The Crazy Definition of Normal

I’m wearing the same clothes I wore yesterday. And the day before. My hair has not been washed. I did brush my teeth. Daily, even, so I’m not completely gross. Today my goal is to groom. I think I will heat up the sauna and wash in there. When I go back to work next week, I’ll have a schedule that requires my hair and face get washed daily. The armpits can go two days. I will have to wear clean clothes, but the definition of “clean” can be loosely applied. I’m depressed and anxious, with pockets of feeling normal.

Right now, at this moment, I feel normal. I can use that word, because when I’m feeling that way, I know what the feeling is – it’s a feeling that I can get through the day. It’s a feeling that doing the tasks before me is not overwhelming. It means I’m not focused on how to commit suicide or cut my arm off. The pit of horrific lead in my stomach is the size of a kiwi seed, easily ignored, not the size of the Jupitor. It’s how I feel when I’m motivated to create interesting and rigorous lessons for my students. I feel normal enough to know I should change my underwear and wash my hair. Normal is good.

Mostly I’ve been feeling suicidal. Depressed. Anxious. The dog peed on a corner in the kitchen and I walked past it for two days. I got myself in the car to go visit my dad and was unable to sing to the music on my favorite CDs as I was busy imagining taking all the sleeping pills and seroquel in the house. I was pretty sure everyone who knows and loves me would be relieved, because really how long can a loved one put up with worrying that their child/friend/spouse is going to off themselves? I was afraid, briefly, that I would live and Luke would leave me, unable to deal with my mental illness anymore, and I couldn’t blame him. That little fantasy strengthened the resolve to complete the act – be “successful.”

A little voice said, “not today.” I agreed, not today. But the malevolent voice said “it’s only a matter of time. You will kill yourself. The question is when.” It’s tiring. And a little freaky that “normal” consists of feeling like I can get up and shower and keep the suicide at bay long enough to justify not calling 911.

I'm hoping not to bore you readers too long with this depressive episode. I'm hoping at some point I can write about clawing my way out of the hole, inch by agonizing inch, with brilliant flashes of insight illuminating my past and my present. I'm hoping, which is a good sign. But even in hope I hear and believe "it's only a matter of time."

My Logic Is Sound- When the Victim Blames Herself

One of the most difficult aspects of my psychological make-up is that I can intellectually know something, and believe it, but cannot relate it to myself. For example, I know that sexual abuse is not the fault of the victim. I know that the victim will often blame themselves for abuse, but that it’s not their fault and healing comes through letting go of that blame. My mind can completely grasp this concept. I could, with great feeling and passion, share this information with others. But you know what comes next, don’t you….I have overwhelming and oppressive shame. I think everything is my fault. I know it’s not my fault, but it feels, without exception, all the time, like I am not only at fault, I AM faulty.

Imagine watching tv and the channels keep changing. If your spouse is a channel surfer, you know what I mean. This is my mind. The channels keep changing and this makes identifying what happened to me very difficult. I can slow the channel changing down a bit sometimes, and I can write or speak about what happened, but the act of writing or speaking is detached from what is happening in my mind. My mind won’t hold that channel, so I have great difficulty identifying the solid, realistic events of my past. I often wonder if what I have said happened, really happened. I wonder if the brief view of my past is real, or if it is a fabrication to justify the intense and horrible reality of my emotional state. In truth, I wish it was a fabrication…

Before I went to the hospital that had a special program for treating dissociative disorders, I wrote my therapist a letter. In the letter I wrote down what happened, for the first time, and said something like “I know this is true.” I was afraid the hospital staff would try to fuck with my memories and I would come out with some crazy story of horrific abuse that wasn’t true but that I believed nonetheless. I wanted proof for myself that what I knew, I knew. So I know. But it doesn’t seem all that bad. It seems like I should just be able to accept that it happened and move on. But it profoundly affects me. The worst way that I am affected, I think, is that I feel incredible shame for what happened and have spent my entire life re-enacting in some way the role I played then, compounding the shame and solidifying the belief that I asked for it, I liked it, I participated willingly in it, and that makes me a monster. Additionally, I think I created the sexual component of the behaviors. What was done to me was meant to be loving, nurturing, and normal and I am the monster that made it something sexual. I cannot escape this belief. And since I was a child, the shame is exponential as a sexual CHILD is most certainly a monster.

