Across and Inside my Universe

My Mother Lives In Her Own Reality

My mother posted on Facebook, "My grandchildren are bright, brilliant, and they take after their grandmother."

GAG.

This is the same woman who hit me on a regular basis as a teenager.

This is the same woman who thinks she did a good job counteracting bullying when we were kids.  The subject of bullying came up recently when we were down there, and she said, "When (my sister) was in junior high, there was one time (my sister) was being bullied and I nipped that in the bud!"

She said this like she took care of it ALL.  HEL-lo!  Um, Mom, we younger three kids of the 6 kids were bullied mercilessly for over a decade, EACH!  You think you did GOOD?  You don't even KNOW what was going on!

And, I think she's forgetting the time I and my younger brother were sort of kidnapped; I very fuzzily remember that I think that was one thing she found out about, and my parents talked to one of the teens involved (just one?  why not both?).

She doesn't know I was beat up, several times, and THAT's why my glasses were broken; it wasn't because I slipped and fell in the snow . . . she doesn't know I was whipped with a jumprope with all those sliding plastic thingies on it, and that the pain from that was like a hundred stinging bees . . . and so much other crap.

CLUELESS.  Although she shouldn't be about the hitting thing, but then again at the time she saw nothing wrong with it; why would she now?  Then again, each of us kids holds a part in the fact that she's clueless; our relationship may not have been good enough then for us to want her to know?  But when older, we could have told her . . . I dunno that the relationship has EVER been good enough to tell her, though . . .

UGH ugh UGH.  Keeping my mouth shut when she exhibits her pride in her mothering skills, or anything else I've mentioned, is both hard and easy.  Hard because . . . I'd so love to verbally slap her in the face with reality.  (Hmm, the violent metaphor there, is probably not too hard to figure out why.)  Easy, because . . . she has no idea we look down on her for stuff, that these things happened (or that they were wrong), and we do, and she looks the fool to those of us who know . . .

It's sad, really, that she is so . . . out of touch.  Sad and pathetic . . . although I remember the raging mother coming after me physically and cornering me before whaling on me . . . and then I stop feeling sorry for her.

I dunno.  Empathy is good, but . . . when she throws this stuff in MY face, empathy is the furthest thing from my mind . . .

This whole situation reminds me of something one of the Mythbusters says, "I reject your reality and substitute my own!"  The difference here being that she either doesn't know she's doing it, or any glimmers of what reality is are too painful for her to face, so she lives in a constructed shell of glossed over (maybe painted over) memories.

Zentangle-Inspired Recovery Tags

You know how AA has recovery tokens, for 24-hour, 1 month, etc.? 

Well, I thought since I'm trying to stop an addictive behavior, that I could adapt the idea.

Recently I discovered Zentangles (copyright symbol here).  Zentangle.com  Lots of patterns at Tanglepatterns.com.

There's even a study whose early results show a marked increase in mindfulness related to Zentangles.

If it weren't the middle of the night, I'd show you the Zentangle I've done, and the Zentangle-Inspired recovery tags/tokens I've made. 

I make the patterns on one side, more than one pattern, and the day, week, month etc. is on the other side.  I have a small Xyron laminator, so I'll laminate these. 

They are about 1-3/4 inches high, and look like a small shipping tag, the ones with the top corners angled.  A hole punch at the apex will let me put these on a small ball chain holder thingie (like nail clippers come on).

I'm hoping these thingies will help me.  They'll be small enough and durable enough to carry in my pocket.

Bedroom Progress - Small Moves, Ellie

I started in this corner of the room. Floor only, as I'm doing a mostly garbage pass, although if something's on the floor we'll put it to donate, chuck, or find a home or temporary home for it until I can tackle everything on top of everything, which is pretty much taking up the space that needs to be homes for (organized) things. These pics are the same as the previous post, pre-cleaning, but they're a visual aid.

I cleaned just about up to the small child's chair you see in the corner of the room in this picture; a bit over a quarter of the room's circumference. That small chair, by the way, was made by my dad for my daughter when she was THREE. She's in Junior Highschool now.

