Blueberry's healing: what's beneficial and constructive for me

[Blueberry]

I did do that round of EFT yesterday but then on the way back home from somewhere, I went and bought some sweet stuff and ate most of it too. Not very beneficial or constructive. I know at least partially where I went wrong - I'd been getting way ahead of myself and planning not to need overeating as a crutch anymore. Boom. That lasted a day. 

It's possible I was tired as well because I did quite a lot yesterday. In the evening I was on a choir outing, just in my town. We visited a church of completely different denomination - Serbian Orthodox. The priest gave us a guided tour and answered questions on their belief system and ways of celebrating. He was very open and very pro-ecumenical services and finding the common denominator. That left a very positive impression on me and I felt happy and optimistic.

Today I still had impulses to do various things - and did so - like laundry and continuing digging up stones and roots in the garden so I can plant some of those plants I have to move. In the afternoon an outing with a different group to play mini golf. Late evening just before dark I did a bit more root and stone removal. I've also decided to extend the bit of garden that's mine, to make up for the bit I have to forego. Up until today I hadn't been daring to do that. Now I am. 

It's progress - taking land that nobody else is using atm and if in the future a new tenant in one of the apartments not currently using the garden much wants some land they can take it off somewhere else, or dig up the middle of the lawn or something. I've had enough of moving my beds around! It actually involves a fair amount of work, due to stones and bricks stuck under massive roots and new trees sprouting all over the place. In order to dig a hole to re-plant something I end up moving a couple of bucket loads of stones/half-bricks/brick fragments/bits of broken glass and roots. In the future somebody else can do that instead of moving into my cleared space.

[Laura90]

So proud of you Blueberry! 

[Sceal]

It's wonderful to follow your progress, Blueberry. You seem so much stronger now than just a short while ago. It's amazing! Cheering for you

[sanmagic7]

well done, sweetie.  working in the garden can be so soothing, too, so grounding.  i'm really glad for you that you have that outlet.

after i told you yesterday i was going to do some eft, i totally forgot.  will do it right now.  thanks for the reminder.   love and hugs.

[Blueberry]

Thank you Laura, san and Sceal. It's so helpful to hear you notice a new strength in me.

For the first time, the heat is getting to me today. I was outside on my bike part of the time between 11 AM and 2 PM which is part of the day they recommend you don't spend in the sun doing sports. I was actually just cycling from home to somewhere and then back again, so not doing sports. But now it's evening and cool again.

So I plan to get up early tomorrow, say 6 AM or at the latest 7 AM and cycle up to the farm where I can do some work in the veg patch before it gets too hot and then I can go into the lovely, cool, cheese cellar and do my work there over the hottest part of the day.

BeHea1thy, I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who makes plans that might not in the end happen I don't just do it around food either. So we'll see whether I actually get off up the road before 10 AM after all. Tho now I'm imagining the feel of the cool, early morning air on my skin as I cycle up the valley and the joy of cycling up this valley - the flowers, the trees, blue sky, the streams I pass. Thinking I should try and remember to do that tomorrow morning rather than thinking that I don't want to get out of bed.

[Blueberry]

Yesterday I was so exhausted when I came on here I couldn't even begin to write anything. I didn't wear my sunglasses yesterday so my eyes are very tired. Why didn't I wear my sunglasses? I thought they might interfere with spying the caterpillars I was picking off cabbage plants and then by the time I was due to ride home, I was feeling pretty listless and useless. Somebody else wanted to do my Friday late morning / afternoon job on the farm so he and a friend who'd dropped by did. It "should" have been OK for me, but it wasn't. I noticed how hard it was for me to find something else to do on that particular day. Too hot to continue with the caterpillars, I avoid cooking like the plague (tends to send me into EFs)... So all in all I felt as if yesterday had been useless. Or as if I had been, more to the point.

I didn't even think of writing on Three Good Things Today thread. That might have helped a bit.

[sanmagic7]

blueberry, i know that there are a lot of you in the u.k. suffering from the heat.  from my experience in the desert, along with hydration we were encouraged to drink electrolytes, to replenish those that we were sweating out.  lack of them can also cause exhaustion, listlessness, dizzyness, nausea, even affect our minds and thinking.  during the summer, i'd drink between a pint and liter of electrolytes daily.

i've mentioned this to a few on the forum already, but i don't know how many people are aware of the importance of these when our bodies become heat-stressed.  i learned the hard way, mainly cuz it took me awhile to understand the effects of prolonged heat, especially when moving in it - even walking, let alone biking.

please be careful.  such heat as you're experiencing can be disorienting at best, deadly at worst.  love and hugs.

