dollyvee's recovery journal

[Hope67]

Hi Dollyvee,
Sending you support for having just watched what sounds like a very powerful meditation - it's great that you felt that awareness around shame and that it helped a lot.  I am intrigued now to watch the meditation myself, so I'm thankful you've put a link to it.  Maybe I'll take a look in the coming days. 

I am also interested that Dan Brown has proved the false memory theory re: SA survivors, to be false.  That sounds really great work.

Sending you a hug 
Hope 

[dollyvee]

Thank you Hope 

Sometimes I forget how much good information there is that is actually meant to help us. (My attachment system says yeah there are people that want to help  )

I thought I posted this but can't see a reference to it in a search, but if anyone is interested this is an interview with Dan Brown from Therapist Uncensored who I quite like.

https://therapistuncensored.com/episodes/tu157-treating-complex-trauma-and-attachment-with-guest-dr-daniel-brown-replay/

"We are very excited to resurface this episode this week as it is one of our most popular, and it is rich with great content. Follow along as Sue takes a deep dive with Dr. Daniel Brown into complex traumas, the myths behind false memories, and the 3 essential ingredients of effective treatment for many clinical issues. Dr. Brown has been an expert witness in over 200 child sexual abuse cases, and is also known for his work at the International War Crimes Tribunal for his role in developing a standard of evidence for victims of war atrocities. Learn more about how treatment from an attachment perspective can lead to significant and long-term healing."

I also had a look for Healing Developmental Trauma which someone on another forum had recommended for fearful avoidant reading. It was in my to sell/give away pile and the receipt said I bought it 9 years ago and it's just the thing I have been talking about in my journal about infants born into freeze. This is the connection survival style. I guess sometimes things take time to understand and be ready for.

[dollyvee]

I think it's taken me nine years of work to begin to understand how the things in this book relate to me.

Some notes/things that stand out and I can see in me and relating to the connection survival adaptation.

p239 "establishing trust: she carefully tracked my responses and reacted to any misattunement on my part with despair and shame...I was repeatedly reminded how mother and infant co-regulate their emotional arousal, influenced and being influenced by each other's changing behaviour. Neurologically, signals between a mother and child pass back and forth between each other at amazing speeds, and it has been shown that mother and infant, in response to each other's facial expressions, show sympathetic cardiac acceleration and parasympathetic deceleration.

With Emma, who, like a baby, sensed every affective nuance of relational attunement or misattunement implicitly in her body, I had to be emotionally present and genuine. She needed consistent demonstration of my trustworthiness and capacity for empathetic attunement.

Hypervigilance is experienced like a baby's bond with its mother, constantly tracking peoples' emotional responses looking for "danger" (inauthenticity, misattunement, evidence of distrust). Like Papa Coco mentioned, no one is perfect and there will be moments of misattunement in a relationship. People can help co-regulate our emotions, but they are also not our parents. I guess it's helpful to know what a young response this is and how long I have been doing it.

p239 "She frequently expressed how important it was that I take her seriously, meaning that I not pathologize her. She felt that a diagnosis would strip her of her dignity and show "one up-manship"on my part, proving that I discounted her experience on a fundamental level. She wanted to be seen as person of value and was both terrified and infuriated by the possibility of being put in a diagnostic box."

This sounds quite close, if not almost verbatim, to what I experienced when I first started therapy. I think there is also the underlying feeling of disconnection and holding back because people have not related in the past, wanted to judge me, or when I felt like I wouldn't be seen etc

P240 (parphrasing) parental attunement helps name/untangle a child's non verbal state. Without this attunement and "without words to mentalize the physical experience, unnamed, overwhelming emotions and sensations remain in the body and its. organs and are expressed as psychosomatic symptoms."

"When children miss their developmental markers at the sensory-motor level, the physiological foundation is not at a place to support the emergence of their emotional and relational capacities...Without the necessary sensory-motor skills, children have a diminished capacity to respond, the demands of the environment cause greater stress, and they cannot keep up with other children. More importantly, they often lack the key defensive reflexes that would allow them to adequately protect themselves, and they are more vulnerable. As a result, children who sense their vulnerability will scapegoat and attack them.

Emphasis in bold is the story of my life. This is an underestanding of the process that led me to feel like that and be in that position, and that I'm not "crazy" and it wasn't all in my head. I was treated a certain way (and still am to a certain extent - gym & work) because of how I was treated as a baby. I think my sf probably picked up on this, and my m too, though it initially came from her (probably because she had a similar experience.

