Searches that Lead to this Vortex
April 28, 2008 at 3:57 am | In anxiety, change, eeabee, needs, pain, shame, support, vortex | Leave a CommentTags: blogging, change, needs, quest, shame, support, vortex
by eeabee (who is now “eeabee of the 26.2 miles”)
These are some of the searches that have lead people to our blog. Some of which are apparently from fellow silly souls, and others from fellow sufferers. Either way, we can only hope you find what you need, or a link or idea for where else to look, or even just a little company.
wiggly toes
toe of shame
toe wiggling habit
kindness to oneself
“trauma reenactment”
mrs vortex
the feeling of being in a vortex
vortex in human body
always feel shame
why do my toes wiggle
body memories
wiggly toe
what are body memories
feeling wiggley anxiety
vortex
“body memories”
toe wiggle
vortex as metaphor
shame vs fear
vortex healing depression anxiety
shame and self care
blogs about shame on oneself
trauma vortex
heart get suck down a vortex
Some of these, the toe/wiggly ones and mrs vortex especially, make me smile, and some are things I’ve no doubt gone out searching for myself. There’s a lot of this kind of pain out there, and it’s not the kind of pain we can live with alone, especially not when the heart gets sucked down a vortex, as it does sometimes.
Vortex Imagery from Mr. Fancy Poetry Guy (Yeats, in this Case)
April 15, 2008 at 3:18 am | In eeabee, family, fear, relationships, shame, vortex, writing | Leave a CommentTags: culture, family, gyre, poetry, shame, things fall apart, vortex, Yeats
by eeabee
In Yeats’s “The Second Coming”:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. . .
Here the vortex is out in the world, unleashed–maybe a different thing than the internal ones of individuals–but no, I think not. I think maybe that they are all the same thing, all part of each other. Individual shame spirals don’t come from nowhere, they come from other individuals, from families, from culture–from all the systems we move in, all the systems that can house a vortex. Some of us just seem to feel them deeply. Some of us try not to pass them on, and so they stay with us.
Shame Binds or/and a Cliffside Dance Party
February 25, 2008 at 4:02 am | In change, coping strategies, eeabee, fear, needs, psychology, shame, trauma, vortex, work, writing | 2 CommentsTags: addiction, lightness, melodrama, needs, playfulness, psychology, recovery, shame, tone, writing
by eeabee
I’m reading John Bradshaw’s Healing the Shame that Binds You, and I see that he says: “To be shame-bound means that whenever you feel any feeling, need or drive, you immediately feel ashamed” (32).
Oh dear.
This does seem a bit of an awkward way to go through life, a bit inconvenient.
And so it is. I find things like this helpful though, not to weigh myself down with the enormity of an issue like this to be point of being immobilized, matted down, stuck to the floor, but because it makes me realize how huge of a deal it is to be able to move at all. This could become overly self-congratulatory, and probably already has, but there may be worse things. Clearly I like (and fear, but also like) attention, or I wouldn’t be writing here, so there’s no sense it denying it, not really. Even less so, if I admit that my job involves me having regular almost captive audiences, which I do admit, because it does.
Equally distressing are these quotes: “As each new shaming experience takes place, a new verbal imprint and visual image form a scene that becomes attached to the existing ones to form collages of shaming memories” (32); “As the years go on, very little is needed to trigger these collages of shame memories. A word, a similar facial expression or a scene can set it off. Sometimes an external stimulus is not even necessary” (33). A whole big webby network in which a disturbance (or not even) in one spot triggers the whole thing to go haywire. And so it does. Not always–not like it used to. And I was just about to write that with this collage/network thing, the situation is as likely to worsen over time as it is to get better, and I’ve experienced some of that, some of it lately. But I’ve experienced the opposite too. It has taken great labor to get this far, which, if you haven’t gathered this already, is a bit sad considering how much room there is for improvement, but it’s more dazzling to think about where I came from. End-stage addiction, for one thing. And I do mean end stage. Which is where I now live, poised delicately above the brink I was just about to plummet from. See, I’ve been starting to think that a little melodrama–or a lot, it’s not really something that works in subtle accents–has some things to be said for it. It’s not actually that I’m exaggerating, but my prose is a bit purple at times, juicy-like, a bit oversaturated. Overdecorated with swooning-couches. But it’s such pleasure to overdo a bit like this, and it lets me play with something I certainly wouldn’t be able to wrestle down without getting myself killed in the process. But dancing with my awareness of where and how I live–on this edge of disaster, having stepped a few feet back, but I don’t think it’s possible to get far–that lightens the feeling of living here. It reminds me there is pleasure and lightness even here. Or shall I say (Oh I shall, I shall. . .) “especially here.” “Especially here” it is then, because while it sometimes seems intolerable and too scary here, sometimes it seems just as right to wonder what could possibly be more surprising and exciting?
