Though everyone thought me a total wreck, here's why that assumption was incorrect: While my body (listen to your body) suffered the same degree of torment experienced when I was a terrified child, my adult intelligence dived into my past, hour after hour, day after day for weeks, in hopes of identifying the source of that which I'd 'sensed' as the erruption of subconscious terror.
Eventually, determination to dive ever more deeply into my mind exposed the main source of my reaction: As a small child—in a house, dark and scary with inconsolable grief made worse by condemnations of guilt—I'd felt so utterly confounded and alone as to have lost my smile, and as my spirit sagged, my mind soaked in an all pervasive sense of loneliness, making me easy prey for others to 'use' to satisfy their unmet needs. As Will's surgery drew near, any thought, fearful of cancer, tapped into that confounded and vulnerable three year old child's unprocessed fear of facing the world alone, again.
Having lived alone during our separation, I'd no clue that, day by day, the magnitude of my childhood fear was in the act of re-emerging. Once this unidentified fear overwhelmed my signature smile, the magnitude of yesteryear's unprocessed frown, so overblown as to have swallowed me whole, emerged from my subconscious, permeating me with déjà vu in that I'd felt the same worthless sense of vulnerability that I'd felt at the age of three—suggesting my fear of loneliness and vulnerability had become associated with The Shadow of Death, which had terrified me more than I'd consciously let myself know …
I've copied Post 808, written Sept. 13, 2013, below. As I go back and forth between my thoughts in September and insights, born of hindsight, today, you'll notice a change in font:
While watching a person exhibiting that which we believe to be an over reaction, we may, in fact, be witnessing the re-emergence of an unprocessed trauma, repressed deep within this severely distressed person's subconscious for decades. As long as subconscious trauma remains in an unprocessed (unidentified, undiagnosed or misunderstood) state, the traumatized reaction will be triggered, again and again—in the same way that a war veteran mistakes a backfiring car for gun fire. Just as it proves difficult to heal the brain from battle scarred PTSD, that's how difficult it was to identify wounds in need of healing after unprocessed memories had traumatized the natural course of my development at the vulnerable age of three.
Hindsight suggests why intuition compelled me to figure out which part of my self esteem got stuck, spinning its wheels, in a terrified three year old's frame of mind: As long as fear remained in its unidentified state, I was unable to open my mouth and ask for help, just as I'd not been able to ask for help at the age of three, when I'd misunderstood why my entire support system was so consumed with the baby's disappearance' as to have utterly forgotten about me.
From the age of three, I'd unconsciously conceived of my needs as being inconsequential, and as my mind had not developed the vocabulary to say—I believe I'm not worthy of being loved unless we are smiling at each other while I'm meeting your needs—that belief felt so painful as to have been repressed into my subconscious until recently. Subconscious wounds to self esteem cannot heal until fate offers up reason for those wounds to break through the defense system's wall of denial, feeling as bit as raw as had been true when I was a three year old child. As I'd had no clue that the health of my spirit had come to depend upon enmeshment with my loved ones's smiles, clarity suggests that a vital portion of my voice had failed to develop.
If you ask: Annie, which part of your voice felt stuck in your throat for most of your life? I'd respond: I'd failed to develop a voice that felt free to declare my existential right to be true to my needs, out loud. As a result of that fact, intuition guided me to raise three children in such a way as to teach them to grow practiced at speaking up for themselves by the time each one had developed the wing span to fly free of the nest. It was not until fate offered me reason to dive into self discovery that I came to see my need to develop that strength within myself.
When intuition prods an adult to process through a delayed reaction to terror, pain, anger and/or confusion associated with early childhood trauma, the need to deflect shallow-minded judgments (negatively focused feedback) prolongs and intensifies post traumatic symptoms in that recovery from misunderstanding proves more complicated and lengthy. (I am inconsequential, unworthy of being loved unless you are smiling at me.)
Since negative feedback heightens emotional pain, misperceived condemnations combine with unprocessed trauma to exacerbate stress to the point that the brain, feeling squeezed in a vice, falls into such a deeply irritated state of mental exhaustion that the spirit—our life force—wears down and passes out.
June 12, 2014—Though my reaction, preceding and after Will's surgery may have seemed irrational to observers, hindsight spotlights this insight into why hyperactivity usurped control over my brain:
Upon hitting bottom, the exhausted mind needs to rest while the spirit, in need of resuscitation, yearns to feel valued, loved and supported.
