I M Perfect lady

Category: Books

  • My Walled Garden.

     

     

    More from Iron John, by Robert Bly.

     

    “If a man or woman has been sexually abused in childhood, or has lived in any form of a ‘dysfunctional family,’ he or she will need sooner or later a ‘heaven haven.’  The story says that each of us needs it.

     

    The walled garden is a shelter from the world, and a place to recover your broken trust…..A walled garden also is a place to develop introversion.”

     

    Rilke says:

     

    I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough

        to make every moment holy.

    I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough

    just to lie before you like a thing,

      shrewd and secretive.

    I want my own will, and I want simply to be with

       my will,

    as it goes towards action,

    and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times

    when something is coming near,

    I want to be with those who know secret things

    or else alone.

     

    “We could say that in the walled garden, as in the alchemical vessel, new metals get formed and the old ones melt.  The lead of depression melts and becomes grief. The drive of success, an insistence tin, joins with Aphrodite’s copper, and makes bronze, which is good to make shields and images of gods.  The enclosed garden then suggests cultivation as opposed to rawness, boundaries as opposed to unbounded sociability, soul concerns as growth for the soul desire opposed to obsession with a generalized greed for things……

     

    In the garden the soul and nature marry.  When we love cultivation more than excitement we are ready to start a garden.  In the garden we cultivate yearning and longing – those strangely un-American feelings – and notice tiny desires.  Paying attention to tiny hardly noticeable feelings is the garden way.  That’s the way lovers behave.

     

    The enclosed garden is a right place for lovers…..

     

    Garden work may begin unexpectedly.  An illness that confines the sufferer to a room for weeks may be his enclosed garden. An accident may bring it on.  Thoreau, on the other hand, chose to live for some months in a cabin he built himself, and he and his cabin and Walden Pond were his garden.  He knew very well that he had become a lover, and said, “A match has been found for me at last: I have fallen in love with a shrub oak.”

     

    Some men entering the garden begin by getting up at 5am, and keeping an hour for themselves each morning before work.  A father, in order to do that, may have to resist his own insistence that life belongs to his work, his children and his marriage.

     

    Making a garden, and living in it, means attention to boundaries, and sometimes we need the boundaries to prevent caretaking from coming in and occupying our time.

     

    I am too tiny in this world and not tiny enough

    Just to lie before you and be a thing.

     

    Addiction to perfecting, as Mariann Woodman reminds us, amounts to having no garden. The anxiety to be perfect withers the vegetation.  Shame keeps us from cultivating the garden.  Men and women deeply caught in shame will, when they tend their garden, pull out both weeds and flowers because so many of their own feelings seem defective and soiled.

     

    What do we love so much that we want to protect it from strangers?  That is a good question for garden makers.

     

    No matter how deeply I go down into myself

    My God is dark, and like a webbing made

    Of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.

         Rainer Maria Rilke

     

    I love the analogy of being in a walled garden.

     

    I love that when we seek to know ourselves we have to put up a wall and cultivate ourselves.

     

    I truly lived in a walled garden and mended my wounds, my sorrows and tears fell there and helped grow a new me.

     

    To put up boundaries and to lean into yourself, going deeply into the dark places to find answers and then to sit with those answers awhile. 

     

    In your own world you will find ways to have garden time.

    I was blessed to be at home, alone.

    My house was my garden and it expanded to the road along the river.  It became my sanctuary, my walled garden.

     

     

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  • Iron John, by Robert Bly

    There is another section that I loved from Robert Bly’s book “Iron John”; he speaks of the becoming passive to your own hurts.

     

    “The passive man may not say what he wants, and the girlfriend or wife has to guess it.  As a compensation for passivity at home, he may go into robot production at work, but that isn’t really what he wants either. 

     

    We can go farther.  The passive man may ask his children to do his loving for him.  Children often observe the parents with great acuteness.  The family therapists around Murray Bowman, working on anxiety in families, stud how much anxiety there is and who carries it.  They conclude that an adolescent “in trouble” who is “acting out” may in fact be transferring some of the anxiety between mother and father to himself, and in that sense carrying it.  Children are active in loving to the point of sacrificing themselves.

