I hope to be back early next week. I was originally shooting for Saturday the 18th, but I need to update my computer while on break, so fingers crossed all goes well!
Our son’s visit during this break gave us joy and fresh energy. And my next post, Emotions, Part I, is in progress. So I will be back soon.
Thank you for your patience, and for walking with me on this journey.
Saturday, July 18, 2026
“There is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.” — Amanda Gorman
As an unexpected gift, our son will be visiting for the week. So I am going to take a break to fully enjoy his company. Our visits are always lovely, but too short and too rare.
It is also a good moment for a short “respite” after the intensity of the post on Triggers and Flashbacks. So before I dive into the deep emotional turbulence of this darker “Nigredo” period, I will let this break recharge my energy.
In the meantime, I will do what I did last Thanksgiving and Christmas – leave inspirational “Gift Posts.”
I will be back here by Saturday, July 18, 2026, with fresh energy, and the next post – Emotions, Part I.
Thank you for your patience, and for walking with me on this journey.
Friday, July 17, 2026
At times of distress, strengthen your heart, Even if you stand at death’s door. The lamp has light before it is extinguished. Wounded lions still know how to roar.
As an unexpected gift, our son will be visiting for the week. So I am going to take a break to fully enjoy his company. Our visits are always lovely, but too short and too rare.
It is also a good moment for a short “respite” after the intensity of the post on Triggers and Flashbacks. So before I dive into the deep emotional turbulence of this darker “Nigredo” period, I will let this break recharge my energy.
In the meantime, I will do what I did last Thanksgiving and Christmas – leave inspirational “Gift Posts.”
I will be back here by Saturday, July 18, 2026, with fresh energy, and the next post – Emotions, Part I.
Thank you for your patience, and for walking with me on this journey.
Thursday, July 16, 2026 Some days I’m the fire, some days I’m the ashes, some days I’m the phoenix, but always
As an unexpected gift, our son will be visiting for the week. So I am going to take a break to fully enjoy his company. Our visits are always lovely, but too short and too rare.
It is also a good moment for a short “respite” after the intensity of the post on Triggers and Flashbacks. So before I dive into the deep emotional turbulence of this darker “Nigredo” period, I will let this break recharge my energy.
In the meantime, I will do what I did last Thanksgiving and Christmas – leave inspirational “Gift Posts.”
I will be back here by Saturday, July 18, 2026, with fresh energy, and the next post – Emotions, Part I.
Thank you for your patience, and for walking with me on this journey.
Wednesday, July 15, 2026 “Unstoppable” – Donna Ashworth
Unstoppable they called her but I saw her stop I saw her stop many many times.
Sometimes I thought she had stopped for good
but no she always found a way to resurrect.
To rise again.
Not the same neverthe same.
Each time a little more determined and a little less vulnerable.
Unstoppable they said but I think it was in the stopping
As an unexpected gift, our son will be visiting for the week. So I am going to take a break to fully enjoy his company. Our visits are always lovely, but too short and too rare.
It is also a good moment for a short “respite” after the intensity of the post on Triggers and Flashbacks. So before I dive into the deep emotional turbulence of this darker “Nigredo” period, I will let this break recharge my energy.
In the meantime, I will do what I did last Thanksgiving and Christmas – leave inspirational “Gift Posts.”
I will be back here by Saturday, July 18, 2026, with fresh energy, and the next post – Emotions, Part I.
Thank you for your patience, and for walking with me on this journey.
Tuesday, July 14, 2026 “The path isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.”
As an unexpected gift, our son will be visiting for the week. So I am going to take a break to fully enjoy his company. Our visits are always lovely, but too short and too rare.
It is also a good moment for a short “respite” after the intensity of the post on Triggers and Flashbacks. So before I dive into the deep emotional turbulence of this darker “Nigredo” period, I will let this break recharge my energy.
In the meantime, I will do what I did last Thanksgiving and Christmas – leave inspirational “Gift Posts.”
I will be back here by Saturday, July 18, 2026, with fresh energy, and the next post – Emotions, Part I.
Thank you for your patience, and for walking with me on this journey.
Monday, July 13, 2026 “The Four Agreements” – Don Miguel Ruiz
As an unexpected gift, our son will be visiting for the week. So I am going to take a break to fully enjoy his company. Our visits are always lovely, but too short and too rare.
It is also a good moment for a short “respite” after the intensity of the post on Triggers and Flashbacks. So before I dive into the deep emotional turbulence of this darker “Nigredo” period, I will let this break recharge my energy.
In the meantime, I will do what I did last Thanksgiving and Christmas – leave inspirational “Gift Posts.”
I will be back here by Saturday, July 18, 2026, with fresh energy, and the next post – Emotions, Part I.
Thank you for your patience, and for walking with me on this journey.
Sunday, July 12, 2026 “Every next level of your life will demand a different version of you.” Power of Philosophy
As an unexpected gift, our son will be visiting for the week. So I am going to take a break to fully enjoy his company. Our visits are always lovely, but too short and too rare.
