![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Apr. 16th, 2011 04:48 amOk, so, nix that about the bubble bath, and I'm making the muffins now, and getting up even earlier than I thought, BECAUSE...
This faith crisis I've been having (stay with me now, it's relevant I promise) is really at it's core about how I have dissociative disorder; I've been able to "manifest" feelings of all types within myself for most of my life as it was part of the coping mechanism of my childhood (spending almost all of my time immersed in a fantasy world). I would laugh, cry, even have orgasms based completely off of thoughts in my head with no outside stimuli.
Yes, you read correctly.
Dissociation is not always a deep immersion in a fantasy world, a lot of the time it's a more subtle emotional disconnect that involves seeing yourself in third person and not perceiving anything around you as truly real, among other things. That's been the more common dissociation I've practiced as an adult, to greater (in the OR) and lesser (I'm bored) degrees. In more extreme cases people even have multiples ("others"), but I'm not that extreme. I did have a lot of textbook dissociative traits as a kid - losing time, repressed memories, sleepwalking, walking into things while wide awake, losing my train of thought in the middle of spoken sentences, etc. I never spoke with a therapist about it until I was an adult.
So, in recent months, as I've realized the scary majority of my real life that's been wasted on dissociating, and also the degree to which dissociation is an enabling crutch that allows my real life to go on sucking, I've...stopped.
I'm trying to be aware and emotionally present in the moment, ALL. THE. TIME.
This has led to major problems in my marriage, as it's made things within the marriage that I'm not happy about way more starkly hard to deal with than they were before when I had this catch-all coping mechanism (escape hatch).
It's also led to a major crisis of faith as I increasingly felt that God was obviously another thing I made up to feel better - right around the time I stopped living in a thick cloud of years-deep imaginary friends (around 15) is when I had my big Christian conversion. Looking at it that way is kind of horrible and shattering to many of my palpably-real spiritually transcendent moments.
And it's also a paradox, as I don't want to pray about it or read the Bible for guidance or any of that as I already know I can convince/hypnotize/trick/whatever myself into feeling it's all real if I throw myself into it and try to believe it. So I've been in this gridlock standstill waiting place where I long for and miss God but refuse to live in some illusory dreamworld...but also know that if God is real I'm completely missing out here since I have no way to "get back" without some trust/faith that I'm not willing to give.
See, I don't always tell the internet everything. And, I'm even crazier than you thought. Anyway:
Several days ago somebody anonymously asked me to please, please describle one of my most significant religious experiences. I replied:
A neurologist and neonatologist sat me down with MRIs and told me my baby - Elise - had massive global brain death. They said “Everything that makes a person an individual is destroyed”. I went home that day numb from sobbing and picked up my never-fails amazing devotional journal, like “This better be fucking good.” That page was the gospel story wherein somebody asks Jesus why some guy is blind, like what did he do? What was the sin that caused him to deserve blindness? And Jesus was like, no, you don’t understand, he’s blind so I can heal him and you and others will have faith. Watch this.” I teared up and clenched down on this wild welling hope that it could be like that for my daughter.
A little over a week later I arrived at the hospital to accompany her on a transfer and instead she got discharged. She’s basically been completely fine ever since. I’ve received dozens of emails, comments and messages since then saying either “I believe in God” or “I believe in God again”, because of her story.
Then I sat back, blown away, by how that actually happened. I didn't make that shit up. I didn't "manifest" that. It might be open for alternate interpretations, I'm not denying that, but what I'm saying is it did not happen in my head. Those doctors exist, those medical records are in my filing cabinets, those comments and emails came to me from other people. That devotional journal really did say something FREAKISHLY, LITERALLY SHOCKINGLY whoa supernatural on-point every time I opened it for many months. I showed Grant, Laura and Dama many of the pages as I was first seeing them, they all remember, and the thing is sitting on a shelf in my library right now. Elise is also sleeping in her bed healthy, though I do understand that is a somewhat more subjective sort of "proof", particularly of Christianity specifically.
I started thinking of all the wildly nutty things that have happened in my life, the concrete things that were not just feelings in myself but quantifiable evidence of something "more" at work.
