Out of the shadows

At work on Saturday I blanked out for a while. A customer handed me some books, and the next thing I knew, I had to ask him if he was issuing or returning them, as I suddenly looked at the screen and was the issue screen, but I had no memory whatsoever of scanning his card, or of him giving me his card. It was only for about less than 10 seconds or so, and nothing happened, but still it scares me.
I’m facing a whole barrage of defence mechanisms and insecurity just now, so that’s probably why. Although in a way it’s kind of reassuring as it sort of makes things ‘real’. I also can identify some possible triggers in the time just running up to my dissociative episode.

~

http://www.teachers.tv/video/27050

I watched this on Sunday.

I cried.
In a healing, I’m not alone kind of way.
I used to be a primary school teacher. Full time and then supply. [my ex head wouldn't give me a reference for anything else..]
It wasn’t the career for me, being as I have very little confidence in groups and can’t assert authority calmly.
But even so the stories on the video struck home.
I had a breakdown in my 2nd year of teaching, triggered by stress. I stopped being the head’s ‘golden girl’ and she wore me down more and more. The parents didn’t like my teaching methods. I got more and more unable to cope. I resigned, with support of other staff, at the end of my 4th year there, rather than go through a disciplinary procedure. But supply teaching led me into a deeper hell. It took me 12 years in schools before I could escape the torture, which included re-traumatisation. [I suffered over a decade of daily bullying by my peers throughout my own school years. Now I was being bullied by my employers, and the children I taught...]
It was work in therapy that helped me to start to move away from a lifetime of hurt. I moved house, I started working in a public library. After over 2 years of relentless failures at interview, I finally secured a job that I am safe in. And which is fully accommodating of my illnesses.

I maybe should be proud to say that I’ve taught in some of the roughest primary schools in Inner London - Brixton, Hackney, Dalston, Deptford, Shadwell, Stepney, East Ham, Leytonstone…. and didn’t run out of the room crying like other supply teachers.
I’m not sure.

~

The hay fever is easing. It certainly seems it was stress induced. I’m working hard at accessing the key that will unlock me from the psychosomatic problems that I’ve had ever since I was at least 6 or 7, with frequent urination, and being anxious about that. It’s hard work, unburying feelings that were ‘forbidden’ *back then*. Like the desire for approval and recognition, the longing to be trusted, the desire for intimacy, the ache to be visible, to be seen. That last is the most conflict-laden one…

And, in teaching, as with my father when I was a child, being seen meant having my faults picked out.

I feel very fragile and delicate. Like my skin is exceedingly thin, and exposed. Physically, but I feel it emotionally.
It’s not in a raw, painful way. But in a kind of nascent, needing nurturing protection way.

I think it’s at least in part as a result of work I’m doing in therapy at the moment, which is empowering me to focus on my wellness and potential, which directly confronts my Other One. My Other One being my self-destructive, self critical, bullied/bullying mindset. It’s power is being overthrown.

This kind of breaks my heart open after, what, over 30 years of often heartless inner rule.

I had an important realisation at work this afternoon, when I let a customer off paying fines, as he’d been in hospital. If I’d been in the grip of THO, as I call it, I would have been authoritarian and refused, ‘made’ him pay. But, I chose to respond to empathy and compassion instead. It was powerful for me, because I realised how often it is that fear of authority [like, fear of what a manager might say if I were 'softer'] is what cuts me off from expressing compassion.

I’ve been having many intense and vivid dreams recently. This is indicative of deep breakthroughs happening in my therapuetic exploring.

Here is one recurring dream -

Basically, in the dream I’m back teaching [primary school children] and I’m struggling to keep going, to keep in control. Struggling to keep the class in control, and terrified of misbehaviour and feeling so lost. In the dream I am also desperate for approval.

This was how it was in real life for most of my teaching career, starting with the teaching practices. I did have one good teaching practice, but the others… Were pretty dire. 5 year olds putting water in the sand pit, kids generally messing around and not listening. You get the picture. Supply teaching was even worse, and lets just say that it re-traumatised me.

I’m no longer teaching. Thank goodness.
But I do fear my own emotional loss of control.
Yesterday I had an important breakthrough in understanding what is beneath my occasional public ‘losses of control’. It’s a longing to be recognised and seen and taken care of. It comes from a child state in me. Obviously. And I’m working to hold the sadness safe in my heart, and tending and containing that is helping me feel more in control.

Why this recurring dream though? Especially when I’m at last starting to get to grips with it. Why do I feel I’m always under scruntiny and will never be good enough? [Actually, I kind of do know. But I still crave it's recognition and acknowledgement.]

In some ways I could see it as a PTSD style dream. Just an overplay of painful traumatic memories embedded and replaying over and over indiscriminantly. But I know more than that. I look deeper.