It is also a good moment for a short “respite” after the intensity of the post on Triggers and Flashbacks. So before I dive into the deep emotional turbulence of this darker “Nigredo” period, I will let this break recharge my energy.
In the meantime, I will do what I did last Thanksgiving and Christmas – leave inspirational “Gift Posts.”
I will be back here by Saturday, July 18, 2026, with fresh energy, and the next post – Emotions, Part I.
Thank you for your patience, and for walking with me on this journey.
Saturday, July 11, 2026 “I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.” Carl Jung
There are things left within that remain still totally alive today, buried alive, even though you don’t know it. They lurk…in your psyche. Your nervous system. Your memories. Waiting.
Something happens in the moment – a loud noise, a smell, a touch- and you are suddenly spiraling backwards in time, to a place of total emotional chaos and terror. It doesn’t matter how old you are now, or how long ago that memory was buried.
They are happening again…right now.
Triggers and Flashbacks
There are so many instances that I will be having a pleasant day, absorbed in something fun, and then, when I least expect it, it overwhelms me.
A knob on the kitchen cabinet catches my shirt, and I react with fear and rage at “being pulled.” Someone starts up a loud motorcycle unexpectedly, and I jump out of my skin because the loud noise was like the noise of Dad coming into my room ready to grab me. Body and sensory memories.
Then there are the emotional ones. I have hated weekends most of my life. Except for when I worked in the hospital lab. At least on those weekends, I wasn’t home and was doing something useful. When I was at home, he was at me. Either sexually, or physically if I refused. It took me years to realize that my weekend “dread” was a powerful emotional flashback to “those weekends.”
These days the weekends still haunt me. I will be cleaning the house, then I sit down to rest for a moment and look over my to-do list. Immediately, from out of nowhere, I am filled with intense anxiety and the sense I am “bad.” I feel afraid. I feel like I’d better not be “caught” sitting down. I am in danger…or I am a “bad person” because he has made that clear to me.
Then, there is the “3:00 p.m. sense of dread” every day because “Dad will be home soon,” even though he is long-dead and I am in my seventies.
Or every year in July, on the anniversary of the first moon landing. I hate that day, feel anxious, and full of dread. I just want to sleep. That’s because it was one of the worst days of my life then. I had “avoided him,” and so he was at me all day verbally and emotionally. He didn’t hit me that day – he might have had to explain why to my mother. But he would shoot me “The Look” – that intense glare of pure hatred and rage that kept reminding me I was unloved and in deep trouble. When he wasn’t doing that, he was totally ignoring me. If I talked to him, he looked right past me.
So there is no question but that those memories are totally alive yet within me. I experience them all the time.
“The Look”
We all know those family photo albums full of pictures, especially those candid ones that can range from fun to outright silly because the camera caught the person off-guard in a hilarious position.
And then there are those posed family shots too, the ones everyone gathered for and smiled in unison.
My father’s posed photos sometimes captured a smile. But, especially back then, they usually looked more like his work badge. Sour. Unsmiling. “Tough guy.” Even when we were celebrating.
This was the photo from the celebration of my First Holy Communion when I was seven. In the Catholic Church, it’s a joyous time. Grandparents, cousins, aunts, everyone’s together laughing, smiling, eating. And photos. Lots of photos.
The smiling “posed ones” would always be taken outside by the flowering bush in the backyard. Here is Dad’s posed, “celebratory” face. Could he have been any happier that day??
Whether I call this period of my life the Nigredo phase, the Dark Night of the Soul, or an existential crisis, the name doesn’t matter. It was just bleak.
I had chosen this – unleashing all the emotions that had been waiting a lifetime for me to face them. And looking back, I would still make that same choice. It has been worth it.
But at the same time, I won’t deny that the years from 2018 until about 2023 were truly daunting. My safety net came from my therapist’s skill and her carefully paced processes, my husband’s and friends’ support, and my strength from the previous years of work.
From 2018 to the end of 2019 alone, I had thirteen sessions of EMDR. So much came up all at once, all of it urgent and intense, that we just needed to keep doing them to manage all the “hot” emotions.
2021 would be another intense year with five more EMDR sessions, followed by my mother’s death shortly before that Christmas. And while 2023 only needed three, the fury of a two-hour-long explosive session that March made up in intensity what the rest of the year lacked in numbers. It was a game-changer, and I’ll write more about that soon.
For now, I will simply say that there were many times I felt like I was walking through the fog-shrouded swamp. To look anywhere held the same view — bleak, gray, and limited, as if the swamp had always been my reality and had no beginning or end.
Each step only guaranteed it would be deep, squishy, and uncomfortable. I felt like at any moment I could be sucked under the muck or struck by the sharp fangs of a hidden viper. And I was blind to what lay ahead, or behind me.
But at that point, I learned the best thing was to just keep stepping. There was no point in turning back because that was swamp too. No matter where I turned, it was just more swamp. So I might as well just keep going forward, trust the process, and believe there was an end to it somewhere.
First…The Process…
What was the process of marching through the swamp of this dark time? And what was in that swamp?
Soul Mosaic 