[UrsaMajor]

I saw this posted from a friend of mine who is an Episcopal Priest.... Don't know how long the link ill be valid...



but it pretty well sums it up.... Add "Mid-Lifers" to the "out of my Control" sphere

[FaithWalker]

Good visual reminder

[Nas]

A few good reminders:

https://www.talkspace.com/blog/projection-defense-mechanism/

https://www.baggagereclaim.co.uk/dodging-peoples-projections-its-not-about-us-really/

 https://youtu.be/ImJpqutxOmg?si=bzqcf09BaHPvRueS
🎶We are we are we are
But your children
Finding our way around indecision
We are we are we are
Rather helpless
Take us forever
A whisper to a scream 🎶

[xyzcf]

If you are interested in looking at how ACE's (adverse childhood events) can impact an adult's physical and mental health this podcast gives insight into how neglect and sexual abuse can damage someone into adulthood.

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-75-white-coat-black-art

The two doctors that were interviewed have written a book called:

Damaged: Childhood Trauma, Adult Illness, and the Need for a Health Care Revolution
by Robert Maunder, MD and Jonathan Hunter, MD

In my work with children who have been neglected and abused, the concept of ACE's is connected to their development and difficulties in adulthood.

Often  a person who has been neglected or abused is not aware in their consciousness and the abuse may only be uncovered later in life, or never. It can be buried deeply, and the person can function"normally" until eventually it explodes...sometimes as a physical illness and other times as a crisis.

The podcast talks about how this patient "Issac" came from a regular middle class family. It talks about ACE's in a child's life as witnessing parent's addictions, parent's going to jail, neglect, physical and sexual abuse or witnessing violence in the home.

Several LBSers have written about their spouse's dysfunctional families. Some LBSers are interested in why their spouses suddenly had a crisis and why MLC is not studied more intensely by the scientific community.

[Nas]

I could have a many-branched discussion for days about this one:

https://dismantledmind.com/integrated-self/

“If you are relatively “functional” and mostly happy, you wouldn’t feel the need to dig deeper and put in the effort to do elaborate inner work. You’ll get by without it. You might even lead a fun life and go on to achieve a bunch of cool things. But as Jiddu Krishnamurti said, it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Have you ever considered that your idea of a 7/10 level of well-being may actually just be a 4/10 in reality?”

Sometimes the songs that I put at the end of my posts are just songs I like and sometimes they are connected to the post. Today I was trying to think of a song that could sum up my feelings on life and this one came roaring with such intensity and purpose out of a dusty cobwebbed corner of my hippocampus, I figured it, like me, really wants to be heard 😂:

🎶 https://youtu.be/TNxm0VZO7l0?si=InB52CW03JWGVuYW

[Treasur]

I enjoyed the song and yes, a lot of life in the UK right now feels a bit like this 🙄
But I enjoyed even more the phrase “  a dusty cobwebbed corner of my hippocampus”…..hate to think what’s boxed up in mine 😜

[Nas]

I LOVE this quote from this article:
“Emotions love themselves: they often make us feel like acting in ways that strengthen them.”

https://psyche.co/ideas/if-feelings-for-an-ex-are-troubling-you-try-opposite-action

I think the techniques outlined here can be useful in a lot of scenarios. When I think of it, in a relatively short space of time, I was married then unmarried, financially secure and then poverty stricken, living a carefully planned life with a carefully arranged future and then literally and metaphorically dying, and then living again… without realizing it I’ve been employing this “act opposite“ technique in different ways with every obstacle I have faced and still face. But not just with the huge obstacles, also with trying to reparent myself, learn from my past and find a place where I am valued for just being and not because of anything external or material, not having to be any specific thing or fit into a specific box.

It’s interesting, a person with CPTSD is always afraid of being “too much“ but so much of my life comes with something overwhelming that I need to navigate, fears I need to face, disappointment I need to accept, and illusions I need to face and break that lead to more emotions I need to process. It’s exhausting. The inclination is always there to just give up, to give in to negative emotions, to just say firetruck it all, and the motivation to “act opposite” can be hard to muster. (That’s probably why people in crisis don’t do it. They run instead.) But what’s the alternative? I spent so much of my life in a false narrative of trauma. it would be easy enough to say I’m tired, I give up, I don’t want to do this work. But now that I know what I want and deserve, even if I never get it, it would be self-sabotaging and downright self-destructive to not make sure I am ready for it.

