Papa Coco's Recovery Journal

[HannahOne]

 
PapaCoco, so much resonated with me. Letting go of achievement orientation and moving toward relational orientation. Maybe it was hard for we with CPTSD to access relational orientation, since through relationships we were wounded. Through years of healing, we can access this new compass, new direction. That is not a bad thing! Here we are.    

[TheBigBlue]

[sanmagic7]

back atcha, PC.  loving this connection aspect you're integrating, love the idea of connecting w/ people who care, who share, who are real - and can enjoy rice together!  love and hugs

[SenseOrgan]

I'm so happy for you Papa Coco! Just great! 

This organic algorithm churned out the following:
Your shift tells me that relating can be/is safe for you now. That's no small victory, considering your rough history. Just like other human beings, you are wired for connection. Finally it's safe enough to be you, so connection can actually be possible. The need for it was there before, but it manifested as loneliness. Because it couldn't flow in a hostile environment that shaped and carried survival patterns far into the future.

There's no need to become a worthy person through achievement anymore. There never was. No more need to push away the actual you, because he was met with such incredible hostility. No need to deny your worthiness by attempting to earn it. You are worthy by definition. Right out of the box. The people you grew up with greatly obscured, but couldn't erase that. It's starting to shine through for yourself. Despite it all.

I think this shift towards connection is a fundamental part of what Pete Walker referred to as "from surviving to thriving". We can't be fully human in isolation. Even if that isolation exists in our own mental prison only.

Congratulations for making it here. Welcome to the human race, that you never were not a part of. Welcome to your rightful, honored, appreciated, enjoyed, and valued part in the greater whole. Right where you belong.

Much love 

[sanmagic7]

  

love and hugs, as always!

[dollyvee]

When I lost my job of 42 years, and turned it into retirement, I realized I had also lost interest in over achieving. All my hobbies fell away. I lost interest in classic cars, kayaks, bicycles, making money, remodeling homes, taking vacations, exercising, etc. I literally believed that I had accomplished everything I ever wanted and still had to keep breathing anyway. I felt like this was a massive depression that was probably never going to stop. I would read about chronic depression, and have believed for 6 years now that I'm just a depressed old man waiting to die. 

PC, perhaps this was the next step for you? I may have quoted it before, but there is a lecture that Tenzin Wengyal Rinpoche gave where he talked about the loss of identity, and how sometimes you go through situations where your identity is tied up in an idea about your life --ie you are your job, your relationship, and when you lose those things, you lose your sense of identity. Perhaps you are not depressed, but mourning that loss of identity? Perhaps, it was created, or focused on to keep you from other aspects of yourself that were too painful to face?

When Things Change: Releasing the Pain of Grasping
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10kUW8oZH2w&list=PLaSy-g6A5sG3Jvh8Ru5k--D_0VUlZPpEw&index=14

Sending you support,
dolly

[Papa Coco]

Thank you everyone for the supportive responses. Before I connected with you all on this forum, healing was stalled. Now that I have so many wonderful connections with like-minded people, healing is actually getting some traction. I think that healing is a never-ending-journey, but we can choose whether to be on its path or not on its path. On my bedroom wall, I've hung a sign I printed myself that reads "The Journey IS the Destination" so as to remind myself every day that I'm right where I need to be, and that each day still has more healing for me. I expect that on my deathbed in 30 years, I'll still feel like I have more healing to do. But I'll be so much more healed than I am today when I get there.

Using the Ai tool as a research tool has been giving me a lot of good help as I work through my lifelong identity crisis. Dolly, I'll watch that video later today, it looks interesting and timely for where I am on my journey. I'm exploring my imaginary world now. I'm finally tired of using fantasy situations to help me fall asleep at night. I write a new book every night in my head as I'm falling asleep. Always the same plot line: I'm an abandoned or orphaned teenager who's so traumatized, I'm completely lost. I meet an adult man who rescues me from abuse, and we become inseparable friends for life. I finally admitted this fantasy to the chat tool two days ago, and it's helping me to research it.

It says I'm doing something called "bedtime stories" where I use my imaginary daydreams to comfort my nervous system with a story that has a happily-ever-after ending so I can sleep. It's also giving me gentle suggestions for how to guide the daydream toward integrating my abused teen with my rescuing adult so that I can lose the need for a new fantasy ending to my real-life childhood.

