I had an appointment with D. I have worked with this boy to improve his memory for over a year and made very little progress. I can usually see a difference, at least some difference, in someone's mental functioning after one or two short BrainManagementSkills sessions. I thought it was time to work on acceptance of the limits of his mind.
I first asked him if he tried to cover, so people didn't know he had memory problems. He said yes. The feelings behind it were fear and sadness. I assured him that no one liked to be different from the people around them. I also told him that I thought he had to learn to be open with people and tell them he had memory problems. Whatever problems he might have in school because of it, it would also be a problem when he was grown. He would be better off telling any boss outright that he had this problem, ask the boss to write his instructions down rather than just tell them to him. While his boss might fire him because he had this problem, he definitely would fire him for never following directions. (I just thought of another solution that would work even better. Record the boss's instructions on his phone. )
I got a message from Yvette asking me if I wanted to come down a see the exposed beams now that Scott had taken down sheetrock. He said he could see that the beams were nailed initially together rather than screwed. The wood had dried out and shrunk, and the nails had rusted. This would have created space for movement and rubbing. Also, two boards were laid parallel to each other with no space between them. They had not been screwed together. This meant that they, too, would rub against each other. Yvette and I both felt good about this solving the high-pitched squeaking noise.
I took a nap before my 2pm appointment with a high school student who also has memory problems. First thought it was stress and depression. There is a history of sadness combined with the stress of online schooling. Then it occurred to me he was a visual learner and had an audio processing problem. He confirmed that he learns better by doing and seeing than hearing. Online classes are a disaster for kids like that.
I spent some time working in Mike's library searching for more books to donate to seminaries. Found over fifty. Scott came up bearing a lamb chop Yvette had cooked. I was going to have a hot dog for dinner. Guess not!
I called Judy as I did my evening walk with Elsa. She was doing much better. Her white blood count is down to 11,000, the high end of the normal range, from a high of 35,000. Her sepsis was clearing.
Judy told me that when she was got to the hospital, the doctor asked her if she wanted to be resuscitated if she had a heart attack. She left it to Howard, but the question freaked her out. She had no idea how sick she was. She told me the doctor was surprised at how cogent she was given how advanced her case was.
I told her about my adventure on my trip to Hilo, including how I had to go to the bathroom. She recommended I get a woman's urinal to take it with me. She had one. She thought Paulette did too. I called Paulette to ask, she groaned. She had fallen again. We made an exchange: my walker for her urinal.
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Musings:
The other day I was complaining to Judy about some harsh judgment someone made against me. Judy said it was time to let it go. Hmm! Most of my work in therapy involves learning to tolerate harsh criticism and contempt. No matter who it comes from, it makes me feel shattered inside.
I addressed it again in my session with Shelly today. I know the origin of this reaction. Those who follow my updates already know my mother had zero tolerance for any differences from her point of view. When I said something or did something other than she thought I should, she would attack. My mother wasn't calm in her attacks. They were sharp and explosive. She was acting out of fear. My mom was not a well glued together woman in this regard.
I experienced her attacks as life-threatening. While my mother would never have physically harmed me, the message she sent out in her attacks was that she wanted to kill me. She didn't want to kill her daughter that she gave birth to, just the personality that manifested. Her response was so primitive that I think I would still find it hard to know the difference.
Since her attacks were not just intense, they were filled with accusations of my defectiveness; they left quite a wound. This wound leaves me vulnerable to anything resembling a similar attack from others – literally anyone.
The depth of ridiculousness was on one visit to Hawaii before we moved here. We arrived after dark. There was some confusion between Mike and me about when I was supposed to bring the car around. I crossed the empty roadway without waiting for a signal from the crossing guard. I thought she was going to have me arrested. She was intense. I was shattered. Did I know this was more her problem than mine? Yes, of course. Did it do any good? Not a jot. My body reacted; I went into shock.
We all know the difference between a response of mild annoyance and more profound anger. The end result of anger is always death. Fortunately, it rarely goes to the end result. I have never seen it go there in my lifetime. My mother's vitriol is the closest I have come. However, I suffer from PTSD as a result, and the initiation of the impulse triggers fear in me much as a car backfiring triggers it in a military veteran.
I saw an analogy to a car motor. There's the ignition stage. A common point of response in all of us. We may even say, "If you do that again, I'll kill you." Meaning absolutely no harm. It's just saying it is important to me, nothing more.
After the ignition stage, most times, the motor idles, the engine of anger sputters out, or we suppress it. But then there are the gears. Do we shift into first, second, third, or overdrive? At overdrive, we become actively physically dangerous.
I would say that my mother took her 'engine' into second gear as a norm. I became very sensitive to the sensation of that engine ignition system. As everyone else with PSTD, I can't tell the difference at an autonomic level. I can tell the difference on a cognitive level. I could do that even with her when I was a child. But the autonomic system takes over, and I'm helpless.
The solution for the day was to find a way to remain calm in the face of that danger. If I remained calm, I had to see how crazy my mom was. I sat there and observed a distorted face, a crazed look. Who wants to see your own mother as crazy? How can you rely on someone like that? My life goal is to remain calm and loving in the face of that anger.
I believe that when any of us clutch too tightly to 'our way' of thinking about something or doing something, we become crazed. As I've said many times before, I believe most differences between people are over questions of the 'right way to do something, even the right perception of what is right in front of both of us.
I think once the basic survival needs are addressed, all conflicts are over conceptual differences. Why are we so vulnerable? Maybe because reality is that elusive. We have to accept uncertainty. We have to accept our limits in perceiving the world around us. No one can know everything—reality by consensus = a culture. Living with so much uncertainty is hard on the nerves. The more trauma we've had at some point in our lives, the harder it is.
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