11:22 a.m. Millbrae Library
Just spent 30 minutes reviewing previous blog entries. My present moment experience: suppression of breathing. Feel "bad" about myself: reading my own blog entries was bad and wrong. (I typically feel bad when I've spent any time reading my own journalings.) Lost, don't know what to do. I have a million things I should be doing and I'll be lucky if I do 1 or 2 of them in the 5 hours I have here. Still not breathing. Feeling bad about feeling bad. Tension in jaw. Aversion toward the not breathing. I will adjust my posture now. Yes, I hate this feeling in my chest of not breathing ... though I'm breathing a little more freely now. Pleasure in a yawning, quivering feeling in the back of my right throat, mouth, jaw. No! It's dangerous to feel pleasure; it means I won't get stuff done. Tension in abdomen. In jaw. Hearing (conversation behind me), anger, fear about being angry. Hearing, anger, fear. Hearing a baby say "Mama": pleasure. I don't know what to do and there are a million things I should be doing! Tension, aversion. Mommy, hug me! What I am doing this moment must be wrong. Craving from the right abdomen. Hearing, sadness. Hands resting on the keyboard (am I getting carpal tunnel?). This can't be the right activity: I feel bad! <Pause to feel without typing>
12:12
Just spent 45 minutes feeling. I sat in a reading chair and put my backpack in my lap for support. I felt the craving, the dissatisfaction. About halfway through, I dropped into a state of calm. I noticed the immediate urge to get back to my previous state. Is this because I identify with it? I stayed with the calm. As the 45 minutes progressed, I drifted more and more deeply into a state of quasi-sleep.
Spent 15 minutes on Facebook, including reading an article, "Forty F'd up things about being 40". This was so I could feel good about being 53.
Now, torn between doing ISB work (would feel good to get this certain thing off my plate) and thinking/writing about my heart's desires. How about some of each.
12:55 Edited my code in R; am waiting for a test run to complete. (Seems I have no syntax errors on first try!) Looking at my feelings ... I feel slightly queasy in the back of the throat, "bad". Tension in jaw.
2:00 Still waiting. So I guess this still takes over an hour to run, even though I just now cut its work in half.
So much has been happening in my life lately ... many thoughts, many experiences, little writing. I indeed have time to write, but not so much inclination. Clearly, something is changing, happening, in my personal experience ... vague feelings I've had most of my life seem to be coming into focus ... and within my psychotherapist's framework, this is considered an experiencing of trauma stored in the body. I wonder how this will be viewed 100 years from now ... 1000 years from now. Worldviews are continuously changing. The common psychiatric diagnoses of 100 years ago pretty much do not exist anymore ...
Wonder why it is so hard to write, given that I normally love to write, to pour my thoughts and feelings onto the page. Perhaps it is because when I am experiencing these so-called somatic memories, these body sensations that are supposedly related to early trauma, I am in a non-verbal state.
Lately when I do inner work and attend to my feelings, and give voice to them, I feel strongly that someone is attacking me from the right. I want to defend myself, but I also don't want to, because it brings up intense feelings of powerlessness and humiliation, a sense of "what's the use?" I feel as though, wherever I strike, the attacker will keep moving behind me ... I have to keep turning to the right. As I do this, a sense arises that something has been thrust into my mouth, is pressing against the back of my throat, causing a gag reflex. I always thought that, once I experienced something like this, I'd somehow quickly push through it ... then maybe feel hot and sweaty, maybe cry a lot ... but essentially I'd be over it and wouldn't find these sensations and impressions uncomfortable anymore. But what has actually happened is that these sensations/impressions have become my constant companions. Usually, after spending a period of time (typically 10-90 minutes) focusing on them, I feel clearer, refreshed. But sometimes (like today) I don't.
Part of me wants to conclude that some adult relative orally raped me, because I want someone to blame, I want a coherent story that I can tell people. But, in fact, such a conclusion wouldn't help, I think. My feelings of hatred toward my adult relatives extend to nearly all of my adult relatives, and it's impossible that all of them did something like this. And I can't imagine any good arising from confronting any alleged perpetrator, or even of telling anyone in the family about such an event.
So many more thoughts on this subject, but such a lack of interest in writing. I have 90 minutes to myself. I will go outside in the sun.
