Gina Harris's Blog, page 60

More on Complex PTSD

Based on comments, these recent posts are really resonating, and there is a lot of trauma out there. It seems valuable then to go into my process of self-assessment, and also some resources.

I learned that Complex PTSD existed because of Kai Cole opening up about her divorce from Joss Whedon, followed by Brandon Flowers of The Killers discussing his wife's struggle with it.

https://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-infidelity-affairs-ex-wife-kai-cole-says/

https://www.nme.com/news/music/brandon-flowers-reveal-how-his-wifes-battle-with-mental-health-inspired-the-killers-new-album-2141097 

While these articles are from 2017, I don't think I encountered them until 2019. I know I used "Rut" for the song of the day in September 2019, and it felt familiar. 

I am pretty sure I read Kai Cole's letter first, where the trauma was in an intimate adult relationship that created a lot of self-doubt. Well, maybe the doubt instilled in her entire world and sense of reality was worse than the self-doubt, but it all relates.

(Our first lesson is that Brandon Flowers is a better husband than Joss Whedon.)

Because my relationship with my mother was so significant, and because caring for her was the majority of my existence then, and because so many times she was accusing me of lying when I was telling her the truth, that is why I worried that Complex PTSD could be a possible result for me.

No one was trying to gaslight anyone else. When she didn't believe me, I was telling her the truth. When she was telling me how horrible I was, she was just trying to get home. It felt horrible, and like no amount of time could ever take away that hurt, so I wondered. 

With Tana's story - which is really a more classic case of Complex PTSD - I started to doubt whether that was applicable. I was an adult, so not still forming my personality and patterns. My mother's disconnect from reality was painful, but it was also comprehensible. I might frequently have doubts about whether I was doing the right thing, or doing it well enough, or things like that, but things she said could never make me doubt that I was her daughter, and trying to do right by her, or who was alive or dead or grown or missing.

In retrospect, my recovery period tracks more with recovery from depression and anxiety; pretty straightforward and logical.

If I have any Complex PTSD going on, it is from earlier.

I have read a book on it: Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker, published in 2013.

Honestly, I didn't think it was great. Though he is a therapist, the book is based more on his personal experience. It is not overly technical. If you are wondering if you have Complex PTSD, it might help you figure that out. 

In looking things up for this post, I discovered another book from 1998, and I do intend to read that. I am also still waiting for another key trauma book from the library. Will they arrive before I have finished this blogging section? Will they provide more answers? I'm not sure. It's not that hard to get me to read something.

However, there is a level at which I am not too worried, because I am not sure how much the distinctions matter. For one thing, it is not impossible to have both regular and Complex PTSD. Fortunately, a lot of the same treatments are helpful for both.

I'm not denying that it is helpful to have an idea of what to call your conditions, and to understand their origins. I am a big fan of that. I am saying that you don't need to understand it to seek help; diagnosis is often included in process.

If there are things that you do where it doesn't seem like you are in control and you don't know why, that may be a sign of trauma. If you recognize a harmful pattern on your own and try and correct it but keep failing, it may have deeper roots. 

Those can be reasons to look for a counselor, or to read a book, or to talk to a friend. We start where we are, but we don't have to stay there.

One of the most wonderful things about this is seeing how many different things there are that can help, where it feels like there must be something for everyone, if you can just find the right one for you.

It is harder if you don't feel you deserve to get better, or that it is not possible to get better. 

My biggest message is to have hope.

Childhood's end

I'm skipping around with the order a bit. Yesterday's post focused on my father, and I feel like for balance this is a good time to write about my mother. This will be mainly about something that happened when I was nine, and then next week I will get to some things that happened between ages 3 and 6.

That was a totally different relationship. We had a lot of fun with Mom, and appreciated that she liked our music and our friends and was interested in the things we had to say.

That doesn't mean it was conflict free. Her parenting style focused on the things that needed correction. With my insecurities, I often felt like the only things she cared about were my weight and the messiness of my room. 

I don't know if her being different would have been enough to help me get over that sense of wrongness or not. I do know that my father had a strong influence on all of us about apologizing or acknowledging mistakes, and that limited our ability to get past things sometimes.

Regardless, we mostly got along and enjoyed each others' company, and I was fiercely protective of her.

Does that sound backwards?

