I M Perfect lady

Author: bjukuri

  • We truly never ride alone!

     

    I met a woman yesterday who is in our country, can’t speak our language fully, has three kids (that I saw) and she was selling a car and she can’t even drive.

     

    Smiling, with papers in hand, trying to explain with little words and lots of nods, about this ‘thing’ she was left to sell for her husband.  It was left to her to do, since he had left this country already and was back in their home country. 

     

    She didn’t appear to be frightened, worried, or frustrated, just smiling and gesturing the best she could about how nice a car it was, how comfortable it was, how she no longer needs it.

     

    She was watching my mechanic husband look under the hood, under the car, start it up, shut it off, he had the car turned inside out and backwards in a few minutes.

     

    She is talking to him and he is not hearing her, her words lost to his limited hearing.  I chuckled at the two of them, one can’t hear and the other can’t talk. 

     

    I speak louder to her and him, she smiles, he continues to learn about this car, and I learn about her.

     

    Her courage just to be in this country, but to be left here so vulnerable, it seemed, doing what has to be done for her family, humbled me.

     

    When I asked how long it would be before she gets to go home, she smiles and says, “One year January!”

     

    After some discussion, she has over a year to go, but made it seem like just a short while.

     

    What she takes in stride some would find very impossible to do, and would not even consider it.

     

    I have no idea where she came from or where it is she will return, but to be staying for over a year with kids, no car, learning a new language, showed an inner strength that I admired.

     

    There is another woman, this one I only heard about, she lives in this country, speaks our language, has a car, and an opportunity to learn a new mail route, but the ‘big office’ scared her, so she declined.

     

    The difference between the two is startling.

     

    I have no true idea of what is really going on in the lives of these two women, for I have not walked but one step in their shoes, but I have to admire the car saleslady and her willingness to be in the game.

     

    It seems we can get stuck in the pattern of No, yet once you say yes and arrive, you then are walking forward learning, growing and offering opportunities to yourself and family if you can only utter, ‘yes.’

     

    Due to a frightened lady’s “No,” I will be learning yet another route.  This one is a unique route and has only 20 miles with lots of businesses. 

     

    This is a ‘city’ route, with lots of small streets and alley’s with the box on one street and the house location on another, with apartments and senior citizens buildings, lots of in and out of the car, almost like a walking route! 

     

    I will be delivering to a Prison and limbs to a business that makes artificial legs and arms, going in a Casino to pick up mail, a marina, a state park, the DNR, to name a few!

     

    What interesting things will I learn and be exposed to, what opportunities will this extra route offer me, and my family?

     

    Maybe those of us who continue to say “Yes” are almost incapable to saying no, I just never seem to have a good enough reason not to try.

     

    The car saleslady will be an inspiration to me as I forge once again into learning another route. 

     

    What power I have compared to her, what resources, what connections, what unlimited support I have, this is all a piece of cake, compared to her.

     

    And who knows, she may be tickled pink with herself for successfully making a sale, for rising up to the challenge.

     

    She just added a tool in her toolbox, ‘used car saleslady’ one more thing that she can do successfully.

     

    We truly are unlimited in what it is we can do, but first you have to be willing to try, willing to fail, willing to be uncomfortable in a place of unknowing in order to know.

     

    I loved her authentic unknowing and her delight when we said we would take it. 

     

    She sold me my next mail car.

    I hope her spirit comes with the car!

     

    We truly never ride alone!

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Energy Leaks and Memory Maturation.

    Energy Leaks and Memory Maturation.

    (Awakening Intuition – Mona Lisa Schulz)

     

    Imagine that every one of us is a set of encyclopedias.  In the present perhaps your life has reached volume 17. But something back in volume 2, in the past, is still affecting you, causing you ulcers or some other disease.  You have to go back and figure out what this ulcer is all about.  Its cause could be five volumes back or four volumes, or it could be in the current volume.  The stomachache you have today may be due to your boss yelling at you this morning, but it may also be due to the fact that your mother yelled at you every morning in volume 2.

     

    Trauma in the form of experiences such as child abuse, military combat, man-made or natural disasters, witnessing violence, or even lesser emotional and mental traumas increase levels of disassociation.  This means that certain emotions and memories are split off; they lie in the body tissue or areas of the brain we can’t talk about.  If not dealt with properly, they can create disease in the body.

     

    The important point – and this gets a little complicated – is that it’s not the memory itself, not the actual trauma of the past, that causes our problems in the present.  What the memory means to us is what is important – as is the way we react to what that memory evokes.  In other words, it’s not the boarding school that caused your problems, it’s that you perceive college as being the same as being in the boarding school.  You could have an absolute angel of a professor, the class your taking could be wonderful, you can go out to lunch any time you want, but your body is perceiving the current experience as being just as traumatizing and stressful as the former experience.

     

    This has been demonstrated scientifically.  In one study woman who were to have mammograms were questioned about events in their lives over the previous five to eight years.  Researchers discovered that they were able to predict which women would be found to have cancer based on the answers they gave to those questions.  Those women who had experienced a severe life event – living through a natural disaster, perhaps, or the loss of a loved one or the loss of a job in the last five to eight years were consistently more likely to be diagnosed with cancer.  Even if the woman had had a trauma in her early life, it was not that even that triggered her problem.  She did not come down with cancer because she had been a victim of incest and had never had the capacity for love.  It was because of the way she reacted to the more current events.

     

    The researchers looked at the difference between the women who approached their crisis actively and those who disengaged from them.  Disengaging is a minor form of dissociating, separating conscious reality from our feelings about it.  They compared women who had formed an action list, a series of steps for dealing with the problem, with those who didn’t, and they compared women who got support from others in dealing with their problems with those who didn’t.  Which strategies do you think increased the woman’s chance of getting breast cancer?  Amazingly, it was the activist strategies.