Another core tenet of a connection survival strategy is a sense of impending doom/that something bad is going to happen, and as the book mentions, it's because something already had. I know this was also reinforced in the family, that you can't trust anyone, and "the world just doesn't work like that" (when thinking of something good but don't have a specific example). So, I think there is a legacy of this and becomes a bit blurry trying to pick out what is mine etc. But I notice it in me regarding relationships etc. A slight reaction from someone means that he's not interested and it's all over; that it's never going to work out etc.

p140 "When early life experience is traumatic, the trauma lives on in the form of on-going high arousal states in the nervous system. Unresolved high arousal becomesthe source of a relentless, nameless dread, a continuing sense of impending doom that never gets resolved"

"adults who develop the Connection Survival Style are engaged in a lifelong struggle, conscious or unconscious, to manage their high levels of arousal. They struggle with dissociative responses that disconenct them from their body, with their vulnerability of energetic boundary rupture, and they psychological and physiological dysregulation that accompanies such struggles"

I'll come back to this because there is an interesting idea about internalized rage (when one could not rage against the primary caregivers as it was unsafe), so it makes one feel powerless. The Connection Survival Style is also characterized as the beginning of our identity, which I thought was interesting.

[dollyvee]

Am thinking about a core facet of the Connection Survival Style which is lack of "aliveness." Sometimes I become aware of how compartmentalized my life is. I do things, have a job, basic plan for success with that job (like how can I continually get work, what do I need to do for that), but I'm never thinking about the next step like what do I want out of life? What do I want out of my career? It's maybe more focused on accomplishing things. John Bradshaw descibes toxic shame as being locked in a sense of doing, that we are a "doing" rather than a "being."

I have a place that I live, but it's kind of on a survival level to an extent. Sort of like the meme, a man will live like this and see no problem/be happy. Once in a while I will buy something for decoration etc, but it's not like I'm making something my "own." I guess there is a part of me that feels, what is the point? Though I don't know if I ever consciously voice that. It's only been the past few weeks (maybe months?) that I have had an urge to "nest," and started thinking things like these sheets are terrible, I really need new ones (because I've had the for 8 years)

One thing I think the book is making clear is that I think there's a form of dissociation, or maybe chronic dissociation, going on from a very young age. What I find tricky is how can you even be aware that you are dissociating when it's been such a large, and hidden, part of your life? I remembered the feeling/thing I was shown/memory when dealing with another romantic interest last February where, half asleep, I saw myself helping a little girl (infant/toddler?) through a change room at my old pool. I felt very maternal, protective, helping her. When I became conscious that this was the change room in my old pool, where I'm pretty sure my m said I learned to swim as a baby, I became anxious and worried if I was able to take care of this little girl. At the time, I had no idea that there was another, maybe dissociated part that was coming up, pushing someone away (or how it felt with the romantic interest - that on one hand, I want a relationship, but on the other, something stops it). Maybe the part that became conscious was how the little girl (me) felt at the time, and worries that taking care of another person is too much if I don't know how to take care of myself. At the time I also wondered if this was generational, and if I was picking up on my m's and gm's feeling that they didn't think they could take care of me.

I guess relationships are about co-regulation and someone is not going to magically not have any needs and help you heal your self-esteem. You also need to be present to "take care of their needs" (in a non-codependent way) at times. I watched a good video by Heidi Priebe about toxic shame and limerance today where she talks about this. She also says that we cannot [heal our self-esteem] if we are chronically dissociating from [the things inside us that we find disgusting and wrong] and living in a world of fantasy connection. It just feels tricky I guess when you're dissisociating on such a fundemental level for so long. I guess it becomes about finding a way to regulate that anxiety/terror. And/or showing those parts that you can be maternal/take care of things.

Another thing about this chronic dissociation, that I think Narckiddo touched on, is not being aware that I have any needs on some level. Like with buying new sheets, it's not really a life and death need, so is it really a need? Can I have something beyond life and death? Sometimes it feels like a perpetual not knowing what I want (and I guess not knowing myself because I was never allowed/didn't have a chance to). When other people come into the mix it becomes more complicated too. Like how can I say I feel tired, I don't want to do something and it means not showing up for this person (ie if they need me to help coregulate let's say). I think I've been doing such small things like that for a long time for people, that it's second nature, and I become unsure of what my needs are, or dissociated from them, because it might mean that I will lose my attachment figure as I probably did in the past. Not 100% sure if this falls under the chronic dissociation umbrella though, but probably goes back to the same time as a baby where there were issues with needing things. Also, similar to what Papa Coco mentioned I think, that crying as a baby, having a need, wasn't soothed for example.

