psychology

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Posted on by SomatiCat

I am an adorable three year old.  A perfectly happy little girl with natural exuberance radiating from her smile.   Whenever I post my baby photo on facebook, many of my Facebook “friends” say, “You haven’t changed at all.”

And I’m like, “Yes!!!!” crying out my victory.  By age four, she was locked up behind a heavy door.  I dedicated the last 30 years of my life to find and raise her to be a woman she was meant to grow up into.

“You are too skinny,” Dad said. “You are ugly.  No man will marry you,” Dad said.   “Having girls is a waste.   I shouldn’t have had a girl child,” Dad said.  “Why aren’t you a boy.  I wish you were a boy,” Mum said.  “Your skin is too dark for a girl,” Auntie said, “but strangely red becomes you.”   “You were a tiny thing.  A tiny wrinkled faced monkey baby.  I was sure this baby wouldn’t survive,” Grandma said.  “Look at this girl’s eyes.  Too small,” Dad said…

I was too short, too dark, too skinny, too fat.

I was ugly and nobody would ever love me.  (Then why did you touch me?)

Everything about me was wrong.

Don’t believe what they say, Girl.  They are defective mirrors.  They reflect distorted, biased images of you, or maybe perceived images of themselves.  It’s not you.  You are a perfectly happy little girl with natural exuberance radiating from your smile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nightmare that didn’t happen

Posted on by SomatiCat

This is a nightmare that didn’t happen.  I was about 11, sleeping in my room.  The door suddenly opened and my father came in.  He was yelling something and he threw things, talking to himself.  I hid under the comforter.  I heard him walk around in my room, talking to himself, throwing stuff.  Then he left.

I waited.  I waited for my mother.  I waited for my mother to come to check on me, comfort me.   Minutes passed.  Nobody came.  I fell asleep crying.

I woke up in the morning.  I found my stuffed animals were on the floor.  One of them, a stuffed kitty my friend gave me, was almost decapitated.  I didn’t understand.

I quietly went down the stairs, expecting my mom at least to explain what happened.

Nothing happened.

Nobody mentioned anything.  Mom was cooking breakfast.  My father was reading the newspaper or whatever.  Nothing happened.  I ate my breakfast and went back to my room.

That was the nightmare that didn’t happen.

But I remember that I sewed my stuffed kitty’s head back by myself, crying, saying to myself again and again, “My friend gave it to me.”

Decades and years of therapy later I confronted my father and asked what it was about.

He didn’t remember.

My mom came to me to tell that she had no idea and asked, “Your father didn’t hit you, did he?”

“No, he didn’t,” I said.

It doesn’t matter.  It was not my father’s unpredictable rage that marked me.  It was the absence of my mother.  I learned that nobody would come for me.   I didn’t want to be the scared little girl, so I became my father.  “You have a temper just like your father,” my mother used to say.

Now I have many friends who are fathers.  When I saw their daughter perfectly safe with their father, not hiding from them, not tensing up at the sight of them, remaining soft and smiling, I wonder how they do.  It is a dream that didn’t happen to me.

How do you feel in your body?

Posted on by SomatiCat

“How do you feel in your body?” my therapist asked.  “Fine,” I answered.  “Do you feel the floor under your feet?” he asked.  “Yes. (So what?)” I answered.  This question irritated me like a hell.  I didn’t understand what it was to do with my psychological misery.  I had two arms, two legs, feet and hands.  I was fine, thank you for asking.  “Stump your feet on the floor.”  I stumped.  “How does it feel?”  “Nothing,” I answered.

“What does it make you feel like?” the therapist asked and I looked for my feeling outside of my body, staring at the ceiling, or watching my therapist’s cat yawn. I didn’t find my feeling in my body.  My feeling didn’t reside in my body.

Disconnection is an excellent survival mechanism.  In a battlefield you won’t survive if you feel.  And for some of us, childhood was a wartime, and the body is where the battle was fought.  In Trauma and Recovery Judith Herman writes, “Traumatic events violate the autonomy of the person at the level of basic bodily integrity.  The body is invaded, injured, defiled.  Control over bodily function is often lost; in the folklore of combat and rape, this loss of control is often recounted as the most humiliating aspect of the trauma.”  Our trauma doesn’t have to be of rape or combat.  It could be grandma pinching your cheeks.

