Learned Optimism

I have a cousin William.   Although we’ve grown up separately only seeing each other a few times in our youth, we’ve lived mirror lives, unbeknownst to us.  Charismatic, intelligent and warm hearted, with the same  desire to leave the world a better place for having graced it, he’s burdened with the same anxiety, sense of inadequacy, and unguided driveness that fuels impulsivity and foolish mistakes.   While his physical features resemble that of his father and not my aunt, my features are strikingly more similar to our grandfather, but yet we share our grandmother’s mental DNA.

Like a scientific study of twins separated at birth, the similarities between us speaks to the power of genetics and the impact of family dynamics.  Our mothers, who were sisters, recreated the same environments and family dynamics with out ever really speaking.  To what degree things were different or worse for either of us really doesn’t matter, because we both hurt just the same.  Begrudgingly, we’ve become products of our environments.

In the the 1960-70’s famed psychologist, Martin Seligman coined the phrase “learned helplessness” to describe the phenomenon in which animals give up their attempts to avoid adverse experience because they believe there is no way to avoid it.  Locked in a room with no escape, they suffered electrical shocks again and again.  Believing they were utterly helpless to escape their pain, they eventually stopped trying to avoid pain or escape, even when a door was wide open before them.  Instead they just adapted and braced themselves for the painful stimulus, rolling over on their back and placing their feet up in the air because electrical shocks hurt their back less then it did on the tender pads of their paws.  They adapted to survive but failed to see the opportunity to escape.  This term applies to humans as well, but in humans our minds take things one step further and we tend to blame ourselves when the things go wrong.  We suffer pain and it is our own fault.  Learned helplessness.  It should be a diagnosis that exists in one of those big manuals used like a cookbook to label individual inflictions.

Voices in my mind rage at me right now: “What do you mean I could have made a different decision?”  “What?! I had other options?” “You mean I could have avoided all this pain and I didn’t have to be this way?”  So many times the doors to escaping my madness was open before, me but  I just lay on my back, hands in the air waiting for my electrical shock.  Separated by thousands of miles, growing up not knowing me, William’s done the same thing.

While our addictive behaviors and actions aren’t connected to illicit drugs or alcohol, we both developed unhealthy ways to cope with our distress.  Speaking to him yesterday made me understand why people in recovery from addiction need to find a sponsor, someone who has walked the path and can hold out their hand, supporting and encouraging, without judging when we fall.

Changing is uncomfortable and usually hurts, but so does getting shocked when you do nothing about it.  I remember how it felt when I started to understand this.   My world and reality swirled around me, feeling groundless with nothing solid beneath my feet.  I  began to understand that I had a choice and could change.  The world and  others in it were not the way I thought, and it turned out that my survival behaviors actually made the situation worse.  Slowly I’ve began to realize how and why I hurt and that allows me to learn how to stop and change.   The thing I never understood was that every time I gave up and allowed myself to endure the electric shock, it wasn’t just me who felt the pain, it hurt those around me.

Late in his career Seligman began to add to his theory and identified the flip side of helplessness and described what he called  learned optimism.  The notion that things are not always our fault, but yet we are still responsible for getting ourselves out of the situation that we are in.  So, I’ve learned that when a door is wide open, take a step outside.  Do not be frightened by the vastness of the world beyond your cage.  I know it hurts to stretch your arms and it takes time for your eyes to adjust to the bright light of the new world that you will see, but if you take advantage of the chance  you’ve been given, your hurt and anxiety can start to subside and that will bring comfort to those you love as well.

There But For…

Isaac Newton. Ludwig van Beethoven.  Winston Churchill.  Abraham Lincoln.  Ernest Hemingway. Vincent Van Gogh.  John Keats.  Virgina Woolf. Peter Tchaikovsky. Albert Einstein. An impressive list of some of the most prolific minds of our time.  Making revolutionary contributions to the fields of science, mathematics, literature, art, and political leadership.  All are interwoven in history by the common thread of mental illness, be it depression, mania, or some other mood disorder, these individuals who in many ways graced the world with their presence paid a high price for their success.  From the outside it appeared  if there were a deep well within them, one that taped into an eternal spring of creativity and imagination endlessly inspiring.   Yet each one struggled with the pain of feeling different and socially awkward, feeling disconnected from others, and suffering bouts of melancholy and sadness.  Does genius or creativity cause madness or is it the other way around? And, if these people with such amazing minds struggled with their own demons, perhaps I can be more forgiving and accepting of myself for having to battle with mine.

Empathy is an interesting thing, it can be highly developed or muted completely.  People with autism struggle to experience it, not because they wouldn’t want to if they could, but their brain just doesn’t register it.  Children who have been abused struggle to  with it as well, although I suspect they feel it more than they let on.  Research suggests that empathy converts to our compassionate actions and those actions are what allows others to know we feel for them too.  In the book, The Other Side of Sadness, George Bonanno, Ph.D describes psychological studies that demonstrate that people who are experiencing sadness see reality more clearly.  During my own bouts of depression I had often thought that but dismissed it as delusional or simply self pity.  It is a difficult experience to describe because depression can fog and cloud your mind, it causes fatigue to the point that your body aches and even breath is labored.  How can that greyness of make things more clear?   I think it is because when we feel sad, our emotional defenses are down and we are willing to examine painful things that we’d prefer not see when our moods are good.  When you are happy and enjoying yourself, why would you want to stop and think about the fact that young women are still being sold into sexual slave trades in foreign countries?  When you are celebrating your child’s birthday, why would you want to stop and think of the family who’s child is gone, or who’s mother is dying?  Empathizing with mother’s pain is hurtful to us, but when you are already sad, what have you got to lose?

