Revelation from a First CoDA Meeting

On August 22nd, 2008, I went to my first CoDA meeting. The next morning, I wrote this in my journal:

I didn’t sleep too well last night, but finally fell asleep around 1:00. I woke up at 5:30 with a phrase running through my head. A shrink would probably tell me it's mania  because it feels very profound and all-encompassing and it won't leave me alone. I don't know where it came from, but it feels like it was put in my head... here it is:

Give what you can but take what you need.

It's pretty simple but to me it says it all, at the moment. Maybe that's what CoDA is all about? 

Images and Tools

A Brief Reprieve

For more than a week after Father’s Day, 2008, I had the longest string of good days I had experienced in years. We got two puppies, that week, I spent a lot of time with my children, and I felt generally happy and full of energy. My journal entries were all positive and incredulous, with an underlying fear that the fall would come.

Back to Work

The big drop in mood did indeed come, and a rush of reactive, memory-induced anxiety came along with it. I say memory-induced not because I remembered something specific, but because I was aware that the feelings I was experiencing were not about anything that was currently happening in my life. I knew that they were driven by things from my past.

This understanding was, in itself, a big step in the right direction. In the past I had always viewed my moodswings as something beyond my control - something that happened to me sometimes, often out-of-the-blue, for no apparent reason. Understanding that these mood swings were caused by something felt like hope because it meant I might be able to find the cause and be in control of my life in a whole new way.

One tool I've used a number of times to help me figure out what part of my past is triggering my present anxiety is “Alternate Hand Writing”. Briefly, the idea is to talk to the part-of-self that is being triggered, whether it is a dissociated part or just a set of memories from the past.

With the dominant hand (for me this is my right hand), I ask questions. The questions are directed at the triggered part-of-self as if this was a separate person. With the non-dominant hand (my left hand) I answer the questions.

Every time I've tried this, I would have a nagging doubt in the back of my mind as to whether any answer to my questions would come. I needn't have worried. Almost always, the answer popped into my head soon after I switched the pen to my left hand. It felt almost mystical or magical, the answers almost seeming to write themselves.

This is a tool anyone can use, any time. It can help you identify what you're feeling and why. I've included examples in my memoir, "Through the Tiger's Door".

Rollercoasters

Riding Again

Hopelessness – a pervasive presence
Both fragile and resilient
Inside this box
Relentless Despair
Silent intensity and dissonance

Flat line – a subway locomotive
Gradually moves back
To the sky-scraping heights
And unforgivable depths
Of the roller coaster track

Black an Blue Soul

Black and Blue Soul
by Shen

I have become a black hole
Everything pours in but there is no way out
The endless energy that is trapped here in my body
Searches for a reason to continue in this state
Compressed into a tiny lightless sphere

Lonely blue spirit
Worries, is there peace in the next dimension?
If I give in to the desperation
Will it ruin what I can become?
Will it leave me with this emptiness forever?

Pasting on a Smile

Pasting on a Smile

by Shen

She Pastes On the Smile As She Rides
She smiles as she straps herself in
She waves to the people on the side
She sits on the edge of her seat
And the car begins to click up the hill.
It's a high one;
The top is out of view and she has no control, but
She pastes on the smile as she rides

As the train climbs she dares to look back for a moment.
All the other cars are empty;
the seat belts blow in the gathering winds.
She is already so far above the ground.
Something feels wrong;
Like the moment you know a dream is turning dark.
But even now,
She pastes on the smile as she rides

The train gathers speed.
The motion makes it hard to lift her arms.
Gradually she gets her hands to her face.
She feels the smile there but it isn't adhering.
Under her thumb she feels a corner lifting.
It begins to peal off just as she realizes
She is at the top of the hill.
The car comes over the precipice.
It pauses for a moment
The promise of a view of all the world crosses her mind,
but then the descent begins.

Gathering speed, her hands reach forward,
hanging on to the front of the car,
The smile slips out of her hands
It is falling
Has fallen
Will fall
To the ground
She screams
The rush is intense but the tears come too,
Washing over the blankness
Which shows through the missing smile.

Panic! Soon she will be at the bottom.
The train will round a bend
And her car will come into view of all those waiting.
She must fix this blankness!
She can't let them see the truth.
Frantically she begins to build the smile again
Working with both hands with her being with her soul

She remakes the fake, plastic thing
And pastes it over her face just in the last moment
As the train pauses.

She is right where she started again
and, wow, that's good, no one can tell.
No one seems to wonder why
She pastes on the smile as she rides.

Nobody else gets on the train.
She has a moment to wave before the nightmare begins again
She is climbing high into a blackening sky, but still,
She pastes on the smile as she rides.