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Thursday, November 6, 2014.  Very interesting.  I don’t remember ever specifically mentioning a product on this blog.  I only mention the one you will see described at the end of this post because I have had a chance to try it for 48 hours compliments of a dear friend of mine who bought some in town here for $38.40 per bottle to help her get through these very difficult days as she and her family bury their much loved mother who died last week at age 90.

I trust my friend’s wisdom.  I’ve known her for 44 years.  If this product rates high on her shelf of “survive life supplies” then I am quite certain this product is worth a longer trial period for what ails me = MUCH trauma-related chronic ANXIETY!  I see through a vendor who supplies Amazon.com this same product is available for under $18 per bottle online.  Now THAT is a price I can afford on my low budget.

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I can tell I FEEL different in ways I can’t quite (yet) describe from the short dose of this supplement.  Maybe I can say it seems as if the BODY of the massive traumas built into my body are backing off from ME.  I can almost SEE the great giant dark beast of my chronic anxiety overshadowing these large apartment buildings in this complex here as the distance grows between IT and ME.

Inky thick, heavy, sticky, stinky ICKY blackness.  OUT THERE?  Not IN HERE?

A black fog, although oddly as it is (perhaps?) leaving me (somewhat, although now I have to go some days before I can order and possess my own supply of these supplements to see what happens longer-term) this fog does not seem to be entirely without form.  It is big, billowess, maybe about a hundred feet tall and 45 feet wide.  Not unlike a large dust devil, but not with any intense motion.  It floats in my image, perhaps two to three feet off of the ground.

Although whatever this is of my anxiety seems to have been banished from my body (at least for now), I certainly would not say “there goes ALL my body holds of trauma!” because I know better.  But what burden is THIS “thing” that seems to have sunk itself into me the moment I left my southern home to head to this foreign northern land (of my past)?

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My dear friend came to visit baby and me this morning.  She comes for 2 hours once a week and takes us OUT of this tiny apartment.  She also brings me three-servings worth of some kind of her healthy excellent home-cooked meals.  Maybe?  Because of this “backing off/out of me” of this darkness today I was able to think about asking her to take me to the grocery store (I am still not able to drive her because of my extreme anxiety) for some food to cook — her way.

An education!  Home I came with carrots, onions, peppers, garlic, yams, sweet potatoes, squash, broccoli, cauliflower, leeks, brussel sprouts, asparagus — all fresh although I could only find organic carrots!

In between writing these words I am cleaning and chopping.  My friend’s secret?  She ROASTS her collection of vegetables tossed with sea salt, black pepper and olive oil for 40 minutes at 400 degrees – beginning with the ones that need the longest cooking time.  I CAN DO THIS!

(I hate to cook and do little of it, a process that began for me when my last child left home in 2004 and I was left to eat alone.  My consumption of Snickers since I came north does not count as healthy!  Now that I have fake teeth I cannot chew raw vegetables although I do juice wheat-grass and frozen green vegetables every day — usually two or three times.)

Once the vegetables are cooked they will be divided up and frozen to be eaten as is or added to whatever dish I might like later on.

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It seems that no post I have written for many months ends up addressing what I want it to.  It seems that huge parts of me linger behind the scenes — or somewhere else — other than where I currently reside with this body of mine.

I certainly woke with a clear title in my thoughts this morning.  What was that title?  Where is that post?  Was all of it too close to my dreams to actually make it across the threshold into THIS waking world?

It was about danger.  About disaster.  About a contrast to a sense of security.  Not specifically safety, as in “safe and secure attachment.”  Just about how a sense of SECURITY in the world seems to be the countermeasure to a sense of DISASTER.

In connection to this some vague part of me was also thinking about how a permanent (in the body) sense of DISASTER makes it impossible to CHOOSE to “feel secure” in one’s life.

Yet what might I be able to do (choose to have present in my life) that would HELP me feel more secure?  Does the presence of the Big Black Cloud of Trauma in the body interfere with being able to make these helpful, healthful choices?  I would say “Yes!”

But it also interests me to note that these thoughts appeared as I was evidently benefiting from this supplement my friend shared with me.  If I had transportation perhaps I’d make it across town to that same store and spend twice what I should be charged for that product.  My friend should be back to see me on Sunday and perhaps I can “borrow” a few more supplements from her to tide me over until mine arrive.

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I feel a little hopeful at this discovery that would not have come to me if I were not living in Fargo now.  To be here when my friend arrived at the time of the death of her beloved mother.  Now I know something I did not know before.

Never mind it snowed first time of the season yesterday.  The sun is trying to show itself and has at least made all that white stuff go away.  But the days are getting shorter and shorter, the nights darker and darker, the temperatures colder and colder, and days without strong north winds fewer and farther apart.  “The end is drawing nigh” in significant ways.  Unless one can hold on tightly to the knowledge “I will survive.  No matter what.  Or die trying.  Because another spring will come.”

I don’t want that sense of disaster to swallow me up again.  Can I be detached enough to marvel at a change if feeling tone I am probably going to experience if indeed this swirling blackness swallows me up again before I can have my own remedy at hand?  Will I learn something else new through this whole process —  other than how tasty my roasted vegetables taste?

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I have another friend in town who is picking me up to go with her to an open clay studio several times a week.  We will go again tonight.  Interesting how I can remember how to throw a pot after nearly a quarter of a century away from this process!  That’s encouraging, and this is fun!

I will survive!  No ray of sunshine will enter this one window in the small room I spend my days in with my grandson for another four months.  Time.  It moves on….

