The Lies We Tell Ourselves
⚠️ Content Warnings ⚠️
⚠️ Domestic Violence, Rape, Child Abuse ⚠️
Talking about my trauma therapy today, early childhood and conception. I’ll repeat the warning block right before it comes in to the post.
In December 2018 I went to Mexico, using money I’d raised through donations, and trained in offering Bedside Yoga for end of life care. The whole combination, succeeding at raising money and the training left me feeling unsettled.
As 2019 went on, I began feeling like I was increasingly off balance. My therapist suggested we move away from Art Therapy into SAFE to address the root traumas. We spent a couple of weeks identifying an underlying false belief I have about myself. Then we went back in time from present day to the earliest memories I have that connect to this false belief.
With all that in place, we start at the beginning, reprocessing each memory in turn until it loses the charge, then we “install” the memory into our history. It’s has slay been an illuminating process. We’re only on the third memory.
I say it’s a false personal belief, yet at the same time this belief feels so true. Despite the illogic of it, part of me is certain that I’m ultimately toxic. People shouldn’t ever get too close, if they do I’ll eventually harm them because I’m dangerous.
Right. That definitely makes it hard to connect with people.
The process of going back gives space for people who want to address birth trauma. For me I asked that we start by processing my conception story. I know it because my Mother weaponized the information against me when I was 16; a memory recorded to integrate later.
⚠️ Content Warnings ⚠️
⚠️ Domestic Violence, Rape, Child Abuse ⚠️
My conception is the result of a night of alcohol fueled domestic violence. In 1969 it wasn’t illegal for a husband to rape his wife.
My Mother has experienced multiple miscarriages, a stillborn son, and had a girl who was born with significant birth defects who died at 18 months of age. She told me endless stories about her singing & reading to me when I was in her womb.
She would call me her “miracle”. She wild often remind me that she made me, I was hers.
My therapist helps me understand that my Mother has a personality disorder. That her mental illness was the direct result of my Grandmother’s abusive parenting. Having experienced abuse from my Grandmother, I know she was terrible.
Knowing all this, combined with memories I already had of physical abuse, I feel like I shouldn’t be surprised at new memories of physical abuse showing up. And yet, memories of yet more abuse have upset me, I realize I was still trying to minimize.
I want to believe that I became a difficult child that caused the rages I do remember. Instead I must integrate that she was physically, energetically, and emotionally terrifying to me. By age 4 I knew that no one in my family would ever help me.
My childhood wasn’t that bad...
“Why?”, asks my therapist, “Because she never gave you a black eye?!”
Becoming Light
I’m grateful for therapy. I may often feel angry at what has put me in a comfy seat, but I’m so grateful to have this kind person helping me integrate painful truths.
I have so often felt broken by the experiences I’ve survived. This new round in trauma therapy is helping me feel like I’m really uncovering the hidden weights holding me back.
Despite the ugliness, the hair-crackling rage I’m feeling on the process, “I feel myself turning into something of inexplicable value.”, to quote Mary Oliver.
Conundrum
Trauma doesn’t make sense and yet I can’t stop my thinking brain from trying to understand. I’m getting better at realizing when I’m spinning my wheels in the deep mud of a trauma memory and I need to stop trying to make sense of it. I’m getting better at reminding myself that my Mother has a personality disorder, there is no sense to be found.
My grandmother was terrible to me and that was while she noticeably more loving towards me than my Mother. When I recall this, I’m reminded that my Mother’s mental illness was a direct result of the abuse she received as the unwanted, second child. My mental health is the direct result of intergenerational trauma, and it stops here.
The past doesn’t have to make sense and I’m learning to be OK with that.
Return
I’ve been away healing, growing, but have been considering that some writing best belongs here, but on social media alone.
Thursday would have been my Mother’s 77th birthday. I’m remembering how we were getting ready to take her to Hawaii for her 70th. Social media tells me I was ordering our cab to the airport about this time 7 years ago.
Yesterday I reminded my wife, “The forecast said there’s a high chance of Mom-Mopes.”
These post-death birthdays get easier, but I’m in the midst of processing a trauma memory that’s opened my eyes to the physical abuse she visited upon me as a very small child. I’m integrating how terrifying she was and how I have been shaped by this.
Glad I have therapy on Tuesday, it feels right to keep working through the memory. I'm prepared with my self care plan for the rest of the week. Physical Therapy on Wednesday. Donuts with a friend on Thursday itself. Time in a floatation tank Friday. Making art with friends on Saturday.
I’m also enjoying watching my orchid from grocery outlet store, never have seen the flowers, bloom!
Parks Gratitude
Now that I'm teaching at the Mt. Scott Community Center 3 days a week I get regular opportunities to walk through the tall firs the fill the space of the park. It is a park with a lot of history for me, my grandmother lived not far from it when I was a child and the park was the setting for several family gatherings including my birthdays. Having an August birthday meant several of mine were celebrated in public parks.
