Strange, Healing Dreams

    Last night before finally falling asleep, I was struggling to rein in the thoughts running through my mind. I would get caught up in all of the negative "what if's" of my new living arrangement. A part of me feels like I made a mistake in saying yes to this place; that I said yes so that I could stop looking, not so much because I loved the place. In order to interrupt this, I would return to my "what would it feel like to be free" exercise and would allow all those thoughts to drop away. It's a good practice, but I had to keep returning to it. When I did get to sleep, I had really weird dreams. Not in a bad way, just weird. In one of them, my sister (who was an EMT at one point) was driving an ambulance to see me...she was both the driver and the paramedic, and I hadn't even called 911 or anything. She comes into whatever strange place I'm staying in and starts checking my vitals and things in front of other people that I don't even know. It seems my angels and guides were administering to me last night. 

A Day of Good News

    Today turned into a pretty good day. I was tired and broody this morning...somewhat inevitable since I awoke around 4 again. I had a can of unsweetened Matcha tea with breakfast before my early morning dog walk. After spending some quality time with a canine, I did a brief shop and then headed home. Despite having the caffeinated beverage and despite my body's resistance to sleep, I was actually tired enough to choose to attempt a nap and actually caught some z's. Hooray! Also, it looks like my boss was kind enough to give me a three day weekend which will be perfect. And to top off the good news with more good news, I finally got my federal tax return and it will cover the security deposit and the first month's rent at my new place...the only time when being "poor" pays off is with the tax returns.

Housing Update

    I finally heard back about the room in a house-share I applied for and I'm in! I'm going to need to get some help moving all my things when the time comes, but I've got a place at long last. There will be 4 other people there with me and as far as I know it'll have a communal vibe. I do have to get my bed from someone's basement since I let them keep it for me while I continued to move around since it was too much trouble to worry about at the time. No pets are allowed sadly, but the person who showed me around seemed like a potential good friend. The room is small, but I think I'll still be able to get my things out of storage. Hopefully the move will be more effortless than it appears to be at the moment...we shall see.

A Prayer to Restore Self-Love

My biological father successfully convinced me that I am unlovable.
He successfully convinced me that there is nothing good about me.
His actions successfully convinced me that the world was made up of monsters
and that I was one of them.
He made me angrier at myself than I was at him.
He made me hate myself more than I could hate him.

I don't know how I let him get away with this for so long.
The amount of energy I have put into my self-hatred,
into suppressing all that needs to be expressed...
How did I let him so thoroughly ruin my relationship with myself?
And how can I begin to rectify it?

Dear Mother, Father, God, Great Spirit, Our Creator...
Angels, guides, and ancestors,
please pour Your healing light, Your healing grace into my crown. 
Dear Mother, Father, God, Great Spirit, Our Creator...
Angels, guides, and ancestors,
please dissolve all of the shame, guilt, and self-contempt
that still thrives in my consciousness.
Dear Mother, Father, God, Great Spirit, Our Creator...
Angels, guides, and ancestors,
please mend the fissures in my mind that allowed me to believe
that I was unlovable, that I was despicable, that I was the monster.
Please mend the fissures in my heart that ruptured my self-love,
and those that kept it ignorant
of God's unending, unconditional love for me.
Thank You, God. Thank You, God. Thank You, God.
Let this be so. And so it is.
Amen

Another Layer Brought to Light

    This afternoon I have begun to ponder the root cause of the hair pulling habit. It was our point of focus during my half hour therapy session today and I used the BLS (Bilateral Stimulation) while working on healing this issue. The first conclusion I came to is that this self-soothing habit is something I do in order to keep an extraordinary amount of suppressed rage bottled up. Specifically, all the rage aimed at my biological father that I continually fail to acknowledge. No matter how wild my discoveries are in terms of what he has done to me, the only anger and rage I ever acknowledge is directed toward all of the other adults who were around me at the time who failed to advocate for me and who failed to protect my siblings and me from our biological parents. Three of them knew what had happened to me and yet DSS would continue to send us back into the war-zone.