     

    You might think that the activist approach is really grappling with your problem is what I’ve been advocating.  But these women were faced with severe and unavoidable life events – death, permanent loss, inescapable stress.  There was no changing what had happened to them.  Their strategies might have been acceptable in other settings, but not here.  They had to face the question of when to hold them and when to fold them.  In the act of trying to fight something unavoidable, the activist women were actually reliving this inescapable event over and over, making the trauma grove deeper and deeper.  You can’t bring dead people back; you can’t relive your childhood.  Some things are simply irreversible.  It may not seem fair, but no one said that life has to be fair.  Look at the birds at the feeder sometime and watch the big, powerful bluejay with his long beak and cap swoop in and elbow out the little sparrows.  The birds don’t start squawking, “Hey, hey, hey!  You better get in line bubba!”  They just go back in there.  This is the way of nature, and the best thing to do is accept it.  In fact, this is called radical acceptance.  Without this capacity, the activist women were using up physical and emotional resources that could have protected or healed their bodies instead.  The researchers actually concluded that the women’s behavior caused their breast cancer.

     

    We want to pay attention to body memories and figure out the emotions related to the body symptoms we’re experiencing. You want to focus on those memories, however, so that you can transform them, acknowledge them, deal with them, and then release them and move forward.  If you’re forever focused mentally on some trauma or emotion that occurred in the past, you’re losing energy to the past and sapping healing energy from the present.  Your lightbulb in the present will be operating on a level of 60 or 70 watts instead of 100.  In medicine this is called the steal syndrome.  Cancer cells have been shown to ‘steal’ energy from adjacent normal tissue.  So if you’re repetitively reliving and reexperiencing a traumatizing memory, two things happen: you begin to see the pattern of that memory every where and recreate it in the present, and it causes the area in your body that carries the metaphor for the trauma to steal energy from areas that are normal and to reinforce the disease in that area.

     

    In psychiatry we no longer focus exclusively on the past; we teach our patients how to deal with the present.  We teach memory maturation.  This consists of four steps: (1) locating the traumatic experience in the past and differentiating it from current reality; (2) focusing on living in the present without feeling or behaving according to irrelevant demands belonging to the past; (3) decreasing hyperarousal by means of meditation, relaxation response, and exercise; and (4) decreasing intrusive reliving and stopping black hole cycles.

     

    The brain has its own mechanism for decreasing the influence of painful memories.  As you lay down new memories that contradict the old one and help you reframe it, the neuroconnection to the old painful memory weaken.  It becomes the credit card you stop using.  In the meantime you use the other, new credit cards more frequently.  Think of the story of the pianist David Helgott in the movie Shine.  His father tyrannized and abused him while professing to love him, forming a traumatic childhood memory and helping set the scene for a mental breakdown.  But after the boy left home, he had a lot of other experiences of people being loving to him, including various teachers and mentors and eventually his wife.  Their love was expressed differently, and had a healing affect.  David never lost the memory of his father, but he was perhaps able to change the way he interpreted that memory, because it was replaced by memories of other people showing him love in a different way.  As the neuroconnections to those memories strengthened, the old ones weakened.

     

    An illustration of how this works can be found in an eye study performed on monkeys.  Researchers put patches over the monkey’s right eye to force the left eye to do all the work.  Over the period that the right eyes were patched, the neuroconnections that helped those eyes function became retracted or pulled back.  When the patches were removed, the monkeys were functionally blind in their right eyes, unable to see clearly.  The neuroconnectionss to their left eye were strong, but the right ones had been weakened simply due to the lack of use.

     

    Memories work the same way.  There’s no reason to believe that you are ruined or trapped for life if you have a bad memory.  If you don’t constantly reinforce the trauma, it will weaken.  WE all know people who go around talking, almost with pride, about their terrible allergies, for instance, and telling the story over and over of how they ate something that made them swell up so badly that they nearly died.  They keep looking out the same eye and reinforcing it.  Consequently, they’re not using the other eye, the one that can see all those times that they didn’t swell up and were absolutely healthy.

     

    We can learn, forget, and change our behavior.  We can all put aside and learn to live in the present.  Our brains and memories can help us do that.

  • “Awakening Intuition” by Dr. Mona Lisa Schulz

     Memory and Emotion

     

    One theory about the way the memory functions holds that all memory are not completely preserved and that forgetting things means that our memories have been lost from storage.  Another theory holds that nothing we experience is ever truly lost.  Everything we see, every gum wrapper, every hole in the road, is stored somewhere in the brain.  The fact that we don’t remember every one of these things only means that we have lost the route of associations that would enable us to remember them.  It’s like losing a pair of earrings.  They don’t cease to exist because you lost them, but you can’t figure out where they’re hiding, so you can’t get to them.  Once a memory is created, you never lose it; you just can’t find it under the bed among all the dirty socks and other objects.

     

    It’s generally believed that our memories are laid down all over our brain and that our capacity to retrieve them involves certain neuro-connections, which are like telephone lines in the brain.  Forgetting represents a disconnection of some of these lines.  In other words, if you don’t use a memory, the brain simply cuts off the telephone line to it.  Or think of it as a credit card that you haven’t used for six months, so the bank cancels it.  You can’t use it to retrieve money from the ATM anymore, but you still have the credit card itself, right there in your wallet.

     

    It is fair to say that we don’t remember most of life.  The things we do remember, the memories we retain a connection to, are those that have an emotional charge to them.  You’re not likely to remember a bottle cap you saw on the ground at a country fair when you were six years old.  If, however, you slipped on the bottle cap, fell, broke your arm, cried in the ambulance all the way to the emergency room, and then had to walk around wearing a cast for six weeks, that you would remember.

     

    Memory in other words, is the experience of an emotion encoded and empatterned in our brains and our bodies.  Some of the memories are pleasant and good; some are upsetting and bad.  A memory that is unusually happy or pleasant, and not particularly stressful, is usually encoded mostly by the way of the hippocampus in the temporal lobe, which helps record verbal memory, or memory that can be talked about.  When an experience is painful or traumatizing, however, the hippocampus is unable to encode it because it’s suppressed by stress hormones released by the brain and body.  That’s when the amygdala, another area in the temporal lobe, steps in and takes over, encoding the experience as a nonverbal memory, or one that can’t be expressed easily in words.  The memory is stored in the body memory.  You may not consciously recollect it, but it still lives in your brain and the tissues of your body.