[Hope67]

Hi Blueberry,
I would also recommend getting some Electrolytes - and I was so grateful to SanMagic for pointing me in their direction - I've taken some this past couple of days, and it's made such a difference to how I'm feeling - I will be having some more today.
to you Blueberry, and hope you feel better and more hydrated soon.
Hope 

[Blueberry]

OK, thank you both. Not that I'm in the UK, but in a country where possibly even hotter. No cooling maritime breezes anyway. I will look into those electrolytes. It's weird, on some of the hottest days I had an aversion to drinking water even though I generally like drinking it.

I heard today at the farm that there's not likely to be any rain for 2 weeks. Fortunately I'm in a town at a higher elevation (therefore cooler) than most towns and cities in my country.

________________________

I'm hopping mad. My landlord still hasn't got back to me on lowered rent although he is here. His van is outside the building. As a tradesman with school age children, he might have left on holiday without telling me the new rent. Instead he's here and just hasn't told me.

On Saturday while out cycling (to the farm), I decided if he didn't get back to me by today, I'm going to have to do what I originally intended: a clear-out in my apartment and in my office space and move all my office and teaching paraphernalia up into my apartment. This is more work than it might sound. But once done, it will be done. To take the pressure off, I'll probably hand in my notice for the end of the year, or maybe end November since hard to get moving and/or rearranging and/or setting up help from friends or companies at Xmas/New Year.

It makes more sense financially anyway because my parents haven't got back to me on money yet either. They made grandiose claims a number of years ago that "of course" there were no strings attached to any money they passed on to me (or my sibs). But actually there are strings. Even just a few months ago after I'd had a bout of on and off exhaustion (and not capable of dealing with things on my end) enF said that "anytime" I was ready to discuss again, they would get back on the discussion too. HaHaHa. Now that I'm actually discussing and not just accepting my fate, all of a sudden they "don't get round to it". When people show you who they are, believe them.

[Blueberry]

I was going to write this on the Emotional Flashback board because I couldn't see what was beneficial or constructive about it. But then I saw at the end and the post is so long, it can only go in my Journal. Here goes:
I know there's a slight difference between amygdala hijacks and EFs except my brain goes on strike - an EF - when I try to read too closely about it. lol. Slight irony.

Anyway I was involved in a situation on Saturday and as I was thinking it through again today, suddenly the word "amygdala hijack" burst into my mind. There was this situation where I felt responsible and acted on it (with words) but I wasn't actually responsible and one of the people who was responsible was pretty annoyed with me.

I tend to put myself in these kinds of situations so that's why I've been thinking about it. The person's dog (I know the person and the dog) nipped a child at the beginning of a walk we were all going on although the child was told she could stroke it. The child ran off screaming for her dad and when she finally found him, he picked her up and came near to where the rest of us were standing, the dog headed towards them again with a stance which I interpreted as being certainly 'on the lookout'. I spoke to the dog by name and said quite gently "stay here". The dog owner said "It's our dog" in a voice that meant "butt out!". I apologised immediately but she went on to explain how confused the dog gets when "everybody" thinks they can order the dog around.

I felt pretty abashed and sad (although by no means as badly as in former times).

Quoted here on  the forum elsewhere e.g. by Three Roses (from Pete Walker??): "I have come to call these reactions, typical of ... many other clients over the years, emotional flashbacks—sudden and often prolonged regressions ("amygdala hijackings") to the frightening and abandoned feeling-states of childhood. They are accompanied by inappropriate and intense arousal of the fight/flight instinct and the sympathetic nervous system. Typically, they manifest as intense and confusing episodes of fear, toxic shame, and/or despair, which often beget angry reactions against the self or others. When fear is the dominant emotion in an emotional flashback, the individual feels overwhelmed, panicky or even suicidal. When despair predominates, it creates a sense of profound numbness, paralysis, and an urgent need to hide. Feeling small, young, fragile, powerless and helpless is also common in emotional flashbacks. Such experiences are typically overlaid with toxic shame, which, as described in John Bradshaw's Healing The Shame That Binds, obliterates an individual's self-esteem with an overpowering sense that she is as worthless, stupid, contemptible or fatally flawed, as she was viewed by her original caregivers. Toxic shame inhibits the individual from seeking comfort...."

