Sadness. Self-Loathing. Self-Healing

 

Source:

Daylio App 

Dear Reader,

I am in psychological pain. I woke up from a series of disturbing dreams. The dreams included people from my past while I was still living in the Philippines.

Yesterday, I found an article I have yet to read in full.

I saved it on my blog, where I am recording my step by step process to heal and recover from agoraphobia. The article was the first to pop up, after I typed in :

Source : …overcome Self-Loathing 

Pain indeed can tell you something if you listen to it and stop ignoring it, pushing it away or distracting yourself away from it.

Source 
I made it bigger for myself to aid me in times of dysregulation

Source: Dysregulation

My preliminary diagnosis from the current professional mental health (4th of March) experts I am consulting is : Borderline Personality Disorder. This has been very disturbing and upsetting to me, and this is the first time I am admitting it to myself since I heard it beginning of the week.

Sadness 💙 💭 

I have been trying to use the method I learned from YouTuber Heidi Priebe in being with and processing of emotions I usually simply ignore.

This is what I did after I woke up, I was desperately trying to shove away all my emotions and it made me feel worst and started building up more anxiety.

Luckily, Marjon (my therapist from November 2022-December 2023), spoke in my head, and said:

1. Open the door for Little Joanna; let her in.

2. You have it all within You; you can heal.

3. You are strong

4. You are intelligent

5. Have compassion for yourself.

In the throes of yearning for “someone else” to take my pain away, make me feel accepted, nurtured, I became blind to what Marjon kept trying to remind in her most compassionate way the entire year we were together: 

I recognize now the source of my sadness: self-abandonment.

Source : Stop Self-Abandonment…

Self-Loathing 🧠 💭 

After Sadness, Anger usually follows and that’s one of the emotion, that I am terrified of.

I have tried to articulate it again and again for the past years to the therapists I have seen between 2020-2024.

I don’t remember ever mentioning  self-loathing in those talks but now I realize, my anger directed to myself is something I have never truly reflected on. Until now.

I woke up from disturbing dreams about my father taking interest in me processing my sexual abuse trauma in his hamds.

The therapist in the dream was a narcissistic dominant female in the image of all dominant female figures I feared.

I felt helpless, alone, and there was this rage inside me I couldn’t let out.

Source: …Dorsal Vagal Shutdown…

Self-Healing 🧘🏻‍♀️ 

✨🥰✨👭🏻 💕 

This is why I am here, now.

I would like to let out all my emotions the only healthy and helpful way, I know how:

1. Write as honestly as possible about what’s going through my head.

2. Connect genuinely with my inner child by letting her know - I am here now for her. Show her: I get it. It’s up to me to take care of her needs. I will not abandon her, anymore.

👭🏻

So. That’s how my Sunday morning began. I opened the door 🚪 to my Joanna. I am a mom to my daughters and my eldest will be 25 years old in Autumn. I still have a ton to learn to be the mom they deserve. Learning to be good to Little J will take twice as long. Both endeavors are worth living for.

How’s your Sunday morning?

Rumination, Regrets, Resolutions

 Dear Reader,

Today, I am staying in bed out of compassion for myself.

Source : Daylio

Creating the blogsite to write about the history of my agoraphobia, and how I will step by step conquer it has awakened a very strong resistance in my whole being.

Learning what I have learned in therapy and from all the resources out there about this anxiety based disorder, it’s a natural reaction. My body is trying to protect me from what it perceives as me putting myself in grave danger.

Source : Article on Dorsal Vagal Shutdown 

I couldn’t sleep last night but thankfully by 2 am mental exhaustion from unending rumination sent me to a slumber filled with series of dreams that woke me feeling I was back in my home country. 

Luckily, I was able to process the dreams quicker than I normally could and had a brief but deep moment to appreciate the early morning. The exposure made me promise myself to make more effort in consciously waking up before 7 am. There is something special with being awake between 6-6:30 am.

Caramel, one of our four cats cuddled with me and that helped calm my nervous system.

I asked the young to take care of the groceries being delivered. Afterwards I wrote the older girls to ask when they were coming. Today is their crochet day; I love it that they have a Crochet Club and how they arrange crocheting together to have quality time together.

Source: Daylio

Seeing them and their love, their fondness for each other, and hearings their laughter behind the door fills me with a deep sense of happiness.

Their shared joy together helps me let go of all my shame, regrets that I was not able to seek professional mental help before I became their mother.

2020

I hope to look back to today within any regrets. My resolution is not to judge myself too much for times I let rumination take over completely that I get exhausted and paralyzed. I am doing my best every single day, and I can’t ask my body for more than it can.

How do you help yourself process regrets? Do you catch yourself in ruminations?

Quiet Mind

 

Dear Reader,

I feel good to be back, here.

Writing quiets my mind and I feel glad I can once again find solace in this process.

Simplifying my daily blogging is one of my baby steps towards learning to live in the moment. Keeping everything connected and related to blogging (the whole process of it) as simple as possible quiets my mind as well.

Yesterday, I created the blog page project, which I have been contemplating on since I discovered blogging way back in 2006.

It took me 18! 🙈 years to finally *just do it*. In those 18 years I tried hard to convince myself that I will one day share a successful story of how I overcame agoraphobia and share how I did it.

