Floating jar of a disturbing event

In my head there is a mason jar filled with one part of a disturbing event, floating in a lake. With the help of my EMDR therapist I took this situation of a comment made about my body image by a man who was suppose to be a trusting adult, and I traveled through the steps of emotions until it didn’t feel as shameful today as it has made me feel for the past 18,19, maybe even 20 years. I took the emotions, along with the stupid ass nightgown I was wearing and I shrank as small as a mouse, like in Alice In Wonderland. I scooped it all up climbing up the ladder until I reached the top of the jar, I tossed it all in and it flowed and poured and continued filling the jar like raging river during a flood season. I grew back to my normal size, placed the lid on the jar until it was tightly sealed. I tied a rope around it and walked out of my driveway into the road and down the street. I continued walking until I reached the lake where I found a tree against the waters edge. I tied off the jar and there it floats in the lake until I need to address this issue some more. Then I took my spirit to my sanctuary that I have created. A place with moss, birds, and butterflies, along with streams, flowers, and waterfalls. I danced, and played, and washed out all the negativity hanging from a vine leaning my hair into the water as the elements carried away these feelings. 

Dissociation

Dissociation, it’s a defense mechanism that I mostly have under control now days. But sometimes it hits, and most often at the most inconvenient times. One minute you are talking with someone the next you are waking up feeling like hours have passed yet the person is still in front of you talking and you never really fell asleep. You feel confused and scared. Terrified. Dissociation can come in many forms, from what I have I read it is a personality disorder with several different categories. With the information I have read I seem to struggle with the depersonalization side of things. The very first time I realized it or was rather aware of it was when I smoked pot in the back of my grandparents car. I was 14 or 15 and I didn’t understand what was going on because I had been smoking pot for years already at this point with nothing like this happening before. It was dark outside and as we drove down the highway the lights started blurring into one constant stream of lights and I felt like I was losing chunks of time as I was talking with my grandparents. I felt embarrassed and confused I didn’t know what was happening so I laid my head down and went to sleep and never thought about it again.

Then it was New Years Eve and I was celebrating with my friends, I had a couple of drinks, and smoked such a small amount of weed. I went into the kitchen to help my friend wash dishes and all of a sudden everything became black, tunnel vision I could not see anything but the floor. I was terrified and confused I had no idea what was going on. Everybody was talking and I was losing grip on their words, I was fighting to hang on to the moments, scared to let go and slip into an unknown dimension of a world I was unaware existed. That particular situation got worse, I went home and had seizures, convolutions and even memory loss over the course of the next few weeks. I went to the emergency room at one point, I had to have brain scans, test after test was done and nobody could link it to anything. All I could think was it had to be the pot, so I didn’t smoke anymore, I could never risk that again. Slowly I came out of this weird in-between world’s type dimension that I felt. For years and years I wondered what caused this reaction, was it laced, was it a traumatic thing, was in the mix of the booze and the weed, was it just anxiety from what was going on, was it PTSD from my abusive father living at my grandparents with us when he wasn’t supposed to be because of the abuse he was found guilty of in the eyes of the law? Was it the strobe lights at the party? I never really found out and every so often even when I didn’t smoke  the dissociation would creep up on me, although never quit as bad as the New Years eve time but still it could become pretty intense.

When I was 17, 18, and into adulthood I could get away with small amounts of using THC rather it be others shot gunning it to me, or if I consumed it in cookies or tea, and a few times I tried smoking. It was always hit or miss if I would slip away thought. Still it never got as bad as it did during that New Years Eve, most times I could sleep it off.  I feel like it’s a cruel and unfair joke the universe plays on me to not be able to use a natural medicine that grows on our planet in a way to help me. I struggle a lot with anxiety and pain and some strains of marijuana can help but I cannot risk the chances of increased dissociation with never knowing or not how it will effect me. I have spent years and years working out traumas to not disappear. Because even without the use of THC I would still dissociation just not as intensely I suppose, and each time it would still be as scary as ever, between that and sleep paralyses I would have to say they are the two most scariest things that happen to me. I will try and figure out what triggers it or sets it off. I will try and tell my brain to stop jumping around in time. It’s like a weird time vortex, or losing grip on the reality that I am in at that current moment. It’s hard to explain and people look at me like I am insane when I attempt to explain it. Often I will refer to it as disappearing, because that is essentially what it feels like.

The other day at work I all of a sudden realized I have gone through several customers and feel like I cannot even remember. I work in a busy retail like setting as a cashier. It hit me out of nowhere and for no reason that I could even think of. All thought sometimes my social anxiety can get bad so maybe it was related to that and my mind decided to check out I am not even sure. It felt like my skin was on fire, I felt like I was drenched in sweat, and the world I was standing in felt miles away, such as if I was standing on the ground and gazing up at a big bright moon that appeared to be exceptionally close to earth yet still too far to reach out and touch it. Everything was so far away, my customers’ voices and the co-workers standing next to me all just felt like echoes and far. I needed to get out of there, I wanted to ask to go home but my shift had barely just started. I was scared to ask to go home. I was just scared that this was happening at work, and at a new job, a job I cannot afford to lose at this time. My arms felt tingly numb like and my legs felt like they weren’t even attached to my body. Was I a robot?  Is my world melting away right around this body that I am standing in and no longer have control over? These thoughts they are mine yet they are not at the same time, is this a dream? It feels like a dream. I am scared and unsure how to react or what to do. I have done this before in a less public setting but still around other people. Onlookers don’t realize or recognize it’s happening. Can I fake my way through the day until I can get home and safely crawl under my blankets? Will they notice, maybe I will pass out thought, what if I start having seizures, it feels like I am having many under my skin and in my mind, I’m shaking and clammy and slurring my speech but nobody seems to notice, so maybe it will be okay. I am screaming at my inner sleeping self to wake up, this is real, stay here, stay in reality, stay in the present, just stop, Stop STOP!! Don’t look up, don’t make eye contact with anyone, just get through this day, come on, you have made it before just keep going, I think to my robotically controlled self. If I pass out I can never return here, the shame and embarrassment will be too much to bare. Am I moving in slow motion? They seem annoyed, maybe I am, am I not being nice or social enough, maybe my coworkers notice, maybe they will think I am just sick, please someone tell me to go home that I don’t look so well. But nobody seems to notice, I struggle hanging on to this rope to keep from falling right out of this dimension of a world. Should I let go, where will I go? I question everything in my existence, the lights dim, then they get bright again, do these people notice the fog that is in the store, the dimming of the lights then the brightness? Nobody seems to notice, it’s just me, am I going blind maybe? Is my blood sugar low, if I eat maybe it will help. It doesn’t help. Nothing helps. I walk to clock out, I can’t feel my feet, I’m floating to the time clock, just go with the motions, just let the robot controlling your body guide you, it’s like pretending to be sober when you are completely drunk. But I am not drunk, I am not under the influence of anything, what if they notice thought and assume I am and I get in trouble?  Once I got home safe and buried myself under my blankets I felt a tiny bit better, and after sleeping I work up more in touch with reality. Still feeling off for a few days but nothing like the first day at work. I question myself on what happened, if I was set into an anxiety, or if there is just still too much I need to deal with. Has me been working on my writing and emotions been affecting me and how do I make that not happen again? I have so much more work to do on myself to continue my journey of healing. I hope I can figure out the emotional triggers of the dissociating and prevent it from happening.

