Closet: Open. Stuff: Everywhere.

My husband thought I let myself off the hook too easily in last week's post.

He thought I got to the heart of the matter and then shifted focus to my daughters and talked about them rather than sticking with it and talking more about what was happening with me in light of this new understanding.

It's true. I totally did that.

Upon rereading the post, I think I sort of glossed over the heart of heart of the matter, too.

The real point in last week's post, I think, was the part where I was repeating to myself, and receiving with extreme prejudice, the mantra "All of your feelings are welcome here."

That isn't true, for me, just yet.

It is true in my environment: my husband, my therapist, my support system. They are all as sound as they come. I trust them completely.

They are not the problem.

Nope, the problem is all within. I don't trust... something. Somewhere. There are parts of my limbic system that have never seen the light of day. The emotional center is still in lockdown.

I said last week that I wasn't "having feelings," I was "just having an emotional reaction."

Does this resonate with anyone else? 

I first experienced this when I was pregnant. I'd go in for an ultrasound, and find myself weeping, but not moved in a specifically happy way, as one might expect. I wasn't allowed access to the whole spectrum of feelings-- way too overwhelming. I just sort of registered the WOW of it, and then got the tears.

And since I wasn't a crier in the first place, and then suddenly found myself crying but not crying happy tears, or tears that I could identify as belonging to any particular emotion at all, I'd get a little freaked out, but I wasn't freaked out by the experience, just sort of irritated and mortified and confused by the tears, which seemed to present as distress to every doctor I saw and subsequently freaked out by my weird crying.

When really, I felt great about the pregnancy; I just couldn't figure out why I was crying.  

Because I wasn't having feelings, I was just having an emotional reaction. 

And it was weird.

It's like... instead of being hit by a wave of emotion, being borne along on top of it. You know it's there, you just sort of glide along on top of it and never dip your toe in.

I'm not often aware of the wave. Only during big, high-emotion times, like the pregnancy.

Or when there are moments, like last week, where maybe I'm dipping my toe in a bit. The moments when the tears come for no reason, like they're trying to take advantage of a weak moment and force their way through. 

Those moments always feel like communication from the other side. Someone is trying to reach me, then. Some other me, in some other place. The me with the healthy limbic system, the me with healthy emotional functions, perhaps.

She's trying to push through, in those moments, and say, Relax, we know how to do this, you can let it happen, you can let it come, and let it come, and let it come... and when it's over, we know how to let it go, too.

And therein lies the problem, I think. That's what I don't trust. That I will be able to let it come, whatever it is, and then that I will be able to let it go.

I've learned through this process that there is so much more to come than I ever imagined.

I've also learned that I am much less willing to let some of it go than I would have thought, even though it is damaging and painful and I've spent years searching for ways to do just that. 

When it comes down to it-- if it comes down to it-- would I? Will I? Can I? Let it flow through me, as it always should have, painfully at first, and then let it ease the pain, and finally, in the end, let it run its course and truly leave me for good?

Who will I be then? What will I do with what's left of all this wasted time?

_____

Went to the doctor this week. Another great doc at this new clinic I've been going to; this one a GP. She renewed my lorazepam prescription and we discussed my current antidepressant, which is doing great work for my migraines but isn't quite cutting it for the depression and not at all for the anxiety.

It's time to add another element. <sigh> Here we go again.

On top of that, I've got monthly hormonal upheavals adding to my mood-- these things are always so much stronger when on meds. Hence today's post, I guess.

Basically, after a relatively good and productive week last week, this week I feel like I'm barely holding it together. Which is a humiliating way to feel.

That closet is definitely open. I need to go back to reminding myself that deep struggles like this are signs of progress. They are, right? They must be.

They'd better be. Because I think I've pulled the knob off the door and there is no way that thing is getting closed again, let alone with all this stuff crammed back inside.

