Good News!

First piece of good news - I have a guest article about art and trauma on Michele Rosenthal's PTSD website and blog: http://healmyptsd.com/2012/10/healing-art.html

Aaand  second piece of good news (with excellent timing in view of the first one) - I started drawing again!!

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Desperate Pain

October 20, 2012

This drawing was a release of some of the strong emotions that I have been experiencing after some of my memories reintegrated with the feelings associated with them. Many of the memories I have are detached from many of the overwhelmingly strong emotions that I experienced when they were happening. Through various coping mechanisms, I managed to avoid feeling anything too scary for me, either at the time or after the fact. Though this was a good survival mechanism for a child, it turned into unhealthy coping and now it only does me harm. So even though it doesn't feel very good right now, it's actually a positive thing that I've started to feel the full extent of all of the fear, pain and helplessness associated with some of the memories. But I definitely needed a way to get some of it out of my head, so I'm glad that I finally listened to my therapist and picked up my pastels again.

Re-experiencing Feelings

I forgot to make a little celebratory post last month... It's been over a year of no cutting!! Something I'm actually kind of proud of... I still really really miss it sometimes and get urges, but I think of how long I've gone without and I don't want to start over. I can also see how not doing it has really improved my self-view in some aspects. I used to feel so horribly guilty about cutting and I would beat myself up about it and then that would make me want to cut more - it is just a really vicious circle of self-hatred and punishment.

I was actually struggling a lot with urges to hurt myself in the past month. I was feeling so helpless, not in control, and confused. Part of me kind of knew that I was going to remember something but I refused to accept that idea so I pushed it away and ignored any scary thoughts that I was having. But these memories always find some way to sneak   their way in... They wait until you're not expecting it and your walls are down - this one waited for me to be in the process of falling asleep to attack. Strangely though, once I remembered and figured out that the feelings I was having were my childhood feelings being re-experienced, I felt more in control and therefore I was having fewer urges to hurt myself. My therapist also had me think about what happened from an outside perspective so that I could see that it makes sense for me to be feeling trapped and confused because what happened is just too much for a child to handle. So even though I hate having this memory in my head and it makes me feel horrible, I can tolerate having it because I understand why it's making me feel bad and I can recognize what I'm going through emotionally.

I am thinking about starting up some art again. My therapist has been trying to convince me that I should because it has always been a good coping skill for me. It would probably be a good thing at this point to find an outlet for the scary feelings.

The Void

I don't really have much to say, but I haven't posted in a while...

I've been trying to pay attention to what triggers this feeling of emptiness that I have sometimes. It's a really strange feeling - I don't feel incredible depressed, it doesn't make me want to curl up and never move - but I still want to just disappear because it's a pretty unpleasant feeling. It feels like nothing can fill the void so when I feel like that I just move around from one thing to the next trying to do something that will make it go away. I did a lot of cleaning last week, and it helped to distract, but it always comes back when I run out of things to clean.

It definitely gets triggered by being by myself - it's like the emptiness of being physically alone triggers the feeling of being empty inside. I also notice it sometimes when I get triggered with trauma stuff. I'm not really sure what it is - sometimes it makes me feel like my life isn't entirely real... so does that mean it's derealization? Am I dissociating a little bit to deal with anxiety? I don't know, it's confusing. I've tried to talk about it in therapy but I got even more confused because I couldn't describe how I felt.

When I was little, before anything bad happened, my family went on a vacation to California and we visited Alcatraz. I was completely freaked out by it - there are pictures of me in a jail cell and I look completely miserable. I remember that afterwards I had this weird fear that I was still really trapped in one of the cells and I was just asleep and dreaming my real life. It's kind of a good analogy for how I feel now. I'm trapped in the jail cell of my mind and the rest of my life is just a dream.

Feeling Progress

Wow. My most ridiculously stupid post, in which I tried to say post as many times as possible, is already one of my most viewed posts... Kind of strange. I'm not usually that crazy! I swear!

On a different note, I talked a bunch this week with my therapists about how I've been frustrated about talking about trauma stuff and feeling like I'm not making progress. It helped me realize that just saying what happened isn't really enough - I've been trying to avoid facing and dealing with the feelings associated with the memories. So I ended up asking my therapist to help me talk about that part more and I also asked her to kind of validate what I talk about in a way that might help me stop minimizing what happened. I was so nervous about asking, but my other CBT therapist has been encouraging me to ask for things that I need. So I tried to ignore all of the thoughts that tell me that I don't deserve to ask, or that she would think that I was criticizing her or that I was being indulgent, or even that she would just reject me, and I asked her. It turned out to be so empowering and positive. She was glad that I had asked and told me that I should always bring something like that up because she wants to know how to best help me. We also talked about progress and how sometimes it's so slow that I feel stuck but it helps to look back a year and think about where I was then. This time last year I was between hospitalizations and I was just reacting and not really coping all that well. Now I am making choices about what to do, I am coping, and I am (with the help of medication) not feeling so horribly depressed and anxious. I felt so much better after our session and I'm now feeling really positive about how things are going.

