I was going to write about my experience of chronic pain and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) separately but changed my mind.
I find myself re-reading that sentence and trying to decide whether I'm more likely to flinch if I have two more pages to write instead of one or if I try to combine all that pain into one pile. Yikes!
I'm trying to find a place to grab on to my pain and trauma. I've started about 6 different paragraphs in my head, get three sentences in, and lose my grip.
Perhaps that's the first thing I need to say. Trauma and pain desperately need to be shared, talked about, chewed over like cud until they are digestible or at least excrete-able. And in my experience, the more intense that need is, the less the capacity I have to process or share it.
Ok, instead of narrating here, let me simply start listing links. Maybe after I put in a pile everything I've already said, something will come.
Flavors of pain
Criticised
Harrowed
Self Portrait
My pain, my dream
Body bowl
Something comes. All these works, all these pieces about my body, they are my way of trying to give voice to the unspeakable, to embody my story.
Keeping body and soul together- that has literally been the task of my healing angel and my art. In bright colored wax and baked hard dirt, in the remains of burned out fires and ripped scraps of paper, in melted minerals and thumbprints and smudges and seeds and hair and Mylar balloons and salt- in every piece is me trying to tell myself my story.
Wide
Hope
Unbreached
My hair cut in mourning
It was all in my head
Now a link to my blog, Amy's Healing Garden. I have been writing for 18 months with an audience of 5 people. Now I am ready to share my garden. I need to put it all on the table. You are welcome to read anything in the blog or nothing. I do hope that one other person suffering chronic pain and PTSD finds some solace here.
Reflections on my experience of chronic pain and post traumatic stress
First, let me restate what I said above.
``You might have talked to me more when you came to dinner.''
``A man who had felt less, might.''
Elizabeth and Darcy
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
The more intense the pain and terror, the more that needs to be said and the less I can say.
Second, I see that my healing journey is not a linear one but more like a bubble diagram where things connect and dead end and loop around the outside to link opposite parts, all simultaneously. Maybe this is partly my style but I suspect that this is the nature of overwhelming experiences like pain and trauma that we have to keep coming at them from many angles over time. Backing into it obliquely while whistling oh so very casually and looking the other direction.
Third- which if I were drawing those bubble diagram lines would connect with both 1 and 2- I find it difficult to stay grounded in my life. I find it hard to stay present in my body and in my own day-to-day experiences. I don't do drugs or drink alcohol which is at least in part because feeling out of control of my body triggers my anxiety. I do read and watch movies and tv shows excessively. I will check emails and blogs too much sometimes and I simply haven't permitted myself a cell phone because it seems way too seductive a disassociating tool for me. I find academics and work to be great escapes and also an antidote to the general feeling of meaninglessness in it all. I have also been co-dependent, meddling in other people's lives as a way to escape my own.
Wow, that was so accurate that I actually could feel my stress rising and had to take a break and watch a couple episodes of a tv show. That would be funny if I were making a joke but it's only too true.
My chronic pain and anxiety are both a cause and effect of my difficulty staying present. One example is back in my 20's, I took Advil and aspirin, more than 10 each per day, to deal with my chronic back pain which then lead to stomach pain and nausea which then lead organ distress which lead to more pain meds. Because of my pain, I lived from my neck up in a world of ideas which further ignored my body's legitimate needs which lead to more pain. Walking hurt. Bike riding hurt. I was uncoordinated. So I exercised less, slouched and slumped, and engaged in the activities like keyboarding and holding books which continued to hunch me up which weakened muscles even more so every activity hurt more. I felt profoundly unsafe in the world and being sexually desirable was deadly so I gained weight to distance and pad myself. When I lost weight I lost too much too quickly and gave myself gall stones. You get the picture.
In no particular order, here is a list of things that help me embody:
- cooking from scratch
- eating veggies from a Community Sustained Agriculture share, my favorite: La Finca
- body work, all kinds including: acupuncture, chiropractic, NET, shiatsu, cranio-sacral, massage
- walking especially in the sunshine and breeze
- doing art
- laughing
- crying
- The North Shore
- nature, rocks and plants
- good smells, especially Stargazer lilies
- yoga
- personal retreats away from people