In the part about my conception yesterday, I almost didn't add the threat about my father looking elsewhere if my mother did not get pregnant. I mean, there are plenty of things that make him sound like a jerk already; why pile on?

He did end up going elsewhere later, and this became another key point in my development.

It happened when I was nine, More details came later, but my first memory of it was one night when Mom was on the couch crying. I think my younger sisters were in bed, and my older siblings were doing other things, and I can guess where my father was. I only remember the two of us, and being so devastated to see her so sad. I tried crooning a song to her to comfort her, but it was not effective.

Sometimes people talk about the moment their childhood ended. I generally think it is a bad sign if you know exactly.

Maybe if it happens when you are a teenager, like someone looks at you funny for trick-or-treating, and you think "I guess I'm not a kid anymore", that could be a little sad, but still okay. (And teenagers are welcome to trick-or-treat at my house, no judgment.)

Nine was too young.

I know that there are things that Mom didn't handle well about it, but I have a lot of sympathy for that. 

My parents married really young. She was 17 and he was 20, and if it wasn't that unusual back then, by now science has told us that neither of their brains were fully developed. 

Also, being Italian, she came from a different culture, and was far away from her family as this happened.

For the most part, I think she did the best that she could, both in terms of how she tried to handle her relationship with him and in how she tried to raise us.

She did not say anything that night, but certain kinds of pain make me mute too. I don't know what she could have said that would have helped. She eventually did tell us that Dad was having an affair, and that I did not know what that meant, and she did not elaborate. He was spending time with someone else, and it was a hurtful thing. 

Should she have kept it from us? There was so much tension during it, and then there were big changes after it that we couldn't ignore, like him stopping going to church and her getting a night job so she would be less dependent on him, I guess. He gave her all of these reasons that he had strayed, like her cleaning too much and not being creative in her cooking, and maybe concerns about money was a part of that, where her bringing in money was one of the rules so he could love her again.

(Look, if you are confused about why the cheater was the one who got to set the conditions, remember this was forty years ago, that he could never admit he was wrong, and that patriarchy sucks.)

Yes, loving our mother would have been a good thing to do for his children. It just went along with a lot of other stuff.

All of this did two things for me. 

One is that my over-functioning, care-giving personality starts here. The seeds were probably already there, and the lack of value for myself that made it so dangerous was definitely already there, but I consider this the beginning of my chronic need to fix everything and make everyone happy. It has evolved and changed over time, but that wrote the script for a lot of my life.

This is also when I became fiercely protective of my mother, and that also affected many life choices. 

It involved some pain when dementia was something that I could not fix or fight off.

Always somehow wrong

In my church we like to quote that the greatest thing a father can do for his children is love their mother. 

Usually when people take exception to it, it's because they know of a man who had children with a woman who was very hard to love. I know people who have had that problem myself.

I get caught up more on whether the man loves his children, Or himself.

We also say that you can't truly love others unless you love yourself. That isn't quite accurate either, though there are elements of truth to it. It certainly affects how well you love.

My father was never satisfied with any of us. I don't think he was satisfied with himself either, which is its own tragedy, but it was combined with a refusal to ever admit being wrong. This eliminated apologizing and change.

He definitely could have been worse, and I think he has hurt himself more than anyone else. Nonetheless, there was this vague sense going back further than I could ever remember that there was something wrong with me. I was not good enough, and I did not understand why, which made it worse.

So much of who I am comes from that.

This has affected his relationships with all of his children. Reminiscing with my sisters usually ends in "He is such a dick!"

It might have been worse for me, because I was kind of born to fill a gap, and it didn't work.

Not every child in our family was planned, but I was very deliberate. My father told my mother "You WILL get pregnant!" (or he would go elsewhere) and she did. 

That happened a few weeks after both of my father's parents died in a small plane crash. 

In fact, every aunt and uncle who was in a relationship at that time has a child my age. Most of them have names with our grandparents' names in them somewhere, though I don't. On a smaller scale, it was like the baby boom after the war.

That was major trauma for all of them, but it may have been worse for my father because he'd had a fight with them not that long before and was not speaking to them. Well, the fight was more with his father (and his father had indeed been rude). I know his mother was upset about it.

My father did not learn from this. About two years later when one brother died, a dispute about property led to him cutting off ties with his two other brothers. He said that they were the ones who were not speaking to him, which is probably fair; for years they were not in touch with any of their sisters either. However, my father also ended up disowning every child he had over time, and multiple times if they apologized and resumed relations.

