Tag: neurological

Transitional Spaces

From July 7, 2024

Hallways and parking lots have been peculiar places for me until more recently.  These are common throughways between two places, often after sitting awhile or engaging in some kind of activity before travelling through them.  Whether on foot or by some kind of vehicle, our time in hallways and parking lots is usually fairly short.  Get in, get out, go through, get on to the next thing.  They are pretty mundane really, but it wasn’t always this way for me.

I came to understand that my difficulty with these two spaces was more symbolic of something else than a phobia per se:  bad things happened to me that made it difficult to move on through various stages of my life.  I have come to understand that trauma keeps a person stuck emotionally for a time even though the days come and go, one still has to get to work or school or some necessary appointment, eat, sleep, and repeat.  The feelings we experience sometimes don’t match up with the task at hand, minutes on a clock or demands of life pushing us forward.  (This gets even more difficult when interacting with the people in our lives!)  My emotional stuck-ness manifested itself in weird inner experiences that affected my ability to walk down a hallway in the darkness of night or to quickly get into my car and drive to the next stop on my To Do List or calendar.  Each played out differently, however.

There was a sense of spiritual darkness lurking in the hallway of any home I lived in as an adult.  A simple task of getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night was a big ordeal; I needed to turn on a light, never entering into a dark room lest I become overwhelmed with fear.  A night light didn’t count; that was spooky too.  It’s as if I felt the presence of another being in the hallway, there to bring me harm.  He wasn’t an intruder.  He was a sixth sense even demonic being dressed as a male figure in my mind’s eye, there to taunt and torment me with this FEAR.  I really can’t explain it to someone who doesn’t know or hasn’t experienced the spiritual realm. I can just tell you that it’s real and it’s terrifying.  So as a Christian, I’d attempt to put on my “spiritual armour” as we read in Ephesians 6 and even quote scripture such as Romans 8:38-39.  We read in the book of Matthew that the Word of God was Jesus’s defense against the lies of Satan in the desert so that became my sword of the Spirit to deal with these fears as well.  A counselor who specialized in ritual abuse suggested that I put up my hand with a stop sign as I moved through the hallway.  In the end, these methods became rituals unto themselves until I was finally freed from all of it years later. 

My point is that the transitional space of a hallway marked my difficulty moving on from one moment to the next with confidence.  It took sheer will and determination to finish a project, exhausting me in the process.  Larger projects and processes had severe consequences if realized.  The biggest example:  fibromyalgia came with completing my Master’s degree.  In all, I over attended to details and still made mistakes or left things out.  In my professional life, supervisors and my fellow Occupational Therapists and Assistants would compliment the thoroughness of my documentation then cite my poor productivity at work getting it all done.  I’d leave work and sit in my car in a severe state of “brain drain,” that continued for hours afterwards; falling asleep at night usually entailed an involuntary review of the work day once again.  Letting things go in general to rest or relax was really, really hard for me.

So there I would sit in a given parking lot, needing to drive home or somewhere else with little mental ability to do so for long while.  At times this was an hour or more.  Higher level thinking skills were there but challenging to draw upon, requiring an inordinate amount of energy to transition from one task to the next, driving from one location to another.  After my ex-husband left our marriage in 2003 it got so bad that I kept a small spiral notebook in the console of my car.  I’d write down a few lines of poetry or sentences of prose to cathart, cathect, or move past the feelings that were immobilizing me.   I made lists and kept every little detail recorded on my calendar. Eventually the Lord allowed the crafting of a new life with Steve, who I call my Intended Beloved, and the excitement of our new life together carried me through the day much better than before.  What a blessing!

Then things got bad again when I developed a severe neurological illness at the end of 2011, worsening with the onset of what would eventually be labeled as a Convulsion Disorder in 2012. Not only was I spending a lot of time in my truck between appointments, you know “checking for messages” and the like, I was dealing with the sequelae of my symptoms.  Did I pick up a perfumey scent walking through the toiletry aisle in the grocery store?  Was the building moldy and now I’m in the pre-tic phase of a convulsive episode?  Quick!  Open the windows, remove my coat, eat and drink something, or just do anything to lessen the reactivity to some offending chemical or scent if I can even think rationally to do act at all.  Many times I had to call Steve when able to do so, to rescue me.  He talked me through the situation or actually came to get me and drive me home.  What an ordeal for both of us!  Steve was usually at work, needing to figure out what to say on the phone to his wife in a crisis.  At least a couple of dozen times over these 12 years of chronic illness, he has needed to drop everything he was doing to rescue me from some situation away from our home.  Very stressful indeed.

As the Convulsion Disorder became more compartmentalized, as I came to understand and release more of the demonic trappings from abuse that occurred in my past, and as my complete dependence upon the Lord for everything including the very breath of life became my way of life, the power of the transitional spaces diminished significantly.  This took time.  Now I regularly walk through the house with no lights on as I prepare for bed.  I hardly ever even think twice about it as even the habit attached to this behavior broke down then went away.  The time I spend in my truck between destinations these days is less than ever I can remember unless I am not feeling well that day.  Further, the feeling of spaciness has shifted to the end of the day, requiring a different set of coping behaviors.  But alas it may be from me simply doing more.  Perhaps bedtime will be my next area of victory?  I hope so! 

And that will be a good thingy Gentle Reader.