     

    This is how the brain works when you lay down a memory.  As you live a certain experience, the brain records it in the visual area and the auditory area, taking in sights and sounds of what is occurring.  It also records what you are feeling in the body-sense are.  These are all primary sensory areas of the brain.  Later, when you evoke that memory, all three areas come on-line.  You get a hologram in your mind of your wedding day, for instance.  You see people milling around at the reception, you hear the music, you feel your shoes pinching your feet, and you hear your train sweeping against the floor.  It’s a memory without trauma that you talk about easily and often and with great enjoyment.

     

    But now let’s say you go for a walk one day down a country road.  Your feet are crunching on the pebbles, you smell the lilacs in the air and feel the breeze against your arms and face.  Your feeling strong and carefree when suddenly out of the bushes besides the road charges a huge dog, snarling and baring his fangs.  You see his great teeth, you hear him barking, you feel the gooseflesh. Terrified and stricken you run as fast as you can to get away from the dog.

     

    That evening at dinner your husband asks you how you enjoyed your walk. “Oh, it was fine,” you say.  You don’t really want to mention the incident with the dog, so you don’t talk about it.  In a sense, you’ve already begun to forget about it, because it was unpleasant and frightening and therefore something you don’t want to confront again.  This very similar to what happens after you have a bad dream or nightmare.  If it’s a particularly frightening dream, and you don’t wake up and tell someone immediately, then it’s not laid down in verbal memory.  It stays in body memory, however, and you might walk around for an hour or two feeling extremely shaken from the experience of the dream, even though you can’t really recall it.  Like a bad dream, your emotionally charged encounter with the dog is encoded in your body memory.  What you have done, however, is to dissociate it from your conscious memory, mentally split it off or isolated it as painful and unacceptable.

     

    This is what we do with trauma.  We act out the line from the Barbara Streisand song: “What’s too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget.”  To the degree that we do this, however, with memories that it is important for us to face, we will experience the consequences in our emotional state, our physical state, or the state of the organs and their relative health or disease.

     

    The Black Hole of Trauma

     

    A famous study raised rats in boxes where they regularly received electric shocks from birth.  It sounds awful, but for the rats it was home sweet home.  It’s not unlike life for a great many people who grow up in an atmosphere of trauma.  The rats grew up with shocks, and after they reached adult rathood, so to speak, they were allowed to leave their boxes and were given the opportunity to move to other boxes, where they would receive no electric shocks.  Well, they all choose to return to their original boxes, and the memory of life amid electric shocks.

     

    The rats were happier reliving their know distress than trying out unknown possible future health.  They had learned that helplessness was the only way of life.  It was the song they lived by, the beat they marched to.  In their boxes of electric shocks, they were in control.  They thought, “Hey, I can control this.  I’ve lived all my life with getting shocked.”  In the same way, many of us have lived all our lives with being overburdened at work or being unhappy in an unfulfilling relationship.  We can handle that, because it is familiar.  The prospect of changing jobs, though, or striking out on our own, leaving the bum and possibly being alone, is downright terrifying.  It’s easier to stay where we are.

     

    Unfortunately for the rats, however, their helplessness ultimately affect their immunity.  They got used to the idea that the world wasn’t safe, that they would continually be shocked.  Even though they had learned to tolerate this emotionally, their bodies would not physically tolerate it.  Body intuition and body memories always win. Eventually our minds block out the number of shocks we feel.  But the body keeps score.  With each shock our white cells and immunity slip lower and lower.  Over time, the rat’s immune systems broke down, letting in all kinds of disease.  They had become physical incarnations of the rat’s belief that they were constantly vulnerable to attack from the outside world.

     

    Like the rats, most of us tend to relive past trauma over and over.  We fall into the black hole of trauma.  Past memories increase physiological arousal – that is, they prepare us physically and emotionally for shocks.  It’s as if we’re bracing ourselves for the other shoe to drop, except that there are simply more and more shoes.  At the time of the trauma in the past, we secreted the stress hormones cortisol and norepinephrine.  These get us revved up for the next attack.  And guess what?  We actually attract further attacks!  When we recall that trauma or memory, the brain and the body release these hormones again and again. What that means is that we find ourselves in an environment that evokes a traumatic memory, we interpret it as being stressful and traumatic, just like the past.  Our bodies experience it as if the real trauma were occurring, even though it’s only a memory, only like a bad dream.  The body is shaking as thought we’ve been having nightmares all night, even though we’re only reliving a pattern encoded in the brain.  As a result, we’ll re-create traumas in the present and future.

     

     

  • Grace of God go I!

    “Failing to Appreciate” I thought was such an odd term to use for the meaning of psychic blindness, for it seemed so kind.

     

    But as I pondered that word yesterday, we use that word appreciate when we speak of value.

     

    If a house is getting run down it depreciates in value.  When you really appreciate what someone has done, you are giving value to what they do, and if you feel unappreciated, you feel less than, so it does make sense to use the word appreciate.

     

    We failed to see the value of an action.  Our value scale was skewed and we valued the wrong stuff.

     

    It is like finding out diamonds are worthless and rocks have a high value.

     

    Appreciation, noun: gratitude; thankful recognition: They showed their appreciation by giving him a gold watch. the act of estimating the qualities of things and giving them their proper value.

    I am just getting the word, “Self Worth”…and low self esteem.

     

    Self Esteem, self-respect: confidence in your own merit as an individual person.

     

    Self Confidence, confidence in self: confidence in yourself and your own abilities.

     

    How tragic is the nervous disease called ‘psychic blindness’ it literally has you living life feeling worthless, due to your inability to see what is worthy or not on the outside, you can’t recognize your own self worth.

     

    Imagine, if you have the value system backwards, you inner values too are backwards.

     

    It is quite a ride for sure, to witness the changes occuring, like Fall Leaves changing their color, we now put credence on the correct things.

     

    Going from dark to Light, from sad to appreciation, from despair to joy, from fear to love, responsibility to freedom, from control to allowing, letting go instead of holding on, not breathing to breathing…..

     

    Even while losing family and friends, I understood why, and there was sadness in what could have been, but there was gratefulness in walking beyond the dysfunction, which we now know as Psychic Blindness which has our ‘relationships’ how we relate to people and things.

     

    I failed to appreciate, oh boy did I ever.

