May 2024: Portals

Posted on May 30, 2024

May in a nutshell: learning about complex PTSD, working through Your Body Speaks Your Mind, slogging through old journals that eerily parallel my current situation at times, integrating my former selves into my True Self, having myself as a client.

I don’t know why, but April’s blog feels a lifetime ago, not just a month. It’s likely due to the ‘time travelling’ I’ve been doing while working on my book. There are so many parallels between my life experience in 1993/4 and today, that it’s a bit discombobulating (yes, that’s one of my favourite words 😉). I recognize on some level that I am completing the trauma response from 30 years ago. Part of the mind-game is that I didn’t know I was struggling with OCD and complex PTSD way back when. I barely recognized depression and a persistent discontent I referred to as anxiousness. Anxiety as a diagnosis wasn’t in my periphery yet. By early 1994, I considered getting information about depression, but I had no idea where to look. It would be another 3 years before I would receive proper diagnosis and treatment for depression (dysthymia). Anxiety had a much longer wait.

But it was this crazy-making thinking-and-feeling roller coaster that added to the chaos of that time. No matter what I did, it wasn’t enough (part of OCD and cPTSD). I wasn’t enough. Reviewing these old journals is like reaching through a portal to a former version of myself who desperately needs the knowledge and compassion I can offer her now. While I can’t change the circumstances she was struggling with 30 years ago, I can offer her a safe space to process in the present. Like I said, a bit discombobulating. I feel for that younger version of myself much differently than I used to. I read her journal entries, and recognize the thought patterns and emotional upset that are part of the aforementioned diagnoses. I can break the shame-messaging and be gentler with that version of myself.

I can welcome her into my integrated True Self. Still a work in progress. And it is interesting to see how I am handling financial insecurity, work concerns, friendships, relationship issues, and family dynamics in this day and age compared to 30 years ago. The butterfly effect of April’s blog also seems to have shifted some things around in my internal framework. I see my younger self through my current framework/lenses; and she looks much different than how she saw herself back then. I’m not sure what she’d make of her future self. She’d be quite surprised, I’m sure. And she wouldn’t know what to make of the butterfly effect or a fiery Phoenix as it pertains to her sense of self.

It might have helped her to know she had an inner flame – that was hers alone – yet had the ability to attract male attention like moths to a flame. Given her lacking sense of self, male attention caused a lot of consternation. She had no idea she had a flame that could burn or singe. She had no coping strategies for emotional regulation, racing thoughts, obsessive thinking, or compulsive assessment of her existential state as a Christian. Through retrospection, it’s difficult to own and understand that I could’ve suffered less if only I had better mental health strategies and skills. I wonder how my life would’ve turned out differently if only I understood what was going on inside my psyche.

My healing journey didn’t happen that way, though. It took a much more circuitous route. I am still integrating past versions of my Self as I learn more and process what surfaces with new tools. I attended a webinar on complex PTSD that shifted my entire self-understanding. I’ve had the diagnosis of PTSD as long as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but I didn’t receive any treatment for it. I would soak up whatever I could at every trauma conference and seminar there was to attend. So it wasn’t like I was receiving completely new information at this webinar. It was how it was presented and how I factored into that information. I related far more to the material as a patient than a practitioner; and it redefined my entire life experience.

Ergo, reading my journals through the lens of cPTSD, as well as the usual OCD, dysthymia, and anxiety (I also recognize early signs of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). My blogs about my father wound (Nov & Dec 2023) play heavily into this conception of cPTSD whose defining features are a sense of self that is consistently negative (or I word it as filling the void of no sense of self with negative perceptions because that is what has been mirrored/reflected back) along with never developing a sense of safety (aka trust issues). Previously, my self-esteem and insecurity issues were character flaws – something I had to build up as I went along in life. Now I know the two prominent features of my way of experiencing the world were part of a complex coping mechanism.

So, I am still working through the goo of the cocoon. I hope to emerge soon as a brave butterfly; but I sense more trauma response completion in my future as I continue reviewing my old journals, reaching through the portal to better understand my former self, pulling her through the portal into the safe space of an integrated True Self. If it sounds complicated, it is. I haven’t been my own therapist to this depth and intensity before. Being one’s own client is mind bending, but it is also creating a safe space within myself that was never there before. And the space where my sense of self should be is no longer being filled with only negativity. I am able to see myself for who I really was, behind the symptoms of all those future diagnoses.

I am beginning to see my own buried flame that will, hopefully soon, emerge from the “cocoon goo” as a Phoenix-like butterfly.