Dear Anita,

thank you for sharing a part of your story with me, a very big part, as I understand.

I haven’t posted again because I’m just so exhausted all the time, it takes all my energy just to do the basics at present. The problem is that we are having humid weather, I can cope very well with dry heat, but humid heat just leaves me like a wilted lettuce!!  (the kind that are so far gone, you can’t revive them!)

I have naturally nevertheless been thinking and observing concerning your post of 11 July, but I cannot go into detail at present because I am just taking a little break now for my second breakfast before a man comes to fix the watering system in the garden.  That should at least ease my workload somewhat.  So far I had no irrigation system at all and it’s been taking me a couple of hours daily just to keep my plants alive due to the continuous heatwave.  Needless to say, I am not looking forward to August.

I just wanted to at least respond briefly, as I have no idea when I will be up to producing a comprehensive post again.  I am usually best in the morning but these days I’m not having a “best” time at any time of the day!

What I would like to know is if it would be okay for me to include some of my thoughts regarding your own situation in my reply?  I feel it is a little difficult not to, given the details you have shared, however I don’t want you to feel I am expressing my views or thoughts uninvited.  Especially as I have some perhaps alternative perspectives and tbh I am a little hesitant as I don’t want to upset the delicate balance you have to find in your life, due to the myriad issues you are suffering from.  I really respect and admire how you have nevertheless managed in your life and I would not wish to adversely affect you in any way.

Regarding speaking my truth, as much as I am consciously aware of my truth, I try to say it as it is.  So please believe me when I say that there is no need for you to feel sad and believe you cannot help me.  I am very happy about our communications, truly.  I will go into detail as soon as I am able.

Sending you a virtual hug for being such an amazing survivor!

Juanita

Dear Anita,

I wish I weren’t so tired.  I’m afraid I’m only going to respond to a part of your post again.  I would love to write some more but I think a half response is better than none.

I am so sorry that you were triggered.  I can understand that happening.  I know how difficult it is to be with such emotional and physical states.  I had the sense this might have been the case.

I do believe that “The Body Keeps the Score” so I can also understand you thinking about Somatic Experiencing.  I have tried it and a ton of different body treatments over about 25 years and had good and bad experiences.  It can bring faster results than talk therapy but I found it to be very dependent upon the person giving it – their skill and your rapport/sense of safety with them.   And of course, it stirs up old feelings, so for me it was often 1 or 2 hours for the therapy and days to weeks for the “calming down” period.  I got fed up of that drama cycle it in the end.  This was just my experience though.

I personally find simply facials or foot massages to be really relaxing and calming without stirring up any issues anywhere, but what also came to mind is something which helped me to regain a sense of trust within and how to find peace in my body, which is called “Yin Yoga”.  It is a very, very gentle way of saying “hello” and building trust to your body.  It is very beneficial generally too, science is beginning to realise that this kind of exercise gives lasting health, so you wouldn’t be wasting your time, and it isn’t very dynamic, so you don’t have to be super fit.  You can do it at home once you’ve learned the basics.  It’s not like normal yoga, it’s a deep inner strength which you build in a most gentle manner.  It also helps regulate emotional states without actually having to deal with them.  It’s due to holding the poses for a longer time, which clears the mind.

I used to arrive at class with all my fears and dramas and my teacher always used to say, “Juanita, just get down on the floor!”  I started with only one exercise, the Butterfly.  You close your pelvis with fear and stress, and this exercise allows you to open as much as you are willing.

I hope this may be of interest to you, dear Anita.  You deserve to live in a relaxed body free of fear and pain.

Juanita

Dear Anita,

I hope you have recovered well from revisiting your trauma?  I am glad that you know yoga and feel the benefit from it.  Writing to you reminded me that it is time I took up my own practise again!

I want you to know that writing to you and receiving your posts isn’t a disturbance to me at all, but rather one of the most enriching experiences I have ever had with another human being!  I too am learning very much from our communications and am immensely grateful for this.

