Super Better

I have good days and bad days, and there are two kinds of each. Good days are when I don't cry. The better days are when I don't cry because I actually feel good. These are the days when I am in touch with everything that is good and right and beautiful in the world. The days when I am grateful to be alive and for the wonderful life that I have with loving friends and family.

The lesser good days are when I'm simply pretending not to feel bad. I suppress it because I have to. These are the days I have to work or am obligated to some social function that prevents me from being able to reach the sadness. Sometimes I pretend because I am not strong enough to let the pain in. I feel good only because I won't let myself feel bad. I am numb to the sadness and grief that is bubbling just beneath the surface. I know it is there; I can see it and smell it, but I can't feel it. I simply cannot reach the pain even if I want to.

The super bad days are when I am in touch with the Black Oil. It makes me doubt and hate myself. Everything is so dark; I cannot see the light no matter how hard I try. I want to end the pain no matter what it takes. On those days, I am full of hopeless despair. It is on those days that I want to die. This past year I have had a lot of super bad days; days when I could not pretend but still had to function in the world. Days full of Black Oil when I felt like dying or like I could collapse at any moment under the pressure of normal life. Those were the worst.

The lesser bad days are when I am able to be in touch with my pain without it overwhelming me. I can process, I can cry, I can experience the grief and sadness. Sometimes I can let it out in small quantities, one cup at a time. Other times it comes spewing out at volcano-esque velocity. But the sadness is not Black Oil; it is not shame and self-hatred. It is simply the truth of my experience. It is the sadness locked away inside of me for decades, a veritable vat of grief that wants to be acknowledged, that must come out eventually in order for me to be healthy and well.

My ratio of good to bad days has gradually changed in my favor over this past year. One might conclude that my goal is to only have good days, but that is not so. I want to be Super Better. Super Better, for me, means that I no longer have to pretend and I don't want to die. When I have good days, I want them to be real. No more pretending. And when I have bad days, I want those to be real too. I need to be in touch with and able to express my grief and sadness when they come, and come they will - whether it is because of my sordid past or because of current life circumstances (whatever they may be) that naturally elicit pain. For life is pain; Joy and Sorrow are simply two sides of the same coin. I'm not trying to block out all pain as that would be akin to living a muted existence. I could do that at any time with medication, but have chosen not to. I want to be real, to live an authentic life full of truth. Sometimes truth is beautiful, and sometimes it is pain. I want both. I need both to truly live.

Perhaps I need a new lexicon. The bad days where I am in touch with my pain should not be called bad days; in fact I think I'll start calling them days of true sadness. The good days when I'm pretending aren't really good either; I will start referring to them as pretend days. What I really want is to live an authentic life, which consists of days of true sadness and days where I feel truthfully good.

This notion of becoming Super Better is not my own. Super Better is an online game created by Jane McGonigal where you can design a personalized journey towards health and wellness. Her journey involved recovering from a traumatic brain injury, but thousands around the world have joined in to create their own version. Playing Super Better helps you to build up resilience which supports you in  "staying curious, optimistic and motivated even in the face of the toughest challenges." The game encourages you to identify allies, power-ups, bad guys, future boosts and quests while tracking your achievements to reach your epic win. An epic win is something that can only be achieved by tackling a tough challenge, an accomplishment that feels so awesome you will do whatever it takes to get there.

I am a gamer, and so defining my epic win and identifying all the things that make it more or less achievable appeals to me. The objective of my Super Better is "To Live an Authentic Life." This means eliminating pretend days and days when I feel like dying, living only days of truth (be it painful or joyful). The process of outlining this game for my journey has actually been quite helpful in making sense of and giving language to my healing process. This can be especially useful when communicating with my support army. In fact that is the first recommended step in Super Better: to create allies.

