This is Day 47, the longest period in which I have not had an alcoholic beverage in roughly four years. Never has a break been so noticeably improving of my health and mindset. Dark clouds are fewer and further between.
So something is working in this process, which heavily comprises nesting. Thankfully, I have a partner who is supplying the fireside space where I now nest in yoga pants, watching snow clouds release enough tiny six-sided water crystals to cover a mountain range.
I take my comfort and cues from nature. I have always felt safer with animals and the elements than with people, but I don’t fully equate that with the incest, abuse and absence of protection in childhood. All people buzz with energy. If you need confirmation, step into an elevator with a large angry man.
I am exhausted by the energies of people—our unwritten stories, hidden motives, needs and wants, styles of communication, layers of aware and unaware, trigger points and general inability to just sit quietly and look out of a window at a snowstorm in the mountains.
Drinking helped me endure people and the predatory energies that victimization attracts. Uninformed people like to parrot the phrase, “stop being a victim,” but the transit from victim to survivor is different for everyone. It doesn’t come easy. It takes time, and the support of other survivors—many of whom are just now starting to speak up.
For me, recovery involves more “being” and less “doing.” “Doing” is how we think we pass the time while it’s actually passing us. “Being” is naturally aligned with time. It has no preoccupation future or past. Attention is brought constantly into the moment. This takes practice, particularly in a stimuli-addicted society where getting our attention for even a few seconds at a time generates an enormous amount of money for someone who is not either of us.
As with all practices, having an instructor helps. I listen to the mindfulness lectures of Borscht Belt Buddhist philosopher Tara Brach. I recommend her podcast to anyone who deals with depression and anxiety. If you’re a survivor, you probably do.
Mindfulness is the practice of noticing but not identifying with your own thoughts. As simple as it sounds, mindfulness takes great effort because the survival brain is constantly convincing us that we are our thoughts. Noticing thoughts in a non-identified way first requires recognition of one’s own ego and the occasional willingness to part with it.
The ego may project pomposity or anxiety, but both are based on false constructs, like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. Mindfulness helps us remember to pull back the curtain when we’re in the grip of thought loops that drag us into depression and anxiety.
These loops—laid down into our developing brains like electrochemical grooves—cannot be re-recorded, but they can be replaced with a healthier habitual thought. One of the most helpful I have ever employed in my lifetime of negotiating depression and suicidal ideation is, “This, too, shall pass.” Not in terms of a dismissal, but with a stubborn perseverance that outlasts the depressive thought loop and thus reinforces itself.
Eventually, a space opens where depressive and suicidal thoughts no longer gain purchase, but float by like barely noticeable debris on the wind. When triggers fling us back into contact with them, we can always bring to mind the feeling of that larger space, where we know there’s room to contemplate that a snowflake is miracle of nature; a unique, ephemeral sculpture we have to look for to see.
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
Trusting Intuition
I am an incest survivor and I feel safe. I am here to tell other survivors that it’s possible to feel safe. My hope is, if you’re half my age or less, it will not take nearly as long. If you’re mid-fifties, like me, or older, please know that it will feel no less powerful. Your own body will no longer be frozen between fight or flight.
This paralysis happens because childhood sexual violations are like putting a hot branding iron to brain chemistry. The experience is traumatic, and the human body is programmed to register danger in order to avoid it in the future. Even people empowered enough as children to evade violators distinctly remember feeling uncomfortable during the encounter. The creepy uncle who made children sit in his lap. A groping grandma. A family friend who wouldn’t stop staring. Children intuitively recognize danger. Their bodies recognize danger.
As children, we learn how to respond to our intuition by watching adults. If an adult intervenes on our behalf, they empower us to trust our intuition. If they tease or ridicule us, we learn quickly that we are, at the very least, alone in dealing with danger. The most common response is denial, and it’s the most destructive.
Denial negates not only the intuition of the child but denies the child’s right to an identity. Sexual abuse continues within families throughout generations because of denial. We use denial to gaslight our children and ourselves into over-riding the single most important survival mechanism we have—our intuition. In “The Gift of Fear,” security specialist Gavin de Becker, who survived a horrible childhood, repeatedly stresses the importance of intuition in avoiding violence as an adult.
