First of all, thanks. It has been heartening to see how many have read the PTG post and Evie's Taking a Brief Vacation meditation post.
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I just wanted you to know that I am taking a couple weeks of (actual) vacation to go up and see my son whose health has not been all that good for the last couple of years. He had a lot of chemo and is in remission, well sort of. The Doctors should know more later this summer (probably.) Any way I'm going up while we can still hang out, have fun and make good memories (no matter which way remission goes later.) I'll be back blogging probably the middle of July.
In the meantime...I have posts scheduled ahead on Wind Harp Tree up until July 20th. As for Not the Life, Evie has a couple of posts she is working on and I have two posts waiting for whenever Evie is ready to post them up. (and of course we always want to hear from you.)
I have been trying to look at what makes the difference in experiencing trauma and choosing #B and #C ( see the PTG Post ) because choosing #B and #C means choosing the difficult path to re-connection after Betrayal and trauma ( you know PTG) or choosing #A on the PTG post about "Choices and recovery) I have been wondering what happens when people like my father (and to some extent my ex who were both grievously traumatized) choose to disconnect and control and manipulate, choose to take advantage of children, wives, and people in general ( getting them to do for them) instead of somehow choosing to take the path to PTG and reconnecting and growing forward in their own right. ( I want to understand myself and know how I can better raise myself onto the path to PTG)
One of the pieces I left for Evie to "post as needed" is about my father and how he used "Puppy Stories" to hook and use people all his life. My father was a great story teller. I myself am trying to write a book telling the stories of my family because stories connect. So what's the difference? I believe as I said above that his story about the circumstances of his puppy's death was so unbearable that my 5 year old father turned off the pain to such an extent that he never re-learned empathy but only learned to use the heart wrenching true stories of his childhood (and then made a few more up as necessary like "good husband" and "bad children") as a means of controlling and using others to fill the dead spaces inside himself.(he could use sex in his twisted ways but never felt love)
I have sifted through my own "incest stories" and tried to string together not only meaning but enough understanding so that I (and hopefully others) could see my way to regrow, reconnect and help myself and others on Not the Life chose a path toward PTG. The Puppy Stories Blog is about the Path predators chose when they are forever frozen by terror and become predators and "puppeteers" instead of actors in their own lives.
(Actually the "Puppy Story blog" Evie will Post later is also a cautionary tale about what happened to my mother when she was so emotionally hooked , so sucked into taking care of the poor traumatized little boy my father had once been, that in the end, the man that the little boy became used her up/ sucked her dry. It is Maybe why even though it is so hard to emotionally unhook from "them" as wives and spouses and girlfriends of sex offenders we have to choose PTG for ourselves and our kids instead)
Anyway I have been working on my memoir, Happily Ever After trying to see what it was in my own childhood that made it possible for me to eventually begin to understand the Process and make the necessary moves to reconnect with feeling and begin my own journey forward. Because I too, turned off the pain in childhood. It was the only way to survive my own incesting. And I did survive but for a long time I ended up seriously depressed and that I was unable to put two and two together or spot danger as an adult.
The very defenses that made it possible for me to turn off the pain and reach adulthood, made it extremely difficult to protect myself or to protect my own children. In fact I didn't. For a long time.I was so frozen in defending myself from past trauma (and whether as mothers who were incested (or not) in our own childhoods, in one way or another many of us experienced some kind of trauma in childhood) anyway I was susceptible to marrying a man who was in many ways, "strangely like my father." As a result I remained disconnected from what was going on right under my nose.
I didn't start out to dump all this very personal "musing" on you but I wanted you to know that I have scheduled blog-posts for Not the Life and I plan to schedule some posts on Wind Harp Tree specifically about trauma. I discovered some new ideas therapists have about what happens to victims and mothers and about how to understand and begin to outgrow the Trauma of betray. ( this field grew from War trauma and finding out what worked and didn't with PTSD )
I am not suggesting that you or I become "Therapists" however we all need to be "informed consumers" since we ourselves and our children have been traumatized and may be "ordered" into therapy by the court or may have a personal interest in stopping "cutting" ourselves, in getting away from the drag of depression, in unhooking from the anger. We can explore and see if understanding and even using using these ideas help us in our quest for PTG. If they just seem like psycho-babble to you, then let me know what works better for you. Not the Life is a "mutual help" Blog. No one here wants to pretend to be know-it-all. But what we discover and share might help. No one gets through this alone. Each of us wants to get on with life. Somehow.
