Oh Christmas Tree

 Please excuse the mess, it's a little chaotic down here right now. I put up my Christmas tree last night and today RD and I put the ornaments on. Yes, that's a FedEx Office beacon as my star...it seemed fitting. And yes, that is also RD on the couch with her laptop. We like to blog together.

I have a dillema with Christmas trees I have to admit. I really love them because the lights are so nice to look at. I enjoy putting the ornaments on and I enjoy remembering where some of them came from. It's not extremely sentimental but I remember the excitement as a kid of putting up the tree and the anticipation of Christmas morning. It's the one holiday I could count on not being a total disaster. I enjoyed the morning opening gifts and our family being kind to one another. Some of the ornaments on my tree are from the year I was born which is nuts..but super cool to have items that have been consistent each year in my life. At least some things belonging to me were not taken, destroyed or tainted by my mother.

The other part of the whole Christmas tree ordeal is that it represents to me when my father died. During my fathers first suicide attempt the paramedic practically knocked the tree down trying to move the stretcher out and all I can remember thinking of was how angry I was that they broke ornaments that were special. We had these glass bulbs with our names on them that each of us received our first Christmas and my fathers and my own were knocked off and shattered. A few others also came down and I remember cutting my fingertips on them as I tried to pick the pieces out of the carpet after my father was taken to the hospital. It was a strange thing to be focused on at a time like that but the attention I was giving the tree was far more safe than what was actually going on. I remember clear as day the sound of the ornaments cracking under the EMT's huge black boots. The next image I have burned into my brain is the blood that spattered from my fathers successful suicide onto the Christmas tree behind him when he shot himself. I remember finding those spatters the following year as we opened the boxes of ornaments from our summer home to decorate the second tree in our regular house. I remember the look of horror on my sisters face and the way she touched the blood as if she were trying to connect with my Dad. And then I remember Christmas that year...four days after he died. My mother trying to get us to open the presents that we did have, the ones my father bought for us. How could she do that. The last present my father got for me was a beautiful porcelain doll he purchased on a trip to Maine. She had red hair and a velvet green dress. It was the only present for me. Then shoot to the next memory, at my fathers memorial service the day after Christmas. The church was still decked out for the Christmas services and the smell of pine and candles burning filled the sanctuary. How could it look so beautiful when everything going on was so ugly? How were these decorations still up? And why are they so gorgeous? All that together and the first things I think of from that time are trees and the Celine Dion song "Another Year has gone By" to which my mother cried at, as if she cared about my Dad. And snow, it fell while we poured my Dad's ashes into the water.

It seems unfair at times how much destruction and filfth that my family has poured over things that should be beautiful. I am thankful RD helped me decorate and that my tree is so pretty. I am thankful that Little E is mesmerized by the lights and ornaments the way children should be, but I am sad for the little girl(s) in me that cannot pull apart the icky from the pretty.

Can it Be?

I spent this Thanksgiving with my family and friends obviously, it's been a couple years. I have to admit that aside from the Thanksgiving at my house last year with just my best friend and I it was the best I've had in a long time. This year there wasn't the normal anxiety from being around family or the food anxieties associated with my food issues. The day was spent entertaining my nephew and enjoying the time spent with my brother and sister and best friend. It was fairly low key until the evening when Little E was getting tired and overwhelmed as we put up the Christmas tree. I was able to balance time with the crowd and time downstairs with my BFF, we'll call her RD. So, it was a success and now I am looking forward to Christmas. The only intrusion from my mother was a simple send all text message and I can handle that any day.

My brother in law is extremely OCD and he got it in his head that we would rearrange the entire house, basically everyone got a new bedroom and Little E's bedroom was turned into an office because of it's ridiculously small size. I was moved to the basement...again. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand it gives me a lot more space and quiet time than my bedroom upstairs gave me and on the other hand it is the place that one of my most horrific traumas occurred. Everything about it is different, including the fact that I have a futon instead of a bed which was my choice because I prefer a couch like sleeping area versus a bed some nights. I have a couch and my 'therapy' chair which is the same IKEA chair that Therapist has in her office. All very different, actually it's a pretty awesome hang out space. But the light is the same, the walls are currently the same color and the smells are the same. That was such a difficult fall to begin with and then when the final straw landed when my mother entered our home and waited for me that one night...where she violated me in the worst ways and convinced parts of me that Therapist was the person that harmed me. I am waking up each night around that time with terrible anxiety and a desire to run outside. It's difficult to stay put and endure the night without the hope or comfort that I can speak with Therapist the following day so she can externally confirm that it was not her that harmed me. I miss that a lot right now. I miss being able to connect with her to convince myself that she has done nothing and that it was my mother in my room that night. Most of me knows this and that is helpful and comforting but as I had suspected there are still parts of me that hold onto the delusion that it was Therapist because it's too painful for them to believe it was my mother. That is a difficult grasp to break.

