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Life is not stagnant.  With the changes life brings people change right along with it.  Changing.  Like the weather changes.  Like the seasons change.  Because I am in so many ways in a holding pattern in my life waiting for changes I cannot anticipate has stressed me.  That cannot do.  I need to find a better way to wait.

With my diet cleansing and changes my body is changing.  That’s a plan I CAN do something about — and my work to heal my very fragile digestive system is progressing.  I do not know how long it will take for my body to heal itself.  That is one of the unknowns.  Yet day by day I am making choices governing how this change is taking place.  This is a very good thing.

My diet is still extremely limited.  I still spend most of my time at home with fast access to my facilities.  This is still not one bit fun, but my body is making progress – and me with it.

Fact:  The body forms mucus in the intestines to encase acidic toxins whenever necessary and possible.  This mucus can entirely line the intestines preventing nutrients from being absorbed properly.  This has happened to me, and detoxing is allowing that mucus and the toxins it encases to finally leave my body.

It is possible – because high levels of stress create acidic toxins in the body that mucus has to take care of to prevent (as much as possible) harm to the ‘main body’ – that the amount of abusive, traumatic stress I experienced from the moment I was born has left behind the very troubles that I am trying to help my body heal.  This means that the detox is allowing my body to release mucus – and as I found out yesterday – degrees of body memory that corresponds to the traumatic stress that created the need for the mucus all the way back to my birth.

I would not have believed this kind of healing were possible if I was not experiencing it.  I will not describe the infant abuse memories that came to me yesterday as my body “had a very hard time,” but the memories came through in thoughts, very clear ones, that I have never before had in my life.

These were very ugly memories.

I am now free of some major part of the body damage that those early assaults by my psychotic mentally ill mother did to me.  Today has, very thankfully in many ways, seen my body in a much calmer state.  I believe our body knows exactly how to heal itself given what it needs to do so.  I am very impressed.  Impressed with the work my body did on its own yesterday, and impressed that today it has stabilized itself.

I am expecting there are more levels yet to this detox/healing, but if this stage is releasing infant abuse traumatic stress trapped in mucus there shouldn’t be too much more coming.  Our bodies are such miracles!!!

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So I guess I can call what I am doing right now active waiting.  “For everything there is a time and a season.”  I am allowing myself to be quiet in my life right now, to turn to face my loneliness so I can better see what it can teach me. 

Meanwhile our monsoon rains have come and even though my depression is not leaving me with the usual sense of joy and enjoyment (in-joy) with these rains that I have experienced during the past 13 monsoons that have come and gone with the seasons since I moved down here, I am waiting with myself — to know that whatever I am feeling — is exactly OK.

Things will change.  I will change.  For now, how I am who I am is exactly OK.  As I eat clean and green my body is healing itself from the depths of my insides.  I must be ready.

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July 6, 2013.  It just struck me that of the accumulation of ‘disabilities’ I live with as I approach my 62nd birthday probably all of them are triggered in the current set of circumstances of my life.  I am poised to move – had made that decision to return north to live near my daughter and her family so I could be at least some part of my 1- and 3-year-old grandsons’ life.  Two days after I made that decision once I returned from my visit north all was tossed into the air as my daughter and her husband decided to look into better paying (by far) jobs in an entirely different location.

There is nothing firm under my feet to think about until they are done thinking about whatever it is they need to think about.  I am just ungrounded.

I just found myself thinking about my ‘diagnosis’ of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) – which in my case is “undifferentiated” because I was so abused for my first 18 years of life I was never allowed to form an identity at all.  I have DID without identities.  I am in the middle of what that feels like right now. 

One of the worst states I can find myself in is to be ungrounded.  Being ungrounded in my life keeps any particular part of myself from taking hold.  This is tied to my depression:  “Who am I today?”  Some part of me is simply wandering around in space.  It’s a very good thing that I have a house to live in, with a yard.  This gives me space where I am safe within which I wander — as I wander around inside of myself — looking for WHO is actually present in this body in this material world.

I don’t know who.