I was reading a research study last night that describes the way that our faces react when we are feeling sad.  Our pupil’s constrict, our eye lids droop, and our mouths turn slightly down.  All of these are involuntary, our body betraying the inner workings of our mind.  But then the research study went on to say that by simply empathizing with another person, our body can mirror theirs, our pupils constrict, our eye lids sag, our  mouths form a pucker…we see things through their eyes. But we must choose to perceive it, we must accept that sadness is there.  That interests me because sometimes I feel as if I am a mix between a radio receiver and a sponge, feeling intensely things that I see.  I remember sitting at lunch on Mother’s Day several years ago observing a women a few booths away.  Alone and cloaked in a shadow of sadness she anxiously and frequently checked her watch.  As I watched my heart filled with sadness and I simply wanted to cry for her.  It felt as if there was a psychic bridge between us and I could not help but be distracted by her.  It distracted me so much that I could not carry on a decent conversation, I lost my appetite.  Some times I am haunted by the memory of her and my failure to say a kind word.  I wish that I had asked her to join us, I wish I had silently and anonymously paid for her meal, but instead I kept my head down and pretended not to see her.

In hindsight I’ve never lacked empathy, I’ve just failed to let it be seen by withholding  compassionate actions.   There but for the grace of God go I…perhaps those are words I should live by.

 

Seeking Serenity. No Escape and No Going Back

As I think back on my life I get a sickening feeling in my gut as I realize how many precious moments I have squandered, trying to escape from the present, perpetually spinning my wheels and getting no where, instead of seeking acceptance and resolution.   It is embarrassing and humbling to admit that I vehemently clung  to the belief that I could escape from my self hatred, remorse, guilt, and depression in the same way that  a child clings to a favorite blanket, soothing them self with it and screeching as if their life were ending when someone takes away.  I laugh in disgust at myself as I reflect on the times  I would drive by offices in tall buildings that lined the streets of large cities and think to myself “if I had a job where I was important enough to work there, THEN I’d feel happy and good about myself.”  I used to think that if only I were loved tenderly and attentively enough “THEN I’d feel happy and good about myself.”‘   If I had the perfect house and landscaped yard “THEN I’d like myself”  if I took a relaxing vacation, if I had different friends, if I had better hobbies,  if I were a size zero…THEN I’d like myself.  Some how I’ve actually managed to accomplish all of those things but not a single one has made me feel a better person or like myself any more.  If anything, I feel more foolish for having been so ignorant and naive.  All these external “things” that I had constantly sought in the hope of constructing a perfect life, believing if I did then I’d fill the endless void  that exists within me,, were never enough.   I’ve finally realize that I’ve been looking in all the wrong places for all the wrong things.  Actually, I shouldn’t even be looking at all because I need to just accepted that I may always feel horrible about myself.  Even if I don’t feel awful I now understand that every life, even the most perfect one, has  hurt  in it sometimes and life is about coping with that fact.

When life gives you lemons make lemonade right?  Not only did I compulsively try to make lemonade, but by inadvertently forcing moments in a desperate effort to create their perfection, I sweetened the drink so much that I ruined it all the while hanging out a banner for the world to see brandishing “LEMONADE!  LOOK AT ME! LOOK WHAT I’VE DONE!  I’VE MADE LEMONADE! I SHOULDN’T HAVE BUT I DID! AREN’T I GREAT?!   I never stopped to taste it myself, because what did my opinion matter?  If I had I would have realized that it was spoiled.  I never enjoyed a drop of it.  Instead of seeking attention, instead of seeking validation, instead of seeking escape, I simply should have sat back, quietly, and tasted the freshness of the juice I had squeezed.

As I survey the scene surrounding me I see the carnage from my battle with myself.  I see deep and gaping wounds I have inflicted to those I love,  through friendly fire.   I never intentionally sought to hurt anyone, but now I understand that it happened anyway as a result of  being a weak and vulnerable person.  I get so angry at myself and the way I’ve lived my life.  My weakness and vulnerability were not a conscious choice.  I didn’t want them, I railed against them, I sincerely tried. In my rational moments  I understand that this way of being is the natural consequence of growing up with neglect and abuse.  I don’t think it excuses away the hurt or damage that I caused, I don’t think that it reduces the pain I have caused others, and that makes it all the more difficult to explain or to find a way to forgive myself for not being any different.  It’s like having a stomach bug that contaminates the ones you love  before you even realize you are contagious.  I’ve had my turn to writhe in pain and wretch as the disease works through my system. As I recovery and regain my strength, I see those around me fall weak and ill, their discomfort paramount because of the disease I spread.   I have moments where I believe that I am a contagious disease.  Loving me comes at a high cost, consider yourself forewarned.   If I could simply disappear and have all of the pain and hurt go away, I would.  When I think about the moments in the past when I had considered ending my life, for the same motivations and pain that I feel now, I understand that the only difference between the degree of panic, fear, sadness, guilt, remorse, depression that I feel in this moment and the past is that I no longer hold the delusion that if I simply disappear, the pain of others would stop as well.   I think back to the moments when I was on the verge of death and realize that I actually believed that others did not love me as much they really  do.  I thought that it genuinely didn’t matter if I just were no more. That manner of thought gave me the luxury of believing that nothing I did mattered, that there were no consequences for my actions.  But Newton’s law holds true…every action has an equal and opposite reaction.  I should have paid more attention in physics class.