     

    The passive man may skip over parenting.  Parenting means feeling, but it also means doing all sorts of boring tasks, taking children to school, buying them jackets, attending band concerts, dealing with curfews, setting rules and behavior, deciding on responses when these rules are broken, checking on who a child’s friends are, listening to the child’s talk in an active way, et cetera.  The passive man leaves his wife to do that.

     

    He then goes on to a section called “Naiveté”

     

    We see more and more passivity in men, but also more and more naiveté.  The naïve man feels pride in being attacked.  If his wife or girlfriend, furious, shouts that he is a “chauvinist,” a “sexist” a “man,” he doesn’t fight back, but just takes it.  He opens his shirt so she can see more clearly where to put the lances…..

     

    He feels, as he absorbs attacks, that he is doing the brave and advanced thing; he will surely be able to recover somewhere in isolation.  A woman, so mysterious and superior, has given him some attention.  To be attacked by someone you love – what could be more wonderful?  Perhaps the wounds may pay for some chauvinistic act, and so allow him to remain special still longer.

     

    The naïve man will also be proud that he can pick up the pain of others.  He particularly picks up women’s pain.  When at five years old he sat at the kitchen table, this mother confided her suffering to him, and he felt flattered to be told such things by a grown-up, even if it showed his father up poorly.  He becomes attracted later to women who “share their pain.”  His special ness makes him, in his own eyes, something of a doctor.  He is often more in touch with women’s pain before he checks his own heart to see if this labor is proper in the situation.  In general, I think each gender drops its own pain when it tries to carry the pain of the other gender.  I don’t mean that men shouldn’t listen.  But hearing a woman’s pain and carrying it are two different things.  Women have tried for centuries to carry men’s pain, and it hasn’t worked well.

     

    The word special is important to the naïve man, and he has special relationships with certain people.  We all have some special relationships, but he surrounds the special person with a cloying kind of goodwill.  The relationship is so special that he never examines the dark side of the person, which could be a son, a daughter, a wife, a male friend, a girlfriend.  He accepts responses that are way off, conspires somehow with their dark side.  “Some people are special,” he says.

     

    We might say that if he doesn’t investigate his son’s or daughter’s dark side, perhaps they will not investigate his.  He may also have a secret and special relationship with the wounded little boy inside himself.  If so, he won’t challenge the little boy, nor will he point out his self pity, nor actually listen to the boy either.  He will simply let the boy run his life.

    Sincerity is big with him.  He assumes that the person, stranger or lover he talks with is straightforward, goodwilled, and speaking from the heart.  He agrees with Rousseau and Whitman that each person is basically noble by nature, and only twisted a little by institutions.  He puts a lot of stock in his own sincerity.  He believes in it, as if it were a horse or a city wall.  He assumes it will, and should protect him from the consequences that fall to less open people.  He may say, “It’s true that I betrayed you with your best friend while you were away, and even after you were back, but I was frank with you and told you about it.  So why should you be angry with me?”

     

    This book may be for Men, but all women should read it too, it will give you a greater understanding of what men are up against.  He even comments that the men need a movement similar to the feminist movement. 

     

    Here is a short quote by Antonio Machado,

     

    Look for your other half

    Who walks always next to you

    And tends to be who you aren’t.

     

     

     

     And one by Juan Ramon Jimienez

     

    I am not I.

            I am this one.

    Walking beside me, whom I do not see,

    Whom at times I manage to visit,

    And at other times I forget.

    The one who forgives, sweet, and when I hate,

    The one who remains silent when I talk,

    The one who takes a walk when I am indoors,

    The one who will remain standing when I die.

     

  • Reality is a mixed life.

    I am reading Robert Bly’s book “Iron John.” 

     

    Here are a few paragraphs that caught my attention.

     

    “If a human being takes an action, the soul takes an action….. The soul itself which does nothing if you do nothing; but if you light a fire, it chops wood; if you make a boat, it becomes the ocean.”