I miss the focus of my book writing.  SNAP!  All of that ended abruptly without any warning whatsoever.  That writing simply STOPPED.  Whatever part of me did all that writing disappeared like a puff of smoke in a sudden breeze.  GONE!  DONE!  No book writer to be found anywhere around where I live.

No gardener, either.  Whatever focused identity built this garden, put up those walls out there, created the pathways, took pride in the flowers, enjoyed caring for it all – is also GONE!  POOF!  Nowhere to be found.

Nothing in my house feels like it actually belongs to me although intellectually I know it does.  It doesn’t FEEL like this is my life.  I don’t know where my life is — or where an identity is any more that fits here.

I am a floating, bobbing, drifting ball of spirit light not in any special form.  Untethered, ungrounded, unfocused.  This is not any fun whatsoever!

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Maybe it will turn out that I won’t move anywhere.  Mabe it would take more out of me to go through that uprooting than I have to spend of all my internal resources combined.  Maybe I will have to upack these boxes.  Or not.

Where is Linda?

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My personal boundaries were brutally invaded my a mean psychotic madwoman nearly every time I turned around – or did not turn around – all the way through those 18 years of my childhood.  It made no difference what I did or did not do.  I simply endured it all.  But WHO endured?

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I am awaiting a meditation CD – yoga Nidra designed for PTSD war veterans – that my sister ordered for me.  She has found it extremely helpful to her.  Something to look forward to with a narrow beam of light.  Will it help me?  It cannot hurt me!

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I have a nicely framed canvas reproduction of this painting hanging on my living room wall by the artist de Grazia –Los Ninos – given to me by a stranger.  It was too large to put in a box so it’s the only object hanging still on my wall.  It comforts me.  Part of me feels a little grounded looking at it.  A kind of portal, a window into some part of me that knows I really do live here.  Here in this house that feels like a boat drifting without sail on a wide open sea without another person or shore in sight.

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There is a day-and-night difference to me between depression that falls like the sun does at nightfall and depression that falls away.  One of my several so-called clinical diagnosis is “reoccurring major depression.”  There is never any mania with this kind of depression.  But the fact that it is “reoccurring” means that I am fortunate enough to have the worst of the depression fall away in time — until next time.

I have to find my gratitude where it comes to me.  While I never am depression-free except on the rarest occasions, at least my chronic depression is “minor” rather than “major.”  Life is nothing if not relative!

I tend to notice subtle shifts in how I react to how I feel as they appear in the language of my thoughts.  “I feel depressed” (sad) is not as scary to me as are the words I hear now:  “I AM depressed.”  The difference between these descriptive phrases alerts me to the fact that once the “I AM depressed” words appear I am in need of serious work to find my way through to the other side.

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What sends anyone from “tumult” into “plummet” is intensely personal.  I recognize that my thoughts and feelings have been tumultuous for weeks heading into months.  I know I have very real needs that are not being met yet I have no clear – or even at this point possible – way to make changes at this time. 

My inner self is always called upon to keep me upright but it is the nature of how longterm severe traumatic abuse affected my physiological development during the first 18 years of my life that has left me rarely, rarely at ease.  I have to work very hard on every level to ever feel simply OK.

I am used to this.  Yet every time the major depression threatens to swallow me whole I have to search for the iron will of my survival instincts.  Nobody can do this work for me.

I force myself to do everything I do right now.  My “conditions” are completely “medication resistant.”  What happened to me in the first place was too complicated and caused so many complicated changes within my developing body that I am always left with only one solution:  What can I do to help myself?

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 I force myself to do my 45 minute daily walk, to make and drink my green vegetable juice, to take my vitamins.  (Oops!  I better go do that now.)  I take a total of 21 pills of 14 different supplements daily.  I am even juicing organic carrot tops now and have added quinoa, spelt noodles and organic stewed tomatoes to my diet.  I am making progress through my pH Miracle dietary changes in my effort to help my body be able to heal itself.

Today I found and added the clear words, “I am fine.  I feel wonderful.” into my thought patterns whenever I detect conscious negative thoughts.  I force myself to pick up gardening scissors to trim dead flowers off of at least one rose-bush.  I force myself to find a rag, wet it, and wash at least part of my kitchen floor.