When doctors were saying my Nana was beyond all hope and that my Mom and Pa should starve her, months after her strokes when she was still incoherent and unable to move certain limbs, and I asked St Jude (Patron Saint of lost and impossible causes) to intervene and she got better, and better, and better again. Quickly, for the most part. That happened. I wrote about it here. She was in a permanent-care sort of facility. She's home, now. Going to the mall to get her hair done.
I also asked St Jude to help me the one time I actually stopped eating like a fucking pig and was succeful at Eat to Live, but that again is something within myself and subject to my own placebo effect if I'm being skeptical.
I was praying the rosary for the first time and had the most incredible, truly miraculous seeming revelation about how to see and why to love my mother despite all the weird history between us, last Fall. I wrote about it here. That is powerful enough that when I remember it, and how it came out of nowhere, it really does not seem at all like it could have come from within myself.
KT, my sponsor, has had candles lit in her home for our family's finances ever since Grant lost his job, and prays for us every day. Not only did Grant find a great job here in our small commuter town right away (which could totally be amazing yet plausible coincidence) but we started having money heaped on us left and right from sources I didn't even know about (bigger payout than we expected for the Prius, likewise with tax return, then a title company refund and an escrow refund I had no idea were even possibilities, one after the other, Grant's 403b refund from his old job, and my getting approval for a full ride plus extra for college...). Even all of that could really be luck, temporary, serendipidous and impressive but whatever, except...that last Fall? When I started giving offering every week and praying about our finances? The same exact thing happened. My mother in law called us out of the blue two days after that first Sunday and told us she was sending thousands of dollars because it was a small fraction of the retirement fund she'd decided to cash out and she wanted to do something surprising for us O_O Then, within the week, Grant's GREEDY STINGY SALARIED job sent him a one time $800 bonus in the mail just for "being a good employee" (?!) and...there was something else I can't remember, it's freaking LATE and my brain is fried, but it was all three of these things inside one freaking month we were doing this offering and frequent finances prayer thing!
I don't think anyone should believe in God or try to be faithful for money or even with the expectation that they'll be financially secure. I do think people need to work hard and do the best they can and that sometimes terrible things happen to every-and-any-one. I actually really hate that Joel Ostein style "have faith and you will win the lottery" sort of attitude..I'm just saying, that is also an awful lot of crap to try to ignore. I mean, what? CRAY-CRAY.
I don't believe all that I've listed here (which does not go back to my earlier experiences, some of which are more vibrantly "accountability-proof" than any of this and REALLY giving me pause) proves the Pope has authority, or proves Christ's real prescence is in the communion wafers, or any of that - but I do think it gives me something concrete and outside of myself showing there is some kind of energy being tapped into, some kind of guiding force responding to prayer. Something bigger than the power of my own imagination and far more helpful than any coping mechanism has proved to be.
I didn't manifest it or make it up that Catholic Charities paid my electric bill and gave me bags of groceries, when I was a young and newly single mom, working as many hours as I could get and with two toddlers.
I guess what I'm saying is, I still have some institutional problems with the Catholic Church, and some skepticism about all of it. But I also have broken through an invisible barrier that has been holding me back for the last few months, and it's a tremendous relief to do so. To give myself license to say, "Whatever details might be up for personal debate, this isn't just a dissociative trick I'm playing on myself. It's bigger and 'realer' than that, at the very bottom-of-the-barrel least."
I've prayed, a few times, really prayed for the first time in what for me has been an incredibly long time, and it's been good. Not lightning bolt good, but clarity inducing good.
So yeah. My muffins are done, and I'm gonna go set the alarm for some insanely early horrible masochistic time so I can take a short nap before I have to guzzle a giant latte and present myself at RCIA, for pleading and testimony as to why I want to continue in the program after randomly not showing up. Twice in a row :/ Hopefully this can mostly be done through my sponsor and the Priest as I would really rather not deal too much one on one with Iris re: such emotional hooey. I'm still hungry to be part of sacramental life and there is no denying the positive effect that my faith in Christ has had on my life, over and over in countless ways, large and small. I also love sinning and am confused about a billion theological issues but I've arrived back at the beginning of this journey, that place where I started out saying "I can keep asking these questions...from the inside."