So, now I sit with pain and guilt with the wisdom that there is no escape.  This is my penance, my punishment, living with myself despite the self-hate.  I can’t go back, I can’t undo the things that have been done.  I get so angry with myself that I can look back on things with such clarity now, but was so blinded before.  I realize that I simply didn’t have the ability to understand before but I still hang my head in shame every time I am asked:  “How could you not know that?”   The why is complicated.  It is so complicated, but in the end I just simply didn’t.

I want to find excuses to make my hurt and guilt lessen. But even if I am granted a pardon from my past, that doesn’t mean that those I hurt will feel any better because of it.  I struggle to cope with this reality.  As my weight continues to balloon, I realize that instead of starving myself, I now eat to comfort and numb my pain.  I can see the pattern most moments,  but when my panic or frustration mounts, without thinking  I consuming empty calories for no other reason than to satisfy a craving, making the ache within me go away for a few brief and fleeting moments.  Unconsciously, it works, but it is a temporary feeling, it never fixes the problems, and definitely doesn’t heal my pain.  I am so angry with myself for not having the ability to tolerate distress.  I can’t help but wonder what is normal and how other people cope with pain and misery.

Just recently I have started to remember things that make me understand that my struggles with food go back longer than I had realized.   Last evening as I was grilling hot dogs for the group of children splashing in our pool, I had a flash bulb memory  of being 6 or 7 and reaching into our refrigerator and grabbing an Oscar Meyer hot dog and eating it raw, repeatedly.  Then I remembered that I  used to eat uncooked pasta, ice, dirt and grass.  I used to suck on pennies and the metal tops that connected the erasers to a pencil.  I liked the taste of metal.  I don’t remember why I chose those things instead of real food but recall that I ate those things throughout my teen age years.  I remember that I liked the way the grit from dirt felt grinding on my teeth, I liked the metallic taste of the coins, the hard crunch of the ice and the way it hurt my mouth.  I liked to eat the grass just because I knew I could even though I shouldn’t.

Until I had children of my own, I never realized how abnormal those things were. That is painful to accept.   But not as painful as accepting the fact that some sort of pain and dysfunction that was not my fault drove those behaviors.  It is hard to say “I was a victim” because it makes me feel vulnerable and weak, as if my failure to admit it some how makes me stronger, safer, and means none of it happened.  But normal children with normal lives don’t chronically eat weird things. Why would I have done it otherwise?  Maybe infants and toddlers do, but they out grow it.  I never did.  Instead it just evolved and grew with my chronological self, while my emotional development was stunted.  I am so ashamed as I sit with the awareness, recognizing that so much of who I’ve been and what I’ve done just is not normal.  The origins of my thoughts and behavior are so clearly rooted in my childhood, but what difference does that awareness make when I’ve simply perpetuated the hurt inflicted upon me?  I understand why Alcoholics Anonymous starts each meeting with the serenity prayer…because it’s what I need to do as well.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.

–Reinhold Niebuhr

The Best Way Out is Through

This weekend I retraced some childhood footsteps while visiting a summer vacation spot that was a favorite for my family.  When I step outside of myself I realize that this experience has released a current of emotion within me, as if a large boulder holding back a river shifted gently, allowing a stream of water to rush past it.  Once the boulder has been moved from the secure place it has always been, the water gains momentum and builds up its power, rolling the boulder further down the river to a new location, widening banks and allowing more water to rush past.  My emotions and memories are like that water, gaining speed and power, threatening to flood me. I know it, I feel it, the way you sense it when you suspect that you are being watched but you can’t see anyone.  You know there is someone watching, but they are just beyond your view?  I know I have these that I just can’t reach.  Like a river that appears calm on the surface but with a deadly current underneath. I am numb on the outside masking the danger down below.

I find myself still wanting to deny my abuse and trying to blame myself for misinterpreting the things that happened.  Like a person in denial that their loved one has died, they fight to accept it, believing that if they refuse to believe it, some how they can keep it from being true.  I try to blame myself instead, directing the angst inward, with accusations of simply being weak or selfish, or just too sensitive. But this  attempted logic directly conflicts with they way things really are.  I began to read about attachment disorders in adults, it describes me all too well . http://www.buzzle.com/articles/attachment-disorder-in-adults.html  Whether I call it complex PTSD, DESNOS, or attachment disorder the end is all the same.  How can I have the myriad of symptoms unless some abuse and neglect occurred for me? I don’t want to accept it, I don’t want to be that person.  I fight like a caged tiger, I don’t want to believe it. (Poof my mind changes gears) . . .  “A tiger…a tiger…can never change it’s stripes…this can’t be true . . . I don’t want to be a tiger” (poof…I flip channels once again) . . . “run away and hide.”  This desire  consumes me.  I want so badly just to simply run away and become someone different, become a hermit and recluse, to stay hidden from the world.   Depression so intense I  simply long for bed, curled beneath my covers, dark yet warm and hidden.  The presence of these thoughts serves as an indication that my denial isn’t working.

My mind, thoughts, and feelings vacillate so quickly.  One moment I feel numb, then I blink and  feel fear, something hurts, then sadness, then (poof . . . ) where did it all go?  “Look this is the place where daddy had gotten drunk . . .what a tornado?  We are only in the tent . . .Daddy wake up, we need to get to shelter . . . Mommy why are we  leaving him. (poof . . .) Oh, wow, look at these beautiful dragon flies that have just landed near me, they are mating and their bodies form a heart . . . how miraculous to see this, their blue colors shimmer brightly . . .