I am not saying that pinching chubby cheeks of an adorable kid is a form of child abuse.  It could be a rather innocent expression of affection.  However, when it is done repeatedly against the child’s will, it could amount to loss of “control over bodily function”.

My ex-boyfriend had a habit of pinching.  He pinched his daughter, he pinched his nephews and he pinched me.  It was his way of saying, “Hey Sweetie.”   I can’t speak for his daughter or nephews, but when he pinched me I felt a rage surging up deep in my body.  “Stop it,” I yelled.  “Don’t pinch me, ever.”  He pinched me a couple of more times, and every time I reacted violently.  Then thankfully he stopped pinching.  He listened to me.  While pinching itself didn’t hurt much, it triggered an uncontrollable anger out of nowhere.

When I was a little girl, my childless aunt doted on me.  She literally tried to eat me with a spoon.  Since she was the source of love and affection, and chocolate and candies and dolls and all the goodies, I clung to her.  She used to tease me by doing something I didn’t like.   The more I shrank from, the more she seemed enjoying.  She used to lick my face, saying I was so cute that she wanted to eat me up.  It was wet and yucky.  I said, “No!!!” but she was much bigger and stronger.  She told me that she loved me and that I should let her do whatever she wanted to do.  Sometimes, she bribed me with goodies.  It’s an innocent expression of affection, isn’t it?   Pinching was a variation.  I don’t remember who pinched me, but it does not matter.  It told me the same story.  My feeling does not matter.  I don’t have control over my body.  They have.  And I am an ungrateful brat if I don’t appreciate the affection the adults are giving to me.  Tolerating the feeling of discomfort will be rewarded with chocolate, or whatever goodies.  Got it?  Just replace the word “pinching” or “licking” with “touching improperly.” It tells the same story of trauma.  “The traumatic event thus destroys the belief that one can be oneself in relation to others”(Herman 53).

When I was a little girl I told my mum that my tummy ached.  I told her that I would feel better if she let me eat a piece of bread.  She didn’t give me bread and took me to a family doctor.  It turned out that I was not sick but just hungry.  I didn’t know the word to explain the intense sensation I felt in my belly.  What I felt in stomach, aching for food, was denied as not legitimate by adults. When I was a teenager, I had a painful period.  I told that I had severe cramps and couldn’t move.  My father said, “No, you don’t.  You are lazy.”  My mom didn’t protest.  (Later I found that my mom never had a painful period in her life, and she couldn’t imagine how bad it could be.)  Thus in my early ages I learned not to trust the feeling in my body.

We lose the ability to connect to one’s body little by little.  When someone in authority, such as parents and teachers, tells us we have to feel certain way again and again while we don’t feel that way, it becomes unsafe to be ourselves.  Others in our life take away our connection to the body.  We gain artificial limbs and body parts instead, which function very well.   Nobody notices it’s artificial.  Sometimes they could be much more useful than real limbs, just like a sword loaded limb, since we don’t feel pain.  Eventually we might even forget they are not real. When one suffers a hugely traumatic experience and survives, the disconnection between mind and body could be much harder to reconcile.

About the photo: I took the photo of the glass sculpture at Corning Museum of Glass. Unfortunately  I don’t know the artist’s name.

A Fridge in the Backyard

Posted on by SomatiCat

I don’t watch the reality show about hoarding because I have more than one person in my life who hoard, and I have more than one friend who have more than one person in their lives who hoard.  There is nothing entertaining about hoarding.

My father was more than frugal.  It made sense when we didn’t have much.  He saved things and stuff for a time of scarce.   He fixed things with the stuff he collected and saved.  He didn’t allow us to throw away things.  I didn’t understand the logic behind keeping broken fridges and TVs in our backyard, though.  “It’s good for a tool shed,” he said.  The rusty old fridge is still there.  It doesn’t look like a fridge anymore.  I don’t know if there are tools inside.

We were really lucky because he didn’t save newspaper and magazines.

I used to travel back and forth between the U.S. and my old country schlepping a large suitcase.  After years of airline check in baggage treatment, it cracked.  I got a new one and asked my mom to get rid of the beaten up one.  When I visited them a year later, I found the broken suitcase in my parent’s bedroom.