And there’s never a problem with boredom.
The self in its unity and boundedness and other fanciful myths
February 17, 2008 at 7:50 pm | In body/mind, change, coping strategies, eeabee, pain, parts of the self, psychology | 1 CommentTags: boundaries, cheer, compassion, empathy, perverseness, real, self, self-determination, self-expression, support, woundedness
By eeabee
It’s funny. We think our selves are so discrete–so clearly demarcated–such unities–such knowable things. Such myths. We are such myths. Not that I mean we aren’t valuable–I do not reject the value of myths. Far from it. Quite the opposite. That’s sort of the trouble. Myths mean; myths move; myths make. Mmm. It also isn’t that to claim that it would be bad (or good, for that matter), if are selves were always these things we say they are. Maybe they are sometimes, but I think not always, if at all.
The edges of a self are not always so fortress-strong. This means that a self cannot keep all invasions out, nor need it remain untouched. A self cannot enforce its own self-determination, its inalienable rights, which are clearly all too alienable. A self may announce its boundaries, but may not be recognized as sovereign by others–or by elements within–ones that are treasonous, traitorous, sly (I do like me some extended metaphors; in fact, it is becoming a sort of compulsive practice to begin one and keep on keepin’ on with it). A self may not know it can announce boundaries, that it can claim anything at all, or even that it can speak.
I say this to myself and whoever else will tolerate such didacticism: Do not ask why this self doesn’t just take some responsibility; do not say to this self “get a grip” or “grow up.” Only wonder why it does not speak for itself; only trace the reason; only listen for ways in which it almost speaks; only ease the pain of its wounds. Do not say, “when are those wounds going to be healed”; only look for ways to help to heal them. I say this to myself as much as any. I do not always meet these obligations, but I am learning to take notice, and I know that when I mention my shortfall I am accepting that these obligations are mine (as they are everyone’s), and this is something to do not with shame but with pride. Because obligations only belong to human beings who count and who matter, and so are the signs of a real existence, a real life, a fully human life. And because some obligations are a privilege to meet.
There is something to be said from starting from a sense of one’s own unreality, one’s feeling of not being part of the world of real people. Because things that might seem tiresome and onerous to others can seem like homecoming. I don’t mean that this is anything desirable or redeeming. Not feeling real or a full part of the human family isn’t redeemable or okay or tolerable. But it happens. And it has to be lived with (or not, but then that’s a different discussion, or rather, the end of discussions). So I say this in the service of my pollyannaish perverse mode, wherein I take awful realities and find them cheery in a grotesque sort of way, the mode that lets me live.
Wrongy-wrong-wronginess. But at least there’s sleep.
February 11, 2008 at 4:23 am | In body image, depression, eeabee, fatigue, self-criticism, shame | Leave a CommentTags: anhedonia, body image, depression, fatigue, self-criticism
by eeabee
I’ve been fighting with some serious fatigue and some gloominess–some thyroidy problems, methinks, which makes it easier to observe a little rather than getting totally sucked under and in. It’s a little more identifiable, and there’s no anhedonia–the loss of pleasure in usually pleasurable things business, which makes depression so hard to fight because with the anhedonia there doesn’t seem to be any point since everything’s flat or icky anyway. So that’s not here, just the droopy droopiness and getting overwhelmed and falling asleep and telling myself terrible things about myself (wrong size, wrong shape, wrong comments, wrong silence, wrong ideas, wrongy-wrong-wrong).
But it’s been possible to separate from those thoughts and symptoms a bit more than sometimes–not possible to stop them, or stop having those thoughts, but more possible not to add to them by taking them too much to heart. It’s not so easy not to take one’s own thoughts too much to heart, but I find it’s absolutely necessary for survival sometimes.
But I think I’ll stop writing now because it seems to be rather tiring.