I wish I could say I have been having a good rest in the meantime, in fact I am just writing to let you know that I am really having a hard time to keep my head above water at present.  I am still ill from the heat, and this has now progressed to problems with my stomach and nausea, added to which I have now got my old dog (17) very ill.  I think it is vestibular syndrome, which she had two years ago and I cured with homeopathy and supplements, but I think she has it again.  She can hardly get up, stand or walk, and is too heavy for me to be picking her up for eating and toilet, so now I have back and kidney pains from the strain …

Ever since my cat became ill in early June I feel I am no longer making the progress that I need to be doing physically towards my independence, I feel I’m just constantly fixing illnesses and trying to survive each day until I can get into bed again.  I will be so glad when it gets cooler and hopefully we are all well again then.  My little cat is also still not really well, her fur has barely grown back since she was operated on and they had sadly shorn her very badly, so it looks quite awful.  At least she is finally back to eating normally again and beginning to put on weight, but she weighs barely 5 pounds even so.

Every day I hope to be able to sit down and write about my thoughts and feelings, but I’m so physically challenged at the moment, I just haven’t managed so far.  Cross your fingers that I’ll be in a better place soon.

I very much appreciate your virtual hug and especially reminding me to go slow and take it easy.  That advice has been a great help and feels like having a friend around who is taking care of me.  Thank you!

Juanita

Dear Anita,

I have often been thinking of you although I haven’t posted and I am glad to hear that you are well recovered.  Thank you for crossing your fingers for me, I’m sure it helped.  But what definitely has made a big difference is to read the word “friend”.  Thank you so much for that, Anita.  It is a long time since I really dared to believe and trust that someone would genuinely be my friend.  I trust you and I thank you for naming me as your friend, it is a very comforting feeling for me, and I hope to be of comfort to you too, if I am able.

I have been making progress with combating the humid heat, thank goodness.  It has taken a lot of time and energy to research and learn a lot of new things, but I have started to see positive results by using specific foods and herbs as “medicine”.  The approach I have taken is to build on the knowledge I already had of Traditional Chinese Medicine, because I also have had good results before with this.  The strange thing is that whilst researching to resolve physical symptoms, I found some very key information regarding my mental/emotional problems.  I hadn’t expected that.  I found some very old texts which include the mental/spirit aspect of a person, not just the physical body, and I recognised in an instant where my problems lie.  Those old Masters certainly knew their stuff.

I am a little shocked, because although it is good to realise where you are going wrong, it is a lot to swallow.  I have felt very lost the last day or so after this realisation.  In a way it is also a further step towards getting clearer within myself which began through our communication, especially your help in aiding me to see my parents and husband more realistically.  That is good but painful.  Though as Khalil Gibran says, “your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding”.  I should get back to reading him daily again, he was such a wise man and his words nourish my soul.  Do you know his works?

My pain now is that I have understood how much I have suppressed painful feelings and experiences.  I have touched on the edge of that pain and drawn back again in fear.  Like standing with the edge of your toes already hanging over an abyss.  It feels to me like that pain would kill me if I allow myself to really feel it.  But at the same time I realise that my life stopped 18 years ago.  The clock has stood still since then.

I am shocked to realise how much of my life I have lost and I understand that I must somehow break through this suppression in order for my life to still grow and develop.  In a way I am relieved because I wondered for some time now what ever could be wrong with me, why I have no real passion and enthusiasm for living my life the way I used to.  Sometimes a little flame temporarily appears, but I realise now that I have actually spent the past 18 years in a functional depression.

I know I’m not telling you what occurred back then.  I am not sure if I can bring myself to write about it.  I am also expecting my husband at any moment as he took the dog to the vet alone today, but I needed to reach out to you, dear Anita.  What a blessing that you are there.  Because of you I am learning to be more confident again, but also realising how lost I have been to my own self.

Juanita

Dear Anita,

it is very meaningful to me too, to have found you, to have gained your friendship.  I have to think of the sweet Fox in “The Little Prince”, who explains so beautifully to the little Prince how to build trust and friendships.  In the past I gave my heart away too easily, I realise now.  I had no idea that not everyone would treasure and honour my gift of friendship.  I thought that being a loyal and trustworthy person would automatically ensure good friendships, but having lost virtually all my friends along the way, I now know this is not so.  You are helping me to dare to trust again, and I am very grateful to you for this encouraging experience.  Equally importantly, you are helping me to realise how poorly I cared for myself in the past and that I deserve to be respected and treated well and fairly – and this starts with how I treat myself and what I believe I deserve.

