Day 2: My pain is not special
I did wake up at 5 AM today. It’s currently 7 AM and I am sluggish, but feel decently productive and less “alarm” pain than yesterday.
Yesterday I spent the entire day trying to manage my physical anxiety. I wrote both journals I posted yesterday, as well as a third unpacking the feeling of “nonsensical emotional agony.” I don’t know if I will post that one, because reading it now it seems so ridiculously overdramatic in light of listening to the rest of the Chatterjee podcast on Dr. Russell Kennedy and anxiety, which basically had me like, “aw f*** this is what it is.”
So post-Dr. Kennedy / Chatterjee interview, I have concluded:
- My pain isn’t special or incomprehensible.
- It’s probably tied to early childhood trauma of some sort.
- Even if I don’t have “big T trauma,” my experience lines up with a sensitive nervous system that doesn’t require major trauma to activate in this way.
- Based on the examples given on the podcast, the best I can come up with is this: I’m told my mom was on bedrest during the last part of her pregnancy with my brother, when I would have been 1 year old, that my paternal grandma took care of me and helped out during this period. I have no memories of this.
On some level I don’t like that I’m just plain old traumatized like everybody else. Kennedy explains it’s foreseeable for people to feel “something’s wrong with me,” which is the reason I invoke words like “nonsensical” and “agony.” But the pain is so bad it is upsetting to hear that the explanation is minor trauma I don’t remember combined with a “sensitive nervous system.” This just reinforces my worst fear that I’m just fundamentally “weak, nonresilient,” which led to all the shame I’ve felt over a lifetime of struggling to regulate my emotions and failing consistently, resulting in toxic behavior, harm to others, warranted rejection, humiliation.
The only thing that has ever worked for me is to preemptively anticipate bad stuff happening and put up some kind of a forcefield, which more often than not manifests in some sort of toxic behavior (usually, me fleeing or threatening to flee [person, job, situation that is triggering me] before I can be abandoned, betrayed, or hurt).
Now Kennedy is explaining why CBT often doesn’t work (thank you!) and offering tools for responding to the body “alarm.” Find the place where the pain lives in the body, put a hand over it, breathe into it. Imagine your ten-year-old self, talk to her, bring her along with you, tell her she’s safe, etc. Validate her feelings; “it must have been hard for you when ____.”
This all sounds neat and I’ll do my best with it… but my initial thought is that these techniques may well fuel the self-loathing the same way they did when I tried and failed to validate my feelings back then. When I hit 10/11 I basically surrendered to the fact that my emotional reactions made no sense, that I couldn’t control them, and that the only thing that could protect me from complete humiliation and exposing my weak constitution to the world was to fabricate traumas to explain them. So… how do I comfort that child? “It must have been hard that your feelings made no sense?” Yeah, it was. But I knew that then. I know I can probably do better than this.
Anyway, yesterday, the physical pain remained at level 9+/10, and I was debilitated and unable to accomplish anything all day. I attended a 1:30 PM phone call, during which I was unable to hold it together and cried in front of a very important person. I did my best not to hate myself for this, but dammit, why can’t I keep mysel together?
I eventually had to go pick up my son and school, then called and cried to my husband and he agreed to help / pick up the slack. Then I went and shopped for two hours (spending money I don’t have) and the pain was gone during that time frame. I took a work call and was surprisingly effective on the phone while pacing in a Target.
The stomach knot came back when I went home, but not as bad. And I went to bed early (before 10, I think) and took a whole Unisom instead of half, in hopes that I’d get a good night’s rest.
Unfortunately I woke up at midnight for close to an hour… took some melatonin and eventually went back to sleep, but my 5 AM wakeup felt hard. I didn’t have the emotional agony when I woke up, but it set in quickly by the time my kids were up, and it’s back to a level 7-8/10 at the moment. I have things I had truly committed to accomplish by tomorrow, which I did not and cannot accomplish. I have things I need to accomplish by next Friday, which I did not and cannot accomplish. The knot goes away when I distract myself from it with law practice work; it comes back when I try to do synagogue work. I have a strong impetus to quit synagogue NOW, but that would hurt / stress out people I don’t want to stress out…
I very much want to go take a nap right now. I have a call in 7 minutes. I won’t be blogging again til Sunday because I am going to stay off computers for Chag / Shabbat.