In 2024, I realised (having  learned from a lot of other people- experts, fellow human beings on the path of searching for answers, healing & recovery) my story from the beginning is a story of success all along.

The reality of human existence is on its own a magnificent success story. 

Source : YouTube Lauren Rose

The Person I Wish to Become

Blogging my daily thoughts and revisiting my past helps me towards seeing clearly who I was, who I am and the person, the human I would like to become.

I would like to be a person with a quiet mind. A human aware of my own being.

A quiet mind, I have learned can be achieved through self-reflection, self-acceptance and true self-love.

By telling my story (to myself mostly!) and sharing it for others to read, I begin to learn more about “being with my emotions”. Being one self quiets the mind.

It’s my self-made exposure therapy.

How about you? What person do you wish to be? What small actions are you doing to be that person?

Paalam; Para Sa Iyo!

Dear Reader,

I have taken a break from blogging for two weeks. It was unplanned; the feeling of not wanting to share, that everything is pointless and meaningless in the end, that I no longer am excited about what used to excite me and revisiting them to reignite joy just doesn’t work anymore. These thoughts, feelings of inadequacy, overwhelm prevailed and paralysis took over once again.

Is this going to be the cycle of my life? This question plagued me for the last 14 days. Frankly, this has been plaguing me ever since I can remember, or as far back in my life as I can manage to try and remember.

The last time I wrote here, the sun was shining. Today, the sun is shining too after days of cloudiness.

Going back here is intuitive for me.

Without going too deep into all my process, today, I would like to simply say : I am back. Back to blogging. Back to documenting about my learning to live a simple fulfilling life.

Oh! 😃Before I bid you a good day want to share images of what I would have originally blogged last time had I not departed 🙈 abruptly!

Puff Pastry ! 🤤 

I will create another blog for my kitchen adventures ☺️

Paalam 🇵🇭 (farewell!) for now.!😊 

P.S. the title of the blog is not only created to continue with my ABC blog series theme but also to symbolize me saying farewell to my fears and insecurities about blogging. Para sa iyo 🇵🇭 (for you) means I needed a reminder that this is for me personally. My gift to you is sharing my process in the hopes that I can be part of the human chain spreading hope, joy & peace ☮️ 

BE the change; all together we can impact the world positively. 🤗 💕 

Oh, What A Beautiful Morning!

 Dear Reader,

The sun is shining in Ankeveen! 😄🌞💛

I have not been outdoors on my own for months;  2-3 months, I guesstimate 🤔 

View from our bedroom window at 10:58

It’s very long story to tell for another time. I need to briefly write about it though to give you context and understand what this blog is about. 

One of the many reasons I am back here is because of my current situation. I struggle with going outdoors  and I never truly took the time to address this problem (isolating when I feel stressed). It’s chronic and has affected my life seriously, that I have been getting sickness benefits since Spring of 2021 to help me get into the core of this unhealthy coping mechanism and overcome it.

This week (before it ends!😜😅😆), I would like to go out again, and document about my process. They say it takes 21 days to form a habit. So, besides the

  ABC my way back to blogging ***, I plan to make short and simple blogposts of my walks. “Daily” is the target 🙈 but the main goal is to reframe my brain 🧠 to see going out as fun and not dangerous. 

The brain needs a strong motivation so I will give the blogseries a title Walk On Through To The Other Side, inspired by The Doors’ song Break On Through.

How do you motivate yourself to go outdoors? I will be documenting my motivation in the next 21 days. Walk with me!

*** I have not tagged my posts yet, and will do so in the future; I will compile the ABC 2024 blogposts  to make it easier to find them for myself and readers, who stumbles upon them.

Nijntje in the Garden

The youngest lying in our backgarden, last year May (31.05.23)

 Dear Reader,

Yesterday I introduced you to a mobile game I play (Merge Gardens blogpost).

Today I give you a small peek of our back & front garden.

July 2021
We hope to bring back the garden in this verdant state, this year. 

Nijntje is better known as Miffy, internationally.

That’s all for today. 😊

Come back next time for more garden, Nijntje and stories behind old family pictures.

Merge Game

 Dear Reader,

Today. I introduce to you a game I have been using to override the business of my brain. This is not a sponsored post. I simply like this mobile game, and witj this (possibly a series!) blogpost begin documenting everything I love about the game.

I like it for many reasons:

1. The Garden theme resonates with me because I would love to spend time in the garden when Spring begins. The visualization of that goal becomes easier through this vividly colored images.

2. The Categorization & Organization - if you’re familiar with merging games, you would know that merging 3-5 of the same objects will create a new object that will go on to create the next object etc.

3. The Completion and Culmination - it takes a while to complete a set but it is very rewarding when it happens.

4. The Puzzles 🧩- in between you could do puzzles. They’re integral to leveling up and getting rewards.

5. The Compliments - at first, I honestly found this part tedious 😝 😆 BUT 😂💕 I grew to love them

6. The Challenge - the puzzles are not always easy and sometimes they’re frustrating because this part of the game obviously are geared to make you watch advertisements. 

7. Rewards, Gifts etc

In summary, there are enough source of entertainment in the game.

Next time, I will share about my “egg collection” and creatures in the garden.

Are you playing merge game? Let me know which and what are things you like about it !