Luma’s Recovery Journal

[Luma1123]

It took me a while to find this channel, but I'm glad I did. I was actually wondering where people were expressing the details of their history and their progress and everything in between. Looking forward to sharing some of my stuff here, and keeping track of the good and maybe letting go of some of the bad.

*** UPDATE ***

As a general rule, I think comments of support or validation would be the most appreciated. If I want advice or suggestions, I will explicitly ask for it in the text, in which case please type away!

[Luma1123]

I'll be starting EMDR therapy soon. Maybe within a month, it depends on how quickly I can find a professional. Then I'll have to go through the whole therapist-shopping process. But I've looked into EMDR a bit now, and it looks... promising. Really promising. I don't expect an instant fix, but I'm hoping it can help me with the trauma of the last year and a half.

I lost my job last year as a direct result of funding cuts in research in the US. It was terrifying, because it affected such wide swathes of the local community I'm in. I had spent a lot of my savings moving to a new state, and suddenly I had no income, brutally cut from a role that initially felt so rewarding and exciting to be a part of. Now, I have a new job. It took a long time to get here, and a lot of hard, hard work. The role is almost identical to the one I used to have, in a new company. But recently, a few things happened that put me into a surprisingly strong emotional flashback - an unexpectedly sudden drop in workload (as what happened in the months after the funding cuts but before I lost my job), followed by discussion of how this company is getting bought out by a bigger company, and how that can result in reductions in force. I had a few days of feeling sick and shaky and I couldn't understand it. I could feel myself attributing those feelings to other things I knew didn't make sense. But eventually I figured it out. Luckily, things turned around at work, and now my schedule is busy again. Stressful in a different way, but this is preferable, honestly.

So, to hop back to EDMR, I'm hopeful that it will help me emotionally separate my past experiences from my current job. I really hope it works out. I've only done various forms of talk therapy so far, this is the first, like, trauma-targeting treatment I've done beyond that. I'm a little nervous, but I think it will be good.

[Luma1123]

Another thing on my mind is shame. Specifically, as I read through David Bedrick's "The Unshaming Way", I'm becoming more aware of just how thoroughly shame has permeated my inner life. I have two metaphors that I'm playing with right now to help me describe what it's like living this way—I find that the imagery and visualizations have helped me express and wrap my brain around difficult topics.

Metaphor One: Shame is like a shroud.

Have you ever seen those beautiful, eerie statues of figures draped in cloth? Where you can see the outlines of the people beneath, but the graceful folds of fabric prevent you from seeing any more details than the curvature of the head and shoulders, the extended arms and hands. Shame, to me, feels like an incredible fine, delicate, gauzy shroud. I see it as a dark midnight blue, almost black. It is so lightweight that for years, decades, I never knew it was there. But it clung to me like static charge, like gentle but pervasive magnetism. Shame has always been with me, but it's only since I began reading Baldrick's book that I've started to see it as what it is: artificial, manufactured, made from me, but not for me. When I'm having a good day—or an angry, righteously stubborn day—I imagine that I can see that midnight shroud around me, and that I can fight and tear my way out of it. It would be amazing to see the world clearly without shame in the way.

Another metaphor: a second, parasitic nervous system.

I'm not sure where this one came to me from. But I imagined another network of blood vessels, right next to all the normal ones, tucked away so neatly, so snug. That same midnight black-blue. It's touching every part of me, this shame system, and I have to figure out how to stop feeding it, because when I do feed it, it feeds off me. But I imagine I'll feel much freer, much more loose and unburdened once I learn how to do this whole Unshaming thing. It'll be a lifelong skill, I think, not a "single dose" of Unshaming Way. But that's fine, this is one of those things that will be worth the energy cost of constant upkeep.

Anyways, it's like 9PM my time, and I get really attempted-poetic the later it gets. I wonder if anyone else gets a lot of mileage out of their own metaphors for their PTSD experiences? I should really get into drawing more, I think that'll be helpful, too. Later!

