Perspective

I’m trying to work on my perspective. I’m not stuck in the bottom of a deep, dark hole nor am I lost wandering in a stone cold labyrinth. Horrific images and vicious voices are relatively quiet (just mentioning them brings murmurs and scenes and I must nod at them, to acknowledge them, and they recede). But I am tired. Not exhausted, but deeply tired with sore, aching muscles that feel like they are made of lead. Even my heart feels like lead. I’m angry that I’m so tired. I wake up tired, I go to work tired and get sore, and I come home to walk the dog and eat – in pain and tired. I fall to bed when it’s still light outside, and for mid September in a far northern state that’s pretty damn early. Weekends are a mix of friend and family responsibilities punctuated with bouts of crying and long periods of bed rest. I’ve been at this for a few weeks now, and it’s not getting better but it’s not getting worse. I’ve found my rut for the next nine months.

I feel sorry for myself and I’m angry. I used to enjoy life. I used to work with passion and play with passion. I used to have gusto. Now I trudge. I drum up a bit of the old gusto in the classroom, and I like to be there, figuring out what the faces of the children mean….are they understanding a new concept? Confused? Bored? Entertained? I want so much for them to learn something, to engage in the content and the process of history, to apply the content and process of history to their lives today, to get insight, to find their place, to develop opinions, to be critical of and also love and appreciate their country. I want it so much for them, as I want for myself to have that engagement in life. I could replace the words “history” and “country” in that sentence with “life” for myself. It’s what I want for myself, and so I try desperately to have a shadow of it in the classroom for me and for them. But I end up angry that it’s just a shadow, an act. I am tired and disappointed at the end of the day when I go home and instead of living with passion I plod through the evening’s routine and fall into bed, uneasy with emotion, hurting both physically and in my heart. How sad that I pretend so much. The gulf between what I portray and who I am seems as wide as ever. Not only has my life derailed, it is de-real.

I belong to an online forum for people with disabilities. The spectrum of disabilities runs from physical to emotional, from almost complete dependence on others for food/shelter/clothing to self-supporting professionals. When I read about their lives, I find a common human element that begs me to change my perspective from sorry and angry to acceptance and thankfulness. One person may write about their bad day that included a trip to the ER and worries about whether or not the food stamps will be enough to pay for food for their family for the rest of the month. Their triumph might be that their dog comforted them and they didn’t get angry with the insensitive nurse. Another might write about how their PCP was verbally abusive toward them and their PTSD kicked in but they didn’t totally lose it, and they might get another PCP to help them shower. Some of these people are completely dependent on the State and the kindness of the people who are paid by the State (in pennies, I imagine) to care for them in very basic ways, i.e. bathing, shopping for food, and taking the right medicines. Their excitement for getting a new shirt or an outing to the mall is immense and such treats are in no way in their direct control. They have trouble finding doctors, therapists, and psychiatrists that will treat them because so many don’t accept their kind of medical insurance and the ones that do have waiting lists. They have trouble finding rides to their medical appointments when they do get them and are at the mercy of public transportation. Sometimes they can’t keep time straight and miss their appointment. These problems stand out in stark contrast to the problems on the other end of the spectrum. A person might write about how the graduate program they applied to is quite expensive. Or how nobody in the fancy restaurant understands why they have a service dog because they don’t look disabled.

My brother once said that it’s not fair to compare the pain of the guy with a broken leg to the pain of the guy with two broken legs. He said that just because one guy has “more” pain, it doesn’t decrease the pain of the guy with less pain, the guy with less pain still feels pain. I struggle with this, as I struggle with where my perspective lies. It’s pretty damn easy to focus on the tiredness and soreness and lack of enjoyment in my life. And I suppose I need to validate those physical and emotional feelings. But then I read about the lives of the people on my disability forum and I can’t help but be thankful for my independence, medical insurance, and warm support of family and friends. I have financial security and a home that I love that is almost paid for. I can shower by myself and wipe my own ass. So am I supposed to focus on what I have? And when I do, what do I do with the dark, angry sarcastic ones inside that make rude comments about how wonderful it is that I can wipe my own ass? In a heartbeat I move my perspective from being thankful for what I have to feeling guilty for having negative feelings like sadness and anger. It is not long before the guilt turns to shame for who I am – an imposter, a dysfunctional monster functioning in a loving world. I appear to be a strong and independent woman helping children develop a sense of place in their world, a loving and devoted friend and wife, when really I’m a scared and depressed child clinging to her husband and her therapist for safety, searching for a reason to live another day.

