not sure what to attribute my lack of fear to; all I know is, I'm amazed and proud of myself. I wonder if my ongoing reduction in antidepressant medication has something to do with my calmer reactivity; I'm down 10 mg. -- have been now for about three weeks. There sure have been some rocky moments (ask my husband...), but this sense of inner quiet is a surprising gift. I look forward to telling my husband that I felt zero fear. The beeping is getting to me ... It's been over two hours now ... but somehow I seem to be full of grit and grace today. More reason for thanks!

I've also been nosing around online and have found some good reads; allow me to share them with you ...

First: a book of essays that I can't wait to read. Author Emily Fox Gordon has written four books, including a novel, two memoirs, and now a book of personal essays entitled Book of Days: Personal Essays. I found Grace Talusan's review at the Boston Globe, in which she quotes Emily:

I am a passive woman. I am a gormless woman. My life has been characterized by an extreme and pervasive failure of agency. When I look back at my fifty-four years, I’m appalled at the proportion of my time I’ve passed lying on couches, smoking, dreaming, sometimes reading.

Oh, my. That sounds so much like me ... I'm spooked ... and intrigued! I completely empathize with passive ... gormless ... failure of agency ... and I don't want to admit how much time I've passed casting bum-prints into one or two couches over the last decade. But if Emily can do it, so can I. I have a memoir in me ... and several essays ... and I feel such an urge to write, even as my focus comes and goes like wild spurts of weather.

Emily also writes of a memory that had me doubled over with laughter; anyone who's got a trainable dog might want to consider teaching him or her a timely new trick that will bowl over anyone who likes a little sass with their politics:

... One of my father's favourite anecdotes ... told of me, at age four, traipsing into the lounge of the Williams Inn with our German Shepherd and showing off the tricks my father had taught him to the alums [Mary's father was a professor]. "What do politicians do to babies?" I asked him, and he [the dog, that is!] promptly licked my face. "Would you rather be dead or Republican?" I demanded, and he lay down, putting his paws over his ears and whimpering.

(*snort*)

Another interesting read comes from the New York Times; op-ed contributor Allen Frances ponders a proposed addition to the upcoming fifth edition of the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual -- psychiatry's bible, in a sense). In a nutshell, consider what you would feel or have felt, two weeks after a major loss (the article's example is the death of someone very close, like a spouse). Remember: two weeks. The shock has barely begun to wear off; you're teetering and flailing about; you might be feeling like the proverbial frog in a blender -- with the machine turned up to WHIP. Case in point: Thirteen days after my mother died, I was at work; at the time, I administrated a rehab consultant's business. It was about 3:00 p.m. and my boss was off on a call. I found myself sitting in front of my employer's computer with a file folder in my hands. I was staring at the folder, truly not knowing what it was or what to do with it.

When your mother's just died ... WTF does a file folder have to do with anything? So there I am, two weeks post-loss, in a witless fugue -- as anyone would be, yes? Well, it seems that some of the folks who are revising the DSM have decided (I may be grossly simplifying here, but we could argue that so are the diagnosticians) that if you're still grieving two weeks after someone like your mother, beloved, child or best friend has died, you have a mental illness, and you need treatment (read: pills).

Such idiocy almost doesn't merit comment ... but Allen Frances' article, "Good Grief" does. Allen, by the way, was the chairman of the task force that revised the DSM-IV back in 1994 . Dr. Frances, I thank you.

Ronald Bassman: author, survivor, and psychologist -- an evolutionary story

2010-08-22T11:56:00.000-07:00

Friends, have you heard of Ronald Bassman? I've just discovered his presence today, while reading a review of his book, A Fight To Be: A Psychologist's Experience from Both Sides of the Locked Door at Metapsychology Online Reviews.

A few quotations to give you a sense of who this man is:

In 1969, at the age of 25, I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for the second time in three years. The first diagnosis, schizophrenia, paranoid type was followed by a second hospitalization and the diagnosis schizophrenia, chronic type. My treatments included electro-shock, insulin comas and massive doses of medication. After I recovered from my "treatments" and began addressing the identity issues that had triggered my excursion into "madness," I entered graduate school, earned my doctorate and have worked as a licensed psychologist in a state hospital, in private practice, been a consultant to schools and state agencies and have been the executive director of a 7-county comprehensive mental health center. During that time I worked as a clinician and an advocate and did not reveal my psychiatric history for twenty years.