I call these two repeating characters teenage Kyle and young adult Tuck.

I sort of knew this already, but the research tool is helping me to see it more clearly, that Kyle is my child Self and Tuck is my adult Self. Psychologically, I'm still trying to rescue myself. I'm learning, through all these deep books I read, that life is designed with critical milestones, and when we don't satisfy any milestone, that milestone becomes "stuck energy" that stalls our emotional development, and even causes chronic repeating of old situations because that energy keeps revving up for us to satisfy.  When I watch child prodigies; 10-year-olds, 12-year-olds, 14-year-olds, who are accomplished musicians, singers, inventors, writers, even semi-truck drivers, I see clearly that we grow up as fast as our families let us grow up.  When I was 10 I couldn't get my parents to let me have a new bike, or even to go out and get a paper route or a lawn  mowing business because I was just a baby and I was just being stupid for thinking I was smart enough or competent enough to handle a bike or a paper route. NOW I'm the grandfather of a Racecar driver. He's about to turn 12.He's been racing real cars on real racetracks since he was 9. His parents (and grandparents) are letting him guide the pace that he's growing into manhood. My family chained me down to my childhood and didn't allow me to grow up, so I ended up in an endless loop of finding myself as a tween again, still waiting for permission to be a man.

I was about 60 years of age when I finally stopped being ashamed of calling myself a man. If I ever called myself a man, I'd turn beet red and go hide in shame for an hour somewhere. That's a case of a series of unresolved milestones in my own God-given right for development.

The research tool is helping guide me through some ways to start finding resolution to the emotional stall points of my past development cycle from baby to old man. It's helping me to blend my young Kyle character with my older Tuck character in my bedtime stories, and I'm finding that it's working faster than I had believed possible. Last night I tried to restart the bedtime story in hopes that Tuck would save Kyle and I'd be able to fall asleep, but found that the whole story was boring and not needed. I fell asleep without the bedtime story.

I often call our healing processes our "journey of a thousand steps" because it helps me to feel like I'm in the right place as long as I'm taking the next step toward my goal of thriving rather than surviving. In such a journey, no step can be skipped. If I were walking across the US from Seattle to New York, I can't decide to skip over Idaho. I have to take every step, or I leave a huge part of myself stuck there at that step eternally.

Amazon was once testing robots here in Seattle area to see if they could deliver packages without trucks and drivers. One day I was driving past one of these robots on a sidewalk beside the road. It was confused. It was spinning around in a circle as if it couldn't decide which way to go. It appeared to have come across an obstacle that stopped it in its tracks, and it couldn't get past that spot. I quickly saw that as an example of my own walk through my maturity. Big parts of myself are stuck on a sidewalk somewhere in my memory, still trying to get past an obstacle I don't know how to get past. 

My grandson and these child prodigies I see on TV and the Internet every day are all the proof I need that when we are in supportive, loving families, we grow up faster and better equipped to build strong adult lives on strong childhood foundations.

Through a combined multi-pronged approach to healing from books, therapists, treatments, this forum, and Ai, I'm learning that there really are ways now to go back through the cracks and obstacles of my youth and find resolution to many of the obstacles that have kept me trapped in my childhood. I will say that every now and then, this Ai Tool I use, reminds me that there is great help if I'll join a forum like this one, find a trauma-informed therapist, and even participate in EMDR and IFS therapies. That's helpful for me because it proves there is merit in all these things. I haven't told the tool yet that I already do all those things. It's suggesting them because it doesn't know I already do them.

When I think of eternity and infinity, I come to the conclusion that if I have eternity ahead of me and eternity behind me and on each side of me, up-down-and-sideways, then from an eternal/infinite perspective, I really AM at the exact center of the Universe. Center means equidistant from all edges, right? The world insults people who think they are the center of the universe, but in reality, that's exactly where each of us really is. We ARE the center of the universe, and as such, we DO deserve to be loved and respected and happy. So, I think about that from time to time to help me feel like there is no shame in admitting I am important enough to deserve healing from what other damaged souls did to damage me in the past.