The first time he cut me off was pretty big trauma at the time, and I recognized that. Well, probably not right away at least. I mean, there was a level at which I knew it was hard, but there was also some denial where I told myself that this was easier than dealing with him, which also had some truth to it.

It took me a lot longer to figure out that at my base there was this problem where I was always feeling inferior, and somehow wrong.

Not that I would admit to being wrong easily; I did pick that up from him. It seemed like it was the most dangerous thing to do, like that's when other people move in for the kill. The penalties were so high for being wrong, that you could never admit it.

Then, over time you see that it is really obnoxious. Refusing to admit when you are wrong annoys the people who know anyway, pokes at the insecurity of others who may not be sure, and keeps you from learning and growing. Also, not admitting it does not change that you are in fact wrong. I did eventually figure that out.

Over time there were all of these things peeled back -- assumptions about what I was like and how the world worked -- and despite other factors they were largely rooted in my belief in my deficit, but I couldn't identify that until I had been through everything else. 

Getting here was good, but it was not easy.

Trauma

Before I start getting into my individual trauma, I need to deal with my reluctance to identify it as trauma.

Although you can look back historically and see instances of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) before the '70s, it didn't really become a studied and understood diagnosis until then, mostly because of it occurring with veterans of Vietnam.

That has been long enough that most people have kind of an idea of how it works: maybe you were in a life-threatening situation and you might still have flashbacks where it feels like you are reliving the situation and don't control that. That's a simplification, and there are really interesting things that we could go into about the different parts of the brain, and common factors in when it is likely to happen, but that basic idea is pretty well out there in the public.

In the past few years, I became aware of the term Complex PTSD, mostly because of Joss Whedon's divorce and new songs by The Killers. In both cases, the person who was suffering from Complex PTSD was doing so because their trauma was not from a single dangerous incident, but because of prolonged abuse from someone in a close relationship.

So, still oversimplifying, you might get regular PTSD from a rape, but Complex PTSD from repeated childhood sexual abuse.

It becomes messier, because this is someone you love, or are at least supposed to love, and instead of one clearly defined incident there is a continuing history. 

I remember first hearing the term and wondering if that could apply, and then thinking, no, that would be for bad abuse, and not relate to anything I had gone through.

I started changing my thinking about a year ago, when I first went to hear James S. Gordon speak about his book The Transformation. 

His point was that we all have trauma and that we all have to deal with it.

Well, sure, but some people still have it so much worse, right? I mean, any time I post about anything or start talking to people, the reminders are always there about how much worse things could have been. 

It is really easy to have impostor syndrome about your trauma.

I like that understanding of autism has moved more to thinking about a spectrum, but even thinking that it is a point on the line, where all of the points on the line are identical, does not give an accurate understanding. People are individuals.

For some people, the first time they lose a loved one is sad, and they mourn, but they move on with life and love. Some people have a harder time. That probably isn't just because of the death, but because of other relationships or other questions, but they get stuck in their grief, so it may take longer or hit harder, and they may need help to move on. 

That's just one example; we all face loss and hurt, and we can call it trauma. 

Maybe it would be more accurate to only use trauma for the things we haven't moved on from, but we don't always know right away. 

If there are patterns that played out over time instead of a singular event, it will be less obvious that you are caught up in that pattern. It's not a flashback in the sense that we understand it, but it can still take over your reactions.

Here's the thing: my earliest traumas were the ones I identified last. They affected how I saw the world and myself. When other things affected me later I could see those effects, but the earlier things were the foundation for my reactions. Because they were so early, and so entrenched in the background, I didn't even know that other reactions were possible.

If those of you reading learn things about me and feel compassion for me, great, but I have already done that for myself. That is why it is also fine if you come away thinking I have been overly fragile or dramatic.

I will probably get additional insights as I go through and blog about these things that I have already written about in journals and expressive writing sessions and things like that, and that is a great reason for doing it, and I am good.

But, if you find that some things sound familiar, and you can find ways that they make sense, and ways to understand better and release, forgive, heal, then that's even better.

So this post is for people who have trauma but don't feel worthy of admitting it.

