Feeling overwhelmed

I got very overwhelmed today to hear a family friend’s father had died yesterday, death of fathers is a trigger for me, probably always will be I was also upset I didn’t realise it was in fact my cousin’s sons 21st on Sunday I sent him a text to say Happy Birthday but I didn’t realise his age as its only lately our families have tried to become close again.. It was my sister who sent the news about our friends Dad and I was trying to make my lunch after receiving it and then we tried to connect three or four times by phone but for some reason the line was not connecting and so my energy got all scattered.. It happens so very easily for me, this flooding, these anxiety triggers.

I would give anything to live inside a calm body, a body that does not get triggered as much by fear.. my sister and I had a bit of a discussion about the lack of feeling/alexithymia issue on the phone this afternoon, it also occurred to me after watching a few episodes of Ricky Gervais’s comedy/drama series After Life in which he struggles in the aftermath of his wife’s death with anger and irritability towards everything that in the series he is also portraying alexithymia… making me wonder if it is not indeed so widely spread and forms a huge part of conditions like autism. A theory I have is that when children are born to parents who struggled with their own emotions and related anxiety (as indeed most of our ancestors did coming out of the stress and multivalence trauma of the ‘dark ages’) then a form of autism may be a result..

On that subject, earlier today by the lake I was reading more portions of Marie Louise von Franz’s book on dreams : The Way of the Dream in which she speaks of how native and indigenous peoples live closer to the instinctual and instinctive realm of life and are not as split off into rationality…they are therefore more likely to find meaning in their dreams and be open to the advice that dreams give to them.. Von Franz in this book sites the experience of one of her patients who was an artist and was getting information in his dreams that he totally needed to change his style of painting using more colour in his work.. Prior to acting on the information in his dream he was suffering a host of painful body symptoms that abated after he followed the information from his inner self..

Anyway sitting down to write has helped to calm me somewhat from my earlier frazzled state…when I get flooded or overwhelmed by too much happening at once it can be so hard to find my way back to my own centre…. I get very busy in my head so this afternoon I need to get myself back into a calmer state of mind by going for a walk and doing something pleasant with Jasper… I missed text messages earlier due to the waking up of all of those feelings associated with the wash up of the estate that also got triggered by talking to my sister… I need to put my focus on things that don’t stress me, such as the kind of things I can control and the estate business is very much part of the things I currently have little control over the execution of….the frustration over not being in control is doing bad things to my body lately…I need to be aware of the kind of thoughts I am running around in my head over it so I don’t tend to make myself even more overwhelmed.. I am having constant pain radiating all down my left arm lately from where the painful PTSD coiling and untwisting episodes are putting pressure on it and my heart….I realised today that I do far far better on the days in my life that I have therapy, contact with family lately is just a massive trigger for my anxiety..