All survivors need a support army; if you don't already have one then start building it. Who are your closest friends? Who can you trust? Who is in your inner circle? Who is the closest family member you can count on? Not everyone needs to know everything, and practicing discernment when sharing your story (at least at first) is wise. Admittedly, it is terrifying to think about divulging your abuse secret. But I have read in sundry sources that real healing begins only when the secret is shared. Brene Brown says shame needs three things to survive: secrecy, silence, and judgment. Until you start talking about your story, it will continue to be enshrouded by and fester in shame.

I found this to be particularly true for my own journey. In fact, sharing my story has been the most healing part and here is why: deep down I felt unlovable, unacceptable, and fundamentally flawed because of what happened to me. That's why I kept it a secret; if people knew the terrible truth then they would surely be disgusted and leave me! Ironically, when you give your loved ones a chance to really know you, when you let them into your pain and see that they love you anyway, it deconstructs the prison of shame. When they stand by your side (and they will), when they listen to your pain without running away (and they won't), then and only then you will know what your deepest fears aren't real and never were. By sharing my secret with those I trust and experiencing the fullness of their support, I have never felt so loved and lovable. And when I see that I am lovable by others, I am able to love myself. This is the essence of healing.

The second part of Super Better is identifying your power-ups. These are things you can do that make you feel better or stronger. My power-ups are:

• Talk to someone in my army; let them know I am struggling and allow them to give me support
• Cuddle with my dog in bed while watching Netflix
• Eat healthy, plant-based, nutritious food
• Practice yoga and meditation 
• Stay connected with friends and family by sending messages, emails, or cards
• Go to lunch with a friend
• Go for a run, or if I don't have enough energy...
• Go for a walk
• Listen to uplifting music
• Get a massage
• Create space in my schedule for several hours or a weekend alone in quiet introspection, which allows me to...
• Watch birds at my backyard feeders
• Read a book about holistic or self-healing
• Read a book about a person who inspires me
• Relax in my hammock, doing absolutely nothing
• Take my dog hiking
• Clean my house
• Write in my journal
• Paint, draw, or color
• Ride my bike
• Complete a small house project
• Listen to TED talks or On Being

I also have a list of super power-ups. These things are so effective that they truly have the power to change my outlook even on dark days. I have much less control over these events but when they happen I am super grateful and their role in my healing is not lost on me. They include:

• Getting a text message from my brother that says "Love you." He is my biggest supporter (I write more on his critical role in a later post called The General), and the one whose love has been the most healing.
• Listening to an audio book on healing
• Listening to Pema Chodron on meditation and letting go of samsara
• Connecting deeply with a friend or family member
• Witnessing something rare in nature such as a breathtaking sunset, a rainbow, holding a baby bird, or having a butterfly land on me

The next part of Super Better is to identify the bad guys. These are things that make it harder to feel strong or get closer to your epic win. My bad guys are:

• Prudence - my somewhat alterego who takes over when things need to get done and I don't have capacity to feel the pain. She organizes the pretend days, which move me further away from authenticity.
• Assbags - this is a general category of people (like my horrible neighbors mentioned in The Spiral) who are uncaring and make my life difficult. The world is full of these people, and you never know when or where they will show up.
• Unhealthy boundaries - these creep up in many aspects of my life including working too much, poor time management, overcommitting, and some personal relationships such as my mother. 
• Self-neglect - most often the product of unhealthy boundaries, stretching myself to or just past my limits without equal time to rest, relax, and repair is a surefire way to elicit a meltdown. My epic meltdowns are in exact opposite of my becoming Super Better.

Future Boosts are specific things you look forward to in the coming days, weeks, or months. The essence of this Super Better tactic is that hope and anticipation have a healthy effect on the mind and body. Some of my Future Boosts include planning for:

• Time with my family
• International travel
• A weekend retreat

The point of all this is to understand and anticipate when interaction with my bad guys is unavoidable, and to make sure I have enough power-ups and future boosts in place to make it manageable. Playing Super Better helps you build up 4 types of resilience - emotional, physical, mental, and social - in order to get closer to your epic win. One specific key is to strive for the magic ratio of 3 positive experiences for every 1 negative. Awareness and identification of what is positive and what is negative for you is the necessary first step.

