Scattered pieces

I have come to a point in my healing where the sometimes dichotomous thinking and advice that I have been given has become confusing and counter-productive.  I said in a previous post that I have become so good at distraction techniques, that they have become another form of dissociating the pain and problems away.  I understand why they were shown to me, during the last two years of the marriage, I was consistently suicidal.  I thought death was the only way out of the marriage, as I knew he would never let me leave.  One of the first strategies they tell you when you are suicidal is to distract.  This makes sense when you’re so overwhelmed that suicide is the only option you can see.  So for years, I was told to distract my problems away.  This was the equivalent of telling me to put the problem in a box and put it in the archives of The Basement – which is exactly how I dissociate bad experiences, memories etc.  I’m pretty good at dissociating, and I am pretty good at using the distraction techniques to the point where they are also a dissociated and sometimes self-harmful experience.

Recently, I’ve heard more and more about looking at the pain.  The exact opposite to what I’ve been told to do for years.  It started off with practising some modified Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) – modified so that the names of the points have non-violent connotations and the taps to the head are not utilised.  EFT uses tapping pressure points on the body in combination with phrases to help ease emotional pain.  The phrases used are what I would consider ones which encourages you to think of the pain e.g. “even though I want to self-injure I fully and completely accept myself”.  So it was encouraging me to accept that this painful fact is part of me and that I’m not a bad or negative person for feeling that pain.  What was interesting doing this, is that it depended on who held the pain as to whether it was helpful or not.  If the pain was buried within the dissociative system, then the EFT often makes the dissociation worse.  Remember – this is just my experience and not necessarily one that others will encounter, or even one that I will continue to experience as time goes on.

Then today I read what was probably the most obvious and moving reason why I need to look at the pain.  It was Shen’s (Reunited Selves) entry in the Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse (September 2009) called The Hole in the Soul.  This post shows why we need to heal, the consequences of not healing, the positives that come from healing and acknowledgement of the pain and fear that the process creates.  It doesn’t encourage any particular method of healing, but rather advocates for an attitude, a willingness to do the work and a strength to keep on that journey.  I’m not sure if I have any of these qualities to the point of being able to look at, what Shen describes as, the hole in my soul.  Some of us balk at the use of the term “soul”, but I understand that we have a lightness and a blackness within.  Our internal Basement is in total darkness, while our internal Attic is bathed in light.  The Basement is where the most painful memories and emotions are kept, so I see the correlation.

As an aside, when M draws within therapy, she often does a black swirling circle, I wonder if she is drawing our “hole” and a representation of our feelings about all of this.  She’s our worst artist, so it could just be that’s all she can draw.  But it’s always black and it’s always circular, like a spiral or a tunnel.  This again could correlate to The Basement which is perceived as being bottomless.

So this need to face my pain is what I’m taking to Liz next week.  Liz has asked if we can put aside issues before to try and cope, but this isn’t possible with our current levels of functioning and being in the world.  We must either dissociate or distract it away from existence…  If nothing else, this new possibility for healing has helped to ease the place we have been in for the last week.

Thank you Shen for that amazing story and to those friends who have helped over the last few weeks, it is appreciated.

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Now playing: Dixie Chicks – Wide Open Spaces
via FoxyTunes

Last night on David Letterman, John Key (New Zealand’s Prime Minister) read out the Top 10 reasons you should visit New Zealand…

10.  Auckland Airport now has a Cinnabon - really? what’s that? Oh… cinnamon rolls

9.  We have the loosest slot machines in the Pacific Rim - hmmm maybe that’s why we have such a gambling problem in this country…

8.  Only a convenient 20-hour flight away - you have to be motivated to come here

7.  It’s like England, but without the attitude – obviously they haven’t met my co-workers, they have ATTITUDE!

6.  Down there, Leno’s on at 9 o’clock - I didn’t know we got Leno…

5.  Get the whanau together, stay at a bach, crack open the chilly bin and slap on your jandals - pure bliss as long as the whanau isn’t the FOO

4.  Visit in the next 30 days, I’ll (John Key) will pick you up at the airport – I don’t think so…

3.  70% of our energy is generated through renewable hydropower – look they don’t all have to be jokes - well it is a joke when we have a drought

2.  We drive on the left hand side of the road, like the British and Lindsey Lohan - most of us have her driving skills as well :)

1.  Unlike most of the world, we still like Americans

By the way, my accent isn’t anything like John Key’s :)  Well OK, maybe a little… but not much…

Please note: This entry may trigger.

I’m very aware that I often tell others to “take care” and “be gentle”.  But I have no idea how to do this myself.  I’ve been losing my battle with self-injury more and more over the last month.  It started with the week leading up to the Father’s Day/Mother’s birthday weekend and was easing off, until being triggered again by a potential loss of our ACC funded therapy – they don’t consider that we have made enough progress towards healing.  This all adds up to a total loss of control and a desire to escape.  Even the act of breathing feels disgusting.