    I failed in so many ways.

     

    I was blind, but now I see.  Isn’t that a line in the song, “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me, I once was lost, but now I am found, was blind but now I see.”

     

    The gratitude that comes forth is overwhelming, to be the one to experience the joy, the love and peace, by the Grace of God go I!

     

     

  • “…all obstacles in my way.”

    For some reason I need to write about this Posttraumatic Relationship (Stress) Disorder, where we are backwards, and how we have the psychic blindness.

     

    Do you get the ramifications of that? 

     

    In my case of this psychic blindness, the mind was blind, but my body knew.  My body had the correct feelings.

     

    This is very intriguing and maddening all at the same time.

     

    To understand that the mind/brain can do this switch, it can take fear and abuse and hide it, that it can literally keep you from knowing that, enrages me at times. 

     

    I almost feel a victim of my mind more than my father.

     

    Do you realize that my mind blocked it out? MY mind refused to accept what was happening, was traumatized by the event, so it didn’t record it.

     

    I am not sure if and when that recording will resurface, will it be like the emotions that just pop up out of nowhere and engulf you in grief?

     

    Due to the fact that my mind was blind, I was able to be with these people, feel uncomfortable but not know why.

     

    I always felt that I had a problem, that here they were just being themselves and I wanted them to be different.

     

    Wanting them to be different?  I guess my body knew they were different than what appeared.  I was always not satisfied, always expected and needed more from them, maybe all I needed was more from my mind.

     

    It feels like my mind cheated on me, betrayed me, and hung me out to dry! 

     

    The one act, the one huge moment that it should have recorded all of it, it shut its eye.

     

    Would it matter today if I had the picture, if I knew for certain what it covered up, or have I already made the movements I need to be at peace?

     

    This psychic blindness hurt me much more than my father for it allowed me to continue being around him, to bring my children to him.

     

    My mother and I had the same blindness and I was her biggest champion, I tried to make the outside fit her mental mind, I worked hard to create the family life for her while we were both blind to who our father was.

     

    The ramifications of that blows your mind!  Do you think that this psychic blindness is the subconscious mind?

     

    Is the blindness hidden in our subconsicouness, for otherwise wouldn’t we know we were blind.

     

    It seems like it was hidden out of sight of our normal knowing.

     

    Otherwise wouldn’t it be like pretending it didn’t happen.

     

    What is denial and what is pretend and what is psychic blindness in comparison?

     DENIAL – noun: an assertion that something said, believed, alleged, etc, is false: despite his denials, we refuse to believe a doctrine, a theory or the like.

     

    PRETEND verb: fake, falsify. Synonyms: act affect allege assume , be deceitful, be … verb: play the part of. Synonyms: act , assume the role, imagine imitate

     

    PSYCHIC BLINDNESS –forms of nervous disease in which, while the senses of sight and hearing remain unimpaired, the mind fails to appreciate the significance of the sounds heard or the images seen.

     

    FAILS TO APPRECIATE! 

     

    I did not really think, as usual, that there really was or would be a meaning to the term ‘psychic blindness’.

     

    I knew it was like being blind, or selective hearing and sight!

    But damn the things it ‘fails to appreciate’ my God!

     

    It horrifies me the significance of this nervous disease!

     

    Hell, no wonder we are nervous, no wonder my body was in angst, no wonder I considered myself mental, my mind failed to appreciate the sights and sounds of abuse, of rape of being molested!

     

    Failed to appreciate.  How kind of a definition is that?!

     

    No need to deny or pretend, for we failed to appreciate what it was we saw or heard.

    What appears to be conscious denial is really psychic blindness.

     

    I often stated that my family was walking around plugging their ears, closing their eyes and humming really loud to not hear and see what hit the papers and the courtroom that winter of 2001.

     

    For me to see that paper and have my father sitting there in court, now labeled a “Sexual Predator” and then to read my mother’s account of him being a good man, that he clothed and fed 14 children, that is psychic blindness at play.

     

    To see a brother stand in the court of the land and release back into society a man who molested his daughter, that is psychic blindness at play.

     

    When my sisters called and wrote to me about my horridness, of turning against their father, of not seeing the good in him, that he was doing the best he can, that love is not conditional, that is psychic blindness in living color.

     

    They failed to appreciate what they saw and heard!

     

    Oh my, will that stay with me today.

     

    The working mechanism of this disorder, the culprit is  “psychic blindness,’ it is the cancerous cell, the root cause of our disorder!

     

    What this does to a person, is that we are incapable of seeing or hearing bad things about the very person who molested us, we become faithful to the enemy, we then fight like hell against those who are trying to help us.

     

    We have our sides all wrong, we support those who we shouldn’t and shun and run from those who want and can save us.

     

    I see how it works in my family alone.  My mother and I, our last conversations spoke of the differences of our perceptions, boy is that true.  She is still locked into the psychic blindness and now I see.

     

    I remembering feeling like I could see too much, yet it was so long overdue.

     

    It overwhelmed me, to hear and see all that things that this disease had denied me for so long.

     

    “I can see clearly now the pain is gone, all obstacles in my way!”

     

  • Gratitude of You.

    Imagine if you will, two people with Posttraumatic Relationship Disorder, meeting the opposite person they were usually drawn to, yet forming a bond.

     

    If you understand the disorder, we are drawn to people who are not good to us, and can’t seem to be with people who are.

     

    My brother and I, even though we were raised in the same house, he and I didn’t share much common ground.  He went his way at eighteen and I went mine.

     

    Both victims of childhood abuse, we left home with our Disorder firmly in place and set out into the world fully packed for more abuse.

     

    While he left home and got as far away from our family, its religion, the rules and beliefs of our parents, I settled in and set up a home life much similar to my parents, minus the pedophile.

     

    We didn’t interact much with each other over the years, there wasn’t animosity, but nor was there a deep friendship either.  We were two grown kids doing the best we could, coming from whence we came.

     

    Somehow about 7 years ago, we began talking on the phone.  It was sporadic in the beginning yet an odd but interesting exchange always happened.  We began to explore and to seek a new and better God.  We met again for the first time.