“I Suckery” and Body Memories of the Non-Traumatic Variety
February 3, 2008 at 2:20 pm | In anxiety, body/mind, change, eeabee, self-criticism, shame, trauma, vortex, work, yoga | Leave a CommentTags: anxiety, boundaries, change, joy, movement, running, self-criticism, shame, work, WoYoPracMo, yoga
[I posted this on sparks in the night also, but I'm revisiting and adding a bit here.]
They capture shame, but also the joy of movement and the shape of the world.
I feel like writing about movement today, no thinkies. Those haven’t been going so well, lots of “I failed” at this or that or “I suck” in various ways. Some of it must be fictional–it seems like one person can only suck in so many ways at a time–one would think. I seem to be deteriorating a bit in this area, regressing some, for the first time since I got sober. Maybe it’s just a dip (if not, I’m in trouble), but it’s strange to have so much of the I-suckery going on in my head, like it always used to be. I got all worked up over another work thing, a student complaining about my appalling cruelty (Note: I don’t think this is one of my qualities, in truth) to all sorts of higher-ups. Luckily, she lied about them failing to respond to her at all (they had responded to her) so that helps my situation. And I think I had handled it all well and had a record thereto, but I had some difficulty not taking it in, not taking it to heart. This was a constant problem before and had gotten better. I guess revisiting the “I suckery” and finding it startlingly unpleasant means some change had occured, which is good, but it does drag at my feet, threatens to pull me down deep.
So no thinkies. Movement, territory, rain. I went running the other day, 16 miles I’d guess, WITH HILLS. And I do mean hills–there are some big ones where I was. They actually make it more interesting, more of a journey with different terrains than some sort of tiresome grind. It was a bit moist, which is to say raining for much of the time, but not so cold. I ran through some semi-rural areas, with horses peering at me as if puzzled by my going by, and saw some grey and soggy but lovely views.
Yoga-wise I’ve been mostly keeping up at least some basic yoga poses/stretches each day, sometimes more, sometimes less, but more than I was in the habit of doing before WoYoPracMo. I do definitely notice some new looseness/mobile-ness that is strange with such as escalation of running going on at the same time–must be the yoga. I’ve been to some new classes, including my first all-ashtanga all the time class which was great. It kicked my butt, but it was great.
Dynamic, fiery and vigorous, intense. The first yoga instructor whose classes got me hooked had an ashtanga influence to his flows and poses, so it reminded me a bit of when I first started. That was such an intense time–I was quitting drinking, learning all kinds of new things, getting overwhelmed, living life again. They say the body remembers trauma, and so it does. It remembers other things too. It remembers renewal, the joy of movement, the pain not of injury but of aching muscles being stimulated to develop, the forms it has shaped itself to, the rhythms it has followed.
Linky Bits
January 26, 2008 at 1:04 pm | In eeabee, pain, support, trauma, writing | 2 CommentsTags: abuse, fear, healing, love, pain, recovery, survivors, writing
by eeabee
I thought I’d share this poem by Austin of The People Behind My Eyes, especially because of the way I think it captures how deeply early-life pain wounds us and just how hard it is to live with.
What really sucks is that the person who’s been hurt is left holding the burden, the burden which belongs somewhere else.
This is when I like to say that the person who does the hurting loses a bit of their soul, that there is a cost to them too. I want to say that there is some comfort in at least not having to be like them. Cold comfort. I kind of like cold comfort though, and it’s more than nothing.
And there’s the warm stuff out there too–like in the way we can share our pain with each other. Love. Which not-so-subtly segues into another link–to ama’s post called love and pain.
[I posted this on my blog, sparks in the night, but it's got a link that might be of interest for us too.]
The Mind is a Dangerous Place to be Alone (or at least mine is)
Big Fat Baby Crybaby Whiny Needy Baby. These are the kinds of things my brain tells me about myself sometimes. And I do cry and need things (this needing business is a huge point of crushing shame for me so it’s hard to even say). But even I can see that these labels are a tad extreme.
Rising Rainbow replied to a comment of mind in a thoughtful and helpful post that I’m linking to here. Maybe it’s a tiny bit because she said nice things about my comment, but mostly it’s because what she said was clarifying and also affirming for me. I think it’s sometimes quite hard for me not to discount how I feel about things (any/all of them, really)–it’s such an ingrained reflex–but others’ words can help a lot to counter what my own brain tells me.
