Affirming my sanity

My responses to trauma have protected me. With them, I have been unfit for work; they have made me behave in ways which appear unproductive or unhealthy, and I have hated myself for them. Only by loving my own responses can I begin to understand them, find their value, and find a way through the trauma. The names I have for these behaviours frame them as problematic. I want to rename them, to see the value of them; see how they are responses to trauma, not proof I am bad.

I read that the polyvagal theory of Stephen Porges from 1994 is not endorsed by current social neuroscience, but I love his concept of a ventral vagal state. Whatever brain processes are going on, I have experienced a relaxed, engaged way of being with people. Call that social engagement. I seek it at the start of the Quaker meeting, being with these people, here, now, calm, relaxed, receptive to what is in them and what is in me. Possibly, from this state, as a pastoral care Friend I might see the spoken ministry which will bring us together.

I heard of “Fight/flight”, where adrenalin flows, and the body prepares for physical action. Call that active engagement. As I understand it from Iain McGilchrist’s work, the person, having an immediate task to perform, uses the left-brain to perform that task. I am conscious of objects, even perhaps of people, as tools or obstructions rather than as people, or as things in their own right. With a harsh inner critic, I went into this activation to get anything done, at the price of being constantly stressed. However, a single-minded focus on tasks has value.

Then there is freeze, the human/mammal/tetrapod/eukaryote finding nothing it can do to improve its situation so it becomes still. Perhaps “immobilisation” is a stronger state of this; my motivation goes. My inner critic finds that its screaming, to raise up the energy of anger and fear into active engagement, no longer works. I am “depressed”, unable to get myself moving. This is clearly a bad state to be in. It must be my fault. I should snap out of it. It is sick in the sense we condemn, rather than sick in a way that we provide help and care for.

It is withdrawal. It is a sane reaction to an insane situation. It may be a reaction arising from childhood experience: another person reminds me of my parents in such a way that I freeze. It may not relate to my current circumstances. It is a trauma response. My inner critic still rages at me to get up and get on, and I just don’t.

I want to love and value that response. It protected me. In the last fourteen years it has given me the space to relax, find how the inner critic response was not working, and let out my inner light. And now, I want to see when that immobilisation is triggered, and love and accept it. This is where I am. I want not to fear it so much. I want to know what evokes it in me.

I use addictive responses to dull awareness. I am glad I use social media- had I turned to alcohol I might have brain damage by now. The inner critic, panicking, nags me to get up and get on. The nagging does not work any more- I functioned on rage and terror until I stopped. Increasingly, I find things I find beautiful which motivate me by attraction.

Inward Self and Expressive Self

My friend did not share because he would have been performing. I started in performance, and then came to speak more softly, from a vulnerable part. Are these parts of me in conflict?

There is a part that is a performer, that revels in attention and applause. I made an acrostic from my name with affirming words: I have authenticity bravery integrity grace anger intelligence Love. On stage, I affirmed myself. Then I spoke from a softer side, only to say that I can speak from that. Then I looked round the hundreds in the auditorium, and acknowledged their applause, delighting in it.

A one-word title can reveal aspects of these parts of myself. They are vulnerable part and Performer. Neither is inauthentic, just because it is not the other. Each is expressing part of my true self.

I love an audience. I want to inform, entertain, and be appreciated. So I write here. That part of me can seem confident, though in childhood it was shamed out of consciousness much of the time. In ACA, we see the true self or inner child as crushed behind a people-pleasing façade, so it is easier to identify it with that part which speaks softly from a vulnerable sense of communicating my feelings. The Performer in me, enjoying rapport, gains in confidence as it gains practice. It too was crushed, in fear, when I was a child.

ACA values speaking from Self because generally we have crushed our inner Selves. The group gives a space where Self can be nurtured. I want to heal the wounds of Self. I want to please others without sacrificing Self. We might imagine the Performer is part of the façade rather than part of the True Self. It feels confident where the vulnerable bit is not, it feels extravert where the vulnerable part is introverted, masculine when, speaking from the vulnerable part, my voice goes higher and it feels feminine.

When I named other parts Stretcher and Protector, I reconciled them. I hate conflict, and work for reconciliation among other people: I may be able to reconcile parts of myself. Each are acting in my interests as they perceive them.

