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Back ‘in the day’, meaning just about three years ago, I discovered the information presented at this link

+MAJOR CANNABINOID – ENDOCANNABINOID FILES ARE SORTED NOW

This important research relates to our own internal ‘marijuana-pot’ systems.  They don’t sound to me like systems to be messed around with lightly!

I again post this information today in case it proves helpful or at least interesting to some of this blog’s readers.   I found these facts fascinating!

I am certain volumes of more recent information is available on the topic, but my own thinking and writing has moved into other directions in the three years since I put together the multiple posts that are included within the above link.  The topic came up today in a conversation with a friend and I promised to send this info on – so, here it is again!

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I don’t know but it might be possible that if I treated myself with more respect I would use the term ‘healing’ less often for what I have been doing all of my adult life, and use the term ‘growing’ more often.

I was reminded as I wandered around my gardens before the sun fully reached the front side of the horizon this morning, as I checked on their condition and the state of their health like a volunteer nurse, that sometimes – maybe most of the time – what could count as growing is invisible.

I was happy a few weeks ago to hear one of our local county extension agents mention that this spring time of year in the high desert is not a time for vegetation to display a lavish gratitude for the lengthening days, warmth of sun, warmer night soil temperatures.  No, this time of year is a time of great resting for plants.  This idea, for someone who has spent much of their lifetime living in northern climes seems foreign.  But because I have this new information now I feel less like a poor gardener with my pale-ish peaked plants – and more like a patient watcher who need do nothing special at this time of year other than to water and to wait.

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Because our soil never freezes in the winter here plants spend impressive amounts of energy growing roots at that time of year.  It makes sense to me that NOW they need to rest as this entire area begins to get hotter and hotter before our July monsoon season begins.

Growth under the soil surface with massive root gain in winter will not show its power to grant new life above ground until the season is right.  The plants know.  They do not question, they do not feel any pressure to do anything other than what they know how naturally to do.

I think it’s much harder for some of us humans to live in this state of being perfectly fine with whatever conditions exist.  We have choice-making abilities that plants don’t have.  We can create CHANGE – oh boy, can we!

Changes all plants seem to desire to make are about survival and growth.  If there is damage done to a plant, it will respond the best it can – yes, to heal – but to a plant I suppose healing is the same thing as survival and growth.

As the witness to my garden’s life, and as the human I am, I would prefer to ALWAYS see great gobs of blossoms and yardage of new growth on every plant out there all of the time!!  Not the way life works!  Patterns and seasons, that’s more like it….

Yet it strikes me this tendency of mine to see achievement by my plants is why I so enjoy growing climbing roses rather than any other kind.  It’s not my desire to keep cutting a poor rose bush to ‘keep it in line/shape’.  I have 19 climbing roses in my garden – and I see the growth literally as the seasons go by – as their main canes grow longer and I can wind them further and further up their trellis or their fence.

I like to SEE growth!  It’s sure not easy to see in myself as I seem to travel mostly in repeating circles – never sure where I am going or where I have been.  I am so rarely sure I have made any progress at all!  Today I will aim at thinking like a plant:  “When it is the proper time, it will happen!”

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I am thinking about healing and telling our life story – especially about what the purpose is of conveying to self and to others our his- and her-stories of trauma and abuse.  Before I don my dirt-covered working and clothes and head out into my yard to dig around in mud, work with stone, make creative use of a big hole I made digging out soil to make adobe blocks, preparing for new animals to come into my life this fall, I want to take a moment here to write about healing from my ever-changing point of view.

I was conversing with one of my favorite friends on the telephone yesterday, and yet again realized how much I need to verbalize in spoken words my process and my progress through life.  As I was talking I came to understand that perhaps the fact I stopped dead in my book-writing work last October is actually a very GOOD sign that reflects the success of my healing efforts from my 18-year infancy and childhood of terrible abuse and trauma.

