After both talking to my new financial planner for the first time and then today, afterwards I feel so drained.  Financial issues are my Achilles heel.  Nothing makes me feel better than having money in my account and when I’m broke, or owe money nothing makes me feel more like a bigger failure.   After explaining everything I had done wrong, she got her pen and paper, gave me some questions for my accountant and then gave me some items to do.  WE are off.  I then promptly felt like someone let all the air out of my body.  I napped and started worrying and so got back up and answering e-mail.

Moni said I had to update.  So here goes.

Mainly it’s a bunch of things that I want to scream at the universe and know there is no socially acceptable place to do it.  I did the fourth step of AA last night.  Not for dependency on drugs/alcohol but my al-anon reworking of steps.  It was a humbling experience.  Not sure I got everything out but it was a step.  Reviewing and asking a power higher than me to take away my fears, my defects of character.  Lately I haven’t felt that higher power in a true connected way.  The loss and fear I have in my heart has made me retreat into myself and live in my head again.  This is never a good thing.  Of course, spending time with Moni and Wick, Ron and Christine helped pull me back out but in essence I fear the question that people ask me after a post like this.  “What can I do to help?”  I have NO IDEA.  I don’t ask for help because it makes me feel like someone has ripped me open sternum to chin.  Vulnerable to the highest degree.  So I retreat into my world, my head.  I ask God/high power to help.  I beg for help.  Lately the silence has been deafening or probably more realistically the answers are not what I want to hear so I take it as silence.  I have noticed that I want to be numb.  I come back from visiting friends locally or far away and look around at my life and I don’t like what I see.  I don’t like this life I have made for myself.   I have one foot in the past looking at what I did and a foot looking at a future that seems like a trudge.  Wick has been talking about a plan and I agree that would help.  It’s the overwhelming feelings I have.  Everything seems like a cluster fuck.  And a hard one.  Do I want kids, do I not?  I look at a future without children and grandchildren and that seems bleak.  I look at what it would take to get that in my life and that seems like an uphill battle.  And I seem way to self-involved for having a kid all the time.  Let’s not even discuss the financial part of what it would take.  And having a partner for that child seems crucial.  Financially, I was feeling good and then a little life hiccups and I’m back to that frozen look in my eyes.  Staring at the wall, overwhelmed.  I owe people money.  I owe taxes.  I have bills to pay. My house is a project waiting for attention and money which I don’t have.  I know I need to do things but since I can’t even get my arms around it then where do I start.  I also have to get my dogs to the vet.  One is sick and deserves treatment or relief and I’m so sad about that I can’t even get my head around that.  So much loss lately, where do I even start with that.  I don’t trust men.  I don’t trust relationships.  I don’t trust.  I have a very small group of people in my circle of trust and my heart feels very grinchy.  I can’t spare giving any help beyond the very very basic amounts right now.  People that require vast amounts of time or I get even the slightest amount of need from and I retreat into my safe zone.  I JUST CAN’T DO IT.  Sometimes I find myself so shut down I can’t even answer the phone.  I just retreat into safe.  Then comes the very unhealthy need for numbness.  It just feels too much TOO TOO much and I want to just not feel at all for a bit.  That can’t be healthy.  Isn’t that a recipe for a addiction right there?  Another thing to worry about.  Lately when I go to bed and I find myself crying again about worries or things that have yet to happen, I just want to go to sleep. Wake up to start the trudge again and feel ok.  That doesn’t happen really.  I see people who have a partner in their life.  I’m surrounded LITERALLY by these people.  And I see how their partners have been there for them and continue to be a team effort.  I can’t remember a relationship I have ever had that was like that.  When every relationship you have is with emotionally stunted people then you have to look at yourself and say it’s not them, it’s you.  You are choosing horrible people in your life.  So yes, I want someone to swoop in and rescue me.  Make this shitty life better.  To make my life not be or seem too empty.  I would love that.  But then we all know, there is no WHITE KNIGHT.  There is no simple answer that is going to make this better.  I have to rescue myself.  I have to get myself up off the ground and start on the path.  I have considered my meds are off and I probably should double up on some anti-depression meds – in fact, when I have taken my hydrocodone, I notice the anxiety deadens and I feel better.  I even looked up on the internet if hydrocodone has anti-anxiety benefit and it does but it’s also HIGHLY addictive.  So yah, meds check in my future.  When I have money.

