Transitioning to Resolution

since this i somewhat of a journal for me, i wanted to post what for me is a turning point in my recovery from the effects of incest/sexual abuse. this writing deals mainly with the incest from my brother, and not so much from the other rapes that took place outside the family. the pain that grew over the years was from never having any emotional support to help me get over the pain. the family in which i experienced the abuse could not deal with its own grave sense of shame.

at any rate, as i looked at isolation 1 , and isolation 2, as a big factor contributing to my increased tendency to avoid others, and after posting about it, i immediately found respite from that which i've wrestled with all these many years. so i made this post in response:

friends, thank you all for your input in the topic. i found seeing the points of intersection in this concept to be an immense help in moving quickly beyond the pain that precipitated raising the question in the first place.

it was almost as if after years of gesticulating inside me, the moment i articulated the words of my post, the emotions that were behind them were born.

but my pain leading up to the birth of that isolation post was relieved once it was born. articulating the dilemma in words spelled it out in such away that gave me the closure i needed. i had spent days crying deep heaves of acceptance over the death-loss of my childhood dream-need for mother love. i wanted so desperately all these years to get back the wholesome family that was lost in disclosure of what my older brother did to 4 of his siblings so long ago.......and finally, though much trial and tribulation, the realization dawned on me, that my disclosure of his behavior years ago broke all ties/bonds with that family, and from then on, we would only be tied to each other through denial and deceit, and yes blood. but i had not realized that all these long years, and went on secretly loving /needing them, hoping, driven by a misguided need to mend the breach in the torn garment of a family system, by making up for it as i strove to prove myself worthy.

yes, it's over, and i am in the place where i am modulating back and forth, shifting in and out of anger and sadness, and i can finally feel the rallentando of the shift as this chapter finds its repose.

what a relief to know that in both my head and in my heart. what a relief to know that the rest of my life does not have to be lived in counterpoint to the experience of being born into a family in which circumstances arose to make me its lifelong victim. what a relief to not have to give a crap about them anymore. and what a relief to be able to remove the stumbling block that has stood in the way of making freer, wiser, and more honest choices for the way in which i will continue to spend the precious currency of ron in future chapters.

what i have come to understand from this, is that i may never find the true bonding i seek, but that if i ever give up on that my life will be over. it is the one thing that drives the forward trajectory of all life: the hope of bonding. seeing that resolves what was for me, for so many years a dilemma that was lived out in metaphorical relationships to false replacement matrices.

all the work i have done over the last year in participating in my mcc church group has not been for nothing. it has been the practicum for this great life's lesson, and has given me the strength to reach down inside and find the power i needed to take the risks of being vulnerable, to face the potential for rejection, and yes alternatively to open myself up to the possibility of acceptance and unconditional love, such as i would never have from my family of origin.

without that support, i could not have reached the conclusions and resolutions i have found for myself for today, and i just want to thank each and everyone of you for being part of the story; for helping me by sharing the best of your heart and soul, your love and wisdom, which is more precious as gold to me as it was born out of the crucibles of such deep pain and suffering from your own experiences with sexual abuse and assault.

Attachment Part II

the last couple weeks have been a transitional time for me. as you may know, i have been scarfing up the brain food in bonnies book, 'brainwise therapist' and it has been so seminal for me. i have gone thru it twice already and the margins of nearly every page are lined with penciled in notes and comments which stirred ideas about how her statements relate to my life. the subject of attachment as brought up by her in her book, has led me to the next level of understanding of how this unmet need has contributed to my own lifelong social phobia and dysfunction. the understanding i have been pondering is how my frustrated relationship to my matrix/mother/primary care provider never got resolved, caused me to avoid new/strange situations thoughout my life, and left me in such a fearful and anxious state, that i never felt comfortable or confident enough to risk the rejection that would inevitably become a part of approaching strangers for social connection. so i withdrew essentially, and spent all my energies only involving myself in controlled situations where i could interact with people safely in terms of my relationship to them through my musical talents.

seeing this now, and realizing what a big hole this left in my life, is making me rethink my entire approach to life and people. now, i understand how important it is to risk seeing and being myself as not surrounded by the protective wall of my safely cultivated characteristics, and begin to develop the willingness to branch out of that comfort zone. not as scary as i thought it might be, but really just don't know where to begin to allow new experiences to create new wirings to overwrite the old patterns in my brain. ah well, this i will allow time and space to work itself out.

but this past week, severely wounded by the deeper realizations of the incapacity of my family of origin to meet any of my deep needs for true intimacy safety validation and comfort, i have been suffering in grief of understanding the effects of such abandonment of the essential me. yes, they brought me into this world, then aborted me from their systemic circle after i disclosed my brothers perpetrator behaviors after his death in 1975, and have been the outcast ever since. it dawns on me recently how i have spent all these years blind to that, yet lived solely to invest all my energies in reestablishing myself in their good graces. and now i am done.

