Living As All of Me

[HannahOne]

 
"an organization of how I had come to understand the world growing up. And that control is a part that wants to stop an exile/feeling from coming up."

Dollyvee, I think you're right.
I am going to sit with this.

It may be preverbal, an unconscious agreement. A defense. An exile. "I'm not fleeing from feelings....." LOL. Ok, my love, HannahOne, ok.

Maybe I'm not consciously driving myself this way to flee from feelings. Yet the effect is a blunting and evasion of feeling, replacing some feelings with others, replacing grief and rage with "exhaustion" and "I can't feel my arms," replacing despair and a feeling of aloneness with fear about not doing enough, worry about my "mental health" or workout routine, or anger at myself for not achieving X goal.

The dissociation is clearly a protection from feeling, "I can't feel my arms." And I've been having these grieving crying jags, which I think are much needed, I feel regulated after, it's old grief, it's old stuff. The crying jags feel regressive, I wail like an infant. And I have to do it in my car, LOL. Nowhere else alone, or while driving, to keep some other driving part online, I suppose lest I give into it completely? A fear of falling completely in. So I drive myself hither and yon, while crying from the inside out.

I'm going to notice more, both the protection and the exile. How I adapted to a way of being, as you say.

Thank you for your honesty and sharing your experience.
I am deeply grateful and profoundly moved at how other survivors get it. After so many years of therapy where the therapist just so often couldn't get it. I have never shared with anyone but a therapist. So finding you all here is just a whole new world for me. It is a new experience to feel included in a world of people. And amazing that other people have similar experiences to me. And can understand.

I never find that others have a similar experience, my experience was always so alien. Others talking about jobs and clothes and I mumble along, while my experience is a hall of distorted mirrors, ambitions about jobs and clothes while not feeling my arms, nodding and trying to block out internal wailing, yes yes the HOA, taxes, and the cost of gas....Not so here, where I can have an actual conversation about the real me, All of Me, and it connects to the All of others who can converse back about their experiences of the reality they know of being themselves.
 
 

[sanmagic7]

hannah1, i think it's remarkable how our minds/brains have come up with ways for us to be protected, including from feelings.  staying busy could certainly be one of those; worrying, anxiety, OCD, doing too much, too little, tv, phones, gaming, eating too much or too little or unhealthy, and on and on.  i think the key is balance.  i think the first step is realization, which it sounds like you might be close to.  i think the hardest part is actually recognizing, then feeling those feelings, get them behind us.  very rough stuff, indeed. i've had a really difficult time w/ this last part.  and the realizations have knocked me down as well at times.

while it's not always possible to find balance, depending on what's going on in our lives - for example, the very poor don't have very many choices to propagate balance - we can do what we can and know we did that much.  it takes time, it takes work, it has its ups and downs, but when we keep chipping away, whether it be over days or years, the results come.  sending you love and a hug filled w/ a series of chippers, each a different size, for when you might be ready to utilize them.