[Treasur]

“The self we become is ultimately made, not found.”

Thanks, Nas. I'm going to print that out and put it somewhere I'll remember it.

Isn’t it odd that we usually don’t think of it that way? Yet it struck me too as a useful reminder of what is true for we LBS. In reality, perhaps, the same is true for MLCers….their choices and actions make a different version of themselves and that is why not all stories here turn out the same. Perhaps go so far down that road that this is who they become for the rest of their lives. Us too maybe….certainly there are ways in which I am different now than I used to be.

[Nas]

This was so beautiful, it made me start my day out with a good cry.

https://aeon.co/essays/flat-places-are-the-ground-that-my-mind-is-built-upon

“At its root, complex trauma is relational trauma. It comes from being totally dependent on someone, for a long time, and being catastrophically betrayed by them – so catastrophically that they distort your sense of other people, and what they will do to you. Complex PTSD can mean feeling that other people aren’t real, or safe. That you are fundamentally different from them and can never share a world…

Yet the only way out of cPTSD is relationship. It’s a cruel irony. The only way to start feeling better is to get close to people, and trust them: to have the experience of them not betraying you.”

And there it is, the reason why my own cptsd took over after BD and cancer stripped away the entire façade of who I was pretending to be my whole life. I had no caregivers, no care whatsoever, from the day I was born. I taught myself how to love, but I did it “wrong” and tbh I left some good men in my wake. Then I met my H, I got close, I trusted, and it cost me everything.

“How can we ever know each other? How can we even know what we are seeing?”

One thing this piece made me think of was how the thoughts that arise from complex trauma feel so unexplainable and isolating. I think this is a really important thing to grasp: the person you were closest to absolutely had an entire inner world that was unknown to anyone but them. If they ever seek to resolve their trauma, you may learn part of the why of what they did. But if they never learn a new way of handling life, if they remain in fight/flight/dissociation, it’s very likely that that why will remain unknown even to them.

🎶 https://youtu.be/32GGaizRqu0

[Nas]

I just read this post on the cPTSD community on Reddit.

https://reddit.com/r/CPTSD/s/GBTaWyZkRH

I’m putting it here because this sounds like so many stories posted here of what LBS say their spouses present like just before or after BD. Just a reminder, especially as suicide awareness month draws to a close (the post contains a flair re: suicidal ideation), just because it happens in Midlife does not mean Midlife is the cause. The cause often, almost always, goes back a long way.

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of naming it midlife crisis and thinking that turning a certain age flipped the switch and therefore maybe another significant event or reaching another point in life will make them just “come out of it.” I can say as a sample of one example that with complex trauma, it can be way under the surface, so far it seems nonexistent, for a long time, until something (or things) happens to bring it to the forefront. Once the switch gets flipped, the only way out is to face the cause head on. You can’t re-bury it. You can’t go back to being who you were (because who you were was largely just a bunch of ways you learned to survive). You forget that there were even parts of who you were that had value. The world becomes a different place. Everything that was buried has now become the lens through which the world is seen and that’s bleak and often terrifying.

If your spouse has complex trauma, there’s at least parts of that trauma that you have absolutely no idea about, no matter how well you think you know them, and it’s because of that that they seem completely different now. The person who wrote this Reddit post has a family and kids but still ends the post by saying they have no one to talk to. I’m sure that’s 100% true to them, no one knows the real them, and the real them is defective, and even if they get to a point of wanting to be understood, trying to explain it makes them a burden.

Early on we look for return stories: “they left and then out of the blue they came back.“ Those stories really don’t exist because it’s impossible, it wasn’t about the marriage to begin with so it’s not as simple as they left the marriage and then returned to the marriage. The reality has nothing to do with “leaving someone and returning to someone.” Maybe in a simple straightforward affair that happens, but not in a crisis. And certainly not with significant unresolved trauma. A person can have an epiphany moment, but it doesn’t end there.