That may not sound like much to some, especially since it was just the floor, but I was dripping sweat after 20 minutes, and had filled a kitchen-size garbage bag.

As well, I've been struggling with just doing dishes and laundry (not even folding) on a regular basis, let alone most other chores; that's kinda one reason the place has gotten to this point. Yes, doing things consistently, or at all, is a struggle when I'm depressed, anxious, trying to distract myself from mania (although mania does sometimes result in a burst of productivity, which I'm afraid may be the impetus behind this project). Most of the time though I'm fighting the things mania urges me to do that aren't good; that means there's not alot of me left over for ADL's (activities of daily life, as they say).

Regardless of the reason for doing this, I'm hoping blogging about it will A) help me stay somewhat organized about it, B) help my sense of efficacy and build upon it as I can look at the blog and see the progress I've made, C) help keep me motivated and carrying on with this even if the urge of productivity should desert me, and D) maybe keep alive some unreal notion that my non-existent blog readers might be sending me thoughts of support.

Yeah, that last one, not gonna happen. I need to do this for me, anyway, and I recognize that. Support doesn't hurt, though!

So . . . small moves.

I've been feeling overwhelmed over the last 24 hours, just looking at the whole room. As Adam Savage of Mythbusters would say (and that's how I hear it in my head), "There's your problem!" I have problems with looking too far into the future, looking at problems upon problems (it's turtles all the way down), as if I was looking at the humongous pile of food you need to eat over the next month or year, and feeling overwhelmed by it all.

We don't eat all that at once. It's made up of smaller meals, and those are further broken down into food groups, or various ingredients, or various steps of the recipe.

You can make your moves as small as you like; moving forward, even if it feels equivalent to maybe one frog hop, is the important thing. Just because it feels like a frog hop, doesn't mean it IS one.

The first day, I made a list (a HUGE one), took and posted the photos, and blogged about this. The next day, I took one of the categories of items I needed to research selling/trading, and started that process. (I'll be trading some old collectable gaming figures for a game I want, that takes up less than 1/4 of the space the figures did; a win/win, there. Boardgamegeek.com is great for exchanging, occasionally selling, old or new games and related items.) So, a small move.

I did not beat myself up inside about how little that seemed to accomplish in relation to the whole; the urge to do that came to me as it so easily does, but I countered those thoughts with, "No, it's not too little. You are no longer stuck and you are moving forward. FEEL how good that feels after being stagnant for so long!"

And I did. Feel good, that is. I transformed my negative thoughts and feelings not just into banishing the negative, but I created positive thoughts and feelings to replace them.

My mantra going forward will be, as you may guess, "Small moves, Sara. Small moves."

(P.S. Who wants to watch that movie now? Me . . .)

What a Not So Beautiful Mess . . .

To riff off of a Diamond Rio song title . . .

I'm being brave in posting this. I want to track my progress on organizing this, although the rest of the house is a mess too (mostly not as bad, but this is BAD, so that's not saying much).

This is the master bedroom in our apartment. Much of the mess is craft items, information, patterns, and publications. There's a big variety of crafts and materials: Beading/jewelry making (including chain maille jewelry), knitting, crochet, spinning, and weaving (that's a four-shaft table loom under a makeshift dustcover), Rubber stamping, scrapbooking, and a variety of paper crafts, with a variety of die-cutting stuff (including a Cricut, a . . . robotic die cutter, if you will, for those who aren't familiar with this stuff), and a big wooden rotating tower of ink pads, reinkers, ink pens, and other things.

I have fabric in various places in the room, handed down from my mom when she was clearing it all out; I have no sewing machine though except a tiny one designed for stitching in scrapbooks and on other paper crafting projects. The fabric has come in handy for a variety of my daughter's school projects, though. I've even saved jeans she's outgrown, and jeans of mine as well, for a variety of recycled/upcycled craft projects. It's a good thing I saved some of my jeans that I'd lost too much weight for, because I gained the weight back and needed them. Lol. I'm working on losing weight again, though.

I have a couple drawers of adhesives, from a Xyron laminator/magnet maker/adhesive applier, foam tape, masking tape, double sided tape, photo corners, glaze-type glues, rubber cement, tacky glues, post it note glue, glue for metals, and a whole host of other adhesives for different purposes, materials, etc.