    The question that followed this conclusion was "what belief or aspect of my consciousness has been the stronghold against this impotent rage?" The answer that came to the fore there is my belief that I deserved everything he did to me and the part of me that still carries a great deal of self-loathing. I have directed a great deal of anger towards myself and towards the people who failed to help me, but not towards the abuser. And yet I know there's a huge well of rage reserved just for him that I have failed to acknowledge and express. As twisted as this discovery sounds, it's a good step forward because I know where to go from here; I know what needs to be healed.

What Freedom Feels Like

    This evening I have been asking myself what my life would look like and what it would feel like if I were free. Free from the past, free from the intrusive thoughts, free from the effects of the trauma, free from it all. What would that look and feel like? I'd be free of self-judgment. I'd be free of self-contempt. I would be free of the painful cycles. I would be free to fall asleep with ease. I would be free of my fear of falling in love. (I don't fear a broken heart so much as falling for someone who is charming at first, then turns into a monster.) I would feel alive again. I would feel as though anything is possible. I would feel as though nothing could stop me. If I hadn't gone through trauma, this is what I imagine my life could have felt like. And it still can if I can just maintain faith in myself and in the transformation that could be possible if I were to allow it. As I wrote a couple years ago, I have the key to my own cell. Yes, my biological father built it an threw me in, but I always had the key to my own freedom. I don't have to be trapped in the cell anymore.

What would it feel like to be free?
I'd have no worries. I'd have no guilt.

What would it feel like to be free?
I'd have no fears. I'd have no doubts.

What would it be like to be free?
I'd feel loved. I'd feel safe.

What would it be like to be free?
I'd remember to feel the warmth of the sun
and trust the falling rain.

A Not So Merry Merry-Go-Round

    I thought it would be easier to write during therapy, but it hasn't been. All the things that I am trying to overcome are coming to the surface to deal with and I haven't yet been able to get into a meditative state that would ease the tension in my mind. It's been a never ending merry-go-round of depressive, intrusive thoughts surrounding my early childhood experiences. As I read in an article recently, what's going on in therapy at that moment is that I 'm "actively opening up old wounds in an effort to reframe my experiences." Now that my work load has lessened, I find myself going back to binge-watching shows and trying to pull all my hair out again. (Still not sure what part of my history caused the hair pulling habit, but I might be able to find out through the EMDR.) I guess I just don't know what else to do to escape my mind. Other people use a drug addiction to escape and I seem to choose a screen addiction. Don't get me wrong, I'm still going on walks outside everyday, with and without the pets I walk, but I spend the whole walk thinking in circles. There hasn't been any real relaxing going on when I try to relax.

Another Brief Update

    I had a chance to hang out with a close friend Thursday afternoon and then had a good therapy session Friday. After having withheld a few big things, I finally gathered the courage to share with my therapist more from the list my intuition has compiled between March of last year and now. As hard as it was, it was also a relief not to have those secrets bottled up anymore. I managed to share 6 out of the 8 things on my list before reaching my threshold which was more than I expected to be able to do.  One of the reasons it took a while to share is because I have no evidence and no memories, just hunches and notions, so I had worried that what I wished to share wouldn't be believed or taken seriously. But so far, my therapist seems to trust my intuition.

    As for the COVID situation, I'm the only one in this apartment who doesn't have it...so far. One of my roommates is getting over it but still has a painful cough and the other tested positive yesterday. Both of them are vaccinated, so these new variants that have cropped up are starting to come for us. I wish more people trusted the vaccine because all of these crazy variants were only made possible by the number of people who have remained unvaccinated.

Looking Up

    Things are beginning to look up. For one, I have been getting more sleep, and secondly, I just this morning submitted an application for an apartment. Granted, I had to tweak things a bit since my current living space has been rent free & has no property manager that I correspond with. The last time I paid rent was for the November of 2020, just before my grandfather got sick and my mom and I became his caregivers. Then I stayed at his house until August of 2021, 5 months after he had passed. And lastly, after my brief trip to AZ, I began crashing at my friends place. 