This faith crisis I've been having (stay with me now, it's relevant I promise) is really at it's core about how I have dissociative disorder; I've been able to "manifest" feelings of all types within myself for most of my life as it was part of the coping mechanism of my childhood (spending almost all of my time immersed in a fantasy world). I would laugh, cry, even have orgasms based completely off of thoughts in my head with no outside stimuli.
Yes, you read correctly.
Dissociation is not always a deep immersion in a fantasy world, a lot of the time it's a more subtle emotional disconnect that involves seeing yourself in third person and not perceiving anything around you as truly real, among other things. That's been the more common dissociation I've practiced as an adult, to greater (in the OR) and lesser (I'm bored) degrees. In more extreme cases people even have multiples ("others"), but I'm not that extreme. I did have a lot of textbook dissociative traits as a kid - losing time, repressed memories, sleepwalking, walking into things while wide awake, losing my train of thought in the middle of spoken sentences, etc. I never spoke with a therapist about it until I was an adult.
So, in recent months, as I've realized the scary majority of my real life that's been wasted on dissociating, and also the degree to which dissociation is an enabling crutch that allows my real life to go on sucking, I've...stopped.
I'm trying to be aware and emotionally present in the moment, ALL. THE. TIME.
This has led to major problems in my marriage, as it's made things within the marriage that I'm not happy about way more starkly hard to deal with than they were before when I had this catch-all coping mechanism (escape hatch).
It's also led to a major crisis of faith as I increasingly felt that God was obviously another thing I made up to feel better - right around the time I stopped living in a thick cloud of years-deep imaginary friends (around 15) is when I had my big Christian conversion. Looking at it that way is kind of horrible and shattering to many of my palpably-real spiritually transcendent moments.
And it's also a paradox, as I don't want to pray about it or read the Bible for guidance or any of that as I already know I can convince/hypnotize/trick/whatever myself into feeling it's all real if I throw myself into it and try to believe it. So I've been in this gridlock standstill waiting place where I long for and miss God but refuse to live in some illusory dreamworld...but also know that if God is real I'm completely missing out here since I have no way to "get back" without some trust/faith that I'm not willing to give.
See, I don't always tell the internet everything. And, I'm even crazier than you thought. Anyway:
Several days ago somebody anonymously asked me to please, please describle one of my most significant religious experiences. I replied:
A neurologist and neonatologist sat me down with MRIs and told me my baby - Elise - had massive global brain death. They said “Everything that makes a person an individual is destroyed”. I went home that day numb from sobbing and picked up my never-fails amazing devotional journal, like “This better be fucking good.” That page was the gospel story wherein somebody asks Jesus why some guy is blind, like what did he do? What was the sin that caused him to deserve blindness? And Jesus was like, no, you don’t understand, he’s blind so I can heal him and you and others will have faith. Watch this.” I teared up and clenched down on this wild welling hope that it could be like that for my daughter.
A little over a week later I arrived at the hospital to accompany her on a transfer and instead she got discharged. She’s basically been completely fine ever since. I’ve received dozens of emails, comments and messages since then saying either “I believe in God” or “I believe in God again”, because of her story.
Then I sat back, blown away, by how that actually happened. I didn't make that shit up. I didn't "manifest" that. It might be open for alternate interpretations, I'm not denying that, but what I'm saying is it did not happen in my head. Those doctors exist, those medical records are in my filing cabinets, those comments and emails came to me from other people. That devotional journal really did say something FREAKISHLY, LITERALLY SHOCKINGLY whoa supernatural on-point every time I opened it for many months. I showed Grant, Laura and Dama many of the pages as I was first seeing them, they all remember, and the thing is sitting on a shelf in my library right now. Elise is also sleeping in her bed healthy, though I do understand that is a somewhat more subjective sort of "proof", particularly of Christianity specifically.
I started thinking of all the wildly nutty things that have happened in my life, the concrete things that were not just feelings in myself but quantifiable evidence of something "more" at work.