[HannahOne]

Welcome! How do you feel about people commenting on your journal? Let us know if you like responses and what kind of responses you prefer. Some people want validation, others are open to advice or shared experiences, some don't want any response at all. We try to be supportive here but it helps to know what kind of feedback people want, if any.

[Luma1123]

Hi, Hannah! Thanks for asking - I think in general, validation and support are what I would most appreciate. I won't put a hard line against advice, but I will explicitly ask for it if I want some. This is actually a really good reminder, I will make a note of this in the top post

[Luma1123]

Blazed through 1.5 chapters of The Unshaming Way this evening... the chapter on body shame didn't hit me as much as I thought it would, which may have been to be expected, given that my body issues aren't really centered around weight (and that was the emphasis of the chapter, especially around weight and body type expectations for women). But I got to the chapter on Unshaming disturbing feelings, and had to take a break after finishing the very first feeling section: Anger.

"Empirically speaking, what actually is a feeling? It is an organized set of sensory body experiences. Most people use names of feelings in ways that are not helpful because feelings are not the same as our labels. Neither are they solid states; they're in motion. When a feeling arises and gets expressed, it starts shifting into the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. For instance, someone might feel powerful, then at ease, then at rest, then safe."

Why has this literally never been explained to me before?! The last sentence makes it so CLEAR, why expressing the feelings is a part of processing them. It's so flooring, so stunningly simple. God, I wish I'd had a relationship with an emotionally perceptive and empathetic adult as a child. I desperately could have used this as a guide, an explanation, a defense.

"... anger is always just one element of the great diversity of our feelings, not because it leads to anything else; just for itself. Being angry does not mean something is wrong with us."

I really, really love this perspective. An element of the great diversity of our feelings, is such a beautiful and welcoming turn of phrase.

"For some people, it's difficult to make sounds in relation to anger. The idea that anger should be expressed is so taboo that they can't even bring themselves to make an angry sound. That makes working with sound even more important if the person's life calls them to use their voice. Perhaps they're suppressing their anger because they've been hurt by an angry person, or they saw someone get hurt by an angry person. Yet suppressed anger that breaks out hurts people."

Picture me, staring into the camera like I'm on The Office.

" "Do it nicely" means "Never do it." We need a lot of anger—and we need to know what to do with it—instead of being trapped in a shame cycle in which tone and apologies take center stage, while the issue at hand melts into the background, unresolved, unseen, its message unheard. Anger not expressed will almost always express itself somatically. People with unexpressed anger develop symptoms like stomachaches, acid reflux, or tight muscles."

Yeah, no, that tracks.

"A shaming witness teaches people to suppress and be unconscious. Nobody ever gets smarter, wiser, or more adept at navigating emotions amid suppression and unconsciousness. Shame doesn't lead us to be less abusive; it actually causes us to be less in touch with ourselves—our compassion, our empathy, and the shadow we've denied."

Bedrick reiterates this frequently, within and across chapters. Definitely a good thing, and a core message and principle of the book.

Whenever I come up for air after reading from Unshaming Way, I always feel calm, cool-temperatured, meditative, and melancholy. I had an epiphany today that I need to think about more to really internalize: part of that melancholy comes from grief. I see a lot of myself in the people Bedrick describes in his book, and the way these people experience shame. My grief is for all of the suffering I've had under unrealized, self-driven shame. I used to think that I hated myself, and that there was something incredibly wrong about myself that made me hate myself, where other people around me seemed to breeze through life without that same burden. But I realize now that this sense of grief that keeps popping up in therapy and as I read this book, it comes from a deep sense of love for myself. Why would I grieve all the harm I've done myself, however unintentionally, if I didn't actually love me? If I didn't love every age and every stage of me, not just the me I am now, but also the me I was at nine, and fourteen, and twenty-two, and thirty? The sadness I feel is the proof that I love myself, and the self hate is actually all this shame that has to be untangled and peeled away from me instead.