+MAKING FACES IN THE MIRROR (WITH SOUND EFFECTS)

alchemynowLeave a comment

+++++++++++++++++++++++

I am not convinced that by their nature either resentment or bitterness are ‘bad’ things.  They are simply parts of the natural human experience.  I do, however, think that being STUCK in any state is a problem.  Life itself is a constantly changing event, and if we can’t change in flexible ways along with the changes life brings us — well — THAT can mean trouble.

So perhaps if whining bitterness was to become seasoned with a little growling resentment — or growling resentment could become mixed with a little whining bitterness — a person stuck at either end of this ‘stop-go’ nervous system continuum could budge enough to get a start toward healing change.

If bitterness is too close to the despairing giving up end of the stress response, and if resentment is too close to the forever-in-the-wanting-to-fight state, then a move off of dead-center STUCK would be a positive one no matter which way the move took place!

So to get the bowling ball of mood states rolling again, I suspect that if growling resenters took a little time in front of a mirror and practiced turning their scowl into a pout, and whining bitter people took a little time in front of a mirror to practice turning their pout into a grimace — and both need to add the sound effects along the way — and throw in a heaping spoonful of good humor — well — what can I say?

A bowling ball stuck half way down the lane isn’t much fun to play with, and when we get ourselves stuck in these fighting or despairing places and can’t get ourselves out of them — trying SOMETHING is better than doing nothing at all.  Otherwise we can eat up our lifespan either waiting to fight our invisible foes so we can beat them and win — or waiting for some magical event to change the past for us into something better than what it was.

Making faces at ourselves in the mirror while we growl or whine ourselves off of an unhappy dead-center might just free us up enough to find something more pleasant to do with our time!  Never know until you try it!

+++++++++++++++++++++++

+BEEN ABUSED? PATTERNS OF RUPTURE WITH OR WITHOUT REPAIR

alchemynowLeave a comment

+++++++++++++++++

Another important piece of information about resentment and bitterness!  Safe and secure, appropriate, adequate (does NOT need to be perfect) parenting and early infant-child caregiving IS SUPPOSED TO include LOTS of practice with what is called RUPTURE AND REPAIR.

Parents who were not parented correctly are most likely to not recognize the opportunities life gives us through its patterns of RUPTURE to ‘learn’ how to REPAIR them.  All these patterns — adequate or not — build out nervous systems-brain-body-mind-self from the beginning of our life.

Done well, CALM and CONNECTION is the middle set point for our nervous system-brain-mind.  This happens when every rupture is met with an opportunity for repair.  The entire feel good-feel bad chemical system in our body is tied into these systems and is built by these patterns.

When an infant cries and has its needs met appropriately in a safe and secure environment, calm connection builds the center point.  Crying represents a rupture, having needs met is the repair.

We never leave these patterns behind.  All our lives we negotiate what we want and need with the environment, most often with other human beings.  We bump into one another in all sorts of ways, but a well built nervous system-brain-mind-self has all sorts of feedback loops built into it including REMORSE and EMPATHY to let us know what works and what doesn’t — to increase calm and connection for everyone.

Severe child abusers like my mother did not have the right kind of patterns built into them from early on, and as their developing body-brain adjusted – like in my mother’s case, the vagus nerve system was also affected and the ability for empathy and remorse was removed from her.

In our adult years when resentment and bitterness begin to solidify and ‘control’ our ability to respond – decreasing our calm and connection and our sense of well-being — we can bet our body-brain-nervous system-mind-self was built with LOTS OF RUPTURES that did not have adequate or appropriate repair.

My mother could beat me and beat me, etc. and NEVER, not one single time, feel remorse.  She offered NOTHING toward helping me build patterns of repair into my body.  These ruptures without repair ARE what dissociation is all about – plus!

A short post here — but important!  Healing means we recognize the patterns of rupture without repair from the time of our birth and name them for what they are.  Then, if resentment and bitterness are present – and again, they are IN OUR BODY, in our stress-calm response system — we can learn NOW how to live well with these patterns and to find ways to improve and change them!