Our intuition has always been to tell someone when we’ve been violated, and to believe they will help us. Too often, however, we encounter denial. What we are finally seeing in our culture is the united voices of survivors shouting over the rote banalities of denial—and being heard! We are finally being heard, by one another, and by others who want to believe in the better angels of our nature and can no longer ignore the shouting.
It took more than 150 women to bring down Larry Nassar. It took just one voice to start the chorus. Every person who speaks out makes it less difficult for the next, and so on. Now, more men are starting to feel safe enough to talk about their own childhood sexual abuse. Many men are denied their truth by a culture that labels them “lucky” enough to be introduced to their “manhood” early.
“Transparent” character Josh Pfefferman is a good example. Josh was statutorily raped by an adult female babysitter when he was a young teen. His entire family remained in denial even when the grown child of their illicit union joined them for dinner. The character is said to have “troubled relationships with women,” as if the two are somehow unrelated.
Nothing that I know is more healing than naming the truth. I say this after decades of meditation, mindfulness practice, yoga, fitness of every sort, journaling hundreds of pages and leaning into work as if my life depended on it, which it did. There are frenetic decades of “doing” to remove oneself from the original experience. The body will carry its own violation for decades before presenting a bill.
Some will die with the secret. Others will live with the truth, and it will set them free. New neural pathways will slowly override those created by trauma, so that even an incest survivor can feel safe.
This paralysis happens because childhood sexual violations are like putting a hot branding iron to brain chemistry. The experience is traumatic, and the human body is programmed to register danger in order to avoid it in the future. Even people empowered enough as children to evade violators distinctly remember feeling uncomfortable during the encounter. The creepy uncle who made children sit in his lap. A groping grandma. A family friend who wouldn’t stop staring. Children intuitively recognize danger. Their bodies recognize danger.
As children, we learn how to respond to our intuition by watching adults. If an adult intervenes on our behalf, they empower us to trust our intuition. If they tease or ridicule us, we learn quickly that we are, at the very least, alone in dealing with danger. The most common response is denial, and it’s the most destructive.
Denial negates not only the intuition of the child but denies the child’s right to an identity. Sexual abuse continues within families throughout generations because of denial. We use denial to gaslight our children and ourselves into over-riding the single most important survival mechanism we have—our intuition. In “The Gift of Fear,” security specialist Gavin de Becker, who survived a horrible childhood, repeatedly stresses the importance of intuition in avoiding violence as an adult.
Our intuition has always been to tell someone when we’ve been violated, and to believe they will help us. Too often, however, we encounter denial. What we are finally seeing in our culture is the united voices of survivors shouting over the rote banalities of denial—and being heard! We are finally being heard, by one another, and by others who want to believe in the better angels of our nature and can no longer ignore the shouting.
It took more than 150 women to bring down Larry Nassar. It took just one voice to start the chorus. Every person who speaks out makes it less difficult for the next, and so on. Now, more men are starting to feel safe enough to talk about their own childhood sexual abuse. Many men are denied their truth by a culture that labels them “lucky” enough to be introduced to their “manhood” early.
“Transparent” character Josh Pfefferman is a good example. Josh was statutorily raped by an adult female babysitter when he was a young teen. His entire family remained in denial even when the grown child of their illicit union joined them for dinner. The character is said to have “troubled relationships with women,” as if the two are somehow unrelated.
Nothing that I know is more healing than naming the truth. I say this after decades of meditation, mindfulness practice, yoga, fitness of every sort, journaling hundreds of pages and leaning into work as if my life depended on it, which it did. There are frenetic decades of “doing” to remove oneself from the original experience. The body will carry its own violation for decades before presenting a bill.
Some will die with the secret. Others will live with the truth, and it will set them free. New neural pathways will slowly override those created by trauma, so that even an incest survivor can feel safe.
Thursday, February 8, 2018
This is About Boundaries
I feel an obligation to check in here, which is good because I would otherwise be basking in absolute enjoyment of life. That is how I have felt for the last few days, having taken a difficult action to establish a necessary boundary—something incest and childhood abuse survivors are not wired for. We are devoted to, and protective of, those who abuse us because they were literally all we had. They count on this trauma bondage to outlive life.
