hey how are all of you?  is this group still going?  i hope you're all ok.  i had to drop off the radar, i got overwhelmed with therapy and trauma and books.  i am guessing you understand?  but i don't want anyone to feel abandoned.  it wasn't personal about you guys.  i miss you.  i just start to feel pressure with email, and also it feels weird, you know?  i write this and then in three hours it's not a big deal anymore maybe and i don't want to remember thinking this stuff?  this is why i got off facebook too, i want real life interaction (actually also some abusers found me on facebook and i just cannot handle that).

so i got the book by cheri huber "there is nothing wrong with you" and thanks - you were right - it is very helpful.  now when i feel angry or scared or have flashbacks i just breathe and say "come on in" and let the feeling just nestle inside me.  i see how i am not it, and eventually it goes away.  i have been reading the mindful path of self compassion as well at the same time which helps.  it's all stuff i learned in DBT hospitalization programs, which is interesting.  i swear all the new therapies are buddhism.  i am not my thoughts or feelings....

i am facing a lot of shame, it's crippling me.  i found a therapist here who was a conscienous objector in south africa and also lives in an eco-community here, so he's kinda on the same page with me, but he's jungian and doesn't really understand all the new techniques that are working for me and so i cannot tell him about them, also he doesn't seem to understand the intesnse shame.  i said outloud some of the traumas i have experienced for the first time in therapy with him and then just fell apart, tons of junk food, ativan, and hiding in bed.  i felt like i'd be told they weren't traumas, or asked why i was there and put up with it, or blamed for them, or attacked by my abusers.  so many scary feelings, i still have having trouble with how prepared i am for the IT'S YOUR FAULT backlash. 

i guess a lot of this is worse because i was talking to a buddhist leader here and she asked me "why did you allow these things to happen to you?" and i just had never been pointblank blamed like that. then she said the rapes and beatings and homeless were good because it worked off my negative karma, and i just wanted to die when she said that.  i am feeling pretty scared now.  i don't know whom to trust - i really want a cheering leading squad chasing me around yelling "you're innocent, it is not your fault!"

i don't really know whom to trust.

right now i am trying to get in the day program at the local hospital, i think it is DBT, and i figure if insurance will pay for it, why not, but i have a lot fear about them misdiagnosing me again with bipolar ot trying to fuck with my meds or just having some crackpot theories like so many therapists i have seen have.  i am obsessing about what to tell them and preparing to defend my story to them.  the stress of getting help sucks.

i want to recommend two books i am finding very helpful.

finding life beyond trauma- this is a workbook and you know i have to watch myself with them becaue i tend to OD on them and go nuts.  so i am going slow.  this is acceptance and commitment therapy, ACT, which takes the things i found helpful from DBT to the next level - radical acceptance and mindfulness.  the premise of ACT is that we cannot make the past go away nor fight the symptoms, but we can accept them, what happened, and be mindful.  it works on acccepting what happening so we don't have intense flashbacks and emotions and body reactions etc.  no more running from the past, so we can just sit with it until we realize we are safe, there is a lot more though. there is a huge difference between accepting what happened and is happening AND saying it was ok.  they don't make you forgive and they recoginize a lot of stuff other PTSD books i have read just didn't.  the next focus of ACT is concentrating on your own values and finding ways to make a life based on them, having your own life back.  the book actually makes me feel safe, which is very unusual.  so i found that an ACT author teaches at a SUNY near me, and sent him an email and VM asking to find someone trained in this.  i don't know if it is for everyone, but it is helping me at this point.  it is the belief that life can start NOW, not when we're "fixed" or "cured" (ie the trauma never happened).

