1467N WHAT CATALYZED THIS STRING OF INSIGHTS TO EMERGE, TODAY?

This post was retrieved from those left in drafts during the weeks preceding Jeremy’s passing.

Solitude, being one of my brain's best friends, has

Recently had reason to offer my processor downtime to
Dive so deep into my mind as to stimulate my intuitive powers to
Emerge with this next string of insight-laden thoughts intact ...

August, 2017

Over these past several weeks, several distraught members of our extended family have been phoning, daily, to vent, and knowing each one to be in need of compassionate trains of thought, eventually, my spirit felt sluggish from lugging around a painful sense of heaviness as though knots, tied around my heart, were severely constricting the free flow of oxygenated blood that energizes my brain to function at its optimum, and with those insights in mind, my memory unleashed visions of my experience with Takotsubo, stimulating these words to fly out of my mouth:  Oh no!  It's happening, again!  My pattern of empathetic sensitivity has been absorbing my loved ones' pain as if it is my own—suggesting my need to consciously unhinge each reactive eruptive episode of PTSD from igniting my subconscious fear of being unworthy of love unless my processor is healing the ills of the world!

So, first and foremost, I charge myself with not believing that my processor can heal the pain that my loved ones’ defensive attitudes defensive attitudes have been flinging back and forth at each other for decades in the same way that I, at the age of three, was unable to stop my grandmother's defensive processor from flinging insults at my precious mother each time my mother did not respond with subservience to her mother's dominating attitude as in:  You'd better agree with everything I believe and say and do or you’re against me, through and through—accept my opinions as facts or be cast out of my heart.

Across the spectrum, there are many ways to love.  Loving, as described above, exists at the loving-poorly end of the spectrum.  In another post, I'll describe the entire spectrum from loving poorly to loving purely (one end being heavily populated, the other not so much).

Over my lifetime, I’ve made an art of mediating between warring relatives in hopes of reconciling that which all too often proved to be irreconcilable differences.  And here’s why I never felt like a meddler:  Invariably both sides invited my objective perspective, which, more often than not, calmed both minds until the next time that one dynamic duo or another challenged each other to set foot on the warpath, again, and you can believe me when I say that heart piercing arrows, flying back and forth, had naught to do with cupid's quiver  ...

Though today's insights are not new to me, here is why I felt need to review each one:   I stand before you clearly declaring myself free and innocent of undeserved (survivor's) guilt, straight into my core!

You see, I've come to realize that retiring The Fixer depends upon freeing my think tank from feeling sucked back into yesteryear’s anxious bouts of patterned hyper vigilance, regarding peacekeeping for this reason:  If my hyper vigilant pattern of empathetically absorbing the pain of others does not change for the better, I'll never experience inner peace for very long, because I'm one of those people who love people, and life is such that at least one of my peeps will be laboring through unresolved pain at any given time.  And now here it comes—the intuitive insight that's been attempting to emerge from subconscious storage ever since the conscious portion of my brain awakened this morning:

*Ever since I'd witnessed terrifying arguments between my mother and her mother concerning blame, during the traumatic weeks following Janet’s unexpected death, I've unwittingly felt personally responsible for mending torn relationships before they succumb to a sudden, terrifying demise, as has true of so many of the couples whose weddings Will and I stood up for, who are now divorced!

*Suddenly, I come to see that over most of my life, my heart constricts with fear each time fate offers my adult intuitive powers a sense of deeply repressed memories of anger arising to haunt my well being anew, as though reviving a three year child's failure to heal her severely depressed mother's heart-piercing pain each time my grandma's mean-minded, power-struggling, tongue lashings disrespectfully whipped her grief struck daughter's dispirited lack of self respect to a pulp while my dad was at work ...  and just imagine my confusion when a temporary truce dictated an icy cease fire throughout our electrified apartment right before Dad's key unlocked the front door, and my emotional safe haven gathered me into the safekeeping of his embrace  ... 

No wonder why I can't read the newspaper or watch cruelty reported on the news.  No wonder why I cringe at the ringtone of the phone (unless caller ID reveals the caller to be Will or one of our kids):  All I need to hear is a downcast tone of voice in need of a sympathetic ear, and my entire being feels stimulated anew to commit myself to saving the world from enduring an unending sense of heart piercing pain before the voice on the line even has time to convey:  Annie, I have a problem in need of your empathetic and yet objective ear ... and the fact that I facilitate classes in family communications, suggests that lots of those SOS ASAP calls seek me out at home, which wouldn't have been true had I'd earned an advanced degree in psychotherapy, because an imperative portion of my training would have required me to set boundaries around my sensitivity to empathy—of which I had set none.

