I M Perfect lady

Tag: traumatic

  • Going Back, Willingly.

    One of my personality traits isn't really a trait, but a side affect of being abused…while I have heard the term Post traumatic Stress disorders, I hadn't considered myself out of order, when in certain situations, it clearly is so.

    What is witnessed as being out of control, is actually me grasping control of the situation and reality, so I don't get 'abused again'…I have a hair trigger where power seekers, offenders, liars, false promisers, people who always hand out the short end of the stick, etc are concerned.

    I can smell the hint of offensive behavior, words and false promises a mile away and I cut them off at the pass.  I clearly state without a smidgen of wiggle room, the swindle they are trying to slip by me.

    This can lead to loud outbursts, but with a very clear intent on my part as to what I will and what I will not accept.

    My boundaries which in the past were non-existent, are now like an electric fence.

    Without a boundary fence, people could do and say pretty much anything without 'getting a rise' out of me, in fact I was considered pretty laid back and hard to 'ruffle'…and I considered that too a personality trait, when it was actually a signal of No boundaries.

    Normal has to lie between the two…a bridge that isn't so igniting or completely shut down.

    Will I ever be labeled as normal, or is my 'electric' reaction normal for me?

    My husband has alluded to the fact that it is now normal for me to react with precision and zero in on any hint of abuse, albeit sexual, physical, emotional…I am on it and refuse to let it go.

    There is no almost abuse, or a 'little' lie, or loving control or friendly manipulation.  I see abuse as abuse; whether it is a seed just sprouting or a life times worth.  I am abuse detector and my alarms go off.

    My body comes alive and alert and intensely focused to do battle with whom ever is trying to steal my power or that of someone I love…whereas in the past all my signals were disconnected or I overrode them by disengaging them around 'family'.

    For now it seems to me that this new reaction is my body learning how to respond in a new way to an old dance.  It is me even learning to trust that I can say what I need to say, but not have 40 years of submission bursting forth to 'tell 'em off'….

    I can't know how long I will be considered Post Traumatic…or if this is what they call a chronic condition…but if I had to pick to either be totally shut down or completely tuned in….I will take the later.

    My Post Traumatic Stress disorder, my sometimes verbally attacking response, is me fighting back against abuse…it is me gaining my power, using my words, standing up with shaky guts facing the controlling powers that be.

    Even if I do it without the grace and dignity that others seem to have, at least I am no longer a silent unmoving victim.

    What just came to me is that I would shoot wildly at innocent targets, for I didn't know the real source of where my power was leaking…I had mistakenly believed that anyone I couldn't control was stealing my power. When in fact, anyone who controlled me was stealing my power.

    It isn't about the people I control, but about the people who control me.

    What I have learned is that there will be lines after lines of people who want to control you, and it is up to you to say no.

    And If you say No, and they don't hear it, disregard it…what they are wanting most is to control you.  "No is a complete sentence" says Oprah.

    Any time you are not able to say no, your power is gone.

    Yes and No are the swinging doors to freedom…if all that is accepted is a yes, you are with someone who is controlling you.

    I can smell the teeniest hints of only one choice or no choice….and I burst forth knowing the cage is about to settle down upon me.

    I remember the caged feeling and I go beserk….Post Traumatic, I have been there before and have no intention of going back, willingly.

     

     

     

  • Holding it all Inside.

    I didn't catch the speakers name, but heard her on Sirius radio say, "trauma is experienced in the right brain and stays there until you express it.  The left brain categorizes our experiences and it needs to be expressed or it gets left on the right with no way out."

    I had never heard trauma explained quite this way.  I had looked at trauma being felt in the body, but I hadn't considered the brain, except to note that my category lady was filing things in a haphazard way.  And actually, she was doing a fairly good job without the experiences noted of abuse.

    When you connect the trauma and file them in correct categories, you then get a complete picture of reality. 

    As a child, my trauma was not allowed to be expressed or let out of the right brain…so there was a divide between what the left brain was saying and what the right brain was holding on to.

    I believe that while the right brain is holding on to trauma, it leave little room for creative tasks, or space for love, peace or joy. The overall humming of trauma, the screaming fear muffles out the music of our souls.

    When my niece spoke up, she opened a pathway to my left brain, allowing the trauma to escape my right brain. It started as a small trickle, but a waterfall of expressions flowed forth.  In a short amount of time, my trauma which had been stuffed in my right brain for 40 years finally made connections with my left brain.

    It is quite incredible how the two sides are designed to work together and when the right side holds back expressions how frozen you become or numb and unexpressive in all areas.

    When Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor spoke of the right and left brains, she wasn't speaking of childhood sexual abuse, so I failed to understand the meaning of what happens when traumatic emotions get lodged inside and have no way out.

    Dr. Jill did say that the duties of the left brain is to weave the most plausible story with the least amount of information.  What I hadn't considered is how a story is written minus expressed emotions.

    It was shocking to be me as the first trickles of traumatic expression flowed forth, for it was very alarming in the velocity and strength, the years seemed to have added volume and force…or perhaps it was exactly as a 6 or 7 year old would have felt it at the time of the original event.

    Incredibly horrific and wildly freeing at the same time.  Like riding a wild horse yet fully in control.  Experiencing traumatic emotions, riding their waves to freedom…expressing and releasing myself from the years of holding it all inside. 

     

     

  • Joined them back together.

    The way I described this past Christmas was an ugly beautiful one, where inside I was so dark and the outside so light, how mental psyche steers my world, not the decorations on the outside.

    I was clearly shown that no matter how I orchestrated and decorated and baked and made perfect the outside, it had no influence upon my inner world.

    It wasn’t even a blue Christmas it was black.

    Frozen darkness inside…is that called depression?

    Yet it was a moving depression where I was working on the outside to cheer me up inside.

    I always pictured depression as sitting in a stupor, unable to move. Is there a moving depression or a fallacy that if you can create a warm peaceful atmosphere you will have the same inside?

    What I think I thought, was that if you were dark inside you could change it up on the outside to help alleviate the feelings, yet what needs to happen is that you have to go deeper into the feelings, leaving the outside alone.

    When I started to spiral into darker feelings, I kept
    cleaning, instead I should have stopped and sat with my feelings.

    Writing and exploring why I felt the way I felt.

    I wonder if depression is repressed feelings, if denying them and focusing on changing the environment you live in, instead of investigating your feelings and relationships is the cause?

    What I feel is I was given a real life experience, situations and feelings that represented the flavor of my childhood, and then a dream to show where the seed was planted, how my mental psyche was developed.

    A main piece of the puzzle was cleared up for me.

    My father was happy and desiring me.
    And I was happy to please him.

    The sheer terror wasn’t there, perhaps too young to know…in my mind no terror.
    And my head seemed detached from my body.

    My body and head separated.
    Hence, no memory in my head, but my body held on tight to the trauma.

    I am filled with admiration for the little girl who so bravely withstood such trauma, who did her best to please in the most horrific of circumstances, all she wanted was her daddy to be happy.

    When it is over, and the child seems ‘unaffected’ it is because they no longer are one.

    The mind and the body separated.

    The body holds the truth while the mind was elsewhere.

    Bikram Yoga is about bringing the mind back to the body.

    In the 360 days that have passed, I have missed 32 days, days in which I was working so hard to reconnect my head to the rest of my body.

    To live as mind body and soul.

    Yoga is the yoke that joined them back together.