Review retrospective: Greatest Guitar Songs

I am trying to order these chronologically, but that is rarely simple. Start and end dates are often far apart, and often my only clues to when something was happening are in the blog.

However, I know exactly when I got the idea to go over Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitar Songs: April 5th, 2012. That was the day Jim Marshall, inventor of the Marshall stack died, and they were playing songs from that list on the radio to honor him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Marshall_(businessman)

https://marshall.com/live-for-music/history/the-story-behind-the-infamous-marshall-stack 

The reason it intrigued me was that was during the time period when I was memorizing My Chemical Romance, and they did have great guitar. The New Wave music I loved in the '80s was a lot more into synthesizer, and the punk rock that I started to love later did have guitars, but often less skillfully used, compensated for by the energy and attitude. 

I was starting to realize what guitars could do.

The list was very disappointing.

https://www.stereogum.com/10114/rolling_stones_100_greatest_guitar_songs_of_all_ti/lists/ 

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2012/04/rolling-stones-100-greatest-guitar.html 

Delving into the comments on that was not so disappointing. 

It took a long time. Based on blog posts, I had finished the original list and decided to go through the comments in April 2012, so that was not that long. I was listening to about ten songs a day, if I recall.

I then posted an update in October, and did not finish until the following August. That had gone from 100 songs to 179 notes of songs, albums, musicians and bands, sometimes not well specified.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2012/10/update-on-my-musical-odyssey.html 

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2013/08/greatest-guitar-songs-trouble-with.html

Let me also point out that I wrote nine full blog posts about the project in August; "The trouble with internet comments" was just the first.

I also created a Spotify playlist, "Guitar Sampler", which tries to build a history, but then crams in my favorite bands at the end, completely legitimately. 

I was introduced to Magazine, Gang of Four, Richard Hell, Wolfmother, and Dinosaur Jr. I gained a greater appreciation of Lindsey Buckingham, David Bowie, and Django Reinhardt. I found some gaps, which I will spend some time on next week.

For this round of songs I wanted to focus on some songs and artists that were previously unknown to me.

Obviously I did already know Run-DMC and David Bowie, but I had not known these songs, and I was glad to find them. They gave me new insights.

I am sure I had heard of Satriani, but I don't think I had heard any of his work, and a song based on comic books? Sweet!

The rest were completely new to me, and pretty good to know.

Daily songs for 1/29/21 through 2/5/21:

“Through the Fire and Flames” by Dragonforce

“Been There All the Time” by Dinosaur Jr.

 “Surfing with the Alien” by Satriani

“Rock Box” by Run-DMC

“Shot By Both Sides” by Magazine

“Chick Magnet” by MXPX

“Jean Genie” by David Bowie

The subtle misogyny of "Smile, Sweetie! You'll look so much prettier."

Saturday night I posted my first week of selfies. 

Like clockwork, a man commented on how I look better when I smile. 

I smacked that down, even though I am confident he meant no harm. My doing so could easily be construed as rude; I mean, it's really a compliment, right? 

I shall now -- for all of the men, not just this one -- explore the issues with that exchange so that there is an internet record that can be used for quick reference on the topic. It will come up again, just as it has happened before.

(I have the strangest urge to start every segment "First of all," but they won't all really be first, so I'm going to fight it.)

There is a lot of gendered socialization that it is easy not to think about. With a little effort you can notice patterns.

If you are not a member of the dominant gender, noticing is significantly easier.

I have noticed over the years that when I disagree with a man, it annoys him a lot more than when a man disagrees with him. Pointing that out is super-offensive.

Once annoyed, if he doesn't really know me so is not constrained by politeness (more often on Twitter), he will make some criticism of my looks, most likely about me being fat. If we have common connections where the rudeness of calling me fat could draw censure (more often on Facebook), he will probably make a dismissive comment about my "little" blog.

I am big, my blog is little. Both are seemingly insults, but also factual. 

My blog serves my purposes, and I am pretty happy with it. I know how to adjust if my goals change.

I have had a harder time being happy with my body, but so much of that has been because of the stigma on how disgusting and wrong fat is. That may be cloaked in concern about health, but that paradigm ignores a lot of other things that are both bad and good for health, focusing on what is considered attractive. Then it comes up more for women, for whom it is important to be attractive for men. 

I have to reject this system; it has caused me nothing but grief. 