(hearing a my child’s laughter). . . (poof again) . . . I’m doing okay, my children seem happy, they are laughing, I must not have screwed them up too badly . . . (poof. . . ) Why do I feel so much anger hurt and rage? ”   Just like that . . . as if I were changing channels but instead of simply watching television from an unemotional place, my emotions change with it.

I can feel the psychic crack widening within me, the abyss expanding.  I feel unsettled . . . I feel crazed . . . I feel frightened.  Yet if you saw me you’d not know.  I’d appear calm and detached, maybe a bit distracted and I’d find some way to spin my words in order avoid describing the angst that I feel and then be angry because the listener believed it.

I am tired of being so toxic. It hurts to change and become something different, yet it hurts staying the same.  The best way out is through, but going through it isn’t easy.

Chasing the Snake

If you were walking through the woods and were bitten by a poisonous snake would you react in anger and chase after the snake so you could attack it or would you recognize that you are hurt and must tend to your wound and try to seek the necessary medical care?  Which type of person are you and how do you really know?  If you said, “well, I’d seek medical attention of course” can you think of moments in your life where you have acted differently?  And if you said “well, I’d get that snake” did it occur to you that you have been gravely injured and that by chasing the snake you might die instead?   I am the type of person who says “I’d seek medical attention of course” because I know that is the wise and rational choice, but in the moment that I get bit by the snake, I get so mad I can’t think straight and sometimes chase the snake.  Admitting that feels shameful, but it is the truth none the less.  So, I must ask myself:  “Do I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear? Pema Chödrön

In her book, The Dance of Anger, Harriet Lerner states “Sometimes, however, even when we are ready to risk change, we still keep participating in the same old familiar fights that go nowhere. Human nature is such that when we are angry, we tend to become so emotionally reactive to what the other person is doing to us that we lose our ability to observe our own part in the interaction. Self-observation is not at all the same as self-blame, at which some women are experts. Rather, self-observation is the process of seeing the interaction of ourselves and others, and recognizing that the ways other people behave with us has something to do with the way we behave with them. We cannot make another person be different, but when we do something different ourselves, the old dance can no longer continue as usual.”  I think she’s right.

Pema goes on to say “The only reason we don’t open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don’t feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else’s eyes. ”  When I think about the moments that I have acted upon my emotion instead of  thinking clearly and calmly making a good choice it has always been because the emotion I felt was too large for me to contain.  So, how exactly does a person learn to “lean” into the emotion, to ride it out until it fades when it is easier to make a rational choice? How do I stop my dance with anger and be different myself?  I suppose it happens one moment, one experience at a time.

But my ability to do so will only come through the letting go of anger and resentment and learning to forgive.  Mahatma Gandhi says “The weak can never forgive.  Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”  I understand why.  I have spent so much of my time seeking the forgiveness of others that I never realized that I needed to learn how to forgive them myself.  To forgive them for their failures, their intentions gone wrong, forgiveness for their reactions to their own hurts, and how I often times made it worse.

It is comforting knowing that forgiveness is difficult for everyone to learn and that my inability to do it well isn’t another burden from my chaotic childhood.  But I might have to work a little harder at it.  I was reading an analogy for marriage from the IMAGO dialogues where it describes marriage like two partners canoeing across a calm and placid lake that turns windy with waves picking up.  Should you continue to paddle the same way that you paddled when it was calm?  If you do it will not work.  If one person stops paddling and criticizes the other, the boat might capsize and both partners will get wet.  Harvey Hendrix, Ph.D says, what ever you do, stay in the canoe and just keep paddling.   I cringe at the analogy and think too myself “Oh My God” as my head hangs down discouraged.  I hate canoeing.  It is an argument I’ve had many times with my husband before, I hate canoeing for that exact reason, it’s why we bought kayaks.  I’ve always giggled at the fact that people call canoes “divorce kits.”  But the analogy says more about me than of marriage itself.

Harvey goes on to say “Empathy is the most powerful bonding experience you can have. It restores the experience of connectedness and union, overcoming the “illusion of separation.” The experience of connectedness is the goal of the process. This is difficult for most of us,
since in childhood, empathy was lost because of the emotional pain of frustration or abuse. Pain turned our attention inward, and we became self-absorbed. This is the single deepest tragedy of life–the loss of empathy and the emergence of self absorption. With the loss of empathy, we experience ourselves disconnected from others and from the world. We live in the illusion of separation.”

After writing this I spent some time reading websites about the loss of empathy due to chronic child abuse and the effects that abuse has on the developing brain of the child.  I read how the part of the brain needed for empathy is often less integrated in children who have been abused.  I read about adult attachment and the effects of a damaged childhood and I just feel so afraid and so discouraged.  It’s not just that I need to learn how to canoe with others, but the stupid canoe is on a lake at the top of a mountain and I’m in a canyon chasing rattle snakes staring up at it. A long sigh escapes me as I realize that looking up at it in frustration doesn’t get me any closer to it, but making one small step at a time will.

What does normal anger look like?

Have you ever wondered why hurt and anger, fear and pain are such powerful influence over human behavior?  Why do these emotions drive us to do things and be people that we normally wouldn’t or aren’t?  Have you ever, in a moment of anger or fear said or done something that you regret then afterward questioned yourself?  “Why did I do that?”   Or have you ever watched someone you love be transformed into someone they are not because of the hurt and grief they feel? Our primal, animalistic brain gets triggered and we become so very different.  The fight or flight response exists for a reason.  But how do you survive when your switch has a hair trigger?

