A Sadness Fast

Saturday, January 31, 2015


Have you ever done something called a sadness fast?  I recently came up with the concept a few days ago.  I have never heard someone use such a phrase.  I have been thinking of tangible ways I can support my ongoing healing process.  Doing a sadness fast seems to be one good idea.

I would define a sadness fast as living in a way that avoids undue and excessive exposure to stimuli (violent television programming, news of man's inhumanity to his fellow man, dilapidated parts of your community) that will provoke feelings of sadness and despair.  I don't believe I have ever really thought so consciously about what prompts me to feel sad as I am doing right now.

I have been reflecting on my own sadness quite a bit lately.  I found myself sometimes feeling almost super-aware of my sadness in the last few weeks.  I attribute this heightened awareness to the intensive work I undertook in the outpatient program I just finished.

Underneath all the anger I once carried around was a heaping quantity of sadness.  I have difficulty recalling a time when I did not feel some significant burden of sadness when I was a kid.  I had my happy moments.  But long, stable stretches of happiness in which I did not concurrently feel some unpleasant level of anxiety are not something I can easily recall from my early life history.  Anxiety has been a companion I had for much of my life.  Changing this reality has been no small task.  Indeed, it seems to be the task of my healing journey.  And I feel sad that I had a heightened level of anxiety for so long.  My anxiety was preventable.

Last night I began making a pros and cons list for a major choice I am contemplating.  I found the process quite demanding.  Shortly before I finished working on my list I felt a growing awareness of how mentally drained I was feeling.  I believe there is a certain truth in the idea that you cannot always think your way to an answer.

I feel fortunate that my motivation to keep trying and showing up for my life each and every day is much greater than it was earlier this month.  I believe my progress can continue.  I simply need to keep being mindful of my needs.

The Issue of Compassion Fatigue

Friday, January 30, 2015


"Caring too much can hurt" - Compassion Fatigue Awareness Project homepage

While recently attending an outpatient treatment program at Abbott Northwestern Hospital I decided to look up the issue of compassion fatigue.  I think it's very true that caring too much can indeed hurt.  When we get enmeshed in the pain of other people's lives we can end up emerging from the enmeshment feeling drained and demoralized.

I discovered the Compassion Fatigue Awareness Project while briefly delving into this topic. According to the project's website compassion fatigue symptoms can be seen as "normal displays of chronic stress resulting from the care giving work we choose to do."  Perhaps even more interesting is the contention of traumatologist Eric Gentry that "people who are attracted to care giving often enter the field already compassion fatigued."  Some people may take an interest in "other-directed care giving" because "these are people who were taught at an early age to care for the needs of others before caring for their own needs."  I can certainly see myself in this population of people.  I experienced such early conditioning.  I grew up in a family of people who are good at being martyrs.  They take care of other people at the expense of their own needs.

Unlearning an obsessive adherence to the martyr archetype can require some real discipline. A brief summary of potential indicators of a martyr can be found here.  Of the indicators listed I can most easily see within myself the first one, namely "invoking the shadow in order to control".  I once strongly believed that my commitment to graduate school would bring me rewards worthy of the time and energy I put into the endeavor.  When this didn't happen within the timeline I had originally imagined was reasonable to expect it to happen within resentment grew within me.

I see clearly that my own 'case' of compassion fatigue began early in my development.  It began in the summer of 1982 when I was returned to the custody of my father after he was nearly murdered by his own spouse.  I lost my trust in my father after this horrific conclusion to his second marriage.  And then I was expected to pretend that my capacity to trust was not deeply undermined by my father's immense mistake and subsequent deceit.  My wounding became a source of my feelings of alienation and betrayal.  In essence I was expected to lie about how I felt about being abused.  I was expected to tolerate abuse and deceit as somehow not being immensely unhealthy.  I was asked to pretend.  I was asked to pretend I was not deeply hurt.  And I felt immense resentment due to the dysfunction I was expected to tolerate.

I became very good at ignoring how I truly felt.  My adolescence and early adulthood were marked by an unconscious pattern of frequently putting the needs of others ahead of my own needs.  It is no wonder I eventually found myself at the end of a long road whose terminus was alienation, sadness and a feeling of immense emptiness which outwardly also manifested as a loss of motivation to keep participating in the world.

I want to participate in the world in some way.  But I need to participate on terms that are healthy and in alignment with my current and future needs.  I will no longer participate in ways that only enhance my previously strong feelings of alienation, sadness and frustration.

It's clear I need to continue to redesign my life.

I began thoroughly redesigning my life some nineteen months ago. I made a number of significant changes at that time.  I have remained dedicated to continuing new healthy behaviors.  I intend to continue to pay close attention to how I am feeling each and every day.  By attending to my needs I feel confident that I will become healthier over time.

This blog has served me well as a creative and therapeutic outlet.  I intend to continue writing.  What form my blog will assume as time passes is not something I can clearly see at the moment.  But somehow my journey of writing is enabling me to knit my deep wounds together.

Today I will be reminding myself of what I am grateful for.


What are you grateful for?

Showing Up For Yourself Over and Over and Over Again

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Eighteen months of individual psychotherapy as well as two forays into a partial hospitalization program at a local hospital have helped me to reach a number of conclusions about myself and my life.

The horror of my early life history

I experienced genuine pain due to the ignorance and negligence of other human beings.  My trauma was compounded by institutional corruption.  The group therapist I had in the program I just completed today acknowledged that I was ‘treated very, very badly.’

A lot of people have suffered immensely in their lives

And yet my life journey has exposed me to the reality that many, many people have endured plenty of horror of their own.  In other words, I am not alone in my experience.  Stated another way, I am not unique.  Stated still another way, there are plenty of people who can have empathy for my experience.

Hardship is not always a function of having been or being a ‘bad’ person

You can do everything ‘right’ and ‘proper’ in your life and still suffer from hardship.  I realized in my most recent plunge into intensive treatment that one persistent form of my own distorted thinking is known as something called heaven’s reward fallacy.  In this form of distorted thinking you imagine that your life should be better than it is due to all the sacrifices and efforts you have made.  Put more succinctly you believe being good means you should experience good.  I have learned this isn’t always the case.  You can do everything that is required and expected of you and people will still find reason to complain and whine.