Despite the fact that I own my own home and have a successful career, I’m sad and angry and tired and sore. I don’t want to be those things anymore. I want a healthy body and mind. And I am ashamed that I can’t be thankful that I can wipe my own ass.

Labyrinth

You may have heard of “once upon a time” but sometimes there is also “once upon a space” where the events of the fairy tale happen in the present, but in another realm. Imagine a little girl skipping through the woods enjoying the sunshine and the wind, the grass and the trees. She’s happy and she’s content. This story is about her, in another realm. Instead of grass underfoot there is stone cold and hard. Instead of trees there is a wall, again of stone, damp to the touch. It’s not a cool dampness with moss either, to be enjoyed on a hot day. It’s a never ending wall in all directions so that no air moves along the corridor and nothing grows on it. It’s a labyrinth with endless dead ends. So this little girl isn’t skipping gaily anymore, she’s trudging along in the shadow of the wall, struggling to breath, and hoping to find her way out. She’s cold and her feet hurt. At one dead end there is huge bed with blood red covers and soft pillows and she thinks perhaps she can rest a bit.

But that’s part of the nightmare of the endless labyrinth. It’s not terrible at first, lying in the bed. It seems restful. There appears a little window nearby from which a cool breeze blows. She feels as though the bed is swallowing her and it’s okay, because falling deep into the softness removes the pain. From above, miles and miles above, for the wall reaches into the sky for miles, a raven circles. It makes its way down in circles followed by another raven, and another, and another. Their tail feathers disappear into trails of choking smoke that block the bit of sun she can see. She cannot get up from the softness of the bed that now pulls her down without her permission. The ravens come ever closer until they land on her arms and legs and stomach. Some take bites of her stomach, others jump on her stomach and cut like razor blades into her.

From the distance she hears a voice that’s like a portal to another world she barely remembers, asking her to walk walk walk with him in the woods where the grass is green and the birch whisper sweet nothings in the breeze. Exhausted and open and desperate she pushes up from the bloody covers to walk. Ever the voice beckons from beyond the portal that ever moves ahead of her, just outside her reach. The ravens follow, screaming, trailing their smoky tails like demons. She stumbles on the stones beneath her feet, one foot in front of the other, blind in the present and able to see through the portal to some other place where she wants to be.

They come to a section of wall that shimmers transparent like sea polished glass. Through the wall she sees “family” breaking bread together, laughing, and handing her cake and ice cream. She reaches for it and as soon as it touches her hands it becomes ash, crumbling away to nothing and chokingly dry in her throat. “Family” doesn’t seem to notice. All the social cues tell her exhausted mind that she is there in the dining room, laughing and eating cake while her body feels the cold of the wall and her eyes see the shadow they cast. In the background the ravens scream so loud it’s like radio static being piped into her brain.

Eventually the polished glass clouds over and becomes solid again, and the child stumbles forward. It’s only in motion that she is safe from the carnivorous ravens so forward she must go. Forever moving forward, turning right then left, finding a dead end and turning around to retrace her steps. Moving into the hard coldness and crying and becoming blind even to the wall. Ahead she sees another portal with a scruffy old magician sitting in front of it. He’s kind, but he does not step aside to let her through the portal, he talks. “The ravens are addiction,” he says. And she’s so tired she can barely hope that’s true. Addiction is familiar and not so frightening as ravens that eat her bowels and slice her womb. She wants to tell him what she sees through the polished glass, but the static grows so loud she can’t find her voice. “Help me through the portal, I miss the grass and the trees” she whispers, but is not sure he hears. “I’m afraid.”

The ravens are huge and peck and slice and tear. She runs through the labyrinth in panic, seeing the “family” and hearing the voice telling her to get up and walk and finding the magician whose words echo off the wall “It’s addiction.” And finally the bed again, in a corner, soft. She falls into it and stares off into the polished glass at the “family.” She’s a child and she’s so tired of moving. Armed with a gun to fight off the ravens who morph into “family” she lies there confused like she has never been before. It occurs to her that to kill would feel good so she shoots the “family” and watches the blood seep through the walls. It doesn’t feel good, but the blood covers her like a blanket on the soft bed and reminds her of a warm womb where she can feel safe. It’s a thoughtless action that puts the gun in her own mouth and pulls the trigger, blood meeting blood. She’ll never bleed again.

Can I Get You Anything Else?

