Papa Coco's Recovery Journal

[Papa Coco]

San,

That's a really good question. and before I answer it, I want to say that I read your response, and DollyVee's response over on Chart's journal, and saw a lot of wisdom about how ChatGPT was NOT a therapist, and NOT a human friend, but more of a simulator. Like a flight simulator, it was a therapist simulator.

The information I received when I was in a serious panic on Saturday night at 1 AM, was not with a human who was connecting with me, but was good information, collected by a robot from the various books and websites published on the internet. It was presented to me in conversational format through an algorithm. The good that it did is real, but it was not a soul-to-soul connection. It was information, and rather than it giving me a page to read from a book, it interactively sequentially fed me the steps toward body regulation.

I did recognize all the steps as being similar to what my therapist has given me any time that I've EF'd in his office, but because it was 1 AM on a weekend and my therapist wasn't available, I used a therapist simulator: AI. Simulators are excellent tools for mimicking reality and teaching human bodies how to react. Flight simulators teach pilots how it feels to fly an A320 or a 747 through hailstorms with an engine on fire so they don't have to learn it in a real hailstorm with an engine on fire. The simulator feels real. The pilot's brain knows it's a simulator, but the pilot's body thinks its real, so it learns. For Christmas, my 11 Y/o grandson got a driving simulator that he can sit in and feel the vibrations of the wheel, shift gears with a real clutch and gas pedal while his car slides, and crashes. As a result, he has suddenly gone from last place to first place during his weekend racing on the real track with real cars.

I need to roll back what I said in my last post here. I retract my statement that ChatGPT was my best therapist. That's not true. It was a simulation that helped me when my therapist wasn't available.  It helped and I am grateful beyond words that it calmed me down and kept me from requiring medication to survive the night. But it's my actual therapist who has always been, and continues to be, the best therapist I've ever had. My human therapist gives me what I really need; to be felt by another human. I need to feel felt by other humans to feel like I'm connected and safe.

That being said, San, in answer to your question, no. I am beginning to feel like I have never physically grieved the complicated and dark life of my youth.

What I learned through this entire experience, from the moment my safety was breached, and my life was violated by thieves, is that I can now see clearly, that I try too hard to muscle through my past violations by pursuing information with an insatiable need to understand it, fight it, and control it. I have a box of books (I wish I could show you a photo, because it's a surreal heavy box of books) that I carry with me everywhere. I read and read and read. I refer back and underline and take notes. I ask Google, ChatGPT, therapists, you all on the forum, over and over and over to try and tell me how to understand why I can't find peace. While the information is helpful, learning is not the same as just giving the body some peace every now and then. Grieving happens when the crying happens. And the crying can't happen when I won't stop trying to push through the pain.

I learn and learn and learn, and then I share it with everyone, hoping for helpful feedback... This is not helping me in the area I need the most help in. I need to sit down, quiet down, and find some peace by NOT constantly trying to understand it, but by just letting it flow.

Even just a few hours ago, I read and read and read from Thomas Hubl's book, Attuned. I stopped reading at the end of Chapter 7, where he describes his version of Divine Law: In Hubl's trauma informed teaching, Divine Law is like what we used to call "slowing down to smell the roses." He describes it as being able to slow down and connect with the present moment, and the quiet, natural rhythm of life and the universe. I feel like he took a bumper sticker "stop and smell the roses" and detailed it out, with step by step instructions on how to do that, and why feeling life through our bodies, rather than fighting it through our brains, is not just a bumper sticker, but an actual real requirement for feeling safe and creative and grateful to be a survivor, rather than feeling like I haven't yet survived my past. This is about reconnecting with our bodies to heal the dysregulation that keeps us on high alert when we don't need to be.

In Hubl's, teaching of trauma therapy, when we can stop connecting with the ghosts of the past, the chaos of the present and the fear of the future enough to just settle into the quiet moment of a cozy fire or a quiet apartment or a nice lunch on the sofa, and just let our bodies relax to feel the moment and the vibrations of the world and the universe, that's when his version of Divine Law starts to take effect: creativity begins to flow. Faith in ourselves begins to flow. Peace flows through us. Dread turns to gratitude for life. We breathe and enjoy the sensations of reality rather than the prisons and whippings from our past. When we connect with our bodies, rather than our memories, we feel who we really are, rather than who we thought we were.

I've not been pursuing peace, I've been frantically looking for the logical answers for why I can't feel peace. Looking for answers has given me a lot of good information, but it hasn't brought me peace.

San, back to your question about grieving, I think it ties in with this new realization that I keep trying too hard to rationalize why I can't find peace, and I haven't just learned how to sit down, quiet down, and smell the roses. When I do this, in very small doses now, I immediately start to cry. ChatGPT did tell me that when I started to cry the other night, that it was not from weakness, but from release. As I was letting go of the stress of the moment, my body started to do the grieving, but I was only able to do it for a few seconds.

