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As I continue to process what happened to me last week that disrupted my equilibrium so that I felt like the floor dropped out from under my inner world as I fell into my troubling disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment patterns I find myself pondering a series or a collection of words.  Perhaps by exploring what these words mean and how they might be connected and related to one another I can better understand the dynamics of these dissociating shifts that happen within my body-brain as they leave me feeling lost, depleted, confused and dysregulated.

MAINTAIN comes to mind:

1: to keep in an existing state (as of repair, efficiency, or validity): preserve from failure or decline <maintain machinery>

2: to sustain against opposition or danger: uphold and defend <maintain a position>

3: to continue or persevere in: carry on, keep up <couldn’t maintain his composure>

4a : to support or provide for

Origin of MAINTAIN

Middle English mainteinen, from Anglo-French maintenir, maynteiner, from Medieval Latin manutenēre, from Latin manu tenēre to hold in the hand

First Known Use: 14th century

Related to MAINTAIN

Synonyms: conserve, keep up, preserve, save

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SUSTAIN also comes to mind, and I wonder how this word might be different than MAINTAIN:

1: to give support or relief to

2: to supply with sustenance: nourish

3: keep up, prolong

4: to support the weight of : prop; also : to carry or withstand (a weight or pressure)

5: to buoy up <sustained by hope>

6a : to bear up under b : suffer, undergo <sustained heavy losses>

7a : to support as true, legal, or just b : to allow or admit as valid <the court sustained the motion>

Origin of SUSTAIN

Middle English sustenen, from Anglo-French sustein-, stem of sustenir, from Latin sustinēre to hold up, sustain, from sub-, sus- up + tenēre to hold — more at sub-, thin

First Known Use: 13th century

Related to SUSTAIN

Synonyms: nourish, nurture

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And then I think of the word RETAIN:

1a : to keep in possession or use b : to keep in one’s pay or service; specifically : to employ by paying a retainer c : to keep in mind or memory : remember

2: to hold secure or intact

Origin of RETAIN

Middle English reteinen, retainen, from Anglo-French retenir, reteigner, from Latin retinēre to hold back, restrain, from re- + tenēre to hold — more at thin

First Known Use: 15th century

Related to RETAIN

Synonyms: hold, reserve, keep, withhold

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And finally, the word DRAIN:

1:  obsolete : filter

2a : to draw off (liquid) gradually or completely <drained all the water out> b : to cause the gradual disappearance of <drain the region’s wealth> c : to exhaust physically or emotionally <feeling drained at the end of a long workday>

3a : to make gradually dry <drain a swamp> b : to carry away the surface water of <the river that drains the valley> c : to deplete or empty by or as if by drawing off by degrees or in increments <drained the country of its resources> d : to empty by drinking the contents of <drain a mug of beer>

4: drop 7c, sink <drained the putt>

Origin of DRAIN

Middle English draynen, from Old English drēahnian — more at dry

First Known Use: before 12th century

Related to DRAIN

Synonyms: bleed, draft, draw (off), pump, siphon (also syphon), tap

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All of these four words invoke and involve activity of some kind that either contributes to holding onto life or contributes to its decline.

As I have aged, as I have continued to endure and survive, I find now that my margin for staying on the plus or positive side of well-being has become a very narrow one.  It takes very little depletion now for me to feel it as it happens.

My inner storehouse of sustenance seems to be minimal.  When faced with stimulation from my environment that creates a challenge to me, I have trouble maintaining not only my slim margin of well-being, but more critically I have trouble maintaining-retaining my sense of self.

As I look backwards through time at the circumstances of severe abuse and trauma that were ongoing major stressful challenges to my developing body-brain during my most critical growth stages I am filled with wonder.  How did I come out of that horrible hell being a person at all?  I certainly was never treated as one!

At the same time I try to reason with myself by letting my self know that it shouldn’t surprise me now that this marginal sense of self that I have come to know can so easily dissolve into oblivion when I am in situations that make demands on this self in ways that deplete my inner resources rather than help me maintain or sustain them.