my mother, who last year after recovering from two knee surgeries went to live with my brother and his family in san diego, the other day came back to pittsburgh to stay for the summer. i was never informed about her plan. i heard about it when i randomly ran into one of my cousins last week who made mention of it. it seems that there is a very closed circle in my family who has the inside skinny on what's going on, and i am not part of the circle. only the sibs who are in the inner sanctum exchanging and sharing pain meds amongst each other are included. i was severly disturbed and deeply troubled for a few days as it dawned on me, and i made the connection as to why my mother doesn't respond to my emails, return phone messages, and when she does, she is always just going out the door, or carrying on a conversation at the same time with someone else in the room on her end of the line. i think her behavior is a way for her to manage avoiding talking with me about anything significant......such as abuse in our family.

so now, i have actually laid to rest the final notion of my mother as ever being a capable true source of nurture, and turned to the new matrices that i have been cultivating in my life, such as the metropolitan community church family, AND also, just recently joined the pittsburgh primetimers, an over 50 gay mens social group.

so i am feeling a lot better this week. trunking off bonnie's book, i picked up a copy of daniel seigal's 'mindful brain' and have been consuming more of the same concepts bonnie extrapolated in her book, but his focus is more on the mindfulness aspect of brain grooming.

so there is ron's inner life in a nutshell over the past couple of weeks. feel like i just had a psychic birth, and the poor offspring was stillborn. BUT, in this death there is a seed of hope for a new chapter to begin, unhindered by secret schemas implicit in the regions of subjectivity of my own thought.

hejira is such an apt theme for my life right now......leaving normal....

change the brain, the mind will follow

i spent most of my life post abuse feeling like i was standing on the edge of a precipice peering into the impenetrable darkness looking for answers. always acting on the thought that the answers lie in following and unpacking the pathology of some mental process which led to a current fixated state of thinking.

but since i have fallen in love with the study of neurobiology, i have taken it out of the realm of mental and begun to understand it as a function of the ingrained neural wiring patterns of the brain. and they are not really playing tricks on us. they are just firing synapses according to the way thought and feeling perceptions compute and form their circuitry which we reinforce every moment until we do something to change their regular paths of behavior.

i liken it to this old joke about the dog who will not be house trained. the master comes home every day from work to find that the dog has soiled the carpet. angry, the master opens the window, picks up the dog by the scruff of the neck, and tosses it out the window [don't worry it's a first floor window.....]. this happens repeated day after day. then one day the master comes home from work, sees the same thing, begins to go through his regular process, but on seeing his approach, the dog runs to the window, opens it, and proceeds to jump out.

that's what happens in our brains. eventually the neural transmitter take over, and since the power of decision is no longer necessary, it is removed from the process, which ultimately become involuntary.

in terms of the social connection, i did the same thing. my brain never fully developed that social connectivity, because it was never imparted originally by my primary caregiver, and thus no paths were in place to expand upon, to generate greater potentiality. as a result the dysfunctional patterns of attachment that were wired in me as a result of a lack of contingent relational interactivity, left me in such a state as to interpret all new situations i encountered throughout my life as being strange, and therefore a threat to my sense of well-being and security. without having developed a palette of flexible responses in relation to strange situations i encountered, i was left to, like the dog who throws himself out the window after soiling the carpet, to fall back on the old regular and now involuntary reactions that had been reinforced though out my life.

understanding this as the primary shaping criteria for many of my actions, reactions and seemingly selective behaviors helps me to take an active part in restructuring my old automatic choices.

in terms of social anxiety, what i have come to realize, is that because i never developed the initial pathways that would lead to expanded social connections, and because these were further impeded by the experience of sexual abuse which interrupted my mental capacity to engage in relations that did not fit the model established by my abusers, i would be destined to keep repeating what was already a pattern established in my brain, that being withdrawal.

patterns of withdrawal provided the solution for a security that could not be found in my attempts at connecting with others. sure, i used my mind to trick myself into developing the talents of my own natural resources, but i always lived my life hiding behind my puny powers as a shield to protect me from participating in the larger culture. as long as i felt strong and powerful in my vocational role, then i didn't need anything else.

until, that is, i began to sense a gnawing unidentified anxiety that told me i was missing something. adn the something i was missing was my connection to larger causes than those in my own narrow world.

it was realizing that that turned on the switch for me. in my own tiny safe world, i had climbed many mountains. i chose the ones i knew were conquerable. i learned how to avoid withdrawl in my own small circles.

but now i am being beckoned to greater causes than my own safe one. and this is where i must begin to deny the tendency to withdraw from the new strange situations that present themselves daily, and challenge myself to muster up the courage to approach new situations without the accompanying fear and trepidation that precipitates a sense of dreaded rejection.

as i realize that i begin to create new wiring, giving myself the smallest goals each day: see a stranger as a potential friend, see a new situation as an opportunity for expanding my limitations. and all of a sudden old depressions subside, and spring arises in the brain as it blossoms once again in new realm of possibility, where hope and creativity nest unimpeded.

patterns of withdrawal can be eliminated when replaced by the new approach practices. it is scary, and challenging, and yes, it takes a loooong time, but at some point i have to become the champion in the conquest and triumph over all that the experience of sexual assault and abuse has levied in my life. as you say, we must do it ourselves. but i submit that we not change our minds, but our brains, and the mind will follow.