Rings around the moon.

 One of my favourite words! OK, let's go. Where am I? I'm below ventral vagal and above sympathetic in the zone called 'challenged' which is a pretty good place actually. Let me explain - I read a post a while ago criticising Porges polyvagal theory and so I headed off to download papers, to read blogs, to get a handle (Gendlin!) on what this criticism of a theory that actually proved incredibly helpful to me, is all about. Oh! Nothing but a storm in a tea cup actually. Gets people excited. Upsets some therapists. But fundamentally, total waste of time - the criticisms I mean. Unless you are going to do more research? And if you are a therapist the answer is probably no - since research means cutting up animals. Between clients? Seriously! It doesn't change anything if you too find that reptiles have a ventral presenting vagus nerve. Simply means that they have a ventral branch too. Perhaps they can be more sociable than the people who cut up animals believed? I per...

Process mapping was useful. I will have more to say about it, a separate page for later. Right now? Triggered to hell. What I know is, I don't have any good associations with this stress state. This is the one in which the person feels as if they are crawling with ants, inside one's body, all across my skin. Ripples of anger that my husband simply jumped from one family to another in response to this, first time around. I don't care how bad things get, I would find the memory of just leaving my family because my son is suffering from psychosis hard to live with!  So, ok.  Here I still am. Accessing memories of playing Half Life and Doom 3. Knowing that in those chosen fear states the important thing is to have a protocol and save points.  I can understand my son's rage when I'm here, thinking of my husband and his lying. There is a magnification, intensification of pain with this stress state. Being acutely aware of other people's inability to see and to be dow...

After gathering information on what you do, and how the experience of doing, being, as you do it - gives or takes your energy and attention. The next dimension of the map is to notice which of the three autonomic nervous system states is managing, directing, your energy and attention. Ok, state one is a primal on off. This is where endogenous opiates come in. This is the place cult leaders send cult members by causing terror, paranoia and love bombing. Outcome? Disorganised attachment. Down here we have dissociation, being petrified, zoning out, bewilderment, confusion, word salad. There are a whole set of physiological effects too. Memories created under this state will not make sense. Reality is vanishing, strobing. Thinking produces weird effects. Overall there is paralysis. Curiously many people find a way to live here - this isn't good. The pathway out of state one leads through state 2. Fight, flight. A person between 1 and 2 may well use 'fawning' as an attempt to fe...

My aim today is something I call process mapping. Anyone who knows the Bullet Journal method understands that keeping track of what you actually do, and noting down what you need to do, creates a framework which can be used to discover what gives your life meaning and purpose. Additionally, to know what you might do to change things in a great direction, it helps to have two more categories of information.  1. What will things be like when they are really good? 2. What needs to be done now so I can shift my life towards that? Process mapping is part one. The task is to describe and evaluate your actions during an hour, or a day, a week or a month, a year , a lifetime even. Bullet Journal folks, You've got this ok! Decide your time period. Next, log what you are doing. Check in every hour. ( If you are logging an hour, check in every 10 minutes).  Log your actions - a sentence or a single word to describe, but keep it simple. Next - rate  the energy the actions took, or ga...

I really, really did not want to come back to this blog.  It's almost 11am. Josh is in bed. Josh has slowly cut himself off from everyone. His feelings about his dad are a smouldering heap of jigsaw pieces. I don't know where his dad is, but I have his old phone number (I'm sure he will have changed it).  But he hit his son, is he even able to feel sorry? More to the point I doubt that he has a clue about what really happened to his sister. Josh hasn't anything to get up for. He hides from the hurt of seeing that friends have jobs, houses, partners, dogs, cats, babies. This is how an entrenched OCD process works, magnifying a person's sense of inadequacy and worthlessness - because it hurts to feel that way and entrenched OCD is all about getting that hit of despair. By thinking about it, never facing it. It overwhelms, it seems to all make sense, all about avoiding pain by maintaining it. The Idea that if you are safe and calm it will get better?  No. Last night, h...

When I look into the feeling of grief, I find an intense sensation of loneliness, of falling. The metaphor of a room a thousand years wide (SoundGarden) reminds me of when my husband came into my room (before he told me that he was in love with me) and put the headphones over my ears...and that song? Within the metaphor I recognised how lonely I'd felt - abandoned actually (because I was abandoned by my eldest son's dad) and it was beyond awful, but I hadn't felt as if the expanse was endless... Like father like son?  I think my son is there - in his father's room, the thousand years wide room.  When I think about it, the way my husband was - the fear, exhaustion, scared to leave the house. The flood of texts about wanting to be home, safe, with me (!) the 'love bombing' was all about anxiety I guess? His fundamental, autonomic nervous system settings - is one way to distance myself from the sense of powerlessness it evoked in me; I just thought it would pass. I...