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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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No matter how hard I try I do not feel like myself today.  Just going out yesterday to do my monthly shopping leaves me feeling today like a different person, like a foreigner in my own body, in my yard and in my home.  This ‘derealization’ feeling leaves me without grounding as if I am not the same person now that I was before my venture out yesterday.  Like I left in the morning and came back as somebody else.

The world around me does not feel the same, either.  This is a dreamy sort of feeling and I don’t like it — but neither can I find a way to rush things back to the way they were.  Intellectually I know that the world including the people in it are continually changing.  But I also know that we are supposed to remain with a sense of intactness as time moves forward.

All I know to do now is to be patient.  Take it easy, be gentle with myself and be patient.  There is nothing I can do to rush away this unreal feeling.  There is nothing I can do to convince myself this unreal feeling isn’t real.  It is real.  Very very real.

I let myself know this is a sort of sickness feeling, a sort of un-wellness that is a part of my life.  I allow myself to feel grateful that I don’t always feel this way at the same time I feel grief and loss for myself in my life that actions as simple as running a day full of errands can so disorient me, so unsettle me — so that I feel I left a bread crumb trail from my home-self yesterday that I should have been able to follow to get back to myself — but it didn’t work.  The bread crumb trail is gone.

These feelings and this sense of derealization is a part of what it is like to live with a trauma changed body-brain.  I didn’t ask for this.  I didn’t ask for any of the horrors that happened to me when I was so young and so little — trying to grow up in a world of pain and terror.

But here I am anyway feeling lost to myself no matter what I tried to (or did) accomplish this day.  It doesn’t help me that the wind is racing and tearing around today.  I never do well here in these winds, but they go away.  They do not last forever and this feeling — though it is likely to come upon me again in the future — is also going to go away before too long.

(This is like losing my place when reading a book and having to try to find that place again — in a complex book that is the story of my life.)

I wait this out knowing that my usual work in my yard is greatly about grounding myself in my body in this world, and that yesterday I had to break that stride, break that rhythm because those errands had to be done.  But it feels like I left myself behind yesterday when I left my home and when I returned I wasn’t anywhere to be found.  Perhaps I could see humor in this but I can’t.

I am going away now.  I will be back when I am back.

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I am paying attention to myself as I walk somewhere between fearfully and courageously into the next moments of my life to my process.  HOW am I doing that?  HOW am I using my efforts and life energy to order and organize myself at the forefront — at the leading edge — of this sense of chaos I am trying to overcome rather than being overwhelmed by?

This is a personal inexact science.  I realize this at the same time I marvel at my self as I notice how I do this.  I find myself realizing that after I left my miserable home of origin and entered my adult life the pattern I notice TODAY is probably the same one I have used ALL OF MY ADULT LIFE!

What I did from the instant I posted my last piece of writing was look around the universe that is my tiny little piece of the world and asked, “What around me NEEDS me to take care of it?  What around me needs me to work with it so that it can achieve its own natural progress in its own life?”

As I asked these questions I realized that part of what probably contributes to altered development of an early abuse survivor’s left brain is that — as happened to me — is that nobody ever let me set my own individually-based PRIORITIES!  (My single priority as an infant-child-teen, unconscious and body-based as it was, was solely to endure and survive!)  Nobody was ever concerned with what I NEEDED or with what I WANTED.  So how could I begin to ‘train my brain’ to process my own priorities?

Priorities, I just now realized very clearly, are what humans use to ORDER and ORGANIZE their self in their life — which means moving through time one instant at a time.

My priority as an adult has most centrally always been to help, or to caregive to, someone else.

‘Experts’ say that it is only when our own internal attachment system is turned off that we are free to caregive.  They describe these two systems of being connected to one another like the ends of a teeter-totter.  One up/on the other down/off.

Well, I believe from inside my own life that in cases of severe abuse survivors we can operate differently.  I certainly did as a mother and I see myself doing the same thing today:  Taking care of someone/something outside of myself IS taking care of ME!