[dollyvee]

I watched another Heidi Priebe video where she does a good job of summarizing toxic shame. For anyone intrested, this is the video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxBm9r2tpyY

There's a couple things that stuck out. First is that emotions are shamed and it becomes about "I am wrong, bad" because these emotions are wrong/bad as it mentioned in the Healing Developmental Trauma book. However, what I think is so different, or alien to my understanding, is that "secure" people experience the full range of emotions throughout the day, every day. Their parent/caregiver was able to mirror those emotions back to them, help them name them, and give coping strategies and advice for what to do with them (ie that sounds like sadness you're feeling. Sometimes when people are sad, they cry and it helps them grieve and feel better). If you weren't allowed to feel that emotion because our own parent/careegiver was dysregulated, or not able to deal with their own emotions, whenever sadness, or anger in my case, pops up, we understand that it is "bad" and then becomes covered in shame, which is where we feel bad for feeling that thing. So, it stays in our system and we're not able to regulate it. (I think this is the chronic impending doom for example in the HFCT book).

What's interesting too, is when she talks about complex shame binds where the emotion we were feeling was not only shamed, but then labelled as something else. This is where I think things get a bit tricky for me emotionally at times. For example, when you were angry your parent could have told you to stop being selfish (I think perhaps in my case there was a sense that any emotion was selfish as it wasn't supporting NPD family members). So, when you are angry you now do things to sooth what you know as selfish. I have been bad (angry) and hurt that other person, so I will stop being selfish and give to them. However, she says that this maladaptive coping strategy likely had the opposite effect and brought more of this energy into my life that caused me to get angry in the first place. Anger is generally a warning that your boundaries are being crossed, and taking responsibility instead of setting boundaries is going to not make you feel better. So, we push down the feelings of distress and feel chronically dysregulated, but not sure why we're feeling dysregulated because we did the thing we were told was going to soothe the emotion.

I want to bang out that last part with a drum haha because I think that's so much of why I felt crazy growing up. I was doing the thing that people loved me (who I understood to love me) wanted me to do and it only made me feel worse. Setting boundaries also made them upset and me feel bad for doing it. We then find ways to comfort and self-sooth that which we can't name and don't understand what's going on inside us for example through food (I do this but it feels very unconscious). Our ways of coping and self-soothing then create a shame double bind because these are things that we don't want other people to see (because secure people don't regulate like that and wouldn't understand), or we don't like the way our body feels when we have been eating/drinking, or another one for me, our bank accounts when we have been shopping.

We then go through a process of isolating instead of co-regulating when we feel these things come up, we feel like "our emotions don't make any sense, and if I tried to show someone what was up for me, I would probably be shamed even further because my behaviour doesn't make sense, and then I would be labelled as weak etc."

The second thing that sort of stood out or kept popping up was, how did I deal with this as a baby?/how do babies deal with this? For example, if I get upset as a baby, or shut down and freeze, because I feel like I don't have any energetic boundaries, how does shame manifest for me? What did I do to deal with it - just shut down? It's not like babies can set boundaries or tell people no, that doesn't come until you're a toddler. So, how can I begin to show people an authentic self when nothing has made sense for a long time? Yes, I feel like I've developed a very good false self who can be kind and empathetic, but also falls apart (in the sense that these buried emotions which are unnamed etc come up) when people come close and then need to self-isolate to begin to regulate them. I guess by understanding (and writing out this process) it helps me be aware of what is going on, and what's coming up maybe feels so scary because that's how it felt as a baby or small child (??).

She talks about taking our inner critic offline as much as possible and to begin to look at yourself as a person that makes sense. We learned that our feelings don't make sense, or to suppress some things, to fit into an early caregiving environment.

[NarcKiddo]

I know next to nothing about babies, never having had any myself. But from what I have read, I think babies probably cannot feel shame during the early years. They do not have the cognitive capacity. They don't understand things outside themselves - hence why they can't understand why someone might have a different point of view, or things might be happening in the outside world that they cannot see.