The Ai tool repeatedly reminds me that much of what I'm going through is common for anyone who was scapegoated as a child. Where I am, is where scapegoated souls go. This knowledge comforts me. Someone not only understands my journey, but they know how to help. What a relief. I'm no longer the scapegoat and it's not my fault that I became one when I did.

[HannahOne]

PapaCoco, I'm so grateful to read your experiences from "further down" the road, or from "above" the storm. It's so helpful to see how it unfolds.

I loved reading about your discovery of a Time Machine, the flexibility of how healing can in fact flow backwards. While I spend a lot of time accepting that I can never be a person to whom my past did not happen, I also spend a lot of time sending love and care backwards to "inner children" is one way to think of it, or to past me, or to parts of me. Seems paradoxical to both insist that the past is unchangeable and also to be intent on changing it. But both are true.

And it does work. Maybe because we're more imaginative, I don't know? But the visualizing, imagining the rescue, imagining meeting the unmet needs, is profound. 

And isn't so inspiring to see the next generation and the one after, in the case of grandkids, making their way? And our inner kids, tweens and teens delight in it too, get to touch it all again, from THIS side of the storm. 

[Papa Coco]

Hannah,

I agree with you big time.

I'm a tried-and-true believer in IFS therapy. It's been inimitably helpful as I resolve one old story after another in my own life. I'm sometimes shocked at how many times I was belittled, shamed, and left to fend for myself in this world. But as I do the IFS therapy with my therapist and explore, through reading, the neurological evidence of how the brain holds these stuck moments in time and continues to relive them until the day comes that we address them with love and validation, I'm able to find a bite of healing almost daily. It just floors me to see how much I've been through--how much all of us have been through. It seems like every time I think I've finally reached the bottom of my IFS parts bucket I find a whole new layer of parts waiting for their turn to be felt and loved by adult me.

It's good to read that you and others are finding this way of dealing with stuck past energy works for more than just me. My understanding is that the actual originator of the concept was Carl Jung way over 100 years ago, but the concept went quiet until Richard Schwartz revived it, named it IFS and began teaching the world how to benefit from it.

I never would have believed, as I do now, that we may not be able to change the past, but we can change its meaning. And that's even better. I don't want to change the past. I just want to overcome it and embrace it as the roots of my raising.

I am who I am because of every, single, solitary thing I've ever been through. If I could change the past, I'd become a different person today, and I don't want that. I just want to be a better-informed person today. One who takes the difficulties from the past and uses them to forge a more compassionate and empathetic present-day man.

   

[HannahOne]

I am who I am because of every, single, solitary thing I've ever been through. If I could change the past, I'd become a different person today, and I don't want that. I just want to be a better-informed person today. One who takes the difficulties from the past and uses them to forge a more compassionate and empathetic present-day man.
 

PapaCoco, wow. I aspire to this. I'm not quite "there." But I'm getting "there." If there is any there to get to To fully want to be the self that we are seems the deepest of healing, while wanting to be better informed, compassionate, and present-day seems the deepest of acceptance.

I'm always a little thrilled to meet someone else who uses the parts or inner children language.

Yes, IFS repackages Jung, Schema, inner children, and other parts work, in what I think is pretty user-friendly way. I wonder if you would be interested in the work of Janina Fisher. I have found it to be the next step for me. She has a number of YouTube interviews, a web site, and a new workbook out. She thinks less in terms of specific parts and more in terms of states: fight, flight, freeze, submit/fawn, attach. She brings in more somatics, which I also found helpful.

Whatever model we use, finding some way to connect with who we once were, being able to defuse from our emotional responses, and bring compassion to them have been far more helpful to me than any "trauma processing" EMDR or CBT/DBT. Sometimes I laugh to myself, why aren't the DBT skills working, why did EMDR not work? Well, which part got the DBT or EMDR? Probably not the exile/freeze part! That part was off hiding while a self-like "therapy" part complied with the protocol to get it over with. LOL. Some kind of parts work seems to me to be much more aligned with the complexity of CPTSD. 

[dollyvee]

Papa Coco,

My thoughts about identity and suggesting the video are that a lot of people experience an identity crisis after they retire, and that whether it be a relationship, retirement etc, when things like this happen it's a good chance to reexmine how we see ourselves and what we might be clinging too tightly too. Of course it's not an easy process. I don't think I've heard you say on the forum before that that you feel like you are an old man waiting to die, but maybe you have shared it?