It's just that sometimes I get tired of rearranging all of this junk into new piles, trying to makes sense of it. Some days, it seems like if I configure it just right, I will make a magic staircase that will lead me out of here.

Other days, it just feels like it's all going to cave in and bury me one more time.

Guess which one today is? :/

Electrified

Okay. Back to write the rest of the story.

I've been thinking about it, and I think the reason this is so difficult to write is not so much that these memories are so painful-- they're not; they're so time-worn and familiar that they don't have sharp edges anymore-- but that I've been doing a lot of work in this area and I've been deeply triggered along this particular wavelength (shame, self-worth, fear of achievement and praise, fear of no achievement or praise), so every word is like an electric shock to the system.

It's like... imagine this first-grade experience is at one end of the wire, and I've just grabbed hold of the other end, so now everything in between is swinging around like a jump-rope.

Yeah, that. That exactly.

In fact, that can be said for a lot of this therapeutic work. It ain't a bowl of cherries, or a field of wheat, or whatever metaphor you use to signify a period of contemplative growth.

(Would you use a bowl of cherries for that? That would be weird, I think. You figurative cherry people. Weirdos.)

I've realized lately that this therapeutic work has become my more-than-full-time job. It is what I do. What I am always doing, 24/7. Everything is done relative to this work. Everything. It is never not present. 

It's a can't-put-the-toothpaste-back-in-the-tube sort of thing, only not funny. Or minty-fresh.

Remember that post, last year, with the picture of the woman holding the door closed on the closet bursting with junk?

Yeah, I guess I opened the door. Somewhere along the way, I just flung it open. I don't really know when it happened. 

I thought it would be different than this. I thought there would be a movie-like epiphany; maybe a sudden, shocking flashback to the accident where I relive the whole thing and get to release all of the trauma energy the right way, and then everything would just settle down and start to adjust back to something more closely resembling normal.

I mean, I didn't really think about it, but I guess if I were forced to describe what opening that door would be like, I'd say it would have to involve a major accident-related flashback.

Turns out, no. Turns out, I'm just standing here in a pile of junk, holding the ends to a lot of jump ropes, and a lot more of those ropes than I would have thought seem to disappear into a tunnel in the back wall of the closet that I didn't know was there.

AWESOME.

So I just feel triggered all the time now, and I get ramped up to body-numbing, vision-narrowing, breath-constricting, mouth-drying, full-on fight-or-flight-response-style triggered by more things every week. 

Sometimes the things are obvious, in that you might expect a car accident victim with PTSD to get freaked out by them, and sometimes they're not.

Here's an example of the first:

I was watching the Olympics the other night with my sister and bro-in-law, the adorable newlyweds (I'll get tired of calling them that at some point, but Not This Day).

We were watching Alpine Skiing, the Women's Downhill event, one that already freaks me out a little because it's so fast and dangerous-looking and I'm jumpy about such things (because... duh).

And if you saw the event, you know what happens next. Alexandra Coletti of Monaco crashed hard on the big turn.

Until that happened, I'd never connected my jumpiness at watching these events to my PTSD (um... duh is right). But when I saw that crash, there was no room for doubt. My body tensed and braced, my mouth went dry, the "cold fire" started up everywhere, my arms went numb from the tips of my pinkies to my shoulders, my vision got dark and cloudy around the edges and narrowed to a bright, focused center.

I couldn't watch the rest. I probably won't ever watch that kind of competition again. I'm getting the cold fire just writing about it.

But it makes sense, that response. You can easily connect that to the car accident. You can see how A led to B, there.

_____

Here's an example of getting majorly triggered and not being able to connect it to the accident, but to something that happened way, waaaay before the accident did, and was just cemented into my fight-or-flight response by a car on the wrong side of the highway one night.

This is the story you came here to read:

I'd actually uncovered the whole shame/migraine/first grade teacher link with Dr. Oz a few weeks ago in therapy. We'd just scraped the tip of the iceberg at the end of the session one week, and then really dug into it the next week, and by then I'd realized that this was a Really Big Deal.