Perhaps, under it all, I am both vulnerable and confident, introvert and extravert, masculine and feminine. I want a place where that vulnerable part can express itself and play, and Performing has value too. ACA might call the Performer the Inner Teen. Just because they appear so different, does not mean they are in conflict.

ACA gives a space where the vulnerable part may be nurtured, perhaps more than the Performer. The Performer is still Authentic. Nothing I do is inauthentic. It may be hurting, blind, or desperate. It may be suppressing certain aspects of myself to meet more pressing needs. It may create conflict in myself. But it is all Me, all the flow of the biological process I call Abigail. Some of the atoms, some of the ideas are different from last week and a lot are different from twenty years ago and it is still given these names. And some of the things the process does surprise or distress parts of that process. Those parts may judge those acts or thoughts, and produce condemning words.

Condemnation is part of my process understanding itself. The process, I believe, grows and adapts. It is my experience that great distress- trauma- freezes responses, locks away alternatives which might be valuable at another time. The strongest judgment and repression comes from traumatised parts.

There is a Performer, which entertains, persuades, communicates. There is a vulnerable part, which feels feelings deeply, and can express feelings. Both are loving and creative, both authentically Me. I will nourish and cherish both. I seek balance of all my inward parts.

The untamed human

Can I take down all the barriers to Love that I have erected? Can I speak and act from God in me, all the time? I believe I can.

Moving from the idea of God within as Power, to God as Grace, seemed a decisive step. So I sought a meeting with Friends to explore this: not quite a meeting for clearness, as I was not making a decision, but finding that of God- the Light, the Seed- within me.

What is within? Gabrielle Roth talked of a moment, dancing, when she is being danced- the movement comes from something spontaneous, unconscious, liberating- powerful. Anna Akhmatova wrote of “something not known to anyone at all, but wild in the breast for centuries”. Mary Oliver: “Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”. Ladinsky’s Hafiz poems have “The God who only knows four words, and keeps repeating them, saying, ‘Come dance with me’.” This is not Michelangelo’s God in a pink shirt and grey beard, reaching out in Love to us, but a liquid God, flowing and sparkling. If I observed it, I could only say where it had been, not where it is, now. If I surrender to it-

Four Friends. Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. A psychotherapist and a lawyer. Two men, two women. I wanted one of the men to be straight, and he got things that I did not fully articulate. With no false modesty, I asked for, created and received a celebration of Myself, me in my purest form.

In my reclusive life, this is what I do: I find my I Am, and- whatever else there is in me, my internal conflicts. What ought I to do? What do I want to do? The answer surprises me. I wanted to write about the EHRC and the conversion therapy consultation, and I did. It was a lot of work. And I stopped applying for jobs because, while applying was stressful, I did not sense until I was weeping and screaming how stressful it was. Something blocked my awareness. That something is the Trauma.

If I do something freely, I am motivated to do it. If I do it under constraint, I am not. You clean your teeth as a routine part of preparing for the day, or for bed. I clean my teeth to make my mouth feel good, and do it carefully, because it is important. But if I do it because that is the rule, because I am supposed to, there is no life or motivation in it. I might lie in bed all morning, listlessly thinking, I ought to clean my teeth, yet I do not move. This perplexes and distresses me, as my apparently rational being says, of course I ought to clean my teeth, and cannot understand why I don’t. And there is-

something inside so strong

that is so battered, so hurt, that all it can say is, “No”. And it will say “No” until it is heard. Then it says, “I Am”. Then for a long time I was in a stage where it was like a beaten animal, to be managed. My conscious self, apparently rational, would spend some time listening to it, humouring it, so that it would come round, and obey the rules again, so that I would be safe and rational, doing what I ought to do. But somehow it, unruly, unmanageable, saw through this stratagem.

I could not hear God within because of trauma. Imminent fear of death made me willing to do anything to survive. It is not a trauma I remember, only one I have deduced from experiences. Then its guards are active, telling me, that is ridiculous, I am not traumatised, I am pretending or acting.

They tell me no-one will believe me. That is, if I want to assert my ridiculous nothings, I will be completely alone. So all I can say is “No”. As a child, controlled by my mother, the only way I could assert control was to refuse food. So I did, and she fed me a limited diet of beefburgers or rissoles, chips and beans, which I accepted. I don’t remember the negotiation, only its result. That was what I could control, by saying No, and that was the control I was allowed.

