Being in neck pain every day is really starting to make me super fucking irritable. It’s so fucking limiting and really frustrating. And just made worse by being back at work and having to prioritize my few functional hours for work tasks during the week.
I started seeing a new PT on Thursday who’s a spine specialist. I think I’m officially in the stage of it feeling worse before it feels better wrt the exercises he’s having me do. My neck muscles feel like tight fists pummeling the base of my skull. But at least this guy has a plan. My hEDS PT seemed sorta at a loss on Tuesday and that really fucking sucked. Spine guy thinks that my situation will be an “easy fix” and that he doesn’t think I’ll have to come in more than three times.
I would not believe a word of his cockiness except that W recommended him to me and she said that he saved her life when she was experiencing CCI. So. I guess he knows what he’s talking about. I definitely noticed some improvements right away. Today has just been really hard because the muscles I’m working with my new exercises feel absolutely horrific.
Shit has just been a lot. We’ve had an influx of new trauma memories show up in the past week and a half…some really heavy ones that seem central to some of our core programming related to our mom. Lots of life and death stuff (um, literally, and like, intentionally caused NDE and stuff) that I think this neck shit has been partially responsible for bringing to the surface. I see how everything is connected and it’s extremely overwhelming. And excruciating and devastating.
Just like. Hard to process the concept of your mother nearly killing you multiple times. It’s really a mind fuck when the person who you depended on to keep you alive as a child was also the person who seemingly wanted you dead. An unsolvable contradiction. Anyways. Been trying to process tons of shit related to that but also like…limited in my processing because I have to be mindful of my neck at all times. Super fun.
The bright spot is that these new memories have reinvigorated our commitment to life. E tells us all the time how incredibly brilliant we were and are to survive. She says we always knew how to survive. Somehow we always managed it. Even when there was no way out. We’ve been reframing our collapse states that we frequently have as the echo of a last ditch effort to live. A desperate fighting for our life. Like a possum who wants to live so badly that they’ll pretend to be dead until the danger is over. Collapse is not dying or failing. Collapse is a refusal to stop living.
There was no way out back then, no way to solve the impossible life threatening attachment quandaries. But eventually there was a way out, and we found it, and we took it. And every day we wake up is just another data point of evidence that we’re alive and we made it here to this life we created for ourselves.