     

    Shortly there after, he introduced me to yoga a well as new and exciting authors, and so began this most unusual relationship for us, the opposite of what our ‘disorder’ usually sought. 

     

    I now believe it was that fact alone that helped us the most.  I wasn’t his normal cup of tea if you will, nor was he mine, yet by our seeing the ‘other-side’ we were able to see where we stood.

     

    This may be hard to follow, but in my mind it is a clear as day.

     

    Up and until the time we re-connected we had no one to show us where we were wrong due to our Posttraumatic Relationship disorder!

     

    If you have a relationship disorder, you never really get to experience a ‘healthy’ relationship because the disorder won’t allow you to get there!

     

    It is simply amazing to me that we stuck it out, well it wasn’t always easy, we did go for months of silence, and had moments of major disagreements, but one thing always remained in the midst of us in the past 4 ½, Reality.

     

    Here we were two grown adult with this disorder or the affects of the disorder, learning to create or do a real relationship, the blind leading the blind.

     

    Except that I could see what he couldn’t see and he could see what I couldn’t see, so we were the perfect pair!

     

    I could see where his mind was confused and he understood perfectly where I had missed the mark.  We both needed the other to make sense of where we were, and even to where we stood today.

    Because of our similar childhoods with sexual abuse we were able to understand the unthinkable, to acknowledge the inner trauma and how it affects the body and mind.

     

    Where my mind was closed, my body was wide open and held the fear, his body was closed but his mind wide open to remember. 

     

    I was continually amazed at our sameness, but the differences we carried.  He remembered all, but his body was numb, my mind forgot all, but my body seemed to hold the memory alive.

     

    As far back as I can remember my mind and body were at odds, I would not be alone with my father, yet I couldn’t tell you why. 

     

    On December 4th 2004, I had the answer to a puzzle of 46 years, I made sense, the full disclosure of my life came tumbling out, and with it the aftershocks that left me standing in a pile of rubbish that was my life.

     

    The after affects were the knowing that I was with people who hurt me and couldn’t be with people who didn’t, that my whole system seemed to working backwards and upside down.

     

    The disorder had made such a mess of my world, I had a lot of relationships to rework or let go of, and in the midst of that my brother and I were both affected personally as well as a unit. 

     

    Our new relationship was going to be tried over and over and each time we were forging new boundaries and learning how to be with someone in a new way.

     

    He taught me and I taught him, together we stood true to ourselves and our inner truths, we challenged our minds and sought to reclaim a new reality, we shared books and new authors, to the millions of insights that would startle us and have us sitting back in our chairs, the volumes of ways we had it so wrong.

     

    It wasn’t a teacher and a student relationship although it was, we just kept changing chairs, sometimes I was being taught and others I was the teacher, it never seemed to matter which, if it was our time to be the student we welcomed the others great wisdom, and when it was our time to lead, we did so with the greatest respect.

     

    He thanks me in his blog, “Sister of Kindness” and I was beginning this blog at the same time.  Yet in it’s place came the blog about the Posttraumatic Relationship Disorder.

     

    I began a blog and was trying to share how we were the same but the opposites, how we connected in the most unlikely way, and how it was that we carried each other to the finish line while running the same race, and it seemed nearly impossible to write, but now I can see that I had to first read about the Disorder in Dr. Mona Lisa’s book, who we were and why.

     

    I didn’t have such a fancy name for our dysfunction, but I knew intuitively that we were the perfect opposites to make our way through.

     

    We have literally shared millions of hours on the phone, each in our own personal hell, sorting and labeling, tossing out and lamenting at each new loss, elated with each new freedom and fragment of self we discovered.

     

    If you can picture two lost souls buried under a mountain of rubbish, weakened and in total confusion, working in starts and stops to become free to stand tall and walk alone towards brighter future, that is who we are!

     

    The mountain of stuff we had to sort out whether it be in the reality of now or in the messed up past or in the vaults buried deep and out of sight in our minds, we have traveled great distances to get where we are today, and greatest feat is to figure out the messes of the mind.

     

    How do you do that?  How do you even begin to begin to begin sorting when you don’t even know that what is in your head is wrong?

     

    Our messes were created or began by little children, left alone in our minds without adult supervision, so we created and labeled and sorted out things as a child would, but then called it our truth.

     

    That inner truth was a beacon that led us down roads most would fear to go, in places and with people that were as messed up as ourselves.

     

    It is indeed amazing that you become color blind to the fact that you are both a mess. There is no one healthy person to compare your self too, no bright light of normal.

     

    Normal too is a fallacy for what is normal?  I have always said I went in search of normal but way overshot the mark.

     

    I am not normal in the general definition, but I am way normal for me.

     

    I am normal to me and my brother is normal to me, coming from the road we have been on, we are perfectly normal.

     

    We are the perfect example of two souls caught up in the disorder and the perfect pair to tag team and to work ourselves free.

     

    What a journey my brother and I have been on, one that required the fearless, a seeker of the truth no matter how shocking it was.

     

    We stood bravely and with courage without any idea what we stood against.  We were walking into a mad mad mind!

     

    A journey with my brother, wow what a road we have been on.  Thank you brother for being there, for being you and for walking the path you had to walk, because of it I can see.

     

    When you think that all your pain and suffering was for naught, it wasn’t, it was all for me.

     

    There is no word big enough, just Gratitude of you.

     

     

  • The New Feminine Brain.

    “The New Feminine Brain” by Mona Lisa Schulz, M.D., Ph.D.

     

    Posttraumatic Relationship Disorder;

     

    Childhood sexual abuse, incest, or adolescent rape can rewire the brain circuits for love, bonding, trust, and intimacy, so that women tend to love, bond to, trust, and be intimate with people they should in fact fear, people who resemble the perpetrator of their trauma.  And they tend to FEAR those they could LOVE, those whom they could actually have a trusting, secure, healing relationship.  In effect, with PTRD, the fear and the love circuits get crossed.

