Day 10 SEP

So it's very hard not to get frustrated during this process. Every night I go to bed exhausted and sore and every morning I wake up exhausted and sore. This frequent urination at night time that's been happening for months is starting to drive me a little crazy. On a good night I'll have to get up about six times to use the washroom and on a bad night it's over a dozen. I don't get solid sleep and it's really affecting my mood during the day on top of the pain in my neck back and hips. It's relentless. I don't understand why I have stretches of a few weeks of very mild pain but then it'll come back with a vengeance. Then I'm left feeling that all the journalling and reading and learning and work I've been doing was for nothing when the pain comes back. I can't help but feel like this is going to be my life forever. It's very discouraging to say the least! I've been trying to learn my limits and to not over do it during the day and practice self-care but when you're a single mother with no family and no car my to do list of things that are Necessities that I must get done is too much and it adds stress which creates more pain. So every day I only do what must be done and not what I would like to do but even that is too much but I can't throw in the towel and it's creating a lot of rage. Excuse my Italian but I am getting increasingly f****** pissed off over here. My childhood was awful. Was raised by a single mother who was addicted to drugs. Moved 24 times and went to 21 different schools. I got bullied at almost all of them. I was always the new kid and was trying to fit in but everybody else already had their groups and there was no room for me. Became homeless at 15 years old after getting out of Children's Aid got caught up in drugs and partying ended up getting raped on the street. My life was going nowhere fast. I continued doing drugs and drinking everyday from age 13 to 25. My own mother was the first one to give me my first drug at 13 years old. It was acid. Mother of the year I know. It snowballed from there and I started dabbling in ecstasy cocaine Percocets morphine oxy's Valium Special K magic mushrooms and a s*** ton of alcohol. No wonder my brain is screwed up today. But after all those years of being an addict and following in my mother's footsteps I quit everything cold turkey back in October of 2011. The year I got pregnant. And I haven't looked back since. I now have my own apartment, I went back to school and got my grade 12 at least, my baby was born healthy, and most importantly I'm completely sober and I'm not repeating the cycle of my childhood with my daughter. The reason I say this while I'm crying is because I feel like this chronic pain that I'm going through is the thanks I get for doing a 180 to give my daughter the kind of Mother that I needed as a child. I deliberately stopped using all drugs because I didn't want to be like my mom but I never thought that I would be dealing with this chronic pain that still leaves my daughter stuck with a mother who is not at her best mentally even though it's not from drugs and it's from the pain. Battling sobriety is a job in itself and then the chronic pain makes me so depressed but now I have nothing to numb myself with because I refuse to take drugs so I'm doing all of this unmedicated and I'm extremely pissed off. I know that this kind of turned into a big rant about a bit of my life but I needed to get this off my chest. While I'm struggling everyday still and trying to heal the parts of me that my mom has broke my mother is absent and she lives right down the street which creates a lot more rage. She never visits she never calls to see how her granddaughter is doing. It's like she's already dead. I'm livid and I know all this anger and hurt and sadness and frustration is feeding my pain but I don't know how to break the cycle.

 

Jodie, I'm so sorry. There's no way I can even comprehend what you are experiencing, but since here is where you're at, I will do my best!

First:
Day 10 - don't despair! major setbacks that start sometime after the first seven days or so are REALLY common! This is your primitive "survival at all costs" brain in panic mode, fighting back against the risk that you will really truly access your deepest so-far-unacknowledged emotions. You have to understand that your primitive brain is doing this from, seriously, a primitive-world point of view, with NO understanding of the infinite number of intangible stresses of the modern world, or of the fact that the modern world, for most of us, is actually physically quite safe, with very few tangible threats.

It literally does not know the difference between someone who cuts you off in traffic and a sabre-tooth tiger waiting to eat you. It is afraid that if you are wallowing in deep repressed emotions, that you won't pay attention to the tiger.

I don't know if this can help, but if you could turn this around and have some compassion for your poor primitive survival brain, it might at least remove a layer of resentment from your current emotional state. Nicole Sachs is great on this topic - which is understanding where your primitive brain is coming from. One way she puts it is that "life is a choice between what hurts, and what hurts worse".

So what does your brain think will hurt worse than giving you symptoms?

Clearly you have rage regarding your mother, which is totally appropriate, of course. Her behavior is unforgivable, and should not be forgiven - but I wonder if you are able to forgive her (not her behavior) out of pity for her inability to cope with whatever it was that she had to deal with as a child? You can do this at the same time that you continue to celebrate your success in breaking this cycle - proving that a f***ed up childhood does not have an inevitable outcome! Don't just give yourself credit while you rage at her. Stop and LOVE yourself for this. Every day. Multiple times a day!

But that doesn't answer the question: What hurts worse than physical symptoms?

Some of the best work that I personally did was a meditation where I was able to visualize and experience myself as a very young child once again, craving and receiving the love and nurturing of my mother. The experience was hard to grasp, and kind of fleeting, but I think the good part of it was that I felt vulnerable in a way that my parents never encouraged (and as the oldest of four children, whatever nurturing I receiving early on was rudely severed as soon as #2 came along, followed by two more) and I finally understood what I had been missing since those early days.

I am very aware that this is hardly on the level of dysfunction that you experienced, which is why I think it may be even more important for you. Many people have reported that when they open themselves up to this infant desire to be nurtured, that it releases a deep ability to finally grieve what has been lost. And what has been lost is profound when your parent has completely broken the implicit contract that they made when they brought a child into the world - the contract to love and, above all, protect that child. Every child has the right to expect love and protection, and when the parent fails to provide love and protection, the end result is profound abandonment and isolation.

Is it possible that your brain thinks that you can survive some physical symptoms rather than really feel the abandonment that you experienced as a child? Because to do so would be deeply distracting - so distracting that you might not see the tiger. And THAT is what it thinks it is protecting you from.