However, I am pretty sure they know how vulnerable they are and that they must look to a caregiver for literally every need they have. I think that if they cry out because they have a need, and that need is not met, they quickly realise the caregiver is not reliable and they cannot be sure of having any needs met. I suppose that to a baby every need is equally important, so if a caregiver is unreliable in dealing with one need it probably follows to the baby that there is no guarantee any need will be met. That means death and the baby must do whatever is in its power to get needs met. Silence may have better results because the carer does not get so angry if the baby is not screaming. Or the baby may simply resort to shutting down because expending energy in screaming is pointless if the need is not met.

I am working a lot with my T at the moment on feelings which seem to be replicating how I must have felt as an infant. It is quite interesting because I have very few early memories (before age 6 when everything went to * and I remember more than I care to) and of course I don't remember being a baby. I have had to piece together what it must have been like from what I know of my mother and what little I have been told. This has always slightly worried me, because I wonder if I am just making it up. But my mother is currently exhibiting very reprehensible attitudes and behaviours around relatives who are vulnerable because they are sick. This is making me very upset, far more so than is logically warranted. I have come to the conclusion, with my T, that this is bringing up feelings I have had before. I will probably journal these myself but I wanted to mention it here because it fits in very much with what you have written.

[Armee]

Thanks Dolly. Your bolded aha insight makes so much sense to me in a family dominated by personality disorders and although I never thought about it it rings very true for me to, that we learned to soothe the other's emotion when we felt bad instead of ours. Hence yes obsessive caretaking and doing for others and then feeling worse and worse. Explode-y was how I labeled it. Because there are so many emotions mixed up at once. Thanks for these insights and links.

[dollyvee]

Thank you Nk and Armee.

I think what I'm trying to understand, or comprehend, is how this stuff I experienced as a baby manifests for me now because underneath it all, I think some of my core emotional reactions are stemming from there. I agree that babies can't feel shame, or don't cognitively know that "I am bad" yet. Though I wonder if it is the beginning of that feeling somehow when we're not responded to, or receive misattunement. I guess the anxiety I felt as I became conscious that I was the little girl in "memory" I had at the pool is probably pretty close to how it might manifest. Just a kind of panic/high alert.

I discussed the book with t and she said it looks like you were ready (to hear? I can't remember the exact phrase) this. I guess it's taken me time to seperate from my emotions and be able to have some space from my dysregulation, but I don't know if it's like I've cognitively/consciously come to this place. I feel like this stuff (these emotions and anxiety) are very much frozen and only come into consciousness through specific interactions, like romantic interests.

I don't know if could willingly access these things to work on them. It's like in that memory, they flash into consciousness and then a brief moment of anxiety, and then I guess I dissociate them, or they're gone. I know t has talked about things like preverbal trauma for years, but it's like I could only grasp them after it I read it in the book and it made sense rationally. The connection survival type is disconnected from their body/feelings and "tend to relate to others in an  intellectual rather than feeling manner." I feel like maybe things are blocked off unless they come through the rational filter, or am in that mind. She talked about feeling things in the body and it made me uncomfortable. I think it's going to bring up issues of being gaslit in my family when I talked about things before that I wasn't comfortable with. It was always, it's not that bad why are you making such a big deal out of it (ie your feelings are not valid). The thinking mind is also not overwhelming and I don't want to not be able to function.

Anyways, some thoughts for Sunday that have been kicking around the past couple days

[Armee]

I also wanted to thank you for the links to Dan Brown. My therapist has slowly been introducing me to the ideal parent protocol and had sent Dan Brown doing that video meditation version. The bells he used made me jumpy so I stopped but may work up the nerve to try again. And I enjoyed the interview podcast you posted.

In a way I can't help but think maybe babies can feel shame. If you are a baby and cry and need food or a changing and your parent comes and is quite noticeably upset that you have needed something I can't help but imagine that shame would be learned pretty quickly from a few interactions like that.

[Hope67]

 

[dollyvee]

Thank you Armee and Hope

I've had a whole thing here that I wrote about the sessions in the HFDT book that have disappeared. I will repost  when I have more time but it's been very powerful stuff to read.

[Larry]

 

[Hope67]

Hi Dollyvee,
How annoying that you lost what you wrote, and I hope that you are able to re-write it again, should you wish to do so.  I wanted to say that I related to what you said about how you'd been working for 9 years and then feeling you can process and take in stuff now - I very much feel the same - I have read some books about a similar time ago, but haven't really felt that the content has been as meaningful - but currently, I feel like I am able to take more of it and process it more. 

I was looking in your journal for the author of the book you mentioned, called 'Healing Developmental Trauma' and I can't see the author, despite trying to look - could you let me know who the author is, as I'm interested.