I'm just now getting into Super Better so I have little to report regarding the online achievement tracker. It's taken me this long to get my arms wrapped around what works and doesn't work for me on the path toward my healing. They say that the journey is more important than the destination. Likewise, the process of outlining the parameters of my Super Better game has made me more understanding, aware, accepting, and proactive in moving myself along the path toward healing.

For more information listen to Jane's Super Better TED talk. To get involved and proactive in your healing journey, start your own Super Better today!

The Essence of Integration

Frau Wolleh with Children by Gerhard Richter

I recently visited the Art Institute of Chicago. The collection is largely Impressionist, most famous for their sole ownership of Seurat's Sunday Afternoon de la Grande Jatte. I was excited to revisit this Seurat and indeed spent a good amount of time admiring it. However, I was most captivated by this piece by Richter. I stopped, I stared, I wept. It is the perfect depiction of my struggle with fragmentation this past year.

Each time I was subject to an abuse event, I left my body so that I wouldn't feel and could pretend it wasn't happening. Now that I am revisiting and processing these memories one by one, I have a mental image of my dissociation. It feels like each time I dissociated, a part of me left and did not come back. They are each floating up above my head in ether-space like white, wispy smoke. Those parts of me are frozen in time (age, appearance, maturity level) and chose not to come back into my body. It's not safe in here. Each time this happened I became a little less myself, a little more fractured, a lot less whole.

Those lost pieces of me are my true essence. This is why I feel fragmented, damaged, and unwhole. As more and more of my essence gathered and lingered outside, I became less Me. A shell of my former self. At the point of mass fracture - The Terrible Awful (about which I have yet to write) - my frozen inner self curled up into a ball, a small and tight 13 year old version of me. Adult Me has grown up around her: hiding, pretending, shielding, overachieving. But she remains unloved, abandoned, closed off, and alone.

My essence continued to escape, one white wisp at a time. All the times I subjected myself to unhealthy situations. All the times I failed to erect healthy boundaries. All the times I entered and stayed in unhealthy relationships (I will discuss this more in a later post called Married to Crazy.) And each time I was revictimized, as it turns out that survivors of childhood sexual abuse are 2-5 times (sources vary) more likely to be subjected to sexual assaults later in life.

The boundary-less situation with my mother only served to perpetuate the escape of my essence. Last fall when I realized the true nature of that relationship and finally acknowledged that I had lost her many years ago, the last of my essence escaped. Adult Me wound up small and tight like a perfect mirror shell of small and tight Little Me inside.

This past year I've been trying to unwind. Stand up. Be erect. Move around. Let go. Loosen up. Be real. Face the truth. Reconnect Little Me and Adult Me. It's painful. Muscles have atrophied. We are stiff. Robotic. Unpracticed. Vulnerable. Rigid. But we are standing! Except now we realize we are empty. Upright, but utterly hollow. The essence of Real Me still floats above, outside. Not in. Not integrated. Not full. Not whole. Not real. Not really living.

I wish so badly to reconnect with those parts of me which were forced out because it was not safe. I can't live without my essence any longer. I won't survive. Being and feeling whole are integral to being me - the whole me, the Real Me. And so much of my efforts this past year have been to show my essence that indeed it is safe to come back in. I will care for each of these lost parts, protect them, name them (discussed in a later post called A Bouquet of Me), accept them, love them, allow them to be playful. Entice them to come home.

The Richter painting is me, Adult Me standing with pieces of lost Little Me just outside. Within my grasp but not inside. It pained me greatly to see an artful representation of what I felt. It still hurts when I look at this painting. Sometimes, maybe even often times, pain is necessary to produce change. I am on a journey towards integration and every little step that gets me there is critically important.

Coincidentally (or perhaps not), though Wolleh is a proper German name it is strikingly similar to the verb wollen which means "to want." I desperately want to integrate all of the lost pieces of myself. I venture to say it is vital to my overall healing.

