Hello my dear friends of this blog on how I lost 100 pounds without gastric bypass surgery or weight loss drugs. During this month of Thanksgiving, I'm exploring how I lost 100 pounds with the Attitude of Gratitude Diet. Working on being more thankful and positive and less irritable and negative, for me, begins with meditation and Alanon slogans. Yesterday I looked at the Alanon slogans "One Day at A Time" and "Just for Today." And today is KISS or Keep it Simple, Sweetie.
I struggle with a lot of past trauma with CPTSD or Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and chronic pain and sleep disorder including nightmares, apnea and arthritis pain. I have a lot of time, when I'm not sleeping due to pain or nightmares, to think. Sometimes I use that time productively and sometimes I don't. I agonize and worry, imagine worst case scenarios, exaggerate, etc.
I'm looking for ways to relax my mind and so maybe be able to relax my body, or at least keep it to a dull roar. KISS is one way that is helping me. I tend to overcomplicate, micromanage and otherwise make things more difficult for myself and others. I'm working on keeping my thoughts more orderly. I think a word for that would be to focus, to do, as my beloved children's series "Flicka, Ricka and Dicka" learned, to do "one thing at a time and that done is a good plan."
Now that isn't always possible. Society today requires multitasking like never before. Maybe not so much physical, as it in times past, but definitely mental and emotional multitasking. Being freer from the physical tasks as we are now, our minds have to work in overdrive. That's why stress, fear, panic, anxiety and ergo, depression feature prominently in many of our lives.
I can't do anything about events in my past but I can try to keep them from negatively impacting me any more than they already have. Now you might be tempted to think that the way to do this is to just "put it out of your mind." Don't dwell on it. Forget it. Move on. Well, anyone who's suffered with CPTSD would like nothing more than to let it go. But the problem is IT won't let US go.
I believe that letting it go might be very dangerous, if it has not been processed properly. I'm 59 years old and it's only been in the past few years that I've actually let myself think and say what happened, how it made me feel and the disastrous effects it's had on me. I did not acknowledge the abuse, neglect, exploitation, endangerment, gaslighting, parentification, parental personality disorders and didn't even recognize these as such until I began to talk about it, think about it and yes, dwell on it a bit. Then it became so much clearer that what I had experienced was not "normal and healthy. It was traumatic, dysfunctional and crippling.
By fighting the memories, feelings, thoughts, pain and suffering in, I overcomplicate them. I don't acknowledge how devastating they were. I minimize the impact, defend and excuse the perpetrators, beat myself up and generally overcomplicate. When I accept that the past experiences did happen, when I let them in, I can let them pass through and out. One day at a time, just for today.
I will definitely blog more about this because it is so critical to healing.
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