Day 3 & 4

Yep, this is like how I feel.

My therapist uses a similar approach to Alan and I have been feeling a lot better since I've started tuning into the actual feelings instead of just thinking/talking about them.

 

Thanks for this great insight, MorComm. Much food for thought in your reply. Even though I try to avoid watching the news or reading the paper (leave all that to my husband), it is impossible to avoid the gloom and doom that the media focuses on.

 

Yes, Nadia, not to sound like a raving dialectical materialist, but it's easy to forget how much consciousness is a function of capital in an essentially narcissistic consumer-focused society. True, my first episode of TMS occurred as what was diagnosed as a "herniated disk" about 6 months after my mother died, but at the same time I inherited her house where mom and dad had fought incessantly for 40 years. Couldn't take the financial responsibility especially when it came with a psychologically over-charged environment? Perhaps! But it is interesting that this first episode went away a few years later when I got a huge settlement check from my father's wrongful death lawsuit. Probably temporarily erased the added financial stress that the house had added to my psyche. But of course none of this would have had such a profound emotional effect if it wasn't for my perfectionist personality traits, which emerged during my early relationship with my battling superego figures (i.e. all forgiving martyr mom and rageoholic, belittling papa locked in a life-long battle for power channeled through number one son - i.e. Little me!)

In this context, what you said above really resonated with me:

"Both my parents were perfectionists (my Dad more than my Mum), had high expectations of us kids, and had/have OCD tendencies. My Dad had intense anxiety/anger issues which I picked up at a very early age. He often would 'freeze time' and abandon us emotionally through extended periods of silence. All four of us kids have had emotional issues stemming from abandonment, and also anxiety, depression, etc."

I sure remember when dad when into one of his long sulks and gave me an mom the silent treatment until we "forgave" him for verbally abusing and threatening us. A real psychic Mobius strip that ran on and on and on! Trapped in a situation where you have to forgive someone for punishing you for being yourself. Catch 22! No win! You can certainly see that inheriting the house would have been an essentially positive experience if my parents hadn't had such a ridiculously conflicted relationship, by such deep rooted conflicts that they hadn't driven me away for years and years.

 

I'm so sorry, MorComm I can see how that would be really tough to live in that house with all of those memories. (((hugs)))

 

Well, as long as my long-suffering, all-forgiving mother was alive (and I had the responsibility of taking care of her), I could live in the house without facing my prior history in it. Could forget that my father had chased me out of it with a gun back in 1981. But when my mother died in January 2001, it was hard to ignore all the bad things that had happened there. Alan Gordon was so right when he told "Annie" that learning that her husband had cancer was a cumulative breaking point. Same with me with the death of my mom: I had just been through too many stressful episodes during the 5 years before her passing that her death was the breaking point where I went TMS symptomatic. You can successfully repress and repress for a long, long time, but finally there's a trigger that activates the pain syndrome.