Dear Brian:

Your second post is very helpful to me in understanding your situation. It is that energy, that trauma energy from your childhood still trapped in your brain/ body that gets re-activated as you anticipate the noises or otherwise hear them. When you anticipate or hear the noises you get aroused: heart beating faster/ breathing shallower and faster/ body temperature rising/ mind racing.

You are doing all the right things to soothe yourself. I will add one aspect that I became aware of only lately, as I deal with traumatic energy myself. Once you are aroused by that energy, the arousal itself, those symptoms I mentioned, any or all, are in themselves arousing, troubling. The brain feels you are in danger because you experience these symptoms. this is the part where I was lost. I kept looking for the THOUGHT that triggered/ aroused me. Often it was the arousal itself that perpetuated more arousal.

I agree with parts of Walking the Tiger, the book in explaining what I tried to explain in the above paragraph. Parts of the book helped me understand trauma better.

One more thing: can you CREATE a good parent image in you, create an “inner parent” so to speak that you can talk to and who will talk to you in the ways that you need, comforting and soothing you?

anita

Hi Brian,

Why not just ask them to keep it down? Usually in an apartment building there is an understanding of ‘quiet hours’, like after 10pm people are supposed to shut the f— up. I had a similar issue in my building the first week I moved in about six years ago and I complained to the landlord. And it worked. (an ps, ummm that’s their job…) And there was no backlash or any issue afterwords.

No one likes noise, especially late at night. Why should you have to put up with it?

Good luck!
Pink:)

Dear Brian:

i just looked at the book I wrote to you about (I agree with only part of it). I will try to relate the part of it that I agree with- to what you wrote about yourself: you (and I and every human) are a human-animal. When you were attacked (abused) as a child, like any other animal under attack, or anticipating an attack, were aroused with the energy of Fight or Flight (or Freeze which in nature is temporary and leads to Fight or Flight after thawing). When animals do either their arousal energy completely discharges and the animal, in the wild, does not become traumatized. Brian in his abusive home was attacked, aroused but did not discharge that energy beccause you did not Fight or Flee. This energy is trapped in your brain/ body and has caused all kinds of symptoms which are like safety valve, where the body will take any which way to (partially) release some of all that excess energy so to keep going.

When you hear the noises from the neighbors, or anticipate the noises, that energy re-activates and you are aroused. Somehow, that energy needs to be released. How? This is where I disagree with the book and don’t even follow the “solution.” But what i do get is that a re-living of the traumatic events of childhood is not effective. This is what I found effective: as I become aroused myself, as the traumatic energy becomes activated, I see in my mind’s eye an image of a mother that I created (recently)- she is there to help me AND I do something else, or I did, the other night: I remembered a traumatic event, was activated but not overwhelmed (the image of the created mother was there to comfort me) and I completed the remembered event by standing up to myself. I augmented the memory with an ending of my choosing, an ending that could have then discharged the intense arousal energy then. By remembering and adding an ending to the memory- i experienced some discharge and slept very well that night.

This kind of discharge, I intend to experiment further with it- but GENTLY, nothing extreme- that will be re-traumatizing myself, so I read. Gentle, like creating an ending to a memory.

anita

Dear Brian:

I feel nice that you created a soothing parent last night … and that you had a good conversation with the neighbors. Regarding the creating part, this is what can make the difference between automatic re-experiencing trauma and healing trauma, our ability to be creative, to create. I figured, no that I am in no contact with my real mother- all I have in my mind is the image of her. When I created my chosen mother, still, it is an image in my brain. My chosen image of a mother is way more authentic to who I am than the image of the biological mother because it is I who created the chosen one.

I hope you experiment with your soothing parent creation again and again and not give up if at any one time it didn’t produce the satisfactory results. After all nobody expects a real-life parent to be perfect, only good-enough. Same courtesy should be extended to a created parent, says I.

anita