The Next Version Of Me

[rainydiary]

Bach, what a difficult and disorienting thing to experience and work through.  I am thinking of you.

[Not Alone]

I kept thinking that surely it seemed worse than it really was but writing it out here makes me understand that it really was legitimately difficult and that's not just me being a whiner.

Yes, it was legitimately difficult. It would be difficult for many people. It was upsetting to you and that's what matters.

I can see where not remembering something would be distressing.

[sanmagic7]

my dear bach, i can honestly relate.  tears connected to something painful, something specifically upsetting have eluded me for so long, yet i could cry to distraction because my D graduated college!  i can cry at commercials, soppy movies and the like, but it has been a difficult road for me to get to a place where i've been able to let out real tears for something like emotional pain from the past or present. 

for some reason i can understand my inability to cry naturally has been a defense strategy in my life.  i was scolded for crying, told 'crying doesn't help', and in my childhood that was true.  it's only been recently, within the past few months, that i've been able to cry over a past situation that was very painful to me. 

i think, as you continue in recovery of yourself, feeling safe within your environment, the tears will eventually come.  i'd love to just sit with you, wrap you up in a warm blanket, bring you your favorite beverage, and just let you know you're not alone.  love and hugs

[Hope67]

Hi Bach,
I read what you wrote before, and wanted to send you a hug of support, 
Hope 

[Bach]

Armee, san, rainy, Not Alone and Hope, thank you for your replies.  My two-way communication circuits are kind of broken right now which is why I'm not participating much on the forum but please know that I do appreciate you all very much 

The move is bumping along slowly.  Everything I own in the world is in this house, my entire history, and emotional reactions are inevitable.  The other day I found some old artwork of Middle B's, which was a very strange feeling for a few different reasons.  One was that I had sort of forgotten that I spent several years of my life bearing my stepfather's last name even though I had a father actively in my life and there was never any adoption or legal guardianship, and it was weird to see my paintings that were signed with this other name.  The other was that I had sort of forgotten that even though I never really liked my art, never thought it was good enough or was what I wanted it to be, I did love to do it, and approached it with real joy and sincere effort. 

One of the things I found was a portrait I did in chalk pastel that I think must have been of my grandmother even though it didn't really look like her.  I believe it's her partly because I can't think what other elderly woman I would have been drawing at that time in my life, but also because I feel that I have a vague memory of her sitting for it, and because the post, jewellery, clothing and facial expression have a distinct flavour of her even if not so much of a true resemblance.  This portrait is not realistic, but it's startlingly appealing.  I sent a photo of it to my mother, which gave rise to a very odd text exchange in which my mother completely missed the fact that it was MY artwork even though I mentioned that I'd found a bunch of my old artwork in the attic, and that I believed the picture to be of my grandmother done by me as a child.  She was adamant that it wasn't my grandmother, and insistently detailed all the ways in which the picture didn't resemble her and, as I mentioned, completely missed or perhaps ignored the remarks I'd made that indicated it was my childhood work.  I reiterated that it was my work, and made a remark about it being signed by "some kid named (stepfather's last name)".  That sent her off on grinding her axe about what terrible ingrates my stepfather's children are, so I took the opportunity to say some true things about the family dynamics among the two sets of children and the way we were treated back then.  I've found that when she's off on a rant about my stepbrothers, I'm able to do without pushback as long as I don't say anything that directly attacks her.  That's always satisfying, but the real import and value of me showing my mother that picture turns out to be the insight it gave me into why I didn't feel positive enough about what I produced to continue to pursue my art as I got older.  I've often blamed it on not having had my interest in art nurtured appropriately, and indeed, that was the case, but there's more to it than that.  I've realised that it wasn't personal.  I've realised that my interest in art is the one thing that my mother and grandmother actually did try to nurture, and the fact that they did it inappropriately wasn't because they didn't value me or the idea of my talent, but rather because of the family culture that they came from.  The attitude in my grandmother's family was to be very demanding with incredibly high standards, plus a strong belief in the idea that artistic talent is something that comes naturally if you have it, and that if you have it you will naturally excel simply by being given the opportunity to do it.  Perhaps I can fault them to some degree for not challenging the belief that either you were a prodigy or you were nothing, especially as they had both suffered and lost as a result of it, but looking back, I believe that this is one area in which they really did have sincere good intentions towards me.  That is VERY confusing.

When I was Middle B, there was a table in front of a window with a view of lower Manhattan in my bedroom, where I used to draw and paint and craft.  In my new house, I will have an art/craft room with a table in front of a window with a view of a river, where I'll be able to draw and paint and craft.  I am hoping that maybe I can recapture some of that spirit, and this time maybe not fault myself so much just because I can't deliver depth or realism. 

[Armee]

It's so beautiful to think of you producing art with love in front of your new window soon.

[rainydiary]

 

[Bach]

I'm really angry at my life right now. I'm angry at the constant conflicts within me between the parts of me that love and want and believe and the parts of me that destroy. I'm sick of being messed up and unable to steer my own ship. I'm sick of anxiety dreams and emotional flashbacks. I'm sick of not being able to express myself in any way that satisfies. I'm sick of my constant feeling of need and deprivation and hunger. And I'm SICK to DEATH of therapy. Sick sick sick sick SICK! This is all the me's, all the B's. We are all sick, sick of all of it!

[Armee]

Oh boy do I hear you! Amen if that's all right!

[rainydiary]

This resonates with me.

[Not Alone]

I get it. I hear you Bach and all the Bs.