I had a terrible, nearly fatal reaction to my last child leaving home.  It was so far past ‘ordinary empty nest’ that I could almost laugh at the concept itself.  My entire BEING was ordered and organized around caregiving my children — and doing that job the best possible way.  No more kids at home?  Linda as a self disappeared again into the invisibility I spent my entire first 18 years surviving in.

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So my pick-for-the-start-of-ordering and organizing my self for this day?  The priority?  I headed outside, dull clippers in hand, to salvage my Pomegranate tree!  As its tiny new deep green leaves began to appear last week I realized that I had neglected to even consider that last winter’s 2-below-zero nights of freezing might have killed that tree!  But, oh does it look SAD!  A few leaves here, a few leaves there — among masses of obviously dead dead dead brown brittle branches.

While it might be somebody else’s priority to wash the dishes or put away all the goodies that litter the kitchen floor in plastic bags, doing so is NOT my heart’s desire!  THIS is Linda, not somebody else.  This is ME that desires to be outside and a part of the gentle wind, under the scooting shadows of the rare desert sky cloud cover, warmed by the sun but still needing several layers of clothing to stay warm out there.

It gives me joy to know that I have the power to act upon the future of that tree in such a way that I CAN save its life.  At the same time I know that helping that tree into a thriving future benefits me because its fruits are luscious and SO GOOD FOR ME!  I can productively apply myself to caregive that tree – and it is my priority at this moment and my desire and my passion to do so.

As I FOCUS on this job all anxiety leaves me.  There is no pressure to do this job ‘right’ because I am confident in my ability to automatically accomplish this task in the best way possible.

It strikes me that I intuitively and instinctively had this same sense as I raised my children.  True, my efforts with my firstborn (conceived when I was 18) were not what they grew to be later on.  But I know about myself that when I follow my OWN inner priorities I do the best I possibly can as I try in some small way to help the world become a better place.

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Next priority for this day:  Create the best home possible for the hundreds of red wiggler worms by beloved Seattle sister sent me for the garden!  Yup!  Caregiving worms so they can caregive the garden so it can feed me is part of The Bigger Plan for my life.  Gotta love this life!

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Previous post: +BEFRIENDING CHAOS? (EARLY ABUSE SURVIVORS AND CHOICE)

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I can’t imagine that any severe early abuse survivor would say that they LIKE this feeling, the one that exists at the edge of where being OK meets ‘dissociation’.  But while I will never LIKE this feeling it is a reality of my life and my concern today is that somehow I learn how to peacefully co-exist with it knowing the feeling itself was built into my body-brain through trauma and abuse from the moment I was born.

I have written recently about my efforts to discriminate between the feeling of what I used to call continual foreboding and the one I more recently named prescience.  Today I would call it a chronic wariness state, one that is tied to chronic anxiety but that also seems to lie at an edge-line where I still retain the power of careful and conscious choice contrasted to the state that lies across this line in which full-blown stress-anxiety takes over the show.

When my personal ‘show’ becomes ruled by my body’s physiological reactions to stress dissociation is most likely to place me in a state of lessened powers of conscious choice.  I would rather have the power to choose how I am going to handle ‘things’ as my day progresses.  And, yes, all of this feels like work to me – often intangible work but work nonetheless.

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Backing up a day to yesterday…..  I went into town with my monthly income and spent nearly all of it on necessities which included material to finish my chicken pen and coop roof.  The back of my 1978 (gas hog) El Camino is filled with bags of potting soil, stucco lathe, stucco wire (which is far cheaper than chicken wire) to enclose the pen, 2’ x 4’ boards for the roof.

My kitchen floor is covered with food staples to pack away that will hopefully last me until my disability check comes in again the first of next month.  There are also bags from our new ACE hardware store containing various boxes and paper bags full of nails and screws.  There is plant food, various useful findings from the local thrift store, and many cans of ‘no sugar added’ canned fruit that was on sale at the only grocery store we have in town.

I am good to go!

Or am I?

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What is actually contributing to my current ‘on the edge of anxiety’ state is that there are TOO MANY THINGS here which places me in a state of TOO MANY CHOICES of where to go from here.