Even writing it down and re-reading it, I can’t find the faulty logic. Children are not responsible for the abuse perpetuated upon them, but my experiences weren’t abusive, I MADE them sexual so I’m the one to blame. Certainly, in the manner of a true dissociative mind, I can step back and ask the logical one inside to make a comment on this. And he says “the behaviors were sexual in nature, and since you were a child you were not to blame. The perpetrator was abusive. The perpetrator was meeting her sexual/emotional needs through you.” Immediately my mind spins, my stomach develops that bottomless pit of sickness, my flesh crawls, and I want to scream and hit myself. It’s easier to blame myself. It’s relaxing and calming to imagine punishing myself. It’s normal and comfortable and safe to blame myself. The awful, threatening, deeply disturbing pit in my stomach disappears as I reject the logic of “she was at fault” and embrace the belief that “I am faulty.”

I also know that there is more to this story. It’s not just about the confusing her-me relationship. It’s about someone else, because I can smell him. I can see, before the channel changes, brief scenes. It set the stage for everything else. I just cannot, for the life of me, determine whether or not it is a fabrication to justify my feelings (and my behavior) or if it happened. I once said to my therapist, “I know for a fact that this happened, and also I know for a fact it did not.” If only I could unlock that part of my mind, and see what happened, and know that it wasn’t my fault…then I could transfer that to the her-me shit. Change the channel.

Book information at http://inandoutoficeglass.weebly.com/

Massage Therapy

They say a massage can bring a person to tears. I didn’t have that kind of release, far from it. It felt good and all, but I had to keep telling myself to relax. I didn’t think I was going to make it for a bit. Despite the fact that all I do is sit around the house “getting better” (whatever the fuck that means), I have still had to deal with intense shit. Every day mom calls, and today was our day to go get massages together. That would be intense all by itself, spending an afternoon with mom, but I preceded the whole affair by stumbling upon a blog. Said blog was written by a mom whose daughter was molested by her dad repeatedly for 3 years. Said daughter is someone I know. So this blog, it was a raw and unbridled telling of the truth – how she felt as a mom, how she was abused as a child, how she felt when he fucked her….it laid all her emotion out there, along with her reason for writing – to be a voice among the silenced many who won’t share their truth because they are victims. And she refused to say she was a victim or that her daughter was a victim. She professed that they were survivors. I never heard all this from a mother’s point of view. I never wanted to connect with my own mother’s point of view.
Any time my mother approaches the subject of “why I am the way I am” she gets tearful and her pain engulfs me and I get lost in trying to take care of her. So I read all about it this morning, all about this woman and her daughter that I know, all about the devastation brought on by this man….and I remember once talking to the girl. We were eating, and she said “I hate my dad. He’s an asshole. You don’t even know.” Only it wasn’t said with the usual child’s intense but normal passion. It was said in a heartfelt, “I would kill him if I could get away with it” kind of rage. I just looked at her, not wanting to poo-poo it, but not knowing how to respond. I didn’t know he was molesting her. I wonder if I should have pursued a line of questioning, right there in the lobby, “why do you hate your dad? Is he fucking you or something?” But I’m kind of tied up in my own victimhood. I don’t really actually want to deal with anyone else’s. And I don’t know how. So I didn’t. And I feel guilty about that. Now that I see how this family has dealt with it – with a public blog using real names, with an article in the town newspaper, with friends and family being invited to the courthouse on sentencing day, with a strong mother making a strong statement that HE is the asshole, her daughter is the SURVIVOR, and damn anyone who tries to sweep it under the rug…well…I wish I had that. Instead I have shame for what happened, shame for having shame, and shame for hiding behind the anonymity of the internet. I’m still a victim. But hey, I didn’t cry when I got the massage. I barely relaxed. So good for me – and yay for the ability to hold it all in. I will take our secret to the grave, mom, for you.