As an adult I have found clues, and the clues convince me. They bubble up from my unconscious mind.

With Tina in Southampton, I mentioned that my mother told me I liked it when my pram was placed under a tree, so I looked up and watched the light through the leaves. And- I went back there. I was in the pram, feeling overwhelming rage and terror.

In the Hoffman process, at 6am in February I lay on the ground outside, and imagined I was in my grave. I looked up, and people walked by, looking down at me. Imprisoned lawyer Alasdair Hall said, “Well I’ve never been that low”. Then, lastly, my mother looked down and said “I never wanted you”.

In the film “Ma vie en rose”, a child decides to express as a girl. The family is driven out of their home. Her mother has a nervous breakdown. At the end, the mother accepts her daughter. Seeing that, suddenly I was on the floor, in the foetal position, weeping and wailing. H was concerned.

If I commit to a task, I commit to it completely, not acknowledging any difficulty I have with it. I do not give up until I am dangling on the end of a rope. Realising that was a profound blessing.

To speak of these experiences on Monday, and have my experience accepted, was profound for me. The guards of trauma, who deny my experience, were silenced.

Preparing for the experience over the previous week, I noticed how frightened I was. What if God acted through me, and it harmed me? The Farmington prophecy came through Licia Kuenning’s inner God, which was insane.

On the train, I made a list of what is inside me, what might be in God in me, what might be in ego. A simple taxonomy is a tempting illusion. Anxiety; denial; self-improvement; motivation; survival; pain; refusal; recordings (when I tell a story in the same words); rationality; feelings; suppression from my consciousness; inner critic; professionalism; history; trauma; love; collective unconscious; God; Ego; introjects; presence in the moment; the soft animal of my body; grace. I do not want to expunge anything, I just want it all pulling together.

In the meeting, I spoke and was heard, about my history. One did not see what I meant by rejecting power, but one did. I articulated it after: Grace is powerful, but not an ideal-masculine power. It is not subduing the world to my will, but dancing in blessing, taking what I need from abundance, acknowledging the worth of whoever or whatever I work with.

I recited my Two Souls poem, which they liked.

He leaves behind the master’s role
She welcomes him, and I am whole.

I wrote that in 2003, and it expresses my aim, now.

I had wondered if I wanted to speak from other parts of me, which I believe are not-God. I spoke of seeing other people as beautiful. One asked, are you beautiful? The voice in my head saying you can’t say that was only an echo. It had no real power. I said, Yes. I have wonderful intelligence, humour and expressiveness, and deep wells of compassion.

I said I do what I see is good to do. Then I said “I don’t get paid for it, which bothers me”. I wondered after where that came from. Is it true? Is it from God? Is it from some conventional self which wants to be earning my living? Is it from a male self which needs to surrender and be integrated? I do not know.

On Wednesday I hosted, and Jamie wrote after, “They all adore you (rightly)”.

After, I wrote,

I speak from my integrity.
I act from my integrity.
I do what I want to do.

This utter gorgeousness!
I Am- beauty, wonder, delight.

How could I trust something that could only say No-
only scream No because I could not hear it until it was screaming?
As I trust it, it says more
I let it withdraw, and it acts.
There is still “I” judging, but more and more it fades, judgment goes away.
I within, I choosing emerges.
I am here, now, real, truthful, loving, whole.

I knew what was sensible, what I ought to do,
and God said, No.
I could not do it, as God said No
and I wanted to do it,
I knew it was sensible,
I knew I ought to do it.

I commanded, and God resisted.

So I decided to humour God.
I would listen for a bit,
make God feel better,
get God on side,
then I would tell God what was sensible and God would go along with it.
But this did not work. God still said, “No”.

I despaired.

Then God said, “I Am”.

I do not know what is sensible. I do not know what I ought to do.
What I thought I ought to do is meaningless to me.
And, there is, “I Am”.
I Will Be.

There is the dance.
I only know the dance when I look back, and see what I have danced.
The dance continues.

Becoming the whole self

Trying to make a man of myself was a betrayal. How can I heal that trauma now?

Quakers will be considering trans rights in August, and I am optimistic and pessimistic at once. Possibly we will have a revelation, as we did with equal marriage in 2009. And Quakers can be conflict-avoidant and arrogant, imagining we know best and we can reconcile conflicts. So some well-meaning Quakers might try to find a reasonable middle line between trans people and the anti-trans campaigners. And some Quakers are anti-trans campaigners, imagining themselves good and righteous and wanting all trans women out of women’s spaces, and all treatment for trans children to cease.

I must convince them trans is real.
I fear nothing I can say will be enough.

I thought, if I can show trans people cannot be other, are not making a lifestyle choice but expressing our essence, then they might accept trans rights are at least of equal importance to others’ rights. If we could be other, I would be. I fought to make a man of myself. I paid privately for aversion therapy. I asked a priest to lay hands on me to heal me.

And I am weeping helplessly, wordlessly, convulsed in my pain and grief, screaming and moaning. I fought like that to make a man of myself because the fear of death was in me.

There is a me that just wants to survive
That, with hands round my throat holding me underwater
will do anything.
There is one goal.
What I preserve of myself there is mere life.
Everything else is stripped away.

For the avoidance of doubt, this is a metaphor. Being drowned is the only metaphor that captures the fear for me. It is the small child, dependent on parents, distraught when love is taken away. And, to forgive the betrayal of ceasing to express me, becoming the male-acting automaton, I need to fully acknowledge the threat I experienced. I was forced, and it was not my fault.

That was when I was broken, as a horse is broken.
After, I would do anything to avoid being underwater.
I worked it out, so I did not need telt.
I forgave my mother’s, and the world’s, betrayals:
there is nothing to forgive.
The betrayal I cannot forgive is my own.

I want to be Perfect-me,
that being that does everything I ought to do,
want to do,
would like to do
have to do to survive
effortlessly.
Without perfect me
all I have left is failure and betrayal.

There is no perfect-me. My betrayal of myself was under pressure I could not have borne.

I take a postmodern view of Wisdom-sayings. If it has some meaning or value for me, I accept that, and I don’t care if that is its “true” or “original” meaning. If it’s a proper wisdom-saying, I doubt it could have one true meaning. If it has no meaning for me, I can let it go. Sometimes, when I loathe a wisdom saying, it can be particularly fruitful. I can’t get my head round Jamie’s idea of the “walking permission slips”, being ourselves and allowing others to become themselves too.

I know I am myself
interpreting a statute
comforting a friend in tears
cycling uphill and downhill
confident and assured, or doubting and fearful.
Always there is the sense of threat.

And there’s something there, of being fully aware of the feelings, of being in the doubt and fear without regressing to the traumatised child, who felt fear and shut down. Fear must not be a switch, to turn me off, or to beat me. It must be integrated into my adult self. So there’s another bit to my verse which is true but difficult. I don’t want to say it and it is just cheap consolation.

Oh the beauty and wonder of it
It is too much for me to bear
and it is all glorious.

The glory comes if I can feel the feelings fully, and still function. The glory is in being fully myself, feeling all my feelings. It is not easy.

Then, to a Zoom group. How is S? I saw his email. He is detained in a mental hospital, and desperate to get out. I am pretty sure he needs the anti-psychotics, and he hates them because they mute his spiritual experiences. Right at this moment I sympathise. Feeling the full range of feelings seems insane: people will be shocked and disgusted. I feel disinhibited, tempted to behave inappropriately. I want to stop twitching.

A Black woman went to Kenya when she was twenty, in a gap year, and saw a picture of Jesus Mary and Joseph. She could see it was them, the haloes proved it- and they were Black. It was the first time she had seen such a thing, just in a souvenir shop, hunting at the last moment for tatty souvenirs. It touched her deeply, and she expresses that. And I am feeling all the sense of liberation I imagine could be in that moment. I am remaking myself, closer to the image and likeness of God.

All glorious? I want to insist on that. Everything that is. All of humanity. And one says the larger the church, the more evil can hide in it. Yeah, s’pose. Possibly the glory is me, the full feeling self. And I am not alone.

This is not for everyone. My colleague was born again, and felt liberated from a life of drunken sexual promiscuity. The rules felt protective. She wanted something formal, secure and comforting. And I want something more: the Glory of God, the full glory of my whole self. To be the whole human, and give permission for others to be whole too: answering that of God in every one.