Over these past twenty-four years (beginning when I walked into a classroom where fate offered me a confounding, impassioned experience, which offered my intuitive powers sound reason to get to work dismantling my many-layered wall of denial), I've been puzzling my way through the fact that love and brutality, cruelty and all forms of human misery prove to be defensively intertwined, and the harshness of that reality served to ignite my self-empowered short fuse to light the wick that inflamed my mind, body and spirit with subconscious frustration, which has fueled my passion to understand the true nature of relationships that had, over time, shockingly burned out my spirit so that, finding myself utterly devoid of energy, nothing about life served to inject my conscious awareness with even one drop of joy!  All I could do was stare at the wall wondering at the non-stop flood of unshed tears that wet my cheeks, because I'd not yet learned that depression (professionally defined as anger turned inward) had stolen my appetite for nourishment of any kind, and in the absence of joy, twenty pounds fell off my flesh in a matter of weeks—causing my sons to fear that I was hiding something to shield them from pain, and the only something that they could think of was cancer—and they weren't far off the mark, because deeply repressed anger is as harmful to a person’s mental health as a malignant carcinoma in need of total extraction ...

Ooof! As you can see, I certainly had my work cut out for me so—thank goodness my processor was practiced at employing my Line of Control while my intuitive powers worked day and night to name the traumatic source of my hyper-vigilant empathetic reactions, based in eruptions of PTSD, so as to create a rebalanced, healthy sense of compassion each time the pain of others called me to the phone, and though it took years to peel the onion before the latest layers in my wall of denial came down, all the time devoted to freeing the tsunami-sized waves of emotional pain (which had knocked my spirit as flat as a pin pops a balloon filled with hot air) was worth it, and that was most especially true when Will’s cancer surgery loomed overhead, and my conscious mind could not function with anything close to clarity, at all.

For those of you who are new to my blog, the story of my grandma's war of wills with my mother and my bout with PTSD during Will's cancer scare have already been written and posted.  So if you're intrigued about a little girl, who'd lost her assertive voice at the age of three, suggesting why she blocked all memory of the sexual abuse that began several years later, followed by being bullied by a gang of mean-minded boys ... may I suggest that you think of my blog as a saga and scroll back to review my posts from the beginning, as though reading an autobiographical novel.  You see, I chose to write this blog for several reasons:
People I love begged me to reveal insight-laden lessons that changed my life for the better
Most people can't afford the amount of therapy that I've chosen to engage in
I'm a teacher, who loves people, and what I learn, I care to share

Thank goodness, I know my brain is up to today's task of consciously differentiating the pain of others from my own as soon as the misery of a loved one seeks my ear ...

I'm sure you'll agree with my rebalanced sense of clarity when I state that my growing ability to offer a compassionate ear will be all good and well once my lifelong pattern of absorbing the pain of others as my own has had time to change for the better.  And now, on that positively focused note, tis time to pull today's train of thought into a rest station where my think tank plans to relax—unless the phone rings—Uh—hold the phone, please, because common sense is suggesting that I concentrate my energy on my choice to relax, so let's delete every word written after 'unless'  ...

PS ... Have I mentioned that this post identified the series of events that catalyzed my dread of answering the phone?  Here's a hint:
IF I'M NOT WORTHY OF LOVE THEN I MAY BE NEXT IN LINE TO BE LEFT BEHIND!

PSS

Though I’ve clicked on ‘select all’ in hopes of regulating the size of the font, so far, this post remains stubbornly rebellious beyond my brain’s computer savvy.  Not to worry.  Once my positively focused connection to creativity comes up with a proactive plan, this unruliness will be a thing of the past.

PSSS
Ahhh!  Problem solved!  How?  By thinking out of the box, I copied this post to a blank file, clicked on select all, clicked on normal size font, and copied that corrected version to a new post, after which I deleted the post that had proved beyond my control.  Amazing what a difference, concerning change for the better, a few clicks out of the box can make!