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Source Naturals Theanine Serene with Relora

• Contains the amino acids L-theanine, to support relaxing brain wave activity
• Contains taurine to ease tension, as well as the calming neurotransmitter GABA
• Features magnesium to support muscle and nerve relaxation
• Contains calming holy basil leaf extract and Relora® to gently soothe away the tension in your body
• 2 tablets daily, or as recommended by your health care professional

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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Leave a Comment »

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Sunday, November 2, 2014.  Even though my immediate life is not overtly revolving about trauma I do not feel safe in the world.  The severe trauma I endured for the duration of the first 18 years of my life (from birth) evidently carved such deep and pervasive tracks into my nervous system including my brain that I cannot escape the FEELINGS of trauma.

Certainly what it felt like to be so abused I wasn’t even able to form a clear sense of myself in my own life carried a profound lack of a sense of safety in this world in my BODY that I very seldom escape even for a few moments at a time.  The older I get (I am 63 now) the more aware I am of how complicated life is and how sophisticated the knowledge present in our body is about how to negotiate the split-seconds of our life as we move forward in time.

Being present in moments of extreme trauma that present a threat to ongoing life, which is certainly the experience of little people being greatly harmed especially by those whose task it is to take care of these little people, never goes ignored by the body.  Patterns of extreme reactions within the body to experiences of trauma prevents any ability to “relax into” the future.  Trauma is an IMMEDIATE experience that overrides any other experience or the hope or possibility of any other experience.  Surviving immediate trauma both consumes all available inner resources a little person may have at the same time it pushes the body’s awareness of resources that are lacking toward survival.

Yes, we early trauma survivors DID survive.  We did not do so by magically being able to make ourselves BIG enough to combat the largeness of the traumas that consumed us.  The LACK of having what it takes to make it through traumas that were way too BIG for us to endure built itself right into our body-brain as a PART of the trauma we survived.

The whole great big mess of trauma, of repeated unendurable trauma that we DID endure, all lies as body memory within us even though we rarely have actual conscious memory of any of this.  Our memory built us to be the way we are in the world.

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I closely watch the stages of development of self that my now 27-month-old grandson is passing through as I care for him weekdays.  I suppose it has been about two months ago now that he had his “AH HA!” experience of recognizing he is a self-within.  The following day he used the words “I” and “me” for the first time and then immediately passed into an obvious stage of being extremely shy.  It seems that at the instant he recognized that HE is a self he also recognized that the world is full of OTHER selves!  He is being helped by everyone who loves him to negotiate what this means for him as a developing person.

Carefully, tenderly, gently, clearly — we help him to negotiate each immediate instant of seemingly quite painful shyness he expresses with his entire being when confronted with other people, even very young children (but not babies).  He does a lot of turning away, facing away and then closing his eyes, peeping through nearly closed eyelids.  Nearly every adult I have seen interact with him in public affirms his feelings with “Sometimes I feel shy, too.”

It is taking the wider world to mirror back to him how to negotiate interactions that don’t, at first encounter, feel remotely safe!

Nobody PUSHES him.  Nobody shames or humiliates or scares him.  And what would happen to a child who crosses this threshold into self and social awareness and who is NOT met by safety within the world?  A child who has NEVER known safety?

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As I write this I find myself narrowing my range of thought.  Are there really only two main kinds of situations in life?  If so, I would divide them into survival states (fear based on a sense of continual threat to existence) and joy states (happiness based on a sense of safety that allows for calmness), and these are not necessarily compatible.

From watching young children I can see their hesitancy in some situations that seems to come from some innate wisdom within them.  I doubt that young abused children get much of a chance to work their own way through situations that elicit caution within them because the traumatic environment they live within continually overwhelms them.  In my case my body developed a permanent cautionary reaction to life.  I have anxiety and fear all of the time.  That is my body’s natural state.

I am too old to believe any longer that I can “work this out” or “work through this.”  I have to learn to live my life IN SPITE of what my body knows.  I have to “work with this” chronic terror that was so thoroughly built into my body.

In some ways this means that I must have TWO “immediates” going on at the same time.  One variant of my immediate existence comes through my clearly trauma-altered body.  The other kind of immediate experience of myself in my life MUST come through continual efforts to keep myself exquisitely aware in the moment of how terror rules my body so that I can consciously try as hard as I can to experience something ELSE along with and in spite of what my body experiences on an ongoing basis.

I am never far from having distinct opportunities nowadays to practice this very strange dance within myself.  My hive attack that began last September 23rd (as I have explained in earlier posts) is still with me continually.  I am being attacked by my own body, which is something immune systems that have adapted to massive prior traumas are prone to do to us.

My range of what feels safe to me has so diminished since leaving my desert home a year ago that there is very little around me I can find to soothe me.  Certainly the upcoming many months of brutal North Dakota winter offers me no solace at all.  Nor does life in this city, in the confines of this tiny apartment without adequate windows and without a beautiful quiet natural world I can step out my door into, offer me the comfort of sanctuary I left behind me.

Certainly “things could be much worse.”  THIS is what my hives are about as they came in response to the message of how close I came to losing my daughter.  Did my body respond to news of that so-near miss for my daughter with a celebration of her being spared?  Nope!  It responded with its pervasive knowledge, grown into it through 18 years of severe abusive trauma, that life is not EVER really safe.  That is what I learned as my body was growing itself.  My body believes that any immediate sense that life is OK is nothing but an illusion.

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Abusive childhoods collapse the distance a growing child needs to traverse between what feels safe to them and what does not.  We ALWAYS need to be able to traverse this distance to have any quality of life to speak of.  My body took the only shortcut it could find.  It (I) was wired to simply KNOW that nothing is ever truly safe.  How true is this assessment of life?  The answer is of course nothing but relative.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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Leave a Comment »

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