Sunday 16th: before worship, I read various stuff on conversion therapy, including a transphobic lie. I am wound up. Then in worship Dugan quotes QFP 2.12. Suddenly

I am the light. I am the Fullness.

I am the light, noticing, accepting, loving. Rather than descending into that part of me which is wound up, and stewing in it during meeting, or attempting to suppress it, I am the Light, aware of it, noticing, accepting, loving it. Noticing, accepting, loving, all of me- body, thoughts and feelings- and being in the Love. It makes me think of George Fox’s instruction to dwell in the power of life and wisdom. Ministry moves on to the conflict in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. It is hard to hear this in love. Now, there is my reaction and the other person as well, to hold in awareness and to love. Finally there’s the sound of a music keyboard through someone’s zoom account. That’s against the rules. What is he thinking? Still there can be the other person, my reaction, and me in the Light, noticing, accepting, loving all. That would be a dwelling-place of tremendous power. It is something to practice. It is a religious experience this morning, an hour of fabulous wonder, and I want to take it out into all of my life, so it becomes my normal state. I ministered, explaining some of this.

Pain

If you share your pain, you risk three possible responses:

• So what?
• Deal with it.
• Prove it.

And, there are other possibilities:

• You gain sympathy, which is different from pity
• Others agree there is injustice here, and they will work with you against it.

I feel better after sharing my pain if someone says, yes, that should not have happened. You were wronged. That was a mistake. They should have known better.

Eventually I deal with my pain. I suffered sustained bullying at work for six months. I can describe it mostly unemotionally now. It stripped me of self-confidence at the time. It was more than ten years ago. Yet the first three responses leave me vulnerable. If I describe what happened, I want my hearer to accept what I say. Challenges reopen the wounds.

My poet friend said that when she had processed pain, she could use it in her art. She can go on stage and express the feelings which the incidents evoked, and communicate them to an audience- an authentic theatrical experience, a whole room feeling with the performer- because she has processed it. She cannot until she has processed it. The healed pain can be catharsis for the hearers. We feel with the performer, and deal with our own pain, or, we feel with her and gain empathy, gain a broader understanding of what it is to be human.

Yesterday I knelt to meditate, and thought, what am I feeling? Hope. I immediately started second-guessing it. It is after playing Metamorphosis III, which rather than being bright and beautiful is the blaring bombast of the Dictator. Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t; maybe it is an arrangement of chords which can be interpreted as you wish, the harsh sun on the desert or a unique move not in other music. I felt hope, and possibly it was authentic.

Yet sharing pain, at whatever risk, can bring together opposite sides. We see the other as human. There they are, doing their best under difficult circumstances, and our heart goes out to them.

Amos Oz was a child in Jerusalem at the end of the British Mandate, and he was a child hurling stones at soldiers with rifles. It was, he said, the first Intifada, which translates as “shaking off”. Now children throw stones at soldiers, and their oppression is his oppression.

I want to make the thing that hurt me impossible, so that I will never again feel that hurt. It cannot be done. As long as we are alive we may be crushed. I want to heal your hurt without sublimating myself.

Dammit. Put down the shield of your rage! The shell crushes and isolates even as it protects.

Spiritual exercises

To love others, you must love yourself.

I have a lack of confidence, and a deep desire to heal it. I deserve more confidence than I have. Over the last month I have produced a detailed concept of part of myself I now call the Pain-bearer, that part of me that holds the feelings which are too strong for me to bear consciously, and which then stew inside me. Feelings can be fuel, the energy to deal with my problems, or a burden making those problems more intractable.

Perceiving or imagining the Pain-bearer, the ideas came from my unconscious. First I saw a part of me curled in a ball, cowering, broken, head down, hugging herself. I imagined myself sympathising, getting her to uncurl, or perhaps uniting with her. The feeling part of myself is in control. The rational part can offer suggestions but not give orders.

Later I saw her as the Pain-bearer. She is not curled up, but standing, bearing all the burden of my unacknowledged pain without being broken by it.

This morning, I cleaned my living room and especially the rug where I kneel in meditation, my Ritual space, in preparation. I was not clear what would happen, but I was clear that it was important.