I didn't think I was fighting or fleeing. More like trying to save everybody. Not that I needed to objectively-speaking but looking back to childhood, I had phases where I was desperately trying to save FOO from themselves and then there was the overwhelming theme that I was meant to be able to predict how my behaviour would affect other people and 'force' them to react for which I would then be blamed so emotional survival depended on trying to prevent everybody else and everything else from doing anything inappropriate/dangerous/rude.... At the moment when I spoke to the dog, I wasn't feeling too much. Certainly not blind panic or anger. I had been feeling tension in the air since the dog nipped the child and the tension seemed to be increasing. I also felt worried because bad start to the nice walk I'd been looking forward to for what I was seeing as a short holiday.

I did 3 rounds of EFT in the evening before I went to bed, which helped a lot. I can understand the pov of the dog owner, I can also now understand my own reaction. My own is the only one I can try and change though. In baby steps. Which means trying to 'remember' to give myself a moment to consider whether I'm really the responsible one in a situation or can I take a step backwards and leave other people to sort it out while I sort myself out by protecting myself and my Inner Children emotionally and/or explaining "see that little girl? She's safe in her dad's arms. He can protect her from the dog and he will if he has to. If he's annoyed at the dog owner and her husband, he'll deal with that too. It's his job." Ah, that's the crux of the matter.

Two memories: 1) F not picking me up when I was 3 or 4 and it was the first time I'd experienced fireworks of the type that zoom around the lawn unpredictably. I was in such a panic and he was standing there in the friend's garden chatting and there's me running up to him, trying to show how him frightened I was. I can't remember if I was crying or not but I do remember trying to get his attention by touching him and pointing at the fireworks and moving about agitatedly until he finally 'got it' and picked me up out of harm's way. He continued chatting, I don't remember being consoled or having fireworks explained.  I used to think to myself - could happen to any parent, they aren't 'perfect', can't guess what's up with their children. Even if that were the case - which I'm not sure about for a 3-4 year old coming from a culture that doesn't have on the ground fireworks and moving to one that does - it doesn't mean that the experience didn't affect me deeply, as it seems to have.

2) The one instance of medical trauma I have - something fairly minor actually but how the medical assistant dealt with it and the fact that my M who was in the room didn't protect me from verbal abuse from the med. assistant although I was very young and very ill. We've actually been through this one in therapy. The memory hasn't gone completely but I have no 'need' to write it out in detail. That's interesting, the situation can obviously still be triggered a bit, the memory return, but not so vividly or with so many emotions or numbing etc. And I don't 'need' to be heard and validated any more.

[sanmagic7]

hey, blueberry, i understand that feeling of tension in the air and the urgent need to do something about it, calm the situation/people down, etc.  i've done that so many times in my life.  it's a dreadful feeling.  when i was living in that house last month, the situation came up several times.  a few times i stepped in, just to get those tense vibes out of the air.

but a few times i let it be, and i was so very uncomfortable, my stress levels skyrocketed, and a couple times i needed xanax to get me clear.   i never thought it was my role in foo to do that especially, but i sure picked it up for some reason.  possibly my sensitivity to such vibes was overpowering to me and it was a self-serving kind of thing.

i like your idea of a bit of eft before bed.  think i'll try that tonite.  i sure would like to sleep longer than 4 or 5 hrs. at a time.   maybe it'll help.  i've just slept in chunks for so long, i think my body has become used to it.  possibly some eft can help it break that habit.  we'll see, but thanks for the idea.

love and hugs to you, dearie.  i hope the electrolytes are helpful.  i didn't realize this heat wave is all over europe.  (have been staying away from the news).   keep taking care of you.

[Hope67]

Hi Blueberry,
I read your longer post here in your Journal, and it was incredibly insightful and also - I related to so much of what you said.  Both in terms of sharing memories where a F doesn't provide the care and feedback that a little person needs, and also in terms of your experience of trying to put things right in situations - anticipate people's needs - handle tensions - anticipate the egg-shells and act accordingly. 
I hope that the dog owner's appreciated your attempts to help that day - because your intentions were good - and I'm glad that at least they explained why they were keen to direct their dog themselves - and that they explained to you about the potential confusion to the dog of other people giving direction - but I completely understand your thought that the dog would listen and understand what you had said, I have felt that myself - in terms of feeling that I can 'sort things out' and 'put things right'.
Blueberry - it made me feel quite emotional to read what you wrote, but in a good way - if that makes sense - because I really relate to things you said. 
to you, Blueberry.
Hope 

[Blueberry]

Hi Hope,

Wow, fancy reading through that long post of mine. I'm sorry you relate to so much of it too, but that has been the case before I know.