Getting to the root of the shame thing, for me, feels like an essential piece to this PTSD puzzle. The fact that the headaches also spring from there makes it all the more important to push myself to get in there and try to unravel that tightly wrapped little knot. 

It feels like the beginning of everything, that time in my life. I don't know why, but it does.

So I was already walking around half-triggered over it, sort of crackling with electricity. It's an uncomfortable state to be in-- raw, vulnerable, weird. But I've never felt this close to the source f things before, so I was trying hard to stay in that place.

Two days after that big therapy session, I went to pick up my 4-year old daughters from preschool. I was waiting outside for the doors to open and the line of kids to pour out, as usual. My girls always burst into huge smiles when they see me and yell, "MAMAAAAAA," and run to me and give me what we call in our house a "Mommy Sandwich," which consists of my face as the filling and their kisses on my cheeks-- one twin on each side-- as the bread.

YES, THANK YOU, IT IS THAT CUTE! <swoon!>

So, smiles, yells, Mommy Sandwich, and then they handed me their daily worksheets, where they practice tracing and then writing a letter or a number and then doing a couple of activities involving that letter or number. Each child does the worksheet one-on-one with a teacher.

(To protect their identities, I'll refer to my children by the names on their favorite Superhero t-shirts)

Supergirl, who is a natural performer and pleaser when it comes to academic skills and usually thrilled to show me her work, handed me her worksheet with a frown and said, for the first time in her entire life, "I am really, really bad at eights. I can't do eights very well."

I was stunned. "What?" I said.

Batgirl, who likes to march to the beat of her own drummer but who still manages to get there in the end and who is also very proud of her work, handed me her worksheet. "My eights are really bad too. I don't know how to make eights."

"Who told you that?" I asked.

And they said their teacher's name.

...

...

...

(that was me, speechless for a minute)

As you might imagine, I had quite a few things going on in my head right then. 

In the next 10 seconds, I had to do a bit of prioritizing:

1. I'd been crouching down to their level for Mommy Sandwiching and worksheet viewing. I went ahead and let my knees hit the deck, and then just sat right down on the ground for some physical stability.
2. I bit my tongue on pressing for details about what, exactly, was said and by whom. More on that in a minute.
3. I put the worksheets down, put my arms around my smart, hilarious, kind, beautiful daughters, and I hugged them and said, "I think you did a FANTASTIC job on those eights. Eights are tricky, and nobody knows how to do them the first time they try them, so you're off to a great start. Now all we have to do is practice them together at home, and pretty soon, you'll be EXPERTS at making eights!"
4. When they looked at me and repeated that they didn't know how to make eights, I looked right back at them and said, firmly, "I will help you. Don't be afraid. I will be with you, and I will show you how to make eights, and we will make eights together."

And that seemed to be enough for them to get on with. They skipped off to run around with their friends as everyone wandered toward their cars, and I sat there, arms numb, vision narrowed, muscles buzzing, halfway to panic, triggered as all hell.

What the actual FUCK?!

I had to get away from the school and calm down, get my body back under control, so I could think about all of this rationally. So I collected my munchkins and we went home.

I fed them lunch, and they were droopy and over-tired, so I put them down for a (rare and wonderful) nap, which they actually took.

And I sat on the couch and folded laundry and but on some mindless television. The American Idol auditions, in fact: something dumb and non-taxing, but which occasionally provokes an emotional response in me through some manipulative back story. The perfect outlet for the emotionally-crippled, who tend to take our tears where we can find them.

I found some there, that day. Only once they started, they were hard to stop. A little desperate, those tears. A little scary. Something big seemed to be threatening to happen. 

It's happening, I found myself thinking, wildly. It's happening.

...What's happening? the Sherlock part of my brain barged in and asked. What's going on here?! Have I authorized this?!

