Friday, September 24, 2021

Friday, September 24, 2021

 

   I just had two appointments today. One with my therapist, Shelly, and one with a Step-Up Tutoring student who has problems with reading she couldn’t deal with. I continue working with a therapist to overcome the PTSD of my youth.  Denial is not my style; I had to incorporate it into my life skill arsenal. 

     I used to work with Shelly every two weeks.  I started working with her once a week a while ago just because I could afford it, and I love learning more myself and the human condition. I also find the more I learn about myself, the more tolerant I can be of others, the more responsive instead of reactive.  I didn’t need support from her for a while. Then something happened a few months ago that threw me right back into old mental patterns. That on top of not having Mike to hold me and comfort me. Most annoying. Now, I need those weekly meetings. 

    For the past year, I had enough skill to pull myself out of the terrified state and get back on even keel.  However, I am never as peaceful as I have been. Not even Mike’s death threw me like this.  It was this incident plus Mike’s death that left me in this state. 

    I started the session telling Shelly a story, which led to another story. The second one had me laughing so hard I could barely speak. The first story was about my Alzheimer’s scare.  I occasionally smelled smoke as I woke up. I couldn’t find the source. There were no reports on brush fires on the island.  Olfactory hallucinations are a symptom of Alzheimer’s, among other things, like a brain tumor.  I made an appointment to speak to my doctor about it.  When I made the appointment, I wrote a few words explaining my concern. 

    The Saturday before Labor Day, I smelled a strong scent of smoke.  It didn’t go away when I got up and went for my morning walk.  When I ran into another walker, I asked if she smelled smoke. She sure did; she complained it hurt her throat. Ah, Thank, God. While the information relieved on my personal concern, now I had to wonder what was burning and who was in danger. 

    When I ran into Vince and Juli, I mentioned the smoke to them too. Oh, yes, said Vince. They’re roasting pork. They do that every Saturday and Sunday.  They are doing an unusually large burn today because it’s Labor Day.  He was sure that was the source of the smoke because he recognized the smell of the wood they used. I canceled my doctor’s appointment. She got a good laugh.

     I told Shelly I had a sensitive nose because it was well trained.  My mother was hypervigilant. Often, while we were eating dinner, she would put her hands up and say, “What is that?”  Dorothy and I went to work. We knew there was a sound or smell she couldn’t identify.  We had to identify it before we could continue eating.  As I told this story, I viewed it from an observer’s point of view.  It would be a comic scene in a movie. I couldn’t stop laughing.

   After my father died, my uncle came out to visit every Sunday.  After a few of these experiences, he became concerned about his hearing.  He had it checked. There was nothing wrong with him. The doctor said, “Your sister-in-law has supersonic hearing.”

     I have struggled all my life to get control of my fear. Some people  retreat.  I don’t retreat; I display it for all to see. When I was younger, I assumed everyone who didn’t manifest fear wasn’t afraid. I worked on healing the cause of the problem.  I don’t know when I learned that others suppress their feelings to control themselves. Suppression was explicitly discouraged by my father. He had some vision of a new world where we could all be free. Beware the utopian! I can control much of my behavior now except when dealing with individuals who hurt me in specific ways that remind me of my mother. Then I lose it; my words can be sane and logical, but my tone becomes spitfire. I would do well on the McLaughlin Report, a weekly news program where people argued loudly. I would see people speak publicly; there are those who reveal their fear and those who either don’t feel it or just don’t reveal it.  I longed to be one of those who had control. 

     I have mixed feelings.  The alternative to that hyper speech is control.  I have an aversion to that control too. I associate it with manipulation. My father was gently manipulative. When I heard that tone of voice, my hair would stand on end.  I know that my behavior prevents me from effectively resolving differences with other people.  (Mike used to say, our relationship worked because there was always one adult present, and it wasn’t always the same person. When it’s always the same person, it’s a dysfunctional relationship.)  Since I need to negotiate with some people, I must, I have to get this behavior under control. While that has been my goal for my whole adult life, it is only now that I’m working on it specifically.  Weird. 

   Shelly directed me to focus on my body, to find where the bad feeling associated with my parents’ manipulations sat.  The object is to focus on it, describe it and watch it transform.  I use the same strategy with my students to modify their brain patterns. 

     I can report that I envisioned talking to the people who are disturbing my peace of mind, my tone was better. I don’t know if it is quite where I need it to be.  I need to be the adult in the room. Their fear drives them to withdraw, the extreme opposite of my pattern. How’s that for irreconcilable differences? 

    I finally had a second session with Step Up E, a third-grade girl with serious reading problems.  even if it was a bit later than expected. Our appointment was for 3 pm. I’m German; 3 pm means 3 pm.  I did other work and gave up, but I didn’t sign out. At 20 after I got a text from her father saying, buenos tarde.  I checked. There she was. Does this family run on Hispanic time? 

   I worked with her on her visual processing. She said she had no trouble ‘seeing’ the letters; they weren’t blurred.  This meant her eyes sight was okay. Then, I checked what part of the brain she used to process visual input.  She pointed to her temple area-Broca’s and Wernicke’s.  I have found that kids who process visual information from there always have trouble.  I teach them to use ‘the screen’ across the forehead area.  I’ve been doing this process for about thirty years, and so far it works reasonably well. 

   She told me the letters moved about in her head, rather than on the page. Some kids see the letters moving around on the page.  Her letters moved both from side to side and up and down. The kid’s response is to resist this movement, make the fluctuations smaller.  

       I teach a release exercise. I told her she should find this exercise fun, not scary. If it does feel scary to stop. I have never had anything go wrong with this exercise; but no one is going to go the distance if they find it scary. I told her to just close her eyes and allow the fluctuation to be as large as it had to be, as big as her head, as big as her room, as big as her house, as big as her neighborhood.  She said the fluctuations were as big as the city.

   After we did the exercise, the letters were stable. I asked her if this was new or not. She said no because they were sometimes steady before. In this case, the steadiness lasted longer than usual.  A good sign! There are cases where one release fixes the problem permanently. Most need more releases.  This is an exercise that will change the brain.  As with with all behavior patterns, it can take time to make the changes.

    I knew already she had trouble distinguishing letters. She said confused h/n, b/d, f/r and p/q.  B/d and p/q are directionally different. h/n and f/r are vertically different.  I started with the h/n distinction.  She was able to tell me the stem of the h was longer the stem on the n.  I found some printed material with both h and n in it.   I showed her how to use the surrounding letters to discern the letter size. If a n is next to a d, the stem of the d is long, and you can tell that the n is shorter. 

   We worked on letter naming without reading the words. Unless she improves her ability to recognize letters, her reading will not improve.   She started okay and then read h as s.  This is a word retrieval problem.  I will work on that next time.

    I recommended that she do letter naming with her mother. I also recommend she do that a little with her regular tutor in each session. 

      Aside from the two sessions, I had a pretty lazy day.  I have work to do if I want to get the Phase II video out.  I have done nothing to that end.  I started watching the movie Starling on Netflix. It got terrible reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.  They thought the A listed performers were wasted on this melodrama.  It deals with depression, and there isn’t an edgy moment in it. I thought it was great.