The first excerpt from my book and some additional notes

The human body is a system that is built to have a lot of different things going on at once that are supposed to work together to keep all of the systems in synergy. Believe it or not, our bodies crave that synergy. There are inevitably things that happen to all of us, even on a daily basis, that threaten to pull us out of that synergy. If that balance becomes off in one direction or another and things become too much, part of us that we have no control over comes online and takes over completely. When these systems are activated for the first time they can be considered protective factors, inherent things inside of us that say “this is too much, lets get to work and take care of it” but in time, these protective factors can start to hurt us more than they are helping us, and that is where my story begins. 

Notes: These protective factors are something that I like to describe as automatic coping skills. They aren’t skills that you have to take time to learn like some other skills but rather they are hard wired into the biology of your body. Whatever is considered “normal” to any given person will determine their synergy or baseline. When an event or a pattern of events pulls us out of that baseline, sometimes this automatic system will get triggered and come online. I have been experiencing that system in my life over the last few weeks as my body attempts to shield me from the full breadth of the grief I have recently been through. For some period of time, these systems act as protective factors and are quite necessary for us to continue moving forward. If I felt the full expanse of the grief I had inside me I wouldn’t be able to take care of myself, my home, my animals, or continue to go to work so it has to get compartmentalized to a degree in order to keep putting one foot in front of the other. This system wide protection is great but it does literally shield us from at least some part of our emotional experience. If those emotions are left unprocessed for too long, they will start to do us harm. Unrealized or unprocessed emotions do not just go away. They all stay inside of you, and if you collect enough of them can really start to take a toll on your mental health.

The Beginning:

I woke up one day (I don’t remember the day only the feeling I had at the time) and by woke up I don’t mean physically woke up from sleeping but more of a metaphorical waking. It was like everything I had been running from had suddenly become too much and there was no longer a possibility of continuing that cycle. My body telling me, we can’t keep ignoring what is going on inside. I had been picking at my arms for about a year or more (picking at the people around me for much much longer), looking down at them, scanning, looking for imperfections. Once I found a perceived imperfection or bump, the process of picking at it began. It had become compulsive at this point, any slight feeling of mental discomfort led to my eyes going to my arm and my arm lifting up to start attacking my own skin. I would do this, oftentimes to the point of bleeding and that tiny moment of pain was revolutionary. It became addictive, the relief I felt from that pain, from picking the bump and then watching it scab and then picking the scab over and over and over again only to watch a tiny scar form. A physical reminder of all of the internal scars I’ve been working on building over the years. You can apply this sentiment almost literally to the relationships I had had in my life up until this point. Picking at them to a point that they started to not be able to stand me anymore only to tell myself after “Well, this is proof that I can’t trust anyone and it’s better to just be alone forever”

This day I woke up, I knew it was time to stop running away, to stop picking at myself and start looking inward to figure out what was causing this compulsion in the first place. The funny thing about all of this is that intellectually I knew what the picking was all about, what was causing it. What I didn’t know, was everything else that would come out as a result of talking about the one thing I thought was to blame for everything else. 

Notes: At the time I started my healing journey my body had been engaging in these automatic protective factors for such a long time that I had endured a significant amount of memory loss. Even now, 8 years into my healing, I still have yet to connect to all of my memories and still have with processing memories into my long-term memory. Due to all of this memory loss and dissociation I had a pretty good idea of what the event was that was causing me all the distress I was experiencing. What I did not realize at the time was that that event, while, yes, being one of the most traumatic, was also the only one I could even remember at the time. That is where the last line in this paragraph comes from “What I didn’t know, was everything else that would come out as a result of talking about the one thing I thought was to blame for everything else.” It was much like that photo you are shown in school of the iceberg and the small amount you can see on the surface you believe is the size of the iceberg but it isn’t until you poke your head underwater you are able to fully see the size of it.