In the posts I wrote yesterday I spoke of how I conceptualize healing from traumas in words that belong to the telling of our abuse stories.  I conferred with another local wise friend yesterday about my ideas.  She affirmed my thoughts by saying that in her thinking, the verbalizing of trauma – not once, but over and over again (in the right settings to the right people with the right motives) – heals the affects of trauma on our lives and souls.

FEARING our trauma histories keeps a lack of love present – and therefore keeps the negative power active in our lives.

Our goal is to deactivate the power that fear had over us while we were under attack at the most important and vulnerable stages of our development, and also to now assert the great power of love in every way that we can TODAY.

All emotions tied to trauma histories came from the past.  Yet the fact that our body will never forget any of the negative feelings we experienced during attacks and brutalizations leaves us vulnerable in our present lives to re-experiencing these emotions any time we turn toward healing the impact that those traumas had upon us.

How do we have it both ways?  How do we remain positive in the present at the same time that approaching memories of trauma in our past brings with it the very real risk – and often the reality – of awakening those sleeping emotional giants within our body?

Tricky business beyond belief, I would say!  Be very careful!  But do not avoid healing work out of fear of what happened to us in the past!

Easier said than done.

It was exactly at the point in my book-writing work last fall when I came face-to-face with a terrific body memory that appeared ‘out of nowhere’ that caused me to re-experience at age 60 a terrific beating I received from Mother when I was 22 months old.

My writing has stopped dead in its tracks because I do fear being brought in my present back to my past should I get any closer to the final writing of my abuse memories for my book.

I do not want to risk any more body memories like THAT ONE appearing NOW!  My solution?  Leave it all alone.

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Yet as I spoke on the telephone with my far-northern friend yesterday it came to me in talking that perhaps I have accomplished ALREADY the best of what my healing work was intended to do all along!

Perhaps there really is no reason whatsoever – other than the completion of my book – to go any closer to my abuse memories.  Perhaps I have already won the race.  Why keep on running?

Perhaps I have won the battle against the ugly darkness of my past – why keep on fighting?

What I might have already done is exactly what I wrote about in yesterday’s posts.  Perhaps I have so cleared away the horrors on every level of my abuse and so clearly located and rescued my own perfect beautiful soul-self from those horrors caused by my abusers that there is nothing else to be accomplished by ever returning to work on my memories again!

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Hum!  Something to consider!

If what I am suspecting to be true IS TRUE – that means that NOW is the first time in my life I have been able to live, finally, without the shadow of the threat of fear – both of my past and of remembering my past.

True, I will always be coping with the changes trauma caused in my body as I developed under conditions of extreme traumatic stress.  My PTSD (so-called) for example, will never leave me.  In my present I learn every moment what that means.  I am like a sculptor working with the raw materials I have on hand (in my body-brain).  This in NO WAY means that I am limited in the amount of beauty I can create and maintain in myself and in my life.

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Once we face our memories – every single dang one of them that our soul has, for whatever reason, CHOSEN to keep for us, and deactivate the fear and sorrow, pain, suffering — stripping all negativity away from OUR SELF that never belonged to us in the first place — we are then free to accept love into every corner of our being-life in every way that we can.

How do we do this?

We absolutely honor our stories!  We put our life story into perfect order.

OUR STORY!

It is extremely helpful, and because of this I believe necessary, to know as much about the history of our family as we can as we work to put our story together – beautifully.

It is helpful to completely understand that the transmission of trauma through past generations is part of the much bigger picture of how – and why – abuse and trauma came to be heaped onto us.

It is helpful to know of the histories of our abusers so that we can more clearly take OUR story back from what (as yesterday’s posts mention) was NEVER a part of our story in the first place.  NEVER OURS!

We are building walls and fences, sculpting moats around our self-home —  as we sort out whose stuff was/is whose!

We have our life.  Everyone else has their life.  We have no use whatsoever for anything on our side of the fence-wall-moat that belongs to our abusers.