I spent two days, one night in the hospital. I had a laproscopic supracervical hysterectomy. Ouch. But that's beside the point. What I'd like to comment on is the quality of the nursing staff. They were awesome! When I pressed the big red call button they politely said "Can I help you?" And when I made my request they saw to it immediately. When they came into my room to check on me, my vitals, my drip, they invariably asked before they left "Can I get you anything else?" while looking me in the eye and actually pausing....waiting to hear if there was an answer. They tried to anticipate my needs and make me more comfortable, even if I wasn't complaining of discomfort. They joked with me. I was filled with gratitude for their attentions.

And then I got pissed. This is the very same hospital that houses me for psychiatric issues. However, the treatment I get when in for "that" is completely different. When I make a request, I am usually met with irritation and a long wait. No one ever asks if there is anything else. If a nurse joked with me on the psych ward I'd be so stunned I might think I'm hallucinating! No nurse ever tried to anticipate my needs or check on my comfort level. When I'm in the psych unit I feel like a blight on society, a piece of shit stinking up the hospital, a hemorrhoid on the ass of the health care system. They truly treat patients like dirt.

So, does the hospital hand pick their very worst, most insensitive staff and stick them on the psych unit? Is it a power and control issue? Has society so stigmatized the mentally ill that even in the same fucking hospital the same fucking patient gets two completely different levels of care based on what the illness is? It's infuriating!

The Myth of the Disabled Superhero (or Superman was Actually Paraplegic)

You’ve heard the stories: Man with Two Prosthetic Legs Climbs Mt. Everest, Schizophrenic Genius Teaches at Harvard, Autistic Woman Saves Beef Industry, Blind Man Sparks Scientific Revolution, WheelchairBound Man Wins World War, Woman With TBI and History of Slavery Creates Underground Railroad….the list goes on. I’m not making these up. People with disabilities have overcome their personal obstacles, achieved fantastic greatness, and made evolutionary contributions to society. People with disabilities have changed the fucking world.

And then there’s Superman. He was orphaned at a young age, never quite fit in to the human race, and had Kryptonitis – an episodic disabling condition! But he saved the fucking world, too. He worked full time, had the usual dysfunctional and stilted romantic relationship with a pretty girl, and flew, like through the air, on incredible missions to save the lives of common people. Truly, he was not DIS-abled, he was DIFFERENTLY-abled.

But then he fell off a horse and suffered a spinal injury becoming paraplegic. The world was crushed, but oh-so-ready to watch him fight the good fight, push himself to the limits of human capacity and then beyond, and overcome his disability and walk. Or, better yet, FLY. Everyone was cheering him on and everyone believed it could, would, HAD TO happen. America’s real life Superman – Christopher Reeve – just HAD TO make his way out of the wheelchair and prove that “disability” was a myth, that with the right amount of fortitude and hard work and heart and soul and blood/sweat/tears anyone could pull themselves up by their bootstraps and fucking not only walk but fly through the air like a bird or an airplane. He tried. We all watched him and cheered him on. He never got out of his wheelchair and he used a breathing apparatus. Then he died, sans fluttering cape. Everyone was super disappointed. What a fucking failure.

What a fucking mean and crushing myth – that the only good disabled person is the one that pushes themselves beyond the normal capacity of humans to achieve a superhuman power be it x-ray vision or flying with a spinal cord injury. I’ve watched the movies – A Beautiful Mind, Temple Grandin, blah blah blah. I have to admit I cry at them. I read the books too. I WROTE a book about it. But it’s a myth. The myth part isn’t that people with disabilities can achieve great things, the myth is that people with disabilities SHOULD achieve great things. Everyone celebrates the poverty stricken Mexican who crawled across the desert and slept in the streets of America only to become the dashingly handsome TV star with oodles of money and a hidden disability mitigated by his faithful service dog. Everyone celebrates the woman with MS who fights her way to the summit of Mt. Everest. The message is clear: If you have a disability then you can overcome it and not only be more than a hum-drum mortal but a fucking inspiration to hum-drum mortals. Plus, it’s your duty to do so.

I have a secret I’m going to let you in on. People with disabilities generally don’t climb Mt. Everest. I bet most of us don’t even really want to. People with disabilities just want to do the best they can on any given day. I wonder if Christopher Reeve ever wished he could just sit in the fucking wheelchair and “be.” I wonder if ever he was proud that he made it through another day without killing himself. I wonder if he felt obligated to try to climb Mt. Everest. To be honest, I have no desire to climb Mt. Everest and I am not particularly smart and although I wish I could save the world I only have enough energy to get myself through the day, one day at a time. Sometimes I’m proud of myself for not killing myself. But then, the myth of the disabled superhero pops into my mind and I beat myself up because that’s such a stupid thing to be proud of. I beat myself up because I not only won’t ever climb Mt. Everest, I also won’t get my Ph.D, my black belt in Tae Kwon Do, or even a leadership position in my school. I’m a failure as a person with a disability because I won’t follow my dreams, won’t achieve my life-long goals, and actually have ended up losing ground in my career. I’m a failure as a person with a disability because I’ve settled for who I am. I’m a double failure because I’m lying about settling for who I am, I actually detest myself most of the time.