If I were to imagine my ongoing life as being a road, I would say that I don’t have enough power in my motor to make it smoothly and easily over even the smallest of bumps that might appear in my path.  Challenges tax me and drain me.

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Part of what brings these four words to mind today – maintain, sustain, retain and drain – has to do with looking back at the few simple interactions I had with people last Thursday when I left the safe-secure-predictable seclusion of my home.  I felt very different depending on which person I was interacting with where.

I am quite fine when interacting with people I am familiar with and that I have a history of positive interaction with.  These people ASSIST me in being able to maintain, sustain and retain my connection with myself – they do not drain me.

As I examine the circumstances of my recent difficulties I see that what each of these positive-impact people seem to have in common is that I can detect each of these people’s own SELF in their eyes, in their voice, in their words, in their body language.

None of these people appear depleted to me.  They each seem to be running down the road of their life with full power.  There is no ‘game’ with them.  There is no conflict present on any level.  These people radiate a kind of empowered JOY and ENJOYMENT of life that has nothing but a positive impact on me.

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While I might hate it that what I have suffered in my life has so contributed to my own vulnerability and fragility of my self-in-the-world, I cannot escape the fact that I seem to have used up whatever inner resources I seemed to enter my adulthood with that allowed me to raise my own children and make it to menopause.  I have to live with the facts.  And if I don’t want to feel this depleted and drained, disorganized and disoriented after every minor excursion I take into the world away from my home I want to try to learn what the dynamics seem to be that seem to so drain me.

I met nobody last week in my excursion that was actively mean.  But I am so sensitive inwardly to ‘energy transactions’ that when I was interacting with people who also seem to be as fragile, vulnerable and inwardly depleted as I am, those interactions created demands on me that I don’t know how to screen out at the same time I have no resources of my own to give them what they communicate that they need.

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This is one of those ‘documenting’ posts that I write sometimes because I don’t have any answers.  At the same time I also know that everything I am describing relates to the process of having survived unbearable traumas for the first 18 years of my life.  I paid a heavy price for surviving, and it is that price that I seem to be most involved in paying here in my later years.  I feel, most simply put, worn down and worn out.

While I don’t mean for this to be a negative post, I do mean for it to be a realistic one.  As our society considers the cost of allowing infant-child abuse, neglect and maltreatment to continue the consequences that survivors will live with for the rest of their lifespan must be included in the ‘budget package’.

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As I allow and encourage my SELF to express its awareness and its experience today, I know that my RIGHT brain with its connections to what my body knows has given over to my LEFT brain not only these four words today, but also its knowledge that the images contained in the words themselves hold great body-based deeper meaning:

MAINTAIN – to hold in the hand

SUSTAIN – to hold against thinning

RETAIN – also to hold against thinning

DRAIN – to hold against drying

These words are about holding onto versus losing the essential elements life needs to preserve itself.  In my case, I am looking at the needs my SELF has, not only the needs of my body that holds me.

These are words that relate to nourishment – physiologically the food and water my body needs.  What I experience when I feel drained of my SELF means that the food and water my SELF needs is just as real a need as what my body needs.  These are life and death concerns.

Looking at the word HOLD itself I see in its origins that it has a connection both to ‘rapid’ and to ‘agitation’.  People who never experienced severe trauma during their earliest developmental years probably never have to experience concern about holding onto not only the life of their body but also to the life of their SELF.  They probably never experience how rapidly their self can disappear (dissociate) or how the inner agitation feels when a SELF cannot at times be held onto.

But for many severe early trauma survivors being able to hold onto our SELF becomes as much of an ongoing concern as it is for us to keep our BODY alive.  For us, the risk of losing one is just as great as it is for losing the other.  Our abusers made certain of that.

Note:  I suspect that the risk of losing my self is GREATER THAN the risk of losing my body!

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