If ever there were a song to describe the message I am sending to my lost Essence, it is best articulated in Drifting by Sarah McLachlan....

Please come home.



On Shame

If anger is a surface emotion then shame is the bottomless pit far beneath. Jungian analysts say that shame is the "swampland of the soul." Research shows that shame is highly correlated with addiction, depression, suicidal thoughts, and eating disorders. I have experienced d) all of the above.

Rage shattered the wall of my silent shame. I began having more abuse memories, so many that I had to name the events so that Dee and I could use a common framework for discussion. At first they came in the form of dreams or in lucid states upon waking, some of them nightmarish. Soon these morphed into body memories which could then be reprocessed and associated via EMDR. Sometimes these puzzle pieces would connect amidst activities like driving or running. Other times they came in the middle of my supposed functional workday. I found the latter particularly disturbing. It was one thing to have memories while alone in a safe environment where I could feel and process what was happening; it was an altogether different experience when I was around people with no place to hide. I had to pretend and keep going, not feel, to be on stage and en pointe. This was a harrowing time for me. I felt like I was falling apart. Fragmentation, guilt, shame and fear plagued me from all sides, but none more pressing than the in-side.

The Hand: I have a distinct memory of being touched while in bed. This was the first one to surface after The Theatre and was difficult for me to acknowledge. Previously I had convinced myself that The Theatre was the only scene of abuse but in this new memory I am in a lying down position, one not possible in a theatre setting. A bed, perhaps not mine. I have no external context for this memory - no understanding of the room, furniture, or house - but an immense amount of detail. Exactly opposite of The Theatre, where I have tons of context but little to no detail. The Hand is touching me - as in my lovely little lady parts - from behind and I am pretending to be asleep. I am hoping that if I lie still and quiet it will all be over soon, much like the stone statue in The Theatre. And likely in a similar fully dissociated state.

Please Don't: Another memory, another position, another time and place. The detail and body memory is different for this event, enough that I am able to distinguish it from The Hand. The most salient piece of this memory is that I feel my body about to sexually climax, but I am praying and begging God to not let it happen. I don't want to. I feel terribly ashamed that this is happening and that my body is responding in this way.

Notable connections and feelings bubbled up during acquisition of these memories. As we processed the events, I was obsessed with my attire. In EMDR sets I would spend an inordinate amount of time "looking" down trying to figure out what I was wearing at the time of the abuse. In my mind, wearing a skirt or nightgown meant that I had given him easy access and was partially to blame. If only I had been smart enough or more careful, I could have prevented it. This is a dangerous rabbit hole for survivors of sexual abuse. It is our #1 fear... that the abuse was somehow our fault. That I showed interest, that I prompted or invited it in some way, that I didn't stop him and therefore that means I must have wanted it. This shame has plagued me for 25 years and is likely the cause of my memory repression and dissociation, aka The Black Oil.

Here is where I tell you how very much I love my therapist Dee for moments like this one. After weeks of obsessing over my attire and the thought of possibly inviting the abuse, she called me out. Inching closer to the front edge of her chair, she looked right into my tear-filled eyes and said, "I don't care if you stood up in that theatre, stripped all of your clothes off and danced around in front of him naked. You were a child. He was an adult. It was his responsibility to hold the boundary and he didn't. There is nothing you could've done to make this your fault and so I want you to stop this clothing bullshit here and now." Her exasperation and brutal honesty shocked the obsession right out of me. I haven't thought about my attire in these or any other abuse memories since.

I have learned through therapy and my healing process that shame and self-blame is often the only way a child can make sense of the terrible trauma of sexual abuse. Uneducated and inexperienced with how the body works, the resulting physical pleasure from unwanted touch is confusing. This response gets misinterpreted by a child as fault when it is anything but. Furthermore, it is easier to blame the self than to acknowledge and understand that adults are not trustable and that the world is indeed a scary place. If only we were told the truth: that monsters are real and they don't live under your bed. They live down the street, in your neighborhood, in your backyard. And sometimes they live at your uncle's house.