I hadn’t thought about my being in the child’s roles in the dream. That’s interesting. My longing for freedom, a safe space where my creativity doesn’t feel threatened, is very precious to me.

Teaching was never really my thing. I went into it because my mum was a teacher, and I didn’t know much else. I’d wanted to be a nursery nurse, but was told I was too intelligent, and should stay on and do A levels and be a teacher instead. :/ Noone ever looked at what I was really good at.

If I ever worked with children again, it would be child psychotherapy.

Yes, I do wish I could still be a child, and do all the things I never was allowed to do when I was small. I became frozen emotionally and physically through the way things were. I was never allowed to make a mess in any shape or form. I was never allowed to make a noise. Even speaking was frowned upon when my father was most unwell.

Invisible.

My flatmates have gone out. All of them. Apparantly someone is coming back with the little one and baby sitting. Overnight. I overheard this, from his mum, who was telling him.

And noone tells me. I live here too. I feel so desolate, invisible, rejected.

I’ve eaten dinner already. Taking refuge in my room.

I feel so alone. So so alone.

I found an article online that expresses the feelings of loneliness so acutely well. But it’s copyrighted, so I can’t reproduce it here. But I’ve saved it. For myself. I do have a self, don’t I? At times like these it makes me wonder.

What does it really take to tell me what’s going on? Am I really so… standoffish that people don’t want to talk to me? Don’t people care any more? Too many changes coming up at work, and now this. And 7 days until I see my therapist again.

Trapped in this cobweb, dark deep sorrow filled cavern of neglect,

Ancient sea at the base of my torment.

Torturous anxieties flood me and make my legs unsteady.

How can you stand on the dark?

Trapped. Can’t breathe. Isolated. Segregated. Marginalised.

Hope. Where is hope?

Please hold onto me. I’m scared.

—

Update 9pm. Babysitter gone home. I can breathe now. Telling myself that she’s nice, she won’t hurt me or laugh at me helped… the voice of rationality and current reality shining through years of fear and humiliation and rejection.

Sorrow. The ache of the place in my chest.

Stepping closer to myself, to the wounded and shining heart.

Maybe I won’t need a sleeping tablet now. It’s frightening and fascinating how the waves of dread drift and slide and pass, like clouds across a watery sun.

Last night I went to sleep late, and slept well. Maybe I can try that again tonight. My heart’s beating fast. Maybe doing some dance before bed again too would be good. I need to write about the dance piece I am developing here soon, too…

In quiet moments, my insecurity floods through me, and I feel that primal fragmentation anxiety. That desperation to be held, reassured, safe, protected. Internally, in those moments, I feel utterly alone and forsaken, falling forever into the ravine of my psyche, a bottomless abyss with no safe landing.
This is pre-verbal. It’s .. a constant dying inside me, as I am frantic to live. Life and death battle inside me, at an unconscious level, moment by moment. The world becomes bleak, and mirrors my internal earliest desolation and fragmentation.
And I fear I will fall into pieces if not held.

This is what I live with, internally, the dynamics of my psyche. I contain it. More than I used to be able to.
Hold on. Hold on. Hold me. Don’t let me go.

These reflections reached my unconscious mind, reflected in my dream/nightmare last night. it helped me in a cathartic kind of way, expressing deep felt anxieties. Basically, in the dream I came as close as close to making a suicide attempt, right to the edge. But my therapist was there soon and helped bring me back to safety.

Today is Sunday. Tomorrow is Monday. I can rest today, gather myself, hear myself. Quietly. And tomorrow, too. At least I don’t have to put myself through travelling to and from meeting my parents tomorrow, we’ve rearranged it to Friday. Because of the football. I cannot face travelling on a crowded train full of rowdy people.

Continuing to be aware of and contain my deepest shadowy thoughts is therapeutic for me. As Jung said, we don’t heal by imagining ’streams of light, but by making the darkness conscious’.
If we acknowledge what is in the shadows, see it for the reality that it is, it starts to lose some of it’s destructive power over us. It’s a relief. Real. Tangible. And can start to make us more whole, as so often the more shadowy feelings have had to be repressed, suppressed and denied for others so called comfort…

I’m working at allowing the sadness. To feel the sadness beneath the anger. To allow it space, to flow. This is my current process in therapy. It can at times feel almost too much to bear, the sadness. It’s had at times like those to resist the flooding in of my Other, who attempts to protect me from feeling connected with myself and others and reality.

Small things, seemingly, touch that softeness that moistens my eyes.

I could have hugged my doctor this morning, when I told her about my grief at my lack of motivation. She said that it is only at work that my motivation is low, that I am still motivated in my recovery. What really touched me was that she said I am in a job that is way below my ability level, because I need to devote my intelligence and skills and energy into recovery. It brought tears to my eyes to be seen as an intelligent person. It means so much to me.