    Now I just have to avoid catching COVID and try to arrange to stay somewhere else for the month of May. My friends need their space more than ever right now and I can't list their personal reasons for that here. But I am super excited about the new place and the person I met with to view the house-share/room said that he things I'd be a perfect fit, so I think I'm definitely in.  It has been quite a while since there have been any positive developments so I'm glad for this turn around.

Two Surprising Developments

     So there happens to be a lot of personal family and friend stuff going on at the moment. I found out yesterday afternoon that my dad had been in the hospital for two weeks and now one of my current roommates has tested positive for COVID. Her symptoms arose a couple of days ago, I believe. I just did an at home test and I am still negative. My dad found out last year that he has stage three kidney disease due to the Lithium he has been taking for the last 20 or so years and he has been struggling with finding a new medication to replace it. A familiar territory for me, too. It still has not been made clear to me why exactly he ended up in the hospital, whether it was due to physical ailments or deteriorating mental health or both. I would love it if life would be a little less exciting.

A Brief Update

    So I was able to get an extra half hour of therapy today which was good since I always have so much to talk about. I was able to fit 6 dog walks in between 10:30 & 1:30 and managed to buy myself lunch just before the 2:00 appointment. This session gave me a chance to admit some of the crazy stuff that came up for me while waiting 10 days between sessions a couple weeks ago... much of it being what I wrote, but there was one thing that occurred that I didn't write about and hadn't mentioned last Friday. Still not ready to mention here at the moment...
    On another note, I have a house-share to take a look at tomorrow evening to see if it will be a good match. I hope it goes well. It ticks a lot of the boxes I had in mind; close to most of my clients, affordable, house-share with people my own age. Crossing my fingers.

Who Am I?

Who am I beyond the trauma?
My ego would have me believe
that my identity is wrapped up in it,
that the trauma is my identity.

Who am I beyond the trauma?
My ego would have me believe
that I am all the flaws and shortcomings
that stem from it.

Who am I beyond the trauma?
It has obscured my true identity.
I find it hard to see
what lies beyond the mask.

My ego would have me believe
that I am the person who can't cope
with day-to-day mishaps.
My ego would have me believe
that I am the person who can't sleep,
who can't trust anyone
(including herself),
and who can't remember anything.

So who am I beyond the trauma?
What if I'm the person who
befriends other outcasts
and helps them feel a sense of belonging?

Who am I beyond the trauma?
What if I'm the person who
can be someone's ever steady rock
in a crisis?

Who am I beyond the trauma?
What if I'm the person who
can see the pain of others
hidden behind their smiles?

Day 10

    Last night was dose 10 and I FINALLY got a full night's sleep! And today there happened to be 2 less walks to do than what had been posted yesterday so that made it 6 visits before my 3 p.m. therapy appointment and 3 visits after. But there were still 2 visits to squeeze into the 7 to 9 a.m. window. I already drove over 41 miles today, apparently. What's funny is that despite my good mood, I was still able to get into a panic pretty easily this morning over small stuff. During one of my early morning visits it took forever to get a cat to eat and I couldn't find a bag for the kitty litter...small stuff and I was extra anxious. Due to the positive mood I woke up in, I didn't know I was so tightly wound up until then. But that's just the way I'm wired, I guess.

    Today, after waiting 10 days, is another day for therapy, so that will be good. A whole lot of nothing has happened and that's part of what has been bothering me. I need to move out ASAP, I am STILL waiting for the support group to start, despite the medication I've been on, I feel more or less exactly the same. But I think that is in part due to the fact that it interfered with my sleep. You can't expect an anti-depressant to lift your mood while it is taking away all of your sleep.