Thanks 
Hope 

[Hope67]

Hi again Dollyvee,
Just to let you know that I have found the book you mentioned, and I've ordered it, as it looks really good, and I am intrigued after hearing your enthusiasm for it - it sounds really useful.  Thanks for sharing your experiences with it so far.
Hope 

[dollyvee]

Thanks Hope  I'm glad you managed to find the book and hope it will be useful for you. For me, I feel like it's a missing piece. I am very much a fan of IFS, but at the same time, it also felt like there were things going on (in thee body etc) that I couldn't "control." This book does a good job of outlining what those things might be and how they originated.

For example, it talks about how people with the connection survival style are very much "out of their body," and operate from a sort of dissociated rational, or at times, spiritual understanding. When I brought up the book with t and its emphasis on very young/preverbal connection and trauma, and how I related to that and understood it now, she said it was like I was now "ready" for it. However, and I want to go back and explain this to her better, but I don't think it was a matter of being ready for it before. I think it needed to be in a "rational" form (researching for example) for my mind to understand it. It's like the emotional part is cut off, and even if I wanted to access these things, and I feel like I have been very much wanting to, there is a split and it's just not available to. Something similar came up with the Somatic IFS book I was reading where it just didn't make me feel great, and was very much in the body. So, I stopped. There's not a facet that let's me titrate this connection (to body/emotions for example).

A later chapter in the book describes the work happening in sessions between the therapist, Aline, and the client (right word?), Emma. They had been working on expanding Emma's tolerance to build connection and begin to trust Aline, using neuroaffective touch and beginning to name, and open up the emotions Emma was feeling. However, due to a scheduling issue, the work comes to a stop as Emma feels closed and "contracted." What is interesting is that Emma explains, "I know consciously that you haven't done anything wrong, but my body doesn't know it." It's like the body is independent of the conscious mind.

Some nots that I made during the chapter, which I think are significant to me, but not sure how much sense theyy'll make. These are things I identified with about the process:

 - after the connection was broken, Emma angrily condemned herself and wondered how she could have let herself open as much as she did, felt shame that she had allowed herself to care for Aline, and berated herself for being a burden

 - while the connection was inittially developing, Emma felt that it was dangerous to let herself need Aline, and a fear of dependency on her because she could just disappear. "She was terrified that I would drop her if she let herself trust the connection...and wanted reassurance that it was safe to trust the connection"

 - when asked what made her lose her sense of connection previouslyy, Emma explained that, "people freaked out and she ended up taking care of them and their upset; they said it was my fault and that I was too sensitive; they never listened to me." When she tried to talk about the lossof conenction previously, she was attacked for being overely sensitive and demandiing, or too needy" (and weak for me)

 - Aline felt that if there was any chance of the connection to be restored, they "both had to honour what was going on inside her without any time pressure, without any judgement, or preconceived idea of outcome."

- Aline also told Emma, "we don't know what will happen, but I want you to know that I trust your sense of what you need. I trust that you know what is right for yourself, and am open to what you might need from me. I want to remind you that we have an agreement to be truthful about our inner experience."

- Aline also urged Emma to "stay with heer feelings, even if they were feelings of mistrust and disconnection. She could retract and peek out of the corner of her eye and see that I was still there. She needed to feel them and not be rejected for having them."

The bold emphasis is mine. I feel like there's a sense of agency with this approach that is important. It's not something you "should" be doing, or I should feel this way (or I will be rejected if I do etc). Sometimes I feel like t and I butt heads when I'm explaining something (my experience) and I feel like she's maybe trying to direct it in a certain way. On the one hand, I know I'm open to other peoples' ideas etc, but it's like this part of me is adamant about something and I think it's because no one ever said those things to me; that it's ok to trust my own experience etc. The pressure about me needing to be a certain way I think is also very strong, but also subconscious. Around romantic interests, it comes to a point where I consciously understand that I will be ok if they reject me, but something is also frozen and unable to do things for myself because it might bring about a rupture.

This idea of agency is also very important I think. However, I think agency has been confused with selfishness growing up, and the idea of being selfish after being in a narcissistic household gets distorted. T talks about a healthy selfishness, but maybe the idea is healthy agency? Where I have empathetic agency, but also realize it's ok to do things for myself. However, there is also the other end of the spectrum where I do everything on myy own because it feels better that way.

I think this is mostly what was in my missing post. I'm looking forward to bringing this up with t and seeing what she says.