I can finish nothing right now except perhaps this post.  Success in accomplishment for me right now is simply IN THE DOING of whatever I can force myself to do.  I feel as though I am in a body moving under the weight of a very deep sea.  Everything about life right now takes my concentrated effort.  This is tiring.

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I do not care what “they” say about depression.  I believe it always comes from a sad and breaking heart.  It is only a loving gentleness that can tend such a vulnerability in anyone’s soul.  Everyone I love lives over a thousand miles away from me.  And it even was my recent travel to see some of those people that so sunk my heart at returning home — alone.

I long ago left behind the silly notion that anyone or anything outside of my own self awareness, initiative and action can help me through those times when my depression falls from being minor to being major.  In the meantime I have to look for, notice and value every little piece of life that is beautiful to me.  I have to work to add something to that beauty in any and every way that I can.

These depressions as they began very early in my childhood in response to horrific abuse are deeply about the crumbling of my hope, and without hope I become so very, very, very sad.  So sad!  At those times being alive in the physical world feels like a trap.  I struggle.  I pray.

When I am up enough I go where there are people but most human interactions exhaust rather than feed me right now.  My healing always seems to require quiet (very typical for PTSD and dissociative healing). 

I am naming a malaise that I know came to me directly from exposure to unremitting horrors of traumatic infant and child abuse.  This is all very difficult to live with, to cope with or to change.  The reprieves do come.  I wait for them while I work for them in any way that I can.

It helps me to write about this here.  It helps me to not feel so terribly alone.  Thank you for reading.  Thank you.

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I misunderstood my American history lessons at school when I was a young child.  I find this interesting as it took me 50 years to finally learn that The American Revolutionary War  began in 1775 and did not end with our independence from Britain until 1783.  Therefore what I always knew as the 4th of July celebrations was just plain wrong! 

The signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 began our war in earnest, and this we celebrate yearly, but it is the forward actions of “bombs bursting in air” that are commemorated, not the END of the war as I somehow gathered from whatever postdated news my early history teachers were telling their students. 

We do not celebrate victory or the winning of the war, which was what I thought since childhood.  Rather we recognize and celebrate our intention to throw all those bombs into the air, to sacrifice greatly and to achieve what we wanted:  Our independence as a nation.  My brain-being didn’t comprehend why anyone would make such a big deal out of an intention! 

Why, I knew from the moment I was born that intention to remain intact was not going to keep me alive, nor was simply fighting that war going to do so.  If I was going to survive what happened to me during those long 18 years I was going to have to WIN the war.  Now THAT, in my mind, is something to celebrate!

(Interestingly, the end goal of safe and secure early attachment, whose benefits continue for its recipient throughout their lifespan, is AUTONOMY.  This state is the healthiest, most balanced and advanced state of being for humans and other mammals, and it all begins with healthy mothering.)

Because it is nearly my total concern to find ways as a survivor of being a brutally abused infant and child to heal from what happened to me I figure that my own Independence Day celebration began with my first breath.  This is a long war, as long as it takes for me to get from the start of my life to the end of it.  The more I learn about how early trauma changed my physiological development so that I did not even end up living in the same BODY I would be in if that trauma had not occurred, the more weapons I have in my conscious arsenal to fight this war with.  Always I learn how I am different because of being an early trauma survivor.

America as a whole chose to fight that war.  At what point as trauma survivors do we realize what a war it is that WE fight?  When do we make our choice to fight it?  We did not choose to be hated, abused, traumatized and CHANGED as human beings by the experiences our earliest attachment people gave to us.  I am sorry “new agers” but we DID NOT choose our trauma!

What choices do we – and can we – make now on our own behalf?

I had yet another conversation with friends yesterday about diet changes and about the topics of many of my June posts related to helping our body heal.  Two of us at the table had extremely abusive and traumatic childhoods and two of us did not.  The two who were spared kept remarking that “It’s all a matter of attitude.  I can eat anything I want to just so long as I keep stress out of my life as much as possible and think positively.”