The Weight of the World

It has been quite a rough week. The hopelessness I feel continues to overwhelm me. Ages ago, I signed up for a support group for people who have survived CSA & it has been pushed back yet again. This time until May. The start date has now been changed so often that I won't believe it until I see it. And due to last Friday being Passover, my therapist shifted our Friday appointment to be three days earlier. So I've waited 10 days between appointments with all this mounting pressure. The insomnia coupled with the demands of my job has caused my exhaustion levels to continually rise. And tomorrow's work schedule is packed around my 1 hour of therapy. I quite literally can't cope right now. I keep getting the message to rest, but again, that's an impossibility. I'm the only one available to do the jobs that need doing tomorrow.

Another Night of Grief

    Someone told me the other day that the reason I am waking up at 2 in the morning is to work on healing "issues concerning my dad". This was confirmed during Monday night's channeled session as well. My inevitable concern is that since this wound runs so deep, how many days of working with my spirit guides on these "issues" will it take? Granted, now that I am not adding my ego's resistance to the 2 a.m. wake up calls, I feel more recovered by 7 or 8 than I was before I found all this out. I still can't tell you straight out that what I get after 2:00 could be considered sleep, but it is more restful. Hopefully this upswing continues because I have two or three early mornings in a row starting tomorrow with full workdays Thursday and Friday.

    On another note, I had another wave hit me last night. Things started feeling supremely hopeless to me. I can't help but feel like I've failed at life and that all I've done is waste time and space. Like I mentioned before, I may have survived the trauma, but at what cost? To me the cost often feels too steep. While I desperately want to be of service to others, currently I'm stuck crashing at a friend's place and I KNOW I have overstayed my welcome. It's been almost 5 months and the longer I stay the more I hate myself and the harder it is to manifest a place. You can't manifest your desires if you hold self-hatred in your heart. How can I help others out of their depression when I can't move out of my own? How can I serve others when I, myself, have failed at all facets of life? Last night was another night of wishing and praying for the end because my exhaustion and desperation had peaked yet again. I have spent a large portion of my life wanting life to be over already... Despite all my efforts, I have not succeeded in finding a way out of this dark and twisted labyrinth.

The Journey to God Continues

    I want to mention something that some of you may already know. The wave of grief I experienced a while back that led to the post "In Ruins" may have passed, but all the realizations that came with it are still very much alive and well. I'm still struggling to see that God was ever there for me. I'm still struggling to believe that God loves me. I still feel as though there is no grand gesture big enough for me to trust God again. If you look at all the ways in which God's presence was evident throughout the last 24 years (since my siblings and my adoptions), you would think I would have been able to accept God's benevolence by now... But since my trauma lasted long enough to lead to a near death experience, perhaps many short journeys across the veil, it hasn't yet been enough to convince me.

    The questions keep coming up. If God loves me, then why? If I am deserving of good, then why? If God was indeed there for me all along, then why? Why did I have to go through such a dehumanizing experience for so long? Yes, I have been aware of, and accepted the idea that I chose this life knowing what I'd likely have to face, but that hasn't been able to take the weight of these questions off my shoulders.

Day Six With the New Version of Insomnia

    Last night was dose 6 of Lexapro and I'm still waking at 2 a.m. and staying awake from then on. My intuition is telling me to wait it out, but I'm not sure how much longer I can function like this.  I still have work on a daily basis; weekends are not going to be a thing for the next two weeks. There will be days with less work, but none completely free to recuperate. It's possible to take it in the morning, but it definitely makes me too drowsy to drive for the first few hours after taking it. I'm dreaming of a day in which my life isn't so Goddamn hard anymore. Sleep is hard, and less sleep means more things will stress me out and trigger me. Accepting the fact that knowing the source of my mental illnesses is trauma doesn't change the fact that I need medication is hard. I always wanted to believe that my self-awareness of the situation would negate a need for medication, but clearly that isn't the case. It took me a whole year to start trying medications for ADD, depression, and anxiety BECAUSE of the exact problem I'm facing now. I already HAVE insomnia and the medicines they recommend for my mental health issues keep causing worsening insomnia. It's infuriating. The main reason I keep taking Lexapro is because the side-effects I have had are supposed to be short lived and the painful ones were. We shall see.