Addicted to Anger

Growing up with dysfunction taught me a lot; from coping skills, to survival instincts as well as emotional addictions to name a few. My anger is a major struggle, not really for me but for those around me. I personally don't mind my anger, I have a very workable love hate relationship with it in fact. The problem with my anger is it hurts other people's feelings, which truthfully I never really gave a fuck about until it was my own children's feelings I hurt. Anger has been a very useful tool for me. Only the closets in my life get to be the brunt of all my hate and rage. Pure true raw fuck you and fuck the world, I'll slit your throat with my words type of hate. The type of  hate that so quickly comes over me like a junkie who just got her next fix, with one less interventionist standing in my way, because this hateful rage is my tool to kick people out of my life. You see...I feel very passionate about my anger as I've always been able to use it in such a way to help me create words, to express emotion, to change, adapt, evolve, and even to protect myself. Of course with that I've also gotten to points in my life where I've felt completely and insanely out of control with my anger and I'll admit I didn't want to feel angry anymore. Yet like an addict I'll still reach for information to piss me off just enough that I can feel justified for my cruel and hatful words just to watch someone I feel hurt by breaking a little inside, to hurt just as they hurt me if not more. Why do I do this? Because I'm fucked up! Because I'm addicted to anger, addicted to pain, addicted to emotion in its purest forms. Yes my mother taught me not to say anything if I didn't have anything nice to say. At the same time my father taught me that daddies aren't always so nice to their children. When you're a child trying to survive you don’t always have choices. You have no control. You're stuck in limbo trying to plan your escape. Every person has a different method that works for them. For me I wrote my way right out of insanity... Or so I thought. Well kind of in some ways I suppose. I spent years and years writing my feelings, well mostly all about my anger and hate for everyone and the whole world. By the time I was able to regain my own independence and control I was actually controlled by this emotion that those people with those fancy college degrees like to call "just a secondary emotion" yeah uuuhh huh..”fuck you and your stupid degrees” is all I ever thought. They don't know me or how I feel! None the less I spent years stewing on ways to word things in such hurtful cruel ways I'd be sure to protect myself when I was able and needed to. So off into destruction of all man kind in the literal since that “men hurt women and I'll hurt them back’ mind set I stomped right into. But you see, right behind my cover of cold icy pent up rage was my loving, warm side. I realized quickly they were at war and I had a major conflict living inside my soul. 

Going into my teen years my anger was constantly labeled as psychological disorders, left and right medications were tossed at me. In counseling they would try and teach me to figure out where in my body I felt angry. To look for the signs on and on but these methods never worked. I went from calm to pissed within seconds, to quickly to catch any warning signs. My anger gets me high, a type of high I cannot explain. I tend to float away so to speak, or detach myself from feelings of a conscience to feel sad or bad for my rage or the nasty words I'm about to spew all over the place. “I have control now” I’d think, “I don't have to take this shit from anyone”. So I got with men who treated me bad because I thought it's what I deserved and I'd teach them! I'd destroy them with my hate. Of course that was never my first intentions, just my second one after they would hurt me. All of this in some type of subconscious coping mechanism I taught myself long ago. This all backfired of course, and I was left with nothing but failure after failure, guilt, and shame for all the damage I caused on the ones I loved. What was I teaching my children? Nothing good was really coming out of my anger when I used it in a way to attack those who hurt me.

I would be lying if I said I am cured from all anger, or even half of the anger I felt. I still am very much an angry person, and I still feel extremely passionate about my anger, with the love hate feelings going on all around it. I still get a rush so to speak when I’m angry. Sometimes I can use the emotional high in a creative constructive way, other times I still have no control and I take it out on those who don’t necessarily deserve it. While other times I can still use it as a protective tool to kick people out of my life and most of the time I am okay with that. I am still working out the wars inside my soul. I see an EMDR specialist counselor who has been helping me work through my anger. The first session that we addressed anger in I had to pick an image of some sort that wasn’t me or directly connected to me that represent anger. I picked the animated Tasmanian devil. I had a buzzer in each hand and my counselor timed the machine causing each buzzer to buzz opposite of each other like a clock; tick tock, tick tock, kind of deal. It helped me to close my eyes, and she said “okay just notice your image” and I could imagine Taz destroying things, yelling, spinning around like he does on the cartoon. After so long she stopped the buzzers and said okay now what do you notice, I told her. Okay good she said, now just notice that, and I realized after so many times of stopping the buzzers and taking a deep breath Taz would change in my imagination. He went from angry, to a little less angry, to sad, and confused, and even lonely, to angry again, to hurt, then confident, and peacefully walking down the trail whistling and hearing the birds sing. It was extremely bazaar to feel the emotions change and evolve. For the following weeks I noticed a difference in what was small triggers to set off my anger didn’t seem to matter anymore and it felt easier to just let it roll off my shoulders. All thought I have so much more work and improvements to make, I feel grateful for this opportunity to learn a better way to aim my anger so it isn’t hurtful to those around me.