Brene Brown says that shame requires 3 things to survive: secrecy, silence, and judgement. My story had equal, hefty doses of all three for 25 years. Once I understood this I did the most difficult thing imaginable: I started telling my story. First my 2 therapists, next I told my 3 closest friends. It was awful and wonderful at the same time. Content with my close circle of five, I continued with therapy and regular conversation with my small support army for months. I have since shared my story with 5 more trusted people in my life, including 2 family members. My army is growing.

LearningToLiveInsideMyBody is a critical part of my healing journey. To aggregate and articulate my process, to share for the hope of healing for others, to rid myself of the shame that indeed this is my story. Some days I have an enormous vulnerability hangover from what I've posted. Other days I feel superbly healed, that the process of documenting these experiences gets them out, as in out of me. They no longer live inside, swirling around and adding to the Black Oil. My story lives on these pages, my computer, the blog server, and now your screen.

A few days ago I made a list in my journal of what complete healing will look like for me. It includes several items related to this topic such as:

• not hiding
• no shame
• no fear that people will find out
• no self injury
• no dissociation
• sleeping all night
• no panic attacks
• no stabbing pain of remembrance
• talking about it with no tears
• no vulnerability hangovers 
• no need for an army
• feeling whole
• freedom

There are many more items on my list. I look forward to the day I get to experience all of them. For now, I am satisfied with shattering the wall and moving forward on this journey.

Intro to EMDR

I had many failed attempts at therapy beginning in late college. It took quite some time to get my mind-body to cooperate with me in order to get there. My state university had a student health program including low/no cost visits with a campus mental health professional. I tried many times, even going as far to schedule appointments. Each time the appointment day came, I would mysteriously get a migraine that prevented my attendance. Ah, the student was not ready.

It wasn't until I began working full-time that I actually went to my first therapy session. Kris was a jolly, santa-looking man with full white beard and bowl-full-of-jelly mid section. My time with him was brief and relatively meaningless other than to get me comfortable with the therapy experience. I remember no significant breakthroughs during my time with him.

A few years later I worked up the courage and awareness to seek professional help again, this time through my company's Employee Assistance Program (EAP). Having grown partial to all things holistic, I searched for and found a therapist whose philoshopies aligned with mine; her name was Elle. I loved seeing Elle and did so for more than a year. She played fluty new age music in the waiting room which felt a lot like yoga nidra. I was safe in her office.

Elle introduced me to a technique called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). She helped me understand that what I had witnessed and continued to experience in my adult life was a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. The nightmares, anxieties, and flashbacks from my mother's first suicide attempt were the focus of our work together.

Simply put, PTSD causes trauma survivors to hold onto memories in the wrong place. There are specific areas in the brain designed for housing and categorizing memories of people, places, and events. But when trauma occurs including life-or-death situations and abuse, memories get trapped in alternate parts of the brain and in the nervous system. This is why a survivor will still feel and elicit panic and debilitating fear even when no actual stressor is present; when triggered, the nervous system remembers and recreates the trauma situation, sometimes over and over again. The goal of EMDR is to alleviate and eliminate these trauma-like experiences so that the survivor can live a panic free life.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy treatment that was originally designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories. Memories that are "stuck" can be processed and integrated so that the accompanying exacerbated emotional turbulence can also be alleviated. In some ways, EMDR is like wakeful dreaming. Dreams occur in the lightest stage of sleep known as REM - rapid eye movement. Likewise, EMDR uses repeated lateral eye movement to recall, enhance, associate, and develop new insights for painful memories. Thus the word REprocess. These things were not completed processed or correctly stored in the brain the first time around; EMDR helps to put memories in their proper order and place - namely, out of the nervouse system and into the functional parts of the adult brain.

EMDR work centers around a target scene. The work is done in "sets," usually 1-2 minutes in length, whereafter the client and therapist briefly discuss the memories and insights that arose during the set. A set involves using synchronized hand tappers, lightbars and/or headphones emitting beeping sounds alternating from left to right.