There is a desire to keep on distracting, everyone tells me when I get like this to utilise my distraction techniques.  I wonder if I become so good at reverting to these distractions, that it means I avoid looking at the problem.  The distractions become another form of dissociating the pain away.  Yet I’m terrified of looking at the causes of the pain.  The very first time I tried Mindfulness I was doing the usual process of trying to look at my thoughts on an internal movie screen, instead I was confronted by a wild haired alter silently screaming through a window at me.  It was terrifying.  I use the distraction techniques to avoid having to see anything like that again.

I’m hanging on by a thread.  I know I’ve been here before.  I know I’ve gotten through this before.  But how many times does this have to happen before I’m allowed to let go of the thread?

Sorry, I’m not strong enough to cope with comments on this post.  I know the people who usually comment on this blog are incredibly kind, caring and amazing people.  It’s just where I am at the moment.  Sorry.

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Now playing: Brooke Fraser – Scarlet
via FoxyTunes

Today I went onto Polyvore to do a set as a coping mechansim, and found this gift from LostShadowChild instead…

for castorgirl by LostShadowChild on Polyvore.com

Thank you… Thank you so much.

LostShadowchild, I hope you don’t mind me adding it here.  If you want me to take it down just let me know :)

I’ve struggled long and hard to understand what is meant by the term “healing” within a mental health context.  I’m familiar with healing that can be quantified (e.g. a broken bone mending), but how do you quantify healing from childhood abuse?  Is it possible or desirable to do so? What time-frame should we look at as reasonable when we’re considering the healing process?

I’m very aware that this is the intellectual side of me asking these questions.  The questions are born from frustration at what is seeming like a very long journey that hasn’t got us very far.  I know that many survivors experience a decrease in functioning with the start of therapy, but how long can I expect this to continue?  I do what I can to hasten the healing process – I do the homework I’m set, I try to be as open as I can within therapy, etc.  But is this enough?  I’ve been told by therapists that I’m “working hard” within therapy, but I often feels as if it’s another part of my life that I’m drifting through.  There will be a moment of clarity surrounding why I do a certain behaviour, but it’s then lost in the confusion and dissociative memory gaps.

I’ve yet to fully understand what the term “working hard” refers to within therapy.  Yet, I often come out of a session absolutely exhausted or on an adrenaline high, both signs that I have experienced something extreme for what I sometimes dismiss as “sitting in a chair for 60 minutes talking”.  I have a great deal of respect for those who are working on their healing as a full-time endeavour, it’s not something that I have the strength for.  But I have no respect or patience for my own healing.  I’m still caught in dismissing and minimising the memories.  Liz has offered to assist with this process by using her as a sounding board to test out the feelings and potential accuracy of the memories.  There is a certain attraction in doing this, we could finally prove what is real and which memories have potentially been influenced.  But there is also a fear that Liz will say nothing about the validity of the memories, but rather ask us to look at them and analyse our feelings and emotions about the events.  This is my greatest fear, having no way to prove or dis-prove the memories and still having to do the work of recovering from the toxic mess they generate.

Part of my anxiety is generated from the proposed changes to the ACC scheme (check out the ACC category at Gudrun Frerich’s site for some of the issues surrounding the changes).  As an ACC client, the changes will mean more reporting, increasing need to measure the healing progress and the threat of my cover being stopped at any time.  There is no way that I would be able to afford therapy without ACC assistance, so this is  a huge issue.  This is not because we are attached to, or reliant on Liz; but rather I have a fear that if we can’t release the thoughts within a therapeutic framework, we will self-destruct.  Yes, I realise that I’m contradicting myself – how can therapy be “sitting in a chair talking for 60 minutes” as well as one of the things that keep us sane…

In totally other news, B entered us into a photo competition which we have absolutely no chance of winning or even placing in.  This goes against every single strand of perfectionism that runs through our body.  I do realise however, that it’s going to be an great deal of fun for them deciding how to photograph 100′s and 1000′s creatively.

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Now playing: The Feelers – Stand Up
via FoxyTunes

Do you ever sit in therapy with the words that need to be spoken swirling around in your head, but experience a total inability to be able to say them?  It can be because the ideas are too scary to raise, there are too many conflicting ideas about what to say, not sure how to say it or you’re too  scared of what the therapists reaction will be.  We experienced this to an extreme level yesterday with Liz.  We wanted to talk about her views on dissociation and diagnostic labels, but couldn’t verbalise it.  This triggered the entrance of the hand scratcher…

I have no idea who the hand scratcher is, but I think “it’s” a mature male who is a protector.  I know it’s not One, as he is incredibly calm and can look people in the eye.  The hand scratcher comes across as being angry as the voice becomes very terse, but he’s very quick to assure Liz that he’s not “getting at her”.  He doesn’t seem to get angry at individuals and is prepared to listen to Liz and what she has to say, but seems continually annoyed or angry.  He also takes away with him all that he has talked about, so we lose the time he is present.  Yesterday he left us with the knowledge that he’d talked to Liz about the diagnosis, but that’s all.  I’m aware of his voice, but not him.  I’ve no idea where he fits into the system, but I’m beginning to wonder if he’s on Ellie’s floor, or even if he has replaced Ellie as the main protector for that floor.  It’s all very confusing and a great way to mess me around – not that I’m a control freak or anything.