Perception does not always equal reality (even when we think it does)

Just because you feel something to be true doesn’t mean it is actually really happening outside your own skin.  For a very long time I have struggled with feeling that I am fighting this immense battle and that I am very much alone in my battle.  But this feeling isn’t based in any objective truth.  The truth of the matter is that I have a large number of people who care about me and are supportive of me and my dreams.  That is the truth.

Sometimes I feel that all I can do is keep showing up for myself again and again and again and again.  And sometimes I feel like I am doomed to keep living a life in which I show up and nobody responds to my showing up in the world in the way I need or want them to.  I attribute this feeling to the number of resumes I have sent out, the number of phone calls I have made and the general amount of energy I have spent in seeking out a meaningful job.  But just because not a single person validates my skill, my kindness, my compassion, my tenacity and so on does not mean I am not skilled, kind, compassionate and tenacious.  When people experience really poor parenting it can take a while to stop looking for validation outside of yourself.  I know that has been true for me.

Asking for help is not equivalent to being weak

I see this as a fallacy that men in particular are especially prone to.  I sense my father has this distorted manner of thinking embedded in his own mind.  If you don’t know how to do something you can simply ask someone to help you.  That is so shocking, right?  Can you imagine what we would become if we never received and accepted help?  We would never leave our cribs!

Failure is just something in our minds

I can still vividly recall how one of my past mentors reframed failure in words that I found so compelling and evocative.  He described failure as ‘not producing a desired result’.  It is the meaning we lay on our perceived failures that gets us into trouble.  When we make our failures mean something about who we fundamentally are as human beings we can find ourselves firmly on the path to self-deprecation.

I don’t have to be anything…and neither do you

My dignity and value have nothing to do with what I am, what I do for my work and what my talents are.  We are all worthwhile simply because we are.

A Reason To Celebrate

Wednesday, January 28, 2015


Today is what I would call a special day.  It is my one year anniversary of being deemed sub-clinical for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  It's been a full year!  Even though it is a gray January day outside I feel quite sunny on the inside.  I still have some additional work I wish to do in support of my own mental health.  But I feel very excited and happy to have achieved this milestone!

Here is a look back at a portion of what I wrote a year ago:

As I made my way home today the world around me looked much as it would shortly after those first sessions I underwent using EMDR therapy: vivid, engaging, exciting.  Though today is one of the coldest days of a winter that has felt plenty long already my excitement about my recovery suffused my body and mind.  Were it not so brisk outside I could imagine going out and shouting "I'm sub-clinical, I'm sub-clinical!"  But then some people might think I am clinical in another way...such as being manic!  The coming of spring and a new cycle of life is still many weeks away but this encouraging news today gives me such a needed boost at a time when I have been feeling a bit weary.  The bitter cold of this winter has been a lot to manage.  I cannot imagine how I would have put up with such enduring cold if it had happened last winter when I had first moved to Minnesota.  Thankfully the remaining days of this winter will be even easier for me to manage now that I have confirmation that all the work I have been doing on myself is paying off...and paying off well!

As a simple means of celebrating the life I have today I am going to enumerate what I am grateful for:

• My health insurance
• My loyal friends I have all over the world
• My health
• My desire to work
• My professional interests
• My love of doing fun and zany things
• My motivation that inspires me to keep trying
• My willingness to open my heart and be open to love

Acknowledging My Sadness

Tuesday, January 27, 2015


Today was my eleventh day attending an outpatient program at Abbott Northwestern Hospital.  I feel much better than I did when I began two calendar weeks ago.  Today, as I have on other recent days, I acknowledged the deep sadness I feel.  I have plenty of 'good' reasons to feel sad.  And I recognize it's about time I finally really opened up and acknowledged the depth of my sadness.

I have felt some amount of sadness for much of my life.  The trauma of my early life history served as the rotten seeds that would later bloom into my longstanding sadness.  And yet being filled with immense sadness is not a death sentence.  I do not have a terminal health condition.  I can improve and I believe I will continue to improve.  The veneer of my anger is finally falling away.  And there underneath my anger was my long semi-dormant sadness.  How long does it take to heal such sadness?  This is another good question.  And I have absolutely no good answer to that question.  The process of healing will take whatever time it requires.  I have no magic crystal ball that will allow me to accurately foretell my future in regards to my health.

A year ago my mental health was quite different.  I was still busy with the process of doing some demanding and extensive physical therapy.  I was also still quite angry as a result of my most recent interactions with my biological father.  I sometimes had the physical sensation of spinning much like the tasmanian devil cartoon character would do on the Saturday morning cartoons of my childhood.  It didn't seem that I could break out of the cycle of my pain and hurt.

Walking away from my paternal family of origin has helped immensely.  It was a painful choice.  But it was a valid and necessary choice.  Choices can be very easy when no manner of real loss is truly involved.  It's another matter entirely when making a choice results in people vanishing from your life...perhaps to never return.

Now I have an immense awareness of the sadness I feel.  I suppose I should learn to be a more entertaining and convivial host.  I have a feeling this sadness will be hanging around for a while.  My sadness is another teacher.

It Just Doesn't Seem Possible

Monday, January 26, 2015


Sometimes it just does not seem possible that I am still working through the sadness I feel regarding aspects of my life from thirty years ago.  I am relieved that I no longer feel saturated with anger.  The anger covered up my sadness and grief for a very long time.  With my anger dissipating I can now better attend to what I can more clearly discern was underneath the anger all along.  My sadness is immense.  It is not debilitating.  But it is so large that the very prospect of successfully attending to it seems to be yet another task for Hercules.

I would feel more encouraged if my physical health did not seem so tenuous lately.  The inflammation and tenderness I have experienced in my feet has been going on for about ten weeks now.  The new medication I am currently taking for my foot discomfort does not seem to be working too well.  So I might soon be switching back to the medication my podiatrist originally prescribed for me last November.

I feel this immense space inside me now.  It is a space made possible by my decision to no longer maintain active ties with certain members of my paternal family of origin.  This space sometimes feels like a gaping black hole or open wound that will heal only very slowly.

There are moments when I attempt to distract myself from the pain I feel by marveling at the beauty of the world.  I actually feel as if this works quite well.

