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Any frightening event—surgery, breaking my arm, an attack in a dressing room, a deposition for a trial—causes my spirits to rise, a great rush of life flows through my veins, and I start laughing and jabbering.
At any rate, Alina Habba, Esq. asks the question about the “number” of my lovers to shame me. But as I am excessively fond of my lovers, my answers to her question give me several minutes of happiness, indeed, some of the only tolerable moments of the entire deposition.
Do you know why I have never seen a therapist in my life? Because I get over things. Do you know how I get over things? I do not dwell. You know how I do not dwell? I forget it.
As long as painful, unresolved feelings and intolerable meanings persist, they will drive avoidant behaviors. Avoidance contributes significantly to anchoring the posttraumatic condition, essentially freezing it in place while enacting an ongoing price in terms of lost opportunity and freedom in one’s thoughts and behaviors.… Ms. Carroll’s self-blame and her efforts to avoid ever being in a similarly dangerous situation have had far-reaching consequences for her life, most notably in the area of intimate relationships with men.
“I can feel the shut-down. It’s like when shopkeepers pull down the metal grate to secure the store. I can feel it when it happens. It is a physical sensation of closing up shop. And boy, do I close up shop. There is a way that when you are interested in someone, you communicate it [in] a million little physical ways, and when you like them, you pursue them in some way. I haven’t done that since then. I shut it down, shut it all down. I haven’t ‘called a boy’ since Trump. Something really was killed, no doubt about it. Little Jeanie who was so boy crazy her whole life just shut it down.”
____It is a surreal feeling being beat up by a man who is asking me to describe being beat up and assaulted by the man he is beating me up to defend.
MY BRAIN DIET Berries Leafy greens Walnuts Almonds Hard-boiled eggs Broccoli Shredded cabbage Pumpkin seeds Black beans Olive oil