OK.  WOW!  Lucky YOU!  I reminded both of these people that THEY do not live in a body formed in, by and for trauma.  They were loved, cherished and well-parented as little people.  I reminded them that there are some of us who were not so fortunate.  We live in a body that was severely distressed and built the responses of our body to those “distressers” right into it.  Our body is fragile in ways that their body has never been and will never be.  I reminded them of the Center for Disease Control’s studies on Adverse Childhood Experiences that clearly shows that the more troubles a child has when little the more likely they are to die an average of 20 years earlier than their non-traumatized peers.

We are not making our troubles up, folks.  But we can be as lost in the history of how trauma has affected us as I was lost about how fireworks came to be in the skies of America every 4th of July.  Once we educate ourselves we are helping everyone by finding times and places to respond to others with the TRUTH about what early trauma and abuse does to infants and children IN THE DEVELOPMENT of their body-brain that troubles them for the rest of their lives.

This means that we survivors use up a lot of our life energy trying to stabilize ourselves in our life that “regular” non-survivors can spend on all kinds of other occupations.  Certainly nobody lives an easy or a perfect life.  But fairness matters, and it is simply FAIR that we all realize what happens to us long before we can consciously remember it shapes the body we live within all of our life in very significant ways.

This blog is packed with information about those changes.

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My father’s mother was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, which my daughter has now joined.  Family rumor has it that my mother’s mother’s side of the family were Loyalists and left America to return to Canada.  I have seen no record that these ancestors were ever within American boundaries prior to 1910.  They immigrated from Scotland and England into Canada around Prince Edward Island to begin with.  Supposedly there was much animosity between my father’s and my mother’s sides of the family about these loyalties when my parents married.

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Because I am on some sort of book writing sabbatical I found it hard to get to the task upon my daughter’s request to put together a list such as this one (below) to include in the upcoming books she is editing.  But I forced myself to enter the nefarious world of cerebral thinking-drive to pull these titles out.  There is so much material on the subject available it seemed like a shot in the dark to select just a few representative authors and video stars to include in this material.

I seem to be living now in an entirely different world than the one I lived in while I prepared the 10 manuscripts that are heading through the editing process.  My book writing self just disappeared, taking all her words with her.  That is fine by me!  If and when it is time to get back to that task it needs to be when all 10 books are OUT THERE – wherever there turns out to be.

In the meantime, here’s my effort to point readers of these books in some kind of a helpful direction on topics they may have never considered before.

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Suggested Reading and Resource List for Books (to be published)

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Allen, J. G. (2001).  Traumatic relationships and serious mental disorders.  West Sussex, England:  John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Child Welfare Information Gateway (2009).  Understanding the effects of maltreatment on brain development.  Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Retrieved July 1, 2013, from www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/issue_briefs/brain_development/

Citisite (2009, November 9).  NeuroScience.  Early childhood:  A. Schore. D. Siegel.  Brain Development.  Retrieved July 1, 2013, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOp4s1PXQGs

Citisite (2011, July 11).  Allan Schore.  JOY & FUN.  Gene, neurobiology.  Child brain development.  Retrieved July 1, 2013, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0iocZu1mVg

Fields, R. D. (2010, October 30).  Sticks and stones — hurtful words damage the brain:  Verbal abuse in childhood inflicts lasting physical effects on brain structure.  The New Brain.  Retrieved July 1, 2013 from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-new-brain/201010/sticks-and-stones-hurtful-words-damage-the-brain

Kestenbaum, R., Farber, E. A., Sroufe, L. A. (1989).  Individual differences in empathy among preschoolers: Relation to attachment history.  New Directions for Child Development, 44, 51-64.

Lopatto, E.  (2012, February 13).  Childhood abuse interferes with brain formation, Harvard study shows.  Bloomberg News.  Retrieved July 1, 2013, from http://bangordailynews.com/2012/02/13/health/childhood-abuse-interferes-with-brain-formation-harvard-study-shows/

Mason, P, and Kreger, R. (2010).  Stop walking on eggshells:  Taking your life back when someone you care about has borderline personality disorder (2^nd ed.).  Oakland, CA:  New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

Neufeld, G., & Mate G. (2006).  Hold on to your kids:  Why parents need to matter more than peers.  New York, NY:  Ballantine Books.