Two nights ago my dear friend suggested I join a Zoom webinar spiritual exercise for the Hunters’ Moon. After a visualisation Tina H. asked us to write down the feelings we were bearing, and needed to release. We would then recite the mantra,

I see you, I hear you, I feel you, I thank you
But now it is time to let you go.

Um. I wrote down, Anger Frustration Resentment Fear Rage Terror HURT
Loss of confidence

but did not feel these were the real issue. I was just writing what I had perceived my feelings to be in the past. Even more, I felt that I could not yet let my feelings go; that I had escaped feelings by pushing them onto the Pain-bearer, so if I were to “let go” or even release feelings I would be loading her further. First, I had to integrate the Pain-bearer into myself, to be one, and then when I let feelings go they would be taken from her burden and we/I would be rid of them. I tried to explain this to Tina, but then left the webinar to avoid disrupting it for others. The moon was beautiful, in a clear sky.

This morning, I knelt. I had not thought of writing out my feelings as Tina H. suggested, but did. They came to me in the form of stories. The advice for meditation is to see your wandering thoughts as passing clouds, and let them pass rather than fixating them, but I found my thoughts relevant. They were stories from which the feeling became apparent. For example, as the pre-bought train fares are much more expensive for the next two months, because of Christmas shopping, I imagined myself working out how to come home from London on buses. This revealed confusion and feeling out of control. Some of these feelings were my mother’s too. I wrote:

Terror of not being accepted: Withdraw.
Rejected- Worthless.
Confusion- desperate scrabbling for Plans.
Sadness- now alone from own doing.

I realised that forcing pain onto the Painbearer is clinging on to it. One may bracket feelings, storing them away to be dealt with later, but I do it all the time, and never release. It makes me think of Richard Handley [the link is appalling].

I know what I must do. I wrote,

Cleanse her
Feed her
Warm her
Love her

She is Me.
I am Alive.

---

Love

Possibly, later, I might consciously release, but right now I am feeling content. I spent a quiet day reading, after tidying my books to make my room look better. And- I made a pigeon!

Fight or flight

Of course, fight or flight are not the only responses people have to immediate threat. I find myself freezing. Yet the common phrase for primitive responses to physical danger is “fight or flight”, and this moulds our understanding of those responses. If that is the phrase I know, my different way of responding merely confuses me. I don’t have the words to describe it, so I don’t understand it.

Fight or flight might seem more useful responses. What possible good could come of freezing? Possibly a predator would not notice you; possibly fleeing you would be caught, fighting you would inspire retaliation, so freezing is least bad; yet the others still seem more active to me, and therefore more admirable.

Carl Shubs, PhD, wrote in June 2014 that Popular culture has long recognized three typical patterns of response to experienced or perceived threat: fight, flight, and freeze. Whatever the stories in popular entertainment, the basic phrase was “fight or flight”, as far as I was aware. I had to work out that I was freezing for myself, though I had heard phrases like a rabbit caught in headlights. I knew “fight or flight” are the primitive responses; I came out with a wrong response, and get more confused and ashamed.

If you google “Fight or flight”, you find articles like this pdf from the University of Nottingham. It is aimed at students using the university counselling service, and explains in simple language why you might feel sick in such a situation, and what long term anxiety can do; but it is titled “What is the fight or flight response?” That is, even though psychologists knew people froze, they still wrote about fight or flight, and if you knew no better and searched for that phrase you would not necessarily learn better. That article says The Fight or Flight response evolved to enable us to react with appropriate actions: to run away, to fight, or sometimes freeze to be a less visible target, but otherwise does not mention freezing. Autocompletes in my search box suggest hormone, stress, freeze, hormone, gland, definition.

If you search “fight, flight, freeze” the next suggestion is “fawn”. I posted in facebook, “Fight or flight” is a false understanding. Many people do neither. Instead, we freeze, imagining I was telling people something they didn’t know, or at least putting into words something people had an inkling of but could not express, Luke wrote, Fight, flight, freeze and fawn are the four characteristic responses we recognise in psychosexual somatics therapy. “Fawn”. I had not thought of that at all, but seeing it makes complete sense. Sometimes people use “appease”, going for rhyme rather than alliteration. Most of the threats that frighten us come from other people, though I might try to calm an angry dog.

