Reclaim my spirit from each and every place I have ever left it (43 43 43)

about the direction that is being taken at my place of work. We once worked as a team with an important common goal, but more and more, individuals are out for their own interests, regardless of how it impacts the whole group.

What am I doing about it? I’ve applied for another position and will continue looking. I’m not ready to jump into just anything, but it’s also true that I tend to wait until things are really desperate before making a change. The unhappiness that I feel is manageable, and even that level of unhappiness is enough reason to look for other opportunities.

In the meantime, I will be following a book that helps foster gratitude and will generally be working on my attitude. Especially I must remember that my job is to give the best advice that I can give, but if others want to ignore it and do stupid things, that is their right.

I’m also going to be taking some career assessment tests. This line of work that I am in has always been a job, never a joy. If I could figure out what it is that I would really like doing, I work toward a change in career.

There’s been a lot of discussion on 43T over the past day on the subject of bullying. It’s stirred up some memories and feelings about my own experiences, and so it becomes another opportunity for healing.

As a child, I was viciously and violently bullied by every member of my family – my father, my mother, my brother, my grandmother. I was bullied at school, I was bullied at church. It was all I knew. Not one person was supportive of me. The biggest kindness I received was being left alone. But I did have my dogs, my imagination, the natural world, and my books, and I know that was a lot.

As an adult, I’ve been sexually harassed at work, I’ve been bullied by groups of “mean girls,” and I was subject to unrelenting and incredibly hurtful bullying for the last two years of a job I once prized.

In many ways, I’ve come to terms with these experiences, although there is always something to work on. One thing I’ve not yet come to terms with is all of the people who saw what was happening and did nothing. In my childhood, there were teachers, parents and doctors who knew I was in trouble and made no effort to help. I was hospitalized and tried to get an appointment with a social worker who never even bother to speak to me.

As an adult, it was exactly the same way. People didn’t want to deal with outrageous behavior even when they saw it with their own eyes. A favorite expression they hide behind is, “So-and-so is always nice to me.” I think back to all those people who looked the other way, who didn’t want to get involved, who treated my suffering as an inconvenience to them, who wanted to hide their heads in the sand because lending a hand would just be too upsetting to their own complacent little fantasy worlds, and what I feel is rage. Did any of these people ever consider what a difference it would have made to me to simply hear someone say, “I see what’s happening to you, and you don’t deserve to be treated like that.”

I see this rage as something else I need to come to terms with so I can progress in my own spiritual growth.

Today I feel pleased with some of my qualities that come directly from those painful experiences. At work, I support the people I supervise and have no tolerance for any form of bullying. As a result, I work in an office where no one is ever singled out as a target. It’s painful to be in a world where cruelty is part of the daily fabric and where it is impossible to save everyone or even anyone, but I know that one thing I can always do is bear witness and be the person who says, “I see what’s happening, and it is wrong.” I know that people do horrible things because other people look away, and I choose not to look away. Imagine how different the world would be if all of use chose not to look away.

I think the fact that I feel this way, instead of just feeling despair over having been victimized, points to another place where I have been able to reclaim my spirit, and I feel very grateful about that.

which is not surprising!

Today I got back another piece. My boss came into the office raging. He was not thinking clearly about something that had happened. I spent much of the morning listening to him vent, calming him down and redirecting his thinking. I am pretty good at this sort of thing, but I don’t enjoy it.

Usually, after an experience like this, I would just feel stressed out and immediately eat something that I didn’t want or need, using food as a sedative. This time, while I was sitting in his office and he was ranting, another part of me was remembering back to when I was a child. My dad was prone to drunken rages, and my mom made it my job to calm him down when he got like that. This was a lot of pressure! There were times that my mom was afraid to go near my dad, so she would send me to talk to him. I can’t really find words to explain what a lot of pressure that was.

Anyway, I remembered that today while my boss was raging, and I could see the big parallel between then and now, and I knew that I was feeling stressed out, even though on the surface I just felt nothing at all. And I talked to that child who I used to be and said the things some caring person should have said way back when. And I didn’t blank out and stuff the feelings down with food. So I think this as very good response.

This is one of the hardest goals I have to make entries about. The more I know people here on 43T the harder it is, because I feel less anonymous.

Anyway, this came up a while ago when answering a question that had been posted about near death experiences. So, here is the story. ^{It is a long story, so maybe that will deter people from reading it, which would be ok with me!} My dad was a member of US Army Intelligence, and his job was to debrief POWs to make sure they hadn’t been brainwashed. It seems he used a lot of what he learned in the army as his guidebook for parenting.

Also, I grew up in Arizona, where it’s hot and lots of people have swimming pools. Our family had one. One day, I was in the swimming pool. Then my dad came into the pool too, with his big glass of beer. He always drank beer starting in the afternoon. He drank it in a big plastic cup, because he liked to put ice in it, and he liked to drink in the pool. Mustn’t take glass into the pool. Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. I was just swimming. I went under the water, and when I tried to come back up, I couldn’t. This was very shocking. Then I realized my dad was putting his hand on my head so I couldn’t come up for air. I tried to swim away, but when I tried to come up again, it was the same thing. This kept happening and I was panicking, but then finally I just thought, “This is it. I am going to die now.”

