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Awake most of the night – up for good well before the sunrise.  Waiting for the sun, I have work to do.  I have cleared out whatever money I have accumulated these past months and invested all of it in yet another fence.  How antisocial of me, erasing what I can now of my neighbor on the west side of my yard whose trailer sits not 6 feet away from that fence line.

Up went the posts, painted the cross boards, up with the corrugated aluminum panels.  I blocked the sight of their falling apart lattice sided screened porch.  I blocked their never ending porch light from penetrating the still darkness of my yard’s night sky.  Or did I?

I had to laugh when I went outside last night to sit, finally, in the privacy of my yard.  Nope, no more of THEIR light in my yard, but wait?  The siding, like tin foil, now reflects every tall street light behind my house on the Mexican side of the border wall!

I dug around on my pantry shelves last night for a look at all the cans of strange colored paint I have accumulated from here and there over the years.  Is there something I can use to cover that corrugated reflective shine, something to flatten the surface, to darken my yard?  Oh, yes, here it is.  I am waiting for the sun to rise so I can take these two mixed gallons of interior paint, one orange, the other dark terra cotta, so I can work some more on my task.

(The trick I discovered ‘accidentally’ to using interior paint on exterior metal surfaces is to thin it with water.  Somehow the paint seems to then forget it’s supposed to pucker and buckle and flake and peel!)

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I am reminded of a time about 20 years ago when I worked as an art therapist on a northern Reservation.  I had a caseload of 40 sexually abused and traumatized children under the age of 10 (over half of them boys).  The Indian Health Service had given me some ‘spare’ money they had for these children’s therapy, and I stretched that money out for a year and a half.  When the money finally ran out and was not replaced, I had to leave, and as I ‘checked out’ another Reservation therapist made this parting comment to me:  “You have been so focused all the time you’ve been up here.”

Even back then I knew his comment reflected something about me that ‘wasn’t quite right’ but I had no idea what I had ‘done wrong’.  To me, whatever I could offer to those children meant more to me than sitting around, wasting time and socializing with other workers possibly could have.

And yet doing EXACTLY that would not only have been ‘normal’, but was expected.  I had failed to shmooze!

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I thought this morning as I waited with pinpoint bright star lights above me for the sun to rise so I could go back to work (before my 2 pm doctor’s appointment this afternoon) on my Secret Garden about my ability to focus.  Being focused these past few days has NOT been about words.  It has NOT been about writing.  It has not even been about thinking, or about feeling.

My focus, whenever it comes upon me, is simply about being alive — in the moment — as I find things to do that involve work — and work I WANT to do, for whatever reasons.

As I think about my powerful ability to focus, I also realize that this ability is not within the ‘normal or ordinary’ range of what MOST people do or HOW they do what they do.  My focus is about being ‘in a space’ where NOTHING else can reach me.

And I know this ability is something that was built into me through the 18 years of terror, trauma and abuse of my infant-childhood, and it has served me well all of my life.

My states of focus have their own patterns of the passage of time.  Stimulation is so moderated that a bomb could probably go off within my sphere and I would hardly notice.

What this topic has also brought to mind today is how I now see my continually operating stress response system that so rarely ever turns itself off that I barely know what CALM peacefulness is or what it feels like.

I think about the three main emotions that get themselves built into the nervous system-brain of severely traumatized little people while they are growing and developing their body at the start of their life in adaptation to the terrible duress, distress and stress they are under:  ANGER, FEAR and/or SADNESS.

I think about what I believe about anger, that it is stimulated by changes and pressures within the environment that could not be solved by immediately known means.  “Find another way — NOW” the body-brain says.  “Learn something new — NOW — and use it to solve this immediate problem.”  Anger includes this important fact:  “YOU CAN DO IT!”

I have been increasingly angry about the noise and lights that stream from my neighbor’s close-to-me yard.  I can do nothing about noise, but I can visually do something about my privacy.  I had to have the RESOURCES to purchase the material I needed to build this fence-wall.  But equally as importantly, I had to have the CONFIDENCE and COMPETENCE to do this work myself.

The interplay-balance between stressors from the environment implicate anger as a reaction that reflects the need to SOLVE the problem, the resources needed to accomplish a solution, AND confidence and competence needed to personally DO SOMETHING useful to make things better to increase well-being.  Anger is NOT so much about learning something completely new as it is about using what one knows in a new and different creative way.

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There was NOTHING I could do about the terrible abuse I suffered for the first one-third of my life.  NOTHING except to survive it.  I survived that abuse without any anger at all — and that could still amaze me if I didn’t now understand that in order to feel ANGER one must have access to some degree and version of what I wrote in my previous paragraph.

I am old enough NOW to understand that my anger at my neighbor’s ‘intrusion’ into my space is my problem, not theirs.  I didn’t tell them I was going to build a fence ASAP.  I did try to choose a color for the cross boards (very light blue) that would hopefully be pleasing or at least not too offensive to them.  That’s the best I could do about taking care of what I need while trying to be kindly considerate of them.

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Everything I have been doing these past five days has been about that fence:  planning, preparing, purchasing, leveling the 40′ of ground along my west line, and doing the work.  I am very, very, very much a project oriented person.  Focus provides a safe inner place/space for me.  While in my focus mode, most everything and everyone else is EXCLUDED from my realm of awareness.

Focus is an emotional-regulation tool I HAVE to use because my right brain did NOT experience ‘normal or ordinary’ early safe and secure attachment experiences with my caregivers that would have built ‘normal and ordinary’ emotional regulation abilities into my body-brain in the first place.

Early trauma during especially an infant’s earliest developmental stages prior to one year of age creates emotional DYSREGULATION patterns rather than ‘ordinary’ regulation patterns.  Survivors of early trauma and abuse live with these changes for the rest of their lives.

My focusing abilities are very much about so-called dissociation.  I know that now.  It is something that was built into me from birth in response to the trauma of the environment that I grew and developed within.  Focused survival — that’s what I spent the first 18 years of my life doing.  It can be an extremely ISOLATED process — as I become my own ‘Army of One’.

But that’s a whole OTHER part of my story……..

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