Portland has over 10,000 acres of parks. The largest, Forest Park is over 5,100 acres, is where I first took my wife on our first outing together to hike in gently falling snow and mud. It is the largest urban forest preserve, significantly larger than Central Park in New York City or Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. I've hiked all over it growing up here and I doubt I'll ever see all of it in my lifetime.
Whenever people visit I usually take them to visit a park, we have so many to choose from. There has always been at least one park within a fairly easy walk in every part of the city I've lived in. I've been so fortunate to grow up living with this abundance of green spaces. Being able to find myself in amidst tall trees and green, growing things remains an important healing tool in my life.
Space to Grow: Gratitude
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
― Leonard Cohen
Today's been a little easier, very busy but I'm feeling better about the day overall. I've been thinking about something I was sharing in therapy about my relationship with my wife.
Most of the time, despite us both living with c-ptsd and her managing ADD as well, we connect well and work well together. We have real synergy at times when we're working together. When we're not, when we get off and end up at such opposites it is if we're magnets pushing each other away. She gets bigger. I get smaller and try to disappear.
I even joked, in reference to a tree in a storm I'd drawn, that "I make myself small enough to hide in that gap, down in the roots."
"So you disappear?", my therapist asked in response.
"Not exactly." I responded after some thought, "It is more that I try to find some place dark, warm, and safe until it is safe to come out."
Making myself small and scarce, only doing things that would please my Mother (like silently cleaning the house), helped me survive her rages. For so long, I have perfected making myself small enough to go down into the cracks until the storm blows over.
I want to think of those cracks now, not as places I go to hide, but places I am reminded of the light. Places where I grow from, until I grow out of this reaction to get small enough to disappear from view.
I'm grateful for all the times that pushing myself down into the cracks kept me safe. It was a useful skill.
I'm grateful for all the light that came in to me during those times since it helped me to find ways through the darkness.
Willingness Gratitude
I've had another tough day, so much so that I've really had to start writing to figure out my gratitude for today. For a moment I thought it might be the fact that tomorrow is another day and I can put this day to rest. However, as I wrote a little bit, it occurs to me that I'm grateful for my willingness to unlearn old patterns of behavior that now, at age 48, really hold me back from flourishing personally, professionally, and in my relationships with the people I love.
Sometimes I really feel like a badly programmed robot.
Having been an isolated, only child and my Mother's predilection for moving nearly every year of school, I often am left feeling that I'm lacking in communication skills. Beyond the isolation of being an only child, my Mother used "grounding" as a frequent form of punishment, limiting me to my bedroom except to go to school and the bathroom. I believe I often would even get a plate fixed in the kitchen and eat by myself in my bedroom. I never thought of sneaking out as a teen, by then I was too afraid of her to even consider trying it.
People who know me primarily as a yoga teacher might be surprised to know that I don't feel like I'm great at communicating. In my years in technology my communications skills were always credited as a contributing reason for promotions, raises, and bonuses. In the realm of more public communication, those connections that feel a little less personal and intimate, I'd say my skills are better than average.
My teacher likes to use the phrase, "Professional Extrovert", which is pretty apt. I can be fairly easy with a group of people in front of me, but one-on-one interactions often feel so much harder and I'll find myself thinking, "How do real humans do this connection shit?!". In the worst case scenarios I freeze up and fall back into old patterns of behavior that don't really help in the present day, and often create more problems.
Knowing it, being aware of it, and being any good at stopping it are all every different parts of the work to do to change behavior. I'm still on the first two and trying to figure out how to get good at stopping it instead of stopping it through painful communication failures. How do I reprogram the routines that convince me that quiet retreat and productivity are the answer, because they always did improve things for my abusive Mother?
Today it feels like there are no answers, however, I am willing to keep digging into the mess of it all, to do the rewiring of old patterns.
Self-Care Gratitude
Last night I realized that I'd been optimistic about the number of things I'd want to do the first week back from retreat. This morning, before teaching, I contacted a friend I'd been planning to see this afternoon and asked to reschedule. This gave me more downtime at home after teaching my morning classes. Time to catch up on some household tasks, walk the dogs, and feel a little more rested.
Over the past few years I've got better about telling people I can't make it rather than try and push myself through. The years where I could just keep pushing myself are long-gone, thankfully, and I have to make time to rest. I've become someone who naps when I'm tired, tries hard to get at least 7 hours of sleep, if not 8.
A topic my new therapist explored with me was self-care. She's worked with a lot of people who are in caring professions who respond with a blank look when asked about self-care practices. I was glad to be able to honestly tell her that, while I'm not always great about doing it, I do have practices. I also try and practice what I teach, so I journal, meditate, do yoga movement, and have a gratitude practice.