Book information at http://inandoutoficeglass.weebly.com/

Step at a Time

I’m working hard to suss out the events of the weekend. I can’t begin to unravel it unless I travel back at least a week, maybe a month, maybe a lifetime. I know the darkness has been with me for a long time, my companion since childhood, my “out” since I created myself in the space of this walking corpse’s mind. This shadow has no name, except the one given it by society, but that’s so clinical and clean – suicide. The real thing is so multi-dimensional and deep and powerful that it has no name. It cast its shadow on my life yet once again, though I thought I had slain this beast years ago. I thought I chose life. I made lists upon lists of all the things I loved, things that gave me pleasure. I made myself visit those lists and practiced the art of feeling good over and over: walking in the snow and listening to the crunch underfoot (winter), pausing to hear the birds sing in the ash tree in my front yard (spring), gazing upon the peonies or wild mustard or Indain paint brushes or daisies (summer), picking up a maple leaf and crumbling it in my hand slowly while watching its reds and oranges sprinkle the ground (fall). I practiced and my brain created more serotonin and I lost the shadow of darkness that infected my soul. For awhile.

When did I again begin to question the wisdom of staying alive? When did the shadow begin to haunt my heart and soul and mind? When did suicide become a viable solution yet once again? I knew the touch of his hand and softened under his caress rather easily, slut for darkness that I am. I opened my arms for this old lover and let him fuck me again despite all the work I’ve done with my lists and my therapists and my medicines and even despite opening my heart to love my friends and husband in a way I never thought possible.

It was surprisingly easy that day. Most of me was worn down to threadbare nothing like jean knees that have seen too many days in the garden and scrubbing floors. Nothing was left to protect me from his seductive crooning. All day in my classroom, as I struggled to grade papers and smile at children and offer praise and suggestions for their hard work I heard him – and I answered him as well. I told him “I don’t want to die. I want to go home and lie in my husband’s arms and fall asleep with the sheets touching my cheek.” But he was relentless. “Just take one step at a time” he said.

It started in the morning when I grabbed the two pill bottles and hid them in my work bag, enough to overdose. It continued, despite my protests, as I wrote a suicide note and ordered all my medication refills over the phone during a break. I argued with the Shadow, telling him I wanted to live, telling him I loved my family, explaining that to devastate them for my own relief was unethical. He quietly answered with “just take one step at a time.” And I did. I entered grades into my grade book and made appointments with parents and held onto the thread of life that was the rest of the day. The next step was stopping on the way home to gather pills from the pharmacy and buy a soda to wash them down, but I refused to turn into the parking lot. I won for a moment. My next victory was leaving a message for my therapist.

But he whispered again, “one more step” and I bought that soda at a convenience store and parked in a rest area 20 miles from home, did a quick search online to ensure I could OD from the pills I had. With sadness and relief I found I could. But I have a long history of making suicidal gestures and landing firmly in the psych ward, and I didn’t want to be in the psych ward over the weekend. I told him, “I want to sleep in my own bed tonight, and knit while my husband watches football on Sunday.” I chose again to live, and drove home.

Exhaustion overcame me, then, like a too heavy blanket over my head so that I couldn’t breathe. I took my 2 sleeping pills, allowed by prescription. The next thing I knew I had an open bottle of hydrocodone pills next to me, and my suicide soda at my side. I cried out to my husband. I faded in and out after that, overwhelmed with seeing my husband’s face distorted in disbelief and pain as he tried to comprehend what I had done and what he next had to do. Somewhere lost inside I heard him tell me to get my clothes on, that we were going to the hospital. The Shadow counseled me to fight, to cut my wrists, to down more pills, to drink rubbing alcohol, and to do whatever else I could to delay and poison and kill myself. But I told him, “just one step at a time” as I put one foot in front of the other to get my clothes and get to the car. I wanted something comfortable for the psych ward. I wondered if I would slip into a coma. I wondered why my therapist hadn’t called back.