It seems I am finally truly alive.

My Ponderous Sadness

Saturday, January 24, 2015

As I awoke this morning I found myself recalling one of the insights I have come to while going to therapy.  I found myself feeling really sad as I remember how throughout the summer of 1982 I felt convinced I would not live to see my ninth birthday.  Such pessimistic dark thinking is a very horrible burden for a child of eight years of age to carry around.

My sadness and grief are still inside me.  They have been my unintended companions for many years.  But by paying some genuine attention to them I feel the onerous quality of their weight lessening with time.  It’s obvious I need to make time in my life to attend to these companions.  I believe they will eventually leave once I make enough space in my life to give them what they need.  My sadness needs attention.  My grief needs attention.  I am giving them attention now.  They will eventually not feel so weighty and demanding.

I have one important task on my weekend docket I am determined to accomplish.  I am going to go visit a friend who has two cats he wishes to give away.  They originally belonged to his former roommate.  I wish to have at least one companion animal.  I believe having a living creature waiting to see me when I arrive home each day would be very good for me.

I have other activities I can participate in this weekend.  Depending on how my energy level is I might attend some events.  One of my primary goals is to listen to how my body feels as I move about and live my life today.  I still feel a degree of weariness.  But the weariness is thankfully also lessening.

This Winter Has Been Easier

Friday, January 23, 2015

It is obvious that the days are starting to lengthen now.  We are now a full month of time past the winter solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere.  The sun has entered the sign of Aquarius.  I do not feel anywhere near as weary of winter as I did this time last year.  All the Vitamin D, exercise, psychotherapy and other healthy practices have made a real dent in the burden of unhealed pain I was carrying around.

I can now somehow sense the metaphorical light at the end of my journey of healing.  I don’t feel it would be a good idea to stop going to therapy this calendar year but I do feel that one day in the not too distant future I will be able to start more concretely imagining when that date might actually fall in a real calendar.  As for now I am working to do better at befriending my grief and sadness.  It hasn’t been easy.  But it is necessary for my own deeper healing.

Next week will feature an important milestone in my journey.  I’ll finally have been undiagnosable (ergo subclinical) for PTSD for a full year of time.  So I will be entering my second year of walking around the planet in a fairly healthy state of being.  I believe it’s going to be much easier than the first year was.

I have been toying with the idea of another commitment I could make for myself that would be supportive of my healing process.  Considering how much sadness and grief I had been carrying around for so long I feel it could be wise to cut out sad and heavy media (movies, news and so on) for a period of time.  I was overloaded with sadness for such a long while.  I deserve to have a real break from all of that heaviness.

Oh Hey It's 1977 Again!

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Today was another day in which I surfed through a variety of many feelings.  I felt amusement, confusion, encouragement, sadness, frustration and more.  And I probably went through this cycle of many feelings several times.

The day began in an amusing way.  I took my razor to the YMCA so I could shave and make myself look a bit more presentable than I have been feeling.  To take the last bus of the bus line I prefer I had to abort my shaving before I could finish it.  So I left myself with hair under my nose.  Yes, I left myself with a mustache.  I found myself laughing as I made my way to the bus stop.  I felt as if I looked like Michael Mouse Tolliver from the movie based on Armistead Maupin's book Tales of the City.  I felt as if I was wearing an outdated facial hair look more typical of the 1970s.

My outpatient treatment program proved helpful today.  I feel better than I did this morning.  I feel a bit more able to sit with and feel the sadness I had been carrying for such a long time.  Memories of being a 'latch-key kid' have been floating through my conscious awareness over the last several days.  The sadness I carried around for so many years was so ponderous and so heavy.  I feel it was genuinely unjust that I be expected to carry around what I did.  But there are many people who have experienced immense injustice in the world.  And some of those people have not survived the injustice that they experienced.  At least I survived my early life history.  I am blessed in many ways.  There are some days when it is difficult for me to really appreciate all that I have.

As I recount what I experienced throughout the day I still feel a lot of sadness as I write now.  And it's perfectly fine for me to feel sad.  Sadness and grief are a part of every human life.  We all experience loss at some point in our lives.

The journey of writing my blog has felt a bit more arduous as of late.  It hasn't been as much of a joy as I would like it to be.  But I want to continue to write nonetheless.  Even the activities that we really enjoy doing might not feel so enjoyable each and every day we honor our commitment to do them.  I feel that part of the challenge of daily living is showing up for what we have agreed to do even when doing so holds little excitement for us.  I think I once heard a saying that "90% of life is showing up".

Cheers.

I Need An After-School Program

Wednesday, January 21, 2015


The therapist who runs the group therapy portion of the outpatient program I have been attending this past week made a comment to me today in regards to something I said to her yesterday.  Sometimes I like to hang out in places for some time after my business in that place is done.  I suppose I sometimes do this as a coping mechanism if I am feeling especially lonely or needy.  I have felt a bit low lately so my inclination to engage in this means of coping has been a bit elevated.

As I departed yesterday I commented that "I need an after-school program".  I was actually referencing that time period in my life when I was still living at home.  My after-school program on many, many days was to go home, watch television and do my homework...alone.  Even after my younger brother was born I still felt a certain gross measure of loneliness.  This was partly due to the fact that my younger brother was never old enough to play with in a way that was age appropriate for either of us while I was still living at home.

Watching television wasn't exactly a healthy after-school program.  Engaging in this activity didn't really enhance certain skills that would prove vital to me later in my life.  Watching television isn't really an active activity.  Yes, there are programs that still exist that are truly educational in nature.  But much of television thirty years ago as well as now does little to really enhance the skills and quality of life of many people.  I probably would have been better served if I had engaged in more social activities.  But I lacked a good measure of self-esteem by the time I entered high school.  This lack of confidence led me to frequently isolate.  It wasn't healthy for me to be as alone as I often was.

Here I am thirty years later and I am continuing to disassemble aspects of the person I have become.  I have more anger and sadness than I want to have.  I need more love and kindness in my life.  I became burned out some time ago because I was not giving enough love and care to myself.  And this was partly due to the fact that I didn't have good role models for the development and practice of self-care skills.  So now I get to do it.  I could choose to hide and mourn and feel pity for myself for what I never experienced.  Or I can choose to go out into the world each day, reach out, meet new people, take risks, dream and keep trying.  I would prefer to apply the latter approach.

All the instability of my childhood profoundly affected my sense of self and my sense of what was possible in my future life.  I still wrestle with how the chaos impacted me.  But I do believe that I am gradually transmuting my personal darkness into something else.  It will take some additional time for this process to unfold.  But I feel I am gradually moving in the direction of an enjoyable and love filled future.

I feel immense gratitude for how far I have come.  I look forward to the flowering of the coming spring.  I believe it will be a spring unlike any other I have experienced.

Sitting With Sadness

Tuesday, January 20, 2015


On this chilly and gray late afternoon I made the commitment to sit with myself and reflect on the element of sadness in my life.  As the anger I carried for too long continues to fade I am finding myself more able to access the layers of other 'material' underneath it.  And I recognize that underneath my anger is a ponderous amount of sadness.  I still sometimes find myself becoming confused as to what the real distinction between sadness and grief is.  According to some brief surfing around sadness may be seen as a synonym for unhappiness as well as grief.

In my opinion sadness is not identical to grief.  I have long understood sadness to be something more transient in nature.  Grief seems to be something that can persist for a much longer period of time.  Lately I feel more and more aware of both my sadness and my grief.  Sadness may be something you feel when a close friend moves far away or when you lose a job you deeply loved doing.  I associate grief with changes that might be irreversible.  Whereas you might feel sad when a good friend moves away you might instead feel grief if that person actually dies.  It seems sadness and grief are related but are not identical.

I have been contemplating sadness a lot lately.  It seems to be what I predominantly feel right now.  I feel sad due to the many elements of my life that once were a part of my life but no longer are.  My sadness feels persistent.  To experience persistent sadness can be construed as indicative of having 'Complex PTSD'.  I first wrote about Complex PTSD last summer after learning about the concept from a mental health practitioner (whom I sought out to obtain a second opinion regarding my mental health).
It was a rather sobering experience when I first read about Complex PTSD.  I could see within myself elements of all six of the criteria described on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs website found here.  I won't elaborate upon all six of these criteria here.  I have done so in other postings.  I want to focus on my sadness alone.

I suppose it would be a correct assertion to state I have felt some amount of sadness throughout much of my life.  I know I felt sad throughout the summer immediately after my father was nearly murdered.  Such a response would, according to the opinion I now have as an increasingly healthy adult, be a healthy and predictable response to a trauma as horrible as nearly losing a parent to murder.  But then something still worse began to happen.  My sadness went 'underground'.  I buried my sadness because I felt compelled to as a way of coping with the family I was growing up in.  I didn't feel comfortable fully  expressing how I felt.  I felt being so fully expressive could make me a target for more unjust, unkind treatment.  So my sadness festered in my psyche.  And this went on for a long time.

Very early in the evolution of this blog I wrote an entry entitled Parents of Murdered Children.  As I think back on this entry I wrote nearly eighteen months ago I see a lot of meaning loaded into these four  words.  When my father was nearly murdered a piece of my own child self did actually seem to die.  I became a 'child of a nearly murdered parent'.

I don't know if completely eliminating the sadness I feel is a realistic goal or not.  Perhaps I will find that time, therapy and living well eventually leads to the healing of so much of my pain that the sadness no longer feels so ponderous.  But I find myself often asking how long that will take.  And I cannot provide myself a clear or accurate answer.  And the professionals I work with cannot provide a clear answer either.  Why?  Because they can't possibly know either.

Sometimes we can feel pained by the simple fact that life is filled with countless unknowns and unknowable things.  And yet somehow, if we want to live, we must continue to breathe through the difficulties of life.  Such is life.

I wish I felt better than I do now.  But I am grateful to feel so much better than I once did.

Where Was The Boundary?

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” - Leo Tolstoy

As I continue to do my grieving regarding my family of origin that often did not give me the proper attention and care I needed I find myself more and more able to retrospectively define what the seminal issues were.  And one of them was the issue of boundaries.

Unhealthy families are distinct from healthy ones according to a number of indicators.  And one of those is boundaries.  In an unhealthy family boundaries are either too rigid and dense or weak and diffuse.  A family with rigid boundaries may express a form of authoritarianism in which the children of this family are given limited access to the world beyond the home.  Friends might not be able to come visit the children of the household with any ease.  Privileges may be restricted.  Access to opportunities for fun and play may be limited.

Meanwhile, families with poor or loose boundaries may exhibit quite opposite issues.  Parents may fail to monitor children's activities and progress in school.  They may fail to provide proper guidance, not be proactive regarding their children's health and even disclose their own struggles with their children in cases where their primary relationships do not offer the support they need.  Parents in such families may also have trouble pursuing healthy relationships of their own.  These issues may adversely affect their own children.  My father's family fits easily into this category.

When I have attempted to confront some of my father's siblings regarding the abuse and chaos I experienced I have rather consistently experienced avoidance or silence.  Self-righteous indignation has been another response.  The responses I have received have led me to make my own conclusions regarding where the boundaries actually are and were within my family of origin.  It seems to me that the abuse I experienced would have continued (in the event my father had not actually been nearly murdered...which led to the end of his relationship with my stepmother and the end of the abuse) up to the point of my own tragic and preventable death.  The issues in my father's second marriage were that bad.  Tolerance of such severe abuse to the point of physical harm, permanent injury and even death is a great example of a very poor boundary.  Is it any wonder I fantasized about running away?

It's my impression that children who grow up in families with poor boundaries will become adults who often face the challenge of learning what healthy boundaries actually are.  When parents do poorly in parenting their children those children will ultimately have to find good role models in other people.  This has been my experience.  I am still learning how to create healthy boundaries for myself.  It has  certainly been a process.

Given what I experienced and what I know of my father's childhood I can only surmise that there is a lot more to the story of my paternal family of origin than I have ever had access to.  And I suspect this will always be so.  I feel immense sadness when I contemplate the boundary issues and seeming 'unspoken agreement to be silent' of my father and his siblings.  Such silence can ultimately prove deeply alienating.  It certainly was for me.

......