Sitting down here reminds of that time in my life, where reality was so unbearable and when my life shattered into a million pieces. That one act took 5 months inpatient to cope with, to get to a point where my system was not in utter chaos just from seeing Therapist walk by. A time where I was so torn about her place in my life that it was torture. Parts of me knew it wasn't her and others fought to almost death to defend my mother. The only way out of it that I saw was to end my life and I was determined to do so. It was a place where every object around me could be fashioned into a way to harm me. It was time that I was in such desperate need of Therapist but terrified of her at the same time. It's a time where dissociative barriers were being actively eroded in my therapy process when I still needed them to protect my brain and experienced a trauma without them fully intact. It took a really long time to repair the damage done that night, not just months in the hospital but years for Therapist to get to a place where we felt like 95% of me trusted her.

I am trying to make new memories here while still honoring those inside that have the memories right there...pressing on them. It's a tough place to be in but I have faith that I have the strength to win it. I want to win it which is different than before. I want my life to be my own and not my mothers. I want places that were stolen from me to become my own and safe again. I want to look at these walls and etch the way it is now into my brain versus the way that it was. It can be different right?

The Shed.

I hate to admit it but I am typing this on a PC! ACK! Actually we purchased a new desktop and a new laptop this weekend and it's much faster than my poor 2003 G4 Powerbook. Since little man is sleeping away I decided to take a little time and blog for a bit. It's been two months since I have been in therapy and wow, that hit me like a ton of bricks today. Little E and I went to Federal Hill Park this morning and I was blown away by this fact while sitting there watching him go up and down the slide. Two whole months I have kept my shit together without therapy. That's pretty amazing coming from someone who used to spend 60% of the year inpatient. I give myself kuddos for that.

Last week I spoke to Therapist for a decently long time and enjoyed it. I felt like I was a kid at Christmas and it was nice. Not all of it was so sad and Therapist had a great opening story. I really miss hearing her talk like that. It was overall really helpful and it gave me the boost that I needed. It was kinda like the feeling when you wrap your favorite blanket over you and you're just comfy and happy. I really needed that! Almost a verbal hug if you will. I am thankful, so thankful for our conversation.

It is however, becoming increasingly difficult to stop my brain from processing trauma related matieral. I had a decent handle on it for the first month but currently I am struggling with a few overwhelming memories. I am unsure if I should be blogging about them or trying to process them on my own because of their content but at the same time it's not helping keeping it locked up inside. I suppose that putting it out there is no more harmful than keeping it in my head on constant repeat.

My mind continues to float back to the late fall in my childhood when I was probably around 11 or 12 years old. I can remember my backyard so intensely that it frightens me. The details of the trees and the way the light hit with different weather patterns, the smell of the moldy and wet ground, the sounds of the leaves and grass crunching below my feet. I can distinctly remember the smell of the chimney smoke in the neighborhood and how deadly quiet it would be on cold afternoons. I remember what it felt like to walk to edge of our property from our garage and taste the almost freedom from crossing the tree line to head deep into the woods away from the world. I also remember the anxiety I felt as I would pass our shed to the treeline, crossing so carefully in front of it as if the doors would open by themselves to yank me inside to the darkness. After the shed would be the wood pile where my father stored all our firewood for the season. It was just an open slate with a roof over it but it was exciting when he built it because I could climb on the top and hide up there on summer days. The sun would warm the top because the shingles were black, sometimes hot enough to make the backs of my legs red. I would lay up there with my towel and book and "tan". Once past the wood storage I would then pass my half of a treehouse. My father once decided he would built me a tree house that wasn't really in a tree. He constructed a frame that was speared into the ground. He connected the four posts with 2x4's and began to lay the flooring which only ever ended up being three 2x4's nailed to the frame. He never finished it and in the winter it stood there looking as naked and dead as I felt. It was like a monument to the childhood I never got yet tried so hard to gain. I remember sitting on those three little planks and pretending that my fort was finished. I would play up there for hours...no one ever thought to finish it for me.

