dwelling on the past

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21, former "friend" had the nerve to steal my car

21, physical assault

21, Sexual harassment

21, structural engineering failure

21 , eviction. In the middle of the semester, got one month to find another apartment

Parental academic pressure

Emotional overeating

When it takes 3 days for your brain to process information enough to understand it, ruminating on the past is both a residual effect of trauma and a survival tactic. I'm always looking for the key to the puzzle of moments I didn't understand until it was too late. Sadly, I think I've convinced myself that I'm just wrong all the time. Even when my being wrong was trusting someone who was incredibly wrong to me. Heh. Yep.

I am reading The Body Keeps the Score, about trauma and how it is stored in the body and how we can use the body to re-write it. As someone prone to morbid rumination in recent years, I am finding it helpful.

I understand the inability to let go of things. I look back at certain things and think, what a tragedy. Or I look back and think, how unjust. If such-and-such an event had not occurred. If my parents had parented, or if the school had been better equipped. If so-and-so hadn't taken advantage. Knowing how unhelpful it is isn't helpful.

A big factor for me is poor interoception. I don't notice signals my body is sending me about the world around me, whether I'm safe, whether I'm overstimulated, hungry, etc. This disconnect from the immediate environment, from somatic reality, leaves me inside my own mind: absorbed, or (often) ruminating. I find it makes a big difference to do routine checks throughout the day: rate my hunger, my thirst, my level of sensory overstimulation, physical energy, cognitive energy. Positive feelings, what's caused them, negative feelings and what's caused them. A quick check-in every couple of hours. (Meditation is supposed to help with this but it has not helped me - I have to externalise.)

My interoception has improved a lot; patterns emerge, so I stop feeling like Everything Is Just Happening To Me. Monthly cycles, forgotten meals, etc. Things make sense to me when I see them graphed.

Hope you also find something that helps you.

(I think Oscar Wilde said somewhere that there are geniuses of creation and geniuses of perception - something like that. I think it's okay just to have a particular perspective on the world. You don't have to do anything with it. Also I think that potential transmutes, it doesn't disappear. Though of course we must grieve for what is lost.)

I do that a lot. It's the anger and sadness in knowing that the damage from past inadequate and unsupportive treatment can't be fixed.

This resonates. Encouraging, as I lay here, still crying for the loss of... everyone. My father died this summer and I didn't feel a thing except sick. When my uncle died, I knew when he had passed before anyone told me, and I was sad he died alone. But my dad... He used to be my hero, but Vodka turned him into an emotional fist and I became his favorite punching-bag. I ruminate to forgive. So much damage. It takes a long, long time to let that go.

But transmute it? Is that what I've been doing? Trying to get back up again, eat healthier, move to recover, keep functioning as best I can so I don't slip down into despair even further? I think, in light of your phrase, "potential transmutes," I finally understand the phrase, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." I like the way you said it much better, though.

I'm honoured that something I've said has resonated with you at such a difficult time.

I tried (and failed) for many, many years to console myself with that phrase, "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger." Now, yes, I truly believe that potential is not lost. Pain is horrible and limiting, and strips us of our faculties, but there are things that can't be taken from us, and gradually they find new forms.

Eating, moving, pushing against resistance - it is incredibly hard work. Fair play to you. Hope it gets easier soon.