[Bach]

Therapy has been such a CHORE lately.  The only thing on my mind right now is practical stuff about moving.  So I have to work extra-hard to come up with therapy things to talk about.  Like everything else going on isn’t exhausting enough.

Lots of practical stresses and aggravations this week.  Water heater died.  Internet service went out, costing My Person a full day of work when we can’t really afford to spare the time to make it up, or the income otherwise.  Fortunately, the water heater was fixable under the maintenance contract even though it’s very old and I was fully expecting to have to replace it.  Cash flow is really tight right now, but our house just went under contract with a buyer for a good price.  So, everything is certainly proceeding apace, but I’m beset by feelings of helplessness and unreality, as if nothing that’s happening is really happening.  Like I’m watching it from outside myself and just being carried along.  That’s a very unsettling feeling.  I’m suppose I’m keeping up okay but I don’t feel like it.  I want to melt down and whine and moan and complain about how hard life is, how everything is hard, how I just want it to stop, how the effort it takes to try to have a productive life with a modicum of satisfaction is impossible and too much.  But my mostly-beneficial efforts to become a more even-tempered person and not be freaking out every five minutes have put a weird block on my ability to express angst.  I could perform that, but it would be more like a bad stand-up comedy routine than any genuine release, and that would frustrate me and make me hate myself. Still grappling with the problem of stuck emotion.

Lately I’ve been using a tapping meditation for gut healing that doesn’t exactly let me cry, but usually does move around some emotion in me. When it’s working, sometimes tears come out, not the liquid hot generous flow I’m looking for, but at least a few that actually come out of my eyes and run down my cheeks.  After that I start yawning and yawning.  Last night when I did it, I felt something shift way down deep in my abdomen, in the area adjacent to the place on the lower left side of my gut where I usually feel stomach sensations, deeper down, further from the surface and closer to the centre of my body.  It felt like a section of me down there that has been frozen is beginning to thaw.  It was an exciting feeling.  Exciting feelings are dangerous.  I’m both afraid to and eager to continue to seek it.  I feel like it could change something.  I’m pleased with myself that despite an immediate feeling of “OOH LET’S TRY TO MAKE THAT HAPPEN AGAIN RIGHT NOW!” after it happened the first time, I remembered that with stuff like that for me, too much of a good thing is a very bad thing, and a good thing becomes too much very quickly.  I backed off, but I can’t help having hopes for when I do that meditation again later today.  I’m tired of these heavy somatic feelings of doom.

[sanmagic7]

dear bach, it was exciting to hear about your somatic experience, having actual tears, feeling some sort of movement inside.  i get it about something positive feeling scary or like it'll turn neg. may i suggest you take your time with it, do it again when you're ready.  it sounds like an amazing breakthrough, tho.  very glad for you.

a lot of times i talk to my t about the stressors that are going on in my life right now, and that is plenty of 'therapy things' to deal with.  from what you said, those feelings of helplessness and unreality, or like you're watching from outside yourself  sound a lot like 'therapy things' to me.  these things sound like trauma reactions, and deserve to be discussed with a therapist.  to my mind, that's what a T is for - to listen to us whine and complain and melt down if we need to, in order for us to get rid of some of that neg. energy we're carrying around, and also to help us discover what's causing those feelings, etc. to be there, making our lives unmanageable.  i think you have plenty of stuff to talk about in therapy without having to dig too deeply for something.  sitting with you while you're going thru this and sending love and a hug filled with warmth, compassion, and caring.

[CactusFlower]

Hi Bach -  congrats on getting some movement in your meditation. I'm curious about this method, is there a name for it I could look up or something? At this point, I'm willing to try new processes to move things along. Best of luck on the home buyer, too.

[Bach]

san, thank you for your love and support   There are big things changing in my life right now, and I'm pretty evenly divided between a realistically hopeful part and a braced-for-disaster part, so it's a real push-pull and it's pretty exhausting.  I hear what you're saying about daily life stresses being just as much "therapy things" as anything, but although I like my therapist pretty well and think she does a pretty good job, the one thing that kind of drives me crazy about her is that she brings everything back to my mother.  As much as my mother is certainly at the root of my biggest fundamental problems, I'm not sure it's helpful for every conversation to end up back there.  I mean, if nothing else, I had other lousy parental figures in my life too!

Cactus, the meditation I've been using is called Healing Your Gut and it's on the app from https://www.thetappingsolution.com/.  I've been using that app on and off since the summer of 2020.  My results with it were always quite inconsistent, though generally good enough that I kept going back to it.  I first did the Healing Your Gut meditation early on in my use of tapping.  The first time I did it it was very powerful, but then subsequent tries only gave me very slight results, so I didn't do that meditation for a long time even though I was still doing others.  Then I stopped using the app entirely for a while and was instead focussing on breathing techniques.  I have always struggled with breathing techniques because I have trauma around my breath in my history.  Lately, though, I've finally gotten the hang of breathing through the initial feeling of panic that I tend to get from focussing on my breath, and I've been getting really good results from breathing techniques, especially 4-7-8, and 6-square.  Then, one day last week my gut was really bothering me and none of my usual methods of settling it were helping, so I decided to try the tapping again, and I really felt something.  I've done it several times since, and each time I've gotten constructive energy movement.   I wonder whether what's happened both with the breathing and with the tapping is that the work I've been doing for several years now has been moving me forward the whole time even though I couldn't feel it, and I've finally reached a point where I can feel it.  Whether it's that, or whether this is simply a mysteriously good time for self-healing, I don't know, but it's encouraging.  It shows me the value of not giving up.