The thing about all these crafts, is, the last two years mostly doesn't count for me not touching them much, due to a year and a half of surgical recovery; with all the pain knitting simple garter stitch was the most I could handle, and I've picked it up now and again. Also, the last two years my husband's been either out of work, or at two couple months long temporary jobs . . . with jewelry making, buying the findings like jump rings, crimps, clasps, bails, etc. can add up, and so as with some of the other crafts, running out of consumables has limited those.

Also, I suffer from a variety of mental illnesses, disorders, etc. You'd think an OCD person's bedroom would look neat, but then there's ADD, bipolar with lots of depression, etc. and everything's overwhelming. These issues also lead to a lack of desire to do anything, including favorite interests and hobbies. My therapist has recommended I not ditch everything, since once (or if, in my mind) my depression improves I'll regret having gotten rid of everything.

SO. With that in mind, I'm analysing how often I've used stuff, over the last 6 years or so, and factors affecting that, in order to help with what to ditch and what to keep. The last couple years it's been mostly knit, with a little crochet and a moderate amount of weaving. A little spinning, too. The couple years before that, there were sporadic bursts of rubber stamping (often related to mania, but not always), mixed with alot of knitting and the like. Also alot of beading/jewelry making during that period. The couple years before that, was when I started the jewelry stuff, as well as the knitting/crochet/tiny bit of spinning. Scattered Rubber Stamping as well, with a year of digital scrapbooking. It's been longer since physical scrapbooking, but that's mostly due to organizational issues (ie, I can't find my stuff) as well as some money factors (do you know how much the scrapbooking and stamping industries make? It's ridiculous. TOO many commercial products, I think a simpler, less expensive approach will suit me better.

Still, at some point when you're in an apartment, you can't just leave all that space being taken up by stuff you don't use . . . I need to figure out where to draw the lines. It's gonna be hard.

I can do it, though, one step at a time. I have a budget of $200-$250, from birthday and special occasion money I've saved up for awhile. That doesn't seem like much compared to all the stuff in there; some small portion of which needs to go in other rooms.

There's SO MUCH organizing info out there, though, that it's overwhelming. I'm starting with a blog or two, like http://iheartorganizing.blogspot.com/, which has some great ideas and showcases a variety of organizing products, ESPECIALLY in use, so I can get an idea of what may and may not work for me.

Wish me luck? And also, that I don't get so overwhelmed I just quit.

No judging my mess. I should have an apron that says that . . . lol.

Next post on this project will be the list of stuff that I've come up with that needs doing in there. Although, with the rest of the house being a mess too, I'm not sure what I'll do with the stuff that gets kept but goes in another room, before I've cleaned and organized the room it goes in so there's a place for it . . . . it's like a Mobius strip. Or MC Escher stairs.

Body Memories

I've had several body memories, and they aren't fun. Sometimes it's apparent right off the bat that you are having a reaction that doesn't fit what's going on, other times it has been a reaction that I've felt unsettled, bothered, but that I haven't been able to put my finger on without a few minutes of reflection; it's needed some thought, and thinking about the different feelings I had, putting words to them, that then has triggered a "Wait a minute, that does NOT fit, that is so . . . wrong for what was going on, what's the problem?"

It isn't that I WANT things to be a body memory. Let me explain what went on in the "think about it for a minute" example.

My husband came home from work and I was lying in bed (laying?). He sat down on the edge of the bed and stroked my arm, with his fingers together, palm side (but not the palm, just the fingers) against my arm, stroking downwards on my arm in what felt like a petting motion. It felt exactly like you would pet a dog or cat.

I instantly had a negative reaction, but kept it inside as I didn't want to make him feel bad. He'd hold my shoulder, then go back to this stroking of my arm. I can't even type it without emotionally & mentally shuddering; the reaction is visceral, which I think is key to confirming it's a body memory, after the few minutes of thought/investigation.

After a minute or three of lying there, I eventually told him it bothered me, and that I'd like him to not do it anymore. That it felt as if he were petting me like a pet, or that he was pawing (at) me. He immediately stiffened and went into his "hurt" mode. I hate that. I can understand it, though.