So let’s try this:
Big Fat Baby Crybaby Whiny Needy Baby.
Person. Regular old human being, plain and simple.
I Object, I Protest, It’s not Fair, If it’s Going to be like that I’m Taking My Toys and Going Home.
January 25, 2008 at 5:44 am | In depression, eeabee, fear, rejection, shame, support, work | Leave a CommentTags: anxiety, communication, fear, panic, relationships, shame, support, therapy, work
by eeabee
So. My friends here reassembled me after falling apart over various things the other day, and I’ve got a new project for you all already! The previous project is a little hard for me to untangle/piece apart, but the basic idea is that I keep having the experience of feeling some trust (for people like my spouse and therapist) and being startled to find that I’m feeling hurt by them, while at the same time knowing they don’t want to hurt me, thus making me get all confused and feeling like my cat looks when he’s running in circles after his tail. So that’s been a whole big thing lately.
And I really felt that this was plenty of this sort of thing thank you very much.
But (complain, complain) yesterday I was back at work for a whole new batch of students and classes and fairly wound up because I was so reminded of last spring, which is when my father died and everything was just a big boggy mess. My employer overheard me talking to a friend about house-hunting, and I live a ways from work and my employer does not appear to like of this situation, so she did this whole pull-me-into-her-office-close-the-door thing, accompanied by some very alarming comments. It was very out-of-the-blue and strangely without context. I handled all this with extreme dignity, of course, and burst into tears (and I do not cry glamorously but blotchily and puffily). Turns out that she wasn’t saying anything new at all and hadn’t meant to be threatening (it had sounded to me like I was on the brink of job-losing), just worried that I wasn’t getting to know some of the people I work with well enough because that might have effects on decisions they make about me in the future or something. Not quite how it came out initially, and certainly not to my ears. I had felt more like an abject creature halfway firing-squad victim and the other half small child who’s been sent to the principal’s office and is imagining catastrophic consequences awaiting. The said spouse and therapist helped me to not freak out any more than I already had–nice twist isn’t it? Maybe the next thing will be my employer helping me deal with whoever the next situation is who gets me all confused. I’m not quite ready for that though!
Wiggly Toes: Shame vs. Kindness to Oneself
January 17, 2008 at 3:55 pm | In body/mind, change, coping strategies, eeabee, self-care, shame, support | Leave a CommentTags: addiction, body/mind, change, compulsion, coping, kindness, recovery, self-criticism, shame, toes, yoga
by eeabee
–this first part is also posted on my individual blog, sparks in the night, but the end is some additional writing that has to do with the shame aspect that we’ll probably be talking about a lot here–
Yoga has gotten me more aware of my toes and what they want like and need, and for some reason I can feel all nice about them and want to do those things (stretching them out and rubbing them after a long run).
A photo from hikejmt’s WoYoPracMo posts, more of which are here: http://woyopracmo.ning.com/photo/photo/listForContributor?screenName=l9ykcnwlo6hl
This isn’t something that always comes easily to me–feeling okay about myself needing or wanting things (especially on the emotional/psyche level), but this seems like a starting point, something to work from. Maybe it’s possible to start there and work to the things that are harder for me.
I was talking to some fellow recovery people yesterday about the ways in which we seem to jump from large addiction/compulsion to a multitude of little ones (and less harmful ones, so this is no small improvement, and it’s really a matter of going from lethal to non-lethal). And I think that part of it (there are many many many aspects, a real manystranded tangle) is that we (women especially maybe, but perhaps not exclusively, but this is who I was talking with and about) often don’t feel we have the right to try to get our desires and needs met, and addiction/compulsions can be a little way of compensating, of feeling like we’re giving ourselves something over here on the side when you’re not looking. It’s not usually something that’s actually good for us, but it’s also a way of preserving or recognizing our right to have wishes and needs. Now if we could all “just” quit killing ourselves our driving ourselves crazy with this technique.
But this tending to parts of the body that want or need something seems a little more accessible to me than the whole treating oneself as deserving of existence. My reflex is to perceive myself as inherently wrong, wrongness incarnate, fundamentally faulty. But I don’t do this as much with the physical part of myself. “As much” I say because I do not always feel thrilled about whatever flaws I happen to be deciding that I have at a given time (it varies, and I think it’s almost arbitrary).
But I am going to stop writing now because my toes are saying they want to wiggle and not only that but they want my full attention as they do.