Anyway, if I made it to the tree line uninterrupted I would get a wild feeling inside my stomach and I would take off running as fast as I could. My legs would burn and my ankles would give out often causing me to trip and jerk around against the trees. I am not sure why I felt as if I could run so freely after that point or what exactly I felt in those moments but I assume it's what a wild animal feels once it's freed from a trap. It's a sickening excitement mixed with fear and relief. I imagine my blood pressure to be very high and my heart would pump faster than it should. Maybe it was because it was so rare that I actually made it to the line that I became so excited...

Most often my mother would shout from the deck at me before I could take off. It was such a dangerous trip for me to try to make undetected because her hang out was most often in the kitchen which had a huge bay window that faced our backyard. She would see me and stop me before I made it. I would hear the door slam shut and turn to see her putting her jacket and boots on. I always felt so damn stupid for being out there because it was just steps away from the shed, her favorite place to torture me. No one would hear me from there. It was almost an invitation for her to go ape shit on me but the times I did make it in to the woods were my favorite. I had a safe spot out there, a whole fort I had made on my own. I kept snacks out there so I could binge when I was starving and I had a few toys that hadn't been ruined by her yet. I also kept my journals out there...I wonder if they are still there?

The shed, oh that horrible shed. It matched the colors of our home which were a sickening cream and a deep brown. It reminded me of a Boston cream doughnut and I hate those kind of doughnuts. The doors were locked with a deadbolt and only my parents had access to the keys. Inside there were no working lights unless my mother brought the lantern with her and there was only one small window in the back at the top. The flooring was just large slats of wood that had never been swept or cleaned since we built the damn thing and they wore my badges of courage on them. Everywhere were splatter stains and most of them were a deep crimson color. It smelled of oil and grass clippings and sometimes reeked of a dead animal or two. On the walls were rusty nails with all kinds of items hung from them, mostly rusty chains or gardening tools..but in the back left corner is where one funnel always rested. On the back wall below the window was a workbench my father had built with a vice on either side. An old can filled with nails, screws and pencils stayed in the exact same spot on the right for my entire childhood. Did anyone ever use the pencils in there? Probably not. Under the workbench was my mothers tacky toolbox which is where she kept her 'secrets'. She kept her torture devices in there is what she really did, but she told Dad it was her secret box and she kept in that way with a huge lock on the front of it that bore her initials. K.G.M. Underneath was also a wooden chair that my Dad had made for me but my mother despised being in the house. So she moved it somewhere more useful. My Dad had a lot of talent in woodworking only I wished he didn't when he made that stupid chair. It was more sturdy than the Berlin Wall and the armrests were perfect for my mothers chains.

Hearing the sound of that chair and her toolbox being scraped across the plank floor still haunts me. As soon as I heard it I would look up at the little window and watch the particles in their air floating through the stream of light and imagined what it would be like to ride on one of them. Once I was fastened in she would close the doors to the shed, it would click shut and she'd turn on this tiny flashlight. It usually rested on one of the shelves to the left of me, casting shadows on the walls from the shelving. It was a small black flashlight that most people would keep in their car but it was metal like a police flashlight...sturdy. Terrible things happened in that shed, things that no one should ever have to think about and I despise my brain for remembering. I lost myself in there at times, and only now am I trying to get it back. So many of my flashbacks are from in there and what makes me nuts is that I can't see much in them because the light wasn't bright enough to make out anything but shadows. People tell me that I ALWAYS have my eyes shut in my flashbacks and I think to myself that it doesn't matter because even when they were open I couldn't hardly see. My BODY remembers everything. It's as if my body experienced it all and my eyes were left out of it. When it comes to memories in which I can actually see it's easier for me to connect with the moment and the little girl that experienced it because I can see myself. I usually remember what I was wearing or what my feet looked like and I know how small and vulnerable I was. I feel sadness for those moments. For these, it's difficult because not only was I fighting my mother I was fighting some invisible entity which my body felt. The mind/body connection just doesn't always happen for me.

This fall I am trying to experience the same sights, smells and sensations that the Maryland outdoors and weather has to offer in a less traumatic way. So far it's working decently. But I'll keep you updated.

how?

I downloaded the new Peter Bradley Adams CD and I find I am having a very difficult time listening to it and not feeling overwhelmed, angry and terribly sad. He seems so attached to Therapist and I cannot even ask her if she has listened to it. I think she would really enjoy the album. If Coldplay comes out with a new album I doubt I’ll be able to handle it.