     

    The same can happen with monkeys that have had both amygdalas removed, a key temporal lobe area that is important for encoding and detecting fear, anxiety and intuition.  When monkeys have had a bilateral amygdalectomy, they lose the capacity to feel fear in frightening situations.  The monkeys run and hug laboratory workers in white coats – people they should be frightened of.  They also try to have sex with inappropriate partners.  These monkeys, called Kluver-Bucy monkeys, are said to have psychic blindness, a numbness.  Their fear and love emotional circuits have switched.  They lose the capacity to make correct choices even though all the indicators are clearly in front of them, right before their very eyes.

     

    Posttraumatic relationship disorder alters the amygdalas and the other brain areas so that women tend to have ‘psychic blindness’ to dangerous situations, especially relationships.

     

    Prostitutes are more likely to have survived childhood sexual abuse.  Rape victims are more likely to be raped again.  Women who have experienced physical abuse as a child are more likely to be in a physically abusive relationship as adults.  Pain and stress are more likely to be recorded in body memory by the temporal lobe’s amygdala, where it evokes physical health reactions, like digestive complaints and heart palpitations.  The hippocampus, the memory system that puts fear into words and creates conscious though, is less apt to lay down traumatic memories.  When a woman has had a life-defining, emotionally traumatizing experience, the frontal lobe-hippocampal circuits are disconnected in a way so she is less likely to talk about it.  She will however, reenact the trauma – not in art or play therapy as a child would – on the biggest playing field: relationships.

     

    Previous traumatic experience is very likely to shape your unconscious behavior, and your personal choice in mates, jobs, and social contacts.  You are less likely to understand why you feel the attraction that you feel, because during traumatic stress, stress neuropeptides norepinephrine and cortisol disconnect the left-brain “talk” memory systems, but simultaneously turn up the volume on the right-brain “action” memory system.  Your brain and body are primed emotionally to return to the relationship “scene of the crime” and react and reenact that past traumatic relationship over and over.

     

    Baby mice who are raised in a locked box where they are repeatedly shocked tend to return to that box when set free as adults.  Despite the genetic differences between a woman and a mouse, unfortunately, we do tend to act similarly when it comes to trauma.

     

    Previous traumatic experience preheats and warms up the brain pathways, increasing your chances of having the same type of relationship again and again.  Even if you think it through, and say to yourself, “I am never going to fall into that trap again,” you may be pulled back toward it like a moth to a flame.  Your frontal-lobe reasoning circuits murmur, “think this through. You don’t want to go through all that pain, do you?” But your temporal-lobe amygdala, body memory circuits scream louder.  What would you more likely hear?

    “He’s so exciting.”

    “She really just understands me.”

    “Being in his arms feels like I’ve come home again.”

    “I feel like we’ve known each other for years and years, even though we just met.”

     

    The greater the trauma, the more inescapably stressful it seems, the longer it lasts, and the greater its intensity, the more likely the feminine brain-body circuits will be shaped into creating a chain of relationships that mimic the trauma.  Unlike the male combat veteran who has flashbacks, visual memories of the trauma, a woman will replay the memory over and over again in the cinema of her life until she gets the proper help to stop the pattern.  Alone, she can’t prevent herself from being attracted to reenacting the trauma anymore than an alcoholic can stop drinking by himself without proper treatment.

     

    Each time she chooses the “loser,” the “creep,” that “bum,” whatever “prototype” can play the part of the perpetrator, the deeper the pattern gets engraved in the memory network of her brain and body.

     

    In fact, the brain’s visual and attentional pathways that could actually direct her to healthier mates fall into disuse.  Abused women are attracted to the same people who mistreat them because their brains become molded in such a way that’s the only kind of person they tend to notice.  The nicer, normal men and women don’t seem ever to make it on the screen of relationship radar.

    Posttraumatic Relationship Disorder is a long name for what I believe I had or have. 

     

    Just knowing there is an actual word or words to describe me is an awesome thing.

     

    What I recall saying is that it was like changing the DNA of who I was, to undo and step away from habits that seemed were there for generations.

     

    The psychic blindness is my mother to a Tee, and me of course.

     

    I am half way through this book, which has a subtitle, “How Women Can Develop Their Inner Strengths, Genius and Intuition.”

     

    I would highly recommend this book for any woman who is not totally balanced in mind and body.  It may be interesting for you to see why!

  • A no to you is a yes for Me!

    If someone said to identify yourself how would you do that?

     

    What do you consider your identity?

     

    We can’t use our bodies, or our titles, but our own inner identity, what would that be?

     

    How do you explain your own inner identity?

     

    I am sure self has to be connected with identity, or otherwise we would be describing something outside of us.

     

    It is not our bodies, it is not our brains, our thoughts our minds, is it the heart of who we are?

     

    Is it our passions, our joys, the things that make us smile, laugh and do what we do?

     

    What is our identity that gets stolen with abuse? 

     

    Dr. Robin Smith spoke of this on her radio show about addictions.  That little children who get abused lose their identity.

     

    What happens to us at that time, what leads us on a life of addictions, of being cold and treated like an object? 

     

    I have been trying to write about this, but damn this seems like a puzzle with no answer, that the more you look and the more you twist the less clear it becomes.

     

    If I can’t use this body to identify myself, then how do I do that?  My actions?  Do they point the way?

     

    What is taken out of us so that we are left a barren vessel that we will use and abuse trying to get back what was stolen!

     

    When a two year old learns the word “mine” is that how we begin to identify ourselves?

     

    But usually the child is referring to an object that she wants.

     

    It seems we have many ways to prove who we are by credit cards, driver’s license or social security cards, but does that really tell us our identity, for when a small child is abused, she has none of that, so how do we identify our self?

     

    Stolen identity is when someone creates a false life using our identity.

     

    Did my father steal who I thought I was, and replaced it with his idea?  Did he take who I thought I was and make me into a new thing?  Did I go from being his daughter to something else?  Is that what Dr. Robin means?

     

    Did I change from being a little girl into a thing that no little girl can describe, but a little one who is used for things that she can’t comprehend? Is that how it was stolen, my young little innocent girl identity was stolen from me?  I then became a part of a twisted dance.

     

    Instead of seeing myself free to be me, I am now an object for him. 

     

    How did I let my identity go so easily to be replaced by something so sordid?

     

    Why was I so easy to convince that this new me was a better one?  What did he do to win my approval to make me lay down my own sense of self?