I was still trying to work it out the next day in the hospital, and the next, as I argued back and forth about the meaning of my life and my responsibility to live so that others did not have to grieve as I grieved. I didn’t understand at first why I was in the hospital, as I had chosen life in the rest area. It wasn’t I who took the pills, why was I the one in scrubs not wearing underwear and shivering under the too thin blankets with the paranoid schizophrenics and borderline personalities? The Shadow told me “because you are the dissociative disorder.” And I wept as I looked at my hand which was his hand also.

But I refuse to let my diagnosis define who I am. I have built a life around the shadow and he will not rob me of it. I don’t know how to cast the sun into his corner of my soul, I just know that today I look into his darkness and whisper back “Life, just one step at a time.”

Book information at http://inandoutoficeglass.weebly.com/

To Cut or Knit or Med-Up

It had been a good week, followed by a good weekend. I was not oppressively exhausted. I was enjoying my time knitting. A few parts of me collaboratively engage in knitting and it’s a most excellent activity to pass the time and allow us to be doing something that feels good while being restful. I love the feel of the yarn, love to look at the colors. Rae loves to process the previous day, week, whatever while we knit. Amanda loves to create and feel productive. Prowler finds it relaxing, and Ray joins in with Rae in the processing. Of course, being such an addict, I knit at the expense of grooming and eating. But as Luke says, it’s better than sitting around perseverating on cutting my arm off or jumping off the bridge. So it had been a good week.

Monday came and school was tiresome and I had my weekly appointment with Craig. I’m afraid that the whole session could be boiled down into a few words: let’s work on co-consciousness, integration is the next step, and by the way – we should think of having a therapy vacation sometime. Trigger, trigger, TRIGGER. I translated that into: let’s work on the most terrifying issues you have, and then I’m going to leave you. My head was full of static Monday night, and by Tuesday morning I was able only to think of cutting my arm off. I was so pissed. “Therapy vacation” to me means “I’m leaving you and therefore you will have to deal with all those feelings of abandonment and loss and grief and you’ll be alone and too bad for you.” The backlash made my stomach sick. I questioned myself on why I turned to arm amputation immediately, and why that thought provided a shred of comfort to me. I don’t really understand… just know that it did. I wondered if somehow I thought that cutting off my arm would get me the attention I feel I need, would delay “therapy vacation.” Such a dumb answer to excessive emotional reactions to normal therapeutic processes gave me a reason to beat myself up. And the pit in my stomach grew with the anxiety and fear over the therapy session and the disgust over my reactions to the anxiety and fear grew and suicide seemed like the only way to make it stop.

Tuesday was all about chaos. I hated Craig and I hated myself. I hated the process. I hated the feelings. But then I heard a little voice, Craig’s voice, say “I won’t make you do anything. We’ll only take a vacation if you’re okay with it. It won’t be forever, it will be for weeks, or however long seems okay. If you need to talk to me, we can arrange that.” I didn’t want to believe the voice, I didn’t want to even hear it, because it represented a kind of anchor that I could hold onto while I “felt” the abandonment and fear and anger. But I heard it anyway. And I felt those feelings, all bloated and ominous and out of proportion and stupid. But only in little bits and punctuated with arm amputation fantasies and lost time.

Wednesday morning I forgot to take my medicine, abilify. All day I was a little tired, but amazingly connected to the present. That night I slept better than I have for years. I woke Thursday morning rested and happy. I never wake up feeling rested. I took the abilify that morning, and I haven’t had a day so bright since I first went on the abilify. I repeated the experiment Friday morning, not taking the med, and I found myself HUMMING at the end of the day. Tired but connected and peaceful and fucking HUMMING.