I don't think the dog's owner appreciated my efforts at all. She's one of the people at the farm and the only one I have to be really careful about. Bit of an eggshell dance. Though to give her her due, I'm pretty sure she feels the same about me and has a lot of trouble imagining how my situation plays out. I think she finds my problems annoying or else she takes out some of her annoyances in daily life whether farm or otherwise on me. If the latter, it's not OK! But so far I've not been able to protect myself. I just stay away from the farm for a week or so, or get sick so I have to.

There have been changes at the farm within the past couple of years resulting in her and her husband no longer being the only ones with a say. Two other (younger) couples do too and they're possibly healthier emotionally, don't feel the need to dump things on me (or on others). They'll say "Thanks Blueberry! You're washing the dishes, that's so great, we're so happy!" But the dog-owner will say "Are you still washing dishes?? Or are you at it again?" meaning "My God, you're slow." I am slow, it's true, but that's one of the reasons I'm not working on the normal job market. If I didn't have the problems I do, I wouldn't be at the farm at all. I think everybody except the female dog-owner appreciates this, I mean her husband does too.

She's always been a bit weird towards me. When I first worked for them on this kind of basis about 15 years ago, anybody who was around was meant to answer the phone. If I was the only person near the phone, everybody else milking cows, driving tractors etc. I'd answer the phone and take a message since they didn't have an answering machine. She told me to stop because I "misunderstood messages", after I reported a potential customer who'd phoned for the 2nd or 3rd time to arrange something and they didn't have any recollection of who that could be and didn't bother to recontact the person. Large scale depression and anxiety = mental defectiveness in some people's minds unfortunately. Or it's just a power thing, Idk. Their 7 year old child still answered the phone though  taking business calls (customers, potential customers, other farmers...) and that was fine by them.

I'm realising now bit by bit how she reminds me of uBPDM and SIL2 but not so strongly. She's a bit unpredictable and tends to order me around like a sergeant major, something she doesn't do to most others who work on the farm, e.g. the two younger couples who've joined it. I will maybe manage to just ignore one of her orders some time or say "I'm doing something else" or even "I'm taking a break, ask somebody else". None of that's easy. I still have visions in my head of FOO reactions - making fun of me, telling me how "childish" my reactions are. But since I managed to set that other person who does painful handshakes a limit despite all those FOO voices / ICr, this is probably just on the cusp too 

When I'm not really thinking straight with the new thoughts and realisations of my healthier Adult, I think I can sort things out especially because I think I 'have to'. That was one of my roles in FOO: the scapegoat family 'saviour', responsible for everybody's happiness or relaxation and responsible if they weren't happy / relaxed. I don't know if that makes sense when somebody else reads it.

I had a pretty strenuous session in T today. It was on something unrelated. I need to let it sit for a day or two before I can write anything about it.

[Hope67]

When I'm not really thinking straight with the new thoughts and realisations of my healthier Adult, I think I can sort things out especially because I think I 'have to'. That was one of my roles in FOO: the scapegoat family 'saviour', responsible for everybody's happiness or relaxation and responsible if they weren't happy / relaxed. I don't know if that makes sense when somebody else reads it.

All of what you wrote makes sense to me, Blueberry - I can definitely relate to what you write in most instances. 

That owner of the dog does sound like she's challenging to interact with.  I always think it's helpful to listen to a 'gut-instinct' about things, and that is often based on pieces of information that stack up to create that gut-instinct, and you've given quite a few examples of the ways she's been when interacting with you.  Seems like there are double standards - she treats people differently depending on their relationship to herself, even to the point of allowing her 7 year old to answer the phone to business people etc.  Not appropriate really - no matter how 'mature' the 7 year old might appear.


to you, Blueberry.
Hope 

[Blueberry]

Thanks for your response Hope 

_______________________________

I'm feeling all burned out this morning. One good thing however: when I got up and couldn't be bothered to do anything, I realised and told myself that that is typical after a really heavy-duty therapy session. It usually takes a day or two to start to sink in and then I get these mild to heavy-duty EFs. So still get up and start slowly doing things. 

I've caught the exhaustion a bit earlier this time around, so I don't feel the need to write on Difficult Day board. I'm staving off some of those difficulties e.g. by not responding to new mbrs or Difficult Day posts. I know other members on the forum will do so in time.

I'm continuing to clear things out - paper and books so far. It feels quite good to do so. There's still a lot to do, but step by step I'll get there.