And now it is time for a hopeful counterpoint to what I have already written.  I may be effectively and permanently estranged from my father's family but that doesn't mean I cannot go out into the world and create my own family and abiding friendships.  This is what I want to be about.  But as I do this I need to continue to attend to my grief.  Each day is often just a bit better than the last.  I have my difficult and demoralizing days but I am happy to say the trajectory continues to be upward.

Wrestling With Fear

Monday, January 19, 2015

Each day when I sit myself down to write I am performing an act of faith and hope that one day my life will resemble my grandest dreams.  I still feel myself to be making forward progress.  I feel more hopeful about this coming week than I did last week.  And yet I also feel some very real fear.

In my opinion fear is not an easy subject to explore.  From what I have seen and heard all human beings have the capacity for fear.  If we didn’t feel fear we might not take actions to protect ourselves in the face of potential harm.  Fear seems to have an evolutionary purpose.  If we respond to our fear in a healthy way we can keep ourselves safe.  And yet if we live our whole lives in a state of fear we might not take the risks that will help us achieve what we dream of experiencing.  Fear can be both life saving and life withering.

As my Monday morning begins to unfold I find myself recalling how I lived in a state of fear for much of my childhood.  There were times when the fear was genuinely debilitating.  The months immediately after my father was nearly murdered are but one example.  I exhibited a very obvious symptom of recent trauma by going throughout the interior of my home and double and triple checking the locks on the doors were functional and engaged.  This behavior apparently didn’t concern my father.  He was too tuned out to pay much attention to the clear signs that I felt deeply traumatized.

The trauma of my earlier life history deeply affected my adolescence.  I did not have self-confidence befitting an individual of my intelligence and appearance.  To other high school kids I came off shy and unsure of myself.  With my father’s attention riveted primarily upon my new half-brother I felt myself fairly invisible during that important time in my life.  I became a wallflower.  I became a very good wallflower.

I am writing about fear today because fear is something many men do not easily acknowledge.  Many men are not taught to acknowledge their fears in any way that might cause them to lose the respect of their peers, suffer career setbacks and the like.  And yet to ignore our individual and collective fears is, in my opinion, very unwise.  To do so is the equivalent of playing a game of pretend that children play.

I want to acknowledge my fears and continue to move forward.  I believe this is one way I can be an authentic man.

......

Grief: The normal process of reacting to a loss. The loss may be physical (such as a death), social (such as divorce), or occupational (such as a job). Emotional reactions of grief can include anger, guilt, anxiety, sadness, and despair. Physical reactions of grief can include sleeping problems, changes in appetite, physical problems, or illness.

During my outpatient program today I acknowledged the pain I experienced when my first boyfriend broke up with me, moved away and then later attempted to commit suicide.  In reflecting on how I felt yesterday and today I realize the pain and grief of this experience was larger than I acknowledged it to be when I first began working with my therapist.

I feel some sense of relief that I am finally really beginning to own the magnitude of the grief I carried around for too much of my life.  Just verbalizing this truth is freeing.  I still do not feel great but at least I am becoming a more authentic person.

I have taken another small step in my journey.

Unexpected Remembrance

Sunday, January 18, 2015

As sometimes happens in the process of healing I found myself a bit thunderstruck by insight today.  It happened while I was sitting in the Basilica of St. Mary.  Perhaps the soothing church music or beautiful surroundings helped me to suddenly find myself aware of the pain I experienced due to the circumstances of a significant relationship that ended some twenty years ago.  Who knows what exactly caused it to happen.  Maybe it was something like grace.

As I was sitting near the back of the Basilica I unexpectedly found myself remembering how my relationship with my first boyfriend (Scott) ended.  It was 1994.  I was attending Texas A&M University as an undergraduate student.  I first met Scott through an event held by the Department of Atmospheric Science in 1993.  I shared an apartment with him in the autumn of 1993.  Our relationship was often marked by turbulence.  Looking back it is clear to me this was due to two primary issues.  One was the fact that it was my first gay relationship (I was still not able to accept myself as a gay man at that time).  Secondly, Scott had his own difficult past history.  I would learn about this history later on as our own relationship began to disintegrate.

Scott and I parted ways early in 1994.  The separation was a painful one.  I was left with a bewildering array of feelings including confusion, anger and sadness.  My pain was compounded when I received a letter from him some time after he had moved away.  He informed me that he had attempted to commit suicide.  Worse still was his attempt to lay the blame for his suicide attempt on me.  I was appalled and deeply hurt by this.

As I sat in the Basilica this morning some twenty years after that time in my life I found myself unexpectedly and vividly remembering that painful time.  But what I found myself most clearly remembering now was how I did not bother to seek out counseling to help me deal with the incredible pain I experienced for a lengthy time.  I instead attempted to find consolation and guidance by disclosing to my father the true nature of my relationship with Scott.  My decision to disclose the details to my father unfortunately had the opposite effect.  As per his usual way of living my father advised me not to let my stepmother know of what had been happening.  In other words, secrecy was my father’s answer.  Hiding my pain from others who were a part of my so-called family was his solution.  To my knowledge he has never changed in that regard.

Remembering that time in my life on a January morning over twenty years later was quite painful.  I felt sad to recall that very, very young man that I was and how that young man that I was did not reach out and seek resources to help himself through a very dark time.  Thankfully I would never do that to myself now.  My choice to address pain in my life in a different way is an indicator of how much I have grown as a person.

I am going to speak about this time from long ago when I meet with my therapist this week.  Applying EMDR therapy to this remembered pain might prove to be a suitable response to my unplanned recollection of this time.  Whatever happens I feel hopeful that this unexpected intrusion of my past history into my present life is actually an indicator that I am becoming healthier with each passing day.  One can only hope!

10,000 Days Of Distorted Perception

Saturday, January 17, 2015


I feel much better than I did yesterday.  This is the good news for today.  I slept in until almost 10 a.m.  I had thought to go to a Saturday morning yoga class at the YMCA which I enjoy attending.  But last night I made a promise to myself that I would get up when I was ready to get up.  It's important that I keep the promises I make to myself.

The 'bad' news of the day is that I still do not feel that great.  I know it's my sadness and grief.  Hearing the song Runaway Train yesterday morning triggered a torrent of tears to rise up behind my eyes.  Having a restful night of sleep certainly helped me.  But the sadness I felt as a teenager is more omnipresent in my conscious awareness than it has perhaps ever been.  There were many days in which I wanted to run away from home.

