Post-Traumatic Growth Journal

[SenseOrgan]

NarcKiddo
Thanks for dropping by and sharing some of your own experience. I feel so lucky to have found a community with people like yourself. It's so important to be able to communicate about EF's with people who've been there too. It's great you're getting better at sitting with emotions. There's a limit to that, isn't it? Being alone with it is the factor that makes it so unbearable and seemingly forever in my case. That part of the EF is the pinnacle of what went wrong, which is relational. I find it very hard to organize a relational container to provide a safe enough space to process this. It's like no part of me is big enough to hold something of this magnitude on his own. A very good therapist I once had framed it as the feeling having you, instead of you having the feeling. 


sanmagic7
Good observation. That very much happened with the woman who organized the whole thing, who was present throughout. It was all sorts of unsafe for me to be there. As you know, that can get wildly out of hand when psychedelics are involved. Since the shaman was from a completely different culture [Shipibo], and I wasn't much into the shamanic side of things, or the worldview of many other participants, that felt very unsafe. It was an unwise decision on my part to attend. Even though I had talked to the woman who organized it quite extensively via e-mails. When I saw her IRL, I should have walked away. She was a trigger fest for me. Domineering and all over the place. It doesn't get much worse than to be at the mercy of somebody like that, when you're defenses are stripped down by psychedelics. It's a horrible combination with developmental trauma.

The environment triggered such alienation and fear in me, that my paranoid mind came up with that vision. I didn't expect there to be so much ritual involved, which triggered me like mad. I felt utterly out of place. My fawn response went through the roof. And a big dose of freeze was mixed in with it. I was reduced to a terrified, helpless little boy. I temporarily lost a lot of autonomy/ego strength that week and in the aftermath of that.

The shaman himself was actually a nice guy. He only spoke Spanish, which I don't [except for the part where I briefly could a bit!]. Since those experiences involved psychedelics, it's all kinds of unexplainable. A far away part of me remained in everyday reality, and knew the demonic vision was not real. In the midst of it. There was also a moment where the entire group, me and the shaman included, burst out laughing. A very special moment, in the otherwise dead silent, and pitch dark hall. When it was my turn to undergo the ritual that he did for everyone, I uttered "muy comico", which initiated a bit of a rerun of the hilarity for no apparent reason. It was summer 2019, and speaking with you about this now, does help to shed some light on these experiences. Thank you for that. In the end, the * is usually about the relationship with my mother.

I feel stronger today. Not so much in the EF. I wrote the below last night. It feels like I've taken some power back from the overwhelm again. Thank you for being a factor in that. 

*********************************************************************************************************

Today I spent a couple of hours with a questionnaire. A friend wants to know if he's on the autism spectrum. I'd be surprised if he isn't. If I would be asked why, I wouldn't have an answer straight away. I'm intuitive. It takes time to English or Dutch that. I just tap into that and try to translate until it feels "right". My shrink tends to believe it's perfectionism. To me it's wanting to say something that I actually agree with, and filtering out the rest.

The way I tick has been a great source of suffering. I remember drawing a translation machine in group therapy. It was tied to the ocean floor with a chain, and the machine itself was being smashed around by the waves, while it churned out unintelligible characters. Many years later it struck me how well the image captured how I often felt. The irony was that the group session ended with the therapist and the group putting pressure on me to accept some story they had formed about it. What I remember is that I felt completely misunderstood. The very kind of lonely and powerless desperation I had tried to communicate with something else than the words I couldn't find for it. A whole group of steam rollers drove over me. No space for my experience here either. No space for me. Client centered therapy. Looks great on paper. I still don't regret honoring my experience and refusing to swallow the force-fed meal. Not in that, and not in any other of the gazillion times this sort of thing happened. Sure they all meant well. And it was a very painful rerun of the invalidation that had pushed me to this place to begin with. The only place that was available for me at the time.

In all therapies in that clinic, the idea seeped through that being mentally ill is some kind of wrong view or missing insight. I never understood how clearly intelligent and professionally trained people could navigate with such a reductionist premise. Even though there's a place for questioning the patient's beliefs and experience, this kind of angle inherently further undermines the very thing which has been damaged or even destroyed by abuse. It's the opposite of helping a person to trust his inner voice and self-validating his experience. If the therapist doesn't believe in the client, who will? A therapist not placing his bets fundamentally on the self-healing capacity of the client has not understood what healing means. That is dangerous, with so much power and so much vulnerability confined in a tiny space.