What makes me think that he has something to do with Ellie’s floor, is that soon after he left, S talked to Liz.  S is also on Ellie’s floor, so it would sort of fit that they go together in some way.  It was S that caused the amazement.  She swore, was scornful of the father, told about some of the things that the sister used to do to her and Liz took it all in her stride.  Liz could obviously tell when there was going to be the switch from S to B and quickly said that she’d enjoyed talking to S…  Yes, she said she’d enjoyed talking to S.  I was amazed.  One of our greatest fears has been S talking to a therapist, but it went really well.  Admittedly S didn’t talk about anything of a sexual nature, but the fact that she talked to someone and we all survived the experience was amazing.  I knew the world wouldn’t end if she talked to someone, but I was so terrified of rejection, scorn or disgust as a consequence.  Instead I got greeted by a Liz with a smile in her voice and a sense of her having just had fun.  Maybe that will learn me about letting fear get the better of me…  It won’t, but it’s worth a try.

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Now playing: The Feelers – The Fear
via FoxyTunes

Welcome to our new blog.

I apologise for the apparent haste in the move, I made an error in the timing of the importation of the blog from the old account.  This has been compounded by the others not really liking this template, so it will probably change when they find one they prefer.  I’m also still learning the processes behind hosting a blog with the associated joys of file transfers etc.  It’s been an interesting process to get the blog this far – as well as a much needed distraction.

Hopefully the teething problems will be sorted out shortly and they can get back to the much needed release and processing of ideas they achieve through blogging.

Note: This post could be triggering, please read with care.

There was once a little girl who got hurt by the people who should have taken care of her.  This experience taught her about keeping secrets, packing the bad things into containers inside her head and to forget about most of the bad things altogether.  She became good at playing the parts and emotions that were acceptable to those around her.  Compartmentalisation and dissociation became her way of life.

As this girl grew, the dissociative walls became higher and more entrenched.  Her core beliefs were that she was a nuisance, stupid and ugly.  But she wasn’t a victim.  Oh no, she knew that bad stuff had happened, but she believed that it happened to every little girl, and no one else seemed to be complaining.  So when the girl became a woman and met a nice man, she didn’t tell him about the bad stuff; instead she listened to his stories of being abused by his sister when he was a boy.  She didn’t understand how that could have happened to this seemingly big, strong man.  It made him cry and she comforted him.

So began, what would become 8 years of physical, psychological and sexual abuse for that woman – me.

In many ways, the man came into the relationship more honest and open than we did.  He said he’d been abused, we didn’t. We got so caught up in his past that we didn’t say anything about ours – we didn’t really consider it that bad or worthy of talking about anyway.  Abuse was what we had come to expect.  So when he raped us for the first time, we dissociated it away and considered it normal.  Besides, he was good to us – he gave us flowers, cooked for us and treated us with a form of delicate care (when in front of other people) we’d never experienced before.

A pattern developed over time, he would have a crisis of some sort and we would save him.  He needed us to be strong, so we were.  We were hardly innocent within this scenario.  The woman at work used to feel sorry for him as we appeared to pick on him and order him around.  I can understand why they would get this impression – he needed to be saved and we needed to be a saviour.  The weaker he became within his work and mental health, the stronger we had to be, and the more he would abuse us when no one was looking.  The strength we showed to the world was one of us organising our world to gain some control.  When we got behind closed doors there would be a dissociative switch to one who enjoyed the pain that he inflicted sexually and physically.  He became good at triggering our switches, so we built the walls inside our internal house higher and stronger.

About four years into the relationship, we were in a side impact car accident.  We sustained a mild concussion.  In that one instant, our lives changed forever. Our coping mechanisms fell apart.  Suddenly we were weak.  Suddenly he had to be strong, but he wasn’t able.

He had been intermittently seeing different therapists over the years, but had never seen one for more than three sessions.  They were always useless or changing their fees or playing games…   We realised we were in trouble and started counselling again.  He began to self-injure, often in front of us or because of us.  He was fired from his job for assaulting a supervisor.  We tried to be strong, but were slowly falling apart.