We only want what we love on our side!

We do not want pain, sorrow, suffering, fear, terror, hate, rage……. etc!

True, we are claiming power over our self in our healing journey and that exactly means that we empower our self by making increasingly conscious choices and decisions about what is GOOD for us and what is BAD for us.

Love is good.  Peace and calm and joy and forgiveness and much, much letting go is good for us.

Someone mentioned to me the other day that I sure am free to feel angry at my mother!

NOPE!  Why on earth would I CHOOSE to be angry at my mother?  She was in the ‘nearly sickest on earth’ group – and I KNOW that now.  I am not going to intentionally – or even unintentionally if I can help it – ever walk backward in my healing journey.

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When I listen to others speak of their traumas I most often very strongly battle with my temptation to despise, hate and condemn other abuser’s actions toward the person I am listening to.

Here again I am serving no good purpose by allowing myself to experience negative thoughts or emotions related to any person’s trauma history I hear.

Negative is negative, and it is the biggest part of goodness that we absolutely know the difference between right and wrong, between what exists on the side of truth and what exists on the side of the lie-evil.

I want no part of the darkness myself – and I choose not to want any part of the darkness related to anybody else’s trauma history, either.

I always have to consciously monitor and make wise, good choices any time I am near the ‘issue’ of horrible traumas done by people to people – especially done to little people!

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Once the darkness has been clearly recognized and identified as we work to heal by telling our stories of trauma to self and others – we are then moving ever closer to letting all that is harmful and hurtful simple GO!  Those who believe in God – whatever name, whatever spiritual pathway one might have connected to that recognition of a Supreme Unknowable Creator that has always sent Teachers to humanity – can release all that’s dark in that direction and walk away!

In other words, the goal of healing requires of us that we do not fear our past in any way.  We are only hunting for and gathering up what is good, and we increasingly learn how to leave what is rotten and bad alone!  Simply LEAVE IT ALONE!

Which is why at this point I realize OF COURSE I don’t want to work any more on my own book!  Go figure!

I also realize that as I make my own best choices it is entirely possible that I will simply will my intellectual property – every word I have written in blog form and in book draft form – to my three children.  I especially have one daughter who is a professional expert in writing and editing important thoughts into common-sense form.

If this is the way the future plays out, someday when she has time – with the input of my other two children – she can compose books to publish from what I have said, am saying, and will continue to say for the rest of my life about severe early trauma – and how to heal from it.  If destiny requires this, it will happen.

Meanwhile, I am under spiritual obligation to honor what feels good and not bad to me NOW.  If book writing feels bad to me, for whatever reason, then I simply choose not to feel bad!

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Life is fascinating.  Survivors have a far more interesting story to tell than most.  Too bad?  Yes, in many ways.  But I am absolutely NOT a fan of self-pity and I am so NOT a fan of whining and complaining!  If something in life needs to be taken care of, then we simply need to do the best that we can at turning in the direction of solving a problem – and get to work!

We can increase the beauty in our life!  We didn’t want those horrors that happened to us THEN – why on earth do we want them NOW?  As we heal we are learning to trust our own self – and in doing so we are in the process of loving our self more and more.  Once we do the work of identifying all that is NOT GOOD – we send it off and then ignore it the best we can for the rest of our life.  ALL THAT IS GOOD AND TRUE AND BEAUTIFUL BELONGS TO US!

I say, “Get greedy!  One can never have too much good or too little bad in one’s life!”

Now, it’s off to beautify myself I go!!  Out to play in my yard!

Thank you for listening – and for being YOU!

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Yesterday’s Posts:

+FREEDOM: HEALING SELF, HEALING OUR LIFE STORY, SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

+PRESERVING ONE’S SELF IN SILENCE

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It strikes me as I ‘recuperate’ from the intense experience of writing my last post that perhaps the greatest possible gift God gave my soul when He created me at my conception was this:  A RELENTLESS DETERMINATION TO BE MYSELF.