When my body had tensed into a fetal position, due to yesteryear's unidentified terror filtering into my mind, the Limbic portion of my brain signaled my defensive fight/flee/freeze instinct to direct my adrenal glands to pump my body so full of adrenalin that my think tank raced, suggesting my need to muster more self control than ever before to counteract the degree of hyperactivity running interference with my well practiced ability to brainstorm until understanding was mine. The fact that I'd continued to work toward resolution no matter how great this build up of pressure became suggests that the most intelligent part of my brain was clearly not a runaway train wreck, at all.
*We call the brain the last frontier because mental science has so much to learn about patterns of thought, which prove to be every bit as complex as computing solutions to story problems, which require the mastery of higher mathematics—seriously, when I look at an entire blackboard filled with if/then numerical equations based in mathematical theorems, my head aches …
As Will's cancer was diagnosed early in July, hindsight suggests subconscious fear festering behind my smile during our two month wait for his biopsies to heal. Have you ever experienced what it feels like to wait two months to remove cancer from a loved one's body? Though you may not have experienced reason for that degree of tension to build inside your head, I have. Now, combine that degree of tension spiking with the emergence of PTSD, which had been exacerbated by negatively focused feedback, and you may come to understand why logic could not relieve the vice-like pressure of my emotional distress until subconscious fear had been identified, thus lessening the pressure that had caused my tension to triple in intensity.
June 12, 2014 … In addition to that triple pressure, *a fourth and fifth element heightened my distress in that flying across the country to celebrate my mother's birthday in a fetal position proved impossible unless I was transported on a stretcher. So the fact that my absence would darken this day for my mom pressurized my mind and spirit along with this fact: At a time when I'd wanted to take care of Will and my mother, every part of me had frozen up—except for my think tank, which alternated between giving myself a hard time and figuring out what was terrifying me, deep inside. While all of those reasons for pressure continued to mount, there was no way that my exhausted mind could juggle even one more conflict in need of brainstorming.
Today, with hindsight offering 20/20 vision, we can see why observers thought my connection to courage and logic had imploded when pressurized fear, feeling like a vice, piercing my sense of self trust from all sides, had been fully aroused, but here's why that was not true: My sense of logic was sustained by the compelling belief that, with time, I was capable of figuring out what was going on inside my head, and thus did my sense of self trust prove a far greater force than my fear of that vice which could not squeeze all of the life out of my spirit nor could negativity tackle my intelligence to the mat as long as the well practiced, solution seeking portion of my adult brain continued to dive ever more deeply into self discovery until I won that internal wrestling match, once and for all. And the final bout occurred on Mother's Day of this year ... two months after my mother was laid to rest.
Though I used to sell myself short, in the aftermath of these recent experiences—no more.
In short:
Between July and Sept. my smile remained strong
Then, two weeks before Will's surgery
(two weeks before we were to fly to my mother's hundredth birthday gala)
It appeared that my adult connection to courage imploded when in truth
The terrorized portion of three year old child's unprocessed fear had re-emerged …
June 12, 2014
Though EMDR has enabled me to consciously reprocess that subterranean fear of not feeling worthy of being loved with a greater sense of maturity and clarity than ever before, echoes of that fear-based mindset will continue to arise whenever the frowning, shadowy Spector of Death has reason to pace back and forth deep inside my head.
Thankfully, with recognition into the main source of my negatively focused attitude—without my smile, I am worthless—my adult intelligence is consciously equipped to quell the unprocessed fears of a traumatized child, who had unknowingly adopted a fear of frowns before her sister died—and insight into corrolating three experiences, all of which had occurred before my third birthday, had not occurred to me until just now:
I'd felt abandoned when hospitalized for whooping cough before my first birthday (How do I know that? More later)
I'd felt abandoned when hospitalized for scratching myself raw at twenty months (How do I know that? More later)
I'd felt abandoned in a deeply confounded, emotionally raw, intensely lonely state—for months—after Janet died. (The key word in those three sentences being felt, because feeling abandoned and being abandoned are not the same)
That which we feel influences that which we think
If you feel badly when another person comes to mind
You'll either think badly of that person or
You'll think badly of yourself—unless
You consciously clear your head of negatively focused emotion and
Recenter your thought processor on only that which is taking place, right now.
Mindfulness, leading toward clarity, can feel every bit as confusing as figuring out 'whose on first'.
Who had a clue as to how worthless I'd felt each time my smile turned blue?
No one, including me—so
A bright eyed pleaser I grew to be until
September, 2014 rolled around, and
My smile wrestled with The Spector of Death until
My spirit went down for the count and
Passed out—not for the first time
And those stories will emerge …
It's amazing how naturally
The heart aches for affectionate affirmation
It's amazing how naturally
A loving voice relaxes anxiety, concerning abandonment
It's amazing how naturally spirits thrive and smiles beam
When the face of a loved one, long absent, comes into view …
The opposite of loving naturally, intuitively is loving fearfully
With insight into self discovery, loving intuitively changes for the better
Once a fear based mindset re-centers
A person's comfort zone expands as though all on its own
And that's why
Attitude, timing, readiness and insight into oneself are everything.