He got a job as a security officer – a job where he could “get some respect”.  We also changed jobs.  But nothing fixed the things that were happening in each of our heads or in that house.  We were two people who had serious mental health issues crashing into each other.  We became suicidal and were regularly assessed for danger, always to be released back into the care of the strong man who was now our husband.

On the 9th of February 2008, we attempted suicide.  It wasn’t our most serious attempt, but it landed us in A&E and then the secure psychiatric ward.  On the 10th of February 2008, the strong man took us home.  What followed is blurry, but I know M made a smart arse remark to him about how he needed to grow up.  He then showed us how strong he was by trying to kill us.  His level of violence scared him and he called our mother, screaming that he’d done it this time and it was all over.  The mother thought he’d killed us.  When she talked to us, she asked if we wanted someone to come up to be with us.  Sophie said “yes”.  With our family there, he couldn’t cope with what had happened, so left the house on the 14th of February 2008.

Looking back, I can see how our different issues collided to cause what happened.  If he’d married someone who wasn’t dissociative, this probably wouldn’t have happened.  We were so conditioned for abuse, if it hadn’t been him, it would’ve been someone very similar.  Could we have ever made it work?  I doubt it.  He was not interested in healing.  He paid lip-service to therapy, but wasn’t prepared to invest the time and energy.  I was too defensive and in deep denial.  I wasn’t prepared to heal myself, instead I was so caught up in his problems that he was all I could see.  My life became about fixing him.  He has refused to attend the court ordered counselling as part of the Protection Order, so I don’t think he’ll ever heal.  I hope he does and proves me wrong…

The following clip is one we did a year ago to try to work through the events surrounding the marriage.  It may trigger.

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Now playing: Powderfinger – Sunsets (acoustic)
via FoxyTunes

Yup, I’m thick.  I might be intelligent, but I’m still as thick as a thick thing on a thick day.  I’ve been a dissociative, anxiety ridden wreck for the last week and had no idea why.  I thought it was just S acting out that was causing me to lose so much time.  It’s only today when I was at the supermarket check-out that it clicked… The check-out operator was asking the usual pleasantries about how my day was etc.  Then she asked the big one “Did you do anything special for Father’s Day?”  How in the world could I not connect today with being Father’s Day?  I brought one of the special Father’s Day lotto tickets last week; I’ve seen the Father’s Day card stands in the shops; I’ve seen the advertisements on television; I even thought of buying a camera tripod in a Father’s Day sale.  But for some reason, the words ‘Father’s Day’ didn’t connect correctly in my brain.  Don’t ask me why, but I didn’t associate it with the father and the past.

I don’t know if this lack of connection is a good or bad thing, but it sure helps to explain why I’ve lost most of the week.  It could also explain why S was acting out so violently and challenging the power dynamics within the system.  We were all oblivious to her pain and memories…  I’m so sorry S, please forgive us.

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Now playing: Mad World – Gary Jules
via FoxyTunes
watch via YouTube

I was talking to someone yesterday who got me thinking…  I’ve talked about S several times in this blog – she was born to protect the rest of the system from the sexual abuse and to cope with the psychological and physical abuse from the sister.  I’ve said that I respect her, but I’m also scared of her – what she holds and what she does.  I’m now wondering if is it possible for those factors to co-exist?

Yesterday, I became very aware that I have pigeon-holed S…  I am comfortable with labeling her as the “sexual one”, and the one who “lives and breathes sex”.  But what I forget when I say that, is that she is more than just “sex”.  She has shown this in the past by talking to other survivors and NOT turning the conversation to sex.  Another indication that she is more than what I imagine her to be, is one of her interactions with Kriss earlier this year.  Yes, that conversation involved sex, but it was discussing the past.  She was trying to heal.  I wonder how often I have put the brakes on her healing…

I’m not really sure how to deal with this information.  I know that I’m not ready to face what S holds.  I also know that I don’t have to re-experience every aspect of the past in order to heal from it.  But on some level, I will need to face what S had to do.  I truly admire her strength and courage.  She stood up to the sister when no one else could or would.  She has come forward at other times to help us when we’ve felt bullied, so I know she is more than sex.  But it’s so easy to pigeon-hole her with that label.  The ultimate in irony and hypocrisy – we HATE being labelled with a diagnosis, yet I gain comfort from labelling S.

Realistically, my next step should be to talk to Liz about S.  But this will bring up the whole sex issue.  I don’t think I can do that, there’s so much shame, disgust and rubbish tied to our ideas and feelings about sex that I don’t know if I can.  But I also know that I need to do something.  S is acting out in ways that are harmful, possibly as a way to gain some needed attention.  If I don’t act soon, how much damage will I do?  What is worse, finding out what it will take for S to be heard and healed, or ignoring it all?

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Now playing: Dixie Chicks – Wide open spaces
via FoxyTunes