... I did not reveal my psychiatric history for twenty years.

... This line makes me weep. I feel so grateful for the empathy that this one line inspires ... because Ron goes on to document how he came out as a survivor of both a seemingly incurable "mental" illness and some heartless "treatments" that I imagine (I've not yet read his book, but I will) only deepened his agony and sent his illness into a cascade of further symptoms.

Ron emerged from chaos to become a Ph.D graduate, a licensed psychologist, a teacher, and an ambassador of possibility. I'm clinging to the "ambassador of possibility" potential ... At 51 years of age, I too have been through many wringers of trauma, illness, treatments both helpful and damaging, and what lately feels like a grinding-down of vitality, mindfulness, and joie de vivre.

My hope ... our hope ... lies in the fact that Life wells in our souls, bursts through our defences, and urges us on to fuller, saner being.

Ron, again:

I believe that as long as a person is alive, some seed of hope, some possibility is there waiting to be fertilized. Hope fights the fear, nurtures the courage and inspires the vision and the work required to resist giving up and accepting that your goals are unattainable. Deep in the recesses of our being there are safe sanctuaries, secure hiding places for never fully lost dreams. But sometimes they are hidden so well that we can no longer reach those parts of ourselves. The help we need may come from expected or unexpected sources.

Here is an excellent article, composed by Ron, about his work in training psychiatric survivors as what he calls Change Facilitators. Who better to inform "experts" than people who have trod the long road of healing brain, mind and soul? Despite the fact that today I feel like an abject, rotting failure who's aged ten years in two ... my heart pulses with resonance and possibility. I'm going to read Ron's book and explore further his contributions to a field that is rampant with professional ignorance and prejudice.

I remember when I was in residence at a psychiatric hospital last year; possibly the most helpful person I encountered was a woman who served as a custodian, a cleaner. I'll call her Dorothy. She and her cleaning-cart wheeled every day through the floor I lived on ... She always offered smiles, kind words, humour and a refreshing, blessedly ordinary perspective. She doled out goodness like the "experts" doled out their soul-numbing drugs.

I'll take the "cleaning lady" over the "professionals", thank you. One such person saved my life when I was a child, and it's always the "ordinary" people, interactions and gifts that touch a person's core of being where s/he hurts the most.

Ronald Bassman has been resident in many -- if not all -- of the milieus that "mental illness" weaves around us. Bless him for his fortitude, his heart, and his resilient mind. He offers ample evidence of what one person can do to keep the heart of humanity intact ...

An honour bestowed, received, and accepted with a full heart

2010-08-21T20:35:00.000-07:00

I've just discovered that dear Svasti has offered me a new award that Christine, aka BlissChick, has created! I feel honoured ...

Thank you both ... Christine, for instigating this sassy, lovin' mischief (Pink! -- a colour of radiant, full-pulsing joie de vivre!) ... and Svasti, for your thought of me as a Never-Gives-Up WarriorChick!

Forgive the tardy response to the gifts ... I'm slower than molasses to think, read and write these days ... My withdrawal from the antidepressant I've been taking for nearly 14 years proceeds apace ... I'm down 10 mg. from 40 to 30 and my brain is reacting ... Scrambled eggs for brains -- that's what I've got! Right now, chaos reigns supreme, but this too shall pass ...

Once the dog-days of August have passed, I'm sure we'll all feel more potent and alive ... and I've got this nearly life-long urge to go out and buy new notebooks, pens, and other goodies that kids buy for that first day back to school. I've always been a sucker for that first day ... The blank page; a new teacher; a new classroom; new learning ...

(Who doesn't love the smell of new Crayolas! ... There isn't another crayon that shoots me back to kindergarten like a rainbow-box of Crayolas! Especially the 64-pack that has a sharpener built into the box! Ooh, I'm regressing ... but happily!)