Wow!

Any trauma and severe abuse survivor knows the experience of dissociation intimately – if not nearly continuously.

People who are not survivors like we are probably can – and does – take their own experience of self-in-the-world completely for granted.  Early trauma and abuse survivors (my bet) NEVER walk down this pathway.  We never were allowed by our life to do so in the beginning – hence we never will place our feet upon this smooth clear road to saunter our way through the valley dips and modest climbs that life can bring.

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Saunter through life?  How many survivors get to saunter through even one half-hour segment of any given day of their lifetime?

No.  We were born facing nearly insurmountable challenges – and because we are still alive that means hence far we have surmounted them!

We are the extreme athletes, tough, resilient who are MOST relentlessly determined to be our self.

How I exercised this relentless determination through the first 18 years of my life shows up as I grow to know myself very silently.  I tried, I know I tried to speak my truth from the time I was a very, very little girl.  I see the testimony to that fact even in my very first sentences as Mother recorded them in my baby book.

Every time Mother psychotically attacked and brutalized me for something she IMAGINED I had done – inside of myself I knew and have NEVER lost sight of what really happened.  My vision was absolutely intact and clear.

But the more I tried to speak my truth, THE TRUTH to Mother, the worse she abused me.  Yes, by the time I reached my middle childhood I never opened my mouth to let my words sound.  I grew increasingly silent – until the silence belonged to Linda so loudly it drowned out even the silence of the frozen Alaskan wilderness which so often surrounded me.

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I became so silent by the time I was 16 that I no longer even heard my own real voice all the way until I reached 30 – and the first cracks began to appear in the massive walls of silence I had lost myself within.  Looking backward I see that I had not actually lost myself.  I had lost my ability to reach through my own silence to communicate with myself.

All the fractured fragments that severe abuse-created dissociation forms in a survivor’s life do not eradicate the existence of a coherent self.  We just walk a different pathway toward recognizing and finding our own self.

I see in my mind the image of an Eagle’s nest.  Inside myself that nest is my own true home.  Sitting within the safe and secure confines of that magnificent nest I can view a spectacular scene of beauty.  What happened to me is that I so lost sight of this nest I not only could not find it by the time I was 30 — I forgot it had ever existed at all.

Who I am as I sit centered in my own reality which includes my great power of goodness I am in my body in that structurally sound, very well built nest that IS me-being-at-home-in-my-body-self in this world in this lifetime.

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Inside myself from the moment I was conceived my soul made sure that nest was protected and NEVER violated or harmed in any way.  The more trauma I experienced, the more suffering I endured, the more troubles I had, the dimmer and darker the return pathway to that nest – and to my inner self — became.

I KNOW I lived centered in myself until I reached the age of 18.  What I know today is that leaving home and entering a big world I knew nothing about and was completely unprepared to live in (especially leaving Alaska!) so destabilized my ability to recognize myself during my frantic forward movements into growing into adulthood that I simply forgot how to remember who I was and how to return to my own self.

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It was never ‘the call of the wild’ that created chasms in my ability to live within my own nest of my heart-soul.  It was ‘the call of modern civilization’ that overwhelmed my ability to silently be connected within my own self with my self — my self that I had so relentlessly fought to preserve against all odds from my first breath on earth.

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Perhaps it is exactly because the only way I could maintain myself and my connection with myself growing up through horrendous turbulent chaos and violence was in my own inner universe of silence that I find interacting with ‘the world’ so utterly exhausting now.

Simply put, the truth is that at age 60 I am burned out!  How could I not be?  I am not complaining.  I am recognizing my own reality.  My resources have been spent and I have so little in reserve.  Quiet sustains me and does not drain me – even in my lonely hours when I crave a connection with humans that I will never truly acquire in this lifetime.

Peaceful calm eventually might be the only state of being my relentless determination to survive as myself allows me to experience without my feathers being ruffled and so messed up by the disturbing winds of ‘ordinary’ life that so easily threaten to toss me out of my nest.