With hindsight into the complexity of thought that causes the brain to feel discordantly stressed to the max, I'll not close my door to a loved one as long as the brainstorming portion of my think tank can come up with simple plans that come to mind once mental confusion has passed and crystal clear clarity is mine.
As today's train of thought has, once again, led us straight toward insight into deeper truth, I'll bid you adieu until the sun comes out, tomorrow :)
I've copied Post 808, written Sept. 13, 2013, below. As I go back and forth between my thoughts in September and insights, born of hindsight, today, you'll notice a change in font:
While watching a person exhibiting that which we believe to be an over reaction, we may, in fact, be witnessing the re-emergence of an unprocessed trauma, repressed deep within this severely distressed person's subconscious for decades. As long as subconscious trauma remains in an unprocessed (unidentified, undiagnosed or misunderstood) state, the traumatized reaction will be triggered, again and again—in the same way that a war veteran mistakes a backfiring car for gun fire. Just as it proves difficult to heal the brain from battle scarred PTSD, that's how difficult it was to identify wounds in need of healing after unprocessed memories had traumatized the natural course of my development at the vulnerable age of three.
Hindsight suggests why intuition compelled me to figure out which part of my self esteem got stuck, spinning its wheels, in a terrified three year old's frame of mind: As long as fear remained in its unidentified state, I was unable to open my mouth and ask for help, just as I'd not been able to ask for help at the age of three, when I'd misunderstood why my entire support system was so consumed with the baby's disappearance' as to have utterly forgotten about me.
From the age of three, I'd unconsciously conceived of my needs as being inconsequential, and as my mind had not developed the vocabulary to say—I believe I'm not worthy of being loved unless we are smiling at each other while I'm meeting your needs—that belief felt so painful as to have been repressed into my subconscious until recently. Subconscious wounds to self esteem cannot heal until fate offers up reason for those wounds to break through the defense system's wall of denial, feeling as bit as raw as had been true when I was a three year old child. As I'd had no clue that the health of my spirit had come to depend upon enmeshment with my loved ones's smiles, clarity suggests that a vital portion of my voice had failed to develop.
If you ask: Annie, which part of your voice felt stuck in your throat for most of your life? I'd respond: I'd failed to develop a voice that felt free to declare my existential right to be true to my needs, out loud. As a result of that fact, intuition guided me to raise three children in such a way as to teach them to grow practiced at speaking up for themselves by the time each one had developed the wing span to fly free of the nest. It was not until fate offered me reason to dive into self discovery that I came to see my need to develop that strength within myself.
When intuition prods an adult to process through a delayed reaction to terror, pain, anger and/or confusion associated with early childhood trauma, the need to deflect shallow-minded judgments (negatively focused feedback) prolongs and intensifies post traumatic symptoms in that recovery from misunderstanding proves more complicated and lengthy. (I am inconsequential, unworthy of being loved unless you are smiling at me.)
Since negative feedback heightens emotional pain, misperceived condemnations combine with unprocessed trauma to exacerbate stress to the point that the brain, feeling squeezed in a vice, falls into such a deeply irritated state of mental exhaustion that the spirit—our life force—wears down and passes out.
June 12, 2014—Though my reaction, preceding and after Will's surgery may have seemed irrational to observers, hindsight spotlights this insight into why hyperactivity usurped control over my brain:
Upon hitting bottom, the exhausted mind needs to rest while the spirit, in need of resuscitation, yearns to feel valued, loved and supported.
When my body had tensed into a fetal position, due to yesteryear's unidentified terror filtering into my mind, the Limbic portion of my brain signaled my defensive fight/flee/freeze instinct to direct my adrenal glands to pump my body so full of adrenalin that my think tank raced, suggesting my need to muster more self control than ever before to counteract the degree of hyperactivity running interference with my well practiced ability to brainstorm until understanding was mine. The fact that I'd continued to work toward resolution no matter how great this build up of pressure became suggests that the most intelligent part of my brain was clearly not a runaway train wreck, at all.