Okay, I’m back from the toe-wiggling and want to add some thoughts on how shame fits into all this.
I didn’t think much about shame until recently, which is kind of funny since it’s pretty much the core of all this difficulty with needs. It’s the feeling that I shouldn’t have any needs, even some of the most basic human ones, and certainly anything that has to do with relying on others or being vulnerable. And incoveniently (or not!) I seem to be quite open and vulnerable, not icy/thick-skinned. So it’s a recipe for difficulty at least and disaster ultimately. But it’s also a recipe for changing because I can’t not change.
Shame tells us we shouldn’t want and need things, that we have to pretend we don’t, and it even sometimes makes it hard for us to recognize what we need and want. It’s quite disorganizing. It involves a lot of nastiness in terms of the self-talk that runs on (and on!) in one’s head, all the time just about. It’s appalling, and I say things to myself I wouldn’t dream of saying to others, as if I’m somehow different (worse) than everyone else, not quite human. But somehow I held onto the feeling that all of this isn’t right. And honestly, my compulsions are part of how I did that, I think. This may not be a popular view, but I think it’s true. That doesn’t mean I want to keep being enslaved to them if I can help it; it doesn’t mean I still need them in the same way. But it’s a reason to forgive myself for having them.
Mrs. Vortex of Rabbithole Junction, Wormholeville.
January 15, 2008 at 6:15 am | In change, eeabee, fear, rejection, shame, vortex | Leave a CommentTags: change, fear, rejection, shame, transformation, vortex
by eeabee
Note: I might post a few things here, like this one, that I’ve also posted a version of on my individual blog (sparks in the night on Oct. 25 2007)–things I’d like to revisit. But I’ll write different things too.
Last fall I had some major descents into shame vortexes (I think I prefer not to use the “vortices” plural form at this time) and I’m thinking back on them, from a little distance, now that I’m a few feet away from the edge, the precipice. Sometimes the ground around the vortex seems to slope, so that the vortex expands and engulfs the normally-level ground around it, engulfing whatever in it’s path. But it’s staying more contained now, for now, ’til next time.
For me, falling into the shame spiral goes like this: I am walking along feelin’ fine and not on edge (that’ll teach me not to be on edge!) and I fall right into a wormhole-rabbithole. Rejection (real OR potential OR only imagined) or anything that triggers an overwhelming attack of self-criticism seem to be what make me lose my balance, tilt, and fall.
These are moments in which the past seems to return, uncalled for and unwanted, to make the present seem like a replay of the past.
Anything that smacks of rejection and/or not being seen and/or how much I allegedly suck is potentially lethal for me. Lately it’s been moments of remembering difficulties with my spouse and therapist, and me worrying that I have ruined my car somehow (because it’s having a couple issues, and of course it must be my doing somehow, even though one issue is at least due to a faulty computer and others are due to having been hit by another driver, but so what, it could still somehow be my suckiness that is to blame). Rejection, invisibility/unrealness, suckiness–these are installed ideas that can be easily triggered, and can be harmful and even threaten to be lethal. Because that’s the life they have when stirred and not balanced out. And I’m afraid I find myself getting all dismantled more times than not. I’m told I have a choice about this, but I have little idea about how not to, and little-to-zero skill in the matter. But it’s a nice thought that it’s possible to learn to have a choice, even if it’s just a dream, and maybe it’s more.
But that’s not always available, not always there in the present moment; some days are for falling into rabbitholes, for being whisked out of time. This timelessness, this collapsing of time and space, this vortex–it swirls with shame and fear. It pulls me in, and I am gone once I enter the spiral. Or so it seems to me, and so it is in effect, for a time. If I don’t know I exist for a minute–if I lose touch with myself, I am not there for myself until it passes.
I fear the vortex; I want to learn its power in a new way, without such fear. It transforms, which is scary, but it is other things too. Exchange. Recirculation. It is not a black hole, though it feels like one; it does not eat. It takes me in. But I come out, or some version of me does. What if I could move in it, through it? What if I could ride its energies?
I’m getting carried away though, as I generally do. It’s one thing not to fall apart in terror of the vortex, but that doesn’t mean I have to love it, be seduced by it, give myself utterly over to it. Like the kids so wisely say, “if I love it so much why don’t I marry it.” Just call me Mrs. Vortex. Life is never boring in our house. It’s wild.
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