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What if the only thing I am responsible for in my lifetime is to leave a coherent story of my life behind me when my body dies and my soul moves on through eternity to God’s next world?

I can’t imagine this to be a very big job overall for people who did not experience severe and overwhelming trauma and abuse in their life – especially during their most vulnerable years of infancy and childhood.  But for those of us who happened to be born into families filled with inter-generational horrors of unresolved traumas, our task then becomes nearly as difficult as was the task of enduring and surviving our traumas in the first place.

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As I began my day early before the crisp cutting heat of the sun envelopes this high desert land, as I trimmed off this year’s random wild growth from the single Mesquite tree at the south of my property line so I could feed the new tiny leaves on those nasty thorn-covered twiggy branches to my 5 hens for breakfast, I thought of a very bizarre image told to me in a story 20 years ago by my landlord when I lived in northern Minnesota.

This man had rented out a shack in the north woods for nearly 30 years to a family whose last member in the house had just died.  When, finally after all these years, the house became empty the landlord had entered it to find — to put it most mildly — an untenable mess.

Mess?  A grown man would have to stoop over to cross what should have been a normal threshold into the house and into any room within it.  What must have been 30 years of garbage – and I mean GARBAGE – had accumulated so that it was wall-to-wall over three feet deep.

Attempt to rescue the house or burn it down, that was the question.

The landlord found an unemployed work crew with tough skin who agreed to the job for very little money and the digging began.

Horrors of horrors, and I apologize to sensitive readers, under many layers of stinking trash an entire litter of dead puppies was excavated in one of the bedrooms with dead momma dog included.

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Oh, what horror!  Yes!  Also very, very real.  And as this story came into my thoughts this morning as I trimmed the fresh new yet unwanted growth off of my Mesquite tree I put 2-and-2 together as I understood in words that cleaning up the horrors of an entire infancy and childhood spent in hardships of abuse, neglect, trauma and malevolent treatment amounts to a VERY similar process of cleaning out the trash.

I add the exception here:  I also understand that when it comes to the work of turning our chaotic horror stories of memories from terrible childhoods into a beautiful coherent and organized life story — we ORIENT ourselves and ORGANIZE our story by understanding what we are looking for.

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Imagine that there was a single diamond buried under the accumulation of unimaginable filth and trash in my old landlord’s house.  This diamond being priceless and of HIGHEST value, was worth looking for!

Any trauma survivor reading this post must be willing to take what I am saying on faith if they have never yet realized that what they are doing in their healing work is healing their story which is exactly what heals us.

On faith, believe me that this priceless diamond (or any other gem of great value you might prefer) NEEDS to be found for healing to move toward completion in this lifetime.

What we are searching for is, of course, not a tangible physical object – it is, to my understanding, the essence of who we are, who we have always been and who we will forever be.  We are searching for the perfect purity that IS our SOUL self.

Our soul was, is and will forever be beyond time as we measure time in our material lifetime in our body.  Our SOUL can be found present within every single memory of horror, torture and trauma we can remember the facts about — or not!

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When I look back at every memory my soul chose to keep of my childhood I can now exactly spot the shining pure and perfect me in the middle of each episode of hell that happened due to my madwoman mother’s terrible (misplaced and projected) absolute hatred of me.

THIS perfect gem of ME is the one that belongs in my own coherent story of my life.

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Long term readers of this blog will recognize that when I write about healing our life story to heal our self that I am talking about healing the insecure attachment disorder that was built into us as our body-brain developed in the midst of terrible trauma.

The physiological damage that was done to us through adaptations to the powerful stress hormones our body generated in the midst of trauma are lasting, although they can be somewhat repaired as we do our healing work.

It is to the essence of who we are, and to the inner quality of our understanding of our self in the world, that I am speaking of being able to find and release from all the garbage we might currently have our pure perfect self buried and hidden within.