Sudden Thoughts: Depression

2010-08-16T16:05:00.000-07:00

Depression is not only a dark night of the soul ... It's a soul gone dark.

Biopsychiatry's shadow

2010-08-08T12:52:00.000-07:00

... Once the mind is reduced

to the brain, then it falls within the grasp

of the machine. It is the mind incarnate

in the body, in community, and in the earth

that they cannot confine. The difference

is love; the difference is grief and joy.

Wendell Berry, "1990, III", from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979 - 1997

When your brain feels on fire ...

2010-07-20T13:14:00.000-07:00

... know that you're not alone. Read Ms. Moon's thoughts on those summer days that leave us explosively exhausted ... when the touch of light feels like shrapnel to the skin ...when all the world is on fire and the blast's ground zero is seemingly us.

This too shall pass ... All things eventually do.

Thanks, Ms. Moon, for the reminder.

Dear bloggins,

2010-07-14T11:34:00.000-07:00

I've not been here much lately, have I ... Summer's here -- Splat -- and I'm laying low 'til the withering passes. Funny how we associate "withering" with autumn ... but then again, perhaps "wilting" is the word for summer.

Yes, I like that. Wilting. Don't dare ask about the cats, poor loves.

Seems my scribe-mind is wilting, too. Every once in a while, I toot out an idea and gaze around the room for pen and paper. If it's nearby, the toot gets jotted down for later perusal. If not, oh well ...

Summer ... My, how you've changed. I first sensed a climactic shift towards the weird in 1983, when I was a student living in an icky walk-up with no A/C and ~ shudder ~ a western exposure. My previous summers had been spent mostly at camp, cottages, or in homes with the revered central air. I was a very fortunate child that way.

Ella said it best ...

When my brain is no longer broiling, I'll write more. In the meantime, I'm reading with abandon (at night). Not much online ... It's too hot to sit at the 'puter. Otherwise, I intend to clean out my fridge, lay it on its back, and live inside it for a spell.

Did I tell you that our fridge croaked a few weeks ago? It was gradually losing its coolness, to the point that a litre of milk purchased today would be cruddy by tonight. This while the humidex soared to 43C (109F) for five days straight.

Today -- rah! rah! (no fist-pumping; sorry)-- the humidex, at 3 p.m., stands at a modest (for these times) 37C (98.6F -- normal body temp.), with a relative humidity of 72.2%. It's bearable. My head feels a Probability Of Explosion (POE) index of 38%. I can live with that.

We humans; we adapt.

This may be our undoing.

A post-cynical top ten list about therapy from a former acolyte

2010-07-09T20:31:00.000-07:00

... so I'm going to hawk a list that Catatonic Kid posted to her blog -- It's a classic: hilarious! -- and I'm going to let it inspire me to craft my own ... and I'll call it ...

TOP 10 WAYS TO KNOW YOU'VE BEEN IN ANY KIND OF THERAPY TOO LONG

(wee preamble: I'm writing this with tongue in both cheeks. I've been a recipient of some mind-fucking "therapy", and been graced and met by some sages. One or two literally saved my life when it needed saving. I revere the sages; they lived the proof that sanity, equanimity and love are real ... Real. [One of them introduced me to The Velveteen Rabbit.] I honour those who messed me up for being worthy teachers in their own ways. 'Nuff said. The great ones -- my grandparents of impeccable presence -- remain as guardians, mentors and tricksters. I was once a therapist too ... and irony is best served with a big dollop of compassion. So without further ado ...)

#10. Someone says "Hello" to you and you spill your life story. You don't even wait for "How are you?"

#9. It doesn't feel right to change a light bulb ... period. You're too young -- you're perpetually regressed to two years old, and two-year-olds don't know how to change a light bulb; they only know how to stick light bulbs into their mouths. So you sit in the dark and scream for Mommy.

#8. You think of yourself less as a person and more as a flaming fuck-up who cannot survive without at least two weekly appointments, phone access, and cartons of journals scrawled in devotion to your process ... and your therapist. Either that or you are ranting about what a Pig-Parent your therapist is because she told you you're in denial or otherwise thwarted your raging inner child.