“What the hell is it doing in your bedroom?” I asked.  “Your dad didn’t let me throw it away,” my mother said.  My father doesn’t like to travel.  He doesn’t even like to go out of the county.  Where did he think he was going with the broken suitcase?  It was not about being frugal anymore.  They had to have storage sheds built in the backyard for the stuff… three of them.

Inside the house, my mom managed to contain his madness in one room.  It was filled with empty boxes, toilet paper rolls, tissue paper boxes, and bars of cheap soap.   “Why did you buy so many bars of soap?” I asked my mother.  “They were on sale,” she said. “Your father drove all the way to the shopping center to buy them.”   I stared at piles of soap bars probably enough to supply for three life time, and said to myself, “How long is he planning to live?”

When I stand and stare at the room full of toilet paper rolls, tissue paper boxes, and bars of cheap soap among other stuff, I see my father’s fear.  I feel trapped.  I lose the will to change.  The fear steeps out and penetrates into who I am.

I know it is not my fear, but I need to be aware of its presence.

Universe provides what one needs.  My father lived in the same house for the most of his life, creating fortress with stuff, a fortress for him, a prison to me.   I moved many times, one time across the Pacific with a single suitcase, several times out of broken relationships.  I was forced to shed stuff like a stray dog.  As soon as I settled in a new place, usually smaller than the one before, I started accumulating stuff.  Every time I moved, I had to choose what should be part of my life and what should not.  It served as a priceless mindfulness training.  I still accumulate stuff, while I know my fear.  Universe doesn’t have to force me to move anymore just to remind me to choose.  Once in a while I do it voluntarily, especially when I witness somebody else’s fear in their space full of stuff.

Neuroplasticity and Netflix

Posted on by SomatiCat
Sawshark

Sawshark

Netflix/Amazon Prime binge watching is my choice of drug.  Once in a while I medicate myself with streaming mindless films for hours and hours and stay numb.  When I can’t tolerate feelings, mindless B horror movies or super violent action movies with serial killers, monsters, vampires, zombies, and werewolves are the most effective sedative.   I fall asleep with a horror movie playing.

Netflix learns.  If you watch Evil Dead 2 and like it, then they recommend Amityville Horror.  They recommend films I didn’t even know existed.  I click on one, watch 1 minutes, then move on to the next, till I stumble upon a movie which fits my numbness of the day.  Eventually my “You might like these” list looks like something a disturbed teenage boy would like.

When my friend apartment sat, she binge watched Netflix/Amazon.  After her visit, Netflix started to recommend something like Beckett, Elizabeth, etc. Since I don’t watch those intellectual films often, it eventually stopped and my Netflix personality returned to the normal.

Yet, the list does not represent who I am.

I guess our brain is like Netflix recommendation.  If I keep focusing on traumatic experiences of the past, my brain’s Netflix list will be filled with traumatic titles.  Eventually I would believe there are only traumatic experiences in this world.   It’s not true.

When Netflix recommended Sharknado and Human Centipede, I asked myself.

“What have I done to my life?”

Well, I chose not to watch Sharknado.

Deep Rollers Club

Posted on by SomatiCat

empirestate

“There are shallow rollers, and there are deep rollers. You can’t breed two deep rollers… or their young, their offspring, will roll all the way down… hit and die. Agent Starling is a deep roller. Let us hope one of her parents was not.”     Quote from Hannibal

Work of deep psychology requires us to roll.  There are shallow rollers and there are deep rollers.  We need to teach the young how to roll deep without crashing.

I used to roll deep.  I guess one of my parents wasn’t a deep roller.  I survived.  I don’t deep-roll anymore.

I believed that I should roll deep, that I should risk crashing and dying, and that the psychological work should be painful.

I suspect that I was addicted to the sense of elation after the deep roll.　From the bottom of self-hatred, we soar to the high of “I am different because I roll deep.”

After all it was millions of rolling without crashing that saved me.

Psychological work is just like athletic training.  You need to train your mind’s muscles to roll deep.  I hope you find a good trainer/coach/therapist, who could teach you how to roll without crashing.