I haven't told the tool yet that I already do all those things. It's suggesting them because it doesn't know I already do them.

PC, to me it sounds like there is projection in this statement and are perhaps framing what the AI is saying in a light of what you want it to be saying? Because without asking, how do you know a computer's intentions for saying what it did? Could it perhaps be suggesting these things because it thinks that that human connection is more important that a human-machine connection? I'm again not saying this to shame or blame, but as someone who also faces there own struggles in framing things so they don't have to feel something (all the hurt/pain/grief). Again, the machine is built on data and I think our senses for predicting what might happen are very, very different from what is actually going on in AI (those well versed in it can point it out to me).

To me, it doesn't matter if you use AI or not and that the only thing that matters is that you are honest with yourself about what you are doing and why. To me, that's the essence of the self healing journey uncovering and opening all the doors that we have and looking at what's on the inside.

Sending you support,
dolly

[sanmagic7]

PC, as soon as i read the words you wrote about a teen and a rescuing adult, i immediately thought of it as being you then and you now.  that they were both you, that you are able to see your own strength as an adult now to the point that you are able to finally do what's needed to bring that younger you - kyle - up into the world in the way he was supposed to be brought, he needed to be brought, but by a caring, loving man - tuck - to become the best man he can be.  kyle will be brought along by a loving tuck, the best way possible.

i think as we go along in recovery re-parenting ourselves in some way, shape, or form is healthy and needed.  to my mind, it's the only way we can actually fend off those voices of our parents that got stuck in our immature brains (and by parents, i mean every authority figure in our lives who somehow demanded we be someone more to their liking, no matter what that may look like.  it's like our neural networks got frozen in time encrusted w/ neg. messages to and about us, and we can now take a metaphorical sledge hammer to the crust, unfreeze the old, ugly, self-hating messages, and replace them w/ new, healthier, self-loving (rather than self-loathing) messages. 

that's why, as you've been saying all along, we need connections to others, to reinforce those messages we're trying out, trying on, to see which fit and which really aren't in our best interest.  connections and empathy, which only comes from the heart.  we're here for you with our hearts a-flyin'!  love and hugs

[TheBigBlue]

connections and empathy, which only comes from the heart.  we're here for you with our hearts a-flyin'!  love and hugs

       

[NarcKiddo]

I second HannahOne's suggestion that you consider checking out Janina Fisher. I don't personally get along with the structure of IFS but found her approach very helpful, although it is clearly based on IFS principles. The book I read is aimed at therapists as much as clients and I always like that kind of book. As I recall, you do too.

I'm really happy the AI is working out so well for you. It's clear that you are aware of its limitations and dangers and are being careful how you interact with it so the output from it is supportive and helpful. I wonder if maybe that is one of your parts looking out for you. At any rate I think it is important that you are approaching this work from a loving perspective, which you must be given the AI output. If your approach was coming from a place of self-loathing I think the output could be very different, and possibly harmful. So it seems your use of this tool has started at the right time for you - when you are in a good frame of mind to make full use of it.

[dollyvee]

PC, as soon as i read the words you wrote about a teen and a rescuing adult, i immediately thought of it as being you then and you now.  that they were both you, that you are able to see your own strength as an adult now to the point that you are able to finally do what's needed to bring that younger you - kyle - up into the world in the way he was supposed to be brought, he needed to be brought, but by a caring, loving man - tuck - to become the best man he can be.  kyle will be brought along by a loving tuck, the best way possible.

i think as we go along in recovery re-parenting ourselves in some way, shape, or form is healthy and needed.  to my mind, it's the only way we can actually fend off those voices of our parents that got stuck in our immature brains (and by parents, i mean every authority figure in our lives who somehow demanded we be someone more to their liking, no matter what that may look like.  it's like our neural networks got frozen in time encrusted w/ neg. messages to and about us, and we can now take a metaphorical sledge hammer to the crust, unfreeze the old, ugly, self-hating messages, and replace them w/ new, healthier, self-loving (rather than self-loathing) messages.