     

    Did he threaten me, shame me, blame me, did he convince me that this is what I wanted to, to be this new me?

     

    It seems hard to go back to that point in time, to the innocence of a being such a small girl, to put my big lady self back there, in that land that is even hard now to view.

     

    We have to picture an innocent girl doing acts that are way beyond her years and understanding, with a man who holds the label father.

     

    Maybe his identity is what really changes, maybe he no longer looks and acts as a father should but convinces me it is.

     

    Perhaps Dr. Robin is partially right in that we lose our identity, but we also lose the father’s identity too.

     

    He no longer acts nor behaves like a father, but instead of changing our identity of him, we change ourselves.

     

    Is that what is meant by our identity getting stolen?

    That being a loved and protected daughter dies, and is replaced with one who is damaged.

     

    Not loved, not protected, no longer good enough to handle with care and compassion.

     

    So the loved and protected part of me, the trusting part was stolen and it was replaced by the opposite.

     

    There is a small book I picked up a few years ago called “when I love myself enough.” 

     

    After living 40 some years in a body without love of self inside, I now am able to speak of what I need, what is good for me and what I want.

     

    I am free to move away from people who hurt me and treat me like an object, I no longer see myself that way.

     

    I see myself as love.  So the identity inside is Love?

    When love disappeared, I lived in Fear.

     

    Reaching forever outside in fear trying to grasp on to the love that is missing inside.  That makes sense in my experience. 

     

    I also heard Dr. Robin speak of boundaries, and that once they are trampled down as a little child they remain down until we build them back up.

     

    So we are walking around in fear, exposed and vulnerable with no inner sense of love and boundaries, easy prey to be manipulated and tossed about.  It is no wonder our bodies are forever anxious, for no one is minding the door, there is no inner guard, we are wide open for abuse again.

     

    This is very intriguing to me, it explains my lack of knowing, my lack of control, my lack of love, my lack of boundaries, it explains how I built a mental lady identity.

     

    When I look at myself now, I can see how I slowly erected boundaries, each little no set this in place, each time I refused to attend a gathering of folks with lost identities, I succeeded in gather more identity for me.

     

    I am amazed, grateful beyond words to have this inner Love.  My words and actions match what is now inside, I no longer feel so out of control, to be whipped around in the wind in a thousand directions for my long lost love.

     

    Instead I stand with my Love in hand, looking out at the world, with the greatest understanding and awe at those folks who are still empty inside, I know, for I walked there, “forgive them, they know not what they do.”

     

    I recall telling my brother that it felt like I was walking out of rehab, that each time someone asked me to go back to the family with no boundaries and lost identities, it was like a drug that I had to resist.

     

    Now I way know why.  They were my drug of choice, my responsibility for them was my drug!

     

    Addicted to responsibility. 

     

    I am a recovering addict, I am recovering my self, my love and my control, I am outside of the rehab and now the real walking begins.

     

    A no to you is a yes for me!

     

     

  • my hand is reaching…..always.

    When I seen the date today, I felt the need to explore where I stand with the brother whose birthday it is today.  He is the oldest in our family with me coming in a year and a half later.

     

    We were different in so many ways, where I felt responsible and took care of the siblings, he seemed to rebel and go his own way. 

     

    His life was separate, often in his own room, drawing Art that was very intricate in detail but in a twisting and mixed up sort of way, black lights and posters of darkness.  He seemed to stand alone and aside from our family in a defiant sort of way.

     

    He rebelled in school, about rules and things the teachers were teaching, always challenging the norm.

     

    He wasn’t afraid to be the loner or to be the odd man out, in fact he seemed to try and be outstanding but in a unique way, yet never really catching on to our disapproval, for he was just being himself.

     

    He feels that it was my fault that his childhood is now tarnished with deeds from a father towards a daughter, that I totally wrecked what he considered an average childhood.

     

    His memories are now twisted and mixed up like his drawings of past, perhaps his sub-consciousness was the Artist back then.

     

    When I first discovered that I was a victim of my father, that he was a pedophile, it never crossed my mind that my owing that would affect my relationships with my siblings, that it  would come between brothers and sisters.

     

    My brother felt that the ‘victims’ would get all the support and that his poor father would stand alone, so he became the one to step up and be with him. 

     

    So he was the one who made sure he had a good lawyer, that he was bailed out and a place to live, first at his house, until I called the Court, letting them know he was in a home of a young girl, and then to his camp. 

     

    As he stood steadfast by my father’s side, I slipped away.

     

    It was odd to fear a brother, to lock doors with a racing heart, not knowing what such a confused person could do.

     

    I was the one he stood against, me his sister.

     

    What do I do with that?  How do meet him and keep this part of him separate and not allow it to come between us?

     

    I fully believed the children would unite and form a close front, that we would heal, and deal and commiserate together, a rag tag crew, broken, defeated, upside down, dragging each other across the finish line of normal.

     

    They say what doesn’t break you makes you stronger, our family broke, well it was already broken, but this just made the crack wider and even more jagged. 

     

    The relationships between the 14 children, varied between ages and the span of years that separated, whether you had kids or not, whether you lived near each other, and even if you had similar likes, but at the end of the day, I assumed when trouble hit us, we would cling to each other and become a better family because of it, instead it seemed to stretch and rip an already weak thread that held us together.

     

    We all, each one of us were not strong enough to paddle our boats through the rapids while carrying and holding on to another, it seemed it was each man/woman for himself.

     

    And maybe that is the way we all grew up, separated and it was for survival of the fittest, doing what needed to be done to get us through.

     

    I really don’t know how he felt justified to stand beside a man who hurt little girls, a man who was so self- absorbed in his own addiction, but that is what my brother did.

     

    All I can now do, is honor his choice, allow him the freedom to spend time now with his dad and my perpetrator, and in doing that I also get to have the freedom to step away from that relationship.

     

    There is no common ground between the way we two handled this crisis, the way we rowed our own boats, his headed deeper into the swirling dark waters, while I paddled like mad to put distance and space reaching for land and the safety it would offer.

     

    He and I literally are heading in opposite directions, I guess like we always have.

     

    Funny he now steps in and is responsible or feels responsible, to stand by his father, like we are in a mental relay, he grabs what I release.