It scares me to be so emotionally all over the place. Did I have a good end to the week because I successfully dealt with something? Did I have a good end of the week because I gave my brain and body a break from over-medication? Did I actually DEAL with the therapy session and my feelings or did I dissociate from them?

Dissociation as a Mirror

The chiropractor said something very affirming to me last week. I asked her if she treated many patients with dissociative disorders, or if treating me seemed weird. She looked at me for a moment and said, “It doesn’t seem weird to me at all. In a sense, all of humanity is dissociative. We see ourselves as separate people with separate lives, and even when we connect with someone else we still cling to our separateness. Really, though, there is only One, we are all really only One.” I was taken aback, and pleased, and enlightened. I believe that there really is only One as well, and that One includes people, animals, plants, the Earth, the Universe, and so on. I forget this, a lot, but I do believe it. The statement took all the freakiness I sometimes feel about my disorder out of the equation. My condition seemed suddenly to be a mirror of a bigger condition, and not some absurd and wacked condition way out there, but rather a byproduct of evil like the human condition of separateness from each other and the Earth is a byproduct of evil. (By the way, evil, I believe, is always a perversion of Creation. Evil is not creative or original. The whole Universe is only good creation, but evil can pervert that goodness and that’s all it is.)

So dissociation mirrors the human condition. In a way, I feel like that this gives me the opportunity to learn in a very personal way HOW to connect and how to APPRECIATE connection in a way other people may not be able to. It makes me think of how I became grateful for being an alcoholic. In working the 12-step program I learned so much about myself and was able to move beyond so much of my past that I actually appreciated the fact that the disease of alcoholism precipitated the changes. Other people, ‘normies’ as we AA members call them, sometimes have a harder time initiating change in their lives because there isn’t the loaded gun of alcoholism pointed at their heads demanding they do so or die. Disease can be motivating.

Dissociation, then, can be an opportunity in my life. Instead of focusing on it as a disabling mental illness, which I believe it is, I can focus on it as the precipitating factor in my life that leads me to learn to connect with myself which will open the door to learning how to connect with others and the Earth in a more intimate and personal way than I otherwise would.

Book information: http://inandoutoficeglass.weebly.com/

Dissociation, Flashbacks, Panic Attacks, and Anxiety Attacks: Differences Discussed

I have always called them anxiety attacks or panic attacks. But now I hear that clinically, these two events are different. Throw in the term “flashback” and I am genuinely confused. To add to the psychological soup, the DSM5 now claims that flashbacks are a dissociative symptom! I bandied these terms about in my head, thrown them out at doctors and close friends, written about them, but how do they apply to what I have experienced and so what?

A co-worker experienced chest pains and was having difficulty breathing at work and was rushed to the emergency room. Not a heart attack. Nothing wrong with her heart at all. But the stress of her 2 jobs, her advanced schooling, and life in general caused so much anxiety that in the middle of the day in the midst of her work she experienced a panic attack. She openly discussed it at lunch. Suddenly, everyone in the room was sharing their experiences – one had an anxiety attack while working up the courage to attend an extremely difficult meeting, one had thyroid issues and experienced panic attacks repeatedly until she got the physical problem under control, another vaguely described generalized anxiety at a certain point in her life. I said nothing, although the pink elephant in the room was trumpeting his horn, as I am the one everyone knows has a “disability related to anxiety.” What could I say? “Sometimes when Luke and I argue I switch identities and start crying uncontrollably, bang my head against the wall, hit myself, feel like I’m being choked, hallucinate, and wet myself.” I wasn’t about to share that. But it did get me thinking about what I was experiencing compared to the general public.

