Journey

Photo Credit: Alexander Krivitsky, Unsplash I've been thinking about failure a lot lately. More specifically, I have been thinking about how I am a failure. Does anyone remember my run-in with Cognitive Processing Therapy in late 2019? I do. I made it to the halfway mark in the process and had to call it because I couldn't change the way I was thinking; TKO. CPT is a sub-type of Cognitive Behavior Therapy and is typically a great form of therapy for people dealing with cognitive dissonance. You either learn to change your thoughts, or you learn to change your actions. Neither felt possible to me because I was convinced that I was at fault for the trauma I was trying to process. I couldn't refute my own arguments even when they made no logical sense to others. Truthfully, it wasn't just that I felt responsible for the trauma. I couldn't quite pinpoint what I felt, or rather what I thought, in a way that I could communicate fully. Either way, trauma won, and I lost. I...

Photo Credit: Brett Jordan, Unsplash Outer Chaos My house needs to be cleaned, laundry needs to be done (sheets, towels, and clothes), bills need to be paid, checkbook needs to be balanced, the menu needs to be made, a grocery store run needs to be done, and animals need to be taken care of. I have three books lying around the house that I desperately want to read. One of those books had two starts, and in three weeks time has only progressed to page 136. The others haven't been opened for two weeks, at least. There are three incomplete blog posts sitting in my draft box, not including this one. My Mom fell two weeks ago. It was hard to see her so vulnerable and laying on the floor. It was hard to see how much my Dad does for her. He's not just cooking, cleaning, mowing the lawn, maintaining the pool, fixing things around the house, preparing for my family to come to visit (making beds, getting extra groceries to make sure we had things that we needed, making brownies that Ian ...

  Involve, participate, draw into, interlock, commit, show up, and/or connect. Those were the words I used when I announced my 2021 intention to engage . Specifically, I wanted to engage by working on three goals:  Avoid using humor for the purpose of escaping discomfort Talk about difficult things, honestly Feel the things I don't want to feel  I have been intentional about engaging, and I have focused on those three goals as part of my daily commitment. I have chosen to allow myself to engage in and with whatever comes up. Humor and maybe a few others...   I'll start with humor. I love humor and use it often, but I use humor as a way to deflect how I am feeling or to hide pain, sadness, and anger quite often. Humor, the past six months, has primarily been a way to smile and laugh instead of hiding or running. My jokes haven't been quite so frequent, although my enjoyment of jokes has been heightened. I was thinking just the other morning about how I have been ...

Photo Credit: Keagan Henman, Unsplash (edited) Weeks of hard work passed with me sitting in Matt's Tuesday groups wondering how I could start to heal. I asked him for help with my mind mapping - a practice he uses to process different thoughts (and the shame associated with those thoughts). My volunteerism occurred before I knew what we would be mapping on that Tuesday, so when he told me to turn to page thirty-one, I think the blood left my head. It could have been "What's On My Mind," the "Problem Map," "Situation Map," "Person Map," or "Choose Your Topic Map." Unfortunately (or fortunately), it was the Trauma Map. The problem with the Trauma Map was that I was going to have to talk about my trauma.  I thought of a traumatic event, the image associated with it, and wrote words to express that image in the middle of my page. I then scattered thoughts all around the page. My body started to feel shaky, my jaw tensed, and my sho...

Photo Credit: CLAS Ropes Course and Canoe Rental, Provo, UT I’d like to think I was compared to Robbie Knievel the other day, but I guess I should admit that my therapist was actually comparing the process of EMDR to Robbie Knievel's famous  Grand Canyon jump  (start at 35:35). Her analogy: Robbie used the throttle perfectly to make his jump across the canyon successful. If he pulled back on the throttle too much, he wouldn't have made it to the other side. I have apparently, well, obviously, been throttling back in my EMDR sessions. I know holding back is going to keep me from getting across my canyon, and  I don't want to be outdone by some badass daredevil who hit 92+ mph at the top of a ramp and dropped 45 feet down while gliding 228 feet across to a rough but successful landing (he broke his leg - "a mere flesh wound"). I can be a badass like him. When I was asked in a recent processing session if I thought I could keep going with EMDR, I thoughtfully conside...