I know I look better when I smile. It is worth considering how painful that comment could be for someone who is insecure about her teeth, but we're going to move past that for now to some other questions:

Why does being pretty matter?Why should your opinion on my prettiness matter?

Other things that could make me look prettier include weight loss, cosmetics, better clothes, and being able to afford getting to my hair stylist. (I trimmed my own hair in desperation two days ago, and I bought the clearance box of hair dye to save $3.)

Those all (if even possible) have costs of at least time or money; sometimes both! And yet they are expected of women, even though women get paid less for all labor and are expected to do more of the unpaid labor. Then that's not enough, because we still need to look good. 

I reject that, and there are difficulties with that rejection.  

I am currently looking for a job. My appearance will factor into how others perceive me, how much they want to hire me, and what they will pay me.

That's only one potential area of conflict. Rejecting male expectations sometimes gets me unfriended on Facebook and on Twitter sometimes I have to block. 

(I don't worry about a lot of harassment there, because like my blog my Twitter presence is small, and I escape a lot of notice. There are advantages to that, especially without a lot of resources.)

However, it becomes much more dangerous in the real world. If I get that request for a smile and smack it down at a bus stop, I could end up injured, raped, or dead. No, not all men will do it, but the ones who will are not conveniently labeled. Women  have to guess which is which. They do it all they time.

I can't change that, but I don't owe you a smile.

Here's the funny thing with the last comment: I was smiling in 6 of the 7 pictures (masked in two, but I think you can still tell). Then there was one funny face with gritted teeth. 

(This next week will be mainly funny faces too, but that was already planned; it's not a reaction.)

One of the joys of this round of #365feministselfie (my third) is that I look so much happier. The last time I did it, life was grinding me down and I hated seeing it in my face over and over again. It was a relief when that year ended.

So when I got a similar comment the last time, I was indeed looking sad.

That commenter and I had talked about a lot of things; it might not have been unreasonable for him to message me, "Hey, you look sad. Is there anything I can do?"

Of course, that would be emotional labor; that's for chicks.

In fact, the sadness wasn't anything he could have helped with, really, and he may have known that. When someone is going through a hard time, for something that is physically and emotionally exhausting, hmm, what  could be a helpful thing to say?

"I like it better when you smile."

I am so sorry that with all of the other things I have to do, I have forgotten about pleasing you.

In Kate Manne's Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, she finds (I'm paraphrasing) the essence of misogyny to be the expectation of women being at men's disposal. It's not that every woman serves every man, but she should be providing some service to some man, which definitely includes stroking and stoking the ego. 

I assume this is why when men who have been creepily hitting on a woman find out she is married, they apologize to her husband. Her discomfort doesn't matter, but encroaching on his territory does. As long as she belongs to someone, right?

This probably also explains why a Marketing professor with 344K followers is blaming the Reddit/Gamestop thing on young men not having enough sex.

https://twitter.com/profgalloway/status/1354532507723640835

(A lot of "incels" do get sex, by the way. They just feel that the women they are getting it with are not sufficiently hot.)

There's always a reason it's women's fault.

You may be thinking "It isn't that deep!" but you don't control the depth. That is done by the existing framework. If we accomplish enough structural change to where there is true equality that takes the pressure off of your comments, then we'll see how it feels. Maybe my security will mean I won't mind your comments, and maybe your security will allow you to give better compliments about me as a real person instead of a contestant in a beauty pageant who needs your advice.

I am lucky to be in a place now where I am okay with myself, and I don't have to manage that much danger. Usually my question is not whether it is safe to say something, but whether it is worthwhile.

If I am telling you to do better, it is because I believe that you are capable of doing so.

It's really a compliment.

Genograms

I felt I did the genogram "wrong", but I have to put that in quotes because those terms can be highly subjective. I did benefit from it, and those benefits probably make sense for the activity.

In addition, one of my results feels very important to go into before doing the next section.

I found this activity in The Transformation: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma by James S. Gordon. This link is from his organization, the Center for Mind-Body Medicine:

https://cmbm.org/jordan/strength-family-past-present/

I did mine in two sessions, because I didn't want to do a bunch of graphing that first night - find paper and all of that - but I thought I could at least get down what I knew about the stories and relationships in my journal. I went back and drew all of the names and lines and things later.