When you have a trauma history the world becomes very different.  Sometimes without our knowledge, slowly the exceptions become the rule.  Our brains change as we repeat the same patterns over and over again.  It doesn’t matter whether we are the victim of abuse, combat veteran who watched their buddy die, or a police officer who responds to calls for domestic violence.  Eventually our brains change  in response to what we see and feel.  The change is beyond our control, it isn’t a matter of weakness.  So why do we blame ourselves and deny that it exists because the denial only makes it worse and doesn’t change anything.  Once we realize that we are different than we thought,  how do we get to know the person we’ve become and what, if anything can we do about it.

I read an article today that said that due to the course of anger, you often don’t realize the consequences of it until it is too late.  I had no idea that was normal.  These days I do a better job of managing my anger before it hijacks me, but for years I never realized that was what had even happened.  I just felt so enraged and so violated by what ever had just occurred that I was ready to fight without realizing it could have been avoided.  I suppose that is one of the consequences of living with PTSD.   My anger became my unwieldy weapon turn inward and out towards others.  But now that I have better control of how I react, I’ve come to realize how difficult it is for me to experience other people’s anger.  It terrifies me. I never realized that just a simple raised or angry voice would cause my spine to shiver.  I didn’t understand that a simple grimace or annoyed stare would make me want to cower.  I had no idea the power that other people’s anger would have over me.

And so, I find myself in a situation where I still don’t know what normal anger is.  While I have learned to manage my anger, it doesn’t mean that I have figured out what is normal or healthy to endure at the hands of others.  I don’t know when to say, “excuse me, you are angry, this conversation is unproductive and I am going to go somewhere else and give you some time to calm down”  and when to simply cower and shield myself from the emotional blows.   I have a tendency to do the latter, to fall into the helpless role and then just take the punches, a response that ran rampant in my last career.   I allowed myself to endure the anger from people who couldn’t control their tempers because I thought I was being a bigger and stronger person by accepting it.  I became a victim of my design.  In the end all I did was subject myself to experiencing bad feelings that I could have avoided. But yet I so frequently reacted in other ways that brought it on myself because I felt so hurt and angry.  It is that vicious cycle that occurs between two people.  I felt hurt and angry so I react in a way that hurts and angers you.  Your response then fuels my rage and then the dance goes on.  How do you stop that pattern and when do you simply just move on?

It hard not to be angry at life because it is such a struggle to learn how to have a healthy boundary with others.  My understanding of how people treat each other was so distorted as a child:  Love hurt, anger hurt, families hurt each other, loyalty and friendship didn’t really exist because you simply needed to survive.  I never realized that the effects of abuse became so entrenched within me.  I never thought that I would still be trying to escape it.

Amazing Grace – Part 2

 

Victor Hugo said “Music expresses that which can not be put into words and that which can not remain silent.”   I have a variation of the song Amazing Grace and at times it is unrecognizable because of the seemingly random, chaotic noise of musical notes colliding with each other, sounding like the musical equivalent of an explosion.  The variation starts off regularly enough and slowly builds like a storm rolling in.   It crescendos and then goes quiet, like the eye of a hurricane, providing a brief moment that allows you to remember what life can be like when the sun still shines, eerily in its calmness,  then the song explodes again  like the storm that comes crashing down with torrents of rain, wind, and flying debris, flooding everything around it.  The music seems random, disjointed, almost violent, but yet never loses the undercurrent that commands you to remember the unequivocal power of God’s grace.

“Through many dangers, toils and snares I have already come;  Tis’ Grace that brought me safe thus far and Grace will lead me home.”

Yesterday, as I entered my car and turned it on, the song began to play on my radio and I realized it put to music the thoughts, emotions, and psychological journey I had just experienced in my 90 minute therapy session.   Emotions and insights that seemed completely unrelated, so intense that they consumed and forced me to mentally thrash about.  Every emotion collided.  Each tossed me about like a small boat lost at sea in a violent storm.  All were drowned out by the thunder of my pounding heart.  Some how these complicated feelings are connected in the same way that those random notes were contained within that song.   Some how everything is still part of the same composition, even if I can’t make sense of it it in this moment.

I concede that today the storm clouds linger and the winds have not yet receded.  I must walk in faith and not by sight for a darkness broods over me.

Emotional Tides Do Fade

Without therapy how do “normal” people understand the impact of their childhood?  I sincerely wonder that.  Or,  if you weren’t abuse does it even matter?  Is it possible that the absence of trauma in a childhood or that the benefits of having a parents that were “good enough” create more resilience and benefits then the destruction caused by the presence of neglect, abuse, and trauma? Do the ripple effects of early chaos forever reverberate throughout the lives of the survivors more significantly then the good that comes from it’s absence?  Intellectually I know the answer to this question.  Have you ever seen a MRI scan of a brain from a child who has been chronically abused and neglected.  I have.   And I will share it with you, it is from Dr. Bruce Perry, MD, Ph.D from the Child Trauma Academy.  On the left is the brain of a normal 3 year old child.  On the right is the brain of a 3 year old who experienced extreme neglect.     I first saw this image nearly a decade ago and it gave me great insight and compassion for the abused children I worked with, yet I did not have any clue that my brain had been effected too.

