I threw a light across the room today and almost hit my dog, who had just laid down in a most unusual spot for a relaxing nap.
He was waiting for me. He wanted to go outside. And I was pulling a classic Caz of trying to squeeze in “one more thing” before a hike.
I say it so often there’s no doubt his foreign ears can now translate the, “I know. I know. I know. I’m coming. One more minute.”
I’ve been in a mood lately. In fact, I’ve been on a world tour of mooooooood.
If you’ve read my previous post about Safety, you know that I chose to titrate off of 17 years of prescribed medications in order to detox my body and soul. After years of strengthening my resilience and adding to my Know-ing that I can get through FUNCKing anything, I felt ready to let go of the long-required safety net of medications meant to sustain me through a most unusual auto-immune disease – narcolepsy with cataplexy (known casually as N1).
Titrating off these medicines and replacing them with natural, food and vitamin-based habits was a journey that consistently surprised me. The “hard stuff” was the easiest to get off of. The parts that I felt did almost nothing for me took months to go through.
How did I titrate?
I cut my pills down my 1/4 and then would wait for all of my Fitbit scores – sleep, resting heart rate, HRV, calorie intake – to even out to normal for an entire week before I would cut down by another 1/4.
Pro Tip: I would try to make a titration change only when Stark was out of town on business so no one was around to wake me up, and I had far fewer triggers for days and days of sleepless nights.
Almost every 1/4 change came with 3-5 days of restless, almost completely absent sleep as I detoxed half a lifetime of dependencies. In the end, it was very worth it. At first, I felt a lot sharper. I heard myself laughing out loud more uncontrollably. I’m sure people who change mood-based medications have had similar responses. For narcolepsy, the ability to feel is a little bit different. The reason emotions become more placid has little to do with the medication and more to do with a learned coping mechanism – weird things like, I wouldn’t watch comedies or scary movies because surprises of any kind (good or bad) would cause a cataplectic pins-and-needles reaction within me. I don’t know about you, but I’m not a fan of passing out even for a microsecond because of a loud scare scene or a pee-your-pants funny joke. I’ve avoided them both for a lifetime.
But as time went on, my first results of energetic, happy, cleansed feeling turned back to a familiar tired AF, mindless brain fog, and my body ached from head to toe. Despite having a truly amazing mattress, I would wake up feeling like I slept on a bed of rocks, and the sheets would be torn from corner to corner from restless fighting. These are the moments when my Safety Plan came back into play in full force. I needed relief. I needed something to depend on because although I have known many versions of these same patterns, when it comes down to the darkness of the 3rd sleepless night in a row, it becomes damn near impossible to Know without a doubt that I will get good sleep again and feel rested someday sooner than later. Instead, it feels like an always/never moment, and circular thinking spirals into a real-life worst-case scenario. At the core of every reaction is a perceived belief that, “I am unsafe.” Being too tired to hold my head up and yet wide awake for days on end – unable to use reasonable coping mechanisms such as getting out of bed to journal, read a book, meditate, turn on a noise machine, spray some essential oils, etc. – feels like one of my biggest fears. Those fears have been a big part of my renurturing exploration in recent months – attempting to allow myself to feel every fear of wakefulness while also supporting enough good, quality rest to nourish my sense of well-being and safety.
Today, I feel like taking it all back.
I know better, but I feel like reverting entirely.
Give me all the medicine! Put me back on the hard stuff. Take away my memories of this and ho wit feels to be… myself.
I hate myself.
These are the deep subconscious ebbs and flows that I know are present – the things that my mind and body feel they need to “survive” and therefore are sparking the sense of “unsafety.”
On the surface, none of these seems true. I don’t look like this is how I am feeling. In fact, on the surface, my feelings are simply, “I know. I know. I know. I’m coming!” I’m eager to finish one more click, one more photo, one more upload, and one more sentence so that I can get out and celebrate my work-life balancing act of hiking every day with my most precious puppy. The only reason I know that these things are far underneath the surface is with practice. They are Princess-and-the-pea level thoughts. They aren’t that big, and therefore they are often treated as insignificant or not really there. But these are the thoughts deep down inside that keep you tossing and turning mentally, emotionally, and physically. If left unheard, they fester and become much bigger deals.