The first thing that was striking was how much I knew about so many people whom I have never knew, often from people who didn't know them. There weren't even deliberate attempts to capture the stories, but just things that came out in conversations about other things. 

The example in the book included a woman who needed to end a long marriage to a prestigious man where she was going to face a lot of resistance from family. In doing her genogram she realized that she had an aunt who would support her, and started there for building up her resources.

I don't think I learned a lot about myself or my relationships from this; maybe that knowledge was already there. That is why I say I may have done it wrong.

What I received instead was more about understanding other people. 

Writing in my journal that first night, I suddenly understood the dynamics of the women in my mother's family better. They all had a tendency to worry. I noticed it more with my mother and her oldest sister, but when I mentioned it to my uncles they assured me that they were all that way. 

As I wrote about them, it became clear that was something from their mother, but that it also made perfect sense. From the death of her mother in childbirth when she was five and the effects that had on her birth family, to the loss of two children and some serious illnesses, to having a late-in-life pregnancy during a war (while one of her sisters who had married a Jewish man was hiding from the Nazis), my grandmother knew too well all of the terrible things that could and often did happen. 

That sometimes comes out in stories that are told humorously, like how she would chase owls away from the house with a broom, because if an owl cries near your house it means someone will die. I heard that and thought, Wouldn't chasing the owl make it more likely to hoot? 

(She was born in Italy in 1896 and raised by nuns after her mother died. Her being superstitious is not a shock.)

You don't have to look too far behind the laughter to find the pain, and it doesn't mean her life was only fear, but it was a real thing. Her children could laugh at it, but they also (especially her daughters) picked up some of it, much like I thought I was not a worrier until I realized that it only in comparison to my mother.

The next time, when I did the charting, my feelings centered more on my father's side. I was struck by how strong my great-grandmother had to have been. 

She had to be strong because of my great-grandfather's severe alcoholism, but I saw that in a different light too. The losses that must have fueled it it all become clear, even though none of the information was new. I just saw it differently.

(It also reinforced strong indicators that alcohol and Harris family do not mix, but that had been clear for a while.)

The overall result for all of it was stronger compassion for my family. Everything makes sense for how I turned out, but it makes sense for them too, strengths and weaknesses.

It doesn't mean that there weren't choices, including wrong and hurtful choices, but I could still offer understanding. 

This was important. It worked out well that I had done the genogram before I started the expressive writing, because a lot of anger did come out. That anger was important, and we will spend more time on it, but then it was also important that I could understand and let go.

I wanted to cover that before I start covering my trauma, because as I go into some of these choices and the impact they had on me, there does not need to be any anger on my behalf. I am better now.

It has been a journey.

Expressive Writing

Twenty-eight books have played a part on this, and I still have one on request from the library. 

There were many where I didn't think the book was that great overall, but there was still something that stuck. Then, there will be other people whom that book helped a lot, so it's very individual.

I was mostly not impressed by David Kessler's Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief, but it did have a reference to expressive writing and James W. Pennebaker. That sounded like it was right up my alley. I read Opening Up by Writing It Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain.

Here is one pretty approachable article about the process, but you can find instructions in multiple places:

https://www.journaling.com/articles/expressive-writing-a-tool-for-transformation-with-dr-james-pennebaker-ph-d/

At its most basic level, you have multiple sessions of writing about some trauma in your life. It is free-form, unplanned writing for around 15 or 20 minutes.

In Pennebaker's experiments they had people also try writing about other things, some people talked into a tape recorder instead of writing, and they varied the length. I only remember segments of three consecutive days, but this article mentions four-day periods also. It can be very flexible.

I wanted to experiment a little bit too. My first idea was to see if there was a difference between handwriting and typing on a computer. That made a huge difference in that I can't even complete one fifteen minute session writing by hand. I scrapped that immediately and started fresh the next day.

I said it was very individual.

All of my segments were three consecutive days on the same topic, and then moving on to another topic for another three days the following week. I did that twice for three weeks in a row, but had not initially planned on doing the second round; I just came up with more material.

I did not always start on the same day, but I always kept the days consecutive. I did do both fifteen and twenty minute sessions, and did not notice a lot of difference for that. In some ways the twenty minute ones felt like more pressure, but for someone who worries about not getting everything out it could be liberating. 