To Make Ourselves Courageous

If we can acknowledge that God lives within us
and that God cannot be harmed,
then we will have made ourselves invincible.

If we can acknowledge that God lives within us
and that God is omniscient,
then we will have made ourselves wise.

If we can acknowledge that God lives within us
and that God is love and peace
then will we have made ourselves loving and peaceful.

If we can acknowledge that God lives within us

and that God is grace,

then we will have made ourselves kind and forgiving.

If we can acknowledge that God lives within us

and that God is strength and power
then we will have made ourselves courageous.

To Pay Homage to the Ruins

Make peace with the ruins of your heart.
For it is within the ruins of your heart
that you will uncover
the precious, sacred mysteries of your power.

Pay homage to the ruins of your mind.
For it is within the ruins of your mind
that you will discover
the unsung songs and the undreamt dreams of your soul.

Make peace with the broken road.
For it is this broken road that shall lead you
to your inner well of love and peace,
to your inner well of joy.

Pay homage to the you that was
and the you that has yet to be.
Make peace with where you stand.
For only once you've done these things,
can you believe that you are free.

Dreaming of A Day

I'm dreaming of a day
in which I am thriving,
not just surviving.

I'm dreaming of a day
in which I feel fulfilled
instead of empty and depleted.

I'm dreaming of a day
in which I know of my power
and act with a sense of purpose.

I'm dreaming of a day
in which joy fills my heart
more often than despair.

I'm dreaming of a day
in which I remember God's eternal love
more often than my heartache.

I hope one day I'll watch the birds
and learn to fly.
I hope one day I'll watch the river
and learn to flow.
I hope one day I'll feel the wind
and learn to breathe.
I hope one day I'll feel the rain
and learn it's ok to weep.

I'm dreaming of a day
in which I see my path
as sacred and divine.

I'm dreaming of a day
in which I see all of the courage and strength
embedded in the threads of my war-torn heart.

I'm dreaming of a day
in which I know myself to be sane
and not driven mad by the scope of my pain.

I'm dreaming of a day
in which I feel safe and secure
and happy to be me.

I'm dreaming of a day
in which I feel free
and not trapped in this life
that has felt meaningless to me. 

Just Another Free-Write (With a Troubling Confession)

    My exhaustion peaked today after sleeping 10-2 Tuesday and Wednesday night and 10-5 last night. Yes, I recognize that last night was 7 hours, but 7 hours doesn't help one fully recover from two nights of 4 hours followed by being awake 18 hours. So on the plus side, I managed one of my rare naps today. I haven't expressed it on this blog yet, but the reason sleep is often next to impossible for me, even during the day, is because the trauma my father put me through started while I was napping. So my body and mind are often working over-time to keep me safe simply by staying over-stimulated. Which means that when I am trying to fall asleep at night, my mind keeps me distracted with an endless train of useless thoughts.

    The other thing I have been wanting to unpack is that while I wrote the other day that my father is in fact innocent because the good in my father never had a chance to be expressed, I recognized a place in which I was digging in my heels against the healing process. I realized as I wrapped up that blog post that I do not want my biological father to become a good person because I apparently fear that this would invalidate my trauma somehow or make my story less believable. I want others to see him as the villain that I knew him to be. It's also because I have deified the trauma. Now obviously, I don't want him to keep hurting and traumatizing others so I know it's a ridiculous standpoint.

    With all that said, I relatively recently found out that there is no statute of limitations for what my father did to me and while I'm not entirely sure why this information was given to me, I will say that I do not want to take my biological father to court nor do I want to see him go to prison. Because I recognize that that would simply expose him to more trauma.

An Update and An Insomniac's Realization

    So after taking half a pill last night, things were a lot better. The painful side-effects were nil but the insomnia was still present. And the version of insomnia it has given me is that I am only able to sleep from around 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. After that my body seems to think it doesn't need any more. I even took a CBD gummy with melatonin, lemon balm, and magnolia in it and still not a wink was had after 2. But I feel awake and aware...not overly drowsy.

