The white flower in my gardenĪt home that afternoon, after he left to go to the bar, I went to the garden to cheer myself. I held back my tears because addiction was the invisible guest sitting at the table with us. Soon he would join his friends to drink, like he did every single afternoon, every single day of the year. But in that moment, I loved him, though I knew our time in his presence was winding down. He either didn’t know I was looking at him or chose not to look back at me. As we played, I studied him – all the ways he was beautiful to me, even though he had hurt me so very much for so very long. He was seated at one end of the table, I at the other. Playing a quarters gameĪfter lunch at his family’s house, we played a dice game with quarters. So I dropped the issue, but felt so discouraged that emotional abuse was present even on the holiday. Tiptoeing on eggshells, knowing a blowup was possible, I cautiously asked him, “Why did you mix the nuts together?” He gaslighted me as he had so many times before: “I didn’t” – and his tone held a clear undercurrent of contempt. On Christmas morning, I saw he had mixed hazelnuts into the walnuts and curiously placed the hazelnut package face up on the surface. Then the memory photos of last December 25 played in sequence in my mind: The plastic container of nuts This relationship is now destroyed due to narcissistic abuse that reared its ugly head this year, because my family has betrayed me and sided with my ex. Through this instrumental music, I was whisked back to nursing homes and hospitals in the late 1990’s where I played Christmas music with my mom – she on harp, me on flute. As God often does, he used music to pluck the strings of my high sensitivity to stir my memory and lead me in a Sunday morning journey of grief. On Twitter, I saw a video by Karl Kohlhase, a talented musician who I enjoy following. Instead, I want to paint the most vivid picture of how grief feels to a person with both high sensitivity and a photographic memory. The details are highly personal, but I share them not to vilify anyone. It’s easiest for me to tell you how my grief is harder with these things by taking you through a thought and feeling thread I experienced this morning. #encouragement #grief #hsp #photographicmemory Click To Tweet A Story of How a Photographic Memory and High Sensitivity Make Grief Harder How a photographic memory and high sensitivity make grief harder: encouragement for you. Still, in this second round of grief of the original trauma, they make things much, much harder. But both traits make me a much better artist, writer, and speaker than I would be without them. The highs are higher, and the lows are definitely lower. My high sensitivity is also a blessing and a curse. I have many thousands more photographic memories in rich detail from that time onward, particularly regarding emotionally charged moments. I have a full five-sensory catalog of the moment in the February 1979 blizzard, when I was looking out on the white world and worrying about my daddy out in the cold. My first memory is from when I was only sixteen months old. My photographic memory is both a blessing and a curse. And, I’ve learned that my photographic memory and high sensitivity make grief harder for me than it is for many other people. In this hard, hard year of divorce recovery and betrayal trauma, I’ve been learning more about grief than I ever wanted to learn. The American culture isn’t comfortable with grief, so we haven’t learned to handle it well. How a Photographic Memory and High Sensitivity Make Grief Harder It’s therapy for me as much as a hope that it ministers to you if you are grieving this season. I’m going to try to explain how a photographic memory and high sensitivity make grief harder in this post.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |