"Ego State Therapy--I don't understand it." My response to a search query.

Introduction

 

 

Each week, at least, I check my blog's stat page, and in the process, I check the list of words or phrases that have brought people to my blog.  Today I found that somebody had reached my blog by typing "Ego-State Therapy--I don't understand it" into a search engine, and because this particular therapeutic modality has been so essential to my healing, I decided to devote a post to the topic.  If you type "Ego-State Therapy" into the search engine on my Google blog, you will find that I have written about the therapy in many of my posts, but I have never described my journey through the process from start to "finish."  I put "finish" in quotes because I'll never be completely finished with Ego-State Therapy.  I learned in therapy how to use this modality to achieve inner peace and freedom from my PTSD symptoms, and I will continue to do this work with my ego states as long as I live.  My C-PTSD will never be completely "cured," but I will continue to heal for the rest of my life so long as I use the skills and techniques I learned in therapy.  

Listed below are three articles on the topic of Ego-State Therapy that might help you understand the basics.  If you read them before you read the description of my own process, you can see the theory and how the modality works.  My own process differs in some ways from the traditional process, but the principles of my process remain in line with those of the traditional process.  My process has led to healing, and that's what is important to me! 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego-state_therapy  (A brief, to-the-point definition of Ego-State Therapy)

http://www.clinicalsocialwork.com/egostate.html  (A site with lots of helpful articles about Ego-State Therapy.)

http://www.egostatetherapy.com/Ego-State-Therapy/ego-state-therapists/what-is-ego-state-therapy  (A page with links to helpful articles on Ego-State Therapy.)

Finally, I have found Ego-State Therapy to be an excellent preparation for EMDR.  The insights I received during Ego-State Therapy amplified and enhanced the insights that came from my EMDR sessions.  I think of that saying "The whole is composed of more than the sum of its parts."  Ego-State Therapy + EMDR= Healing!  And healing is, indeed, much more than merely "the sum." 

My Own Trip Through Ego-State Therapy:  Background Material

 

For seventy years I had suffered the misery of Complex PTSD symptoms--the nightmares, the anxiety, the dissociative episodes, the derealization and depersonalization, the flashbacks--all the miserable symptoms that made my life so difficult and caused me at times to wish I were dead.  By the time I was five years old, I felt as if there was a full-blown war taking place inside my head, and the war stopped only when I was asleep, at least my conscious awareness of the war stopped.  At that young age, I didn't know that nightmares and horrible dreams could reflect the activity of the unconscious mind.  By the time I was six, I experienced my "Alice in Wonderland" days, the times when the ordinary appeared weirdly different from usual and when I felt myself to be living in a world where I seemed to be the only person who knew I existed.  Like Alice, I often felt myself to be so tiny that I was afraid I would disappear completely. 

 

As a young child, I knew my life was a struggle, but I assumed that everyone struggled as I did.  I didn't know this for a fact because I said nothing to anyone about the abuse I had endured, and I said nothing about what was happening in my mind.  I said nothing because the important adults in my life were also my abusers.  One and the same!  I kept myself to myself, observed the acceptable social behaviors of other children, and did what I needed to do to fit in. 

 

I credit my Sunday School teachers and other welcoming and accepting adults at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church for giving me the nurturing environment I needed to stay afloat and not give up on life.  Looking back, and I am reluctant to admit this, it wasn't faith in God or Jesus or the Holy Ghost that kept me going so much as it was the kind and loving attention I received.  But, then, I was a child, and God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost were abstract concepts that did not mean as much to me as being treated with kindness and respect meant.  My parents were nonbelievers and seldom stepped foot into my church, and for that I was grateful.  In church, I was happy coloring pictures of Jesus holding little children on his lap, singing songs about how Jesus loved me, putting pennies in my mite box for poor people, and learning about martyrs and saints and how I could be a saint, too, if I said  my prayers and obeyed the Ten Commandments.  In church, I learned how to see myself as being a valued child of God, and I learned what now might be classed as "old fashioned" moral values and how to be a good person, something that my parents did not teach me.  What I learned as a child at my church sustained me and gave me courage to survive.

 

As an older child and a young adult, I struggled to cut through the chaos and noises in my head that threatened to block my thinking, and I managed to force myself to ignore the anxiety that threatened to rend the fabric of my inner stability.  Somehow, I kept myself together through the flashbacks and functioned well enough to meet the expectations of my parents and the other people in my environment and graduated from college.  And then I got married.  Then came twenty years of repetition of the abuses I had endured as a child.  Only when I had reached a point where I was no longer able to reassemble the fragments of my mind by myself did I get help.  After six months of therapy, I slowly realized that I was not the cause of every bad thing that happened in the world--and in my home.  My eyes opened, and I caught my husband in the act of molesting our daughter.  I reported him to the police, and then I knew I was free to help my daughter recover her life and also free to make my own life whatever I wanted it to be.  Thus began my journey toward healing.

 

Looking back, I believe the most important piece of advice I could give to anyone with a background of abuse similar to mine is this:  LOOK AT THE ENDING OF YOUR ABUSIVE MARRIAGE AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO SHAPE YOUR LIFE INTO WHAT YOU HAVE ALWAYS DREAMED IT COULD BE!!  That's what I did.  I asked myself, "If I could have any life I wanted, what would that life look like?"  I answered that question. And then I set out to make my dream a reality.  And I succeeded.  I have no regrets. 

 

I made that decision in 1981, shortly after turning my husband in for child sexual abuse and filing for divorce, and then I planned my course.  I knew I needed to include therapy in my life's plan because I had experienced so much benefit from working with my first therapist.  From 1983, when my therapist retired, until 2010, I tried to find the help I needed to bring about peace in my psyche.  I saw no fewer than 15 therapists before I found the person I saw from 2010 until recently.  One person along the way gave me an accurate partial diagnosis of PTSD--C-PTSD was pretty much an unknown at the time--but then relocated to another part of the state before he was able to help me.  Otherwise, I saw a lot of well-intended therapists and a few who, it turned out, were not so well-intended, but I survived and continued seeking a definitive diagnosis and appropriate help.  Without an accurate diagnosis, how, I reasoned, would I find appropriate help?  Good question!  However, in April of 2010, after following up on a referral by a well-known Portland, Oregon, psychiatrist, I found the right person and had my first appointment with her.  Thus began my trek toward significant healing and peace.

 

Next time:  My ego states begin introducing themselves to me, and we commence our work together. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 



 



 



 

 



After EMDR: An Insight That Makes Me Furious!

Jean, Age Four

Part I:  Background and Flashbacks

Have you ever sat down to write and found yourself immobilized, fingers not wanting to tap the keyboard?  This doesn't happen to me very often, but today I find myself wanting desperately to express my thoughts and feelings but having a helluva time doing so!  Why?  It’s the nature of the material, the long term effects of child sex abuse.  It’s a topic that I thought I had made peace with, but obviously I have not, completely.  However, I am going to forge ahead with this post because I believe the information may be useful to others.   A word of caution:  If you have been sexually abused as a child, be cautious.  If you find yourself being triggered by what I have to say, stop!  Please do not continue reading.

During the period when I was three, four, and five years old, I endured violent sexual abuse by a neighbor woman and less physically violent but just as emotionally violent abuse by my parents.  I’ve described this abuse in several of my posts—“Shadow Girl,” “The Day I Stopped Dancing,” and “My Own Comments on The Day I Stopped Dancing.”  Please use the search feature on either blog to locate these titles if you are interested.  I don’t need to repeat the material here. 

First of all, I have recognized and dealt with the memory of being violently sexually abused by the neighbor woman.  The memory of the event that happened back in about 1943 vaulted into my awareness in the form of a flashback some thirty-nine years later, in about 1980 near the end of my stressful marriage.  Initially, the material in my flashback shocked me, for until then I had buried the memory deep, deep, deep.  Little by little, over the next few years I remembered more of the event. 

Then, in about 1994, I had what a therapist called a body memory, but what I believe was really another, more complete, flashback, so complete that it terrified me!  I remembered the neighbor’s kitchen, the appearances of the woman and her adult son who abused me, and the specific details of the abuse.  I felt the hands holding me down and felt the steam of the hot water as it splashed over my body.  It couldn't have been more complete! 

For those who question the authenticity of my memories and who think that my memories may have been suggested by a therapist, let me reassure you:  I was not in a therapist’s office when I had the flashbacks, and I had not discussed my abuse with a therapist prior to my first flashback in 1980.  When I saw my first therapist, I wasn't even aware that I had been abused! In addition, after my first flashback, I not only returned to my hometown to verify the locations of my house and the neighbor’s house but I also questioned my mother as to the physical appearance of the neighbor woman and her son—this without telling my mother why I wanted the information.  The information I received from my inquiries substantiated the information I received during my flashbacks.

In addition to re-living the violent abuse, I have re-experienced the feelings associated with the photo sessions my parents forced me to endure when I was four and five years old.  The difference between these sessions and “normal” photo sessions that kids tolerate in the course of childhood is the fact that I was forced to pose stark naked in front of my parents’ friends and was yelled at when I tried to cover myself.  So during the time I was being terrorized, humiliated, and embarrassed during the nude photography sessions, I was also being groomed by the neighbor woman in preparation for her final, violent abuse event.  Now, that’s a big psychological burden for a little girl to bear!  I bore it without telling anyone at the time, but decades later I found myself no longer capable of keeping the secrets. 

Recently, I have undergone EMDR to release some of the distressing energy surrounding the events.  Now I can remember without having to feel the horrors.  The abuse happened, and now I am able to understand it and some of its effects more clearly.  I can look back and understand, too, why I had bad dreams as a child and why I became claustrophobic in elementary school and frequently threw up when the teacher closed the classroom door (See http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/conversion-disorder/DS00877)  I also can understand my lack of trust for people and my fear of closeness.  My parents forced me to pose nude for their friends, and the next door neighbor woman fed me cookies, fondled me, and then violently sexually abused me.  Why would I trust or want to be close to anyone?

A little girl might escape severe emotional damage by these events if she were helped to process them right after they happened.  This might be the case today.  However, back in the early 1940s, help for traumatized little girls was not readily available.  In my case, too, why would I have trusted my parents enough to have reported the neighbor woman’s behavior?  After all, my parents were also my abusers.  So I was a child caught in a trap of silence, a child who grew up possessing huge and horrible secrets that festered for decades before breaking into my awareness.  And all the time that these secrets festered and spilled their toxins into my subconscious mind, I was living my daily life unaware of them. 

Next—Part II: I Connect the Dots

My Red Balloon: Dealling With A Persistent and Destructive Memory



Please Note:  If you have a history of emotional neglect, reading the following post might be triggering for you.  If you do read this and, as a result, find yourself in distress, please call your therapist or try 1-800-273-8255.  If you are in Oregon, look on this website for a local number: http://www.suicide.org/hotlines/oregon-suicide-hotlines.html. 

Many years ago I was enchanted by an amazing film titled "The Red Balloon."  The main character, a little boy about ten years old, Pascal, befriends a large red helium-filled balloon, and their relationship is the stuff of which the story is made.  Neither boy nor balloon speaks a word, but no words are needed.  For much of the film, the red balloon follows the little boy, dogs his heels, in fact, to the point where the boy is punished for the balloon's bad behavior by adults who do not understand that the balloon has a mind of its own.  Why not punish the balloon?  Nobody, of course, thinks of that!  At the end of the film, a pack of envious schoolmates destroys the beautiful red balloon, but does this act destroy little Pascal?  Certainly not!  A multi-hued cluster of helium-filled balloons from all parts of Paris swoops Pascal up and takes him on a ride high over the city.  And there the tale ends.

So what on earth does the tale of little Pascal and the red balloon have to do with me and with C-PTSD and with my journey through therapy?  Interesting and complex question!  I'll attempt an answer.

Last week, I discovered my own "red balloon."  Although my balloon is not a benevolent balloon,  it certainly is as faithful as little Pascal's.  It has dogged my heels throughout my life and has seemingly had a life of its own for all these decades.  I say this because much of the time I have not been aware of its presence.  But I know now that it has been bobbing along, shadowing me for 74+ years, pursuing me relentlessly and with a vengeance.  How do I know this?  I know because last week it made its presence known big time!  It bumped up against me as I talked to my therapist about my early years, and it remained with me as I dipped deeper into depression after I got home.  Yes, I've given my tenacious balloon a name: essential depression.  I say essential depression to mark that its roots are deep in my psyche and go back in time for as long as I have existed. This depression is different from the fleeting, more superficial and temporary sense of depression that descends upon me when I experience a situational setback or the sort of emotional hurt that comes with everyday human interactions that may not be of major importance but, nevertheless, hurt. 

This essential depression may be familiar to many of you:  It's the sense of hopelessness, helplessness, despair, and total isolation that may come over some of us from time to time--or more often, perhaps.  It's the sense of crawling in the white-hot sands of an immense desert, my knees and hands on fire and my tongue parched but with no oasis in sight.  Ravens are circling above, waiting for me to stop so they can make a meal of my body, plucking the gray matter of my brain first, an appetizer.  If you really want to know about this desert, read Camus' "L'Etranger".  One caution:  If you tend to pick up on depression, you might be better off to NOT read Camus' book! 

As my retired psychologist friend often says:  With awareness comes change.  I believe that I'm beginning to understand the nature of this balloon, and now that I am beginning to understand it, I believe I can pop it so it no longer dogs my heels and bobs up to make me miserable.  

My therapist calls this balloon, this essential depression, a "memory."  When she said that last Monday, I thought, "Wow!  A memory!  If it's a memory, then it's not present reality, and if it's not present reality, then why am I letting it control me?  Why am I letting a mere memory make my life so miserable?  I don't want to suffer because of this memory; I don't need to suffer because of this memory.  So I am going to learn all I can about this memory and its origins, and then, when I understand it, maybe some EMDR sessions will reduce the emotional impact."  Sound simple?  Well, trust me, dealing with this memory is not going to be as simple as popping a helium-filled balloon, but it isn't an impossible task by a long shot.  In fact, I've already begun the task.  I have identified what I believe to be the experiences that generated this memory.

If you type effects of neglect on infants into a search engine, you will find a multitude of articles, some probably more trustworthy than others.  For starters, you might read the Wickipedia article that comes up just to get a basic idea as to the effects of neglect on infants, and from that article you might look for others from more trustworthy sites in order to get more details.  If you do this research, you will find that infants who are deprived of the attention and quality of care that all infants need for proper development are at risk for a lifetime of physical and psychological illnesses.  In fact, even infants in the womb are sensitive to "bad vibes" in their environments and can arrive into this world already emotionally damaged.  We come into this world with the neurological "wiring" set to receive adequate parenting; when parenting is inadequate, when we are chronically neglected and don't receive this parenting, then our wiring "shuts down" much as a computer goes into hibernation mode.  The consequences?  PTSD, according to some researchers.  Well, this is my very simplistic description; I'm a writer and not a scientist.  However, my personal experience exemplifies the theory.  The good news is that this inactive wiring can be reactivated at any point in life, including the senior years, and the wounds left by neglect can be healed, at least partially, given the right environment.  By "right environment," I mean good and effective therapy and a good, healthy, and effective emotional life situation.

All my life I have known that I was not supposed to have been born.  I remember thinking when I was a very little girl that I was here by default--God had intended to kill me at birth but had been distracted and simply had not gotten around to doing the deed.  But he would remember, and one day when I least expected it, he would do the deed, and I would be dead.  That thought, like the red balloon, followed me around all day and caused me to be anxious and jumpy.  My kindergarten teacher noted on a report card that "Jean seems very nervous," but she, not knowing anything of my inner life, attributed the nervousness to a growth spurt.  My parents didn't show any interest in ferreting out the cause of my nervousness.  They certainly didn't ask me!  I could have told them, but they didn't ask.  Of course, the sexual abuses I endured added to my nervous behavior, but I did not tell, and my parents did not ask.  The fact is that my mother seldom engaged me in a human-to-human conversation, and my father never spoke to me directly except to yell at me in anger when I was doing something that displeased him.  So the opportunity to tell never arose.

One day, at age eleven, when I had nothing else to do and was digging around in my parents' bookshelves, I discovered and read the manual--the "cookbook"!--that my mother had used as a guide to parenting.  This manual was published by the U.S.D.A. in the 1930s and distributed to expectant mothers.  My mother, I can imagine, regarded it as a gift from heaven.  She had been an only child and was totally clueless regarding infant care, so she read and followed the guide to the letter.  I can only imagine she believed that by following the rules of parenting outlined in this book, she would produce a "perfect child."  It was a matter of "plugging it in, turning the crank, and out would come a perfect product." 

 In order to get this product, parents were admonished to leave the baby alone--feed it, clean it, change it, and if it cried before the time for the next feeding and changing, don't touch it!  Yes, babies were mentioned as "it," as if they were little "things," objects, and not relational human beings.  Touching, according to the manual, spoils children and makes them little tyrants who think they are boss of the household.  Babies need the experience of asking for attention and not getting it, the experience of needing and wanting connection with another human being and discovering instead that there are no other human beings and there are no connections.  There is only isolation and the misery that goes with it.  That, at any rate, is what the cookbook/child care manual in my parents' bookcase advocated. 

My mother, having no sense of empathy and no ability to use any maternal instincts and common sense she may--or may not--have had, followed the book to the letter and even passed the wisdom on to other young mothers in later years when they came to our house for coffee and "klatsching."  Of course, what we know now is that the government-issued booklet advocated child neglect, purely and simply.  And God knows how many babies were damaged and now as senior adults suffer PTSD or C-PTSD because their parents followed the wise words in this booklet.  At age eleven, though, I knew that the "wisdom" in this book was toxic, and I tucked the information into a file in my brain to recall at some future date.  I'm glad I did that at age eleven because now that information is helping me unlock the doors to my healing.

The information I've given above supports the fact that as an infant, I experienced neglect.  I also know that for the first month of my life I lived in the hospital nursery--not a place where an infant receives the nurturing of loving caregivers.  My mother developed a kidney disease when she was pregnant with me, and since there was nobody at home during the day, my parents boarded me at the hospital for the sum of $1.00 per day.  For about a month I lived in a white metal hospital crib and was fed, changed, and cleaned every four hours.  Possibly the various shifts of nurses visited me and cooed over me, but I don't know that for a fact.  I was an attractive baby, so maybe they did.  But maybe not. 

Jean, Almost Age One



When my parents finally took me home, my mother was still recovering from giving birth and the kidney problem, so I can imagine that she did not have much of herself to give to me.  But, then, she didn't seem to have much to give me at any time, as I recall.  I remember that at some point in my eighth year I became aware of what seemed a fundamental truth in my life:  I was on one side, and everyone else in the world was on the other side.  On the side of what?  I wasn't sure, but I did know that if I was to get through my life, I could not expect any help.  Nor did I deserve any help.  Obviously--to me, at any rate--I was essentially worthless, so I had no right to ask for help or to expect any help.  So I decided I needed to be as self-sufficient as possible in order to avoid the certain pain of rejection that would come if I asked anyone for help of any kind.  Because I was a child and thought as a child thinks, the notion that my parents might have been worthless as parents did not enter my head. 

And then one day when I was about forty, my mother's words inflated this balloon I've named essential depression to the point of bursting.  The balloon didn't burst, but it came close.  At one point, as my mother and I were engaged in a discussion regarding the condition of the house my family and I owned, my mother said, apropos of nothing, "You were supposed to have been aborted, but I didn't go through with it because I was afraid I'd die."  She did NOT say, ". . .because I wanted you."  She said, ". . . because I was afraid I'd die."  I was stunned!  After a long pause, however, I asked her why she told me that.  Her response was, "I just thought you should know."  I remembered that response, and a year later I asked her the question again.  Again, she said, "Oh, I just thought you should know."  She's dead now, and I'll never know why she thought I should know, but whatever reason she would give me now doesn't matter. 

I believe I know the reason:  My mother had no sense of empathy, or if she did, she completely ignored whatever she had when it came to me.   Why else would she have repeatedly said to me when I was a pre-teen, "Jeanie, you are built like a brick toilet"?  Why else would she have said to me when I was a teenager, "Jeanie, you have such a pretty face.  It's too bad you are so fat"? Why else would she have said to me when I told her I was getting married, "My friends all believe you are pregnant and have to get married"?  Why else would she have said to me when I told her I had been accepted into a graduate program at one of the state universities, "That will be a waste of money.  Look at how poorly you did when you were an undergraduate"?  I didn't tell her that I had done so poorly because I had tried to flunk out.  After all, I had not chosen to attend college after I graduated from high school--I wanted to work for a year.  But my parents forced me to go to school.  In my still-adolescent mind, I reasoned that if I flunked out of college, they would see that I was right and they were wrong.  However, I failed to fail. I failed to fail, and in failing to fail, I failed myself.  That failure added a few inches to the girth of my red balloon! 

Well, the facts are in, and the data point to one major piece in the puzzle of my life:  I was not wanted, and my parents were not happy to see me. Even before I was born, my mother rejected me emotionally.  After I was born, of course, I experienced further neglect.  And what is the relationship between this basic neglect and parental refusal to relate to me as a human being and this red balloon that has dogged me all my life?  My red balloon has been filled not with helium but with the devastating and excruciatingly painful sense of isolation and loneliness that a baby experiences when she cries and nobody comes.  Nobody comes to comfort and soothe the baby and to reassure her that, yes, she is loved and cherished.  Nobody comes to tell her she is valuable and worthy of attention.  Nobody comes to smile at her and play with her and enjoy her laugh.  Nobody.  Her despair inflates the balloon, and the balloon grows larger as the little girl grows older.  It dogs her heels until she considers ending her young life just to separate herself from that balloon.  But she doesn't end her life.  She just keeps putting one foot in front of the other and does her best to raise her children, be a wife, and earn an income. 

Finally, when she is in her early forties, the balloon swells to the point where the woman fears for her life.  The balloon engulfs her, threatens to cut off her air supply.  Does she give in, or does she continue to struggle, continue to put one foot in front of the other?  Desperate and thinking about her children, the woman asks for help.  And to her complete amazement and joy, her cry is heard and somebody comes.  At long last, somebody comes!  And thus begins this woman's journey on the road to healing. 

If you have been following my blog, you know the story from this point.  I’m not quite “there” yet, but I’m getting there.  And now that I am aware of my red balloon, the roots of my essential depression, I’m going to work at deflating it, rendering it powerless.  Doing this will be, I believe, a giant step in my journey toward healing.  “With awareness comes change,” and with change can come healing.





Jean, Age Two

Jean, Age Four

Jean, Age Nine

 

Jean Today, Age 74

To Dance Without Touching: The Roots of C-PTSD

Preface

 

I wrote the following essay for a memoir group to which I belong.  It describes my relationship with my mother and also gives a bit of insight into the background of this relationship--why, perhaps, my mother was the way she was toward me.  Since Complex PTSD often begins with the mother-child relationship, I am publishing this essay on my blog so that you, my readers, may catch glimpses of the beginnings of Complex PTSD. 

 

Infants, according to what I have read, are wired to be cherished, lovingly touched, and soothed by their mothers.  Babies are wired to see themselves reflected in the loving mirrors of their mothers' faces.  If this does not happen, the brain of a baby must compensate somehow and adapt to an unnatural situation.  In this adaptation lie the beginnings of Complex PTSD, and the baby is set upon a lifetime path of unnatural adaptations, adaptations that can make the baby/child/adult vulnerable to further abuse as he or she journeys through life.  If the person awakens or recognizes this situation and then gets effective help, he or she can do the necessary work to change the maladaptive "wiring" and find a degree of happiness, peace, and understanding. 

 

At my age, I do not imagine that I will "cure" my C-PTSD.  In fact, I doubt that an adult ever "cures" their C-PTSD completely.  I do, however, expect to heal myself to a degree where my life is more enjoyable.  That is happening, in fact.  Namaste . . .

 

 

My Mother, Jean

Me, Jeanie, Age 4

My Father, Robert
 

 

 



On Presidents’ Day, 1995, my mother died.  The circumstances of her death were ordinary, unlike the relationship we had shared.  She died in a nursing home, specifically Oddfellows Home in Walla Walla, Washington, after having suffered her final massive stroke a week earlier.  Even in her coma, she fought her death, and she let go of her struggle only after I whispered over and over, “The boys will never get their hands on your house.  It’s been quit-claimed to Robert, your grandson.”  The “boys” were the sons of her second husband, and during her last years, her biggest fear was that they would inherit the house she took into her marriage to their father. It seemed that after she was convinced that her house was inaccessible to them, she felt free to leave her life, and she died.   

Tuesday, the day after her death was a workday for me.  Her body had been taken to the local funeral home for cremation, and there was nothing more I could do, so I went to work as usual, never mentioning my mother’s death to my colleagues. I saw no reason to tell anyone.  A few days later, I took possession of her ashes, planned a future memorial service, and went about my life as usual.  My mother’s death had been a struggle for her but not for me.  Why not?  I had never really known my mother.  We had danced through our eighteen-year mother-daughter relationship without touching, and after I left home for college, prospects for contact were even more remote.  As my  mother had admitted to me one day, she had not wanted me, and even if she had wanted  me, I would not have been the daughter she wanted.  She admitted this to me when I was an adult; I had sensed it from the day I was born.  But who was this woman, this person who had not wanted me?  I will share with you what little I know. 

My mother was born Jean Peterson in Omaha, Nebraska, on June 14^th, 1913.  Her mother was Margaret Fairgrieve, daughter of Alexander Fairgrieve, a Scotsman, coal miner, and politician from Red Lodge, Montana.  Her father was a used car salesman, surname Peterson, from Omaha.  According to my mother’s cousin, my mother was born “outside the blankets,” a fact that may have profoundly clouded the relationship between her and her mother, although I can only speculate on that possibility.  However, since her mother had been “mothered” by cloistered nuns in the convent school in Helena, Montana, where she had been sent after her birth mother died, I can only assume that her mother knew as little about being a mother as my mother did.  From what very little my mother had told me about her childhood, this assumption may well be accurate. 

When my mother was a year or so old, Margaret Fairgrieve married Robert Murray, a Scottish coal-miner from Wyoming, and the family moved from Red Lodge to Tono, Washington, a tiny coal-mining settlement near Centralia, Washington.  Robert Murray never did adopt my mother, but he loved her dearly.  How do I know that?  I remember him dimly, and what I remember is that he loved my mother as a father loves a cherished daughter.  I remember his bit of a brogue, his joking and teasing, his good-natured hugs, and his teary good-byes.  And I remember that he loved me.  When I look back on my early years, I know that he loved me.  When he and I danced, we touched.  When I was three, he took my little hand in his rough coal-miner hand, and we walked to the tobacco shop to visit his cronies and to show them how cute I was.  He stood me on a table, and we sang songs from the old country.  The other men clapped, and my grandfather was proud of me.  Face beaming, he fed me candy, warning me not to tell my mother and sealing the deal with a wink and a smile.  I never told.  I just knew that if he loved me that much, he loved my mother, too.  But my mother never understood why he didn’t adopt her and make her truly his daughter.  She never understood.  Nor did I. 

My mother left Tono when she was sixteen and entered the teachers’ college in Bellingham, Washington.  She graduated with her teaching credentials.  At some point between graduating and moving to Longview to take her first teaching position, she met my father, Robert Cox, and married him.  He was what we would call now “a handsome stud” with his black curly hair, sensual facial features, and athletic body.  What neither of them knew, of course, was that beneath his black curls lurked a mental illness yet to unleash itself.  At the time of their marriage, the problem manifested itself as moodiness and detachment, two characteristics that might even have served to make him more attractive to women.  Tall, dark, handsome, and a bit distant.  Throw in “brilliant,” and you have a real hunk.  Combine that with my mother’s beauty, flirtatious behavior, and narcissism and you have the makings of a psychological train wreck to come at some point in the future.  

In the early years of their marriage, then, I believe that my mother became aware at some level of consciousness that if she was going to have the life of her dreams with my father, she was going to need to do a whole lot of adapting—either she would have to adapt to him and his behavior or she would have to abandon the relationship, something that was not acceptable in the late 1930s.  Above all, my mother was concerned with how she looked to others, and divorce, however legitimate the grounds, would not make her look good!  

Considering the above, then, my mother had her hands full without the additional burden of a child.  Thus, when she found herself pregnant and being pressed by my father to abort the fetus—that being me—she agonized over the matter of getting the abortion and possibly dying as a result or giving birth and raising a child she did not want.  She told me that she chose what she considered the less perilous of the two paths, the path less apt to physically damage her.  She could not have known that the path she chose would lead to collateral damages which she could not have imagined and would never have comprehended if she had been able to imagine them. 

I mentioned my mother’s “life of her dreams.”  My mother’s dream was to leave the coal-miner culture behind her and embrace a more elegant, certainly a cleaner, life of the sort enjoyed by the middle-class American women she saw in the films and the Life magazine articles.  More than anything, she wanted to fit into this dream culture, and she wanted to be admired and accepted by the people encompassed by it.  Despite my father, she managed to accomplish her goal.  By applying principles of her inborn Scottish thriftiness and common sense, she managed to take us from an attic studio apartment to a decent one-bedroom apartment to the four-bedroom house in the better section of Longview, the house from which I launched myself at age eighteen.  There were apartments and houses in between, and each was a bit better than the previous.  By the time I left home, she had arrived at the “life of her dreams.” 

By the time I was about ready to launch, however, I could see that her constant adaptation to my father’s moods, violent tantrums, and other outward manifestations of his inward mental torment had taken a toll on her behavior and stability.  She and he had turned to alcohol as a pacifier and comforter.   

And then one warm day in the summer of 1956 there came the great train wreck.  My father came home in the middle of the week from his summer job as a forest ranger at Spirit Lake and announced to my mother that he had caught himself standing behind a co-worker with his axe raised, about to bring the axe down on the man’s head.  Instead, he got into his car and headed for Portland where he found a psychiatrist and set himself up for long-needed psychiatric treatment.  As the months passed, he changed and she didn’t.  His changes, in fact, threw my mother’s concept of their relationship all off kilter, and she no longer knew how to adapt to him.  The relationship she thought they had was not the relationship they did have—all those adaptations and sacrifices she had made no longer applied to this new reality, and she didn’t know what to do.   

My father died young, at age fifty-two, leaving my mother a widow in her late forties.  For a while, she was disoriented.  For ten years she remained single, and then one year, after taking a cruise aboard a freighter, she married the ship’s captain.  They had a good life for about twenty years.  She was beautiful and smart, and he adored her.  He had two sons by his previous marriage, one son being a preacher and the other being a dope peddler.  Luckily, the two sons lived far away in California and were not often present to spoil my mother’s new life.  When their father died, the sons made noises of wanting to inherit her house when she died.  They wanted their half, despite the fact that my mother owned the house going into the marriage with their dad.  My mother did her legal best to make sure they would never get their hands on her house, but the fear of this kept her in a state of constant anxiety.  As I said, my assurance that the boys were out of the picture enabled her to let go, finally.   

For various reasons, then, the mother-daughter dance in my life was a dance in which my mother and I never touched.  We never connected.  When I looked into her eyes, I never saw that special look of love.  When she read to me and I tried to lean my head on her chest, she stiffened.  I learned early that touching was not permitted.  Listening and obeying, yes, but not touching.  My school years passed, and the dance did not change.  I became a wife, and her “My friends all believe you have to get married” reminded me of the no-touching rule.  When I told her, at the end of my twenty-year marriage, why I had to report my husband to the police, her “Well, she must have seduced him” was the axe that severed any hope I had for connection with her.  There had never been a connection and there never would be a connection.  Finally, her words sank in. 

Toward the end of my mother’s life, she had numerous strokes.  Family friends contacted me in Walla Walla where I was working.  They were alarmed that the women coming in to do my mother’s housework were stealing her checks and helping themselves to her money.  I knew something had to be done about this, so my son and I transported my mother to Walla Walla.  For a few months she lived in my basement apartment while I attempted to find a good nursing home accommodation for her.  I knew she needed more help than the women who came when I was at work could give her, and I was struggling to hold down a fulltime teaching job and take care of her on the weekends, an arrangement which was putting too much stress on me.  When a room opened up at the Oddfellows facility, then, I was happy.  

My mother enjoyed her corner room there where she could look out on the flowers and take walks in the garden when she chose.  I also arranged for one of her former caregivers to take her for drives in the country when the weather was nice.  On Saturdays I reserved one of the small senior buses and took her to the mall where she could eat pizza, smoke, and watch people, an occupation which she loved.  During her final few months, my  mother had a good life.   

She had her final stroke when she and I were enjoying a Valentine’s Day lunch at the complex where I lived.  The ambulance took her to the hospital where she lapsed into a coma.  After a day of this, she went back to the nursing home to die.  And our dance was over.  The music stopped, the lights dimmed, the people filed out the door, and that was it, silence.  

*    *     * 

Epilogue 

In the days following that Presidents’ Day, I tried to sort my feelings.  How did I really feel about my mother’s death?  “Relief” was the word that rose to my awareness.  I felt a surge of relief.  No more put-downs, no more criticism, no more anxiety in anticipation of a visit to her.  But “relief”?  Should I feel relief at my mother’s death?  Did other women feel relief when their mothers died?  Am I a monster, a heartless monster that I should feel relief?   

My mother died in 1995.  When I think back on the day she died and when I reflect on my feelings, I still feel relief, but I also feel a sense of peace because I know I did everything I could to make her last months as good as possible for her.  She loved walking in the garden outside her nursing home room, she enjoyed the trips into the countryside, and she looked forward to our Saturday trips to the mall so she could smoke, eat pizza, and watch people.  I was able to give her those pleasures, and I have no regrets, for as I said, I did the best I could for her.  As far as I’m concerned, the score is even.  And I’m still relieved.  I can say that now without guilt. 

For Crying Out Loud!

Today I looked at my blog stats and found that somebody had typed "Complex PTSD and I don't cry in front . . . "  as a search term.  I can only imagine that if the term had been completed on my stats page, it might have said, ". . . I don't cry in front of anyone."  I'd like to address this term as best I can.  It's important!

Anyone who has been through the long-term abuses that underlie Complex PTSD has plenty to cry about!  The problem is that a lot of us who suffer from the disorder were taught not to cry.  And for many of us, the training began when we were babies and toddlers.  Is it any wonder that we can't cry now?  We learned our lesson so well!

For those of us who had authoritarian parents of the Hitler era, the 1930s and 1940s, teaching the child not to cry or show other natural emotions was a normal part of parenting.  Those parents had generally been taught not to cry or to show anger, so it was natural that the children of those parents be taught the same lessons. 

When I was about eleven I was going through my mother's cedar chest where she stored a lot of belongings that she no longer used but could not bear to throw away--baby clothes, keepsakes from loved ones who had died, locks of hair from long-dead relatives, and so forth.  Among these relics I found a "how to" manual on child raising published by the U.S. government in the late 1930s.  I remember being impressed by a photo of a little girl with a splint on her arm.  Did she have a broken arm?  No, but she sucked her thumb!  The splint was suggested to prevent her from reaching her mouth with her thumb. 

Among other mandates to parents, the book advised parents of the necessity for breaking the child's will and letting the baby or child know that the parents are the boss.  Parents were told to let the baby cry between feedings and to never, ever pick the baby up until it was time to feed it.  Picking up a baby between feedings, according to the booklet, spoiled the baby and let him or her rule the roost.  Thus, no matter why the baby cried, be it from gas pains or from some other discomfort, the baby was doomed to suffer for the entire four hours between feedings.  Most babies of these authoritarian parents probably learned that no matter how badly they hurt, crying was not going to bring comfort. 

Later, after the baby grew to be a toddler, the no-crying rule was actively reinforced.  Have you ever heard a parent shout, "Shut up or I'll give you something that will really make you cry!"?  That message would be enough to intimidate most small children, especially those who had continued crying and had been beaten as a result.  My parents were a bit more "civilized."  Rather than beat me for crying, they jeered at me and laughed.  Then they told me to go get a milk bottle and fill it with my tears.  By the time I was five, I no longer cried. 

Oh, I did forget my lesson once.  When I was about 23, I cried at my dad's funeral.  My mother poked me in the side and whispered, "Jeanie, stop crying.  You're making a spectacle of yourself."  Neither she nor my brother cried.  I certainly flunked that test!  But for the most part, I remembered my lesson.  I didn't cry at age four when I was forced to pose nude for my parents' friends, nor did I cry at age five when the neighbor woman sexually abused me, nor did I cry when boys caught me on the way home from school and shoved sticks up me, nor did I cry as a result of being sexually assaulted on a regular basis by my former husband during my long marriage.  So, overall, I'd say the lesson my parents taught me "stuck." 

To the person who entered the search term "Complex PTSD and I don't cry in front . . ., " then, all I can say is that I understand the pain and frustration underlying your search.  You are not alone.  Plenty of us who have C-PTSD are unable to cry.  Crying is a normal and natural response to pain.  How can we unlearn the lessons we were taught and learned so well?  I'm not really sure; however, I suspect that those of us who are healing from C-PTSD will be able to cry when the time comes.  At least, that's what I believe.  When will the time come?  I don't know.  I just trust that it will come. 

Here's a Scottish saying that helps me stay on the path: The tree doesn't always fall at the first stroke. Remembering this saying and the other bits of Scottish wisdom I have accumulated helps me continue putting one foot in front of the other and keeps me truckin' along.  May it also help you!   Peace . . .  

Flashbacks--Decades Later

Today, January 30th, 2013, when I checked my stats, I discovered that somebody had found my site by typing "Complex PTSD flashbacks decades later . . . "  I would like to address this search term because I can imagine that the person who typed it must have been in some distress.   Unfortunately, I am not educated in the technical or scientific aspects of neurology related to flashbacks or trauma energy.  I can, however, share my own experience related to the search term in hopes of alleviating some of the anxiety that the searcher may have been experiencing when he or she did the Internet search.

Flashbacks related to old trauma experiences can wreak internal havoc and cause a person who may be living a fairly ordinary life to question her sanity.  That's what happened to me one day late in 2009.  That flashback, in fact, motivated me to find my present therapist and do some healing.  No way did I want to risk continuing to have flashbacks like that one!  So I was desperate.

The day began as an ordinary autumn day in Portland, Oregon.  I had taken public transportation, including the local above-ground light rail system, to my appointment at The Grotto, a Roman Catholic facility that provides spiritual support for people who need or want it.  I had met with a spiritual director who also had credentials as a social worker.  Although I had been a lifelong Episcopalian, I had recently converted to Catholicism and had a lot of questions regarding the Church. 

During my session with the spiritual director this time, for some reason she pounded me with questions, and by the time I walked out the door, I felt spacy.  However, I managed to find my way back to the light rail station and caught my train heading for downtown Portland where I would catch my bus.  I didn't understand the reason for the spacy feeling, but I wrote the feeling off as low blood sugar, since I had not eaten for six hours.

As I sat on the train, however, the spacy feeling intensified, and suddenly I was nine years old and back in the kitchen of my childhood.  I must have done something I should not have done because my father, in a rage, was roaring at me.  I was on the floor, and he was towering over me, roaring.  And then he did the unspeakable: In order to drive home his rage at me, he picked my favorite cat up by the tail and flung her against the kitchen wall. 

As I sat on the train hurtling into town, I tried to claw my way from the past into the present, but I couldn't.  I remained age nine, lying on the kitchen floor, shutting my eyes and trying to cover my ears so as to block out the cries of my cat and the thud of her body on the kitchen wall as my father flung her.  Gradually, the flashback faded, and I looked around me to see if anyone near me had noticed what had happened.  Nobody had. 

When I got home, I lay down and reviewed the experience.  I was about 70 years old.  Why had my mind locked itself into an experience I'd had at age nine?  I was able to understand that I'd had a flashback.  I'd read about flashbacks and had even experienced flashbacks at times when I was under extreme stress during my twenty-year abusive marriage.  But why today?  And why that particular flashback? 

To this day, I cannot explain to myself why, exactly, I had that particular flashback.  However, my guess is that my flashback was triggered by the manner in which the spiritual director had questioned me.  She pounded her questions at me, unrelentingly, so it seemed to me.  I had felt frightened and powerless under her questioning, yet I continued to reply, which caused her to continue her questioning.  If I had asked her to stop, she would have stopped, but I was too terrified to ask--just as at age nine I had been too terrified to ask my father to stop his raging and stop abusing my cat. 

I did not return to The Grotto for spiritual direction.  Instead, I found a therapist and began unraveling the tightly-woven tapestry of C-PTSD.  I've come a long way in my journey of healing, a journey inspired by that flashback I had at age 70 that was based upon a traumatic event that occurred in the 1940s. 

Thus, if you are experiencing flashbacks arising from traumatic events of your distant past, your mind may be telling you that it's time to begin to heal.  Listen to your mind, and heed its message.  Find a qualified trauma therapist that you are comfortable with and begin to heal.  Based upon my own healing experience, I can assure you that the journey is worth the effort. 

Jean, Age 9

Parental Alcoholism, Parental Mental Illness, and Shame: Three Threads In the Tightly-Woven Tapestry of Complex PTSD



My Father

After my father’s memorial service in August of 1962, somebody, a friend of my father, I believe, let slip that my father had been an alcoholic.  “What a pity that such a brilliant man was an alcoholic.  He was simply too sensitive for this world of ours.”  Those were the words.  I was too upset to remember who the person was, and that information doesn’t really matter, but I remembered the words and have thought about them over the past five decades.

Now that I have more knowledge of alcoholism, mental illness, using alcohol to self-medicate, and the accompanying behavioral quirks of both alcoholism and my father’s mental illness, I can look with more understanding and compassion on the members of my nuclear family—and on myself.  Compassion and understanding, however, do not erase the damages, the C-PTSD symptoms, resulting from living with a parent who has an untreated mental illness and who self-medicates with alcohol.  At age 73, I'm still working at the task of undoing the damage done, in part, by my father's behavior.

Parental Alcoholism:  One Thread of the Tapestry

I have heard others talk about being raised by alcoholics.  I have listened to friends talk about the knock-down, drag-out fights, the violence, the yelling and screaming, the abuse, and all the craziness present in many homes where parents are alcoholics.  My childhood home, however, was not like this.  My childhood home was quiet, too quiet.  My parents were, evidently, “quiet, functional alcoholics.”  They quietly did their drinking, went to work, came home, and went through the motions of parenting. Each of us came and went individually and unattached to one another.  Our house was a hotel—except that the people living there were blood relations and not strangers.  But the normal interpersonal family attachments were simply not there!  My parents were wed to their bottles of Jim Beam but not to each other.  My brother and I were their responsibilities but not their children.  They took care of responsibilities, but they loved and were attached to their cigarettes and their booze.  If they felt loving attachment to my brother and me, we didn’t know it.

Despite his outstanding performance as a teacher and his other accomplishments, my father was a shy person who avoided interaction with other people, including his family, when he was not required to be “on stage” in the classroom.  He spent a lot of time holed up in the bedroom grading papers when I was very young; later, when we lived in houses with basements, he holed up in the basement where he built his ham radio stations.  In a recent telephone conversation with my brother, my brother revealed to me that our father had bottles of alcohol stashed in the basement where he spent so much time, a piece of information I did not have—one more piece I can use as I work to complete the puzzle of my own past and trace the roots of my C-PTSD.

As I was about to graduate from high school, I realized that my father’s “sick headaches” that kept him home from work more and more often appeared to be related to the number of drinks he had.  And then one hot summer day when I was in high school, my father, who had been working at Mt. St. Helens as a park ranger and was usually gone all week, came home in the middle of the week.  He revealed to my mother that he had caught himself standing behind a co-worker, axe raised, ready to bring the blade down on the co-worker’s head.  He told her that he was going to Portland to find a psychiatrist and get help.  And that is exactly what he did.

Effects of Parental Mental Illness: Another Strand of the C-PTSD Tapestry

When I was a child, my father seldom talked directly to me unless I had done something to make him angry.  Then he yelled at me. Until I was about ten years old, I thought that mothers talked to their children and fathers did not.  Only when I was I was about ten or eleven and I began to babysit in our neighborhood and observed fathers speaking lovingly and directly to their children did I realize that my perception of fathers was skewed: Many fathers actually enjoyed direct conversations with their children!  What a revelation!  My father required my brother and me to read at the dinner table, a requirement meant to prevent any conversation! 

At the time, I didn’t understand why my father never spoke directly to me or carried on what might be a normal conversation with me, and my speculation on this matter led me to make some very erroneous and damaging assumptions concerning my worth as a human being.  These assumptions contributed to my deep sense of shame and feeling of being invisible and totally worthless as a human being.

What I did not know when I was a child was that my father suffered from a mental illness that impaired his ability to make and sustain close relationships with other human beings, including his own children.  His diagnosis was “Borderline with schizoid tendencies,” a diagnosis that described his behavior accurately, especially in the area of relationships.* I learned this when I was in my early forties, and now that I know more about his illness, I understand and have forgiven his behavior toward me.  Forgiving him has not, however, taken away the marks his behavior left upon me.  Erasing those marks is part of my present work in therapy. *(See the Mayo Clinic website on the Internet for a list of symptoms of borderline and schizoid personality disorders.)

After my father died in August of 1962, I grieved not for the loss of what had been but for the loss of what might have been.  Now, however, in the year 2011, when I think of my father, I remember his courage in recognizing his demons, in seeking help, and in using that help to change his life.  I am inspired by his example at a time when I am working hard in therapy to heal the wounds of my own past. 

Shame: A Third Thread In the Tapestry of Complex PTSD

If you read my essay on shame (See “Of Shame and Snowballs” at http://relievingptsdsymptoms.wordpress.com) and its contribution to C-PTSD, you know that shame is often a component of C-PTSD, and shame usually originates in childhood.  Although my father was probably oblivious to the effect of his behavior on me, his failure to interact with me was a contributing factor to my shame.  I lived in the same house as this male adult who was reported to be my father, but because this person seldom interacted with me or addressed me directly, I doubted my own existence.  Was I really there?  If I existed, why didn’t this man talk to me and interact with me as other fathers talked to and interacted with their children?  Was I so inferior and so flawed that he regarded me as not being worth his time? 

The only way I could explain my father’s attitude toward me was to conclude that there was something wrong with me, something that made me unworthy of being his daughter, but try as I might, I couldn’t figure out what that something was.  Add together the shame I felt as a failed daughter to my father and the shame I had long felt as a failed daughter to my mother, and the sum, the result, was a burden of shame heavy enough to sink a battleship.  Later, when I was a young adult and in college and tried to commit suicide, the shame did almost sink me. 

Now, in my early seventies, I am trying to undo the tightly woven tapestry of Complex PTSD, tease apart the strands that comprise the whole and step through and beyond the tatters into a better place, a place where I can enjoy just being myself, the self I have never really met.  I’m looking forward to that!