When doctors were saying my Nana was beyond all hope and that my Mom and Pa should starve her, months after her strokes when she was still incoherent and unable to move certain limbs, and I asked St Jude (Patron Saint of lost and impossible causes) to intervene and she got better, and better, and better again. Quickly, for the most part. That happened. I wrote about it here. She was in a permanent-care sort of facility. She's home, now. Going to the mall to get her hair done.
I also asked St Jude to help me the one time I actually stopped eating like a fucking pig and was succeful at Eat to Live, but that again is something within myself and subject to my own placebo effect if I'm being skeptical.
I was praying the rosary for the first time and had the most incredible, truly miraculous seeming revelation about how to see and why to love my mother despite all the weird history between us, last Fall. I wrote about it here. That is powerful enough that when I remember it, and how it came out of nowhere, it really does not seem at all like it could have come from within myself.
KT, my sponsor, has had candles lit in her home for our family's finances ever since Grant lost his job, and prays for us every day. Not only did Grant find a great job here in our small commuter town right away (which could totally be amazing yet plausible coincidence) but we started having money heaped on us left and right from sources I didn't even know about (bigger payout than we expected for the Prius, likewise with tax return, then a title company refund and an escrow refund I had no idea were even possibilities, one after the other, Grant's 403b refund from his old job, and my getting approval for a full ride plus extra for college...). Even all of that could really be luck, temporary, serendipidous and impressive but whatever, except...that last Fall? When I started giving offering every week and praying about our finances? The same exact thing happened. My mother in law called us out of the blue two days after that first Sunday and told us she was sending thousands of dollars because it was a small fraction of the retirement fund she'd decided to cash out and she wanted to do something surprising for us O_O Then, within the week, Grant's GREEDY STINGY SALARIED job sent him a one time $800 bonus in the mail just for "being a good employee" (?!) and...there was something else I can't remember, it's freaking LATE and my brain is fried, but it was all three of these things inside one freaking month we were doing this offering and frequent finances prayer thing!
I don't think anyone should believe in God or try to be faithful for money or even with the expectation that they'll be financially secure. I do think people need to work hard and do the best they can and that sometimes terrible things happen to every-and-any-one. I actually really hate that Joel Ostein style "have faith and you will win the lottery" sort of attitude..I'm just saying, that is also an awful lot of crap to try to ignore. I mean, what? CRAY-CRAY.
I don't believe all that I've listed here (which does not go back to my earlier experiences, some of which are more vibrantly "accountability-proof" than any of this and REALLY giving me pause) proves the Pope has authority, or proves Christ's real prescence is in the communion wafers, or any of that - but I do think it gives me something concrete and outside of myself showing there is some kind of energy being tapped into, some kind of guiding force responding to prayer. Something bigger than the power of my own imagination and far more helpful than any coping mechanism has proved to be.
I didn't manifest it or make it up that Catholic Charities paid my electric bill and gave me bags of groceries, when I was a young and newly single mom, working as many hours as I could get and with two toddlers.
I guess what I'm saying is, I still have some institutional problems with the Catholic Church, and some skepticism about all of it. But I also have broken through an invisible barrier that has been holding me back for the last few months, and it's a tremendous relief to do so. To give myself license to say, "Whatever details might be up for personal debate, this isn't just a dissociative trick I'm playing on myself. It's bigger and 'realer' than that, at the very bottom-of-the-barrel least."
I've prayed, a few times, really prayed for the first time in what for me has been an incredibly long time, and it's been good. Not lightning bolt good, but clarity inducing good.
So yeah. My muffins are done, and I'm gonna go set the alarm for some insanely early horrible masochistic time so I can take a short nap before I have to guzzle a giant latte and present myself at RCIA, for pleading and testimony as to why I want to continue in the program after randomly not showing up. Twice in a row :/ Hopefully this can mostly be done through my sponsor and the Priest as I would really rather not deal too much one on one with Iris re: such emotional hooey. I'm still hungry to be part of sacramental life and there is no denying the positive effect that my faith in Christ has had on my life, over and over in countless ways, large and small. I also love sinning and am confused about a billion theological issues but I've arrived back at the beginning of this journey, that place where I started out saying "I can keep asking these questions...from the inside."