    While lying awake this morning I had a realization. Technically it was one of those that I knew in parts and pieces, but now it was made much more whole and concrete. What I realized was that the primary reason I struggle with feeling deserving of good things is because my inner child still can't wrap her head around the idea that she did not deserve what had happened to her. She thinks that the abuse could not have occurred if she truly didn't deserve it. As I have mentioned before, Dr. Gabor Mate says that children blame themselves for the parental abuse they go through because the alternative would be to acknowledge that no matter how they changed themselves to please their parents, their parents would still be unable to love them. It would mean acknowledging that they would always be in danger. So a part of me still believes that the abuse occurred because I was somehow innately wrong, because I was somehow innately unacceptable. This is why when someone calls me out on making a mistake (usually a social error) my first response is to grab the switch that I imagine to be in their hand and whip myself with it saying "You're right. I'm a terrible person". Obviously, just because they call me out doesn't mean they want to punish me, but that is what I often perceive to be the case. 

When Medication Breaks You In

    What I didn't mention yesterday is that I got a prescription filled for Lexapro and I took my first dose last night. And what a night that turned out to be. I fell asleep sometime after 10 and woke at 2 a.m. with a headache and severe nausea. The headache included pain in my sinus cavities (without the pressure present during a bad cold). This was just 10 milligrams and it's a trial run. I only have 10 days worth. I wasn't told to expect this, but apparently it is common for this particular medication to break YOU in. (Instead of "breaking in new shoes", the new medication does the breaking here.) After an hour of nausea bad enough to sit by the toilet, my dinner finally came up and then it progressed to dry heaves. This hasn't happened to me since my encounter with ruptured ovarian cysts 10 or 11 years ago. I was able to get the dry heaving to stop by massaging my stomach with my knuckles but the nausea was still there. Needless to say, I wasn't able to fall back to sleep. On the plus side, I managed to go to work today and had a good time with it despite the persistent queasiness. I talked with my new nurse practitioner about it all and when I asked about taking half a dose tonight, she said that would be ok. So I've taken half a dose with dinner and so far the queasiness has subsided since I ate. Now whether or not it will stay down throughout the night, that is a whole other question. We shall see.

EMDR Update 2

    Since this coming Friday is Passover, I actually had my therapy appointment moved to today and we started using bilateral brain stimulation to begin "resourcing". From what I can gather, resourcing is creating fairly tangible self-soothing imaginings. Or another way to say it is creating and accessing resources that can be used to help us remain calm. The examples I know so far include creating an ally, viewing yourself in a light stream, a safe place, nurturing figure, protective figure, an animal, and a container. Today, I worked on creating an ally and then used the bilateral stimulation to "install" it. Basically make the image more concrete and easier to bring fully into your conscious awareness. Apparently I was trying too hard. The point of the exercise is to let your mind do what ever it's going to do. But I can do this on my own now and keep practicing for the next 10 days.

What to Say, What to Say...

    Time has begun to slip through my fingers even more so than usual. I have been aiming to write something every day but there have a few occasions recently where I kept putting it off for a later part of the day and then the next thing I know I'm choosing to start my bedtime routine instead of writing. There doesn't seem to be much to write about some days but I recognize that it is good for my mental health to take the time to check in with myself via the meditative writing practice that I typically try to do on a daily basis. It is easy for me to suppress feelings (or at least, not deal with them fully) until they overwhelm me the way they did Monday night. When you are already used to chronic emotional pain, it can be hard to notice or acknowledge some of the small things that are sapping your peace until you come across the straw that breaks the camel's back. 
    Currently I'm pet sitting for three super sweet animals, two cats and a dog. My first day here has been a blast as usual. I got to play with the dog and walk her a couple of times and then this evening, I had one of the cats napping on my lap. They're really happy pets and the perfect therapy for me as well. I was able to stay in the moment more often today than usual thanks to their company.