If you want to heap insult onto injury, you could say I’m not only not a disabled superhero, I’m the antithesis of a disabled superhero. Christopher Reeve, though he didn’t ever “succeed” in getting out of his wheelchair, is still reluctantly honored because he “lobbied on behalf of people with spinal cord injuries, and for human embryonic stem cell research afterward. He founded the Christopher Reeve Foundation and co-founded the Reeve-Irvine Research Center.” (Wikipedia) So a nice honorable mention goes to those persons with disabilities who at least become activists for their disabilities. Only I don’t. I’m afraid to. I hide my disability because I don’t want to cause waves at work. I want to keep my job, thank you, until I retire or such a time comes that I can no longer work. According to the myth of the disabled superhero, this is the worst possible offense. It’s a disservice to quietly exist among the hum-drums, sort of blending in but not really exceeding in any way, shape or form. It’s Clark Kent without the cape.

I’m sick of the myth of the disabled superhero. I am, from this time forward, going to not stand up for Dissociative Identity Disorder except for under a pseudonym, rather anonymously in blog form. If I have the energy and I feel like it, I’ll write another book and hope it magically sells because I sure as hell am not going to publicize it. I will continue to be a mediocre teacher in a small-ish town, not because I can’t be a great teacher but because I don’t want to personally invest in my career as I’d rather use my precious free time sleeping or hanging out with people I like. From this time forward I am not going to push myself so hard I fucking resent the rest of the world, rather I will do what I can with what I have in a reasonable effort at maintaining my sanity. Furthermore, should I start losing my sanity, I’ll take a nap. I will not sacrifice myself in a bold effort to not be a burden on my friends, family, and society. Oddly enough, that usually results in me being a burden on my friends, family and society. Rather, I’ll try to be as nice to myself as I am to others when I’m feeling well. When I’m not feeling well, well, I’ll take extra meds, nap, and lean on my friends, family and society. They genuinely seem to think I’m worth it, so what the hell.

Christopher Reeve died never getting out of his wheelchair. The myth of the disabled superhero would have us believe that’s a tragedy, only mildly mitigated by the service work he did for the future of all people with spinal cord injuries. Fuck the myth of the disabled superhero. Superman was a paraplegic. Period. He hoped and hurt and tried. I’m tempted to say he never gave up, but I bet there were plenty of days he gave up and SO FUCKING WHAT. I bet there were days he cried his eyes out in despair and frustration and just plain old sat in his wheelchair. And if that’s true, then that’s what made him human. And that’s exactly what he was, human. Anything else is a myth.

I’m going to nap.

Collage

The more I get to know the DID community the more I find avid collagers among them. Collage: an assemblage or occurrence of diverse elements or fragments in unlikely or unexpected juxtaposition. It makes incredible sense. It’s a perfect expression of who we are; fragments juxtaposed telling a story, often with shocking or disturbing themes. My collages often hurt.

A few years ago mom paid someone to log part of her 160 acres. We walked around back there, soaking in the devastation, trying to remember what it looked like whole and knowing that in the long run it would heal and be a forest again, but never the same. Devastation. That’s how I feel inside. I feel like loggers came in and cut down the forest inside and now I have to grow again, heal. I feel devastated and I’m not sure if the logging happened back in my childhood or if it happened at the hospital or if it happened in therapy or if it just happens continually because that’s what unresolved trauma does – it keeps happening over and over.

In the midst of this devastation I have a house, relatively intact, from which I operate in the world. Currently I have to operate as ‘teacher’ from this command center house 40 some hours a week and it’s really hard. Prowler looks out the window at the devastation around the house and is pretty overwhelmed by what he sees. He used to prowl the perimeter, pissing on the trees and chasing away the evil spirits. He had cover prowling among the birch and pine and cedar. He had an environment from which to operate. Now there’s stumps and downed trees and some of them are burned and some are rotting and some have been hauled away to be made into tables and wardrobes and two x fours for others. He stays in the house with us, in an uncomfortable, anxious state, pacing and claustrophobic as the walls close in around him and the devastation lies unprotected. One of the rooms of the house has a crib and a little one in it – LA – and it’s supposed to be his job to protect her but he doesn’t feel right about it. It used to be she was in deep hole, almost like a womb of Mother Earth’s, and he had her hidden and safe and could prowl in the forest for miles and miles without having to worry because no one finds a cache like that. Now she’s in the house and the only thing protecting her from me and Sarah and the world and the devastation are some terribly thin man-made walls holding up a roof prone to leaking when it rains hard.