With this technique, Elle helped me process the vivid mages I had from the apartment and the hospital. There was one specifically horrific image from the hospital that my mind-body had molded its fear around: that of my mother lying on the gurney being wheeled away from me, hands outstretched, pale as a ghost, with a black mouth from the charcoal solution they made her drink to absorb toxins. She looked like a classic horror movie monster. That image had haunted me for over 15 years.

Interestingly, all kinds of other memories surfaced during my EMDR sets. Things happening in my life around the time of the incident. Feelings, people, events; longings, fears, disappointments; pleasantries, hope, healing. It really is an amazing process to help offset unpleasant memories but also to recapture the lost self which becomes fractured and hidden in the face of trauma. This technique was particularly easy for me to both relate and connect to, and it was the first great success and source of healing I experienced in therapy.

Another interesting thing about EMDR is that it elicits all kinds of "body stuff" - physical formations and remembrances of fear and panic trapped inside the body. In my sessions with Elle I always, always felt pain in my arms. In fact that is the barometer we would use to begin and end our sessions - by the weight and usefulness of my arms. During particularly difficult memories my arms would become heavy like lead to the point where sometimes I could not move them. That was my first experience in recognizing that I had bodily manifestations of fear. Elle and I never talked about the origin of this body communication. It would be years and therapists later before I began to comprehend. What I have learned since then is that everything has meaning. Everything. There is an explanation and origin for everything the mind-body uses to communicate its pain and past.

(Note: as I typed this last paragraph I am experiencing the arm heaviness, as I have in constructing most of these blog entries. Even after years of hard work and healing I still have this fear manifestation.)

Prior to my time with Elle, I could not and had not really ever talked about my mother or the traumatic events I experienced in relation to her. I am happy to report that today I can have an intelligent conversation about the matter. It is not robotic; I can feel and express the sadness and grief I have from going through this. I am simply able to express and process it as an adult, not frozen in a childlike state of terror. I do feel healed from the trauma portion of this part of my story.

The residual psychological and behavioral results are a different matter. It's much like peeling back layers; I had to get through the outer layer of trauma before I could even begin to delve into the deeper wounds. The horrific images and frozen memories prevented me from getting to or even seeing anything else. In some ways, and as absurd as it may sound, PTSD protects the survivor from accessing things for which the student is not ready. It takes time and a variety of healing modalities to get to and process all layers of the trauma onion. Fortunate for me, I was and still am determined to heal from my experiences no matter what or how long it takes.

Israel's Key

In November 2012 I traveled to Israel on a spiritual quest. My close friend Jet came to see me off from Newark. Jet and I had been on and off friends/lovers/friends/enemies - rinse and repeat - for a couple of years. Relationships are not easy with an ASCA, so I admit to being 50% of the problem. The same is true for my failed marriage and the wake of destructive relationships I left trailing behind me before that. The nature of this friendship with Jet is pertinent because the dissociative button is often easily pushed by someone approaching intimate closeness.

Jet and I got into an argument in the middle of EWR. A series of no-fault events had left us stranded for the night with no place to sleep and me with an international departure in the morning. Jet blamed me for the incident and proceeded to explain the nature and extent of his anger in this crowded public place. I was feeling very upset at being blamed for something that was not my fault. And then it happened. I began my typical dissociation tailspin with one exception this time. The Watcher remained conscious, nonjudgmental (because the rest of me is constantly judging myself all the time), and secretly documented everything that happened for later mental retrieval. This is how it goes:

• First I lose my hearing. I can see people's mouths moving, but everything is muffled. I can't talk either. I usually don't have anything to say because my brain is short-circuiting, but even if I did it is like the muscles that surround my lips are frozen.
• Next my arms feel heavy like lead. I distinctly remember sitting at the airport, laptop open, wanting to google hotels but I literally could not mobilize the muscles in my left arm up to the keyboard. It simply wouldn't move so I just sat there staring at it. Arms completely stuck at my sides, meanwhile The Watcher's running script documented the words 'like rigor mortis.'
• Next the heaviness from my arms moves into my chest, and then my whole body goes numb. I feel myself exit through my head; it sort of feels like the top of my head coming off. This is not like the near-death experiences I've read where people talk about being able to see themselves from above. It is difficult to explain; it's more like being behind and slightly above myself, though not exaggeratedly so like hovering around the ceiling. I'm close to my body, I'm just not in it.
• Then I stop breathing. I did not know I was a breath holder until The Watcher revealed this to me. This part is actually quite scary. While watching myself from above/behind I begin to fear that I will suffocate. My journal entry for this reads "I honestly don't know how oxygen is getting into my blood because there is no air passing in or out of my body. If indeed I am breathing I cannot feel it at all, no matter how hard I try." I remain in this breathless state for some unknown period of time until something zaps me back in. Then I either go through the round of ears-arms-numb-breathless state again or stay in and move on to the next tortuous state.

When I come back into my body, then the pain begins. I suppose this is why I dissociate for as long as possible because I fear the pain of being human (as opposed to the stone statue). The mental chatter is maddening, hyper self-critical, and the emotional pain that comes with it is nearly unmanageable. Whatever the situation is, I catastrophize it to death. "This is the worst thing ever." "I can't deal with this." "I'm not strong enough." "I have to get out of here." If dissociation is the mental/emotional flight response, then my last stage of dysfunction here is physical flight. I start to concoct all the ways I'm going to end the relationships, the circumstance, the problem, etc. so that I never have to face or feel this again.

It was fascinating to observe myself go through all of these stages with such a clear minded Watcher. I am a psychologist getting to study the human psyche from the inside. Jill Bolte Taylor speaks of her similarly fascinating experience of being a brain scientist studying the human brain from the inside while she had a stroke in her TED talk called Stroke of Insight. I can so relate. I was in there too.

Jet had no idea I was experiencing my dissociative cycle. To the outsider it looks like I am ignoring and punishing them with silence. They couldn't possibly know the whirlwind of turmoil and pain that is happening inside of me. How could they? These are normal situations; people get mad when things don't go well and there's nothing wrong with that. You fight, figure it out, make up, and go on with your day. At least that's what happens for normal people (I'm guessing). I bet this is one of the major reasons being in a relationship with an ASCA is so difficult. From the outside it looks like we make a big deal out of everything. The truth is, on the inside everything IS a big deal. Everything looks, smells, and feels like trauma. 

It gets worse. Not only are my responses to seemingly small events disproportionate in the moment, but then I can remain in a robot-like state for hours, days, or even weeks. This looks like more punishment to the outsider, but inside I am dying. I can't feel. I'm not Me. I criticize myself for how I reacted in the moment and am left wondering what the hell is wrong with me. On the outside it looks cool and dry, but that's only because I don't know who I am or how I feel. My theory here is that every time I dissociate, a part of me stays outside and does not come back in. I am left feeling less whole, less integrated. As the severity and frequency of these cycles increase, I end up feeling completely robotic and not like Me at all. My ex-husband used to call me Ice Princess. In his defense, I never shared any of this with him because I had no language for it, nor did I understand the origin of my dysfunction. I imagine that many ASCAs can relate to this experience in relationship, both the dysfunction within and the ultimate painful demise.

Jet is sweet and he apologized in the terminal. I came to. We found a hotel. When we got there I went into the bathroom to freshen up for a dinner and I experienced the dissociative cycle again, and all stages were documented by The Watcher. Then it happened for a third and final time in the bathroom. There was no trigger per se, except that I was pondering the fascination of it all. Perhaps The Watcher needed more detail for the script, the one I was writing internally for Dee so that we could use it in my EMDR sessions. 

Fortunate for me, the flight to Tel Aviv is 14 hours. I had plenty of time to journal about my newly understood dissociative cycle in great detail. I had a wonderful time in Israel, but much work was to be done upon my re-entry. The Watcher had found the key.