About Diagnosis

Posted on by SomatiCat

It is useful to have a trail map when you hike unknown territory. It will save you from getting lost at dusk or falling into an abandoned well. When I become familiar with the territory, I’ll know the trail is not the territory, and I’ll start to communicate with creatures in the woods.

DSM V is merely an incomplete and tentative trail map of the vast and unfathomable territory of our psyche.  I hope your therapist is willing to communicate with creatures in the woods without getting lost.

birdy

A Pigeon and Dandelion

Posted on by SomatiCat

What’s wrong with the girl who kicked at a pigeon?

A group of teenage girls were walking down the street.  It was an early afternoon in the late spring.  A couple of city pigeons were picking up pizza crust scraps on the sidewalk in front of a neighborhood pizza place.   An ordinary pleasant day in a relatively quiet street in Upper East Side.

As they pass by a girl in a plaid skirt kicked at a pigeon.  The pigeon trotted away.   “What’s wrong with you?”  “Gross!”  other girls said.  The girl who kicked at the pigeon didn’t say anything. They walked on, talking as ordinary teenage girls did.  Nothing noteworthy happened.  Just another day in their teenage life.

It was a five second clip too familiar for me not to pick up from the cutting room floor.   It was the nonchalant way the girl kicked at the pigeon that caught my attention.

I was the girl who kicked at pigeons.

When I saw a yellow fluffy dandelion flower on the sidewalk, I stepped on it to squash with the heel of black pumps.  My friend said, “What’s wrong with you?”

I tell you what’s wrong.  That’s how the girl is treated in her family.  That’s how she has learned to treat herself.  It’s so natural that she doesn’t even think something is wrong with the way she reacts to the sight of pigeon, a vulnerable and unimportant creature just doing what pigeons do.  Nobody cares.

The sight of innocent and vulnerable creatures like pigeons and dandelions exposed and defenseless made me feel uneasy.  It’s dangerous to be innocent and vulnerable in the open without fangs and claws to fight back.  I can’t tolerate the prospect of the pigeon-dandelion being attacked, being kicked, being squashed.   So I will be the one who kicks and squashes, so that I don’t have to feel my vulnerability.

I hope the girl who kicked at a pigeon will learn what is wrong is the way she has been treated.

And dandelions are not vulnerable.

dandelion

 

 

Oni, on Transformation

Posted on by SomatiCat

An old woman on a desolate beach was standing, staring toward the sea. The sea wind was blowing through her long gray hair. The time was neither night nor day, neither dusk nor dawn. The sea was calm. A blue-gray shadow of distant land was floating beyond the sea.

beach_bw

She came a long way. It was so long that it could not be just one lifetime. She walked through a couple of lives to finally come here to the distant sea. I am tired. I am so tired and I want to die. The wind is blowing through my hair, which once was so angry that it flamed up and burnt the sky.

Blazing visceral anger burnt my entrails like a ungutted fish in a fire. It charred me inside out. Now my heart lost the heat of burning coal, and left me with ash gray hair. Every step I made was on a pass of tiles and gravel. Every breath I took was studded with broken glass.

Where did I come from, I do not remember. It was so long time ago.

All the way here, I slashed, stubbed, and sliced, gushing blood sprayed all over me, on my face, on my neck and on my arms. It burnt my skin and turned it into rusted iron. I hid in dark places days and nights, wounded, without moving as enemies’ shadow passed by. I was always on a watch, alert all the time. And when I slept, I dreamed of blood and dismemberment, and woke up to the smell of burning flesh.

That’s the only way I knew. It was my way. In my hand, I see a sword darkened with dry blood.

And I found myself standing on this beach alone. No more dead bodies for me to make around here. Where is my fire? Where is my anger? It’s all gone, because there is no enemy left to kill.

What did I do to deserve these lives of perpetual fighting. I’ve survived, and nobody to kill anymore. And I am standing here alone. I am tired and I want to die. I want to end this for good. No more fighting, no more bloodshed, no more hiding. I want to dissolve into a total oblivion. No more memories. No more me.

Then what is holding me here on this silent beach? Waves come and go, come and go for thousands nights and days. Let me dissolve into the place where the sea and the sky are indistinguishable. That is the only way I can stop fighting. Please do not make me turn into an Oni (demon) again.

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