The co-worker who went to the emergency room was at first experiencing an anxiety attack as she was extremely worried about present circumstances that were stressing her. That’s the hallmark of an anxiety attack – the anxiety is related to life circumstances. Her anxiety turned into a panic attack, which can happen “out of the blue.” It became a panic attack as she began to experience physical symptoms and was focused only on those physical symptoms (as well as mental symptoms!).

The co-worker who was worked up about the meeting she was about to attend was experiencing an anxiety attack as her focus was on a present-time event. She was experiencing physical symptoms of a tightened chest, difficulty breathing, but it was all related to stress about this meeting.

So what about dissociative episodes and flashbacks? How are they related?
Let’s say Luke and I had a little argument about some trivial matter. If I am in an exhausted state from working, and unable to combat the emotional backlash of the “others” inside me, and those “others” begin to tell me all the messages that I grew up believing like “I am stupid, I am over emotional, I am unloved, no one is listening to me, I am in danger, I will not survive these next few moments” then I will begin to experience an anxiety attack. My heart will race, my throat closes up, my thought processes become jumbled and I have difficulty making sense of the world around me. Fear sets in, and in no time the anxiety turns to a panic attack as I fail to control my breathing and “get lost” in the physical sensations happening in my body. Sometime in this mix I will usually go to my bedroom and seek solace under the blankets as well as distance between myself and Luke- who I love and trust – but who now represents extreme danger.

Sometimes I am able, if left alone, to re-connect with reality and eventually will fall asleep after much crying. Sometimes I has more to go through. If Luke tries to console me, touch me, or even be in my presence the feeling escalate into terror and panic. I will begin to fight myself – banging my head against the wall, hitting myself, screaming and writhing like I’m being attacked and tortured. Indeed, that’s how I feel, like I’m being tortured. It’s at this point that I can really lose contact with the present and all my focus is pinpointed on the terror and the incredible need to escape the terror and the life-sucking realization that I cannot escape the terror. At times, I wet myself, after which I seem to “switch” and surrender to my surroundings, allowing Luke to help me change clothes and crawl into bed. A sad, deeply surrendering, nothingness ensues. I don’t know for sure what happens after this. At times, I switch and make feeble suicidal gestures – grabbing all the sleeping pills, cutting my arm. This results in either a call to the therapist or a 911 call, either of which will pull me into the present enough to manage my behavior and allow Spider-Man (one of the “others”) to run damage control. At times I enter a horrible dual state during which time I am immobilized and experience a few moments of numb peace followed by a few moments of uncontrollable crying, each state alternating with each other until I am so exhausted I fall asleep or enter a dissociative state that is misty primordial fog.

I think these last examples are flashbacks. They are extreme emotional states unrelated to the present circumstances, though usually triggered by an event. It’s as though I am reacting to a past event(s) even though I am having no thought memory of that event, just emotional and physical memories.

If these are flashbacks, then I can see how flashbacks are a dissociative symptom. I seem to have these emotional flashbacks coupled with dissociative episodes. So what is dissociation? I think I have “levels” of dissociation. The misty primordial fog is a dissociative state, switching to another personality is a dissociative state, entering the flashback phase is a dissociative state, and even experiencing the panic seems dissociative to me. Dissociative can denote a split from reality, a split from self, a split from emotion….the fog is a split from emotion, the personality switch is a split from self, and the flashback or panic is a split from reality.

So what? So…..I have developed a number of coping mechanisms for this psychological soup of symptoms. I’d like to be able to now organize those coping mechanisms into which ones help in all circumstances and which ones help in only one circumstance. Additionally, I’d like to be able identify early on which state I’m entering, or in, so that I can use the appropriate tool. I don’t know how possible that is. I’d also like to educate Luke so that he can better determine how best to react and help.

Finally, I’d like for all my parts to meet at the Waterfall, discuss these states, and come to a place of understanding and compassion for us as a system, so that when we are in any of these states we can cease the negative judgment and harsh attitude toward whoever is experiencing the state. That, I believe, would be a big step toward healing.

Book information: http://inandoutoficeglass.weebly.com/index.html