Grieving is no small process.  I feel the need to find better resources so I can complete the grieving process.  Looking back it is clear to me that it was my dormant grief that awoke back in June, 2013.  I first had to purge out the anger and rage I was carrying around; they were covering up my grief.  My healing has thus been something like a diving expedition.  As I journey deeper and deeper the nature of what I am discovering is changing.

It would be dishonest of me to claim that I have no anger left to work through.  But what anger I have is a small remnant of what I began working through back in 2013.  My progress has been immense.

I referenced distorted perception in the title of my post today because this distorted perception is part of what I am still grieving.  I didn't completely appreciate just how much the trauma in my early life history had distorted my way of perceiving and relating to the world beyond my own skin and bones until 2013.  Once the horror of what I had long been (unknowingly) enduring began to dawn on me the grief set in virtually immediately.  I initially felt swamped by the grief.  It seems fitting that the physical health issues I had back in the summer of 2013 were specifically focused in my lungs.  It's as if I was drowning in my own sorrow.

It is my impression that a person does not ordinarily work through an immense amount of trauma, pain or grief in a short amount of time.  Healing takes time.  I have repeatedly noted this as I continue to write.  I feel immensely better compared to a year ago.  In fact, last January seems like a strange blur in my psyche.  I remember it was cold, that I was still coping with my immense grief, confusion and sadness and that I was very gradually feeling more and more capable of addressing the entirety of what I was going through.  The shining highlight of that month was my therapist's determination that I was no longer clinically diagnosable for PTSD as of January 28, 2014.  My one year anniversary is approaching!  It's an exciting time to be alive!

There are many times when I catch myself pausing to marvel at the beauty of the world around me.  Wonder, curiosity and an appreciation of beauty are hallmarks of a healthy person.  When these are completely lacking it can be an indicator that something is amiss in a person.  I feel sad to be able to honestly say that curiosity was rarely something I witnessed in my father and his siblings.  I suspect their own life histories would explain why this has essentially always been the case.  It's my impression there is much more trauma in my biological father's family than has ever been consciously and openly acknowledged.  I find that very sad.  But I can choose to leave the sadness behind me.  It is not an easy choice but I can choose nonetheless.

I am grateful to acknowledge that it doesn't necessarily take as long to heal from something as the amount of time you suffered with it.  I carried some amount of unhealed trauma around in my psyche for about thirty years.  There is still more work to do.  But I feel confident I won't still be hammering away at my issues when I am seventy!

Practicing The Art Of Courage

Friday, January 16, 2015


The last twenty-four hours have been quite interesting.  I feel as if I have been on a roller coaster.

I had a productive session with my therapist last night.  We worked on creating a written set of parameters of what I am and am not willing to do for work in the future.  This project will be a primary focus of my attention in the next few weeks.

My trip home from seeing my therapist was equally interesting.  The world appeared quite vivid.  I found myself noticing the smallest details of the world as it flew by my taxi.

I have felt strange all day today.  I woke up quite sleep deprived due to an ongoing issue with the radiator in my apartment.  This issue is still not resolved.  While at the downtown Walgreens this morning I unexpectedly began hearing the song "Runaway Train" by Soul Asylum.  And then the tears  were crowding my eyes so suddenly that I felt as if my knees could have easily buckled underneath me.  I had to walk outside and deeply inhale the chilly winter air as a means of getting some relief.  A good music video of the song can be found on YouTube here.

The song felt like a broadside across my face and chest because of the lyrics focused on topics like running away, remembering how to smile and 'getting somewhere'.  Suddenly those many, many, many times I unconsciously fantasized about running away when I was a kid all appeared as an immense crowd of pseudo-memories in my waking consciousness.  Somehow I managed to ignore my persistent fantasies of running away.  I suppose I managed to do this because I had become a virtual master of dissociation as a child.  It was my unconscious way of coping with the stressful circumstances around me which I had no easy way to escape.  It's no wonder my knees almost buckled another me.

In the last eighteen months I have asked many questions of myself.  One question among the lot of them has been this one: 'Why didn't I run away?'  I have gradually found an answer to this question.  I didn't run away because I feared the world beyond the house I called home might be more difficult than what I already knew.  I suppose you could call it a case of 'staying with the devil you know rather than one you don't'.  The Known can be more comfortable than the Unknown.

Just being able to acknowledge the depth of the sadness and fear I so persistently felt is but one way to mark the immense progress I have made in the last eighteen months.    My psychic repair work is still obviously underway.  I am thankfully long beyond the stage of my initial and thorough assessment of the depth and contours of my sorrow.  I suppose I finished that some time in early 2014.

I recently felt the time had come for me to take a deeper step into practicing the art of courage.  I want to leave behind the unsatisfying work world that I have found myself dipping into a bit too much as of late.  I need to leave this world behind.  I need to find my way down the path of healing to the fullness of the man I can be.

I'll be sharing more details of this new leg of my voyage in the coming days and weeks.

Learning To Have More Patience

Thursday, January 15, 2015


I continue to find myself feeling better and better as I take advantage of my excellent health insurance by attending a program at Abbott Northwestern Hospital.

I am learning still more about myself and my own needs through some of the work I am doing in my current program.  One thing I am learning is that I would benefit from being more patient with myself.  I tend to have high expectations of myself and others.  When my expectations are not met I inevitably feel disappointed and demoralized.  If I could just learn to trust the process of my own evolution more I might find myself feeling happier, more grounded and more motivated.

My declining motivation in recent weeks was a red flag that something was amiss.  I was beginning to feel more and more overwhelmed.  I had been struggling with some physical health issues since last October.  These issues combined with the necessity of maintaining a pleasant demeanor while working as a seasonal employee for Macys and continuing to do my own psychotherapy eventually began to leave me feeling increasingly overwhelmed.  And so it became clear that I needed to step away from my current life for a bit of time to refocus and refresh myself.

