Express Yourself! In "Survivors Speak" at Heal My PTSD!

Prairie
by Susan August 6 2010

Today I am honored to have one of my articles shared at Heal My PTSD; Express Yourself; this post is a great overview of the process and path I followed in my healing journey. From the "awakening" and making that decision that "giving up was no longer an option" to the emotional healing that came with facing the pain of my past that I could live in the truth that set me free.

I hope you'll drop by and take a look at it!

Click here to go to Express Yourself at HealmyPTSD.com



Seek Knowledge, find Wisdom, live your Truth!

Practicing Living Whole by guest blogger Amy Eden (Part III of Raise Yourself Up!)

Amy Eden of Guess What Normal Is

Today the conclusion of guest blogger Amy Edens introduction to the 4 Practices of learning to live whole in Raise Yourself Up! Part III...


But first you can hcatch up on Part I here


And Part II here...

Today Part III....

4 Practices for Raising Yourself Up

Practice at Learning Who You Are & What Happened

Practice at Doing Therapeutic Work 

Practice at Taking Care of Yourself & Making Changes

Practice at Being Present in the Happiness you Create

3. Practice at Taking Care of Yourself and Making Changes

As you sort your past, you’ll come to have a clearer picture of how you want to lead your life, your interests, values, and goals. 

Practicing taking care of yourself is all about exploring new interests, creating healthy relationships, and establishing a routine in your daily life that supports your happiness and goals.  In this practice, you have the chance to learn about how to live a fully conscious life in which you take care of yourself completely in the way you discover suits you best.  And that encompasses all aspects of your life:

Eating and nutrition

Health and doctor visits

Grooming and personal habits

Exercise

Work life

Time management

Bills and finances

Household tasks

Parenting

Future planning

Personal goals

Friendships

Family relationships

Romantic relationships

Personal boundaries and action plans for protecting them

Taking trips

Developing personal interests

Socializing and networking

Your spiritual life and how to be idle

Feeling and honoring your feelings

Therapy

Cultivating your relationship with your Self

That’s a long list!  Tackling it will involve reading books on various topics, talking through action plans with your therapist and trusted friends—and a lot of trial and error!

Truly, this is the rewarding part of growing yourself up.

We all come to self-growth and healing work with lives already in-progress. So, while you might find yourself wishing that you could just start all over, fresh, the beauty of implementing change into a life in motion is that even the smallest changes you make will have immediate impact. You’ll feel the results quickly.  You’ll feel the change in how others react to you as well.  Each change will inspire the next,  and your change muscles will become strong and an inner sense of “I think I can! I think I can! I think I can!” will build.  You’ll naturally be attracted to healthier people, healthier interactions—in your personal life and on the job, you won’t be curious about people’s dramas anymore, and you’ll expect to be treated fairly (and you’ll have discovered your own, new definition of “fairly”).  Making change in your in-progress life, which might be a “messy” life right now, means you’ll get to see the impact on your primary relationships right away.

The therapist you work with may suggest, or discuss, antidepressant medication with you.  Ultimately, it’s your decision whether or not to medicate.  Depending on the life events that preceded your doing this work, it may be beneficial.  My own rule of thumb is to be sure that I’m doing three things before utilizing an antidepressant tool:  that I’m getting daily (or every other day) exercise, even if that exercise is a brisk, thirty-minute walk, that I am eating fresh, organic, healthy foods (broccoli in particular, fruit, protein, and ample water) and that I’m not abusing sugar, and, third, that I’m getting plenty of sleep.  While I do these before considering medication, I know some of you may want to medicate first, so that you can attend to those three fundamental lifestyle elements. 

I’ve written about depression and treatments on GWNI. This piece is about the similarities between being the child of child-like parents and depression http://www.guesswhatnormalis.com/2010/11/depressed-or-just-the-child-of-childlike-parents.html, and this one’s about chronic or ‘mild’ depression http://www.guesswhatnormalis.com/2010/11/dysthemia-.html 

4 Practices for Raising Yourself Up

Practice at Learning Who You Are & What Happened

Practice at Doing Therapeutic Work 

Practice at Taking Care of Yourself & Making Changes

Practice at Being Present in the Happiness you Create

4. Practice Being Present in the Happiness that You Create

Finally, be sure to enjoy your good life!

If you do a Google search on mindfulness, you’ll find a lot of resources as well as a lot of compelling research about the power—both spiritual and medical—of mindfulness practices.  Mindfulness is essential the practice of being present in the present moment—not distracted by thoughts, but truly at-attention and calm and focused in the present moment. 