This post, also from 2014, reassured me. Most of us are already familiar with the concept of the ‘fight or flight’ response to perceived danger… However, there are two other responses to threat which are less well known – the ‘freeze’ response and the ‘fawn’ response. I was behind the curve, but not quite so bad. Some traumatised people have these responses on a hair trigger, and go into them in inappropriate situations.

The fawn type will often go out of their way to help others, perhaps by performing some kind of community service, but without building up emotionally close, or intimate, relationships, due to a fear… of making him/herself vulnerable to painful rejection which would reawaken intense feelings of distress experienced as a result of the original, highly traumatic childhood rejection.

What I see as my good, innate, qualities might be a response to trauma. But- someone’s got to be like that, or society would fall apart.

On popular culture, TV Tropes told me “Fight or Flight” was an episode title in Star Trek: Enterprise, Supergirl, and Burn Notice, and a chapter title in It lives in the woods. Searching for “freeze” was inconclusive, but I learned “damsels”, that is, girlies who exist mainly to be tortured by baddies and rescued by heroes, are particularly bad at fight or flight. Wikipedia has an article “Fight or flight response” which mentions freezing, but only under the heading “Other animals”. Its article on “Freezing behavior” refers to prey animals and animal studies, rather than human responses. “Fight, flight, freeze or fawn” redirects to “Fight or flight”, with no further mention of “fawn”.

Someone else on facebook gave a fifth alternative, “flop”: Freeze is more of an adrenalinised response – the body is tense and ready for action, whereas in flop the whole body is floppy – literally like playing dead and the brain is also shut down. The more words we have to understand threat responses, the more choice we have.

(c) Larne Borough Council; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

To engage with all that I am

Goodness is a bad thing. Goodness is weak.

Why would you want to be “good”? To curry favour, perhaps, to be safe by fitting the rules. For goodness is an external standard, goodness according to someone else. It does not fit reality, your situation or what is the ethical or truthful in that situation. Goodness is slavery.

When I was a solicitor, we acted for a debt collection agency with Scots and English clients. 90% of the debts were recovered without court action, and 90% of the court actions were undefended. I, a second year trainee then a newly qualified solicitor, dealt with the defended actions.

I have some sympathy with the clients. They felt they had fulfilled an order and were entitled to be paid, and I wrote to them saying I needed several senior staff in Inverness or Perth on a particular day to prove it, or I asked them about a defence they thought spurious. I put the defence to them, and some complained to the debt collection agency. The English office wrote to me and said I should not write to their clients direct, but to them, and they would write to their client. They rewrote my questions in their own words, sometimes misunderstanding the point of the question. Getting the letter dictated and typed took days. Then they did the same with the client’s response. I would wait weeks and get a response that was little more use than “They tell us the debtors owe them the money”.

There are risks in this. You might be able to settle the day before a hearing, but you might not. The creditor might not accept half the debt in full and final settlement. The debtor might sense weakness and not make an offer- one defender’s solicitor refused to negotiate, saying I had attempted to bully him. I am a careful soul, I like to dot all the ts and cross all the is, and found this stressful. The partner could have backed me up, but he was a chancer. Later he was sent to prison.

I joked to him Responsibility without power- the plight of the cuckold through the ages. But I did not analyse it clearly enough: we should have warned the agency, our client, of the risks of their policy. I don’t know whether we did. Instead, I tried to make it work, pursuing a claim without enough information. In the end I got sacked over some other error, but I am sure the stress of this contributed to that error. And now I notice the hindsight: I was not good enough to make that work. I should have done something else. Or Alistair should have. It is my bad qualities, such as lack of resilience, and even my agreeableness, not wanting to confront, was weakness in that situation.

At this point a sign comes up on the screen that there is an internet connection problem and Skype will try to restore the connection- but I can still see her movements, and we can hear each other, so that appears untrue. We carry on talking, hoping we will continue to be able to. Eventually the sign goes away.

Is agreeableness a bad thing? I should have more self-respect, more care for my own rights and well-being. Whether the problem is my neither making that system work, nor changing it, the problem is my failure and my inability to see, my bad qualities. Hindsight is a curse unless mixed with forgiveness.

I have told of that man before. He was a pitiable creature, but I felt disgust first. Before I saw him Andy told me he was a paedophile, and when I met him he put on the table a key ring with two or three keys and about five fobs, each with a picture of a child in it. I could not take my eyes off the keyring. I had to ask him to put it away, it revolted me so much. He said it was his grandchildren. What had he been in prison for? “USI”, he said, as if that were an abbreviation everyone would understand- underage sexual intercourse.