Perry, B., and Szalavitz, M. (2006).  The boy who was raised as a dog:  And other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook — What traumatized children can teach us about loss, love, and healing.  New York, NY:  Basic Books.

Schore, A. N. (1994).  Affect regulation and the origin of the self: The neurobiology of emotional development.  Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Schore, A. N. (1997). Early organization of the nonlinear right brain and development of a predisposition to psychiatric disorders.  Development and Psychopathology, 9, 595–631.

Schore, A. N. (2000). Attachment and the regulation of the right brain.  Attachment and Human Development, 2, 23–47.

Schore, A. N. (2001).  Effects of a secure attachment relationship on right brain development, affect regulation, and infant mental health.  Infant Mental Health Journal, 22 (1-2), 7-66.  Retrieved July 1, 2013, from http://www.allanschore.com/pdf/SchoreIMHJAttachment.pdf

Schore, A. N. (2003).  Affect dysregulation and disorders of the self.  New York, NY:  W. W. Norton & Company.

Schore, A. N. (2003).  Affect regulation and the repair of the self.  New York, NY:  W. W. Norton & Company.

Siegel, D. J., and Hartzell, Mary (2004).  Parenting from the inside out.  New York, NY:  Tarcher/Penguin.

Siegel, D.J., (2012).  The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (2^nd ed.).  New York, NY:  The Guilford Press.

Siegel, D. J., and Bryson, T. P. (2012).  The whole-brain child:  12 revolutionary strategies to nurture your child’s developing mind.  New York, NY:  Random House.

Teicher, M. H. (2000).  Wounds that time won’t heal:  The neurobiology of child abuse.  Cerebrum:  The Dana Forum on Brain Science, 2 (4).  Retrieved July 1, 2013 from:  http://192.211.16.13/curricular/hhd2006/news/wounds.pdf

Teicher, M. H., Andersen, S. L., Polcari, A., Anderson, C. M., Navalta, C. P., Kim, D. M. (2003).   The neurobiological consequences of early stress and childhood maltreatment.  Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 27, 33-44.

Teicher, M. H., Samson, J. A., Polcari, A., McGreenery, C. E. (2006).  Sticks, stones, and hurtful words: Relative effects of various forms of childhood maltreatment.  American Journal of Psychiatry, 163 (6), 993-1000.  Retrieved July 1, 2013 from http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleID=96671

Tvoparents (2012, April 5).  Gordon Neufeld on what makes a bully.  Retrieved July 1, 2013, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7mznfMI1T4 

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June 30, 2013.  Words.  A few words.  What is it about writing that holds hope for me that once I have put a collection of words together I will somehow feel better?  Which is to say that at the moment I don’t feel “better” at all!  Nope!  Life seems too complicated for me right now to give me any sense at all that everything is going to be the proverbial OK EVER let alone soon.

Did I bring “this” upon myself?  Yes, if I am accountable for being myself in the first place.  That I am in a state of unmet need and perplexity about possible options given my disabilities and very short financial resources deeply affects me – and what I can find to do about “this” seems so pitifully meager as to seem as NOTHING to me in these days.  These changing days.

I knew when I returned home from my Alaska-Seattle travels to see family at the beginning of this month that my needs are NOT being met here for meaningful relationships with people I love and who love me.  I have to leave here.  To go where?  When?  HOW can I move when I am living dollar to dollar with very few left at the end of each month?

I started dismantling my home anyway.  Growing stacks of boxes begin to surround my floorspace as I stack them along walls.  How can I know what I can keep if I know none of the above?  How can I find and keep a sense of magnanimous equilibrium in the midst of my growing sense of chaos?

I can handle chaos if it is constructive with a goal at the end of it, a goal in my mind.  Whatever goal I am working toward is nebulous.  I am scared.  I am sad. 

But I also know if all of my belongings have to end up in a storage locker then that’s what will have to happen because deep inside of myself I know I am not staying here.