I think about this in relation to my recent posts about the work of Dr. Martin Teicher regarding the kinds of very real physiological changes that happened to my earliest developing body-brain.

Making conscious choices is an activity handled best by a balanced flow of information between my left brain (changed in its development) and my right brain (also changed in its development) ALONG WITH the assistance of the super highway corpus callosum region of my brain in the middle that is meant to send information back and forth between my two brain hemispheres (also changed in its development).

What all these changes contribute to my FEELING and to my AWARENESS states is a quality of being overwhelmed by possibilities!

“Aren’t possibilities supposed to be a good thing?”  I ask of myself.

“Yes,” I respond, “but all these possibilities sit very closely in my reality to the state I knew ALL OF THE TIME as a little person – CHAOS!”

Some say that chaos is the realm where all possibilities exist co-currently, simultaneously and that it is only by a CHOICE being made and a DECISION being implemented that a tiny piece of chaos is changed into a more useful and constructive reality.

“OK, then,” my inner dialog continues.  “I think I understand these feelings that I am caught in like a gigantic spider web a little bit better.  Because I was so overwhelmed by abuse for the first 18 years of my life, and because I was left with so little opportunity to actually make conscious self-initiated choices and decisions regarding my own self-reality-life, my decision-making left brain did not develop itself to process any of these interactions!”

From the inside of me (not from the Ivory Tower outside of me) I know what all this feels like to me right at this moment.  My body-brain has to fight its way up for air – which is to say it has to fight itself up to the conscious level where I can PEACEFULLY order and organize my own thoughts, desires, efforts, feelings and actions MY OWN SELF.  I have to FORCE my body-brain to calm itself down, to be OK, to feel safe and secure enough at this moment in time to know that I not only have the RIGHT to order and organize myself and my life the way I want to – but that also have the ability to do this!

Choice and decision making – creating organized order out of overwhelming chaos – is an activity that was SUPPOSED to grow into my body-brain from the time I was born.  This is how the SELF of a new human being becomes integrated into all aspects of its life in the world.

As this happens during ‘Critical Windows of Development ’ the substructure that allows everything to flow cooperatively together to accomplish a lifetime of tasks (large and small) is wired into the developing body-brain on the physiological level.

Severe early abuse, neglect, trauma and malevolent treatment of little people sabotages the ‘normal/ordinary’ development of these abilities.

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Enough said about all of this for this moment.  This blog is packed full of information about all of those changes in development.  What I need at the moment is to accept this reality as it exists in my body-brain (still, at my age of 59 ½) – so that if I can’t find a way to become friends right this moment with my body-brain as it was created, at least I can find ways to NOT be its enemy.

Being angry at my reality, being full of misery and suffering because of it, remaining in a feeling-awareness state of blocked mobility in my actions for the day will not help me one little bit!  How can I ACTUALLY organize and orient myself today so that I can move forward?  How do I settle this being-overwhelmed-in-the-sea-of-chaos (too many possibilities) DOWN?

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This disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment-built body-brain that I live in/with doesn’t get to pick and choose when, where, how or why it operates because it is directly built into my entire physiology.  I will always believe that it is ONLY through conscious application of new information about me that can free me from my physiological natural state so that I can experience some peaceful calm that does NOT automatically exist in my body-brain.

I relate everything I am experiencing this morning back to Teicher’s writings (recently posted) including what it IS like and FEELS like to have an apt-to-kindle right limbic brain (which is intimately tied to what it knows of our body).  I have to (in essence) take my finger out of the pot of boiling water!!  Boiling water might be what my body-brain essentially knows, but I AM here, and I CAN make different choices today rather than let this perpetual peritraumatic acute trauma-reality state rule my day.

I can tell myself that all stimulation that happens in life is NOT BAD – nor is it automatically overwhelming!  While this is the reactive state that is most familiar to me, it is not the ONLY state that exists.

Can I take my own hand and in partnership if not in friendship discover how to move forward in time as I change inner CONFLICT awareness into calm peacefulness?  Let me see………

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