When I surrendered to the idea that my dad was going to kill me and gave up trying, that was when he let me come up for air. He didn’t say anything at all. He was just sort of smirking. I didn’t feel anything at all. Everything around me seemed bigger, sounds and so on, and yet also far away from me, and I remember being aware of how easy it would be to die while the whole world just went on doing what it was doing and not noticing at all.

I am pretty sure something in me got lost at that moment. Even now, I can’t connect with any emotions around this event. It’s only very recently that I feel like I’m really getting it that this was not an okay thing for my dad to do.

I would like to be able to get that lost piece of me back. It seems like an impossible task. So I thought I would write about it under this goal because it seems like it might be a step in the right direction.

It’s been 10 days since I started the Big Amino Acid/Vitamin Programme for Brain Renewal. In addition to all the supplements (and it is A LOT!), I am also focusing on consuming at least 20 grams of protein in every meal and increasing my fat consumption (which typically had been only about 10-15% of my daily intake). Before starting, I was rapidly sinking into serious depression, which had frankly progressed to the suicidal ideation point. I did feel much better after just 24 hours, and that has been consistent over the past 10 days. I just saw my therapist, and he felt that my thinking was much more balanced and clear. I also am rarely experiencing food cravings, and when I do, it is for protein.

So, my plan is to continue on with this supplement/eating program and see what happens next!

I am really struggling lately with depression. The big kind, the kind that feels like it weighs 1000 pounds and you are dragging it on your back through every thing you try to do.

This depression has been with me my whole life. As far back as I can remember, back to toddler years, it’s been here. Sometimes it recedes into background noise, and other times, like now, it takes over.

My therapist gave me a book called The Mood Cure. This book talks about different ways that brain chemistry can get messed up and how to reset it using amino acid supplements. I am willing to try, but I am afraid to hope.

The events of last week definitely point out a huge hole in my spirit.

I can look back on that woman’s verbal attack and be fairly certain in my intellect that she was wrong, but still…there is a part of my mind that sides with her, even as I know that the tendency to do this is called “identifying with the aggressor,” and it is a predictable result of child abuse.

And then emotionally…well, emotionally, I just feel very bruised and sad. I talked to my therapist about it. There is just a lot of work for me to do. I need a way to protect myself when things like this occur. Because the world is not a warm, fuzzy place, but I am not going to hide from it any more…

I have no idea how to do this. I think these skills of self protection are ideally learned in childhood, and, of course, when you are battered repeatedly you learn the opposite, you learn to shut down and take it. Still, I believe it can be done, and I am going to find out how.

I started telling people about the things that were going on at home, behind closed doors. I tried to get someone to see behind the facade of normalcy and tried to get some help. I tried to get removed from my parent’s house, too. No one who heard (teachers, doctors, other kids’ parents) helped.

The response to this was that my parents took me to a succession of psychiatrists until they found someone who didn’t ask questions about what was happening at home and instead proclaimed that I was psychotic. Then he put me on huge doses of various medications and the next three years of my life were spent in a stupor, with my parents dragging me out of bed to sit between them while they drank each night so that they still had my body to triangulate through and frequent talk about how this was how I would be for the rest of my life.

There is still so much pain attached to having an adolescence that didn’t happen. So many lessons learned that need to be unlearned, lessons like “the world is a dangerous, uncaring place,” “trust no one,” and “there is something deeply wrong with me.”

I am really feeling the loss just lately. I want so much to find that girl and listen to her and give her a chance to learn the things about life that teenagers are supposed to learn. Wish I knew how to do it. I want to reclaim the spirit of that girl before she was pummeled into silence.

I am not a bad person if I lose patience with someone who is being unreasonable.

Last week, I lost patience at work with a woman who was being unreasonable. I ended up ending the discussion by saying, well, “we need to stop talking about this now because I’m getting too angry to discuss it any further.” Ever since that happened, my anxiety level has been high, and I have felt drenched in shame, too.

But today I am starting to see that I don’t have to be eternally patient with everyone all the time, especially people who are being unreasonable. I can say, “enough!” I am allowed to do that. This truth is exactly the opposite of what I learned as a child.

It’s just like what dogs do. When a dog has had enough, she growls or snaps or snarls, makes sure you know that this is it, and then moves on. The dog doesn’t sit and torment herself with worries over whether or not she is not a good enough dog to be alive on the earth because she set a boundary. A dog has a sense of what is enough. It is an essential part of her being. I can’t pinpoint when I lost that part of my spirit. Maybe it was lost at birth.

Regardless, I’m trying now to get it back.

stockholm syndrome

Recent media attention that’s been given to cases of animal cruelty and also cases of prisoner torture have left me feeling very unsettled. My body is all in knots, though I barely feel inside of it.

My dad was cruel to our dogs. Well, and to me, as well. He was an army intelligence guy during the Korean war. I listen to the talk on NPR about bad things going on in black cells and I hear them name the things “torture,” and my blood runs cold. It is so odd and unexpected, driving home from work, the car radio putting a name for the first time on what I lived through as a child. But when I was a child, I just thought that was how it was and didn’t know it wasn’t normal. It is the strangest freaking feeling.

I know about stockholm syndrome. I know what it means. It is freaky to know what it means and see it in yourself and not have the slightest clue how to fix it.