I take baby steps each day the best that I can.  I am still involved in my cleanse as I have written about it recently although I took last Friday off to travel with friends the 90 miles to Tucson to visit a spiritual healer.  I am still stopped up from the antiD pills I had to take to get out my front door for the day.

Now THAT was a trip and a half!  All ended well post-driver getting lost and us ending up to our appointments late so that mine was cut short.  Which it didn’t have to be except that me being me gave the friend of my friend the first one knowing that I am too dang tough not to end up doing just fine if I (rather than her) was the one rushing pell-mell through such an important session.

Life being what life is with its twists and turns with surprises along the way, I made my right choice.  Courtesy and concern for others when I can show it helps me in deeper ways.  But the rushing through the information the healer, Christy, was sharing began the instant I walked into the room.  I knew it was not her descriptions of what needed to be healed for me that were of substance.  I needed and went there for the healing itself.

And the healing DID happen.  This woman has studied with traditional Native American healers for 30 years.  She is gifted in energy flows, in healing auras and chakras.  I have never given those much thought, and never have I studied them.  But I have known a number of women who, along with their friends, have gone through healing with this woman, Christy, and all have glowing reports. 

So I went with confidence. 

One important point Christy made clear to me is that healing itself as the body and soul respond takes time.  She did not use the analogy I recently used of “peaks and valleys.”  She referred to the image of a pendulum as she told me that in the days after this healing my inner pendulum of experience would swing first widely and then gradually settle down until the swings stop at center.  I am waiting for that day.  It is not here yet, and I suspect that much of what I feel today is part of the swinging effect.

I never realized that chakras can be damaged.  Well, evidently they can be, and certainly because I know of the severe trauma I have lived through it didn’t surprise me at all as Christy described to me what she “saw” and what she was going to heal.  I feel extremely fortunate to have found out about this woman and to have been taken by my very busy friend up to see her.  I am grateful for this healing.

Meanwhile I am living through the healing itself on so many levels that nothing about myself in my life feels “right” to me at this point in time.  Christy complimented me on how strong and healthy my “spirit chakra” is.  But living by faith and trust that there are higher powers that guide my life and make clear the way is not easy, either. 

I am doing more than transitioning.  I am transforming.  This is a difficult time for me.  I am not surprised.  I don’t LIKE this stage, but it is necessary.  I know that.  I am doing my part to make these levels of healing successful.  Along the way sometimes I simply MUST complain.  It is a part of my human process.

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Silly me.  Of course my healing journey must include peaks and valleys!  Healing is not something separate from life.  Life certainly has those peaks and those valleys.  What was I thinking?  I cannot separate out what I choose to accomplish toward my healing from my life itself!  “This, Linda, is a ONE THING!”

Night before last was an awful sleepless night – simply AWFUL!  Yesterday was no day to “write home about,” either!  Now, the day before yesterday was one of the best I have ever had.  It is so rare for me to FEEL GOOD for that many hours in a row!  And then the dark came – as it does – and BAM!!!!!!  There I was in an emotional crisis that lasted nearly 24 hours!

I did not understand – and still don’t – what triggered my crash.  I did NOTHING, thought NOTHING that I could track, and certainly did not ask to feel like absolute HELL.  And there I had been doing so WELL!

Dang!  Seemed pretty unfair to me!

I went hunting in every direction I could think of to find “what I had done wrong” that had created “what had gone wrong,” and I could find nothing.  My fall from my state of grace had simply taken me over without explanation!

The best I could come up with was that Shelley Redford Young and Robert O. Young who wrote the book that is my guide to healing, The pH Miracle: Balance Your Diet, Reclaim Your Health left out an important piece of information!  Leave it to me.  I found it.

These authors describe what they call a physical “healing crisis” that must nearly inevitably erupt for people so drastically changing their lifestyle, especially if they undertake the organic green vegetable juice (I strain mine) cleanse that I am in the middle of.  This is what they wrote:

WHAT TO WATCH OUT FOR

“During a cleanse, toxins are dumped from where they’ve been stored in the tissues into the blood so they can be eliminated.  This means that for a while your blood is actually dirtier than it started out.  You may feel worse before you feel better.  Different people experience varying degrees of unpleasantness, or none at all, during this “healing crisis,” which may include nausea, weakness, dizziness, headaches, light-headedness, rashes, bad breath, flu-like symptoms, and fatigue….