That being said, not all things go *poof* into a sense of freedom and willingness the minute you work through the FUNCK. Many things do, but not everything. If and when you experience something that doesn’t just *poof* into a magically healed place, that means there’s a deeper layer. Just like in this example – the surface layer is anxious, thinking: “I don’t have enough time. I didn’t get to do it all. My dog needs me. I have too much to do.” On the first pass, that is what I’m dealing with in my BeMo Practice. Eventually – sometimes a few days later, sometimes in another era of life entirely – I get down to the root and find the preoperative circular thinking patterns. At that point, all I can do is honor myself and wrap myself in grace and self-compassion. At this point, my only job is to ensure myself a safe environment to let my subconscious travel and do its own work in its own time in its own way.
On the surface, I Know where this comes from. I Know a dozen childhood stories of why I was simultaneously afraid to go to sleep and afraid to be conscious of the night, so much so that my brain flipped on a safety switch that created an auto-immune pattern that kept me in a constant sleep state and literally passes me right out the minute I feel fear or surprise. The brain is amazing in that way. I can acknowledge and honor the resilience the brain and body have to survive, despite how you feel about it. That is why living a Needs-centered life is so very important. To understand, define, and voice the “need for” rather than attack with “need to” is the how behind having a conversation with yourself – your own brain – in order to heal the mind, body, and soul.
I’m here for it. And ya, it FUNCKing sucks a lot of the time.
So ya, I threw a light across the room. There are a lot of whys behind that – far more than there used to be when I would throw such a fit and immediately dismiss it by neglecting my own self-understanding. Today, I’ve added so much to my Know-ing over time that even in a knee-jerk reaction to dismiss in a split second, I’ve already acknowledged that the reason I did this starts with quite literally being taught this is how you react to extreme emotions when being “annoyed” or “bothered” by your child. Sigh. I’m going to breathe that in and give it a long, drawn-out sigh to exhale its existence from within me. That is a big deal and a big acknowledgment. Being taught that and being the subject of that reaction as a child IS NOT ACCEPTABLE. Period. I may understand where it comes from, but I do not have to forgive it, nor do I have to hold onto it. In addition to understanding the start of that storyline for me, I also felt all the BS (belief systems or limiting belief patterns) wash over me. “I am incapable of doing it all. If I don’t get this done… I am alone. Everyone needs something from me. I have to do it all. I have to do this all by myself. There’s never enough time because I have to…” Aim. Fire. OUCH. If that’s the voice flying off inside of my head, repeating learned internal memos from previous external in-validations, it is no wonder my reaction is to throw something large across the room.
At first, I was ashamed. I was apologetic. I tried to push down the anger and not react further. I was ready to go on a walk and spend two hours beating myself up internally. I immediately felt like, “It is literally my profession to teach people how to get through, recognize, and overcome, and I’m throwing shit across the room! Clearly, I am not capable of this. I am a bad person!” More BS.
With self-compassion and tapping into my Know-ing, I can go back to creating an environment of safety in being seen, known, and heard by recognizing that, yes, I feel ashamed because that is not how I want to act. I feel hurt because I relate to my own sweet, innocent fur-child who was resting in peace before plastic warfare came crashing into the cabinet next to me. But I also feel like I understand that it was not the light… it was definitely not the dog… and it was not my lack of being capable of doing it all… I was throwing the light to protect myself. While so many of these familiar messages came from within, the post-traumatic memories were so strong that my subconscious knew that this message and this level of unsafety usually come from outside of me, and like a ninja, I reacted. “TAKE THAT!” I threw a light into a void, not because I wanted the light to die but because I was trying desperately to hold on to me.
Yes, there are consequences. Yes, I am responsible for the choice I made, and I will use self-compassion to work through all of the guilty emotions of feeling as though I acted like the very same people and situations that I loathe from my memories. Understanding where I was coming from isn’t the end of the battle, but it is the biggest part of allowing myself the space to move forward with love, support, and understanding rather than criticism, shame, blame, and so-called “tough love.” One of those paths is so familiar to me that the only space I allow me is to continue acting and reacting from a place of unsafe familiarity. The other is showing up for my needs. The other is honoring myself with the things my psychic insists I “never get” and “always happen.” The other allows me to go *poof*… I’m free.
Cassandra "Caz" Stark 