I also experimented with different times of day, trying before bedtime (my usual writing time), afternoons, and in the mornings right after breakfast. After breakfast completely stressed me out because of the pressure to do other thing. There was not a big difference between afternoons and nights for me. I am sure it makes a difference to feel like you can have the uninterrupted time, varying based on your schedule.

For each week, I kept the session time, length, and method the same. Theoretically it was also always the same topic, but sometimes things come up.

The extreme adaptability is probably something that is very useful. Also, self-expression itself is quite valuable, and it gets discouraged a lot. 

One of the things that makes me feel best about recommending expressive writing is the relative safety. It's not just that it is something anyone can do on their own, but it also seems less likely to pull up things you are not ready to deal with. 

It's not that nothing comes up. Often toward the end of a session I would find myself writing something that did not seem pertinent to the topic, but there were connections and my subconscious knew it. Still, the writing is pulling from conscious thought of remembered things for limited time periods... it should be pretty gentle.

I was worried that it would not be that helpful for me because I have already written about so many of these things so much, but I wrote about them at the level that I was ready for then, and more deliberately, with a pretty clear idea of what I was going to write at those times.

The obvious question is then whether additional journal writing at this time would have gotten me to the same place, or whether just planning a time and a topic but not the words contributed something different. 

I believe the expressive writing was uniquely helpful. Following its format did give me some unexpected thoughts, and bringing those thoughts out is why I ended up having more to write about two months later.

It is also completely possible that it was a better fit for me because writing is so much a part of whom I am. The simplicity of the technique, though, seems like it should be something that can work well for many people. The results in blood pressure for the participating students by itself is enough of a reason to consider trying it.

Worth a shot.

https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/psychology/faculty/pennebak

Healing preview

I thought I should map out a rough idea of where posts are going for the next few weeks.

A lot of this will be familiar if you have been reading this blog for a long time and have an excellent memory for things you read about someone else's life. The combined unlikelihood of that makes some review necessary.

You may of course remember some things that resonated with you personally, but remembering all the pieces and how the fit together is less likely; you have your own issues. Even for me, I understand how they fit together differently now.

The parts that I have visited pretty regularly are events that happened when I was in first grade, ninth grade, and 11th grade. Normally I think of those in chronological order, but I decided to do a section of expressive writing for each of them, and I did them in reverse. 

I don't know that taking them in that order mattered so much, but it felt like the way to go, and intuition has been a big part of the entire journey... combined with a lot of reading.

The expressive writing (I will go over that term, I promise) first round happened in August of 2020. Another three life events that happened between about 3 and 6 years old took on greater importance, but again, those were things that I had written about before. It wasn't that I didn't know, but I knew them better.

As I write this now, it seems significant that I started doing this again shortly after getting Mom settled into memory care. It seems relevant, but I had been working on my emotional health for a while so it felt like a natural extension of what I was doing. 

That's the thing; there is always more to notice.

Therefore, it should not have been particularly surprising that in October I started another round of expressive writing, this time focusing on a deep depression I went through on my mission, and contributing factors that I had never noticed. 

That was followed by a big life shift in early high school that I did not recognize as a reaction to what happened in 9th grade at the time (but it very clearly was) as well as something pretty critical that happened in second grade. 

Overall, some of the writing took things farther out, and some of it filled in blanks. It turns out everything is connected and super-logical, though largely in a sad way.

This gives us six life event themes, I guess, but also several books as well as one really important technique with the expressive writing. 

I am also going to write about three other techniques. I don't believe a single one of them worked the way they were supposed to, but I nonetheless had valuable experiences with them. 

Here is an important caveat from one of my favorite books, A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis:

“What Richard Selzer, M.D. once wrote of surgery is true of therapy: only human love keeps this from being the act of two madmen.”

If it can be hard to find a therapist who is a good fit, surely there are also risks to becoming your own therapist. 

I cannot swear to what is a good idea for anyone else. I used a cycle of reading and intuition; that's intuition about what to read and what to use. There are techniques I have never tried that could be good, but they haven't felt like priorities. 

I can only relate what my experiences have been. When there were fears or safeguards in place, I will include that information in the posts.

For the record, my counseling referral never came through, and it might not even be that useful. I am not depressed now, and I understand why pretty well.

I still do not rule it out. There are some practices that can't be done on my own and would need a facilitator. There could be unrealized benefits from them. When writing about my 11th grade trauma, I discovered a gap in my memory. Would EMDR bring it out? I don't know. I also don't know if it is important, but I don't rule out that it might be.