Oh. Hmmmm. Tears immediately ceased. Trying to analyze what was happening seemed to be the quickest way to stop it from happening.

A few minutes later, it happened again.

It's happening, I thought, so quietly, so as not to intrude. It's happening. I reached for, and found, a mantra supplied by Dr. Oz at my last therapy session as she spoke to the 6-year old girl within me: All of your feelings are welcome here. All of your feelings are welcome here.

I didn't really know what feelings I was having or what was trying to release itself from me just then, but I thought I'd offer some words of encouragement anyway and just facilitate the release instead of try to clarify what, precisely, was going on here, since that seemed to be part of the problem, maybe from the very beginning.

All of your feelings are welcome here.

All of your feelings are welcome here.

It's happening.

And then... it faded and stopped. And all the other contestants after that were idiots without moving back stories and no more tears were forthcoming.

But a little something happened, I like to think. A little movement occurred. Something. Somehow. 

My husband came down from his office around then to see how things were going, and I told him what had happened with the tears, and he asked what I was feeling.

"I'm not," I said.

"No, I mean, what feelings is this bringing up for you?"

"I'm not having feelings," I said. "I'm having an emotional reaction."

He looked at me. "Um."

"Yes, I realize that those technically mean the same thing."

Raised eyebrow.

"They do not necessarily mean the same thing for me. My body is having the reaction. My intellectual brain is not involved, and if my intellectual brain tries to get involved, it makes the reaction stop, so I'm just staying out of it and letting the reaction happen without trying to figure out what's causing it, you know?"

"Ah," he said. "Got it."

He does, too. He totally understands. The poor guy.

_____

So, that happened. I got majorly triggered by a 2014 mini-repeat of the 1977 incident that I was just discussing in therapy and which might be at the heart of all that ails me.

Everything is so close to the surface now, so easily overcharged and electrified. The lizard brain is as activated as ever, but at the same time, I'm learning how to soothe it more and more directly every time it happens.

I realized that although my intellectual brain and emotional brain are still not really on speaking terms, the intellectual brain is now able to allow the emotional brain to have its say once in a while without enforcing a smackdown. That seems like progress of the first order.

And as for what happened with Supergirl and Batgirl and their teacher, I am not making any rash judgements. I think that a thousand things could have happened to give my girls that impression, and the likelihood that this teacher (who I know and like and have been able to observe in the classroom) said something that mean to them-- especially just to be cruel) is extremely low. 

I know that they are stepping up the rules and the standards in the classroom to prepare the kids for kindergarten, so they may be getting more direct feedback than they've had before. I think they may interpret less-than-stellar-praise negatively. I think that regardless of what was said, the message they got was potentially damaging, but that I have an enormous amount of power in diffusing the impact of that message and turning into a positive learning opportunity for my kids.

So I have. For them, and for me, too. We're all in this together, we smart girls who find ourselves faced with an unexpected challenge:

They weren't superstars at making eights. We've been talking about how, when you're a smart girl, it can be really scary to not be good at something. You feel like you have to always be good at everything and never make any mistakes.

But guess what? EVERYBODY makes mistakes. NOBODY is good at everything. NOBODY does everything right all the time. In fact, if nobody every made a mistake, there would never be any reason to learn anything. A mistake isn't a bad thing, it means you get a chance to try again, and maybe try a different way, and learn something new. 

A mistake doesn't mean you're bad or wrong, it just means you're learning. And it takes a lot more courage to learn than it does to just be right all the time.

I tell my girls that I am so, so proud of them for all the wonderful things they know how to do, but I am even more proud when I see them trying something they don't know how to do so well yet. Because that's when I know that they're not just smart, they're brave and wise, and even though they're only four years old, I already admire them for their courage.

Failing is scary. Learning is hard.

But with just a little courage, by next week, we're gonna be making eights like we were born making 'em.

And after that, they'll know I've got their backs, and they won't need to be afraid of whatever comes next. 