This is what is in my head.  When you ask me how I am.  This is how I am.  I will say, I’m fine.  I’m good.  And in some ways I am.  I have great friends, an amazing family and mainly my health.  But I don’t have a short answer for how I am. I am lost.  I am searching.  I am trying desperately to find an answer.  I am trying to be my own white knight.  I am trying to not fall apart at the seams.  Or cry when you ask me.  I shove it back down because it is all of this and probably more.

I did a meditation this week.  Woke up with shame riddling my body in a way I haven’t had happen in a long long time.  I mentally recounted what I had done the last few days and couldn’t come up with anything that would cause shame or guilt or any ancillary emotion like those.  It was hard to be in my body at that moment.

So I meditated and asked all the shame inducing pieces of me to come forward and lets talk.  I did this quite a bit when working with my inner children during the intense therapy times of my early 30s and it really helped me identify parts of me and integrate in pieces of me for a much better, balanced person.  It’s super powerful and reminds me of The Fluent Self and her work with monsters and “destuckification”.  It’s basically calling out the subconscious and asking it to open a dialogue.  POWERFUL stuff if you are willing to dig in.

So the pieces that came forward were shocking even to me…

1.  A monster with three heads covered in stretchy black nylon pinned to box so it couldn’t move – with one head that was rage filled fighting the constraints, one sobbing uncontrollably and one that was just two ineffectual lobster like claws with no pinchers.

2.  My seven-year old just post molestation (who the crab monster was reaching for in a protective kind of way but couldn’t reach as it was pinned down)

3.  My 15 year old covered in body shame, barely able to be in clothing it felt so revealing and shame-filled

4.  My present state sitting there naked (eek) but with absolutely no body shame or nervousness

5.  Me as moderator which got so uncomfortable that I had to stop the meditation and create a higher evolved moderator source

I think that was all of them but there may be more that emerge.  I didn’t get very far as the normal “adult” moderator was so uncomfortable the mediation kept going off-course.  Finally I had to recreate it with a all-knowing kind of queen mother moderator so I could continue.

Normally I just talk to the pieces and we understand what is going on.

First one I started with was the the seven-year old.  She fucking let me have it.  Straight up.  I asked her what she needed and did the “I’m here to protect you” and she was like “No you aren’t.  You don’t protect us.  you continually put us in harms way and sacrifice us for other people and you don’t listen to what we say at all.”  It was justified rage and it hit me like someone filled up a pillow-case with bricks.  I immediately felt it in my gut where I always feel emotions and realized she was right.  In my desire to not be “afraid” of things, I will feel that fear and push forward.  In some instances, it’s great and gets me to overcome many things that others just stop doing because it’s uncomfortable.

But apparently in my desire to not live a sheltered and protected life, I apparently have put pieces of me in harms way.  Tender, vulnerable pieces of me.  I have again at a pretty core level sacrificed what I needed for what others wanted.   There were serious amounts of tears in therapy talking about that I had sacrificed a child (even if it’s an inner-child) and put that in harms way for something so temporary, and so base.  I know I have to go back and talk to the other parts of me but the 7 year old was so forceful and it was so apparent that I needed to digest her words, that I am working there first.  I’m sure I’ll call a shame roundtable again in the coming weeks and see who is there and what we need to work on but first things first, I have to address this, first, basic conversation.

So this week, it’s been on my mind.  I’ve been trying to think about if I am sacrificing what I need – then I best identify what I need and not in a general way.  Specifics.  I will be probably working on that here for the next few posts.  What do I need.