Living As All of Me

[HannahOne]

Thank you NarcKiddo for reading, it's good to know you are there. Thank you SanMagic7 for reading and for the reframe! Thank you, SenseOrgan. "Despair that passes for drive." That's what it was. "The absence of urgency feels like something is missing." That's it. And yes, how to adapt? How to feel at home?

I hadn't thought of it as self-abandonment but that's what it is. The part that thinks going to the wildlife center will make it good, undo something, make me someone it didn't happen to, it's the same old habits dressed up differently. It's so tricksy because there's nothing wrong with going to the wildlife center and it could be a good and fine thing to do. It's just whatever I do gets quickly coopted by this drive. And then the thing becomes another battlefield, a battlefield within me.

A battlefield is not a home.

I have been focusing on choice. To embrace the possibilities, to do as Yitzak Perlman did and play with what is left. The power to decide. I choose.

All my life growing up I was trying to win in an impossible situation. I was living with a man who always had to win, who would win a snowball fight by grinding my face into the snow. I was four. Beat me not with fists but at every game we played. Followed me running for 12 miles and then blew past me in the last 20 feet. Winner takes it all mentality.

Now I have the power to decide what winning means. I can even decide that I've already won! Hooray! Trophies and gold stars for me!!! Now what else is there to do.... I can decide the rules of any game. I can decide surgery is winning, because I foreclose some bad possibilities. I can decide what being a woman means and that I have won at womanhood, lol. I can decide that not needing to support the family right now with a career is a win. I can decide being able to depend on someone is the ultimate winning.... 

Or I can choose not to play! 

How does it feel to be carried by the wind? To not push the water? To not decide good or bad? To flow with the course of events? There is a fear that if I am not "doing" I am dissociated. If I don't see myself actively doing something, I become afraid.

I just don't "know" "how" to "be." My mind can't know how to be, as being is not thinking about being. As soon as I connect to Frank, there I am, being. He doesn't push the wind. But he does have a directed energy, a bit of a routine, ruled by biological needs. When you mention the hierarchy of needs, SenseOrgan, maybe that's part of the home.

Maslov starts with food, water, breathing, warmth. Then "safety and security," which he calls a job, property. Then love and belonging.

But I dunno. For me I feel it starts with basic safety from imminent harm. I don't eat if I don't feel safe. And neither does Frank. I don't sleep if I don't feel safe. First I have to feel safe from imminent threat. Maybe I'm splitting hairs.

Safety from imminent harm. Then eating, sleeping, breathing, warmth, shelter. Then connection, belonging. For me that's how it is.

Maybe that's what I have to know/feel, that I am safe right now. Can eat, can sleep. If I could believe that and feel it, this drive that is despair might sit back more. How to help myself feel it, believe it? I can't think my way into it, talk myself into it. Maybe some plant medicine is the only way

Thank you so much for sharing your experience. I continue to ponder.

[HannahOne]

Ask and you shall receive. SO, I just saw the IPFP post you made. I have been working with this for a few months.

I wrote recently about having been my mother's therapist. In SenseOrgan's post, it said "How Does the Ideal Parent Figure Protocol Work?
A neuroimaging study at University College London found that the brain processes things we experience and things we vividly imagine in very similar ways. In theory, the IPFP might work because vividly imagining a secure, attentive caregiver can give your brain the real experience."

That's part of my trauma. My mother is right, my life was better than hers. But by graphically describing her horrific abuse to me when I was 2, 3, 4, 5, when she was totally dysregulated and sobbing into my hair, my brain experienced it.

One of my therapists, when she retired, made me a recording to listen to. It helped a lot. I still use it sometimes, or just think about her. She was very proactive, very expressive. Her hands moved, her eyes, her head tilted, her voice went up and down. I was fascinated by the body language, facial expression and tone and drawn in. I needed that proactive presence.