Later he phoned me and complained about various things, but I could not find what had gone on. Security guards had ejected him from the hospital, and he wanted to complain, but I could not find out what had happened. After twenty minutes, I asked him what he thought I could do for him, and he said,

“I want you to make it so I don’t have to fear any more.”

My heart went out to him. I wanted that too. Others would see him as a paedophile, and the important thing to prevent him from being a threat to vulnerable children. I saw him as a vulnerable human, lonely and frightened. For the avoidance of doubt, I would want to protect children from him- but not by destroying him.

Soft-heartedness is a bad thing? It is Love. Love is not a bad thing. Love is me, and I am Love. I would not be other than I am. But caring can make life difficult.

Soft-heartedness can be a bad thing, but when people lost their benefits they wanted someone to sympathise, and did not want to answer my questions until I showed I did. And they wanted to tell me the problem the way they saw it. I had strict time limits imposed by the Legal Services Commission, but my attempts at robotic time-limiting, insisting on my own questions, did not actually save time. Sympathy oiled the wheels.

I might slough off “goodness” for integrity. I was inadequate to the challenges.

-Being a person of great intellect and deep emotion is a bugger, she says.

As usual at this time in the session, my intellect seems to be bringing it all together, just one piece missing or one piece too many, and I change it slightly then desperately and my incipient Great Understanding all falls to pieces again. How could I either bring together that Intellect and Feeling, or separate them?

-I see you as a person of honour, integrity, intellect, deep feelings and distress, she says. What steps can you take, so that you can engage with all that you are?

Confidence, acceptance, belief? Trust?

Affirmation IV

I am as I am because I am traumatised.

I could trot out my stories again, to try to persuade you- that is, persuade myself- that it really was that bad, that anyone in these circumstances would be this hurt. But that does not matter. If any person of more than minimal resilience could bear my burdens, hardly noticing them, they have still overwhelmed me. However strong I was, I have been overwhelmed.

Now, having self-respect for the first time, I no longer deny my trauma. “Get up, get up, Get On With It!” cried the inner critic, and I reply that I would if I could. I had a lovely time this morning: I cycled in the sunshine to Swanston for tea with Richard, who complained that the OED has accepted the “wrong” use of the word “refute” to mean “deny”. I can cope with complex human interaction.

These stories: serious threat of loss of funding and job; bullying and failure; failure; failure and loss of funding and job; failure. Ah, that’s interesting. Thinking of this post, I was planning to talk about various unpleasantnesses, but I am quite happy in certain social situations and even with Quakers. However I am quite literally work-shy, though that term is a pejorative, rarely or never thought to be a mental condition. The thought of going into an office, paid or voluntary, or starting the kind of project I used to undertake puts me into avoidance behaviour. I called this post “Affirmation” and thought of writing about how I was going to self-care by seeking out social situations. This realisation changes things.

I am Abigail.
I have been badly hurt.
I will care for,
nurture
and value myself
as best I see how.

 ♥♥♥

And then, something wonderful, and passing strange.

I am- upset. Sad, and likely to weep, without knowing why. And-

part of me-

asks, What is it? Something existential about my whole life, or some small matter just today?

That- part- is not unsympathetic, but still misses the mark. It is like a man seeing his wife crying, and asking “What’s wrong?” However kindly meant, his intention to find the cause of the problem and fix it is not right, in the moment.

I think of Robert Holden’s mirror exercise. “I am willing to make today the best/happiest day of my life.” Perhaps “let be” might be better than “make”. I want to let go of judgment as to what “best” might look like. What

part of me-

is doing the making?
In the shower, again. I permit the feeling of upsetness. Then,

Another part of me!
A wonderful part of me!
Beauty and Delight

in the upsetness
starts saying

I

I

I- I- I- I- I- 

I- AM! I- AM!

feeling the upsetness
permitting the upsetness

I am!

I- beauty and delight- repeat

I am

feeling the upsetness, then joy, and finally singing it, to a simple I , , , V , , , IV , , , V , , , … chord progression, bass line and descant, dancing to it….

I Am
is the only affirmation I need