Now that I am more inclined to accept the reality that I was chronically abused (yes, I am still in denial and don’t entirely believe it) I can’t help but wonder what my brain looks like.  I have always thought that because I was academically successful, had a professional career, good husband who did not beat me, nice home, land, a dog and two seemingly happy children that it meant there should not be anything wrong with me.  When I emotionally struggled I felt the guilt and shame from it, believing that because anti-depressants didn’t work I wasn’t really depressed and that my problems were simply ones I chose to perpetuate.   It has only been in the last few years of therapy that I have begun to accept and understand that my childhood was worse then simply “not good enough.”  Clear as the daylight that rises before me as I write, I recall the first time my psychologist referred to me (at least to my face) as a “trauma survivor.”  I was livid.  Like an old light switch that gets worn out and flicks on with a gentle brush, my anger and extreme rage and panic flooded me.  I wanted to scream “WHAT?! I AM NOT A TRAUMA SURVIVOR! HOW DARE YOU SAY THAT ABOUT ME!” so intensely it was as if those very words flowed through my veins where the blood should bc.  Now that my switch has a little friction allowing me more control, I can reflect back on the constant state of rage and panic that I always felt.  My reaction to her statement was fueled by fear.  I didn’t want to believe I was one of “those” people who got angry for no reason, who saw relationships in concrete terms, either love or hate, never intermingled, who didn’t have the ego strength to endure the loss of love.  I didn’t want to be one of those people who hurt themselves when something went wrong, who was a challenge to be around and constantly needed attention and reassurance from others.  I didn’t want to be someone who was weak and would be judged or perceived as having a sense of entitlement or a desire for revenge because the world had wronged me. One of those edgy “trauma survivors” whose verbal attacks could cut a person down.  I didn’t want to be someone who was chronically depressed or dissociated or anorexic.  Or close to death.  But denial didn’t keep any of those things from becoming true.  My denial only fooled me.

As I write this my head slums down in shame which is hard to explain. I know that I am becoming something more and something different, and I have pride and confidence in the progress that I’ve made.  Had I not done the work to arrive at this point I could not reflect back on my past and identify moments where I could have been different or be able to recognize that I actually had options that I could have chosen only if. . . only if I had the right medication, only if I had known different, only if…only if…  It’s hard not to judge yourself for doing the best you can when in hindsight you realize it wasn’t good enough.  How does a person come to the point of acceptance when you grasp the intricate complication of so many “what ifs” and “could have beens” and then just let things go and simply move on?  I guess that is where the courage to heal is an accurate phrase.  I can no longer be the person I have been, I am too tired and too weak and filled with regret and remorse so fully that it overflows from me. I can not run the gauntlet again, not even one more time, so I’m getting off.  I’m choosing to stop running through the danger and just want to walk on solid ground, on a smooth and straight pebble path.  I see the damage I have caused unintentionally, yet callously to others and recognize that even though I fought it,  I emulate the people who carved and created me.  But change takes time and constant effort and intentional thought, discipline and practice. It frightens me because the degree to which I have been psychologically, neurochemically, physically, and spiritually scarred from my past is still unfolding before me.  I have no sense of security that I won’t dissociate when I am upset or frightened, and I still get scared so easily where I tremble and I cower.  I still feel so beaten by life that I climb in bed and curl up as tightly in a ball as I can, envisioning that as I do so I am pulling in my energy and light in an effort to conserve and consolidate what ever strength I have, resting until my reserves have been restored.  I still get lost and confused when driving home from therapy, as my mind goes on autopilot and tries to escape the reality that my life has been.  I still feel that instantaneous switching on of my anger and my rage and I still feel the pain from loss and rejection so intensely that it is unbearable where I can hardly breathe.  I still want to hurt myself, I still want to cry, I still want to starve myself and slowly fade away.  I still  think that I can not endure a single moment more of hurt or agony, but I remind myself of the analogy that emotions ebb and flow like tides . . . just hold tight to something solid and secure, sit in silence and endure the current lashing and eventually the tides will go out.

The Soul of Depression

Once  you’ve experienced a depressive episode and recovered, you will realize that there is an allure and romance to it.  Like a drug once tasted and forever craved, when you are no longer in the grasp of it, you may miss it, crave it, long for melancholy because of the way your thinking feels.  Some how those moments of dysthymia and despair seem to allow you to slip into a different realm where you are half in this world and half outside it.  You see yourself interacting with people, feeling numb and detached as if it were a movie on fast forward with no sound, yet you  feeling enough distress  that your gut gets sickened.  But then when you turn your head away from the screen you see the  nothingness and feel its magnetic pull.  You are trapped between a world that causes pain and  the void with no pleasure.   When you are depressed, you think suicide is simply be an absences of pleasure and the temptation to walk the path is hard to resist when the alternative means you must feel pain, and not just any pain, but a pain that seeps into the marrow of your bones like a blood borne disease that forever clouds your eyes, leaving them pale and weakened while it deafens your ears so you may never hear the beauty in a loon’s call or the songbirds precious trill.

In my early 20s  I thought that my depression was both a blessing and a gift, that someone how it allowed me to see and feel more deeply  and clearly the reality of life, that some how having to walk around blanketed by the weight of despair meant that I saw with acuity things that others couldn’t.   It often reminded me of the burden that Frodo Baggins bore after he returned to Shire from his epic journey that had spared Middle Earth from evil’s consumption.  After seeing the true horrors, violence and hate, how could he ever return the state of youthful innocence and nativity that allowed the other hobbits to simply eat, drink, and sing?  His awareness that life is bigger, more dangerous, and beautiful, yet precarious and fragile, aged and fatigued him and robbed him of much joy, but yet he was bestowed with the precious knowledge that  even  just one small hobbit, with the help of loyal friends, could save an entire world.  Even just one small being can make a difference in the life of everyone . . .