I don’t have such a hard time operating from the house. Man-made modern conveniences make sense to me. I have access to the outside, my control panel is at my fingertips, and when I’m engaged in a virtual reality game like 'teaching middle school history' I don’t have to look out the windows and see the wreckage or mourn its existence. Sarah has a room upstairs, like she always has, and her window view has changed considerably but from up there she sees beyond the dead zone into greener fields and living woods. I don’t know how she does it, having that kind of sight. She sees what is close and what is far away; she sees the past and the future; she sees her room and the world outside. She amazes me with her primal understanding that is hardly understanding – it’s more like existence in the moment. She’s not shocked at the devastation, nor does she strive to understand it. She has seen it out the window forever – like the devastation was concurrent with the forest that was. Maybe she lives in multiple dimensions and multiple space/time continuums. She does love Star Trek….And like a Vulcan she is emotionless and like a Klingon she is a cauldron of passion and rage. She’s her own collage.

Last night at the staff party I was talking with my boss and her husband. Her husband was a bit of a mentor to my son and we all have a long history of working together as equals, teaching each other’s children, going out for drinks as friends, and alternating in our positions of power. Her husband was telling a story and described someone as a “psycho bitch” and said “no really, the woman had a mental illness.” It stung, not because he said it but because that’s the stereotype – people with mental illness are undesirable. I was busy at my command station in my house, playing the “being social with co-workers” game, and had to make a split second decision as to whether or not to make a little comment like “oh, not everyone with mental illness is less-than.” But I didn’t. He would not have understood the meaning, not having any context, and my boss would have only felt bad and probably uncomfortable, having a much larger context. I glanced out the window at the devastation, knowing what memories, feelings, thoughts, actions, and history those stumps and felled trees and burned trunks represent. I glanced at the virtual reality screen I projected out to the world, was currently projecting to my boss and her husband, with its greenery and flowery color and birds chirping. There was flicker in the screen, but no one out there ever seems to notice them. I played a laugh track.

I’m so tired. Prowler’s presence in this house, with his incessant pacing, his mounting frustration at being a wild animal caged in the rooms of a 1950’s farmhouse, is draining me. I have to operate the ‘teaching’ game, which I love, and deal with his anxiety as he looks out the windows on the forest that needs no protecting because it’s no longer fucking there. Why protect that which has been devastated? What worth is there in rotting logs and lichen? The forest once held LA, and now she’s in the house and the house is small, too small for larger than life Toltec Warrior red-eyed half-wolf man/beast PROWLER.

I once made collages to represent Prowler, Amanda, Rae, and Sarah. Each on its own canvas. Each framed separately. Now we’re trying to create a collage of all of us, one canvas, one frame, and the juxtaposition is just too extreme. The canvas not large enough. The pieces don’t fit. There’s no unifying theme except the ugly devastation and the crying sounds LA makes. The canvas IS the devastation, the theme IS a child sobbing, and the Elmer’s school glue stick doesn’t fucking work because the edges don’t stay down. School isn’t working, because it takes so much effort to keep gluing down the edges that keep curling up. I’m tired. I’m so fucking tired.

Back in the Saddle Again

Three days. That's all. Just three days. Anyone can deal with anything for three fucking days. That's all I had to get through - and on top of that the long term sub who was covering for me during my 5 week long leave of absence was teaching with me for two of them. I didn't even really have to DO anything on day one. So what the fuck happened? Why the fuck did I come home exhausted? Why did I spend Saturday in bed, alternating among crying and dissociating and vegging out on bad tv?

The kids were really happy to see me. I got many hugs from them. They asked me where I was and I said I was sick but that I was better now and that was good enough for them. It's the adults in the building that fucking piss me off. Most of them smiled tentatively and said "you're back! Hi!" but what I heard was "I don't know how to react to you because you are so crazy you couldn't work for most of the semester." I just want to scream "YES! I'm back from the psych ward! I slept a lot, too, because I'm suicidally depressed, but I'm hoping that's in remission now that I have come to terms with the fact my uncle raped me when I was a toddler." But I don't scream that. In fact, when one of the adults gets real brave and asks me "how is it going?" I don't even give a real answer. I don't think anyone wants to know I've carved up my stomach with a box cutter because I'm so overwhelmed with feelings. I don't think anyone wants to know I am finding a new kind of freedom in letting go of the shame that is the foundation of my multiple personalities. I don't think anyone wants to know I don't think I hate babies anymore. For sure no one wants to hear about how fucking exhausted I am after working a whole three fucking days. I just say "it's going well! Thank you!"