#7. You find the thought of a serial killer behind you ... everywhere. Everybody's a serial killer!

#6. You can't ask your partner if they've had an orgasm during sex because you're not having any. All you want is the comfort of your therapist's arms, and cuddles. And a blankie.

#5. Your self-esteem plummets ... and plummets. It's truly in the shitter. (See #8.)

#4. You start mistrusting everybody but your therapist and your inner child, who is two years of age and will not grow up, ever.

#3. You divide your daily activities into 50-minute, $100-per-hour blocks ... and your monthly budget accordingly. You also divide your days themselves into Therapy; The Yawning Abyss Of Endless, Tormenting Time Between Appointments; and When's My Next Appointment?

#2. You start to really lose it if you go longer than one day without some kind of contact with your therapist ... or his answering machine. (At least that way, you get to hear his voice ...)

And the number one reason to know you've been in any kind of therapy too long is ...

#1. Somebody asks you about the meaning of it all, and you burst into snot-to-the-knees tears.

Mothers ... A conversation

2010-06-26T23:22:00.000-07:00

I've just read a beautiful, evocative post at Ms. Moon's blog, Bless Our Hearts. Ms. Moon invites her readers to converse about our mothers ... and a rich dialogue is springing forth. I left a comment ... and made a first-time admission.

My mother was the nemesis of my childhood ... and when she died over eight years ago, I realized the culmination of a twenty-year journey. All along, through rage, hatred, and maddening grief, I was yearning to forgive ...

Please take a boo at Bless Our Hearts ... and dive in to the conversation if you feel so inclined.

Bless you.

P.S. I found the image at Jan's blog, Yearning for God -- another treasure. Thanks, dear Jan ...

Required reading: Peter Breggin

2010-06-21T11:06:00.000-07:00

He calls psychiatric diagnosis a form of "spiritual profiling." He wonders at the lack of empathy in psychiatric care. In some circles, he's considered a "rogue psychiatrist." I say: Rogue on, Peter!

I've begun to slooowly reduce the dose of an SSRI (Paxil) that I've been taking for nearly 14 years. Last fall, I began to wonder at strange new symptoms arising ... symptoms that had no seeming relation to the original diagnoses (Major depression, recurrent; C-PTSD; chronic insomnia). In March of this year, I became aware of Robert Whitaker and his latest book, Anatomy of an Epidemic.

I tore through the book and am now reading it again without the furious underlining, highlighting, and scribbling in margins. There's so much in that book that makes sense to me -- As a former psychotherapist as well as a person who's lived with one form of "madness" or another all my life (in myself, in immediate family members, in so many other loved ones; in people who sought my help when I worked in the field ... and in fellow professionals!), the clinical revelations were astounding to read -- but not surprising.

Have you ever read a book that coalesces your questions into a circle of perfect sense? -- That's what Anatomy of an Epidemic has done for me. My beloved physician has been on a year-long sabbatical that's nearly over; I'm seeing him in two weeks. I'm gifting him with a copy of Anatomy... and we'll go from there.

I refuse to remain so ... blighted. All the will I'm capable of is presently being used in keeping my head above water; the drugs have definitely impacted my body and being at every level from the metabolic to the cognitive, sensorimotor and proprioceptive. I've learned some new terms: "stereotyped activity" -- repetitious, agitated tics and glitches (like my cuticle- and gum-tearing, and a frenetic paddling of my feet whenever I lie down to sleep). "Akathisia" -- aka "severe inner agitation" (Whitaker, p. 232). "Irreversible receptor modification" (Whitaker, p. 160) -- considered a probable long-term outcome of SSRI use --> One letter, written in 1998 by three physicians to the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, states that

... It is possible that antidepressant agents modify the hardwiring of neuronal synapses [which] not only render antidepressants ineffective but also induce a resident, refractory depressive state.

(quoted in Whitaker, p. 160)

Makes perfect sense. I read these words after more than 13 years on only one drug ... and the mysterious symptoms that have been arising and settling in since about 1998 (!) suddenly radiate with meaning.

I want my brain back.