Learning self-care for me was a crash course, necessitated by health crises. I'm grateful for the skills I've learned and continue to learn about caring for myself. It has taken me a while to see that caring for myself is really helping care for the people I love in the long-run; I can't be of help to anyone if I'm too burnt out.
Moving Forward
Despite sleeping well, and the cats letting me sleep until 8AM, I felt a little anxious this morning. Thanksgiving marked one year since my Mother died. The first of December a year since I actually found out. With the strange way the news around my Mother's death unfolded last year it isn't too surprising that I think of her death as being in December. I thought about it for some reason this morning, realizing that Thanksgiving, the blues I felt coming on right afterward, ties up closely to her last act of malice against me.
With CK being away visiting her Mom for some early Christmas celebrating, I decided that unless I felt poorly I would do a little community scouting this morning. I went to church. Not just church, I went to an Episcopal church. That's the faith I was nominally brought up in and am baptized in. We were not regular members of any church, I suppose the one I went to most often was the one my Grandmother belonged to. The rest of the time it was largely related to Christmas and Easter.
The nearby church I picked called out diversity on their website, with rainbows, so I was hopeful. I found an open and welcoming community with visibly queer members; I stayed for a cup of tea. When I stopped saying "spouse" and switched to "wife" no one really blinked an eye. Perhaps I needed a year to pass from my Mother's death before setting foot in a church, some distance from the increasingly narrow, judgmental, supposedly Christian beliefs became.
In the time since I came out to her, my Mother went from standing up for me in front of people (or so she told me she did, who knows, really), to manipulating long-time family friends through their "faith-based homophobia" to gain allies. Telling people how she tolerated my lifestyle. Now imagine your whole life being like that. I would go from the novelty of being interesting and attention-getting for my Mother, to being reviled by her, getting her the attention for denouncing her daughter.
I was washing my face this morning when I had a clear flash of the last eye-to-eye contact I had with my Mother, in a hospital room northwest of our home. The look she gave me was one I'd seen on her face before, always directed at other people, when her plans to cause suffering would bear their fruit of ill-will. She looked at me with a blend of malice, triumph, and satisfaction, the hint of a smile on her face. It was terrifying.
Coming to terms with all the kinds of abuse she either visited upon me personally, or facilitated, or turned away from because to protect me would be too much for her. I honestly struggle still with the shame of it all, it is a daily effort to remind myself that I no longer have to carry shame adults thrust upon me, becoming another kind of abuse. Between the shame and having a hard time trusting, I feel like I make a lot of really foolish mistakes in relationships. Mistakes I feel that somehow, at 47, I really should have grown out of by now.
Despite that terrifying look on my Mother's face burning in my brain, or perhaps because of it, I thrust myself out of the house and off to church by myself this morning. I rewarded myself, and the dogs, by walking in the mud and wet through the nearby woods. I did some much needed cleaning tasks and stocked up on food for the dogs and cats, just in case the forecast of possible snow comes true. It has been good, but tiring day and I might just curl up in bed with some light reading.
Dogs - Portland, Oregon - December 2016
November Blues
Realizing I haven't posted since my birthday. I had a bit of a slump around my birthday, just spent some downtime, teaching classes and resting on many levels.
I've since been regrouping on all the tasks to complete after finishing my Advanced training in Integrated Movement Therapy, seeing clients, having meetings with my mentor, writing. Then it was October, which arrived uncharacteristically wet. We were overwhelmed with garden produce, unable to get to a lot of it processed.
A guest in October left leaving us feeling exhausted and anxious. About the time it felt like my energy was picking up, well the election happened. The next day each of my three yoga classes had students crying in them, which was a lot of energy to contain and hold gently, tenderly. I was exhausted utterly at the end of that day, the next morning I awoke with a fever and sore throat. That quickly turned into a hacking cough. Missed classes, came back to teaching too soon, relapsed and ended up missing out on the first real rest and treat I'd planned for myself at a yoga & art retreat out at the Oregon Coast.
I'll be wrapping up the last of my to-do items before applying to my internship, I'm not too far off my original goals for my program. I'm grateful to have been able to keep focused on this goal while at the same time working on completing my business plan. This week I'm submitting my application for a small seed grant for starting my business, which I'll be using to pay for internship costs. Things are coming together nicely even with needing some downtime around my birthday.
I'm trying to keep focused on all the I've been getting done, because once again this year November has rolled in with rain, dark, and some serious blues.
Trying to be gentle with myself. November and December bring together the anniversaries of 3 deaths: My Dad (step-father) died in December 2000, the a little over 11 months later my biological father died in November 2011. Next month also marks the first year since my Mother died last December. The year my Mother did her best to blow up our lives, that all started in November, continuing on through into the New Year. When I keep in perspective that these last two months of the year have just held a lot of grief.
Which means this year won't be the year the blues don't stroll on into my life in November. Another year of practicing appreciating what I am getting done and reminding myself that these blues aren't here forever and in a few weeks the light will slowly begin to return.