I wrote yesterday about how the nature of my grief is changing.  I am less and less aware of the grief I felt in the months immediately after my father was nearly murdered in 1982.  The pain of that time period in my life has receded and lessened in response to my focus on this period of my childhood in my weekly therapy sessions.  Yesterday marked something of a turning point for me.  I could better identify the contours of the grief I still carry.  Clarity was one of a number of gifts of the day.  I could sense the sadness and grief of my adolescence rising up within my conscious awareness.  I had needed my father to be a present witness as I became a man.  But he wasn't sufficiently emotionally present to attend to this very vital transition.  I didn't experience any significant initiation into being a man.

So it seems that I now need to focus my attention on the wounds and disappointment of my adolescence.  Thankfully I have a skilled therapist and care team to assist me in this process.  I am a much healthier person than I was eighteen months ago.  I still have more work to do.  But I am confident that I can eventually realize the biggest dreams I have for myself.  It's a matter of time, effort and persistence.

Now Featuring One Forty Something Adolescent

Wednesday, January 14, 2015


I clearly recognized something today.  I more clearly discerned the contours of another important piece of my immense grief.  Throughout much of the last eighteen months my therapeutic odyssey has focused on the harm I experienced within the first ten years of my life.  And that harm was quite significant.  I have recounted previously in this blog how I became consciously aware of my thought that I would not live to the age of nine since I began treatment in June, 2013.  And I didn't have that thought in my mind on just one moment of one day.  That thought was a persistent one that contributed to my distress.  Thankfully my thought was not correct.

I feel fairly prepared to move on beyond the wounding I experienced at the age of eight.  As I begin to feel comfortable with moving beyond focusing on this time period in my life (as well as even earlier moments in my development such as when my birthmother was experiencing her schizophrenic breakdown) I feel I can now see more clearly what remains to be done.  What comes after the age of eight?  Nine.  And what comes after nine?  Ten.  And eventually a child enters the developmental phase known as adolescence.  I feel very much like an adolescent now.  And I realize that much as I did not have a healthy emotional life in the final months of my ninth year of life I also did not have a very healthy adolescence.  My physical health was good.  But my emotional health was not so good.  Inside I was smoldering.

The sadness I felt throughout my adolescence became clearer in my conscious awareness than it ever has been.  This clarity came to me during a break in the outpatient treatment program I decided to once again voluntarily take part in.  And perhaps somehow this clarity was made possible by virtue of the fact that I am the only man taking part in this program.  Yes, once again I find myself to be the single male in a room that is otherwise exclusively full of women.  Throughout the day I felt myself aware of the old wounds I carried due to the expectation placed upon me (throughout much of my childhood really) that I tolerate being around sick women.  In essence I was asked to bear a burden that ideally should never be placed upon any child.  I was expected to tolerate illness as if it were normal and healthy for such a child to endure such a thing.

Today I found myself appreciating how this burden impacted my development in my adolescence.  I didn't have a lot of willingness to resist the unreasonable expectations still being placed upon me as I entered this phase of my development.  I was simply too tired of dealing with my dysfunctional father by that point.  I was worn down by years of putting up with my father's dysfunctional behavior.  I would only resist and raise a fuss if I felt deeply violated.  And there were certainly instances in which this happened.  But the consistent and more subtle aspects of the neglect I experienced were something I had learned to look past.  This was an adaptation on my part.  I couldn't raise a fuss each and every time I wasn't treated properly.  To do so would have been exhausting as well as potentially threatening to what attention I was given.

Somehow today I could feel the grief rise up in me that came to be in specific response to what did not happen in my adolescence.  I felt the grief of never receiving a proper initiation into becoming a man.  The lack of proper initiation into manhood is not an uncommon problem in the industrialized West.  I have previously read about this issue.  I have read about the sad consequences that can result when people do not experience a proper acknowledgment of significant rites of passage such as becoming a man.  But I have never really sat with the feelings I carry about how I was never properly initiated by my own family of origin.

It is clear to me that it is now time for me to attend to this additional portion of my grief.

When Despair Comes Knocking On Your Heart

Tuesday, January 13, 2015


Throughout the most recent few hours of this day I have been wondering if despair is too large and scary a term to use in a blog posting.  Is despair really part of what I am feeling?  I think I would rather imagine despair knocking on some exterior door and trying to find a way into my heart and mind but failing to do so.  Regardless of the technicalities of my situation I feel quite low at the moment.  I suppose this is only natural considering I am once again doing an outpatient treatment program.

Quite honestly I feel very weary at the moment.  I have been thinking of this movie that has always held a special power in my psyche.  The movie is Castaway with Tom Hanks.  In this movie Hanks plays a FedEx engineer, Chuck Noland, whose unexpected trip to the South Pacific around the time of Christmas permanently detours the course of his life.  His plane crashes in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean.  He is the only survivor of the crash.  He somehow manages to wash ashore on an uninhabited island.  Four years pass.  His fiancee and friends assume he died in the crash and move on without him.  He is ultimately unable to escape the island.  Then one day a piece of a port-a-potty washes ashore on his little island (thousands of miles from the location of a city it is labeled with, namely the city of Bakersfield, California).  Noland uses the piece of debris to fashion a sail.  He finally finds himself able to escape the island but then is confronted with violent storms, hunger and the immense vastness of the Pacific Ocean.

In my opinion the most heart wrenching scene of the movie takes place once Noland is adrift both literally and psychologically.  An empathetic viewer will feel immense sorrow for him as he weeps  underneath a tropical sun.  He later casts his oars away.  It is clear all hope of ever being found has left him.  His grief and hopelessness is as immense as the ocean surrounding him as he resigns himself to a fate of never being found.  One cannot help but feel his heart has filled with despair.  Then, unexpectedly, and long after he has given up hope, he is found.  He eventually finds his way back to Memphis where he had once lived.  Everyone had moved on without him.  His former fiancee grieved his supposed death, moved on and married.  Time did not wait for him.

Lately I have been feeling a bit like Noland felt after he found himself seemingly endlessly adrift and beyond hope of ever being found.  I feel myself tempted to be consumed with despair.  Just like Noland's character I have found myself reaching a point in which I do not want to keep trying anymore.  I just want to give up and stop trying.  I cannot force the Cosmos to pay attention to me.  I cannot force someone to give me a job of any sort.  I cannot force my life circumstances to change.  I am incredibly bone weary of trying to create a new beginning for myself.