Summary: ChatGPT is not real, but it's just an interactive book, regurgitating the cache of information available on the internet. The path to peace is in connecting my conscious thoughts with my body and with the peace of the moment. My brain will continue to seek answers, but what matters to me now is that I want to stop the frantic swimming against the current and let my body flow with that current and to gently go with the flow and feel the joy of the moment. That's when grieving will finally come up.

Grieving is not just a word. It's something I need to do, and the only way I can do that is to connect with the peace that passes human understanding and just let the current take me where it's taking me for a while.

[Chart]

I agree with everything you've described, PC. I think there is a place for Everything we're doing. But we need to understand the impact of each modality, AND just how far it can take us. We all need (slightly) different things, or the same things in different measure. AND we need to understand how it all fits together, which is not exactly the same for everybody either...

Finally, we have to understand things on a relatively cerebral (prefrontal) level... AND THEN experience it in our bodies... and finally begin sensing it through our very SOUL.

Ha! There's a lifetime of learning in all that :-) Alice went through it too. Getting out is nowhere near the same as how we got in.

I think San's observation about grief is a good one. But I'd add, grief can't be forced. It has to come when our bodies are ready. But too, my personal experience has been, once I opened the spigot, the frickin' dam literally burst. I sense there's a whole lot more to come out.

 

[Hope67]

I really like what you wrote Papa Coco - about being in the present moment and attempting to find peace there, without analysing the past and the future - just being in the moment - I am hoping to try to do more of that today.

 

[dollyvee]

PC - I'm glad you were able to take my comments about Chatgpt as just another side of a coin, and I would've been equally ok with a response of this is something that I really need to use right now. I guess/think this part of me wanting to offer information is an extension of my caretaking part (fawning 101) who needs others to be safe and ok, so that I in turn can be safe and ok.

I am also learning about grief and understanding that it's a complicated thing. Part of the reading (and well youtube videos on this topic) that I have been looking into this year is around scaepgoating in families and being the scapegoated child. I've started Rebecca Mandeville's book, Rejected, Blamed, and Shamed and she has a chapter regarding the complicated process of grief for scapegoated children because grief is masked by anger, which is easy for the scapegoated child to get stuck in because there is no way to resolve the issues with their family. As I understand it, it's a double bind because they suffer if they remain engaged with their family, and they suffer if they end contact with those they still love. When they finally have their sense of anger and injustice heard, it can give way to grief. This is called disenfranchised grief. As I understand, this kind of anger, and therefore grief, in scapegoated children is also unrecognized because they are the ones that are seen to be the problem (and therefore don't deserve validation).

Please take and leave if it makes sense to you. I'm sorry that you're having to go through the issues regarding credit card fraud, but adult PC seems to be handling everything well.

Sending you support,
dolly

[NarcKiddo]

Your latest post has described a huge part of what I struggle with. My logical brain knows something fine well, but if my emotional brain does not have the experience, and thus the circuits wired in, I will never fully (or even at all) understand whatever it is my logical brain knows. (Wow, that was some tortuous sentence construction right there. Sorry.) So, yes, I think you are on to something. You need to experience peace to understand it. But getting there can be a pretty unpleasant experience. All my life I have tended to avoid feeling my feelings and this has not served me well now it is not a survival mechanism. My T would advise me to feel the feelings and my logical brain was cool with that. But when they hit, those nasty, cruel EF type ones especially, my emotional brain thinks they will NEVER END. So I have to do my utmost to NOT feel them. If I don't feel them they are not there. It reminds me of a pet guinea pig I had years ago. He would hide by putting his head inside his house door. He was convinced he was hiding despite the fact that his great big backside was sticking out of the door. I am now making a conscious effort to feel my feelings, when I can bear to, and am realising that they do go away. Much faster than the ones I squash down and pretend aren't there. I don't think my emotional brain has fully cottoned on yet, but it seems to me that there is no way round feeling this stuff when it comes up. The fastest way is to go through it, not round it.

 

[sanmagic7]

i agree w/ NK that the fastest way is thru rather than around.  i know so many people who have problems, and they use various means to avoid looking at them, feeling the feelings, etc. - shopping, cleaning, working, screentime, exercise - you know the list goes on and on.  i myself have a hard time slowing down, being still.  my D and i were talking about meditating the other day, which i've had low to no success with, unless it was a short guided meditation for relaxing.  she went to a zen retreat once to see if she could quiet her mind, it was terrible for her and she felt like a complete failure until the leader told her that if she simply takes the time to stop 'doing' and sit, even if it lasts a few seconds, she has reached her goal.  the goal being stopping doing things, even if for a moment. 

i took that and went with it yesterday.  i was only able to sit still for a minute, maybe 2, but i was able to come away feeling satisfied.  i think we accomplish a lot more than we give ourselves credit for cuz we only see the big picture and think that's the only one that means success.

so, yeah, stopping during our day for even a minute may not be a bad idea.  small steps, right?  love and hugs

[Papa Coco]

Chart, Dolly, NarcKiddo, San,

I can't express enough how helpful your responses are right now.