Being at the mercy of these people, and having them deepening the invalidation, and insisting on self-abandonment made me want to scream at them. I did a couple of times [not that I could translate what I felt so clearly]. It was all pathological in their eyes, off course. That's how they labeled me. It was re-traumatizing to be in that situation. A whole year. I chose me regardless. Over and over. That was what I considered actual therapy. Not what was presented as such. Anger is hard for me to express. It evokes a lot of anxiety, and it takes a lot for me to go against the shame that keeps it festering in a hidden place. I don't regret ever trusting my gut over any kind of psycho babble.

Many years later I understood that a good enough therapist has faith in the patient himself. A lot of people are afraid of not knowing, of letting go. Therapists are just like people. There's a place for top down. Not so much in "treating" developmental trauma. The best therapists I had were very good at attunement, and not afraid of any emotion. It's a specific blend of humility, compassion, courage, experience, and wisdom that makes a good therapist. A prerequisite is having done a lot of your own work first. That makes up a significant proportion of where the rub is, I'm sure. Inevitably transference does kick in. As a patient, therapists basically tried to teach me how they themselves deal with difficult stuff. Which most often was a version of altering the story around it. That's not how trauma stops ruling your life.

How about those feelings being the story that needs to be finally heard? How about experiencing that buried reality in the presence of an attuned other being the very thing that sets free? How about not abandoning, about not choosing fear once again? How about staying? How about opening your own heart and connecting from a human, vulnerable place yourself? I can go on and on. I met a lot of therapists who are afraid of themselves, and therefore didn't bring their heart to their job. There's no such thing as professional distance and being there for a human being in great need at the same time. A traumatized child or a regressed adult smells that from miles away, even if it doesn't happen on a conscious level. Safety can't be faked. What kind of healing will happen if that basis isn't taken care of? Any person in touch with his own emotions doesn't need to be taught that. It's very taxing to be a therapist. Because it requires you to show up, and welcome things in yourself that get triggered. Like "failing".

They blamed me for not getting "there". Like I was a recalcitrant kid sabotaging his own treatment. I was asked what I needed to feel safe. So they did pick up that I didn't. On the surface, it looks like a good question to ask. But it not being obvious that the angle they came from prevents that foundation to get established, makes that a very sad thing to say. If you ask a desperate child that question, you are stating that you are not attuned to him. That itself is the seed where attachment trauma, and thus the danger in connection, sprouted from. How therapeutic is it to recreate that environment and to blame a traumatized person in your care for blocking his own progress?

Because I listened to my gut, I knew exactly what I needed to. Even though I didn't know it intellectually. I'm so glad I didn't let these people in any more than I did. They had no business there. I guess that what I refer to as my "gut", or my intuition, is a bit like that ocean floor the translation machine was anchored to. It has always been my connection to home. Deep below all the turmoil. The sense of belonging is infinitely greater there than what anybody tried to convince me of. No words are needed to make that clear. Just like you know when you're at home. Because it's me.

[sanmagic7]

very insightful stuff, SO.  so glad you went with your gut all those times.  unfortunately, the therapeutic field is filled with too many people who are unaware of what trauma contains, what it's made of, or what horrible consequences it's left on a client.  and, dang, my dander was raised about blaming you for not 'getting there'.  that's never on the client.  rather, it's that the therapist doesn't know (yet or ever) how to help the client get to where they want or need to go.

unfortunately, it's a mindfield (i know the word is supposed to be minefield, but my fingers spelled this out instead, and i think it fits, too) out there when it comes to getting proper help from professionals.  my very first therapist ended up being a NPD, but of course i didn't know anything about me or any of this stuff at the time, and took her word on everything as gospel, so to speak.  it wrecked me, i pressed charges against her with the state board eventually, (it took me 8 yrs. to be able to finally get up the courage) and they told me i was correct in doing so. 

so, yes, going w/ your gut is so important.  i'm glad you can see more clearly now, even if you weren't able to do so at the time.  and i had to wonder inside what a bossy and controlling anybody was doing at a shamanic ritual in the first place!  so we live and learn.  i'm glad you made it out, and have made it thru until now.  keep going, ok?  love and hugs