K,

You asked about when I decided to quite my training for marathons and bike rides.  I just got tired of doing it.  I stopped enjoying the training and the physical toll it took on me.  I wanted time to do other things.

You also ask what are some of things that make me truly happy with that feeling of “Wow.”  I am still working to allow that in me.  I perceive or judge myself by having a damped down sense of excitement and joy.  My emotional range is not as wide as I would like.  I don’t get really angry or really happy.  When I feel pain, I now want to really feel it and sit with it to notice and be with it, to fully get into it.  I do so partly because I want to feel the opposite as well, i.e. to really feel happiness and joy for unless I feel deeply with either emotion then I cannot really feel well.

I pay attention when I cry.  I like when I cry for I believe that taps what is important and deep for me.  I cry when I talk about my children.  I pay attention when I laugh as well.

Insofar as activities that bring me that “Wow” feeling, I love dancing to live music with wild abandon with others who are enjoying themselves as well.  I know that whatever I do, it is the company I keep that makes the activity fun and enjoyable.  I can do something really great but without someone to share the experience with, it does not shine as bright for me.

Thanks for asking.  This is something that I have been working on for years and been very conscious about getting more of.

Mark

Dear K:

You wrote about the time you were grounded, usually a week per grounding, meaning you stayed all day in your room with your toys. No interactions with parents or friends, pets or any person. No tv, no computer games, only you and toys: “The one thing I wish I could have utilized in more positive ways” was your mind, that is, your brain. You wrote that you wish that as a child, you were able to “leverage (your) mindset out of such a bleak outlook, to shift it to a golden, abundant world of excitement and possibilities, to find the humor in the situation somehow”-

You have very unrealistic and impossible to achieve retroactive expectations of the child and teenager that you were when grounded. As a child, your brain automatically, instinctively did all that it could to survive your imprisonment. The misery you suffered while imprisoned was a result of the best your brain was capable of doing, and it is the best any brain of any child is or would be capable of doing.

Your imprisonment was a terribly bleak experience, how can you not have “a bleak outlook”?

Your brain imagined wonderful things best it could, but in the eternity of imprisonment, of isolation, imagination can only go this far.

For the purpose of moving on from your childhood experience of imprisonment, you have to understand that indeed you were imprisoned, that indeed reality was bleak and that none of it was your doing. You were a victim of severe abuse.

“My parents really did give me a great childhood and always tried hard to provide me with such nice memories, things to look forward to, and a warm & cozy home”-

A warm and cozy home, a great childhood, nice memories, things to look forward to- a child remembers and focuses best she can on the positives and forgets best she can the negatives. Even when the negatives are horrendous, the brain still forgets that best it can and remember the warm, cozy, great, nice. As I wrote to you above, your brain automatically did its best to .. make the best out of your childhood experience by forgetting the bad, remembering and focusing on the good.

Unless and until we see our past as-it-really was, unless we see it as bad as it was, we keep reliving the bad parts. The bad parts of our childhood need to be seen, need to be acknowledged. They will not go away until we fully see what was really our experience then, what really happened.

Let’s look at what really happened, let’s look at what your experience was as a child, being imprisoned for about a week per imprisonment:

1) You were sedentary, limited to one room, no playground where to run and play, no children to play with, no.. pool to swim in, a soccer field to play soccer and so on. There was no walking from a living room to the kitchen. There was only that one room, four walls closing in on you. You must have spent a lot of time in bed, lying down, sometimes sitting. Fast forward, you are reliving your sedentary imprisoned experience: “Sometimes I spend my time after work and some of my weekends being pretty sedentary… I’m not sure if it is normal for someone my age (early 30s female) to lay in bed so much and just relax… I feel odd being sedentary so much”.

2) You cried hard, and a lot. But not all the times, as it is impossible. You cried a lot and then stopped crying, played with toys, cried again, then fell asleep and then cried again. Fast forward, as an adult: “I continue sometimes to spend some nights in a stupefied crying haze where I wonder how it is possible to cry so hard and not die or something. But then I wipe my tears away and go to sleep or get on with my life”.

3) Frustrated and exasperated, you screamed at times at the top of your lungs, not all the time, because it is not possible to scream non stop. You screamed, then lay in bed, or on the floor, or carpet. Fast forward: “Sometimes I scream at the top of my lungs in the car and in the apartment because I am just so frustrated and exasperated. Then I get over it”.

4) You missed your parents a lot. You didn’t want to be away from them. Fast forward: “Last year I moved 2,500 miles away.. from our families. I miss them dearly”- you missed them as a child while in their home, while they imprisoned you in their own home, and you miss them now.

5) You were very, very sad. Fast forward: “I have had bouts with what I guess is depression”.