+++++++++++++++++

+STEPPING TOWARD HEALING – WHAT OUR BODY KNOWS

alchemynowLeave a comment

+++++++++++++++

I believe that child abusing parents ALWAYS have an insecure attachment disorder.  I also believe that it is most likely that either in the parent/s, in their parents, or in their grandparents alcoholism and/or drug addiction almost always exists.

I also believe that if adults struggle with either/or resentful bitterness or bitter resentment there is a very good reason why — and that reason nearly always rests firmly on an unsafe and insecure attachment platform in childhood that very likely contained abuse.

In light of the comment and reply included yesterday on the subject of hurt and bitterness, I simply wanted to make these points because I believe at least in the beginning of healing work from an abusive childhood that Al-Anon’s 12-step program (or any other relevant 12-step support group) has a LOT of solid help and information to offer.  I recommend it highly and suggest a weekly meeting and connection with a good sponsor.  If you go, attend at least six meetings before making a decision about your continued commitment — and before you try another meeting to adjust your ‘fit’.

I also know that healing is certainly possible for many people without these ‘meetings’, and that attendance does not have to be a lifetime affair (no matter what any meeting person might tell you).  But or those of us from abusive and nutty families, with and without the chemical (and other) addictions, we have a lot to learn about life that we didn’t learn when we needed it growing up.

I also know that nobody has all the answers!

++++

I also wanted to mention that I couldn’t continue thinking about bitterness and resentment today without beginning to get mingled ‘sense’ information for myself about what my BODY knows about them.  I therefore speak ONLY for myself – and encourage others to listen to their own body-talk to get their own information.

To me, resentment has a nasty oily kind of smell to it, while bitterness has a metallic sulfuric kind of smell.  Resentment has a sound like a low sustained growl, while bitterness has a sound (to me) that is high pitched, obnoxious and a whole lot like whining.

To me, resentment has a dark, dried blood red-brown-maroon color to it, while bitterness is a sick yellow-green tinged with black.

Resentment (to me) is tied to the fight stress response — and involves a continual sustained state of WANTING to find a way to fight back.  This is a nervous system response tied NOT to resignation, but to a search for competence and confidence to right a wrong.  (The nature of the wrong needs to be examined as does one’s reaction to it.)

Bitterness (to me) is tied also to the stress response system in the body, but it lies more toward the ‘giving up’ end or resignation and lost hopelessness.  It lies very close to despair — and will stay exactly STUCK there until a person can identify all the complicating feelings and factors that contribute to the LOSS and grieving, the sadness and despair that has sapped away rather than restored or built up one’s will to FIGHT.

What child abuse survivors with insecure attachment disorders DO NOT HAVE is (as I have said so many times) a balanced calm and connected, safe and securely attached MIDDLE SET point for their brain and nervous system.  From very early, early in life this middle point — set by abuse to be somewhere OTHER than where nature would best want it — that lies too far either toward aggression-fight or toward giving up.

We are human.  We live in a body.  Resentment and bitterness are anchored in our body as is everything else about us as long as we are alive.  I believe it is helpful to think in terms of color, smells, sounds — all the information our body knows about whatever concerns us.  We can explore this information and learn a LOT about our self, our woundedness, our reactions to our hurts, as well as begin to find our own clues about what to do next to improve our well-being.

+++++++++++++++

+I BROOK NO BITTERNESS

alchemynowLeave a comment

++++++++++

Comment and replies on the topic of bitterness – your thoughts and feelings?

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/feeling-bitter-bitterness-as-a-state-of-mind-a-state-of-being-no-thanks/#comment-1958

++++++++++

+FROM A LETTER

alchemynowLeave a comment

+++++++++++++++++++++++

Excerpt from today’s letter to my 83-year-old friend, our Alaskan homesteading neighbor, who was hated by her mother from birth though never physically abused – and who spent most of her childhood hunting, trapping and hiking in the Washington wilderness with her Native American father —

++++

It makes me wonder how I will ever be able to tell my own childhood story.  I will have to return to a place and a way of being in the world that was so unlike where I am today in ‘ordinary’ American life and thinking.