It is interesting that you should mention that precise quote from Khalil Gibran, because I always think of it when I think of you!  I wonder what that means – is this more than a coincidence?  I like it very much.  I do actually believe what he says, that we are not from our parents at all.  This was a big argument I always had with my mother even when I was quite small still, long before I found Gibran.  But although I had intellectually and perhaps even spiritually understood on a deeper level, that I am a free soul, not a human creation, at the same time I failed to notice the chains which my mother bound me with, or maybe even I bound myself to her, due to my desperate desire to receive love and acknowledgement from her.  I didn’t realise until our exchanges now (you and I), just how much I must have suppressed or denied, or I don’t know what, but that I totally lost my awareness of those chains.  I see now that the intellectual and spiritual level gave me a belief in my freedom, yet I have remained factually bound and gagged.  Or imprisoned in the cage we have spoken of, to take another metaphor.

Regarding my poor old dog, I am not happy with tonight’s results at the vet.  They are good people but not qualified to treat this situation, I feel.  I am still not sure what is wrong with my dog.  It was a different vet this evening (same practise), and he thinks it is a mechanical problem, possibly with a trapped nerve.  So maybe my other dog jumped on the old one, or she slipped, or a combination of various things.  The vet just gave her some heavy duty medicine again, but this is no real solution as her back legs and spine are clearly out of place, which I initially attributed to being twisted by the vestibular syndrome as it looks very similar.  Having spoken with my husband now, we have decided to take her to a clinic where they specialise in physiotherapy for dogs, but also offer acupuncture and other holistic treatments.  She is too old for surgery, so maybe this will be a solution.

I am glad that my husband and I are able to deal with situations with our pets so well.  I am very sad that my old dog is suffering though and I always feel a bit guilty, as if no-one should ever suffer when I am there, which is of course quite unrealistic and I realise now this is part of my childhood legacy and I am trying to be kinder to myself and recognise how much I have been actively doing for my pets.

The ever closer reality of losing my old dog also brings to awareness that the last vestiges of my old life will then have disappeared, as I chose her in the early years of our relationship.  I feel some fear at that thought.  I hope my dawning realisations will lead me to discover a new life that I am enthusiastic about.

Thank you for being understanding and leaving me that space open regarding how I am able to communicate about what happened, if at all.  It still feels very raw right now and I am just letting it all settle again and hope to then know how I can best deal with it.

At the moment I am a little dazed still to realise that I have been living like in a time machine where time has stood still for 18 years.  That realisation is still sinking in.  I can feel that it is true.  I am also becoming ever clearer about the kind of treatment that I deserve and should expect from other people.  You have helped me to see the unacceptable cruelty of my parents, but also of my husband.

This new awareness leaves me equally shocked at the awful behaviour I have tolerated from supposed friends, family and lovers over my lifetime.  The recent situation with my neighbours (the witches and weeds folks) brought to my attention how “naturally” I accepted a man being a pest and harassing me, totally overstepping my boundaries by always trying to turn the conversation to sex when we were alone, and being generally importunate.  And I thought I had to tolerate this for the sake of friendship and peace with my neighbours!

The irony was not lost on me that I bent over backwards, let myself be pushed around and used for “entertainment”, yet in the end I was made to blame.  So, recognising I have nothing to lose, I have decided to speak my mind from now on, to not oblige myself to accept or tolerate any kind of behaviour which is not acceptable to me in truth, for the sake of “peace” – because it wasn’t giving me any peace anyway and just lead to another fiasco.

I believe that the new understanding which is blossoming within me of my rights in connection with other people will lead me to meet other kinds of people than so far.  In looking back, I realise how much suffering I would have avoided, had I just followed what was right for me.  I see that the needy child within believed in other strategies, but they clearly do not work any longer.

It is very late now and I have to go to sleep.  I often think of you when I see the big constellation above my front gate each evening, it is called “The Plough” or “Big Dipper”.  I marvel then that somewhere far away you are seeing these same stars.  When you see them twinkle at you, they are waving hello from me.

Juanita