This practice is simple, really:  when you’re mindful, you know how you feel, you notice colors, shapes, tastes, smells, sounds—everything. You’re in tune with your Self, your surroundings, and the universe.

And you’re OK.

Remember, these 4 Practices are not steps to take in order, nor to ‘complete’; instead, these practices are active, living stages. We’ll move between them, starting from the first, to the last, for life. 

At first you’ll spend more time going back and forth between 1, 2, and 3, but as you heal you’ll spend more and more time with 3 and 4, using 2 to keep your emotional, psychological, and spiritual mechanics tuned-up, as needed.

Be kind to yourself.

~

Thank you for reading along with us this week!

Your comments are always welcome; please share your notes, thoughts or "aha" moments in the comments below and please consider dropping by Amy's blog Guess What Normal Is.

Amy Eden, writer of fiction and creative nonfiction, has been studying and writing about issues of children of alcoholics for over fifteen years.  She has worked in book publishing and magazine publishing since 1994, and is currently an editor for a San Francisco-based book publisher. She has published nonfiction articles in city and national magazines, for educational publishers, and for the Web, and earned a BA in English and an MFA in creative writing.  Amy Eden’s inspiration for her self-improvement blog, “Guess What Normal Is” is to “help people trade armor for courage.”

~

 Thank you for reading today! Please visit Amy's blog Guess What Normal Is and let her know you found her via A Journey!

This post is property of its author; its publication here in no way implies endorsement nor should it be construed as medical or therapeutic advice. 

Practice Will Make You Whole by guest blogger, Amy Eden (Part II of Raise Yourself Up!)

Amy Eden of Guess What Normal Is

Here is Part I of Raise Yourself Up!


Today we'll continue with Guest Blogger, Amy Edens series "Raise Yourself Up!", Part II.

Practice Will Make You Whole - Practicing at Becoming You

Our parents didn’t parent us well, for various reasons.  We can wring our hands and wonder why, why, why about that truly unfortunate fact of our lives and try to extract a bit of comfort from the questioning, but—we cannot change it.  Here and now, however, today—you are in charge of your self, your wellbeing, and you are now your own parent. 

So! What kind of parent do you want to be to yourself? 

You cannot copy the model you were given because the results—well, you already know those bad results.  You must develop a new model, and to do so you need to do some investigation.  Who are you?  Think about what it’s like to really know someone.  Can you think of a person whom you feel you really know? I bet that knowing their history, where that person came from, is a key part of your feeling of knowing them. 

Practice at getting to know where you come from—don’t worry about being perfect at it.  We tend to be perfectionists, so start thinking about self-work in terms of “practice” rather than “results.” Being in practice mode focuses our attention on the present moment—so we can not only enjoy the act of practicing itself, but also become present. (Being present is a valuable lesson because it provides us with the experience of feeling “okay” and safe, and forces us to release our need to control.)

Think of the practice of parenting yourself like yoga, learning a language, or a musical instrument, or exercise—something that needs conscious thought, repetition, and expansion into new areas, and just plain doing.

Here’s a definition from Webster’s:  Practice; (noun) late Middle English; “Repeated performance or systematic exercise for the purpose of acquiring skill or proficiency.”  

4 Practices for Raising Yourself Up

Practice at Learning Who You Are & What Happened

Practice at Doing Therapeutic Work 

Practice at Taking Care of Yourself & Making Changes

Practice at Being Present in the Happiness you Create

1.  Practice at Learning What Happened and Who You Are

First, it’s essential to understand, fully, what happened to you.  Go there.  It’s not a waste of time, it’s not “digging up old useless bones,” it’s not just “the past” that you can’t change—no, no!  It’s essential to excavate your childhood.  Find out what it means for people to grow up without having one’s self-esteem nurtured, but also what it meant for you in particular, given your unique circumstances, to have grown up as you did.  It’s essential that you dig deep to remember, articulate, and reflect on your own story and unique situation and reactions. Only if we tell what happened can we become truly free. This will begin to dissolve the burden that you carry—whether you realize it’s there on your shoulders or not (you’ll certainly feel it lifting!) 

Learning where you came from and who you are in a honest, formal, and committed way will be painful at first but will bring tremendous relief, and it will begin to provide you with a blueprint for healing on which you can actually take action. 

Be sure to examine, and address, the coping behaviors—especially addictions to food, excitement or work—that have become habits for you.

Clearly, this is something that needs to happen within a safe environment, one that will help you create borders around the old pain and present reality so that you don’t feel…well…like you’re losing your mind!  This work is best done with a therapist who you choose and with whom you feel safe, and who can help you contain the experience.