Dolly, I have a slightly different take on why you feel the need to help. I feel like we're in this together, and we are wired to share help with each other, and I receive your suggestions as gifts, not as budding in. I've always loved that old quip that says how we have two hands; one for giving and one for receiving. When we use both equally, the healing energy of the Universe flows through us like conduits. That's why I'm grateful anytime anyone on the forum shares their thoughts for the purpose of helping. And I'm VERY interested in reading the book you're reading. What we often call scapegoating, or "Identified Patient", I sometimes call the "Gilligan Syndrome". Gilligan made mistakes that kept the 7 characters stuck on the island. Pretty soon, every time a mistake was made, every single person; all 7 characters, and all the millions of viewers watching that show, just knew to blame Gilligan. In my own life, whenever I'm with someone who treats me like I'm the problem, I start to become the problem. AND when I become the problem, they become surer to just blame me without even thinking first. It's a Confirmation Bias that's shared with both the victim and the accusers. If Gilligan were to somehow escape the island alone, the other 6 characters and the millions of interested viewers would all be suddenly thrown into chaos--lost without the only excuse they knew how to use. The loss would be catastrophic for a while as people were forced to find a new reason for their problems. --I'm probably going to buy the book you're reading. It sounds like it could really help me with my anger issues around FOO and church.

NarcKiddo, That sounds like we share an affliction for sure. In my own world, this credit card fiasco appears to be a karmic lesson meant to help me see something that's always been there, but my head has been in the dark with the guinea pig. I now recognize that my future tombstone could read "85 years of living in panic". I live my life like I'm drowning and flailing for a life ring to grab onto. And as that comes to light for me, I can also see that I've rushed into "cures" in a panic. When I'm in periods of calm, it's because I'm hiding my head in the little house. Then when I'm pulled out of the little house, back into the real world, I actually escalate the sense of chronic panic by panicking for a cure. What we're onto here is a need for deescalation. To calm panic, I need to not panic, but to calm down. 

San, You brought up something I recently heard in one of Daniel Schmidt's amazingly peaceful YouTube videos on his website www.awakentheworld.com. He said that we need to stop DOING peace and start BEING peace. I'm like you and your D. I want instant results, and I can't focus long in meditation. I frantically run toward it, then frantically run from it. I find that, for me, using peaceful meditations found online or through meditation apps, helps me find a few moments of physical and spiritual peace that I hope to increase by repeating. Nueroplasticity is the act of repeating a new habit so often that it forges new patterns in the brain. I'm up to where, if I use the right app at the right time, I can feel peace for up to about 45 minutes now. And back to my comments with NarcKiddo, I feel like this credit card fiasco was a gift from Karma to help shine a spotlight on what the real problem is. I'm in a lifelong panic, and I'm using panic to try and calm panic.

I really like the idea that we don't need to DO peace, but we need to settle into the peace that we are. And if we can stop thinking about yesterday and tomorrow for just a few seconds a day, we can "be" peace for at least a few seconds. And with neuroplasticity in play, we can eventually stretch seconds into minutes, and maybe even one day turn minutes into hours.

I don't know if Karma is a spiritual thing or a deeply wired in sense of balance that, from our deepest subconscious, knows we want to find peace, so it creates learning lessons for us. Karma has been given a wrong reputation that it's about punishing bad behaviors. I don't see it that way. I personally believe Karma is a coach that I've hired to keep creating learning scenarios for me, to help me learn what I need to learn. It repeats lessons only when I'm still not getting it. Like my grandson's driving simulator. Every time he crashes it makes him take the same course again, and it repeats the course until he can master it. My Karma is a gift, either from some universal intelligence, or from my own deepest mind, (I don't really care where it comes from--if it works, it works) but I really, really believe I was attacked by thieves so that I would see how much panic lives within me all the time. I really thought I was in good shape until those thieves showed me how violated and unsafe I still do feel in life. I pray daily for peace, and this chaos is the cure that I have to go THROUGH rather than continue to ignore. This unrest is the answer to my prayers for peace. Thinking of it as a simulator helps me make sense of how I'm being given a chance to go through it finally. These thieves made me go through it one more time. Eventually, I'm going to be made able to accept the peace I keep hiding from now.

The peace is there. It's up to me to "BE" it. I don't even have to find it, I just have to settle into it.

I love you all, and those aren't just words,
PC