The paradox of depression is that you learn true suffering, you see it all around you, which can be a gift, but also a curse you do not want.   You don’t get the choice.  In his memoir Unfinished Business, Lee Kravitz included a poem written by his aunt:

“I walked a mile with Pleasure; she chatted all the way; But left me none the wiser, For all she had to say.   I walked a mile with Sorrow; and ne’er a word said she.  But oh! The things I learned from her; When Sorrow walked with me.”

In Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore he writes  “Depression grants the gift of experience not as a literal fact but as an attitude toward yourself.  You get a sense of having lived through something, of being older and wiser.  You know that life is suffering, and that knowledge makes a difference.  You can’t enjoy the bouncy, carefree innocence of youth any longer, a realization that entails both sadness because of the loss and pleasure in a new feeling of self-acceptance and self-knowledge.”

This is not meant to insinuate that the author encourages a person to forever lose them self in the abyss of despair, but to simply breathe into it and learn from it what your soul needs, while you still cling to hope and life.

I look back on the decades of my life that feel wasted and misspent because of mental illness.  I  regret that I had not learned to trust and accept love sooner.   Rather than feeling wiser and more perceptive, I feel foolish and discouraged.  Or maybe perhaps, this is simply the first depressive episode that I have gotten right because it is the first time that escape through suicide is not an option, I won’t even allow the usually romantic fantasy of it to breach my conscience. This is the first time that in the midst of despair, I have the solid understanding that in time, this too shall pass.  I have not lost my hope.  But most importantly,  I have not lost sight of my love for others and finally accept that others love me too.  I understand that my emotions are not truly mine alone, that when other people love you, they sit by you in pain.  I now hold onto the belief that when people love you they take a piece of you with them, and if I were to kill myself, a piece of them would die as well.  If you love them enough, then you’ll cling to hope.  Hope that this crisis and moment of pain and distress is temporary, hope that some way, some how your life will be  different, hope that some day you can use the melancholy to transform you, give you wisdom and compassion… and then you can endure.

Hope has been my life raft in recent weeks and it makes me feel such sorrow and sadness for all those suffering without it hope.  Depression without hope is a lethal combination   I often scan the obituaries looking at the ages of the deceased.  When I find a young person who has passed I always stop and read them looking for a cause of death.  My insatiable curiosity wonders whether was it an accident or a prolonged illness.  If it isn’t printed, I always assume the worse, that it was a life taken by their own hands, guided and steadied by sorrow and grief.  Out of respect for the family the media usually does not print the cause of death when it was suicide, but in the end it is admission by omission.  Every time I read one I feel a twinge of pain and sadness.  Another life wasted by a death  that could have been prevented.  I feel the grief and burden of the helplessness combined with a mix of relief and  hypocrisy, because I’ve known how close I’ve come myself.

Once you learn ways, as Thomas Moore says to “care for the soul in its darker beauty”  you can use your depression to enhance moments of your ordinary life, I guess I do believe that now, so long as you cling to hope and love.  When despair and depression stop knocking at your door, you truly can more clearly see the brilliance of a shooting star, the innocence of an unscathed youth, and even find deep beauty and blessing of  a natural death after a fully lived long life.   This acceptance can forever shifts the tides of your depression to help you more readily accept the gifts it brings.

I Forgot the Simple Things

By the end of today, my children, who are 6 year old twins, will become second graders.  Today is the last day of 1st Grade.  They are my only children, whose conception was hard fought through three years of infertility, which makes their health and birth all the more miraculous to me.  Although I know it has been an unfair burden for them, they have been my lifeline for survival, the source of gravity that keeps me grounded and motivated.   Sometimes I sit and stare, lost in admiration as I wonder how these beautiful, blond haired, blue-eyed, funny, well adjusted, precocious, sensitive, intelligent, seemingly happy children are really mine.  But then they show their stubbornness, or perhaps they pull a fast one, tag team and outsmart me, and all doubts are cast aside, they are definitely mine. They have also been blessed by a patient, loving, kind, and engaging father.

Because they are my first and last,  everything they do is my first and last as well.  My oldest and my youngest will be finishing the first grade.  I’m very sentimental.  The way they talk about becoming “second graders” refreshes my memory of the innocence of youth.  A week ago my daughter asked if she could bring “end of the year cupcakes” to school, of course I obliged, except we forgot to get the cupcakes mix last night, and seizing the opportunity she changed her request to “sticky, gooey brownies” (yup, she’s mine alright). I had to giggle as I packed their lunches for their school picnic today, pretending to scold them as I shooed them out of the kitchen for what I’m sure seemed to them no apparent reason, but it was simply because I didn’t want them to see me slip the Reese’s Pieces into their peanut butter fluff sandwiches, or see me slip some stickers and a note in their lunch box.  I don’t often send their lunches with them, but when I do I try to sneak a little surprise, a note, a treat, maybe a quarter, anything to tell them that I love them, that they can’t see me at that moment, but they’re in Mommy’s heart.

But yet it is difficult and painful to be that type of mom because every moment that is laced with love and nurturance creates a flash bulb memory of the neglect and abuse I suffered.  The pride and beauty that I am getting it more right than wrong and am breaking the cycle and changing the next generation is interlaced with grief and sadness that comes when a person grieves the youth they never had.