Soon thereafter he left the room, and I lay there feeling the after-echoes of the intense feelings his touching me in that way had caused. I started to think, "It makes me shudder, to think of it" and that made something "click" inside me; I then thought, "That is SO not what I feel his intention was; he was being loving, caring, affectionate; something is going on and I need to figure it out."

So, I spent a couple of minutes thinking about it, the shuddering thing having caused me to realize that the negative feelings I was having were so off-kilter with the actual event (which still makes me cringe, feel disgust and revulsion, etc.), with the actual intentions I feel my husband had. I realized with not too much more thought, investigation, etcetera that all the feelings and reactive thoughts I had above, from disgust, to cringing, to feeling pawed and petted, to other things like feeling it was creepy, very creepy, it was overtly possessive, even to the point of feeling that it was someone "owning" me, that the gesture meant I was owned by someone else, . . . well I realized relatively quickly that this felt like a body memory, and that's when everything settled into place.

This whole process maybe took 5 minutes, and only that long because I was trying to endure the touch, and wait for him to leave. I didn't rationalize what happened, that's not what I was doing either. I was looking for something to explain why I felt so . . . strongly, overwhelmingly so, to explain why it was so visceral, that the feelings were so sure, so . . . immediate . . . so . . . just THERE, as a visceral (sorry to use that so much, it fits though) reaction to the event.

Body memory is the only fit. It feels . . . right.

The other time that I remember most clearly, something physical was going on, in a way that was different than usual, and I remember feeling . . . strange . . . odd . . . and a sense of . . . body deja vu, like the position, and his position, and our relative positions and proximities to each other and various parts of each other, was something . . . that my body had experienced before. There was a sense of . . . the same sense of botheredness, of something being . . . off, that I had with the arm stroking today. Within a minute or two, I settled on body memory, even though I'd never heard of the concept before. It felt like my body was remembering something that my mind did not; I can't explain what else about it led me to that conclusion; it's been about 6 or 7 years now.

I've had one or two other things, but these two are the best representations of what happened.

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$8 Million Kickstarter Project - Pebble E-Paper Watch

Source: kickstarter.com via labyrinth on Pinterest

This makes me want a smart phone.  Seriously.

Not so I can get umpteen notifications of emails, endless Facebook etc. updates, but because there's so many cool little apps you could do, AND I think you might be able to have it notify you of specific people emailing or FBing you.

Being able to see who's calling you, on your wrist?  That's cool, esp. if you're driving, doing the dishes, in a meeting (you can have it vibrate to get your attention to look, there's no speaker), ,in the theater, out to dinner, or a whole variety of other situations.  Of course, in our society, looking at your watch while you're engaged with someone in conversation or some other activity is often perceived as rude, especially if you look at it often.  Still, it could come in handy!  Especially if your phone is across the house, buried in your purse, or what have you.  If you're out on the town and it's the babysitter, you'll want to pick up the phone, even in the theater (or get up and immediately call the sitter back as you walk out of the theater for courtesy).

There's exercising apps, they mention possibly being able to monitor your sleep (other sleep monitor wrist devices I've seen will cost around as much as this well, or more, at retail, although part of that for the other ones is for the software and linking the info to fitness sites), you can control your music on your phone via the watch . . .

An app has been suggested that will translate the accelerometer's movements in the watch when you gesture, to controlling your mouse pointer . . . that would be AWESOME, especially for people who maybe have arthritis or some other issue, disabled hand, or something . . .

I don't know why it excites me so much.  I think it's cool. 

And holy moly at $8 million dollars pledged; that's staggering! 

One big thing to note is no Windows phones, just iPhone and Android; as well, only Androids can send text messages to it; Apple keeps those off-limits, phone only.

I love to see cool new uses of technology!

Updating the Blog When You Have OCD

I spent 4 hours updating the blog today, and several the other day starting to add tags/categories to posts.

The thing is, I look at the Category Cloud and I can see a couple I can get rid of, which is good, but then the urge to add more as I categorize further back is hard to resist.  It's kind of frustrating and a little embarassing.

