It’s Been A While
August 26, 2018
The happy traps of living the life I worked hard to achieve and had envisioned is here. I celebrated my one year wedding anniversary. I am starting a new career as a realtor here in Arizona. I am adjusting to the slower life-wave of Arizona. And with all of that I wake up happy everyday.
Since 1990 I have continually been in some type self examination; sitting across from several individual therapists, including being fired as a client by one therapist, doing hand analysis, Enneagram work, Alanon and Adult Children of Alcoholic rooms, Discovery Balance at the Betty Ford Center, The Grinberg Method body healing, journal writing, sitting in a Rheumatologist therapy room receiving infusions, and meditation.
Since 2016 I have been in a relationship where I am loved, appreciated, and I am able to accept that love and appreciation without fear or doubt. I freely choose to love and cherish my husband and trust that what we have is wonderful, is authentic and surprisingly, it seems effortless.
The 28 years of self examination I have learned to trust my choices, my feelings. Those years I always strived for a better life, a better understanding of what I have to offer and who I wanted to be. Today, I am proud of the woman and wife I have become.
I am still new at being a step-mom and believe I have more to learn to be better. But I have tools to use, communication, validation, and a new found confidence that I can be a positive role model for these two young ladies my husband shares with me. Again a result of the work I have done, because my mother was no mother to be acknowledged or appreciated.
I am still a work in progress. By no means anywhere near perfect, which is not what I am striving for, but knowing and being away of my flaws and the conscious struggle of not letting them take my wheel of my life, is a continuing effort. Probably one that will be with me until my last breath.
Today I strive for something new. Today I strive for a better life for me AND my husband. I want us to live a long, healthy, life together. I want us to travel to Europe together and see it with him through his eyes. Trying new foods, and smells, and languages together.
In my previous relationships I had placed my partners dreams and desires above my own needs and dreams. Not anymore because each day I wake living and applying all my hard work, loving my life.
Fear of Pain Clear Channel To More Pain
January 7, 2010
In working with my Pain Management therapist in the Grinberg Method, I have come to learn that when my mind feels pain in my body and interprets it as a possible flare-up, my mind and body suddenly become filled with the fear of what that pain means; lack of movement, heat to that joint, pain with any movement, continual pain, feeling of helplessness, fatigue, having to ask for help and the general malaise it will cause. As I now compound the pain with all the layers of fear the pain of a possible flare-up will cause I invest more energy and a clear channel existing pain, thus increasing it.
As long as I can minimize and not make my pain a catastrophe, I have a better opportunity not to have the pain at all. I know it works because I had a flare-up in my right knee and when I stopped favoring that knee and simply accepted the pain, it went away. Part of accepting the pain also meant surviving the pain and the clear understanding that the pain will not kill me.
This encourages me to keep facing my fears in hope of truly living a painfree life.
The next 3 months
January 5, 2010
I believe that my auto-immune system has been in overdrive since 1967 when I was in utero. I believe I can heal my body by releasing all the stimulus it has carried and teach my body a new way of existing which is to simply exists = breath calmly; both a physical and a soul’s journey.
My friends and teachers have encouraged me to write my voice of my journey through my past and of my present. My primary focused today is in healing and ridding my body of Rheumatoid Arthritis. It is an auto-immune disease where my body attacks itself and eats away at all my joints, causing pain, inflammation, stiffness as well as night sweats and fatigue. I was diagnosed in 2006 and have experienced the gamut of highs and lows of this degenerative disease. My treatment has been both high and low weekly doses of Methotrexate (chemo) and every 6th week an infusion treatment called Remicade. Needless to say the weekly chemo makes me ill and fatigued, although I keep up a 40 hour work week. I’ve only missed work a few days when I’ve had bad flare-ups or nights without sleep, but no more than two days in a row.
My first emotional stage was fear and yet validation because finally there was something on the “outside” that identified how I felt all the time on the “inside.” Stiff, swollen, lethargic and in pain all the time. Although after I received the diagnosis, initially I vowed to not to let it stop my life and I continued with my set travel plans to ski in Vail two weeks later. I simply focused on trying to not be in pain and lived in the fear of when I would be in pain again.
Other emotional stages during flare-ups where I was unable to move either shoulders, or my hip or my jaw to eat or speak where feelings of wanting to die, depression, as well as feelings of defeat, helplessness and failure.
My current emotional and physical belief stage is that my body will heal itself and I will be done with RA and RA will be done with me. I’ve gained this insight by working with a Reiki master, receiving acupuncture, seeing therapists and for the past few months intensive weekly work with a practioner of the Grinberg Method. I also have a wonderful MD – a Rheumatologist – whom I see every 6 weeks. All of these individuals provide a bit of respite from either my physical dis-ease or my emotional dis-ease; some do both.
Over the years I have worked on removing the internal emotional pain that my external body seems to mirror and thus the effect is RA. I have made a further commitment to invest all my energy and resources to truly healing my body of RA.
For the next 3 months I am going to change my diet some more, write every day, exercise and truly delve into my bodies old pain, memories and fears with the goal of ridding my body of the disease of RA and heal it from the harmful side effects the medications which have served to stop the RA from wrecking my joints.
This will be a moment by moment journey and it will be what it will be. For today I can choose to take another step and look forward to where the road will take me.
A Life Conflicted 