Although I Struggle to do this for myself, to be and feel safe, I was able to do it for my kids. Really do it, biologically. Be safe for them, feel safety in my body so they felt safe. I was like a giant mother bear, fat and happy, rolling around, sucking honey off my paws with not a care in the world, except these babies. The hormonal bomb of birth is so powerful, all that oxytocin, the dopamine high of delivery, all of it. Breastfeeding only continued the chill, the prolactin making me relaxed and sleepy and happy to spend two hours sitting around while the baby slept, nursed, slept nursed... I had no drive to get up and do, then. Was in a perpetual pool of being and being-with. Felt very safe. Solid. Present. Real. So much "Ooooh! THERE's the BA-by!" and "Upsie do!" and "Ooh ooh ooh!" The baby says "ha", I say "ha." Going with the flow. Not directive, no drive. Following the wind. Time stretched out long, and also stopped, both at the asme time. The milk pooled in concentric circles, like a meditation chime's resonance. Skin to skin. eye to eye. Roll over, roll the other way. No thinking.

Now I have no estrogen at all, LOL. I feel like a witch, a crone. I dont' feel a caregiving bone in my body. I'm so far from that state of bliss. Maybe part of that state was also severe sleep deprivation, LOL. Luckily my kids are young adults now! And don't need a blissed out Earth Mother caregiver whose body and psyche is entirely on loan to them at all times. I know menopause also cost me some of my chill, some of the haze of love. It's good to come out of that, because love is, in some ways, blind. Now I see some of what I gave up to mother, and I'm getting some of it back, and it's time for that. To everything a season. But it's interesting that I could "be" when my kids were younger. It was truly a different gear. Maybe much of it hormonally driven.That's part of how plant medicine works, too. DMT/aya shifts prolactin. Prolactin was the magic hormone for being present.

If a small part of my trauma is having been hypnotized by my mother's trauma, and the profound fear that engendered not only because of the content but because my own mother was not safe, was falling apart, disintegrated in front of me....

Maybe part of how to "be" again is to hypnotize myself with the IPFP. I already was doing it with the recording of the therapist who most embodied for me the ideal parent insofar as she was so proactively present, so responsive, so active with me.

One thing that's not working with the current therapist is she is so much a blank slate type, and very non-expressive. Very much thinking. It's not her fault. I just don't need more insight, I need someone to play relational therapeutic footsie with me, someone to lean back when I lean back, sit up taller when I slump, someone whose eyes naturally widen, narrow, someone who thinks with their hands. I need much more presence and responsiveness right now and it almost doesn't matter what we talk about.  I don't even need to talk about trauma or try to get better. I just need someone very responsive.

I'm seeing a new one next week in the city, it's a schlep but I"m going to try it.

In the meantime I'm going to listen to my recording and spend a little time with IPFP. Being with IPFP. That's being with All of Me, not just the driven part. Naturally the baby begins to move away from the mother and explore, but the baby isn't "Driven," it's called, pulled, moved. There's a difference. And the baby always returns to the mother to check in. That's the dance of attachment, a dance I want to do with myself. It's not about go or not go to the wildlife center.

[NarcKiddo]

One thing that's not working with the current therapist is she is so much a blank slate type, and very non-expressive.

How long have you been with the current therapist? I only ask because I would have said mine leans towards that approach, but I have been quite surprised to notice recently that as I let her in she becomes more responsive. I tend very much to being the blank slate myself and perhaps she has just been mirroring me all along. That may not apply to you of course but I just noticed much more connection in my session with T yesterday, and then came on here today to read your post.

I loved reading about your experience of being a mother to your children, of being safe for them and with them.

The imagination study is interesting, and speaks to another study I read about (or maybe it was part of the one you reference, I don't know). Anyway, the one I read about was fitness related and it said that if an athlete is injured they can retain much more of their muscle strength and ability by imagining the exercises they cannot currently do. Really, really imagining them. Getting into gym gear if necessary. Mentally feeling the load on each muscle and how it moves through the body. I tried that approach after gallbladder surgery when I could not lift weights. I was going to the gym anyway to do rehab work and then I would just lift a broomstick. I don't know if it helped but I certainly bounced back very fast when I started with actual weight again.