A few examples of an “act opposite” approach:
https://theantiburnoutclub.com/opposite-action-examples-for-overwhelming-emotions/

🎶 https://youtu.be/DRoo53diveo?si=W-vRBFpDi5VJnWxF

[marvin4242]

I LOVE this quote from this article:
“Emotions love themselves: they often make us feel like acting in ways that strengthen them.”

Thanks what a great article and great point. I would like to add that two important components would greatly help along with this.

1) Accept the reality of a situation the way it truly is, not as you wish it to be. This directly applies to the relevance of feeling love for a relationship or a person who no longer exists.

2) There is no such thing as “unconditional” love unless you are a parent and it’s for your child. This myth of unconditional love for adults is another hinderance when the conditions for that love no longer exists.

[Nas]

I’ve always found a little bit of tension between the ideas of unconditional love and “love is a choice.” The second one I believe in. Choice is a key component in going in to a relationship. No one has ever tripped over a homeless person on the street and said “oh no, I’ve fallen into unconditional love because I have no choice over who I love and this is the person the universe has sent me to love.“ That’s a snarky comment of course, and coming a little bit from my own wounding, but the point is that in choosing a partner, people look for certain criteria to be met. That alone is a condition under which we choose to start a relationship.

I remember having a conversation with my first therapist after BD, a few months after, and I remember telling her “I want to say out loud that I don’t love him but for some reason I feel like that makes me very very bad person.” I was afraid to stop “loving” him, actually, because something twisted and tangled up with trauma bonding had me believing that loving him would bring me love.

But that’s not how it works. We do choose who we love, but we don’t get to choose who loves  us. And that makes us feel so helpless sometimes that we forget the choice is always at least partially ours.

Choice is always there. There’s choice going in, choice all the way through, and choice coming out, but people somehow deny themselves that conscious choice beyond the initial choice at the beginning. And I actually think making individual choice a key component is empowering and can strengthen relationships with others, but also with ourselves (especially if we’re healing from trauma. Imagine if I had just realized a lot earlier and I had chosen myself instead of him).

[Nas]

So I read all the related  posts on Marvin’s thread yesterday and then I left to go audit a beekeeping class (you read that correctly) and then I ended up thinking about life and different kinds of love in the context of bees. Bees only support and help each other. Every single thing a bee does is in service of its fellow bees. They sacrifice their lives basically to keep their colony intact.

But we’re not bees. We have these pesky feelings that come into play, and that quote that feelings make us act in ways that strengthen them is really so important, because our minds can work overtime to find justifications to allow us to act in ways that are against our best interest. The idea of agape love in a one on one relationship has always puzzled me because in a biblical context, it’s universal love and nothing to do with romantic partnership. The definition is also rooted in sacrifice, and sacrifice means to give up something of value for the good of another, to put the needs of others above our own. To do that in an extraordinary circumstance and make a sacrifice for the good of many (usually a one off thing or short duration and helps many people) is one thing. But to put one specific person’s needs above our own and to do so for a prolonged period plainly describes one aspect of the abusive marriage I was in. I guess what I’m saying is that, for me, agape love could potentially apply in terms of talking about “all MLCers” (as in love the sinner hate the sin), but it’s application to “your MLCer” or to individual relationships risks playing out as more trauma bonding and abuse than love. And it’s the people with trauma bonds who are going to be more inclined to want to cling to something like the idea of agape love because it allows the trauma bond to remain intact, and the scariest thing for a person frozen in trauma bond is anything that upsets the false comfort of the status quo. It’s why those with Stockholm syndrome love their captors. In situations where an MLCer has caused severe and even irreparable harm to another’s body, psyche, home, finances, the person undergoing a trauma response has already sacrificed enough.

I agree with what Marvin said on his thread, (paraphrasing) that with a solid sense of self and with empathy, there are times where we give up things that are not critical to help another adult, but to help another if it harms us is not love but more like martyrdom. And I believe things that are critical, like our well-being, physical safety, a regulated nervous system, those are the kinds of things we risk sacrificing early on when we don’t let go of a person who is actually performing the exact opposite of agape love. I feel the need to be explicit in saying that this is not a criticism of what anyone else chooses to do or me pushing a directive of what anyone should/must do, it’s just a thought I had while observing a bee colony. It occurred to me that if our feelings push us to act in ways that reinforce those feelings and do things that are not good for us, then the concept of agape love in the early days of dealing with a BD or any kind of breakup could potentially be used as a justification for not accepting what reality currently is as opposed to the way our feelings wish it to be.

 🐝 🐝🐝And here’s Sheryl Crow duetting with a bee’s favorite singer:
🎶 https://youtu.be/FseuxxcTlvA?si=kIC0FqPPUqEnUx6e