“Unlike simple stress, trauma changes your view of your life and yourself. It shatters your most basic assumptions about yourself and your world — “Life is good,” “I’m safe,” “People are kind,” “I can trust others,” “The future is likely to be good” — and replaces them with feelings like “The world is dangerous,” “I can’t win,” “I can’t trust other people,” or “There’s no hope.” ―Mark Goulston
Trauma
Traumatic Events
“Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic or frying out one of the brain centers. The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen within the body. In other words, we often unconsciously stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie that is still going after the sound has been turned off. We cannot heal until we move fully through that trauma, including all the feelings of the event.” ―Susan Pease Banitt
Write The Poems
“The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables. Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day, I would be grounded, rooted. Said my head would not keep flying away to where the darkness lives.
The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight. Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do. I handed her a twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling. You will find a good man soon.”
The first psychotherapist told me to spend three hours each day sitting in a dark closet with my eyes closed and ears plugged. I tried it once, but couldn’t stop thinking about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.
The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth. Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness
when they care more about what they give than what they get.
The pharmacist said “Lexapro, Lamictal, Lithium, Xanax.”
The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me forget what the trauma said.
The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.”
But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River convinced
he was entirely alone.”
My bones said, “Write the poems.”
―Andrea Gibson
I have felt this way more times than I care to count, and it’s getting worse. I broke down yesterday in despair and exactly two people reached out to me, which lets me know it’s time to weed people out of my life once more.
Cat, knowing something was very wrong with Mommy, crawled into my lap, sat by my feet while I forced myself to eat dinner, and was in bed with me before my head hit the pillow last night. I slept solidly for the first time in months, not so much as moving, as far as I can tell. Upon waking, Cat was in the same spot by my feet and Kitten was coming in to check on us. If I didn’t have these two little beings in my life with their unconditional love, I would probably be dead. It makes me sick to my core that animals care and love far more than people. Today, this quote resonates in more ways than one.
Sleep, Pain, & Stress
Sleep doesn’t come easily for me these days. In fact, I often wonder how long I can function without sleep. Seemingly I can only sleep when I’m sick, upset, or exhausted beyond words. No one likes wasting time staring at the ceiling. Tossing and turning for hours is overrated and I’m not going to do it.
Over the weekend, in the midst of two straight days of research, I kept waking up to write additional notes. I already had about 40 pages of thorough, detailed notes. Apparently I am an overachieving planner. If I had a question, I immediately consulted my phone for the info so I could jot it down. If I had a new thought or idea, I got out of bed and consulted the appropriate chapter in the notebook I am using. It was in those brief moments where I realized that it wasn’t just lack of sleep, but OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) rearing its ugly head.
I’m not one to joke about things of that nature, but I am quick enough to see the signs within myself. It’s not textbook, it’s obsessively writing notes and planning, and there are other things I’ve been doing lately that are simply not me, but are happening just the same. If you’ve experienced repetitive forms of trauma in your life, especially when they haven’t been treated properly, or at all, other things can start surfacing.
OCD in varying degrees runs in my family. I used to think my Grandmother was nuts, always checking the stove to make sure the gas was off, even if she hadn’t used it, and making sure that every window was locked before leaving the house, even if she hadn’t opened them. It drove me insane, but now I see I have things I do before I leave the house that are similar. I don’t check my stove or windows religiously, but do I lock the door a certain way? Yes. Are there other things I do each day that come across as OCD in nature? Yes. I’ve never seen them as anything other than faith, cleaning, or “it’s better to be safe than sorry”, but now I am starting to see it for what it truly is There is no doubt in mind.
I have a ‘before bed’ routine that I’ve always considered ‘good skin care’ and/or ‘good hygiene’ as opposed to ‘ritual’. Most people simply go to bed. I spend at least 30-120 minutes “getting ready for bed”.
Last night I decided no computer, no e-mail, no reading, no checking my phone. Absolutely NO wasting time. I did one part of the ‘before bed’ routine, recycled a bottle of mouthwash, and got into bed. No muss, no fuss. I fell asleep once it was quiet and my brain was able to shut the hell up. Unfortunately, I went to bed a little too early, because here I sit, and it’s not even 5:15 a.m EDT. No sane person wants to get up at 4:00 in the morning unless they have to be somewhere. I thought it was later than it was, but it’s not. In my attempt to get a healthy amount of “normal” sleep, I ended up confusing my body, myself, and cat and kitten, who both think it’s breakfast time because that’s what I do when I wake up in the morning; I prioritize their immediate needs. The birds are chirping, so other living beings are awake, but all I can do is sit here in a panicked state.
I woke up from a nightmare and it’s stressing me out. After checking the time, refilling water bowls, checking the thermostat (It’s unbelievably hot in here, but the thermostat says 64 degrees. Yeah, I’m not buying it either!) and making sure that dry food in readily available to my little ladies, I returned to my room and turned my computer on for the first time in well over 15 hours.
In my attempt to decompress and de-stress, I am trying to be on the computer during daylight hours only. By 7:00 PM, the only way I’m going to check e-mail is via my tablet. Nothing is SO important that it cannot wait. The app for my phone that allows me to check e-mail is also turned off, so even if I wanted to check or sneak a peek at incoming messages, I’m intentionally not allowing myself to read them. I started implementing this a few days ago to see if I could disengage. I know it will eventually allow me to sleep better at night.
Pain, the constant ‘companion’ that is Fibromyalgia has been both restless and lurking beneath the surface, flaring up at inconvenient moments that cause me to get into bed for no apparent reason in the middle of the day, thus insuring I will not be able to sleep at night. I’d gone a few days without taking OTC pain medication of any kind, but I am still in pain. My body still hurts. My muscles scream for pain relief. And my allergies are so bad, it’s hard to function without wanting to rip my skin off. My face has only recently stopped burning. My eyes, however, are driving me insane and I am pretty sure my nails have scratched a path from the middle of one hand to below my wrist. My eye drops are not working and the Benadryl cream I’ve used is a temporary fix, at best. 😦
I wish I had something incredibly thought-provoking or witty to interject with, but I don’t. I have no pearls of wisdom to share, not even a splash of humor. I’m stunned into silence, unhappy in ways I cannot communicate. One of the worst parts of unhappiness is knowing that there are people who relish in your misery. They drink it as if it’s their morning coffee, because it makes them feel better about their own lives. It’s so negative and evil that the thought makes me sick. But I can handle assholes. In fact, I can handle everything I don’t believe I can handle. I just wish I remembered why I have to keep handling it at all. 😦
copyright © 2015 by Lisa Marino & Blackbird Serenity LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
There Are Wounds…
“There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.”
―Laurell K. Hamilton
Written by LISA MARINO-Molchanova 