Tomorrow is another day.  But in this moment I find myself not at all savoring the idea of getting up to greet a new day.  If nothing changes despite all your efforts it can become difficult to remain motivated to keep trying.  Eventually it might feel as if life is a farce.  I have reached that point.

The Natural Decay of Grief

Monday, January 12, 2015

In the first months of my recovery process I often felt skeptical that I would eventually reach the point I am now beginning to reach.  I am starting to feel that grief has at least one thing in common with, of all things, radioactive materials.  Grief has something like a half-life.  In other words, grief doesn't last forever.  I never thought that my grief would indeed last forever but many months ago I thought it would continue to feel truly burdensome for a very long time.  I am now just beginning to feel very differently.

It was a bitterly cold day today.  The temperature barely climbed above 0F.  The temperature is predicted to drop to -11F tonight.  But the sky was filled with brilliant sunshine all day long.  At one point near the noon hour I allowed myself to get a sun-bath.  I was inside the whole time I enjoyed my sun-bath so I didn't feel the cold nipping at my skin.  That was a relief.  I feel better than I did in January of 2014.

Yes, I think it is indeed true that grief naturally shrinks over time.  Perhaps it is the power of the human spirit.  Who among us wants to be caught in an unending cycle of grief and sadness?  Eventually we must find a way to release that which pains us.  Sometimes releasing our pain requires us to give up something immense.  In my case I am giving up on the idea of ever having a healthy relationship with the members of my paternal family of origin.  In particular I am focusing my attention on letting go of my father.  I have wondered (sometimes 'aloud' here in this blog) if my father is actually a psychopath.  I may never know the answer to that.  And somehow I am going to have to find a way to get past it such that it doesn't consume my heart and mind.  It's a very sad thing to contemplate such an idea about your own father.  And yet when people are pathologically averse to telling the truth what can you possibly do to compel the person to change?  You can't!  You cannot force another person to change.

I decided to reach out and create some additional support for myself in the next few days.  I needed it.  I feel weary of being involuntarily required to endure the drama and dysfunction of others.  That was the story of my childhood.  It will not be the story of my remaining adulthood.

"Being A Child Of Domestic Violence Is Like A Death In Itself"

Sunday, January 11, 2015


It's quite obvious that how we respond to trauma is very much a factor of both the nature of the trauma and our own state of development.  Children can be especially vulnerable to trauma.  Consider a March, 2014 Washington Post article focused on the impact of domestic violence.

The article references a U.S. Justice Department sponsored study known as the National Survey of Children's Exposure to Violence.  The survey, completed in 2011, found that one in twelve children have witnessed a family assault.  Perhaps more compelling are the words of Dorothy Lennig quoted in the article: "Thirty years ago, we had to really convince the community that domestic violence was not  a private matter but a crime.  The next iteration of that was we had to convince people not to victim blame.  And now I feel we're moving into the next phase of really understanding the impact on the kids."  When you subtract approximately thirty years from the year 2011 you reach the year in which I nearly lost my own father to domestic violence.

The redefinition of domestic violence as something larger than a private matter will most assuredly change how it is dealt with now and how the children of the present will fare as they entire their adulthood in the coming years.  Yet it will likely be difficult to know the full consequences of such a significant change in policy for decades.  As of the time of this article's appearance in 2011 five states considered the commission of domestic violence in front of children to be a separate crime. Unfortunately the quantification of the effectiveness of such laws to provide additional protections to children is still a very new thing.  It will take some time to understand the consequences of this change in policy.

I find the article I have referenced above a fairly well balanced one.  It presents both the horror of the impacts of domestic violence as well as evidence that healing is nonetheless possible.  Trauma and catastrophic loss do not have to define our future lives.

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I spent part of my day preparing for an intake appointment I have tomorrow morning.  I will be traveling to Abbott Northwestern Hospital to meet with a nurse regarding the possibility of entering the adult partial hospitalization program.  I completed this program in late 2013.  It might be time for me to experience a reprise of it.

Recalling that important time in my life from over fourteen months ago prompted me to ponder just how much my health has improved in the intervening time.  For those of you who have followed my writings over time you might remember that I focused on the idea of Complex PTSD this past summer.  I decided to use six criteria associated with this version of PTSD to review my progress.  My assessment of my progress appears below.  I first list the exact words noted with each criteria as they appear on a section of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs website.  Underneath these words appear my own commentary regarding my own progression.  I was pleased to note that I see improvement as measured by all six criteria.

Emotional Regulation. May include persistent sadness, suicidal thoughts, explosive anger, or inhibited anger. – My anger issues have waned.  The anger I once carried is no longer inhibited.  My primary challenge now is dealing with the sadness I feel.  Sadness, in my experience, is a much less volatile affective state to be caught in.

Consciousness. Includes forgetting traumatic events, reliving traumatic events, or having episodes in which one feels detached from one's mental processes or body (dissociation). – My deeply learned coping skill of dissociation is not something I regularly engage in any more.  The new focus I now have is cultivating awareness and paying attention to when my intuition tells me I may be entering an undermining or harmful environment.

Self-Perception. May include helplessness, shame, guilt, stigma, and a sense of being completely different from other human beings. – My self-perception is much healthier than it was.  Of the types of experience listed I can most identify with some measure of feeling helpless.  I feel disappointment that my career is not really developing as I had first hoped and planned.

Distorted Perceptions of the Perpetrator. Examples include attributing total power to the perpetrator, becoming preoccupied with the relationship to the perpetrator, or preoccupied with revenge. – I no longer frequently engage in disempowering thoughts in which I give away my power to past perpetrators.  The best example of that is my decision to cut my paternal family of origin out of my life.  I no longer project a lot of responsibility onto my father.  I see him quite clearly as the flawed man that he is.

Relations with Others. Examples include isolation, distrust, or a repeated search for a rescuer. – I still have challenges with cultivating trust but it’s better than it once was.  I don’t self-isolate as much as I once did.  And I don’t seek out someone to rescue me from my troubles…I learned that lesson the hard way!

One's System of Meanings. May include a loss of sustaining faith or a sense of hopelessness and despair. – I am still struggling with my sense of what the possibilities for my future are but my faith that there are good people out there who will help me remains strong.

Trauma need not ruin our lives.