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 Comments
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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.

“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 | No Comments
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[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.

One of Those Days

January 25, 2008 at 10:50 pm | In anxiety, mastgirl, self-criticism, shame, tizzy, work | 4 Comments
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by mastgirl

Well, here it goes. Today is one of those days. Where waking up is torture due to being slammed with anxiety before I even open my eyes, and it just seems to get worse from there. I’m rattled from the beginning with a whole day stretching out before me. I’m then alone for part of the day so the part of my brain that is struggling to calm itself has to compete with the part that seems to just want to do me in with the thinking, thinking, thinking….ugh. I do think that part of this anxiety is related to my unlimited ability to put things off that need to be done…that dreaded “P” word. I see one thing that needs to be done and it leads to another, then another until I’m surrounded. It’s not that I see one thing then do it, then see another…it’s that I almost see them all at once…it’s that I just keep adding more to the to do list in my head until it’s too much. All of the chatter in my head about just what kind of person I am is absolutely exhausting. It’s so easy…think Nike -just do it…please do it.

So, I either sit down and open the computer or wander from room to room until I am really in a tizzy. I want to focus on one thing at a time…just one and I want it to be crystal clear…simple. Maybe that’s it, I just want life to be crystal clear and simple…is that too much to ask?

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 | No Comments
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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!

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