     

    ”When an artist is at work on a painting, images he or she had never thought of arrive instead of the images the artist planned to set down.”

     

    “ The sacred response depends on a serious decisive effort made by a man or woman.”

     

    The key is the serious decisive effort….and I suppose the knowing of who walks with us.

     

    Imagine the free will to decide how to move and the soul responds. 

     

    The Universe is waiting for us so it can respond in kind.  If you are not building a boat, no need for an ocean, if you are not in your studio playing with fabrics and design, an inspired image will not fall out! 

     

    How exciting to know that our serious decisive efforts are the key. 

     

    Maya Angelou on the radio yesterday said, “We are equal to the mountain we face.”

     

    In my experience that is true, you have to trust that you will conquer the mountain you face. 

     

    Maya also said that the greatest virtue is courage, for without courage you can’t maintain the other virtues.  I am not even certain what the ‘other virtues’ are, but I do know that I am learning to become very courageous.

     

    And one more thing I heard yesterday, and I believe it was from Carly Simon.  She was asked if she was in a good place in life, and she responded that she doesn’t believe you ever get to a good place and those that say they are, are lying.  Instead she says that she has a mixed life. 

     

    Meaning that it is ever changing and there are ups and downs and all in between.

     

    I would say reality is a mixed life.

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  • Say You Are One of Them.

    In my ‘inbox’ was a Oprah Newsletter speaking of the book, “Say You Are One of Them, by Uwem Akpan.”

     

    Now I have heard this advertised so much, and I have requested the book at the library, but she had a free download.

     

    If you go to her website, www.oprah.com there should be a spot for you to sign up for an online web cast, and on that site there is a place for you to download free a chapter of the book, An Ex-mas Feast.

     

    I did this morning and read it.  It is truly amazing in its depth and to see dysfunction from the eyes of the children who live it.

     

    Of course I relate to the oldest daughter. 

     

    I would love to hear your response.  Email me at bjukuri@hotmail.com or comment on this post.

     

     

     

  • Nature showed me how.

     

    Below is a segment of a chapter in the book Awakening Intuition by Dr. Mona Lisa Schulz.

     

    “What is the essence of nurturance?  We might find it in a certain South African Fish.  The male fish is the social organizer; he plays the role in the outer world.  When a predator appears, he calls the alarm.  The female fish then opens her mouth and all the babies swim in to be sheltered where it’s safe and warm.  When the danger has passed, the male gives the all-clear, the mother opens her mouth and all the baby fish swim back out into the open water, to continue to grow in independence and autonomy.  This is the kind of warm, rosy image of motherhood most of us cherish, the mother protecting her babies against the dangers of the world, yet letting them frolic and develop on their own when safety permits.  Curiously, though, every once in awhile, one of these fish apparently has a problem with the motherhood role.  When the father calls the alarm, she won’t open her mouth to let the babies in.  They either escape on their own or get eaten by predators.  Conversely, there is on occasion a mother who’ll take the babies in when the alarm sounds, but when she gets the all-clear, she won’t open her mouth to let the babies out, and they smother inside of her.

     

    The magnitude of difference, between a healthy and balanced mom, one who knows when safety is required and one who also knows when to allow the child to go free to develop its independence, and one who is unnatural and dysfunctional, is so wide and vast, with lasting lifelong affects to the child.

     

    If only we were just affected as a child.

     

    Instead when grown in such an unnatural environment we become that, unnatural.  And live an unnatural life, and in my case 46 years of being unnatural.

     

    Living in a world with your head on backwards.

     

    Your thoughts, beliefs, values and morals are all held firmly in place with an unnatural mind.

     

    My mind wasn’t right with reality.

     

    What I now know today, is that my parent’s influence was far reaching and changed who I would become.

     

    I became an odd cartoon figure in their mad play.

    Through conditional love they molded me into this person.

    It had nothing to do with the spirit of me.

     

    Dr. Phil speaks of how parent’s actions write on the tablets of who their children will become, and he is so right.

     

    Children are not raised in a special place outside of the environment of your home.  No, instead they are literally being built by what is going on in your home.