I think my dreaming last night was a part of it.  How I thought (and mostly didn’t) as a child seems surreal to me today, but it was ordinary to me then.  I didn’t know anything else, had no other perspective, no input from anyone.

And how I was and what I knew was so different from my siblings.  Most importantly, how I was changed the way I suffered.  Part of me says that I have no business even pretending I can write of myself in my childhood for others to read if I cannot remember how my world was to me back then.

It makes me wish I had written ‘the story’ when I left home at 18 – not 40 years later.  And part of me is afraid if I go back to who and how I was then that I will ‘lose it’ now and not be able to ‘come back’.  I heed those inner warnings.  I have to be very, very careful because I was all alone THEN, and to tell ‘the story’ I have to be able to be in both places at the same time – or very closely to one another — there-then and here-now.

I would have to time-travel — At this moment I examine within myself what the purpose of this would be – what do I have to offer because of how uniquely and nearly absolutely ALONE I was as a child — in my mind-controlled thoughts and self — etc.

++

I know this is getting long, but I feel ‘safe’ writing you these things.  Fortunately, my children don’t know what I am talking about.  Neither do my siblings.  I know nobody who knows what this alone I am talking about actually is – and is like – ‘cept perhaps somehow — you — though you had your father and other family — but your creative, poetic mind can S-T-R-E-T-C-H somehow — hey, I have faith in YOU!

I began to think about the underpinnings of what might be important to others about my story if I can tell it.  My daughter tells me that at times her little much-loved son wakes from a sound sleep crying alligator tears and obviously in complete despair and deep sorrow.

I put this together with a statement both of my parents made in those Mildred-pre-Alaska letters.  The first one Bill wrote upon arriving in Alaska, he said, “I feel like a little lost boy.”  I don’t think he would have described his state that way if he hadn’t exactly known what it felt like to be a ‘little lost boy’.

Interesting sideline – sis just found my father’s birth certificate (sadly without time of birth so can’t do astro report on him).  It reports that at the time of his birth he was his mother’s 4th live birth, and there had been one dead child before him.  We had never heard this, no idea of ‘the story’ behind it — but had heard all our childhood that Bill was absolutely an unwanted, unloved child.  (Set him up for the storm of Mildred – that plus his father being an alcoholic).

Mildred writes in her pre-Alaska letters – she moves from the motel they were in when Bill went to AK, goes on and on about the cute little house she is moving us into, how it will be perfect to wait in, how she can make a temporary home there — and 2 weeks later as she unpacks and makes her ‘doll house’ she writes Bill that as soon as she gets the house all set up and done, all cozy, she will feel LOST — and there at 2 weeks in that house she is planning to move out 2 weeks later (which she did).

++

So yesterday my mind put these two streams of thinking together — and I thought, “What if we all enter this world from birth feeling and being LOST unless someone loves us enough to take that feeling-state away from us?”

I add this into my thinking mix:  Not long after my youngest girl first learned to talk she talked about things I knew she had been thinking about and experiencing from way before she had words.  One of them:  Every time we were in our car out driving anywhere, she was nearly inconsolable in her concern and sadness for everyone else she saw driving around because she was absolutely convinced that ALL of them were LOST.

It didn’t matter what we said to her as we tried to tell her just like we knew where our home was and could find our way back there, so too did all these other people know where their home was and could find their way back.

I was 24, didn’t ever realize she may have been talking about a much deeper and more profound sense of LOST — like the one I am contemplating now.  She was three then – and knew something!!

++

So what if this feeling LOST is something we are even physiologically born with – and in safe and secure, loving attachment early environments our body forms this knowledge as it grows — or in opposite cases, the opposite?

I also have thought about why now, after 10 years, ER would walk across my threshold.  Because he feels lost? — And what lost people need is to feel FOUND.