8 keys to safe trauma recovery - this book ought to be handed out to any trauma survivor because it just helps put the therapy process in OUR hands and figure out what will work and is working for us, since each person is different.  i just read the part of self forgiveness and it shook me up, it's so what i need and so what i resist.  this book is just stuff to make sure your therapy is helping you and to decide what you need.  i really wish i had this years ago.  the author really makes it clear that this is OUR recovery, and to be in charge of it.

i'm looking for a domestic violence support group.  i tried the local anxiety support group and told the leader that i was highly triggered by body awareness mindfulness in groups and have huge panic attacks and flashbacks from it and then she goes and leads one!  i left and the agency treated me like shit for being angry.  also she was talking about how sometimes at grocery stores we want to hit babies that are crying, and that triggered the hell out of me.  MORONS.  i just want some nice feminist cuddly "you're a good person" support group.  i made 41 bars of biodegradable soap with essential oils for the shelter and the woman who runs it anka is so loving!

i did contact the crime victims place and they have a drop in support group for sexual trauma, so i am going to try that.  they seemed very smart and sane.

in trying to be the revolution i want to join, i have been wandering my new town with garbage bags and cleaning up trash.  i don't like this area how it is so gruff, no one says hello when i call - it's like "hair salon" "doctors office" "crime victim assistance" - i feel guilty and like i am bothering them.  most of the spiritual stuff here is very expensive new age crap, leading me to want to picket the Omega center wish signs that say "God for the people, not profits" and "spirituality is a right not a privillage".  my anarcho-DIY inclusive mentality seems to be very unheard of here.  i was thinking of making t shirts that say "the revolution will be assessible" and have a wheel chair symbol under it.  i have been losing a lot of former friends with my critical thinking about karma and blame the victim stuff from the new age community, and also what good is spirituality that doesn't involve where you are but can only be had at retreat centers?  so yes, i am feeling very alone, because this is just stuff no one even is asking themselves.  i am seeing very intensely the oppression and enabling of abuse within my hippie sppiritual community.  so i don't really know where to go.

i think of you because i have been doing all sorts of eco-art!  i glued my fave band and political t shirts i never wear onto cardboard and then framed them with frames i made from vines and fallen branches. i have been turning records i don't like into bowls by melting them.  i have been making tons of soap, and adding plastic toys i had lying around to them, so they are pretty cool.  i take the remains of candles from churches (they let me) and melt them down and make my own candles in old salsa jars which i glue art i like onto.  i go through the trash at graveyards and find half dead plants and good pots and soil.  i bought a ton of mosaic stuff, too.  art is distracting me from obssessive worrying.  this is a good time of year for herbal root medicine, so i have garlic and enchinecea and mullin and dandelion in vodka, and big jars of garlic, horseradish, onion, tumerick, cayenne in vinager waitingfor honey to be added for cold medicine.  i feel productive that way.  i sent more boxes of pagan books to people doing prison ministry and mental hospital ministry.

i am not having a lot of luck with friends - i pushed myself too hard to be out in the world.  i have been trying to volunteer to write grants and find money for a wildlife rehabber here but she cancels each time or doesn't show up.  i know her life is crazy and i feel guilty i stopped offering to help, but i was so angry and also wasn't helping at all so i radically accepted that it was a lost cause right now and not my fault. the pagans near me that i like - big environmentalists - are too busy to ever get it together to see me, so i finally did radical acceptance on that and gave up.  the tarot and astrologer community is filled with bullshit new age blame the victim crap, so i am not safe there.  i was trying to teach astrology for free for an anarchist farm thing here but they are flakes and it made me angry after a while how disrepectful they were being.  i am seeing my community all over the place - persons with mental illness issues, into new age stuff, with radical politics, and lots of dysfunction and scariness.  so i don't really know WHO my community is now.  i don't take classes or volunteer nbecause my anxiety levels make me flake out and then i hate myself.  also it hard for me to be with people because all my life i have had to dumb myself down and not say what is logical or else i am very lonely.

oh for samhain, the celtic celebration of the ancestors, my mom and i went to sojounrer truth park and i hung a huge peace symbol i made of vines and feathers i found and she drummed while i burned incense i had made, we were on the beach of the hudsoon at low tide, and i made offerings to MY REAL ancestors - earth first!ers, suffragists, conscientious objectors, civil rights workers, etc - i would say a name and mom would say present.  emma goldman, elizabeth cady stanton, joe strummer, rosa parks, joe hill,  einstein, david dellinger, dorothy day, racheal carson - i had over 300 names!  i asked them to guide and protect us today and lead us.  it felt goood.  at the end mom was drumming and a hawk came low and then circled her many times, dancing with her, it went on for ever, i was stunned.

please wish me luck with therapist stuff and not to be traumatized more by it.  i hope you all are ok.  i hope these books might be helpful for you, xo xo blessings, heather