Learning to Learn

Today marks my 8th sobriety birthday. I am ok with keeping this as my birthday, despite the fact I took 10 or so hydrocodone in a failed and feeble attempt to OD not too many months ago. I didn’t take them to get high, wasn’t even thinking in those terms. They were all that was available so down the hatch they went. But I lived, and today is my birthday.

I lived. I don’t know how to feel about that.

My dog, Gidget, didn’t learn to “shake” for weeks. It’s weird because she’s a service dog, and in the two years of intense public access training we went through, she learned all sorts of things: how to curl up under a table in a restaurant, how to get on and off city busses, how to down-stay on an airplane, how to walk next to a shopping cart, how to always pass a barrier (like a lamp post) on the same side as me…on and on. It was like every situation I put her in, she would look at me for guidance, do what I told her to do, and flawlessly do it every time after. She’s very intelligent and she learned so quickly people would assume over and over that she had been in these public situations many times over when maybe it was just her first or second time. But I couldn’t get her to shake a paw for nothing. What was the difference? During the public access training I didn’t use treats. All her motivation seemed to come from a place of “Hm, here’s a new situation. How do I behave?” During the “shake a paw” training, if I didn’t use treats, she didn’t seem to even understand I wanted her attention. With treats, all she would focus on was the treat. She didn’t know how to learn the trick. She didn’t know she was supposed to be learning a trick. I don’t think she knows how to learn! Not in a completely fabricated, non-reality based situation.

Today in therapy, Craig and I were getting down to the nitty-gritty of why Prowler wants to saw my arm off. That old compulsion is back, strong, and viciously close. My brain isn’t working right, because there are moments of the day when I go out to the garage and look at the chop saw, pick up the hack saw, practice cutting. I tested the hack saw on my arm, and found it’s going to take quite a lot of pressure to cut. I’ll never cut through the bone. And this kind of reasoning doesn’t seem odd to me – unless I step back from a distant place of Rae – and I realize it’s pretty weird. But then I easily move back into the never-ending loop of how to cut off my arm and how wonderful it would feel and what would happen next…

What, indeed, would happen next? That’s what sticks out in my mind from today’s therapy session. Prowler was explaining to Craig how it would be such a good release of energy to cut off my arm, so satisfying. Prowler knows this from previous self- harm, like when I hit myself with rocks and the bruises and pain come followed by a numbing, or when Sarah broke my arm and there was a peaceful, shocked numbing with the pain and activity that ensued. It doesn’t matter who does the self-harm, there’s release and numbing once it’s done. But Craig is pretty convinced there would be a big risk of death with arm amputation. Luke has said the same thing. I’ve done research on the internet and have to admit that yes, there is a pretty big risk of death. When Craig brought this up, Prowler said that was appealing, too. Then Craig said something that resonated throughout the whole System. He said “but if you cut your arm off and die, you won’t experience relief. You have to be alive to experience relief. If you’re dead you don’t experience anything.”

Prior to the discussion of cutting off my arm, Craig and I had been talking about Prowler’s role in the System, how he’s a protector, and his method of protecting has been to distract with suicidal ideation or thoughts and actions of self-harm. The distraction is necessary so that no one in the System has to feel the pain, sadness, terror, shame, and ‘shattering’ related to LA and/or the Chain of Events. Craig has been trying to reinforce/explain/teach a lesson about how suicide and self-harm are not the only methods of protection, that Prowler can shift to have a new skill set in his role of Protector in which he protects by regulating overwhelming emotions related to LA and the Chain of Events. Much like Sarah, with her rage, is off in her new closet watching the big screen tv and listening to music with headphones, checked out and in the distance, so can Prowler take the emotions related to LA when they become overwhelming and put them off in the distance, perhaps in one of those old traveling trunks.

Prowler learned something. Like Gidget, he’s intelligent and has adapted his behavior in many situations. Also like Gidget he has no mechanism for learning ‘tricks.’ He’s motivated, certainly motivated. His motivation is to protect, to control, to have power. But he hasn’t, until today, understood that he can learn how to do those things. Here Craig has been trying to teach something to someone with no mechanism for learning in such a fabricated situation like a therapist’s office. Prowler, like Gidget, didn’t know how to learn, didn’t even know that learning was what the point was!

The breakthrough, the moment of clarity, was in the statement “you have to be alive to experience relief.” Suddenly, Prowler grasped the meaning in that statement and along with that came a sadness and fear about the feelings that would eventually come from LA. It was like the barrier between LA and Prowler opened and the barrier between Prowler and Rae and Amanda opened and the tears came and the sadness and fear came and we sobbed for a moment right there in the office. Then panic was about to set in, because sadness and fear quickly turn to overwhelming pain, grief, and terror. So Prowler opened up the travel trunk and directed the emotion in there, and shut the lid.

It’s not like that hasn’t happened before. Dissociation is second nature. Like Gidget learning to behave in public seemed completely natural, so dissociation is completely natural to me. But learning to feel, then dissociate in a more controlled manner, that’s a trick indeed! I wanted Gidget to learn “shake a paw” so that I could shape that response into her pawing at me when I am in the throes of a flashback. It’s not just a nifty trick, there’s a purpose behind it that has great applicability in the real world. But first she needs to learn how to learn. She needs to become aware of the very dog-like behavior of pawing, control it, produce it on command (shake a paw), then transfer it to a meaningful task of getting my attention by pawing at me when I am off in another world. In order to do all that, she needs to learn what it is to learn. My System dissociates quite well, just like Gidget paws quite well. But there needed to be more communication within the System so that Prowler could learn to learn.

I think he did that today. He heard the lesson about taking overwhelming emotion and storing it someplace (we envisioned a travel trunk – so that’s going to be it) when necessary to not cause a System malfunction or shut down or melt down. Then he grasped the concept of how we need to be alive in order to feel relief, which caused some powerful feelings to stir. Then he practiced letting Rae and Amanda and himself feel those powerful feelings like sadness and fear. Then he redirected the emotions to the travel trunk when panic started to set in. Controlled dissociation. Control. Power and control.

So I lived through the last suicide attempt. And today is my 8th sobriety birthday. In a way, I’m glad to be alive.