That just reinforces my commitment to universal health care with mental health parity. For now, I am working with what I have.

Review retrospective: My Chemical Romance

I could have started this series earlier. One concern holding me back was stress over the inauguration. That deep sigh of relief was much needed.

There was also some personal conflict about My Chemical Romance and reluctance to write about them. I am kind of mad at them now.

I am not sure how mad I am; it could be more the label, maybe, but there's this ambiguity there. 

They really were important to me, though, and current feelings don't erase that.

Surprisingly, I have never officially reviewed them. I have written about them more than any other band. Some links will be included, but all of them would be impossible. 

Being captivated by them and listening to their guitar sounds is why I plunged into the Greatest Guitar songs and comments (the topic of next week's post). I spent hours writing hundreds of pages inspired by their music. They are how I found many other bands. It's also how I found other people as other fans befriended me on Twitter. 

They have been a big deal to me, and it would be dishonest to ignore that.

And they have had many, many songs of the day - including all of these I am sure - but here we go again:

"Welcome to the Black Parade" (2006)

This is how I learned about the band. It was the sound on the phone of someone I needed to call, way back in 2008. It was just two lines of "We'll carry on" but so solid, I had to ask about them. That was what led me to...

"I'm Not Okay (I Promise)" (2004)

I don't know why I didn't get into the band overall then, because at this point none of that music was new and I liked all three albums once I did listen. Still, for a long time it was just the two songs, especially this one. My finding them was actually around December 2008. By January 2009 - unemployed, alienated, and stressed out - I was singing this song all the time. 

It is one of my best karaoke songs. I don't even sing it that well on the first two verses, but by the bridge when I pull the band from my pony tail, bang my head to the beat, and then go through the fast transition, the very quiet "I'm okay... I'm o - " following by the shouting "KAY" and then the race to the end, yeah, then it's a good rendition. And if the head banging leaves me a bit dizzy, that is probably the point in the evening where I relate most to the people around me who have been drinking, because I have not. 

I broke a glass once.

"Sing" (2010)

I didn't listen to it until 2012, and then I was listening to all four albums, plus Frank Iero's previous band, Pencey Prep.

It's possible that I was really brought in more by "Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)" from the same album, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, but "Sing" was the one with the video that inspired all of the writing. 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2012/09/sing.html

There was a lot that went into that writing, including some personal heartache but also very much the murder of Trayvon Martin. As much as those things hurt, the music felt good. 

Even more important, it got me writing again after all the joy in writing and life had been squeezed out of me. 

And it is still out there, even if it was more for me.

https://ficwad.com/story/207019

"Summertime" (off of Danger Days, never released)

This song has a bridge that is hauntingly beautiful. I have literally had dreams where I have asked members of the band what made it so special (and got a very complex chart that my sleeping brain couldn't grasp at all, but I don't think my waking brain would have done any better).

"Bulletproof Heart" (2011)

Also off of Danger Days, I didn't remember it as having an official release, but Wikipedia shows it hitting 18 on the US Alternative charts, so it must have. 

Going along with things I don't understand about music and its effect on me... even though once I got the bass (which I still cannot be said to play) I started focusing on bass lines, for some reason this song (and also Fall Out Boy's "Thnks fr th Mmrs") makes me want to play guitar. Something about it; I don't know why.

"Fake Your Death" (2014)

I understand this song more in terms of Fall Out Boy, because it came out when I was listening to The Youngblood Chronicles and thinking about their hiatus and return. This song hits on some of the down sides to fame. Maybe some of that is more background that I know and hear in the song without it being explicitly there, but it also helped me understand MCR's hiatus better. (No, that's not what I'm mad about.)

I wrote more about that: https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2014/06/look-at-all-this-pain.html

I love the piano in it, but also it is significant that for all of these songs that existed long before I needed them or knew of them, this was their first release where I was an existing fan, and it still came at a good time. 

"Disenchanted" (off of 2006's The Black Parade, never released).

This song is beautiful in its simplicity. It's like it's almost an afterthought, but still deeply evocative. Also there's a guillotine reference, and there have been so many of those lately politically, but it's also mournful. Taking their heads off is not going to help; we're going to have to find a better Way.