Reading? Bring it.

Minute Tests? We've got your number.

My girls will be fearless. They have 36 years' worth of preparation up their sleeves. They're going to destroy you.

And if I cheer a little too loudly from the sidelines, well, I can't really help it. 

I'm not having a feeling, per se. It's just this pesky emotional reaction.

 

A REALLY REALLY LOUD ONE.

Where It All Began?

Well, as you probably noticed, I didn't post anything during the week, because I didn't write anything during the week, because...

I didn't want to.

I think the teaser for this story will probably end up being more exciting than the story itself, just because actually writing the story, for me, is not turning out to be very much fun. It's freaking me out a little. It's hard to make this exciting for you. 

Because that's what this is all about, as you know. ;)

Well.

Okay, it's actually a long story with a long back story, so it might take a few posts anyway. Might as well get started. The muscles in my arms and legs are already burning with cold fire, my hands are shaking, my body is buzzing like a strummed guitar. 

Here's what I'm about to tell you: the story of the origin of the headaches and the shame. They started at about the same time, and for the same reason. I hadn't ever put it together before, and certainly not in this context, but last week, talking to Dr. Oz, a well-worn detail of an old, old story suddenly took on new, relevant meaning.

I say it's an old, old story because it is: it all happened when I was 6 years old.

As it turns out, this story, which has nothing to do with the accident at all, has been at the very heart of everything that has happened to me since: the headaches, the shame, the PTSD, the paralysis, the fear.

Here goes nothin'...

_____

I was in first grade at a Catholic school in Southern California.

Before we go any further, I'll stop you right there and say no, it's not that. There is no sexual or physical abuse in this story.

Or priests or nuns, for that matter. My teacher was a civilian.

Anyway, as a first-grader, I LOVED school. I was very bright, very advanced for my age. I was already a voracious reader-- I'd been reading for several years by then and was testing at 8th or 10th grade levels or something like that. I was very quiet and shy, but I liked doing well at school and was proud of my abilities. 

I still remember this so clearly: every morning, the first thing the teacher would do was write the beginning of a sentence on the blackboard. Our job was to complete the sentence however we wanted to, and then draw a picture of the "story" we had created.

Already a budding writer, I loved this daily assignment with the heat of a thousand suns. I would make my sentence as complicated and interesting as I could-- I wanted to tell a really good story so I could draw a really cool picture. 

And, as an advanced reader, I had a significant advantage over my classmates: I had a broad vocabulary of words that I could not only read but spell, as well.

Most first-graders are limited, in an activity like this, by the relatively small number of words they've been taught to spell so far, so my classmates' sentences were short and simple.

I began to get a reputation.

And then: I began to get a line of kids beside my chair, asking me for help to spell cooler words so they could write cooler sentences.

Because the teacher wouldn't help them, and I would.

Before long, students began to get in trouble for being out of their seats. There would literally be a line of them next to my desk every morning, and she'd have to disperse them and send them back to their own.

The teacher bought little paperback dictionaries and passed a classroom decree: You may not ask Katie how to spell any more words. If you want to know how to spell something, you may look it up in one of these dictionaries.

Problems with this plan included:

1. First-graders don't know how to use dictionaries, and she didn't teach them.
2. It is very difficult to find a word in a dictionary if you don't know how to spell it.

So nobody used the new dictionaries... 

...Except for me! I pored over them every chance I got! New words! New meanings! More to learn!

Heavenly!

Nothing much changed, despite the teacher's insistence that nobody ask me for help. Kids still did, and I still helped. I loved to write. I loved to spell. I loved to help people make cool stories. 

The line beside my desk remained.

Another cool thing about first grade was Reading Group. I was in the highest level reading group, and instead of one reading textbook, we were given several books at a time to read and discuss over a few weeks.

I took mine home and read them all on the first night, thrilled to have a brand new pile of books to read.