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I think this morning, for example, of the day when I was almost four (see:  *Age 3 – THE TOILET BOWL) when my mother attacked me under her psychotic delusion that I was attempting to drown my 2-year-old sister in the toilet.  I can clearly remember this trauma from inside my little body as Mother is repeatedly and brutally smashing my head against the inner sides of the white porcelain toilet bowl.  I clearly remember myself at four focusing very hard in spite of my terror and PAIN on trying to figure out how to time my breathing so that I could manage to gasp a breath of air instead of a full mouth of water as Mother violently yanked and shoved my head up and down.

I remember the whole beating that followed until this giant madwoman finally exhausted herself – etc.  I can follow the entire story – I can choose what I look at, how I feel now as I honor the pure little person I was/am that endured and survived that attack.

This was one of thousands of insane brutal attacks Mother perpetrated against me during the 18 years she kept me her captive.

My job, as I see it now that I have made such fantastic progress if ‘figuring this whole thing out’, has always been to go FOR THE GLORY!!  To HELL with the horror!

Literally.  That’s where it came from and that’s where it belongs.

Yes, the entire event happened and the pain and suffering and terror of it was vividly real.  But what is VITAL to me is to let everything go that SUCKS about this experience and ONLY keep as a real part of my life story the perfect pure person at the exact center of that storm.

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Everything good was there in me then as it is now.  My honor and my integrity, my love of and search for beauty, my imagination, my desire to share what I found exquisitely fascinating in the world around me with someone I loved, my ability to KNOW my own truth and to HOLD my own truth self-evident FOREVER, my courage and bravery, my strength and endurance, my patience and my pure intent not to hate, my connection with God and with His angels, my survival instincts that let me choose every millisecond through that horror how best to ‘walk forward’ into my own future as I lived my own life — and SO much more — were ALL there as a part of ME who just happened to be forced to live as a child in hell.

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Because we are each ONLY ultimately responsible before God for our OWN life and for nobody else’s, we are remiss and neglectful if we leave our own self forever trapped within the horror of memories of our lifetime.  It is our task in cases where troubling involvement of trauma from abuse contaminates our ability to ONLY experience the purity of our own self in the midst of whatever was done to us — to realize that all that’s horrible and negative (as I keep saying) belongs to someone else’s life story, NOT TO OURS.

As odd as this might sound, using this toilet bowl example from my own early life, if I choose to continue to keep any of the negative from that experience in my story I am actually STEALING something that is not mine to keep.  The negative belongs to Mother, not to me – not in any way to me.

Even the pain, the terror – which was very real and can return to me if I return to it — actually belonged to Mother who caused it.  She caused me to experience all of it.  This is a very refined sorting-out process we are doing here.  Very particular.  Very refined.  Very specialized surgery!

Violators of the innocent and vulnerable are BOUNDARY violators.  They violated our boundaries.  WE are the only ones who can heal by establishing as we work with our own memory-life-story where the boundary was and is!

If it is BAD in any way, it did not and does not belong to us or to our life story.  Quite simple as we practice this!!  If it is good and pure and wonderful – it is OURS!!

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I know how complicated, seemingly overwhelming and difficult it can be to return to our trauma memories to work our way through them.  In truth this process can be as clear for us as it would be to go into that landlord’s disgusting house overwhelmed with rotten filth — to do the work of finding the perfect gem buried within.

No, not fun.  Yes, a task that we can approach with big-time self-pity if we have to.  But through this work we set our own life story free as we set the record straight.  Doing so heals us.

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Just wish to say, after a wonderful conversation with a very special woman who suffered such horrendous abuse growing up, that I was reminded yet again of how fragmented our own life story becomes from growing up in the midst of horrors, trauma, abuse and chaos.

How is it possible that we can tell our own story from our own conception forward in any kind of orderly, oriented, organized way when our stories are so overwhelming, painful, terrifying, grim, dark and ugly?