There is a lot more known about mind-body connection and neuro-science now. There wasn't much back then, "Back in the (my) day!" So this PTG is news to me. Probably I'm telling you stuff you already know. But...as a sort of "gift" while I'm gone, I thought I would mention a couple of resources you can Google on line or check out of your local library or even buy on Amazon (no I am not shilling for Amazon... it's just that where I live the library isn't so good.) So, for what it's worth here goes:
Don't Tell, The Sexual Abuse of Boys 2nd addition by Michel Dorias (this is a Canadian study and I found it enlightening and helpful)
Evicting the Perpetrator A Male Survivors Guide to Recovery from Childhood Sexual Abuse by Ken Singer MSW (this is where I got the info about the 7 Myths and the 7 Facts post on Wind harp Tree) These myths we teach boys tend to "make incest a different experience for boys than for girls and therefore influence the different possible outcomes for boys and girls. And wouldn't we all like know what we could do to "evict" our perpetrators/spouses at least from continuing to take up space rent free in our heads?
The Tricky Part, One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace by Martin Moran (Great Memoir. Both my brothers and my son got a lot out of this book.And there is quite a bit about using Group and Sex therapy plus individual counseling to re-connect our feeling and mend impulses) I just wish I could write Happily Ever After as well as Martin Moran wrote his memoir.
The First Step for People in Relationships with Sex Addicts by Mic Hunter ( with a foreword by Jem wife and recovering "co-dependant" (I don't know whether I fully agree with the "co-dependant" label but I did attend to ALANON for a long time. I found friendship with the other wives comforting. I did not feel so alone and since Alanon is free I could go even though I didn't have money for "therapy." ALANON was good for me at the time.
And now some books Just for US:
Whose Life is it Anyway?When to Stop Taking Care of their Feelings and Start Taking Care of our Own by Nina W. Brown, ED.D, LPC, NCC (Now this book made sense to me about how I was trained to perform my role as wife and mother and as a woman to take care of everyone else first. My grandmother motto was "If you can't do anything else, the least you can do is worry about it.)
Healing Developmental Trauma How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the capacity for Relationship. by Laurence Heller, PhD (coauthor of Crash Course) and Aline LaPierre PsyD
I skipped the verbiage in the introduction and went straight to the Over View chapter on Healing Developmental trauma etc. There are several excellent charts that went a long way to "explain" all the verbiage and once I decided I wanted to understand their ideas the charts helped to explain a lot about why I didn't protect my children as well as I wish I had. Also I googled around and found a synopsis on hakomiinstitute.com/wp that was helpful.)
There is also a piece on line "Understanding the Impact of Sexual Assault: The Nature of Traumatic Experience by Sandra L. Bloom MD (WWW.SANCTUARYWEB.COM) that has a great blog/web site etc and, meditations and pictures. Better understanding the nature of Traumatic experience and how much we need safety and time to grow was helpful to me. Also building upon the "meditation" exercise (Taking a mini-vacation) Evie posted, there is a book Grace Unfolding, (on Amazon of course,) that is about meditation and using spiritual paths to work with our capacity for reconnecting with PTG for ourselves.)
Like I said, I'm not suggesting all of us should be therapists but one thing about taking back our life and choosing PTGrowing forward, we could at least start to understand and honor our own courage and intelligence in surviving and growing past the trauma of betrayal. (and not incidentally better preparing ourselves to understand how our own children are likely handling their own betrayals.)
I tend to climb up in my head and intellectualize when there is a problem (like you hadn't already figured that out about me!). But I also realize that I can "intellectually" know all about how to re-grow a tree that has been cut down, I can "know" the right amount of water, know which fertilizer, think I know the right conditions, but human and "tree" growth is organic and some will re-grow immediately because they are naturally fast growers and others (like me) seem to take years but with patience and knowledge we will all get there together. (anyway that's what I tell myself)
But your way may be different. So if you want you are free to just ignore all this stuff... comes at some of it from another direction and you may help us all by telling us about a path we did realize was there.
Psycho-babble might not be a language you even want to hear! Whatever path we take Not the Life.is all about finding and sharing our own path to "rise" and regrow. (And PLEASE, if you know about other books, therapies, ideas, meditations, websites or just want to let us know some of what you are going through...add a comment or e-mail Evie your story.) We feel so alone sometimes. We need each other. You are in Good company here.
Anyway, looks like, as usual I have gone on and on. I only intended to tell you about what I am personally working on and say that I am going on vacation and will be back the middle of July. Take care.
Evie has a post just about ready.
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