I think about both my parents’ early life — neither loved, neither wanted, and in my mother’s case, severely neglected and abused — both of them had deep undercurrents of feeling LOST and never FOUND.

And in my case, I was so LOST, that when our family FOUND the mountain, I found myself there!  The wilderness is just that because HUMANS have not invaded it.  No matter we were the humans invading that wilderness — at the start I knew that ‘place’ of wilderness, and we MET each other, the wilderness and me.  There really were no humans in my world, either — so I understood the mountain in that way — in that wilderness I FOUND myself more than I had ever done before.  (Most fortunately!)

I think the same thing happened for M, who had since being a little girl FOUND herself in the woods and New England countryside (Joe Anne even talked about that re:  M).

It is becoming clear to me that M’s moving was an addiction — as was her beating-abusing-terrorizing me.  Then yesterday my thoughts went to maybe all addictions (and it is true that they all use the same neurochemistry built into the human body designed for human-social attachments) is just that.

When we feel LOST we grab whatever we are addicted to and it helps us feel FOUND.  Then I realized yesterday if this is true, then depression would not be so much about sorrow and sadness and hopelessness as I have thought — it would be most deeply about feeling LOST and not being able to be or feel FOUND.

Then I realized that even if the experts say we have only five primal-primary emotions of happy, sad, mad, scared and disgust (a gag-reflex emotion designed by evolution to prevent us from ingesting poison) — maybe there is a sixth — LOST.

All this thinking while I am ‘taking a break’ and trying not to think at all – or write — just this to you!!  But I am allowing whatever learning and changes to happen within myself that might prepare me for the writing ahead.

What if people could find it useful to identify within their self exactly what feeling LOST feels like, so they can name it, and then consciously make choices about what they do to make their self feel FOUND?

What if we all share this continuum between feeling-being LOST and feeling-being FOUND?

++

I feel FOUND as an adult as a part of the human sphere more than I ever could of as a child.  I fear losing this sense if I go back there to when I was a child and so LOST.  Once we left my grandmother behind in LA right before my 6th birthday, I never felt FOUND again — until we FOUND the mountain.

Yet even in LA the degree of FOUND I had with my grandmother was interfered with both my Gma’s limitations (that let her ruin my mother) and my mother’s interference with Gma’s affections.

++

More than anything I wish I could go back to that wilderness – and there I would FIND myself – my true, real, deepest self — which was the person I was all through my childhood.  Now that I am civilized and live in civilization — I HAVE changed.  Because we are members of a social species, this dichotomy has always been part of our nature.  At what point do we become differentiated not only from the natural world, but also as our own self separate from others around us?

+

All I know right now is that I have a commitment and obligation for the next two weeks to stand in for my friend, Sharon as she goes on vacation to be in that little office for her – and cannot afford to let myself follow my own thoughts toward my writing.  The Y, used to be the YWCA, is a solid nice building in old B where they rent for $200 per month rooms – 20 of them – to low income adults.  Will tell you more someday.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

fun listen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0N5nHy48vE

+’WHEN SEPTEMBER COMES’

alchemynowLeave a comment

++++++++++++++++

Rosanne Cash – September When It Comes

Rosanne Cash (born May 24, 1955 in Memphis, Tennesee) is an American singer and songwriter. She is oldest daughter of Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto, born shortly before the release of her father’s first single. She is also the stepdaughter of June Carter Cash and the stepsister of country singer Carlene Carter.

If a film would ever be made of ‘this story’ some of the sound track songs would come from the album ‘Rules of Travel’ including ‘September When It Comes,” “44 Stories,” and “Will You Remember Me.”

++++++++++++++++

And

Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull) / Kathrin Troester – Griminelli’s Lament (2005)

++++++++++++++++

+DOES MY BODY BELONG TO A DANCER?

alchemynowLeave a comment

++++++++++++++++++++++++

A few years ago I stumbled upon this 2005 Israeli research study on the genetics of dancers.  I am working toward adding another component to my exercise right now because this isn’t the season (due to monsoon rains) that lets me go do my hard work building adobes outside.  I want to do more than my 45 minute job, so I have decided to start adding time at home dancing.