The epiphany leads to wanting to heal, the epiphany is not the healing. And healing is brave; running is easy. Healing is hard. You have to stop hiding all your perceived brokenness while also often still grappling with the validity of the belief that you are too broken for anyone to care about…and looking for confirmation of that. But they aren’t aware that that’s what they’re doing. If they were, they would be on the road to healing. They can’t step back from what is being said to them and objectively look at it. They don’t have the self-awareness to explore it. Insightfulness comes from growth, but growth is scary and exhausting. The trauma response is to just internalize everything as criticism, or proof that they are broken, different, unworthy…

Just wanted to share to give another angle of looking at things. It’s not personal, it’s not about you, it’s not about the marriage. And it’s also not as simple as “it’s a midlife crisis, one day they will wake up.” We want them to wake up, but it’s not a dream to them, it’s their stone cold reality the way they see it.What we call MLC is no different than what this person describes as cPTSD or what other people might call something else in that none of these things resolve spontaneously.

🎶 https://youtu.be/w0UjPuZKrVg?si=JazQIwNUUgzBDbV5

[Nas]

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-nonattached-self/201906/what-is-nonattachment?amp

“Attachments are our fixated attempts to control our experience, usually through clinging to what we perceive as desirable or aversion to what we perceive as undesirable…

Nonattachment, therefore, is what occurs when we can let go of the need to be in dogged control of what is occurring and can reduce our demands on the present moment to be any way in particular…

Nonattachment is aligned with psychological maturity and insight into the ever-changing nature of experience and the futility of trying to control it….nonattachment involves doing whatever would normally drive you, just without fixation and the accompanied rumination and worry about getting everything right, or adhering to the societal- or self-imposed expectations about what your life should be like.”

The attachment I struggle so much with involves the future less than the past. Though I have spent a lot of time looking to the past as a way to grapple with what has happened and what is happening now, and to help me understand myself and who I am, I don’t ruminate on what has already happened. But worrying about what might/will happen is something I struggle tremendously with – understandable, I have significant challenges. But I know this has a negative impact on me and I have to constantly be conscious of this in working on myself: focus on the moment - everything is transient; clinging to any thing or experience or person is wasted energy.

Detachment is a pulling away from something, whereas nonattachment is not holding on.  It's a subtle but important difference. For example, I can’t detach from my challenges, I can’t just disengage without even worse repercussions; they are ever-present and must be faced. I wish they didn’t exist, but they do. With nonattachment, I acknowledge the challenges, acknowledge the hardship, but I don’t hold onto (try to control/ruminate on/spiral into fear about) what may happen. This doesn’t make my problems disappear by any means, it just allows some moments of peace between storms – but hey, that ain’t nothing.

“Our attachments and our dis-ease with the present moment are so ubiquitous, that almost all self-focused thinking involves wanting things to be better, or worrying about things that have happened or will happen. Rarely are they focused on the appreciation of the present moment.”

Just another way of looking at things...

https://youtu.be/R_zaEcrpCbI?si=BaVN_pkXYPWRORRt
Things must change
We must rearrange them
Or we'll have to estrange them
All that I'm saying
The game's not worth playing
Over and over again
Things must change

[Nas]

A bit more on nonattachment - Thought I would share this, after reading a post on Marvin’s thread that resonated with part of a transformation that’s been happening in me. It seems like a shift has occurred out of nowhere but in reality it’s been a long time in the making, a slow burn that I’m just seeing start to ignite.
Just observing my thoughts and emotions without judging them has been an extremely helpful (and difficult) exercise.

Non-Attachment: What It Is and How to Practice It - Mindfulled Guide
https://mindfulled.com/non-attachment/

“Ask yourself where you are outsourcing your happiness, to things, events, people.”

“You can’t control other people nor can you control the outcome of things. Let go of the ‘musts’ and ‘shoulds’. That way you can allow life to happen without imposing your expectations on it.”

“…if you look closely, you’ll see that nothing is ever truly yours, it’s just your turn with it.”

🎶 https://youtu.be/FD2SfQJOK08?si=becO1VuRfGZDSjdE

[WHY]

Random find. https://davefarmer.co.uk/2017/10/30/the-flat-midlife-crisis-depression-or-alien-probing/

[WHY]

I saw this posted on Reddit.  Any validity to it?

“Typically, when MLC comes, you stop getting dopamine from life (especially from your job). Low dopamine causes depression and/or anxiety, which in turn causes massive constant cortisol releases, killing most of oxytocin (attachment hormone), making neocortex frantically find "logical"  answers ( intrusive and obsessive thoughts). Thus, in most cases both therapy and meds are required. Some people can get through with just one of the two, but it is very difficult.

If you go with just meds, once you stop, it is highly likely you relapse, as the thinking, beliefs and emotional memories are still there. If you go with just therapy, especially CBT, you will be trying to use logic to calm emotions driven by amygdala (fear center). No need to say, it is very tough to do.”

[KayDee]

I saw this posted on Reddit.  Any validity to it?

“Typically, when MLC comes, you stop getting dopamine from life (especially from your job). Low dopamine causes depression and/or anxiety, which in turn causes massive constant cortisol releases, killing most of oxytocin (attachment hormone), making neocortex frantically find "logical"  answers ( intrusive and obsessive thoughts). Thus, in most cases both therapy and meds are required. Some people can get through with just one of the two, but it is very difficult.

If you go with just meds, once you stop, it is highly likely you relapse, as the thinking, beliefs and emotional memories are still there. If you go with just therapy, especially CBT, you will be trying to use logic to calm emotions driven by amygdala (fear center). No need to say, it is very tough to do.”

Yes, although a bit more nuanced - this is more scholarly - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8584322/

Interesting "In bipolar disorder (BD), an increase in cortisol secretion may be seen in the manic phase" - parallels have often been drawn between BD and MLC

[Nas]

https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/how-to-observe-your-emotions

(I particularly like the part about recognizing contradictory emotions. )

I have, over the last few years, often struggled to identify my emotions, let alone observe them without judgment. As a consequence of not even being able to name them, I was operating with some pretty blurry emotional vision. Our reality really is highly subjective. When we  are in trauma mode (and I would guess it’s similar for people in crisis), our feelings dictate how we experience things, and those feelings don’t accurately reflect reality. In the blurriness I’ve been living in for the last few years (hmm, some might call it ’fog’), I wasn’t even “me.” My inner landscape was a bad expressionist painting, emotionally over-vivid, with distorted, exaggerated features. The reality I saw was at times a reflection of my own unexplored, unnamed feelings, and I stumbled more than once but I had to dig and consciously admit where I was blind, projecting, or just lying to myself - if I wasn’t actively trying to heal, I would have (like a person in crisis) reacted to that deluded reality in any number of unhealthy ways - mostly anger, without recognizing, naming and dealing with the root causes of anger: grief, fear, loss, sadness.

The emotion wheel is a good tool for identifying your TRUE feelings, the first step in releasing projection and reclaiming reality - what IS, not what we want to be, what we fear might be or what we secretly hope to be even if we aren’t admitting or even conscious of that hope:

https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/emotion-wheel

“The eight primary emotions in the emotion wheel are sadness, anger, disgust, joy, trust, fear, surprise, and anticipation," Espinoza explains. ‘Humans also have secondary emotions, which are emotional reactions to an emotion such as the feeling of shame when angry or feeling fear as a result of anger.’”

“The [emotion] wheel can make it easier for you to grapple with your true feelings, make an informed decision that best serves you, and find a satisfying resolution. If you're struggling to pinpoint something you can't quite put your finger on, Espinoza recommends taking out the emotion wheel to identify the triggering event/situation/person affecting you and naming what you might be feeling until it resonates.”

“When you experience distressing and confusing sensations, you can stop to physically trace out your emotions on the wheel and check in with yourself to ask:
* Where is that feeling coming from?
* What just happened in my environment that is making me react like this?
* Why am I feeling this way?”


🎶 https://youtu.be/L9Wnh0V4HMM?si=wxPQj08LsK39nqgZ

[Nas]

https://cptsdfoundation.org/2020/11/25/holiday-time-after-experiencing-trauma/

"We, and only we, are the authors of the book of this year’s experiences. What will the pages of your book hold?"

A few nights ago, I took myself (and my inner child) on a solo dream date to see The Nutcracker, followed by some fancy hot chocolate at a great little pastry shop. It was a gorgeous performance, and the evening was a mix of emotions, but ultimately a nice night with great company  .
The holidays are a hard time of year, I'm glad I was able to create a moment for myself. It's been a long time.