Lies. It's not going well. It sucks. I hate that I came home every night an emotional wreck and went straight to bed. I hate that I spent Saturday all fucked up. Wanna know what I WANTED to do Saturday? I wanted to putz in the yard, soaking up the sunshine. I wanted to vacuum. I wanted to bake cookies. And mostly I wanted to go to my friend's house and have coffee and talk and laugh. Yeah, I wanted to laugh Saturday. But I didn't. I couldn't. I did vacuum, but it was like running a fucking marathon. I did sit on the deck, but only out of a sense of duty I have to take advantage of sunshine, not because I enjoyed myself. And throughout the day, all fucking day long, I heard in my head "I want to die" or "Swallow all the pills in the cabinet" or "Use the box cutter to slice up your neck and face." The most common message was "I want to die."

I am so GOD DAMN MAD that I went back to work, something I was totally looking forward to and thought would be easy-cheesy since I haven't been exhausted for a couple weeks now and after DAY FUCKING ONE I was exhausted and I haven't felt good or laughed since. Fuck this. Fuck this! FUCK THIS. I want to be done with this suicidal bullshit.

Protection....Prowler is protecting me....from what???? I can tell you that teaching and being with children is not the stressor, although it's tiring. The exhaustion comes from having to pretend to be a functioning normal person in society. The exhaustion comes from knowing that the adults around me ask "how is it going?" and though everyone probably gives a false answer to that, everyone probably hides their struggles, probably NO ONE else in that building has a stomach of cuts, a storehouse of funny psych ward stories they want to share but can't, and a voice in their head telling them "I want to die." It pisses me off. It makes me buy into the whole "I want to die" idea.

But I don't want to die. I want to laugh and joke with my best friend and my husband. I want to enjoy sitting in my backyard. It's not fair that I have to spend so much energy refraining from sharing who I truly am with the people I spend most of every day of my life with. I filter and I filter and I have to evaluate every contact I have. It's like I am a hyper-vigilant child again, working overtime to keep on my toes to make sure I behave properly, say the proper things. I can't just share who I am. I am a teacher, responsible for young souls thrown into a classroom instead of out running on the playground or through their yards with their friends. So I can't really let people know I, myself, am a child, gravely wounded and hurting, struggling to find meaning in my days and struggling to find a reason to live. I can't really let them know I am terrified of the voice inside my head saying "I want to die" because that voice is me and I do so very much want to die even though I am dying to live. I can't really tell them I am so very proud of myself for surviving rape and an incest-ish relationship and more rape. I can't really explain that I'm working on all my personalities having more access to each others' feelings and thoughts and then dissociating when that becomes too overwhelming. I can't express how mind blowing it is to have a brain that has become so compartmentalized the different parts of it have different fucking names and it's a struggle to not get sucked into a vortex of disability, dissociation, sickness, self-pity, and whether or not repressed memories are real. No, better to say "it's going ok" because in the long run it's better for me, my husband, and society in general if I can drag my ass to my classroom and tell stories about FDR, Winston Churchill, and Rosie the Riveter. Probably if I was brutally honest I wouldn't be in the classroom for long.

Not that I'm lying. But I am.

Not my work - Flashbacks

Flashbask Management in Treatment of Complex PTSD

The East Bay Therapist, Sept/Oct 2005
A significant percentage of adults who suffered ongoing abuse or neglect in childhood suffer from Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. One of the most difficult features of this type of PTSD is extreme susceptibility to painful emotional flashbacks. Emotional flashbacks are sudden and often prolonged regressions ('amygdala hijackings') to the frightening circumstances of childhood. They are typically experienced as intense and confusing episodes of fear and/or despair - or as sorrowful and/or enraged reactions to this fear and despair. Emotional flashbacks are especially painful because the inner critic typically overlays them with toxic shame, inhibiting the individual from seeking comfort and support, isolating him in an overwhelming and humiliating sense of defectiveness.

Because most emotional flashbacks do not have a visual or memory component to them, the triggered individual rarely realizes that she is re-experiencing a traumatic time from childhood. Psychoeducation is therefore a fundamental first step in the process of helping clients understand and manage their flashbacks. Most of my clients experience noticeable relief when I explain PTSD to them. The diagnosis seems to reverberate deeply with their intuitive understanding of their suffering. When they understand that their sense of overwhelm initially arose as an instinctual response to truly traumatic circumstances, they begin to shed the awful belief that they are crazy, hopelessly oversensitive, and/or incurably defective.