Just Some Thoughts

I've been feeling pretty frustrated recently about what to do with my traumatic memories. A lot of things keep triggering me into having intrusive thoughts - the meds keep them from being all-consuming and overwhelming, which is a huge relief - but I don't know how to process my past, so I'm feeling a little bit lost. The same memories play over and over in my head and talking about them helps a little but I feel like I shouldn't talk about it more than once because that just seems indulgent to make someone listen to it multiple times. I know that's probably not something I should be worrying about, but I feel ridiculous bringing the same crap up all the time.

On a completely unrelated note, I've noticed that my body has become really good at keeping me from getting too drunk. For a while after my suicide attempt, while I was doing really badly, I wasn't really interested in going out with my friends at night. Going out and not drinking made me depressed because watching my friends all having a good time while I was feeling like shit wasn't really all that fun. And if I had gone out and had a drink, I would have become completely suicidal. But since I've been doing really well recently, and I'm off of the medications that were dangerous to mix with alcohol, I've been able to enjoy a few drinks. I don't know if it's because of the medications that I'm still on, but I'm no longer able to have more than a few drinks before I feel sick. And I'm totally incapable of taking shots without gagging and having to suppress the urge to throw up. I'm actually mostly happy about that because it stops me from getting too drunk, which would still probably be really bad for my mental health. And it also means that I don't have to suffer through horrible hangovers,  which is great.

I don't have any art to share because I haven't felt like drawing anything recently. I have a few ideas in my head, but for some reason I don't really feel like putting them down on paper. So I guess for now I'm just going to write random thoughts and ideas down until I can bring myself to draw again.

Defense

So after the last post I did end up feeling like posting, however a ghost decided to take over my computer for a few days and so I had to take it into the store to get it exorcised. But I have it back now, and there's no more random mouse movements or clicking, so I am finally going to do a real post.

As a follow up on my medication situation: I have been feeling a lot better again, so I think that the med that was reintroduced has started working again. It's amazing that one tiny little 5mg pill is the difference between being a horribly anxious person and being just a very stressed out person. It's bizarre knowing that without that tiny amount of drug, my soul would be slowly dying under the pressure of all of that anxiety and depression (not to be melodramatic or anything...). I'm just happy that I finally have some meds that work and make life seem pretty OK.

I have some art to post. My therapist and I were talking about how I could go through all of the trauma and yet still act like a normal little girl. There was definitely some dissociation going on; I would just think about other things so that I didn't have to feel what was happening. I think I also separated myself into two parts - one part dealt with the abuse and the other ran around dealing with normal life. I'm not talking about dissociative identity disorder (multiple personalities), I just think it was a different part of me that had to deal with that stuff so that I could then go on afterwards and act normally. It's kind of like I compartmentalized the abuse so that it didn't affect the rest of my life. After something happened I could just tell myself that it wasn't real or it hadn't really happened to me. I remember telling myself that it was Katie that did the bad stuff, and I've always hated when people inadvertently call me that because I guess I associated that name with the part of me that experienced horrible thing.

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Protection

 

August 2012

This is supposed to represent the dissociative defense I used while bad things were happening. The pinkish semicircle at the bottom represents me and the greyish color on the outer part represents the dissociation barrier between me and the abuse. The red-orange is the pain and the black represents how it seemed like there was nothing outside of the abuse while it was happening. The three grey, brown and green spike-things represent the three main abusers. They are mostly blocked by the dissociation, but they still manage to pierce through and leave their mark. I tried so hard to pretend it wasn't happening, and later that it had never happened, and yet it still managed to push its way in and hurt me.

Post

AAAHHHH!!! I'm feeling so guilty about not posting! But feeling guilty is making me feel pressured to post! And feeling pressured to post makes me want to do anything but post! It's a terrible cycle. But it's possible that posting this will make me feel less guilty about not posting so then I will be able to post something real. 

How many more times can I say post?

So post-medication-reintroduction (aka after I started taking one of my meds again), I am still waiting for the chemicals to kick in fully, but I think I'm feeling a little better again. But that might just be the post-work-relief feeling so I don't want to speak too soon... It would be better if I knew I was definitely feeling OK and then I would tell everyone post-haste.

Hopefully there will be more art and less crazy in the next post...