     

    I became what was needed in our home, I became what he needed, what she needed, but I never had the space or the choice to just be me.

     

    It is unbelievable that the environment can override natural tendencies that we can literally learn and grow up being unnatural.

     

    My unnatural state served their needs, but had little to do with mine.  As long as I mirrored their unnaturalness I was part of the team, but that team has no room for natural state of being, of seeing reality in it’s true view.

     

    Their mad play has no lines for me now.

     

    I can still recall the day I was writing an email to my brother about how that childhood play no longer works for me, how those old scripts I will not utter again, how I walked off that stage and onto my own.

     

    Their play hasn’t ended, my absence did not stop production, in fact I think my sister quickly filled my old shoes, but I feel that for the first time I am a star on my own stage.

     

    Isn’t that what all children should feel?

    That they are the main player on their stage called life.

    That it isn’t their job to be the supporting actor, to make another’s play work.

     

    Imagine my whole life up until I was 46 I was a supporting actor in my parents play.  I did barely anything without their approval or a thought of how it would affect them.

     

    I was so totally linked in chains to the stage of their life.

     

    We hear of co-dependency but how about putting our kids in chains to make our life work? Isn’t that being dependent upon our children? 

     

    Take it from one who busted the chains, we know we are no longer supporting you, and are even fearful for going against your play, but know it is the only way we can survive.

     

    My mother and father expected me to continue to support their cause until death do us a part and beyond. 

     

    Society doesn’t look kindly upon children who go against parents, but fails to see the side of the child.  What has the child done, what life has the child had?

     

    Autonomy isn’t to be a supporting actor, independence isn’t found spewing lines the other wants to hear, instead of your own.

     

    And what society fails to support are the children who want to get off the stage.

     

    Instead they want us to try and fit back in with our new scripts and new ways of seeing.  Like that would work?

     

    If I can’t call him dad and treat him like a dad, do you really think my new voice will be welcomed on that stage?

     

    Our voices are drowned out with jeers and sneers, we are made to be the bad man, the one who isn’t loving, forgiving, this or that.

     

    Again, we are set back out in the open sea, alone.

     

    This time though, we are in the sea of normal.

     

    We are learning the ropes of normal, learning what lines we want as our own, learning what steps we want to take, we are free, the designers and choreographers of our own stage.

     

    We are born again we get another chance to live life normally!

    I can also recall feeling like being a baby in those one piece pajamas and looking around knowing I was also the mom.

     

    Like I could be a mom when I felt like such a baby, so naïve and childlike, I was to be running a house, and cooking meals, let alone dealing with a family deeply entrenched in dysfunction, to walking out in public with him on the front page, like oh my God, this is soooo not going to work, that I was put in charge of my own four kids, someone will certainly see the baby inside of me, that I am an imposter and not an adult at all.

     

    It was freaky thinking I was to be in charge when I felt so out of control and helpless, I wanted so badly to be just a baby, to be held and comforted, to be taken care of, to just lay on a blanket and coo.

     

    What I had to do was embrace that child and be an adult at the same time, the balance of not being one or the other, but instead nurture both.

     

    I did what the mother fish was supposed to do for me I mothered myself!

    Nature showed me how.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • 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.

     

     

  • 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!

  • “Comfortable with Uncertainty,” by Pema Chodron.

     

     When we start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, we often think that somehow we’re going to improve, which is a subtle aggression against who we really are.  It’s a bit like saying, “If I jog, I’ll be a much better person.” “If I had a nicer house, I’d be a better person.” “If I could meditate and calm down, I’d be a better person.” Or the scenario may be that we find fault with others.  We might say, “If it weren’t for my husband, I’d have the perfect marriage.” “If it weren’t for the fact that my boss and I can’t get on, my job would be just great. “And if it weren’t for my mind, my meditation would be excellent.”

     

    But loving kindness – maitri- toward ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything.  Maitri means that we can still be crazy, we can still be angry.  We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness.  Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It is about befriending who we are already.  The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are.  That is what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.