4 Practices for Raising Yourself Up

Practice at Learning Who You Are & What Happened

Practice at Doing Therapeutic Work 

Practice at Taking Care of Yourself & Making Changes

Practice at Being Present in the Happiness you Create

2. Practice at Doing Therapeutic Work

Although it’ll seem like the endpoint of looking into your past will be a pit of pain from which you’ll forever live, the truth is that you’ll arrive out in a patch of sunlight in an field—with yourself.  You’ll be light years closer to knowing who you are.  This is partly because you’ll see that who you were as a child was someone who adapted and coped to stay safe in whatever way you could.

You’ll come to realize that, while necessary, that’s not the Who you were meant to be, and that you want to get to the Who underneath all those protective survival layers.  You’ll come to have a much clearer picture of who you do not want to be, and simultaneously, begin to see (and with compassion) and feel that you have greater control over becoming who you do want to be. 

If you do this work, you will discover a lightness and freedom—and sense of your Self and clarity about what you need—like never, ever before.  It will be scary at times.  Some might think it would be “easier” to stick with the old way of denial and not feeling your feelings, but as soon as you put one foot into recovery, the rest of your body will ache to get in there, too.  Your heart will guide you. If you do this work, you WILL come through the darkness and to the other side, into the light of a life you want, that you made.

The intensity of feelings that uncovering our past traumas may bring up isn’t for the faint of mind, so you need a trustworthy therapist to help you navigate the terrain.  If you do this kind of work on your own, it’s very difficult to sort out the monsters from the angels—that is, it becomes very difficult to know whether or not your actions stem from avoidance or courage.  In truth, even the best therapist won’t be able to tell your monsters from your angels, but he or she will be able to give you the time and space within which to get enough perspective that you sure can. 

Be sure that you shop for a therapist just like people recommend shopping for a house—don’t pick the first one, evaluate a few (or several if you have to), and choose the one that feels most likely to provide comfort and safety.  Talk to them on the phone first, asking what their area of specialties are, and how many of their clients (not patients!) are trauma-survivors, or children of alcoholics, etc. Tell them what you’re struggling with, and ask what kind of approach they would take.  This saves your time, and theirs.  Any good therapist will spend up to 15, or more, minutes talking to you on the phone.  If you don’t like their attitude, voice, attitude, or answers—move on to the next name on your list.  Ask if they will give you a free consultation (or use your health insurance to cover it), and book a few appointments with a few different counselors—this will prevent you from feeling obligated to go with the first one you see. (Any good therapist will ask you, at the end of your first consultative session, if you feel it’s a good fit and if you’d like to continue.  Only a bad, desperate therapist will obligate you or sell you on committing to them.)  Remember—you’re the customer.

There’s reward in this:  the process of selecting a therapist is the first step in your healing!  It’s an opportunity to say what you want, and to actively choose the person who is going to collaboratively, with you, help you on your journey of self-investigation and self-repair so that you can live a life as you choose to live it.

~

Your comments, notes and aha's are invited and always welcome:)

Join us here next time for the conclusion (Part III) of Amy's series Raise Yourself Up!

Amy Eden, writer of fiction and creative nonfiction, has been studying and writing about issues of children of alcoholics for over fifteen years.  She has worked in book publishing and magazine publishing since 1994, and is currently an editor for a San Francisco-based book publisher. She has published nonfiction articles in city and national magazines, for educational publishers, and for the Web, and earned a BA in English and an MFA in creative writing.  Amy Eden’s inspiration for her self-improvement blog, “Guess What Normal Is” is to “help people trade armor for courage.”

~

 Thank you for reading today! Please visit Amy's blog Guess What Normal Is and let her know you found her via A Journey!

This post is property of its author; its publication here in no way implies endorsement nor should it be construed as medical or therapeutic advice. 

Raise Yourself Up! Guest Post by Amy Eden

Amy Eden of Guess What Normal Is

Every now and then I run across someone's work that just makes sense and today I want to introduce you to Amy Eden of Guess What Normal Is. I've asked Amy to give us an introduction to the subjects that many of us face who come from backgrounds that may have been less than normal. 

Over the next several days Amy will be sharing her 3 part series on the subject of her blog and introducing some makes-sense solutions we can adapt in our journey from there where we lived in the darkness...


to here, where we begin to live in the light. :)

Today then, Part 1 of Amy's series Raise Yourself Up!

By Amy Eden of Guess What Normal Is

Who, truly, are you?  How did you get here, to this place—this resource?  I’m here because I have a deep desire for a good and happy life, based on love and free of secrets, denial, and shame. It’s not my fault, but I when I was a child, at my most vulnerable, impressionable, when I was in need of consistent nurturing, good nutrition, and encouragement of my emerging self, my needs were a low priority for my parents. My human child needs were in competition with my parents’ addictions.  I was treated like a durable, rubber blob that was expected to be blind to reality, to inconsistencies, to terror, and just bounce, shape and reshape myself to fit my parents lives and related chaos, and then bounce back to shape after it was all over. 