The past couple of weeks have been really strange. I have been really sick on and off and it’s taken a toll on my emotional reserves. Prednisone always gives me a hard time when trying to cope emotionally so I have to admit at times I find it difficult to stop moving for fear I might have a feeling or two. The other day I was driving Little E somewhere and randomly had the thought that I needed to start seeing a therapist again, at the very minimum to process my termination with Therapist. I am not sure I want to get into the DID stuff anytime soon but I feel pretty lonely when it comes to grieving and feeling so sad. I am really stuck on how to talk about it with anyone even though sometimes I really want to. I feel like I’d just keep saying the same things over and over again which is neither productive or all that pleasant for the party listening to me. So I am bottling it up and occasionally allow it to take over when I am alone. It does explode though when I speak with her on the phone. Like an eruption of sadness and childlike needing. Can we say embarrassing?

Lately, quite a bit of good therapy fodder has come up as I am caring for the precious little boy, Little E. And not maybe not just that but constantly being in the adult role puts a new spin on dynamics I see play out or remembering situations from my own childhood with the adult brain I now use 95% of the time. I’m finally feeling the outrageousness of what I’ve been through and have these moments of breathtaking clarity that it was really terrible back then. Maybe I am also feeling the stark difference in my life where I have moments where I can only thank my higher power for letting me be alive to experience. Being thankful also brings me back to the pain…because I should have always had those moments I suppose.

Therapist gave me a book before I left. It’s a children’s book called “No Matter What” which I frequently read to Little E at naptime. The story is about an adult and child talking about how the adult will never stop loving the little kid no matter what. So the kid asks a bunch of different ways how their love could change for them if they were somehow different and the adult continues and continues to reassure the child that no matter what they will love them just the same. What a concept. I read that book during our final session sitting next to Therapist aching and being so thankful for her words and the book. I miss that reassurance because some days it really fades. Some days I forget that I am loved and I feel lost thinking about myself as a child and how small and alone I was. I think about all that had to happen to cause me to have done the things that I have done to myself.

My best friend and I have been talking about this lately as she struggles to come to terms with her own DID diagnosis and she has a story from her childhood where she tried to hang herself when she was three years old. I try and compare my nephew to her as a kid and ask her what the hell would have to happen to Little E to cause him to even think about death. He is currently too young to have any experience with death, it’s a foreign concept as it should be. I give her examples over and over again about what would have to be done to Little E to push him over the edge that way and it breaks my heart. It breaks for her and then it hits home and I feel terribly sad for the child I used to be. Our stories are not all that different and sometimes I get caught up in bringing her into reality and often bring myself too. I mean Jesus Effing Christ, what happened to us? Just little tiny and fragile little girls and some people ripped it up, tore it down and left us for dead. Yet here we sit, actually we are both sitting here in my room right now blogging/writing away…and we survived. A few minutes ago she asked me “How do you think you survived your childhood?” and I swear I don’t have an answer and I am not sure I ever will.

How did I have the courage to keep going? Why did I continue to fight? How did I not just lay down and die? And how did I end up with this amazing best friend or this awesome Therapist that have led me to want to be alive and experience life for real? How is it that I now have moments of pure peace and joy and recognize it and I cry happy tears at its awesomeness? How did ALL this happen in the past 26 years? I survived the abuse, the pimping, the starving, the pregnancies, the broken bones, the chemicals, the sickness, the abandonment, the drugs, the witnessing and yet here I sit doing ok. How? I am thankful though.

Body Memories - Separate Entity

I have the blog “Discussing Dissociation” by Kathy Broady in my Google Reader, which I regularly check out. And let me just put it out there how I have struggled with this blog. The information on the site can be very helpful and thought provoking and I applaud her for putting so much time and effort into the forums and consultant services on other websites. If more people in the trauma therapy field contributed even a quarter of what she does the therapeutic community would be so much better off. That being said it also gives me a funny feeling that is most likely due to the many boundary violations I have gone through with therapists before Therapist. I often wonder why someone that spends their career on this issue continues to talk and write about it so much outside of work…on a regular basis. I wonder what it would feel like if Therapist had a blog out there talking to tons of people about these kinds of issues. I also wonder how dangerous some of the topics could be for those out there not in therapy and going through PTSD and DID. Some of the content is extremely overwhelming and even though the topics are extremely relevant to my own therapy I can’t step into it yet. Even with the disclaimers and such, I am sure there are people that stumble on to the blog and use it as therapy replacement.