     

    I am letting go while he is hanging on, or picking up what I am putting down.

     

    Happy Birthday Brother, if I had a gift to give you today, it would be the gift of release, of surrendering and no longer carrying of others and their lives, to be able to create wonderful art, without the twisted subconsciousness emerging, to be free and unique, in peace and joy, just to be.

     

    Free of the dark swirling waters.

     

    If and when you change direction and start swimming towards land, my hand will be reaching….always!

     

     

  • I walked free.

    My brother and I are having discussions about choices, why we make them, when we make them, how we make them, and even if it is Us making them!

     

    So first of all I had to look up the word Choice in the dictionary.

     

    Choice:

    1.    the act of choosing: Selection, finding it hard to make a choice.

    2.    power of choosing:  Option, you have no choice.

    3.    the best part: cream b. a person or thing chosen, she was their first choice.

    4.    a number and variety to choose among, a plan with a wide choice of options

    5.    care in selecting

    6.     a grade of meat between prime and good.

     

    Also, the synonyms of Choice are; option, alternative, preference, selection, election.

     

    In reading what the Webster Dictionary has to say about choices, a few things popped out.  The Act and Power of choosing.

     

    There is a book, “The Eight Habit- From Effectiveness to Greatness” by Stephen R. Covey that I read.

     

    And what I discovered while reading that book was the space needed to make a choice.  It seems that those of us who were raised in a dysfunctional environment, we have a very small window for choice.  That something happens and we have a knee jerk reaction, and not a response to what is happening.

     

    It is the space where I believe the difference lies.

     

    If you have space, an open area around life, where things happen, but you are able to respond instead of react, your choices are much wider.

     

    Once we begin to respond more than react, the space gets bigger, not smaller. 

     

    I may have to re-read that book.

     

    In my humble opinion, I believe that the more empowered you are, the more whole you are, the more in reality you are, the more choices you have available, and will chose the one that best suits your truth.

     

    My brother’s blog, www.messyguru.typepad.com gave an example of a Rapist, that he doesn’t have a choice that is what he does.  Just as an Artist does Art, a Rapist does Rape, and a Homeless man has no Home.

     

    We can all agree that a homeless man has no house, but can we agree that he is making that choice?

     

    I used to be a woman without power, a powerless woman totally out of control and needing all things in control.  I was the ruler of this mental land, and It all had to be perfect so I could react perfectly.

     

    It was the problem, not me.

     

    If only was my mantra, “If only the kids would be this way and that way, then I would be a good mother, and not have to scream.

     

    It was so not my bad choice, but the kids.

     

    If I only had perfect children, then I could be a perfect mom.

    If only they would learn what makes me go mental and avoid doing that.

     

    They had the power over my buttons, not me.

    I was a victim of my children.

     

    I just heard Byron Katie say on the Sirius Radio, that all victims are violent.  And boy do I agree.

     

    When I slowly and painfully began to realize that my children were just simply children, that it wasn’t their job to groom me, I was no longer a victim of their behavior.

     

    I was free.  I was responsible for my own buttons, my own actions or reactions, my responses and choices I made, and it left them free in theirs as well.

     

    It was their job to do their lives, be a child, be a daughter, but it had nothing to do with me, for me or about me. 

     

    When I landed in my business, when my mouth was mine to control, when my words were mine to choose, I then had a full time job just being present with me!  To watch what I was doing, saying and being!

     

    There have been moments that I was literally screaming at them, that I am not supposed to do this, but I don’t know how to do this any other way! 

     

    I had to wrestle myself out of the reactions and walk into alternatives, but my very first thing I had to do was to realize that I was not a victim.

     

    I wasn’t a victim of my children, that they did not have the power to make me mad, to make me scream, to make me totally lose control of my words and how they rained upon them. 

     

    My hollering was like a shower of dysfunction that rained and coated them with layers of feeling unworthy, for they couldn’t behave well enough to make me kind.

     

    Isn’t that like blaming the girl for the rapist’s actions? 

     

    When I realized and was in shock and awe of how backwards I had this world, that the world had to calm down so I could calm down, the world had to be loving so I could be loving, and when it failed I railed at it, screaming to change the outside, so my insides would calm down.

     

    Again, it is like blaming the little girl in the molestation, and in the mind of the perpetrator he does!

     

    He too is a victim of that little innocent girl and until he realizes she isn’t the problem, he is, there will be no freedom from perpetrators of violence.

     

    All they are trying to do is get love, and they don’t know how else to get it.

     

    Does this sound mental?  Take it from me, it was such a violent world before I understood this, I was so violent inside that at times it scared even me, the strength and volume of anger and rage I held inside, victims indeed are very violent people. 

     

    I was a victim as a small child, and it was the theme I carried forward and what I learned about life. 

     

    When someone was able to steal my love, my trust and my faith in myself, I was left alone and empty inside, and I then moved forward seeking to regain it back, to steal and wrangle it back from anyone or anything in front of me.

     

    My choices then were all very selfish and manipulative, I did so much just to get my self back, my love back, my trust back, I did it all for the sake of me!

     

    It had nothing to do with them, they were just collateral damage along my path, new victims being born, all for my desire to get my love back.

     

    When I could see myself, my mental self, I could also see the ones who paid the price, the damage lay all around, my children bore the brunt of my mentalness.

     

    I sat in tears in an office of a physiologist, bawling about the fact that I had ruined my kids, I wrecked them, my mentalness left marks upon my children.  What can I do now, what can I possible do to undo the years of damage?

     

    I recall her saying that what I was doing, was going to heal them all.  That by staying in reality and by making better ‘choices’ I am undoing and showing them how to be a survivor and not a victim.

     

    I am still not sure if this answers the question of choice, but what I know for sure is that victims will make choices at the cost of others, and those who are no longer victims will make choices based on the truth of self.

     

    My truth of self, is that I am whole and complete without needing to steal love from others, I no longer feel that others must act a certain way for me to be happy, I am happy without them or in spite of them!

     

    I am no longer a of victim of this world.  I am now just an imperfect lady who knows what it is like to live as a victim or not.  I much prefer the non-victim status.  In my own imperfect way, I walked free.