But, what shape?  

Maybe your mother, father, and extended family, too, were abusive, whether emotionally abusive in a secret, stealth, insult-wrapped-in-a-smile sort of way, or physically abusive—or both.  Maybe you had alcoholic parents, or a parent who had an alcoholic parent and was conditioned in that environment. Or workaholic parents who neglected you and put their work first and used it as a buffer between themselves and the world.  Maybe you had a disabled parent—or sibling—who sucked up all the attention at home while you were growing up and needed attention and nurturing.  Or you had a seriously depressed parent, a narcissistic parent, or a parent with a borderline personality disorder.  Perhaps it wasn’t clear, your parents were never diagnosed, but something was just…off—something was wrong.

Whatever the particular lack or dysfunction, we all have a lot in common!  And we all want nothing more than to be free of the effects of how we were raised so that we can have enjoyable relationships and inner happiness.

What, exactly, do we all have in common?

A Childhood You Didn’t Choose

Here are the core issues that most plague people who were raised by deficient, neglectful, and abusive parents:    

• You often personalize things and feel that, somehow, you are to blame for errors in the world, other people’s moods, and the outcome of events. 

Because our parents held us (as well as themselves) accountable—whether in a verbal or nonverbal way—for things that weren’t actually in our control, we continue to hold ourselves accountable for the actions of others and the outcomes of events. Maybe your parent guilt-tripped you into doing things, telling you that other people would feel bad if you didn’t take a certain action. In my house, it was, “Your brother will feel bad if you don’t go to his soccer game.” Or you were told that you “had to” go to a certain school, take a certain summer job, join a certain sport, to keep people happy—“Your father did everything for you to do play soccer (even though you hate it), you better not let him down now.” The message, time and again, was:  you must do what we want, you’re responsible for our moods and the moods of others.

• You can’t seem to come to a conclusion about what’s “normal,” and would feel much calmer if you just knew what are desired and acceptable behaviors. 

You know you’d feel calmer if you freely trusted your gut and didn’t feel so uneasy in social situations, around authority figures, and when making life decisions.

• You judge yourself often and meanly. 

Your compassion just isn’t there when you need it most (during everyday mistakes—snagging the sleeve of your sweater, forgetting to get gas again, spilled milk even!)  We experience great anguish when we realize we’ve made a mistake, particularly one that impacts other people. Our first instinct will be to cover it up because denial and not self-acceptance played such a large role in our homes.

We tend to be afraid that others will reject us, or leave us, when they discover who we truly are.  This has to do with the fact that our parents attacked our whole being rather than our actions when there was a problem or discussion; therefore, we think of ourselves as deeply flawed in light of the smallest fumbles.

• While not meaning to and while not in keeping with your self-image, you tend to react to people, situations, and life rather than take action inspired by your own wants, ideas, and goals. 

We tend to relate to life as something that happens to us, from the position of victims, someone to whom things happen. In some cases this is very subtle—like making sure other people speak first, before you—and in other cases not-so-subtle (like when thinking thoughts like, ‘if only he/she would do x, y, or z, then I’d be able to have what I want.”)

• People exhaust us because we’re not able to fully be ourselves.

A lot of us feel like chameleons.  And being chameleons was a necessary adaptation for surviving our childhoods.  As adults, we take-on personas that we feel work in particular situations and are hyper-attuned to non-verbal cues from others (even in situations in which we’re not entirely sure we want to be taking part!), which determine our actions, or more precisely—our reactions.

• We don’t know our needs nor advocate for them; we don’t ask for what we want; we suffer guilt when we assert ourselves.

The way we grew up, we were conditioned to put others’ needs before our own—now the only way to get our needs met is, first, to begin to understand (a) what it means to have needs, (b) get a feel for what ours are, then (c) to become vocal about those needs and a champion for ourselves. Becoming comfortable saying ‘no’ to others (without feeling guilty for it or apologizing) is part of this, too.  It takes time, but we can learn that our needs and other people’s feelings are independent of one another, that getting our needs met isn’t in conflict, actually, with other people’s needs and their happiness.

• We don’t feel our feelings.