~ Images are linked directly to where I found them ... Thank you, artists. ~

Father's Day: To sleep, perchance to stay asleep

2010-06-20T17:03:00.000-07:00

You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's.

(Robert Frost)

I slept through most of Father's Day this year ... and clued in to why at about 8:00 p.m.

One week ago -- long story short -- my father, through a beloved elder who has been my "guardian angel" since I was five, made it known that he'd be willing to talk or visit with me if I "get a job or go back to school."

This beloved elder is also a staunch friend to my father -- perhaps his only friend. They're both over 80, both parents, and they've known one another for about 46 years.

Eight years ago, when my husband, catalon, came into my life, my father booted me out of his. Long story short: catalon -- in my father's view -- was a gold-digger. He was after me for my money and assets. Catalon was working-class; not good enough; he wasn't a money-shark. He wasn't predatory enough in the working world, I suppose ... and my father believed he was predating on me. The joke's on Dad; catalon and I were both 'that far' from broke when we met. We still belly-laugh on occasion over how null and void my father's fantasy was.

Now, thanks to my beloved elder, my father will grudgingly admit that after these eight years -- and relentless evidence that my man is my mate -- catalon is a decent enough man to have stood by me through some harrowing times, including the long illness that I have experienced. My father -- and I sorrow for him here -- refuses to move beyond this reluctant admission. It seems that the wealth of a man's soul is irrelevant to him; he does not -- cannot? -- see the integrity of my husband's chosen character. He cannot see that my husband has all the qualities of a gentleman ... and of a sterling father. Most of all: catalon's character is centered in love.

When my beloved elder (who considers catalon her son) told me a week ago of what my father had told her -- "I'll see her when she gets a job or goes back to school" -- I thanked her, as I have countless times, for her (latest) attempt to wake my father up. He's been horrifically ill for many years, widowed for nearly nine, and is in relentless pain of every kind. One would hope that his own experience might inspire empathy for others' ... but no. His only daughter, who has been ill for over two years and whose primary work right now is to make herself as well as possible within this context of chronicity, needs to get off her lazy ass and get a life.

I got off the phone and pitched over; wailed for as long as it took.

So on Father's Day this year, I mourn. I close a door that I've kept ajar for my dad for the last eight years. I've given up -- and sometimes that is the wisest thing to do.

I actually sent him a Father's Day card -- a week early! I'd thought the big day was June 13th, and I called all the cherished fathers I know ... each of whom rang out with joy at my call, and mirth at my brain fart. I didn't call my first father. He never picks up for me.

I thought I was over him.

I broke last Sunday, on my goofed-up Father's Day, when my beloved elder delivered Dad's proclamation. There are many factors involved in why he would essentially say She has to get a life before I'll see her, and I forgive them all. I can't help myself; he's my dad. At the same time, the contempt in his statement struck home -- it's far too close to how I still tend to debase my own self and experience.

There were rare but pervasive moments of sweetness, long ago, with my dad ... and he provided all that a family could need and want from a man of his culture and generation. His laugh was huge, explosive; he could be garrulous and so generous when he was in a flush time. He adored Frank Sinatra -- "My Way" was his theme song, and everybody knew it. He gave me a horse on my tenth birthday, and a two-month trip out west when I was 26. He loved to give, and many people took full, fuller, fullest advantage of this; they came to see and use him as a bank.

I broke last Sunday; I've given up. Even so,

my heart staggers
again under the arch
weight of my father's
refusal:
a face
bent low
over his,
forgiving
our mangy old
sins.

Can we save a life?

2010-06-05T21:22:00.001-07:00

I've just visited PostSecret, and came upon this ...

... my first, screaming thought was No! Don't do it! Then came a hunch ... Post this card to my blog and ask you to post it too. Send it out. Maybe the person who crafted it will come upon it, in an otherwise unremarkable moment, and he or she will choose to stay alive ...

Whoever you are, I've been there with you; I've planned my own death. I have to work hard, many days, to want to stay alive. Whoever you are, your despair is shared. Whoever you are, please stay alive ...

Thank you, Frank at PostSecret, for all the good you have cascaded into the world ...