Flashbacks strand clients in the feelings of danger, helplessness and hopelessness of their original abandonment, when there was no safe parental figure to go to for comfort and support. Hence, Complex PTSD is now accurately being identified by many as an attachment disorder. Flashback management therefore needs to be taught in the context of a safe relationship. Clients need to feel safe enough with the therapist to describe their humiliating experiences of a flashback, so that the therapist can help them respond more constructively to their overwhelm in the moment.

Without help in the moment, the client typically remains lost in the flashback and has no recourse but to once again fruitlessly reenact his own particular array of primitive, self-injuring defenses to what feel like unmanageable feelings. I find that most clients can be guided to see the harmfulness of these previously necessary, but now outmoded, defenses as misfirings of their fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses. These misfirings then, cause dysfunctional warding off of feelings in four different ways:

1. fighting or over-asserting one's self with others in narcissistic and entitled ways such as misusing power or promoting excessive self-interest;
2. fleeing obsessive-compulsively into activities such as workaholism, sex and love addiction, or substance abuse (uppers');
3. freezing in numbing, dissociative ways such as sleeping excessively, over-fantasizing, or tuning out with TV or medications ('downers');
4. fawning in self-abandoning and obsequious codependent relating. (The fawn response to trauma is delineated in my earlier article on "Codependency and Trauma" in The East Bay Therapist, Jan/Feb 03).

As clients learn that their originally helpful defenses now needlessly hinder them, they can begin to replace them with the anxiolytic and therapeutic responses to flashbacks that are outlined and listed at the end of this article. I introduce this phase of the work by giving the client a copy of this list of cognitive, affective, somatic and behavioral techniques to use as a toolbox outside of the session. These tools are also elaborated ongoingly in our sessions. I continually notice that the clients who acquire the most recovery are those who carry the list with them or post it up conspicuously at home until they are thoroughly conversant with it.

As clients begin to derive benefit from responding more functionally to being triggered, there are more opportunities to work with their active flashbacks in session. In fact, it often seems that their unconscious desire for mastery 'schedules' their flashbacks to occur just prior to or during sessions. In helping them to achieve some mastery, my most ubiquitous intervention is helping them to deconstruct the outmoded alarmist tendencies of the inner critic. This is essential, as Donald Kalshed explicates throughout The Inner World of Trauma, because the inner critic grows rampantly in traumatized children and because the inner critic is the primary initiator of most flashbacks. The psychodynamics of this is that continuous abuse and neglect force the child's inner critic [superego] to overdevelop hypervigilance and perfectionism - hypervigilance to recognize and defend against danger, and perfectionism to try to win approval and safe attachment. Unfortunately, safety and attachment are rarely or never experienced. Hypervigilance progressively devolves into intense performance anxiety and perfectionism festers into a virulent inner voice that increasingly manifests self-hate, self-disgust and self-abandonment at every imperfection. Eventually the child grows up, but she is so dominated by feelings of danger, shame and abandonment, that she is unaware that adulthood now offers many new resources for achieving internal and external safety. She is stuck seeing the present as rife with danger as the past.

I sometimes think of this phase of the work as rescuing the client from the hegemony of the critic. Despite the negative connotation rescuing has in many circles, I believe there is an unmet childhood need for rescue that I help meet when I 'save' my client from the critic. like mom didn't save her from abusive dad, or like the neighborhood didn't rescue her from her alcoholic family. This rescue process then, is a gradual emancipation from self-alienation, and a gradual deliverance from the internalized parents who trigger the client with flashback-inducing catastrophizations and perfectionistic invectives. If no one shows the trauma-locked individual that extrication from the self-torturing processes of the critic is possible, he rarely learns to rescue himself. He may live forever without discovering that he now has a variety of helpful responses [detailed in the list below] available to him to resist the triggering and exacerbating dynamics of the critic.

Over the course of therapy, I often reframe flashbacks as messages from the wounded inner child about the denied or minimized traumas of childhood. In this vein I paint flashbacks as the inner child righteously clamoring for validation of past parental abuse and neglect. Flashbacks are the child pleading for unmet developmental needs to be met, none more important than the gradual awakening of a healthy sense of self-compassion and self-protection. This is fundamental to recovery because without self-compassion, clients rarely evolve any substantive self-care habits. Similarly, without reconnecting to the instinct of self-protection, clients rarely develop effective resistance to either internal or external abuse.