Somewhere around this time, the teacher decided that I was the problem.

I remember her doing little vindictive things. Singling me out in front of everyone for the smallest of infractions. I was a very shy, quiet child-- it must have been difficult to catch me doing anything out of line-- but she managed. And she made a big deal out of humiliating me as publicly as she could.

Mostly it was little things-- she knew I was shy so she'd call on me in class or make me come to the front of the room.

Or small, mean injustices-- I was made to sit out a whole recess because I'd been shoved into the boys' restroom by some unruly boys.

I didn't understand most of it-- I remember it, but I don't remember knowing that it was directed more at me than at other people. I didn't have a sense of unfair treatment, yet.

But then, one week, we had "reading tests," where children were called up, one at a time, to sit with the teacher at her desk and read through lists of words, each list representing a grade level, and you continued until you missed too many words on the list, and that indicated your level of reading aptitude.

I couldn't WAIT.

I remember watching other kids going up there, and fidgeting in my seat, waiting for my turn. I was going to get the highest score in the whole class, I knew it, and I couldn't wait to see what it would be. I wanted to read all the way through the high school lists. I wanted to read like a college student!

I could hear kids reading, haltingly, missing some here and there, and the teacher corrected them now and then, and they kept going until it became too difficult and they couldn't read any more.

I was going to try not to miss any.

When it was finally my turn, I went up and sat next to her and began reading down the lists.

So easy.

Kindergarten. Ha.

First grade. Second grade. A snap!

Third grade. No problem! I read down the list, one word after the other, and it happened so fast that when I mispronounced the word "few," I had already read the next word before she stopped me.

"Stop." She pointed at the word. "What did you say?"

"Foo," I said.

"It's FYEW." she corrected me, loudly.

"Fyew," I repeated. I frowned. I didn't know that one. 

The teacher slammed the book closed. "That's it." she said. "These words are too hard for you. Third grade is too hard. You can't read past a third grade level."

I stared at her. "I can," I whispered.

"You CAN'T" she said. "Go to your seat." And I saw her mark it in the grade book.

And I knew, then, that she was trying to catch me out. I knew, then, that she was lying in wait for me to make a mistake, and that I was not safe in that classroom. That I couldn't tell her what I knew, or I would be in trouble.

I learned, from her, to feel shame not for what I couldn't do, but for what I could. For who I was. 

That was the first thing.

_____

The other thing that happened that year was Minute Tests.

Math.

I was not an exceptional math student.

I was a normal math student.

For a student who was as exceptional as I was, verbally, it was extremely difficult to understand and accept being non-exceptional mathematically. 

I was the first thing I'd ever tried to learn that was hard, and that in itself was terrifying. I didn't know what to make of it.

As you might have guessed, the teacher picked up on this fear and exploited it for all it was worth.

Every Friday, we had Minute Tests, where we got one minute(or was it five minutes? anyway-- a short, finite amount of time) to answer as many addition and subtraction questions as we could.

I had extreme anxiety about these tests, because the teacher would stand by my desk and grab mine first when the time was up. 

Or she would make me come up to the blackboard to work out ones I'd missed in front of the class.

Or she would announce my score in front of everyone.

It was like she'd found a way to bring me down to size, and she was going to use it. I even remember her smiling while she did it.

I also learned, from her, to feel shame for what I couldn't do. There was simply no way to win.

_____

I was six years old. I was shy, quiet, a lover of reading and writing and learning and school.

Until that year. My first year.

That year, on Minute Test days, I began to get debilitating headaches.

I started missing school.

I started missing a lot of school. Especially all the days when we had Minute Tests.

My mother noticed the pattern and found out about the minute tests. There was talk about me being a normal math student. There was talk about my headaches being psycho-somatic.

I also remember there being talk about me having an ulcer back then, but nothing ever came of it. I didn't have one. But I was that anxious, at six.