“A healing crisis is actually a good sign.  But it can be too intense, and therefore discouraging or even harmful.  So monitor your progress closely .  Some mild discomfort can be expected, but you should not experience undue discomfort.  A healing crisis should be short-lived.,,,”  (pages 176-177)

As I have mentioned in previous posts I seriously doubt these authors come from the malevolent world of severe early abuse and trauma, so it would be natural for them to “forget” to mention EMOTIONAL healing crisis that must, I believe now, be a natural part of this detoxifying process for we survivors.

I am grateful that last night I went to sleep instantly and slept just fine.  Today I am better than fine because I am so aware of how painful the hours of yesterday and the night before were! 

I am so determined to accomplish this life change that will enable my body to heal itself that no drift or crash into a healing crisis of emotional HELL is going to keep me from continuing to move forward.

Everyone I know in town today who saw me when I went in to run errands commented on the incredible transformational changes in me!  I have lost 20 pounds since the beginning of this month, have a buoyancy in my gait I haven’t felt for over a decade, my spirit shines with new intensity in my eyes, and hope and confidence inform my every spoken word.

What is this?  Could this be life?

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There are times in our healing when what we need is so important that we must find a way to translate what is nearly always written by non-severe early abuse and trauma survivors presumably for the SAME — into something we who ARE such survivors can understand and work with.

My guess is that as Shelley Redford Young and Robert O. Young wrote the words I am going to include in this post in their book, The pH Miracle: Balance Your Diet, Reclaim Your Health they had no thought for the kind of lives — usually greatly difficult and shortened lives — that infant and child abuse survivors endure.  Because I don’t see how I can continue to live much longer or with any quality of life in a body that has lost the ability to digest ANYTHING without a run immediately to the bathroom I am left without any choice but to try to find a way to help myself to heal.

There are wonderful ideas in the following passage and there is nothing actually preventing we survivors from apply this wisdom to our own situation.  I do feel it is important for me and other survivors to keep in mind NOTHING about our life is as it might seem to people who are completely uninformed about what early severe trauma can do to its victims.  Yes, STRESS is STRESS – and even though we have lived with great traumatic stress and its distress, the physiological impact on our body CAN be lessened.

Enough.  Here is a section from the chapter “Motivation — How to Get It, How to Keep It” from the book mentioned above that is the basis of my current cleansing, healing efforts.

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THOUGHTS AND EMOTIONS

“Those who wish to regain their health [note:  Severe early abuse and trauma in childhood greatly interferes with our ability to grow up entirely healthy in the first place.  This in NO way prevents us from healing to the best of our ability!] or prevent health challenges must be properly motivated to address the issue on all fronts, including eating, drinking and thinking.  This is not just a diet; the true pH miracle is a lifestyle.

“The eating and drinking part is actually sometimes the easiest.  The “thinking” part includes your thought processes, belief system, psychological health, emotional well-being, personal level of consciousness, and an entire host of attitudes, feelings, and behaviors.

Emotions can cause even more acid [not good, harms the body] than food and drink.  Powerful negative emotions come from all sorts of places and in all shapes and forms.  They can include thoughts, feelings, experiences, conscious and unconscious memories [I certainly include the vast amount of body-based trauma memories survivors of infant and child abuse trauma and neglect carry], and dreams.  Any of the many and various problems in living can cause emotional trauma.  They all come under the umbrella of “stress.”  And stress causes signficant amounts of acid to be dumped into your body.

“The great majority of people, even people in the most profound medical crisis, can return [note:  Don’t let this concept stop you!] to an excellent level of health if they conscientiously work to rebalance the body’s original alkaline design.  Conscientiously changing their eating, drinking, and lifestyle, and carefully following the pH Miracle program, they can and will be successful.  They can return to a level of health they have no experienced for many years, a level of health they never even quite imagined.