The negative parts of my own 18-year child abuse and trauma story – plain and simple – are NOT actually a part of my story AT ALL!  The ugly parts of my childhood did not belong to me.  Oh, finally at age 60, how freeing it is for me to finally be able to clearly understand this.

Yes I suffered.  I endured.  I survived 18 years in hell.  But, as I have mentioned before, as I have studied every memory I have of myself in my childhood what I can see NOW is ME in my own life story.  Me, a beautiful perfect child!!

All the ugliness and horror belonged to the sick, warped, sad, mean, etc. adults that designed, built and sustained the malevolent environment that I had no choice but to reside within.  But their ugliness was NOT mine!  It has NEVER been mine.

Oh how important it is to learn how to see the pure child inside the hell – to be able to strip away, chip away, peel away, pull away all the CRAP from the pure child-us so that nothing REALLY remains but our own beauty.

Get rid of the wreckage.  Unbury our self from the crumbling rubble.  Put the blame and the responsibility for all the bad that happened where it belongs – NOT IN MY YARD!!  Not in my life.  Not in my heart!!  The trauma was never mine – I just had to endure it!

Never mind the mess that is the part of what I used to think of as my child abuse story.  The bad parts of the story belong to my abuser and her enablers.  I am learning how to let the rest blow away in the wind as if it never existed at all as a part of ME — because it never did!

True, this process of sorting out and getting clear and staying clear is nearly a constant process for me.  So be it.  But that’s ‘just’ a consequence of being raised in hell – it is NOT who I am!

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I have been very fortunate to have thus far been spared physical pain in my body in my adulthood.  I guess I must cherish some superstition as I almost feel it’s a jinx even saying this!  For a little while this afternoon, however, I was reminded of the most obvious part of pain – IT HURTS!

Because I am a recluse and spend most of my time outside working on projects in my yard and garden, I rarely do the girlie pretty thing – but today decided to take a break from dull and dirty as I donned a dusky lavender nicely fitting top with fine gathered lacy frills running in lines down the front, painted my nails a sparkling pink, and dug out a summer pair of sandals (purchased with the top at our local thrift store last week).

The shoes began to devour my feet before I had walked 25 paces down a local sidewalk.  By the time I had done my best to prance a bit in my pretty (seems sort of silly now) finery as I visited at the laundromat cafe, bought a tough new pair of $10 work gloves at our local ACE hardware, found a birthday card for my dear daughter whose birthday is next week, and bought a gallon of 2% milk, my feet felt like they were being branded with hot iron along anywhere the brown leather straps crossed the tops of my feet.

OUCH!

Eventually I folded napkins and stuffed them inside the straps to try to protect my skin – knowing that walking in and out of stores barefoot was not such a great idea.  Meanwhile, through all of this, I noticed how this pain felt to me — and more importantly, how I handled the pain.

I COULD ignore the pain at times so completely that I could have sworn I had no feet at all.  Then, WINCE!  BURN!  Searing pain back again – along with another round of being forced to pay attention to how uncomfortable pain is!

It crossed my mind several times as I tried to walk a graceful wobble until I could get home to remove these monster shoes – that given the frequency and severity of beatings I received from my severely mentally ill abusive mother during the first 18 years of my life — there is no POSSIBLE WAY that my body could have been free of very real physical pain very often.

I never, as a rule, think about the physical pain of my childhood.  I seem to be very able to forget the physical pain part of my childhood – which is fine with me!  But today, having very real pain present in my body I noticed through this very small experience that I do have very sophisticated ways to disallow physical pain to exist within my awareness.

Dissociation?  Of course.  Who wants to associate with unstoppable pain if they don’t have to?  I could never have functioned or survived the hell of my childhood if I had not found ways to avoid being focused on the very real pain in my body.  What a price to pay!  Disowning my own body!

What to do with these supposedly cute shoes?  I think I will entomb them within an adobe wall.

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