So as my daughter and I walked hand in hand to our garden, I asked her, “Are you happy?”  and without hesitation she squeezed my hand and answered with a simple “yes.”  I felt my heart expand.  I took my time and pointed out the herbs that border the vegetable garden,”this one taste like lemon, here’s some lavender, taste this one and tell me what you think, here’s some mint, and a chive, here, eat a bit of parsley, it will cleanse your palate.  Now  last but not least try to guess what this one is.”   “Mommy, it taste like pickles!”  “That is right my dear, it is called dill, we will need it when we make your pickles later this summer.”  We admired the sweet peas that have begun to climb upward on the fence, reaching for the sun and the radishes that they planted from seeds at their school day care. We talked about the corn and the blackberries, always giggling when she retells the stories of my surprise because I had thought I’d planted raspberries instead.   As we walked around the yard she named the perennials, “that’s a lily, that’s a hosta, a daisy and an iris” …we’ve done this many times before.

And when we came around to the front of the house, there stood my son on the inside of the glass front door, with his hand pressed up against it in the gesture of “I love you.”  A complex wave of emotions overcame me, as the beauty and the simplicity was so apparent.  I was humbled by their ability to be at peace and content in that moment while I felt so ashamed and disappointed in myself for ever thinking that my absence in their life would go unnoticed or that they’d be better off with out me.

The problem with mental illness is that it so malevolently distorts your thinking, you forget little things like the preciousness of the smile from your perfect child.  Depression blurs and softened the hardened edges of  my pain from trauma, but it also fogs my memory of the happy things as well.  I do not remember a time where I was without self-loathing, angst and sadness.  I have always sought a form of escape from reality.  I first ran away from home at the age of five and I’m not sure how old I was when I started to dissociate, but I suspect it was before that.  My tumultuous teen years were spent in cycles of depression orienting me to the omnipresence of hopelessness and despair with the onset of suicidal thoughts.  While I’ve had intense episodes of reactive emotionality, moments where I’ve found myself curled up in a fetal position under hidden from the world with a protective barrier of blankets,  thinking I simply can’t go on, there had always been a small light of reason, a flicker of hope, something that I clung too that kept me moving on.  But last fall I began a different downward spiral.  At the time I knew there was something not quite right, this depression wasn’t fueled by hurt or rage, there was no reason, no cardinal event it just slowly enveloped me, gradually building a day or week at a time.  Even in my darkest hours I had always clung to my desire to survive, my will to overcome and conquer my misery, but this time was different, I just slowly stopped caring.  It didn’t frighten me at first because I hadn’t seen it’s danger because it was so gradual, eventually I almost welcomed it because it felt like a final “letting go” which was a relief because I often cling on too tightly.  But there came a day when I just decided I no longer wanted to breath and because living simply made no sense, because I knew that I had no reason to feel that depressed, but I simply didn’t care.  I was just tired.  I remember crying all morning, trying to hide it from the twins and I drove them to school.  As they got out of the car they stopped at the curb and turned, both forming the “I love you” sign with their little hands, unprompted and unsolicited by me. I thought, I actually thought to myself “this may be the very last time I see them.”  I am appalled at myself for thinking that.  I am ashamed and embarrassed.  Even as I write this my stomach forms a sickening knot that my mind was so wracked with illness that thinking that was okay to me at the time.  But I regardless, I admit it, it’s really what I thought.   As I drove away I genuinely believed that the effects of my absence in their life would be only minimal, that there were enough people who loved and cared for them so that they would be resilient and I began to look for a bridge that I could drive off of.  I didn’t find one and I cringe to think what would happen if I did.  I found a rest area where I pulled my car into and sobbed and sobbed.  I simply wanted to stop this awful way of feeling and saw no hope or purpose to trying any more.  I was only 20 minutes from a psychiatric hospital and had I had more energy would have driven there, but I simply fell asleep.  I had a business lunch scheduled for that day so I some how managed to straighten up my hair, reapply my make up and physically attend my meeting, although I remember very little of it and my disarray and distress was visibly apparent.  The lunch meeting lasted for hours, perhaps that was my saving grace, although I sobbed heavily all the way back home, constantly thinking that I should just turn around and go to the  hospital, because I simply no longer wanted to live.

I spent the rest of the evening and weekend entirely in bed, just simply wishing that death would find me.  Come Monday I called my family doctor and got an appointment to discuss my medications.  The medication I had started to take because of my hyper vigilance, anxiety, anger, and impulsivity  had a side effect of depression.  Within two weeks of changing to a different form of it, the grey fog had lifted and my thoughts began to clear.  It was perhaps the most frightening depression I have ever known because it was so lethal.

I love my children and when my thinking is clear and I’m not depressed, I know that I could never leave them the legacy that I failed to love them enough, but that’s the problem with mental illness.  You simply don’t think straight.  It’s hard not to be angry with the selfishness it causes and if you’ve never experienced it, then it really makes no sense…that internal logic that creates a world of darkness that sucks you down like a whirlpool. How does a person admit to this in hopes of cleansing themselves, seeking forgiveness and finding redemption?  How do you admit to something so awful and trust that people will support you when you know that in the very acknowledgement of your deep despair it makes them feel like you just impaled knife through their heart.  I’m sure they start to wonder why wasn’t their love enough?  And why didn’t I love them more?  It’s a hurtful thing to look into this mirror.  I have no pride in who I’ve been and simply want to change, but I say to them, I didn’t give up, I am still here, begging on my knees and seeking their forgiveness.