Much of the time spent today on the sidebar widgets, was spent super-fine tuning the size or the details like the order the books are shown in, their size, etc.  I think I spent two hours alone on the boardgamegeek widget, although that one required more primitive-level tweaking in the code itself.

It's going to take me some time to add categories to older posts; hopefully I can do just a few at a time, and not feel compelled to do a year's worth in one sitting . . .

My OCD is acting up, partly because I've been taking my Vyvanse, that lets it come out a bit more when I'm more active, and I'm under a huge amount of stress.

******

Still, the pain I've inflicted on someone I love most dearly, feels almost unbearable.  Before this last weekend, I would have said it WAS unbearable, but I CBT'd my way out of that.  That doesn't mean that I don't burst into tears now and then, when I think about what I've done and how I've betrayed him and my daughter.

Pop Culture References in Psychotherapy

Some pop culture items are so . . . pervasive, they've permeated our society to a depth that one could reasonably expect someone else to understand a general reference to it; ie, Mickey Mouse, "Here's looking at you, kid!" and others.

It's not guaranteed, but most people have a frame of reference.

There's others that are so widely popular and have been mass-marketed so much (Star Wars) that it's pretty rare, though not unheard of, for people to not understand the, "Luke, I'm your Father" reference. Although when it comes to the geekier references (Dungeons & Dragons, sci-fi, fantasy, computer nerd stuff like Tron) it really depends on the "audience".

Still, sometimes in therapy the best analogy you can think of to help illustrate something you are trying to convey, involves a pop culture reference. More often on my, the patient's, part, but occasionally, though not often, my psychologist will do this as well.

For example, when Kung Fu Panda (the first movie) was out in theaters, and had been out for a couple months, I finally saw it, and the moment at the top of the stairs when Master Shifu asks him why he stayed through all the abusive treatment Shifu had dealt out to him, well, Po's (the panda) answer deeply connected with me and I almost started crying (yes, this IS Kung Fu Panda I'm talking about). I thought, someone in Hollywood understands ME.

Now, it's not that important that ANYONE in Hollywood understand me; anyone understanding me at all is excellent! Or, AWESOME as Po would say. Still, you see all sorts of people portrayed in various shows, movies, etc., and if you never see yourself there, you feel like maybe your are too odd, wierd, defective, etc. to ever have a person with any traits similar to you be portrayed.

Now, do I define myself by what's seen in the media? HELL NO! It's just, that moment of connection with Po was a sincerely touching moment for me, and while Po may not necessarily be the personality that many people would want to identify with, well, there it is, I do. My therapist had, actually, seen the movie, and so we spent about half the session talking about the movie and the things I related to in it, silly as that might sound to some, it felt productive, helpful, and validating to me.

On the other hand, if your psychotherapist is relating a pop culture analogy to you, about something you've just told him that prompted him to think of this analogy, and the reference is the movie Fatal Attraction . . . well then maybe you're in trouble. Not with him, mind you, but if your behavior, feelings, thoughts, anything you report brings up a Fatal Attraction reference to his mind . . . well, it seems like a scary thing!

Of course, since I've never SEEN Fatal Attraction, I didn't really get it; he seemed quite surprised that I hadn't seen it. I've heard certain types of references to it so many times I know a little about it just through those; enough to know having what one just told him in therapy being related back to me as a Fatal Attraction reference, is not . . . a positive reflection on me.

Now, he's objective, and I don't believe he was using the references to JUDGE me or anything like that; rather to point out the extremes that certain thought patterns can take you to (not that I think I had done or said anything Fatal Attraction-like, but then, how would I know, since I've never seen it?)

So, he took several risks in using those references, and the fact that I hadn't seen the movie meant his analogies fell kinda flat. Then again, some of mine have as well.

I just know that one probably really needs to look at ones' self and alter ones' course of thought or behavior, if said courses of thought or behavior are inspiring Fatal Attraction references in ones' therapist.

Cheating is Impulsive?

The psychology of morality: Time to be honest

Perhaps. At least, that's a conclusion I draw from the above article/experiment