“But a small percentage of people fail to find full good health despite working hard to change their unhealthy eating and drinking habits.  They share one crucial trait in common:  They are challenged by psychological, emotional, behavioral, or spiritual problems that, perhaps, they do not fully address [note:  Well, we survivors have more of these and suffer from them more intensely than I believe these authors could ever “quite imagine.”  Improved health is STILL our birthright!], and in any case do not fully resolve.  [note:  Personally, being honest and completely realistic, given the extent of my infant-child abuse history I don’t believe it is humanly OR miraculously possible to “fully resolve” the extensive trauma-based troubles I AND my body face.  But I am giving this my ALL anyway!]  Where they fall down [note:  Grr!  Knocked down and nearly crushed to death during our most vulnerable stages of development is more like it!  I have to say, this kind of bias IRKS ME!  I’d like to see any non-survivor live through and live with the consequences we survivors do!  Anyway, continuing to focus on the positive, I continue.  We DO do some of what the authors describe and we can always make improvements.] is at the “thinking” part of the pH protocol.  Their patterns of thinking, ruminations, and emotions aren’t addressed in enough detail.  Unhealthy beliefs, attitudes, biases, value systems, or a diminished level of consciousness hold these people back.  They seem unable to bring an end to ongoing guilt [note:  I would certainly add shame.], grief, blaming, resentment, anger, self-pity, fear, anxiety, feuding, self-loathing mistrust, greed, false pride, spiritual confusion, and son on.  Perhaps they need professional guidance to deal with whichever of these issues dogs them, but do not seek it.  The stress of all this adds significantly to the acid in the body, and not even an alkaline diet can fully balance it out.  [note:  I would say the diet changes are a very good start!]

“When physical health challenges are accompanied by serious emotional and psychological problems [note:  I would say, very frequently so closely caused by these that we have huge difficulty disentangling the two.], you must somehow address them.  Despite what you may be thinking, it is not always a “shrink” that provides the answer.  There are many ways to relieve stress and begin to reduce this part of the acidic overload.  Of course it’s true a well-trained and experienced psychologist, psychotherapist, or psychiatric social worker can make a critical difference.  But so can a minister, priest, rabbi, or other spiritual adviser with years of experience and wisdom.  A good book can set you on the right path.  Reading the works of great thinkers in the realm of intellect and spirit is an excellent way to change your mind-set and quietly challenge the type of thinking that keeps your body mired in an acidic lockstep.  (Some of our favorite books are by David. R. Hawkins, MD, PhD, who writes about the body/sense/mind/intellect/spirit continuum so clearly that simply reading his work will immediately raise your level of consciousness.) You may want to study the stories of miracle workers, saints and mystics, religious martyrs, past-life experiences, near-death experiences, people who apparently died and came back to life, and the lives of Great Spiritual Souls such as Jesus, Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Mohammad, Joseph Smith, Brigham Young and Shirdi Sai Balba.  As you become more aware of how higher consciousness actually operates, it helps you leave behind some of those thoughts and behaviors that pull you down.  Higher consciousness equates to more peace and alkalinity for the body.  Lower consciousness equates to more turmoil and the creation of unwanted acid.

“To fully experience the pH Miracle for yourself, you must explore, pursue, investigate, read, inquire, and search for answers that set your mind at ease.  Why do bad things happen to good people?  What are we to learn from accidents, devastating illnesses, or setbacks in life?  How is it that some people seem to be able to forgive and forget or simply turn the other cheek?  How can you learn to do that?  What does it mean when people say, “Expect a miracle?”  What does it mean when people say, “There are no mistakes in life?”  These are questions that everyone must answer for themselves.  Look for ways to answer.  Develop understanding.

“To gain or regain your ultimate goals in health and wellness [note:  Well put.], your motivations must reach out far enough to encompass the broadest spectrum of the world around you.  You must strive to eat the foods that bring healthy physical and mental processes to your life, drink the fluids that help to cleanse and purify your body, create the thoughts in life that allow you to forgive yourself, cut others some clack, look only for the good in every situation, and bring peace and understanding to yourself and those around you.

“The value of change is the result.  In this case, the peace and harmony that can arise from embracing the change of this program as part of everyday life are yours for the asking.”  (pages 240-242)

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