Yesterday I led a guided mountain meditation on zoom. Where we imagined a magnificent mountain to tap into our inner stillness and strength. As the mountain is just the mountain, whatever the weather up there on the mountain. Awesome stuff.
I started running Lunch Space earlier this year at work where I do a guided meditation for about half an hour, moving it online during lockdown. I really love guided mindfulness meditations. I love the space which is created with others and wanted to bring a bit of that magic into our work space.
I started practicing mindfulness myself after a period of absence from being a social worker in 2013. At the time I went off, 2 of the individuals that I worked closely with had committed suicide, I had just been verbally threatened with a loaded gun and my case load was at 83. Not all of those 83 cases were active, yet I lacked the assertion to ask for time to close cases. I did not want to be seen as not coping.
I knew about compassion fatigue which is caused by hearing the stories of other people's trauma. Yet, I never felt my compassion was fatigued. I felt it was my compassion for people's stories that allowed me to continue to work in a system which kept piling work on me. Local authority vicarious trauma.
Meditation, therapy and yoga saved my life at that time. However, not properly addressing my need to please and inability to say no meant that I continued to be vulnerable as hell in a local authority social work setting. I experienced regular anxiety, hypervigilence and insomnia.
Leaving front line social work 18 months ago and completing an 8 week course in mindfulness has helped a lot. Yet recently in Lunch Space, I ran a story in my head that some one who comes to the group (and was struggling with lockdown) had committed suicide because the mediation that I had guided brought up difficult emotions. These are not new thoughts for me.
I told this story to my therapist very briefly at the end of my last appointment (a few weeks ago because of holidays)-that sounds like trauma, Cath she said. I gave a very immediate and very deep sob. Trauma means wounding. Hypervigilance is a state of increased alertness. If you’re in a state of hypervigilance, you’re extremely sensitive to your surroundings. It can make you feel like you’re alert to any hidden dangers, whether from other people or the environment. Often, though, these dangers are not real. Wounded alertness.
Except my tendency to minimise means that I have pushed these thoughts away. For years. Hypervigilance can be a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I managed to overcome the yelling of my inner critic (that says I am being over the top) and just completed an online Diagnostic and Statistical Manual this morning. It outlines 4 categories of PTSD symptoms: re-experiencing, avoidance, arousal/reactivity, and cognition/mood. To qualify for a PTSD diagnosis, an individual should have symptoms from each category and symptoms should have been present for at least a month. I have had symptoms from each category for at least 10 years.
So my brave as fuckness is to really look at this shit with the awesome support of therapist, Laura. I have an appointment on Friday. Woohoo. #gottafeelittohealit #mountainmeditation #braveasfuck.
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