That was the first sign my parents had that anything was amiss at school. Apparently, I was so quiet that I never said anything about what was going on there. Maybe I just thought that was the way things went, at school. Maybe I thought I'd get in trouble if I told. Maybe I just thought I had to handle it myself. I don't know. What I do know is that I took everything that happened there and I turned it inward. 

It must have been the way I was oriented to do it from the very beginning.

At some point, my mother went in for a conference with the teacher, and was told that I had trouble staying with the rest of the class. When pressed, the teacher admitted that the "problem" was that I was reading ahead, not falling behind.

It was then that she decided I wouldn't be going back to that school the following year. For my parents, that was a pretty big deal-- they both went to Catholic schools for the majority of their education. My dad did for all of his-- all the way through college. So pulling me out after first grade was a big gesture, and I'm glad they did it.

But the damage was done, I'm afraid, and it was incredibly far-reaching.

After that first year, I missed an unbelievable amount of school throughout elementary and junior high. Nearly a third of the school year, some years. If I hadn't been such a good student, there's no way I would have passed my classes. 

I was always an extremely anxious student after that, too, and wary of recognition, although I craved it to some degree and high achievement was required of me by my parents. I always just sort of slid by with As and Bs; just enough under the radar to feel safe from scrutiny. 

School was an uncomfortable fit, instead of a creative breeding ground. I was mortified by too much praise, and too anxious to raise the bar too high for myself, but too smart to allow myself to slip too far.

But this, like PTSD, doesn't resonate so strongly in a vacuum. I was of exactly the disposition to be ruined by that first grade teacher's vindictive methods. She shaped the way I was oriented toward my education for years afterward, and she planted seeds of shame in me that I am still fighting against today, 36 years later. I found roles to fall into in my family and in my social circles that reinforced these orientations. 

We don't find truth outside of us so much as we find it within us and then find things outside of us to match what we feel on the inside, right?

I did that for years, with regard to school, because of that woman.

When I was a junior in high school, I suddenly decided to take the power back (I think this was my idea of teenage rebellion. Was I a nerd, or what?). I knew I was capable of straight As, I knew I was the only one who would benefit from them--or not-- if I chose to make them happen, and so I chose. 

And I got them. And I got them from then on. Through the rest of high school, and through college, and through grad school. Straight As. On my own terms.

It was an I Want To Live moment, even before the accident! It was a real instance of me taking a look at what was holding me back and saying nope, not having it, and kicking it to the curb and choosing a different path.

It worked, to a great extent. But it didn't erase the shame, or the habit of holding back, never showing my hand or performing to the extent that I was truly capable, or the fear and paralysis of knowing I'm not safe here. 

Those things hung around, in the deep framework, and after the accident, when the deep framework was all there was to hold things up, ta-daaa, there they were: very strong, well-formed bones, all ready to build a life upon.

_____

So. There's the back story. Headaches and shame (and math anxiety!) sprung from a single origin, way back in first grade.

Next week, I'll tell you how this stuff came slamming into the present in a big, fat way. 

Too Big To Write About

This post is just going to be a teaser for the post I'm going to try to write over the next few days.

MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH, PEOPLE.

I've had some pretty remarkable things happen over the last few days-- some deep work, some astonishing synchronicity, and a rather spectacular physical display of PTSR energy discharge in action.

But I can't write about it now, because I've only just calmed down from it, 18 hours and 3 lorazepams later, and I've got a dinner party at my house tonight and if I stir it up again I will not be in any condition to host. 

But the point is: major movement. Good movement. Terrifying and uncomfortable and triggering and real.

So, just what the doctor ordered, really.

I took some good notes so I wouldn't forget anything and I'll try to write it on Monday and Wednesday while my kids are at school. I'm pretty sure it's going to give me a migraine so I need to be prepared.

Today, I'm going to take it easy so I can be human for my houseguests later. A much better idea, I think.

So. Watch this space. See you in a few days with a DOOZY of a story. OMG!