I just found this really good article, and wanted to share it here.

http://www.aucklandtherapy.co.nz/Articles/TraumaAndDissociation.htm

It’s especially notable for me, as it includes premature birth as a potentially traumatic experience that can cause dissociative symptoms in later life. [and of course at the time]

This essay briefly describes therapeutic theory and practice concerning treating adults with severe infant childhood trauma (premature birth, ongoing serious illness, ongoing abuse etc) particularly those clients that as adults suffer from dissociative symptoms. It draws on a range of literature from the trauma field as well as specific literature on depersonalisation.

And

Briere (1992) also notes the long term impacts of childhood trauma this typically involve watchful anxiety, a preoccupation with control, and misinterpretation of interpersonal situations as threatening, as well as disruption to ability to form relationships, and difficulties with emotional regulation. From this perspective treatment involves completion of interrupted developmental tasks and skills.

… then we also have

Scaer makes the explicit link between the trauma of premature birth and its long term impacts, including dissociation.

It goes on to say

When treating trauma from infancy or from premature birth Scaer (2001) notes that infants “are especially susceptible to dissociate or freeze in the face of trauma” (p. 136). He further notes that “little if anything in the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) literature addresses the terrible trauma to which premature infants are exposed, or the long-term behavioural and emotional sequelae of that trauma” (p. 152).

I’m so excited and relieved when I read articles like this.

Of course we all know that it’s more than my prematurity that caused everything, but that was the beginning that started a chain of events, a spiral that is Complex PTSD.

How to begin to find words to express this part of my journey to myself? How to give words form and explain how it is to start to feel connected with your own life and spirit, and see connections thread through, right from the very beginning?

I was first consciously depressed when I was 5 years old. Lost. Shadow child. Drifting through life. Unable to stop my father frightening me. Unable to stop the bad nights. Unable to make the children at school like me.

It puts a whole new perspective on the adult self that holds this wounded child in her psyche. Compassion. Yes, I have a disability. Life long depression, complicated by trauma and abuse. I have difficulty in forming and maintaining relationships - I withdraw and isolate myself, find it hard to trust people, find it hard to trust myself. My relating is… fractured, for want of a better word.

Connecting with a lost 5 year old, connecting with a newborn torn out into the world before she was ready, and before the world was ready for her… connecting with the core life-thread at the base of my heartache…. Is liberating. Slowly. Gently. With hope.

I feel so much rage. So much devastation inside. Dissociation.. doesn’t always sedate me. Flashbacks and triggers can sometimes agitate me. Almost beyond measure. It’s the little things. The little things I feel shame about - the physically neglected state of my parents’ house, of the state of my mother’s inddors clothes when I was a teenager, of my father’s ‘attacks’, of how I was bullied and noone cared.

It’s the little things that get me now, still. The being ignored, treated as invisible, the stares. The pain inside. The projections. The shame.

What happened to me was disgusting, my therapist says. I agree with her. But part of The Other One in me does not. She thinks if I had been sexually abused, all my behaviours and triggers would make sense.

But no, it’s more subtle and less direct than that. Shame at my own existence, shame at emotional neglect I endured. Shame that I want more. More warmth. More nurturing. More reassurance.

There’s a well of cloying blackness deep in my soul.

Hold me. Hold me. Hold me.

Don’t hold me down.

How did my father manage to strap me to my bed? How did he get me there? What had I even done?

At least I’m getting in touch with my rage, trying my best to explore the depths below the surface. How I feel so confused, insecure, and how the prospect of recovering from years of emotional neglect and traumatic wastage totally daunts me. The trauma is embedded deep in the pathways of my brain. I am indeed, as my therapist explains, vulnerable to the intrusion of internalised abuses rampaging through my brain. [my words, after the vulnerable bit..] And it’s unhealthy, damaging.

And shameful.

Expressing the anger will cleanse the shame, maybe? Maybe, a little?

It breaks my heart how I was such an outcast, and how I perpetuate this still today.

Is it too much to be treated as a human being, as a fellow walker on this earth? But.. when I don’t see myself as human, and a terrified hostile child lingers behind my eyes.  Someone who noone wants. She who is bad, evil, unwanted, unlovable, abandoned.  Cold. Frozen. Shamed. Humiliated. Lost. Rejected.

How did I come to have so much compassion and awareness when in that lost part of my mind I hate myself so deeply? Will the two parts of my mind ever meet? Will I ever feel truly safe in the world? Will the mask of ingrained ugliness ever melt from my face? Can I ever cry enough tears? How can I live my life with so many tears inside me? Is it any surprise I can be volatile and jumpy at times?

Will anyone ever read this, and care?