6) When imprisoned, you experienced a sensory underload, that is, no tv, no computer games, no friends, just you and inanimate toys. When your mother freed you from a weekly imprisonment, you suffered a sensory overload- you were out of the one room and into a big home, with people, a tv and outside life. Fast forward: “I feel so drained from constant talking and sensory overload”.

7) Imprisoned, experiencing a sensory underload, and feeling such intense misery, feeding times were the highlight of the day, your rare opportunity to experience pleasure. But the sensory input of smell and taste and the feel of the texture of food were overwhelming, creating the sensory overload experience. This sensory overload experience of eating meant you ate in a rushed way, like a hungry wolf in the wild, perhaps. Feeling very excited, too excited to slow down and practice table manners. Fast forward: “I am ashamed a lot of the times of my manners, I am afraid of people seeing me eat sometimes..Sometimes, I eat in secrecy in the bathroom… I wish I would allow myself the pleasure of eating nicely”.

8) A young animal separated from its parent automatically, instinctively experiences great fear, the fear of death. Because in nature, a young without its mother is likely to die. The fear motivates the animal to cry out for help so that the parent will return, and to  otherwise look for and reunite with the parent.

You were separated from your parents. You instinctively experienced fear. You cried and screamed and made noise, but no one came for you, to rescue you. The fear therefore stayed and became anxiety. Fear became an ongoing experience. Sometimes, your brain took breaks from that very distressing emotion,  daydreaming and imagining and playing with toys, but fear was there all along and you felt it again and again. This ongoing state of anxiety is very tiring, draining, exhausting, the brain feels hazy, foggy, it is difficult to focus and it feels weird. The person is exhausted and is motivated to rest, to avoid any stressful activities and relax instead. Fast forward: “I have gone through many years of my life feeling in a hazy.. state off and on… sometimes I do notice if I am not in the right frame of mind… I don’t know what to say, and my eye contact is quick, sporadic, all over the room to avoid making steady contact with the other person.. I feel stuck and so tired all the time”.

Imprisoned each time for about a week, you experienced the following: “I felt powerless and hopeless. Felt like my life was bleak and over with even though I was very little. I felt like I was hopelessly in despair and had nothing to look forward to”- the combination of fear for a long time that looks like eternity, crying for help and rescue repeatedly but not being helped or rescued, brings about this despair that you felt then. It is this despair that you keep experiencing.

People who are anxious don’t tend to open up to people, form and maintain intimate relationships: “I don’t make friends easily…I don’t allow myself to open up too deeply. It is all kept light and superficial”. People who are anxious also tend to “stay in uncomfortable jobs and relationships for far too long”.

9) When your mother set you free following about a week of imprisonment, you felt very happy and you tried very hard to not be imprisoned again, but no matter how hard you tried, it happened yet again and you never felt safe again. Maybe your mother expected you to act happy, to not complain and if she did, you tried your hardest to act happy. Fast forward: “on the outside I am usually such a bubbly, smiley person… pretty chill and friendly usually”. And indeed in your own thread, you’ve been very friendly and engaging with members who replied to you.

10) Children take responsibility, blaming themselves for the abuse they receive, you did that when you were abused, imprisoned, that is, and you still do: “I feel like it has always  been my own fault for feeling so lonely and miserable… I am not sur why I have felt like such an outcast weirdo most of my life”.

anita

Hi K,

Thank you for your kindness.

We all make choices hundreds of times every day.  What to eat, what to wear, what time to get up, who to see, who to phone, which room to clean and so on.  There is little point in regretting our choices – we don’t know what would have happened if we had made a different choice.  Ultimately, the path we go down through our choices is a path of learning.  Always.  The more difficult the path, the more opportunity there is to learn.  Following the ‘path of least resistance’ is going with the flow, flowing with life.  Air flows through us, water flows through us, fire flows through us, earth flows through us.  “Air my body, fire my spirit, earth my body, water my blood.”  I sometimes use this as a way of bringing me back into balance, chanting it to myself when I’m out walking.

With regard to anger, this arises when someone is behaving in a way that we don’t expect them to.  You are already expressing this when you shout, scream and cry.  I think your answer lies in forgiving those around you that have hurt you.  If you do sit with your anger, sit with forgiveness as well.  I can’t stress strongly enough that this is for your benefit.  Sustained anger is very damaging to your health.

You wrote to Mark that you cry when you talk about your children yet in an earlier post you said you have no children.  Also, are you distant from your fiance?

Peggy

Hi K,

When I said are you distant from your partner, I meant were you living apart.  I wasn’t questioning your relationship with him.  I am sorry if that came over in the wrong way.  I also typed “air my body” instead of “air my breath”.  So, it should have read “Air my breath, fire my spirit, earth my body, water my blood”.

In its deeper sense, it is a way of connecting with the Universe and recognizing that we are all an integral part of the whole and that the divine nature of man/woman is that we are all spirits living within a body which needs air, water, fire and earth to survive.

Peggy