I remember when I was 18 and had just entered the big wide world having existed both my home of origin and the next step of boot camp.  When I landed at the Naval base in San Diego for my further training, I discovered the enlisted club there had a live band and a dance floor.  I don’t remember how many nights a week the band played.  But I do remember that when they did play, I was there from the first note they played to the last one.  I danced.  I loved it.  I never danced with anyone.  I didn’t even notice if anyone was there.  It must have been very few people because I basically had that dance floor to myself.

If I remember the Israeli dance research correctly, the defined a performing dancer as one who danced ten hours a week.  I want to see if I can work up to that.  I want to reawaken my dancing self.

I was thinking about this because I am alive.  My mother did not kill me.  She did not take my life, though there certainly times she would have it I hadn’t become so proficient and competent at receiving her beatings I could not avoid so as to protect my head, etc. to avoid being killed.  So, she did not take my body from me.

She took my hope, my trust, my safety, my security, my peace, my happiness, my curiosity, my ability to wonder or to fight back – etc.  But here I am with my body, and if my body actually belongs to a dancer, well, then……. I want to find out.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

+DISSOCIATION: THINKING THROUGH SOME IMPLICATIONS

alchemynowLeave a comment

++++++++++++++++

I just took a break and did my jogging — plus — which I will get to in my next post.  But before I move THAT far forward, I want to think through some implications that are dawning on me know from my last post:  +DISSOCIATION: MY MOTHER’S AND MY OWN STORY SHARE IT.  What if I think about the the paper, the snake skin and the snake as I described in that post as if I am thinking about myself in relation to my mother.

First, my guess is that human newborns are programmed from birth to ANTICIPATE being loved.  That means that I was born to be loved and to love.  I was born to expect the best.  Mother was naturally safe to me and someone to ‘reach for’.  I would say natural “unless proven otherwise,” but it took a whole lot of convincing for me to actually understand my mother was not safe.  Yet my baby book record of my before-age-two sentence, “I didn’t mean to,” lets me know I was certainly afraid of her attacks already by that age.

Our species would not have survived very long if our inherited patterns were to destroy the offspring rather than to promote their well-being.  So, it would have been completely in alliance with nature for me NOT to expect harm from my mother.  I would naturally have seen her as being more like the beautiful piece of paper than to see her as a deadly viper.  That was my natural state.

It took me a very, very, very, very long time from the time I was born to be able to begin to anticipate my mother’s attacks.  Actually, because I could NEVER predict what was going to ‘set her off’ to turn her from being like the beautiful paper into the coiled viper who attacked me, it was impossible for me to anticipate her changes before they happened.

Neither could I ALWAYS live in that state of awareness of the viper.  So, as I went along just being natural me in my body, and as she interjected her madness upon me without warning or provocation, I simply had to switch into a dissociated state when she did!  It was like I ‘forgot’ the viper existed unless I was under direct attack.  As a result nearly all of my abuse memories are ‘somewhere else’.  This might be related to why I was almost always taken completely by surprise by her every new attack on me — as if it was the first time it had ever happened.

Rarely did I see her transformation taking place, like I could see the one that happened as I watched my brain let that harmless piece of paper, transform into a harmless snake skin, and then into a full-bodied very living and very deadly snake.  My mother offered me no transitions and no transitional states — which is essential for a well-balanced and well-adapted brain, mind and self to form.

If I knew how, I could set this line to music:  “There was a whole lotta switchin’ goin’ on.”

My mother lacked transitional states.  She rapidly and drastically just – switched.  Did SHE know she was doing this?  I don’t know.  Did she have a choice?  Could she have stopped herself?  I doubt I will ever be able to figure out what was going on inside of her — but inside of me?  Perhaps I always expected the best and got the worst.

++++++++++++++++