Glued & Pinned

I’ve got the screen glued and pinned ¹This isn’t screen news, but in home art news [fig 4] is one of the reasons the light bars circuit boards I’m building will have UV channels.. It was too late to mount it tonight but tomorrow I will likely get it installed and maybe even get the screen installed on the frame. There was only medium household panic during this project, and we handled it mostly in real time. And now we have a screen frame.

I had lots of trouble eating today. We did things to have a variety of good foods available and I even had weed, but it was still a struggle. Somehow none of it was for me. My brain was real stuck on the idea that I should wait until tomorrow and have whatever food is leftover after everyone else eats ²There are a number of reasons for this thinking, including natural and enforced scarcity and differential access to food..

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We got the screen mounted with minimal fuss, but not until pretty late, so it’s still not a screen. Only one step left – adding the projection material. That’s mechanically fairly easy but does involve me cutting up an expensive piece of material and rendering unsuitable for its current use. And that can be hard on my brain.

I brought up the gaming machine today. I need it for Fantasy Grounds tomorrow (there is a Mac client but it’s years out of date – still 32-bit – and so won’t run on modern OS versions). I found most of the parts that I needed and got Windows the last 7 months of updates, but I eventually gave up on WiFi. I haven’t ever used WiFi on it, so I don’t know if it ever worked, but it won’t stay connected and after flickering on and off the network for a few minutes it loses track of the existence of the WiFi adapter. I’ve got it plugged into an external bridge for now but I’m annoyed that my shmancy Intel Bluetooth/WiFi card doesn’t work.

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I have been working on new ways connect with very young me. For a long time I have not been able to imagine 3-year-old me in any sensible way. Before that I imagined young me was dead – that I had killed them to become PIC. But I have found new stories ³I’ve been working on a new method for connecting with the parts of me I haven’t previously been able to see. It’s been very effective for me to apply a dissociative framework to attempts at connection with these parts. Which is great, but it also scared and overwhelmed my old therapist when I asked them to accommodate my methods in place of … Continue reading that make sense of the feels I can remember.

I have been doing fairly well imagining eating in that context and it has helped me see a different layer of food rules. Not the ones I learned about feeding my siblings, or about following the rules, or about appeasing Mother or even about food management. Rules about what it is safe and nutritious enough as discovered by a toddler searching for edible things. I found food, but also things that weren’t food, or that weren’t edible as-stored. Which will be of great help in training away the triggers to those shitty food discovery feels.

Following that same thread back lead me to an identity-attached trauma. When I was very young, in addition to the smoothering, Mother frequently used water running over my face to restrain me physically and restrict my ability to breathe. I was told I couldn’t complain about not being able to breathe because the water was running and I was not submerged in it ⁴Years later the CIA would take the same position about their own waterboarding activities – it’s not technically drowning so no reasonable person could be upset.. I was held or asked to hold my head in position under a running tap until Mother asked for a change, sometimes for tens of minutes. Other times they left soap on my face and instructed me to leave it, to blind and restrict me. Sometimes that water or soap were used merely to keep me quiet and restrained while Mother ignored more, and I stayed and as struggled and waited. And sometimes it was a restraint used to facilitate hurting me in other ways, like physical or sexual assault.

Which is good to know, despite being horrific, because it lets me see how showers were already a problem for me a decade before I ever took one. It lets me see why PIC has to be in charge of showers. It’s not just survival or control in all the terrible ways I learned at 7 or 11 or 15, it’s managing that toddler terror. It’s one of the reasons hair seems so impossible to me. Shampoo on my head or water running over it are unbearable.

And it’s fraking complicated because that water and soap on my head also means access to drinking water and hygine and parental attention. It’s not just a source of pain, it’s also a source of survival. I wanted the abuse so I could have the care and the water. I hate it and love it and it doesn’t matter either way because I have to do it anyway. Which is how PIC got to be in-charge of showers. PIC is in charge of all the things we do regardless if how they make us feel.

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The sort of trauma model used by my last therapist – by many therapists – insists that fear and avoidance are the thing that keeps us from connecting with old pain. It says that our nervous system activation reinforces an inability to be open and vulnerable about a situation that originally overwhelmed us with fear and pain. It says that if we can reconnect with that state we can heal.

That last part is true – the reconnection is necessary. And the parts about being kind to yourself and clearing shame and resentment and learning to be safe are all true. Now that I am better connected I can see what being kind and safe look like and I can learn to do those and it will help. It did help before when I did it with other things.

But the part about being physically calm and willing to face your old feels only works for things that happened to you. It only works for fragments of an egostate that never got bound to and processed by an identity. For fragments that include a person and not just an event or a feeling, fear isn’t the only barrier, and exposure to and awareness of similar conditions isn’t sufficient to connect with that identity. Yes, my body remembers ⁵Also, not infrequently, the body doesn’t remember because the body’s reaction now doesn’t match what happened before. The reaction that whole other person before had isn’t the same one I have now, and we aren’t connected through it. the trauma. And when it remembers it attaches those feels to the person who felt them, not to the person doing it now.

What I actually need to connect with other bits of me, particularly the ones that seem like big blank spaces, is to find out where those bits have poked into parts if my life that I can see and remember and connect to. I have to construct a path that starts someplace we share, and that’s not something I can do just by being more open or more trusting or more clam or more connected to my body.

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It sucks that what I need makes therapists gaslight me with claims that I am too afraid to and too closed off to use their tools. It sucks that for years I decided to believe them.

But also I’m doing okay with the new plan on my own. I think that knowing what makes me scream and cry every time I get in the shower – that knowing I am afraid to be wateboarded and scalded and frozen and abandoned – will make it a lot easier to retrain myself. I think that understanding the fear will make it easier to be kind to myself while I learn.

One of the limitations of not knowing what’s wrong is that the only kindness you can offer is patience. I am patient with myself. I feel the fear of showering and give myself space to cry about it and I make adjustments to the procedure to make it as technically safe as I can. But I can’t protect against – can’t offer comfort or relief for – the parts I can’t see or intuit.

This is a limitation PIC often has. They aren’t mean to me (except when it’s on purpose), but they’re also not a super good parent. They are kind in the same way that 5-year-old me was kind – patient and willing to keep their fears and frustrations seperate from mine – but ultimately unable to help. Unable to understand what would actually make things different. They don’t need to be more open or more kind, they need new information so they can make a different choice.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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