When clients get that their emotional storms are messages from an inner child who is still pining for a healthy inner attachment figure, they gradually become more self-accepting and less ashamed of their flashbacks, their imperfections and their overall affective experience. They understand that the lion's share of the energy of their intense emotional reactions in the present are actually appropriate but delayed reactions to various themes of their childhood abuse and neglect. As they learn to effectively assign this emotional energy to those events and perpetrators, they metabolize and work through these feelings in a trauma-resolving way. This in turn leads to a reduction of the emotional energy that fuels their flashbacks, and flashbacks in turn, become less frequent, less intense and less enduring. Eventually flashbacks can even begin to automatically invoke a sense of self-protection as soon as the individual realizes she is triggered. Eventually this can even happen at the moment of triggering, as well as just before encountering known triggers.

Some final words. I have seen so many of my clients respond well to this model, even those who 'only' suffered neglect, I have come to conceptualize Complex PTSD as being on a continuum of severity. In this vein, it seems that with enough neglect, certain children automatically over-identify with the superego and adopt an intense form of perfectionism that, via the critic's "not good enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not helpful enough, etc.," triggers them over and over into painful abandonment flashbacks every time they are remotely less than perfect or perfectly pleasing.

MANAGING FLASHBACKS

1. Say to yourself: "I am having a flashback". Flashbacks take us into a timeless part of the psyche that feels as helpless, hopeless and surrounded by danger as we were in childhood. The feelings and sensations you are experiencing are past memories that cannot hurt you now.
2. Remind yourself: "I feel afraid but I am not in danger! I am safe now, here in the present." Remember you are now in the safety of the present, far from the danger of the past.
3. Own your right/need to have boundaries. Remind yourself that you do not have to allow anyone to mistreat you; you are free to leave dangerous situations and protest unfair behavior.
4. Speak reassuringly to the Inner Child. The child needs to know that you love her unconditionally- that she can come to you for comfort and protection when she feels lost and scared.
5. Deconstruct eternity thinking: in childhood, fear and abandonment felt endless - a safer future was unimaginable. Remember the flashback will pass as it has many times before.
6. Remind yourself that you are in an adult body with allies, skills and resources to protect you that you never had as a child. (Feeling small and little is a sure sign of a flashback)
7. Ease back into your body. Fear launches us into 'heady' worrying, or numbing and spacing out.
   [a] Gently ask your body to Relax: feel each of your major muscle groups and softly encourage them to relax. (Tightened musculature sends unnecessary danger signals to the brain)
   [b] Breathe deeply and slowly. (Holding the breath also signals danger).
   [c] Slow down: rushing presses the psyche's panic button.
   [d] Find a safe place to unwind and soothe yourself: wrap yourself in a blanket, hold a stuffed animal, lie down in a closet or a bath, take a nap.
   [e] Feel the fear in your body without reacting to it. Fear is just an energy in your body that cannot hurt you if you do not run from it or react self-destructively to it.
8. Resist the Inner Critic's Drasticizing and Catastrophizing:
   [a] Use thought-stopping to halt its endless exaggeration of danger and constant planning to control the uncontrollable. Refuse to shame, hate or abandon yourself. Channel the anger of self-attack into saying NO to unfair self-criticism.
   [b] Use thought-substitution to replace negative thinking with a memorized list of your qualities and accomplishments
9. Allow yourself to grieve. Flashbacks are opportunities to release old, unexpressed feelings of fear, hurt, and abandonment, and to validate - and then soothe - the child's past experience of helplessness and hopelessness. Healthy grieving can turn our tears into self-compassion and our anger into self-protection.
10. Cultivate safe relationships and seek support. Take time alone when you need it, but don't let shame isolate you. Feeling shame doesn't mean you are shameful. Educate your intimates about flashbacks and ask them to help you talk and feel your way through them.
11. Learn to identify the types of triggers that lead to flashbacks. Avoid unsafe people, places, activities and triggering mental processes. Practice preventive maintenance with these steps when triggering situations are unavoidable.
12. Figure out what you are flashing back to. Flashbacks are opportunities to discover, validate and heal our wounds from past abuse and abandonment. They also point to our still unmet developmental needs and can provide motivation to get them met.
13. Be patient with a slow recovery process: it takes time in the present to become un-adrenalized, and considerable time in the future to gradually decrease the intensity, duration and frequency of flashbacks. Real recovery is a gradually progressive process (often two steps forward, one step back), not an attained salvation fantasy. Don't beat yourself up for having a flashback.

http://www.pete-walker.com/flashbackManagement.htm