Fawn, Freeze, Flight

My heart hurts, I wake up, I didn’t go to practice because I would have to walk a long way in the cold, it’s early on a Saturday, I’m tired, I was up late. I feel terrible. It’s the weekend but I’m thinking about the quote and branding work I’ve said I will provide some concepts for. I feel that I can’t do them, terrified, I’m so scared of the pressure and failure, to avoid the pain I stay in bed and read, trying to hide, dissociate. I remember my mother telling me off for reading too much, for not living in the real world. I didn’t want to be in the real world. I dreamed I tried to go on a children’s water slide and broke it. Always too big, too grown-up, not innocent enough, not clean enough, not small enough. Breaking everything I touch. 

I want to either lose myself in work and praise, to fawn and please, or dissociate and hide, neither of those is healthy, I’m avoiding incredible pain. I need to be able to sit with myself, to know what I want and to do that. Not to be always acting or not-acting to avoid something, to avoid pain/shame/retribution. I feel incredibly frustrated with myself for this paralysis. I don’t know how to not be in either of those states, to be my authentic self. I’m tired. I’m treating myself for anxiety with an anxiolytic but it might just make me tired.

I decided to get up and make us banana pancakes - is this a subservience/pleasing response in an attempt to run away from the pain again? I think partly. We need breakfast anyway, and sitting in bed didn’t feel good, I could numb myself a little by reading but I feel useless, I’m angry with myself for not getting to practice, I’m tired, I’m uneasy. I don’t know what I want to do with myself today, how I want to be. We are planning to go to drink & draw tonight, it might be useful to think about what I want from this, what the purpose of it is, plan for it.

(I spent some time in bed this morning reading Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving and the author's model of trauma types: fight, flight, fawn, freeze).