Matt and I spent very little time together when we were younger. He was older than I was and probably had no interest in an annoying snot-nosed little sister, but nevertheless, I thought he was awesome and did everything he said or did. He enlisted in the Air Force when he was seventeen, and several years later, in 2000, I moved to Pennsylvania to go to college. I graduated in 2004 but stayed to begin graduate school. In 2005 I was hospitalized for suicidal ideation, and I moved back to Michigan from Pennsylvania with the help of Matt and my parents. Matt asked me if I wanted to stay at his farmhouse in Lawrence, Michigan with his family and then cleared out a room on the second floor/attic for me to sleep. My room was at the top of the stairs in a side room with no doors; my nephew, Lane, slept in his crib on the other side of the stairway in an open room; my young niece, Samantha, had a large bedroom adjacent to both Lane's and my rooms. My brother and sister-in-law slept in the ...

When I'm not hiding, I am living. I have been without a hat for months at a time because, for various reasons, most hospitals and residential facilities don't allow people to wear them, but Annie's House did not have a policy like that. Without a doubt, my hat came with me to Utah. It has literally been everywhere I have been for the past 15+ years. I love that thing (Yes, I have more than one, but I have a favorite.) Wearing my hat makes me happy, but most of the time I wear it because I feel hidden and safe. As much as I have treated my hat(s) as just another article of clothing, I knew I needed some separation when I went to Utah. I traveled across the country to plunge into some heavy vulnerability, and wearing a hat would have been a physical sign that I was not truly ready to do the work I needed to do. But, I confess I did wear it twice. My First Offense:   On one particular Friday, I put my hat on and walked into the dining room with my coat in preparati...

My therapist at Annie's House, K, had an office with an L-shaped desk that he sometimes sat behind with two fairly comfortable blue chairs facing him. Off to the right side was a white couch with four throw pillows, two white and two bright turquoise. Next to the couch there was a blue chenille blanket and a portable side table that K used for some of his sessions. His office was in the front corner of the house, and if I sat in either of the blue chairs I could look out the window behind K and catch a glimpse of the mountains through some evergreen and birch trees. During family therapy sessions I would sit in the far chair by the wall with K next to me, on the right, as we sat in front of his laptop. During small group processing I would sit on the couch, with one pillow between myself and whoever else chose to sit there and another pillow in my lap. Most of the time, though, I chose to sit in the chair nearest to the door. That was the EMDR chair.  EMDR stands for Eye Movement D...

In 2002, one of my Professors held class at his ranch in New York. My classmates and I had the opportunity to ride his horses, eat homemade food, and relax in his home with his family. For several hours, two different horses had several of my classmates riding on them, but they did not seem tired (In Western movies, horses can literally run all day and night, right?). Then again, what did I actually know about horses. It was my turn for a nice ride in the fields. My Professor's daughter (we'll just call her Kathy) gave me a lesson on how to hold the reigns, stop, slow down, move the horse in a specific direction, and move the horse along/increase speed. She and I started on our ride; my horse and I on the left, she and her horse on the right. Suddenly my horse sped up to a trot. Kathy sped up to a trot and gave me some instructions. My horse did not care what I tried - pull back on the reigns, gently at first, then with more pressure; attempt to turn the horse to the left...

I gave a glimpse of my life back in December when I wrote a recap on my intention toward courage for 2020. I transparently shared that I had self-harmed 43 out of 275 days. I am confident I have probably been close to self-harming close to 275 out of 275 days in the past, but I have come a long way since those days. But why so high now?  Maybe we can blame COVID-19. The state of Pennsylvania shut down almost completely on March 16, 2020 (I went grocery shopping the next day - it was empty of people and products). My admission date to First Hospital was March 31, 2020. I was discharged April 22, 2020 with a plan to connect with people and begin and maintain coping strategies that proved to be next to impossible when the state shut down. Granted, some of those things were still prohibited, but mental health was more important to me. On December 12, 2020, Pennsylvania was shut down a second time. I went to Steps Recovery Center (Annie's House) in Draper, UT on December 28, 2020 and wa...