Breaking free involves learning to establish boundaries in the wake of having them violated again and again by those we were supposed to be able to trust with our well-being, and who failed us. Families are the most fraught place to establish boundaries even in the best of circumstances and toxic quicksand in the worst. Family ties are frequently twisted in weird and difficult ways. We get trapped in the unresolved traumas of those before us.
Healing from trauma is not a single passage, but many passages along an intuitive path from victim to survivor. No one else can truly direct our healing, but compassionate witnesses and a conducive environment are critical. I currently have both for which I am deeply grateful, and I am in no hurry venture far beyond either, hence my continued boundary of relative anonymity.
We’ll call this Day No. 27 of recovery. Strength of body and mind began to return once I named my trauma. Once I started writing and saying, “I am an incest survivor,” even quietly here or out loud to myself, on my own. The mere act of being able to say those words lifted a large, heavy, black cloud from my life. The cost of carrying the shame of others is illness, depression, physical pain and too often our lives.
It was me or that burden. I chose to live. I do so each day. I must consciously act on my own behalf every day. I must protect the child I was from those who would further exploit her. I learned as painfully as most survivors do that health-care and legal professionals will often fail them and can sometimes do grave injury, like a surgeon slicing someone open and then handing them a bill to be sewed up. Even well-meaning folks can make the most ignorant statements or conjure the most egregious and discredited theories. It takes a survivor to know a survivor and all that it means to be one. We must be the ones who lead one another out from beneath the dark cloud of silence and pain.
Incest survivors share a lot with sexual trauma and physical abuse survivors. The sanctity of our very bodies has been violated, from the Latin, violare, “treated violently.” But incest survivors are unique in the bond we have with our violators and we are gaslighted into believing we must protect them and the family that did not protect us and may never do so. In almost every sense of the word, we have to learn how to care for ourselves. We were not taught properly, but in contradiction to our own well-being.
For me, right now, there is a great healing in quiet activity and meditation, reading, listening to music, doing yoga, hiking and taking care of the partner who is truly taking care of me and helping me learn to be cared for. I know well my good fortune in this circumstance. I worked very hard to create it.
Healing is not a gift, as Marilyn van Durbur reminds us. It is not. It is a practice.
Breaking free involves learning to establish boundaries in the wake of having them violated again and again by those we were supposed to be able to trust with our well-being, and who failed us. Families are the most fraught place to establish boundaries even in the best of circumstances and toxic quicksand in the worst. Family ties are frequently twisted in weird and difficult ways. We get trapped in the unresolved traumas of those before us.
Healing from trauma is not a single passage, but many passages along an intuitive path from victim to survivor. No one else can truly direct our healing, but compassionate witnesses and a conducive environment are critical. I currently have both for which I am deeply grateful, and I am in no hurry venture far beyond either, hence my continued boundary of relative anonymity.
We’ll call this Day No. 27 of recovery. Strength of body and mind began to return once I named my trauma. Once I started writing and saying, “I am an incest survivor,” even quietly here or out loud to myself, on my own. The mere act of being able to say those words lifted a large, heavy, black cloud from my life. The cost of carrying the shame of others is illness, depression, physical pain and too often our lives.
It was me or that burden. I chose to live. I do so each day. I must consciously act on my own behalf every day. I must protect the child I was from those who would further exploit her. I learned as painfully as most survivors do that health-care and legal professionals will often fail them and can sometimes do grave injury, like a surgeon slicing someone open and then handing them a bill to be sewed up. Even well-meaning folks can make the most ignorant statements or conjure the most egregious and discredited theories. It takes a survivor to know a survivor and all that it means to be one. We must be the ones who lead one another out from beneath the dark cloud of silence and pain.
Incest survivors share a lot with sexual trauma and physical abuse survivors. The sanctity of our very bodies has been violated, from the Latin, violare, “treated violently.” But incest survivors are unique in the bond we have with our violators and we are gaslighted into believing we must protect them and the family that did not protect us and may never do so. In almost every sense of the word, we have to learn how to care for ourselves. We were not taught properly, but in contradiction to our own well-being.
For me, right now, there is a great healing in quiet activity and meditation, reading, listening to music, doing yoga, hiking and taking care of the partner who is truly taking care of me and helping me learn to be cared for. I know well my good fortune in this circumstance. I worked very hard to create it.
Healing is not a gift, as Marilyn van Durbur reminds us. It is not. It is a practice.
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