While we are individuals in pain, and harbor deep pain from our childhoods, whether on the surface (sad face, slumped shoulders) or below the surface, we don’t know how to feel our feelings.  Our feelings were denied, yelled at, ignored, and even laughed at.  When feelings do arise, we’re easily overwhelmed by them and very quickly, we either deny them—to be “pleasant” for others and to avoid rocking the boat, or we re-stuff them because our feelings are begging us to say ‘no’ and speak our minds, and that seems high-risk and deeply frightening for us.

The Adult Children of Alcoholics World Service Organization offers a description of the emotional issues of adult children of alcoholics—which I share here because it’s so relevant to the issues of people who endured other various types of childhood abuses as well. The ACA WSO refers to these emotional characteristics as The Problem—there’s no question you’ll find something to relate to in it.  Here’s my take on The Problem (be sure to read my Antidote!) http://www.guesswhatnormalis.com/2011/01/its-a-new-year-right-new-year-new-you-new-habits-new-goodness-and-trying-harder-right-just-making-sure-so-let.html

Comments and insights are invited and welcomed:) 

Join us here next week for Part II of Amy's series Raise Yourself Up!

Amy Eden, writer of fiction and creative nonfiction, has been studying and writing about issues of children of alcoholics for over fifteen years.  She has worked in book publishing and magazine publishing since 1994, and is currently an editor for a San Francisco-based book publisher. She has published nonfiction articles in city and national magazines, for educational publishers, and for the Web, and earned a BA in English and an MFA in creative writing.  Amy Eden’s inspiration for her self-improvement blog, “Guess What Normal Is” is to “help people trade armor for courage.”

~

 Thank you for reading today! Please visit Amy's blog Guess What Normal Is and let her know you found her via A Journey!

This post is property of its author; its publication here in no way implies endorsement nor should it be construed as medical or therapeutic advice. 

Being Positive vs. Being Pollyanna Part 2 by guest blogger Dani of Positively Present

Photo Credit

"We looked for the good (in them), and we found it." ~Pollyanna

Today is Part 2 of a guest post written by Dani of Positively Present; in today's post, Dani takes a look at the difference between what many of us know as the positive thinking that often discounts our experiences and introduces us to the true inspiration behind that "Pollyanna attitude"...


By: Dani of Positively Present


Though it’s been awhile since I’ve seen the film, I believe that Pollyanna was a positive thinker. She didn’t ignore the negative, but instead chose not to dwell on it.

Considering her situation, I’m sure she was combating a great deal of negativity within herself, but she make the conscious choice to focus on what was good in her life.

However, media and culture has taken Pollyanna’s positive thinking and turned it into a negative. It’s convinced us that Pollyanna naively saw the good in the world around her without acknowledging the bad.

Whether or not this is the case is mostly irrelevant considering Pollyanna is a fictional character. What is relevant is what people in real life do.

Those who choose to take part in Pollyannaism, as it’s been named, will choose to ignore the negative and only focus on the positive. This can be extremely delusional and, in my opinion, is not at all the same as positive thinking.

To live a truly positive life, one must consider both the negative and positive aspects of life and then choose to focus on the good.

In addition, in order to live a positive life, one must begin by looking for the good in things.

While negative elements of life should not be ignored, it’s not helpful to seek them out either.

In the film version of Pollyanna, Pollyanna wears on a chain a quote from Abraham Lincoln: "When you look for the bad in men, expecting to find it, you surely will." I believe these words to be true.

When you search for the negative things in people (and in life), you will find them.

Conversely, when you search for the positive, what you find will be positive.

In my opinion, Pollyanna’s gotten a bad reputation for being overly optimistic and sickeningly positive, but I’m not entirely sure that’s accurate.

The character of Pollyanna did not strive to ignore reality or avoid the truth of what was happening in her life. Instead, she chose to face the negative situations head-on and look for the good in them, as any positive thinking person would.

She chooses the path in life that so few people walk down—a path on which positive thinking blooms and inspiration can be found in even the darkest of places.

When looking for inspiration, we should not look to the formulaic version of Pollyanna that has been perpetuated by the media.

We should not aspire to think that everything is happy and perfect and positive.

Instead, we should look to the true heart of Pollyanna’s tale and aspire to be like the little girl who, while coping with the negative in her life, continued to strive diligently to see the good in all that was around her.

Dani, a twenty-something striving to live positively in the present moment, wrote this post. Dani’s blog, Positively Present, embraces the idea of “living happily ever after now” by focusing on all things positive. Dani is also the creator and author of Hope Springs Internal, a blog focusing on the positive representations of women in the media. You also find Dani on Twitter @positivepresent.

I'd like to thank Dani for providing this insightful look into living a positive and insightful life! I hope you'll drop by Dani's blog and let her know that you found her via "A Journey"!

Q: How do you view making the choice to live positively in the present?