     

    Curiosity involves being gentle, precise, and open – actually being able to let go and open.  Gentleness is a sense of good-heartedness toward ourselves.  Precision is being able to see clearly, not being afraid to see what’s really there.  Openness is being able to let go and to open.  When you come to have this kind of honesty, gentleness, and good-heartedness, combined with clarity about yourself, there’s no obstacle to feeling loving kindness to others as well.

             

     

  • Faith

    I never thought I would step into a church again, yet I found myself there. In fact I really didn’t see the church, until months later. Like how can you walk into a church sit in a pew, listen and not see the Church? Isn’t that simply impossible to do?

    How about if you go to the church without going to church, instead you go for the message? Would you then see the building? What if you go because of all the interesting people you find there? What if you go because it seems this is where your people are, this is where you might fit in, this, is where you hope to find the answers?

    What if you have a burning question you want answered? Would you see the church, or instead would you look closely at what was said, who said it and you got to decide if that fit you. If it fit your experience of what you know to be true. If you went to find a perfect match, would you see the church?

    I even did like most loyal members, I found a seat, and it became my special spot. Imagine I have a special seat. This time, I was tentative, unknowing, very much aware, and listening closely and then I would let the words come real close and see if I could find how that could be true for me too.

    Suspicious at best, discerning of all, I literally felt like I was a fly on the wall, just watching, listening and soaking up words. What was also so weird to me, I did not feel inclined to speak, and better yet no one expected me to. Shy smiles, little nods, a room full of strangers, or to me at least, yet I slowly became comfortable there. No one acted like I didn’t belong….yet I was still unsure.

    Months went by, and I eagerly awaited each week, each new message, and each time I walked away unsure. Not really buying the message, the faith I wanted seemed to just outside the fence, freely dancing, twirling in joy of its assuredness. The general theme seemed to intrigue me, but when I measured myself, I seemed lacking, I didn’t have what it took, something was missing, something just didn’t ring true. But each week I entered and had no clue what the message would be, each week a new insight came out. I learned a lot by listening, just sitting and hearing words.

    One day, a day that would be my last, I heard what I wanted to hear. I finally heard the one thing that would set me free, to show me that I indeed did belong to this group. I heard her speak, and before the hour was over, I knew.

    My Writer’s Journey Class was held in St. Mathews Church on the Campus of Finlandia University. My writing class did not speak of God. Get this, the last Author to speak wrote a book called Sundays in America. A year long road trip in search of Christian Faith! And she gives this talk to me, in a church, a church I vowed I would never ever enter.

    She and I are not even aware of all it took for this to come to fruition.You see, she was supposed to arrive here in February, but a snowstorm kept her literally circling above unable to land. What she didn’t know was that it was my fault. I wasn’t ready to hear her message. I first had to begin doing what I wanted her to teach me.

    I had to start writing. Now get this, get what Day was her first day she entered a new church? Easter. Guess what day this Blog started? Easter. Now I am not a real good religious girl, but even I know that it is the day of re-birth a day that means a new beginning. Ok, and guess where she gives me the message….a Church. 

    And I am sure you have to be asking what could this Suzanne Strempak Shea have to say? What did she do? What was the secret I needed revealed? What was right in front of me all the while? What again, did I fail to see?

    She stood there and began to just tell us how each book was created from her life experience! Oh she was a fast talker, you could not squeeze a word more into that hour! Animated, excited, colorful and with humor she looked at her life simply as the seeds of another great book! It was like she wasn’t personally involved, but yet she was. Like her life was there for her to write about, and the more interesting the better. She looked at people like Characters, places a new scene in a future book, a nagging thought the inspiration for whole book.

    I sat there and smiled knowingly. I was looking into my future. Ironically or not, she is the mentor of the lady who started the Writer’s Journey. A full circle moment for me and I wasn’t even there in the beginning, yet some how I was.

    With her signed book in my bag, I opened the door and walked into a whole new world, with a whole new me, with my Faith restored.

    Suzanne’s husband is very encouraging. He is known to say. “Write about it.”

    I think I am.

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