*We call the brain the last frontier because mental science has so much to learn about patterns of thought, which prove to be every bit as complex as computing solutions to story problems, which require the mastery of higher mathematics—seriously, when I look at an entire blackboard filled with if/then numerical equations based in mathematical theorems, my head aches …
As Will's cancer was diagnosed early in July, hindsight suggests subconscious fear festering behind my smile during our two month wait for his biopsies to heal. Have you ever experienced what it feels like to wait two months to remove cancer from a loved one's body? Though you may not have experienced reason for that degree of tension to build inside your head, I have. Now, combine that degree of tension spiking with the emergence of PTSD, which had been exacerbated by negatively focused feedback, and you may come to understand why logic could not relieve the vice-like pressure of my emotional distress until subconscious fear had been identified, thus lessening the pressure that had caused my tension to triple in intensity.
June 12, 2014 … In addition to that triple pressure, *a fourth and fifth element heightened my distress in that flying across the country to celebrate my mother's birthday in a fetal position proved impossible unless I was transported on a stretcher. So the fact that my absence would darken this day for my mom pressurized my mind and spirit along with this fact: At a time when I'd wanted to take care of Will and my mother, every part of me had frozen up—except for my think tank, which alternated between giving myself a hard time and figuring out what was terrifying me, deep inside. While all of those reasons for pressure continued to mount, there was no way that my exhausted mind could juggle even one more conflict in need of brainstorming.
Today, with hindsight offering 20/20 vision, we can see why observers thought my connection to courage and logic had imploded when pressurized fear, feeling like a vice, piercing my sense of self trust from all sides, had been fully aroused, but here's why that was not true: My sense of logic was sustained by the compelling belief that, with time, I was capable of figuring out what was going on inside my head, and thus did my sense of self trust prove a far greater force than my fear of that vice which could not squeeze all of the life out of my spirit nor could negativity tackle my intelligence to the mat as long as the well practiced, solution seeking portion of my adult brain continued to dive ever more deeply into self discovery until I won that internal wrestling match, once and for all. And the final bout occurred on Mother's Day of this year ... two months after my mother was laid to rest.
Though I used to sell myself short, in the aftermath of these recent experiences—no more.
In short:
Between July and Sept. my smile remained strong
Then, two weeks before Will's surgery
(two weeks before we were to fly to my mother's hundredth birthday gala)
It appeared that my adult connection to courage imploded when in truth
The terrorized portion of three year old child's unprocessed fear had re-emerged …
June 12, 2014
Though EMDR has enabled me to consciously reprocess that subterranean fear of not feeling worthy of being loved with a greater sense of maturity and clarity than ever before, echoes of that fear-based mindset will continue to arise whenever the frowning, shadowy Spector of Death has reason to pace back and forth deep inside my head.
Thankfully, with recognition into the main source of my negatively focused attitude—without my smile, I am worthless—my adult intelligence is consciously equipped to quell the unprocessed fears of a traumatized child, who had unknowingly adopted a fear of frowns before her sister died—and insight into corrolating three experiences, all of which had occurred before my third birthday, had not occurred to me until just now:
I'd felt abandoned when hospitalized for whooping cough before my first birthday (How do I know that? More later)
I'd felt abandoned when hospitalized for scratching myself raw at twenty months (How do I know that? More later)
I'd felt abandoned in a deeply confounded, emotionally raw, intensely lonely state—for months—after Janet died. (The key word in those three sentences being felt, because feeling abandoned and being abandoned are not the same)
That which we feel influences that which we think
If you feel badly when another person comes to mind
You'll either think badly of that person or
You'll think badly of yourself—unless
You consciously clear your head of negatively focused emotion and
Recenter your thought processor on only that which is taking place, right now.
Mindfulness, leading toward clarity, can feel every bit as confusing as figuring out 'whose on first'.
Who had a clue as to how worthless I'd felt each time my smile turned blue?
No one, including me—so
A bright eyed pleaser I grew to be until
September, 2014 rolled around, and
My smile wrestled with The Spector of Death until
My spirit went down for the count and
Passed out—not for the first time
And those stories will emerge …
It's amazing how naturally
The heart aches for affectionate affirmation
It's amazing how naturally
A loving voice relaxes anxiety, concerning abandonment
It's amazing how naturally spirits thrive and smiles beam
When the face of a loved one, long absent, comes into view …
The opposite of loving naturally, intuitively is loving fearfully
With insight into self discovery, loving intuitively changes for the better
Once a fear based mindset re-centers
A person's comfort zone expands as though all on its own
And that's why
Attitude, timing, readiness and insight into oneself are everything.
With hindsight into the complexity of thought that causes the brain to feel discordantly stressed to the max, I'll not close my door to a loved one as long as the brainstorming portion of my think tank can come up with simple plans that come to mind once mental confusion has passed and crystal clear clarity is mine.
As today's train of thought has, once again, led us straight toward insight into deeper truth, I'll bid you adieu until the sun comes out, tomorrow :)
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