I mean no disrespect for Kathy Broady, she has done and continues to do amazing things for survivors. She has a voice that most of us do not often use and the amount of education she gives to under-trained trauma therapists is invaluable. For me, I take what I find I can handle and tolerate and the rest I leave for a later time.

I totally digressed from the main point of this entry. (not unusual right?) In her most recent post, Ms. Broady talks about body memories and how cells store this traumatic material and as a part of decreasing dissociation, our bodies remember things. Some people argue the existence of cell memory and such; I will bow out of that discussion and simply say that regardless of the scientific validity of cell memory, I experience body memories and they are very difficult to handle and it can all be chalked up to the BASK model as well. Ms. Broady poses the following questions which I am choosing to explore here on my blog because unfortunately, Therapist and I have some serious conversations coming up this week and they don’t really allow for us to explore this topic.


"What is your body saying to you?

What does your body remember that your mind refuses to think about?

What does your body remember that you don’t want to hear?

What will it take for you to listen to your body?  Your body was there for the abuse too.  Maybe it knows more than you think it does."

It seems like all my body ever does is tell me things I don’t really want to think about, listen to or explore. Every time it expresses a need, impulse, feeling or even just me being aware of it feels like a traumatic offense. I am well aware that the ignorance I have of my body is a direct re-enactment of my childhood and that dealing with it can be a double-edged sword.

It all boils down to the relationship that I have with my body. As a child, because of the abuse that I was going through I had separated my body from me and categorized it as something that betrayed me. It seemed like it’s own entity, much like my mother. I felt as though my body was cooperating with her instead of me and I grew to hate it. I wanted to kill it when I felt hunger pains and demolish it when I needed to use the bathroom. It continued to express needs that would force me into submission with my mother. When my body reacted to my mothers touch I wanted to torture it because HOW could it do that to me? It was allowing my mother to win!

Nothing makes me more hostile than battling with my body. As a child this was much more complicated, but now as an adult this battle continues with my eating disorder. I want to control it the way I needed to as a child. I become livid at times when my body is hungry and fight with it constantly. Sometimes I punish my body with too much food or alcohol to make it suffer, and other times I will use diuretics and diet pills to force it to cooperate. My weight swings wildly up and down the scale depending on which battle I am going through. And honestly, nothing feels more victorious than winning one of those battles. As I have gone through treatment with my eating disorder the thoughts I have about acting out become confused and unsettled. I can go for longer periods of ED abstinence because I know the science behind the treatment. It is logical. However, this creates a great deal of shame and embarrassment for me because I am not really going through an ED, it’s not about the food and controlling my external world. It’s not about perfection or loosing weight.

So what is it about?  It’s about my mother and the control she had over my body. It’s about having needs and wanting to deny them. It’s about being human and desperately not wanting to be human. It’s about being small and vulnerable so I can force myself into a harmful situation to get what I deserve. It’s about not looking the way my mother enjoys me looking. And in the end, it’s about denying my existence the same way my mother did.

When my body tells me I am hungry it is telling me that I am alive and I need something to stay alive. Last time I checked, I was not the biggest fan of surviving and this is a painful reminder my body is still there. It’s humiliating! My body will remember what it felt like to starve and be desperate for any sustenance, forcing me to do crazy things to get a small portion of something, which is degrading. My mother has turned every single part of being a human being into something perverse. Needing to use the bathroom required some sort of sexual favor, sweating meant I was turned on, being hungry meant I needed something from her, being thirsty made her angry because I must be screwing someone else, sleeping made me vulnerable, being happy was a threat to her. Just existing made me her slave. My mother even took away my inhalers as a child because when I would struggle to breathe it made me too weak to fight her and I would allow anything to breathe again.

My body remembers all of this stuff. As an adult each time my body expresses something I feel anxiety, some times worse than other times but each time there is a small reminder. I suppress this stuff on a regular basis and refuse to cope with it. I don’t want to talk about it or remember it. So some times it seems that my body becomes mission oriented and overflows with memories. The body aches or awkward feelings become persistent until I have a full fledged flashback and do everything in my power to suppress it even more. In my head I try to rationalize this cycle, I tell myself that obviously it was so horrific then that I didn’t want to deal with it which is why I have DID. Since I have DID then I don’t need to deal with it now. It seems my body has a different opinion, one in which I am very resistant to.

I should probably feel some sort of compassion for my body but at this point I cannot because it is still separate from me. It still exists in my mind on my mothers team and not my own.