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March
9, 2006
Excerpts from an email correspondence with Ellie Epp
I know I said I was working in dissociation
at the outset, but it's taken a while to feel comfortable with that as my core.
Now I'm pretty sure that's where I want/need to be.
I'm reading Susan Bordo's Unbearable
Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. I need to read
about weight issues so I can intimidate the hateful voices in my head with logic.
I'm realizing that either
something bad happened to me as a kid, or I was overly sensitive, because
my level of dissociation indicates trauma. It's weird to absorb
that, but I'm gently encouraging myself to look at my
past, and this intense, deliberate introspection is powerful. I have few memories,
so I start by trying to remember details about closets, backyards, and carpet
colors. I go wherever my memory takes me, and just keep writing. It's intense.
Bill's urging me to consider therapy, but I've had plenty of that. I'm doing
this on my own terms, and if I need help I'll get it, but right now I'm fine,
if a little ragged.
I'm getting clarity. Instead of accepting my feelings of inferiority as reality,
I'm looking at them objectively, and asking myself, "Okay, are you legitimately
upset, or is this the voice of a neglected child?"
It's like I'm trying to expel something inside. I'm seeing that the self-hatred
and ugliness were put there by my family, peers and culture, and in their absence,
I've been keeping up with the watering and feeding. But I don't have to nurture
the self-hatred, and now I can almost imagine the bad feelings inside me as a
husk. As something that's always felt like part of me, like muscles and bones,
but I can see a day when I'll spit the voices out like something foul.
My feelings swing from anger toward my family, to confusion because I remember
so little, to wanting to protect them. The impulse to protect is huge and, I'm
realizing, lifelong. I loved them, but they could be gigantic assholes, and I
always felt like I was upholding the family name. I also swing into disregarding
myself as a whiner for doing this work at all. But I'm letting everything happen
without being mean to myself. And you're right. I definitely sit outside myself
while I melt down. I'm like a nice mom inside the volcano, making sure everyone's
safe and warm.
Where does the other come from? Isn't that dissociation? Dissociation's everywhere,
Ellie! And that's been the key to legitimizing my focus. I didn't want to work
in an area that was too narrow, but even leaving the grocery store without remembering
where you parked is dissociation. Meditation is dissociation. Drinking is dissociation.
Cutting is dissociation. Right? Or am I wrong?
Ellie's response: Core def: intentionally
or unknowingly using various means to cut off feeling or knowing that wd otherwise
be conscious. Meditation can be for the purpose of turning something off, or
for the purpose of turning something back on. Depends how/when you do it. Drinking
similarly can be for purposes of feeling and knowing or for purposes of NOT feeling
and knowing. Addictive behaviors generally (mine was to sex and romance) seem
to be about keeping dissociated feelings unfelt when they attempt to rejoin consciousness.
Cutting seems to be for the purpose of turning on endophins that act as painkillers/dissociators,
yes.
Dissociation IS everywhere but see whether you can compile memories of times
when you were fully and accurately and pleasurably feeling and knowing not
dissociated.
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