A psychiatrist ponders his profession, and I ponder my blog

2010-06-03T00:02:00.000-07:00

We have become obsessed with psychopharmacology and its endless process of tinkering and tinkering with medications, adjusting dosages, and piling on more medications to treat the side effects of the drugs we started with.

~ Daniel J. Carlat, Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry -- A Doctor's Revelations about a Profession in Crisis

I'm going to read this as soon as I've finished Anatomy of a Depression.

About the blog ... My head's been elsewhere. For some reason, reading is infinitely easier on my brain than writing; I'm finding it really difficult to hone my thoughts and place them into written words ...

Anyone out there know what I mean? -- This isn't what we usually refer to as writer's block ... It feels more like some weird permutation of ADD in overdrive. I have to make myself pick up a pen or focus on the screen, like I have to make myself eat.

Lord knows the Rx -- and the fact that I've been on it for nearly 14 years -- has something to do with it. I'm not into blame; I rely on awareness to make sense of things ... I sat down a couple of days ago and composed a list of emergent symptoms that have entrenched themselves only since I began taking the drug. One is a bizarre (and amber-light alarming) buzzing of mind; about the only thing I can focus on -- and stay focused on --is the silent, open space of a fallen-into book ...

It seems to take several days, or even weeks, at a stretch before I can sit down and actually compose an essay, a letter, a journal entry that's more than a scrawled half-thought, or a blog post. (Tonight's the night, eh!)

I am delving into a rather sudden confluence of books, blogs, conversations, videos and articles about the sometimes erosive long-term effects of psyschotropic drugs ... and beginning a dialogue with a beloved friend about designing and offering a somatic-awareness-based course of re-presencing oneself into one's whole being after jarring existential injury -- the short version could be called "Somatic Awareness for Scaredy-Cats" --> "Scaredy-Cats" being said with deep affection for people like myself who have passed much of their lives "a short distance from their bodies," as Mr. Duffy did in James Joyce's novel The Dubliners. I used to think of this nascent offering as "Yoga for Cowards," but I was studying yoga with some intent at the time (and yes, I was a coward -- again called with affection. Yoga, as much as I've been irresistibly drawn to it since I was 13, also scares the daylights out of me. Every time I make a serious attempt to reenter my practice, my body goes apeshit with sprung-open memories and emotions. Now I'm reengaging with my studies and interest in body-based psychotherapy, and sharing ideas with my friend Sqish (pronounced "Skish"), who practices Shiatsu and innovative community social work, is a profoundly beautiful, sensual dancer, and loves living in her body. She's 20 years younger than me and she's an old, sweet soul.

Ideas -- the good ones -- help to ground me in my will to live and my excitement in gifts and skills I haven't used in many years. Long story short, the expectations and stresses of running my own business on top of a full-time job and a home to help run became too much ... and my health has always been precarious. Beginning one's life in a state of shock and excessive stress does tend to lower one's baseline of vitality and stamina ... so I see myself beginning afresh, if I can do the work in a small, quiet context according to my own body and mind's abilities (which vary from occasionally luminous [thoughts] to so-so and inconsistent {ability to be out and about] to the persistent flat-out depletion that flattens me whenever it damn well pleases. I don't know what I'm capable of yet in my new imagined working world ... It'll be a while before I envision myself doing what I am just beginning to ponder ...

I want to work again someday in a field that I once loved (and realize that I still do). I feel like I've been purged of a lot of therapeutic bullshit -- I was in therapy for over a decade in the '80s and early '90s, and studying / certifying / training / practicing in the field for 18 years. I experienced therapies and practitioners of every stripe -- from mildly wacko to truly damaging to quick-witted and confrontational to sane, spacious and sacred -- and I deeply know now, in this slow emergence from long illness, decades of trauma-based abreaction and tenacious depression, that I want to once again contribute to a profession I know in my bones I can enrich. My approach, as I see it developing (still in the imagining realm here), will be profoundly quiet in tone and pace; full and verdant awareness can only emerge in a setting of sacred (here meaning "deeply respectful") and mindfully moderated experience. One of my great mentors saw herself in her work as a "space maker" -- I would aspire, should I return to working as a therapist, to being such a one ...