Listening as Therapy

This may have occurred to you already, dear listener, but I've had a bit of an 'Ah Ha' moment in the last 2 weeks. Since I started listening to The Listening Program®, I have listened on some kind of schedule. I listen in the mornings or I listen at lunch time or I listen in the evening after work. I made a point to 'do my listening' as I knew I was getting various benefits from doing so. Then life got crazier and I noticed something new.

I made some impactful shifts in my life, like moving my children and myself to a new place. Before, when I have moved, I had all kinds of help. This time I had Adam, 17, Danica, 14 and myself doing all the work. Most of the heavy stuff naturally fell to Adam and then he got the flu. Throwing up jalapeños is not conducive to the activities of moving, so there, my little girl and I were. Everyone I hoped would come by to help, went camping, hiking, were working and other things. I had rented a truck and the clock was ticking.

Really, the moving hassles and costs were not the main cause of stress at the time, by I'll just focus on it, as you get my point. Undo stress, 2 weeks after spending the weekend in the hospital for a non-heart attack and I was not in the best place mentally, physically or emotionally. Then Monday comes along and it's back to attempting to be amazing at work, on top of everything else. And here comes the 'Ah Ha' part. When I started to really feel overwhelmed and my heart rate started going up and the headache started to kick in I reached for my headphones.

I played album 3 of TLP for a few minutes and had to take a call. Not wanting to be left hanging in the middle of a 15 listening segment, I put my headphones back on and listened some more. I drank some water and got back to work. In the middle of a project, my worries snuck back in and I started to feel a bit nauseated. I sipped more water and put my headphones back on. Later that night, when the stress crowded in at home, I put my bone conduction headphones on and listened to some of album 4.

For 2 weeks, this became the pattern. I listened when I needed it, not on a set schedule. When tears welled up in my eyes after a tough personal call I reached for my headphones again and it hit me! TLP had become my stress relieving therapy! I reached for headphones instead of headache medication or something else. I listened to The Listening Program to calm, ground and center myself in the bumpy waters of my life. I found the music in Sensory Integration albums to help me get through a very tough couple of weeks. And I'm very grateful this program and this company came into my life and has such benefit to it.

Now I'm back on schedule, listening to album 5, Speech and Language and back to using TLP in a condensed schedule for its designed purposes! But if things get bumpy again, it is no big deal to switch to the SI albums to get through another tough time.

Depression and time

Depression is the kind of thing you may not even know you have. It can sneak up on you. It can just be. It may be part of your identity if you let it.

Suffering with depression you may say things like, 'Life sucks,' 'nobody understands,' 'nobody loves me,'and you just may not ever see silver linings or light at the end of the dark, dark tunnel.

When I started listening to The Listening Program, I had every expectation I would get gain. I had no idea what to expect. I had hopes the sensory integration component would help with chronic pain, other than that, I really had no idea what to expect.

I got help with sleeping a bit more deeply in the second week and I was feeling better generally in the first 4 weeks.

Weeks 5 and 6 I crashed emotionally and cried for 2 weeks. it was like I couldn't hold the hurt and pain and unhappiness in any more and it fell out in little riverettes down my cheeks. (I made that word up.) It also felt like a dam burst in my heart and I unleashed the pent up sadnesses I held so tightly all those years.

For awhile I was afraid it would never stop! That I was so old and so full of black emotions they would never end.

But in 2 weeks total they ended.

I listened to the other albums in TLP for 8 more weeks and was, quite frankly afraid to go back to the speech and language albums for fear I would lose another couple weeks to tears and prepared by buying boxes of tissues and putting them everywhere!

They weren't needed. Whatever filtering and coping mechanisms I seemed to be missing appeared to have resolved the first time through listening. I really wondered at that. How amazingly miraculous was that experience?!!

I still am listening to TLP. I know every time I do another cycle of listening I will get new gains. And depression is a bitch. Sorry, but it just is. Nasty, insidious, sneaking and debilitating. It makes you someone you are not. And I know so many of us suffer in varying degrees to this bitch of a condition. I really want others to see the hope I see... that listening to this amazing music can change your brain and change your life for the better and for good.

Now if I can just keep from getting any more head injuries!!!

Families of Origin and stuffed emotions

I'm nearly at the end of my first TLP listening cycle of 20 weeks and am looking back at the things I have learned and the benefits and gains I have seen. There is a great book I've never read called, 'Feeling Buried Alive Never Die.' I've been told to read this by all kinds of people in the last 10 years and haven't. I did finally buy it 6 months ago, but have not gotten into it. I totally agree that you shouldn't stuff your feelings and that people probably get cancer and heart disease and other stress related things, like wrinkles, hair loss and bad breath from holding back what they are really thinking, but I still haven't read the book.

One of the most impactful results from my listening to a frequency basic music listening program is the repressed memories that have bubbled up to the surface for me to deal with. Doesn't 'bubbled up' sound lovely?! In the 5th and 6th weeks of listening I was flooded with memories of my childhood; some I remembered and some I definitely did not.

I grew up in an over achieving household full of religious, bigots, beyond their thresholds of comfort, with perfected abilities to act like nothing was awry. People at church thought we were the perfect family. We looked good, sounded good and smelled good, but behind the front door of our house, things were not good. Dad ruled the house with an iron fist, literally.

He had been an only child with parents who did not want him. As a child he was bounced around from his grandparents to an orphanage to a sweet family in his town growing up. His mother was a concert pianist and had several husbands at a time when that wasn't done. Dad worked hard to be a perfect student with perfect grades who sang, played trombone and danced like nobody's business.

Mom grew up on a farm in Missouri, the show me state, went to college in MO, then to design school at Ray Vogue Art Schools in Chicago, where my parents first met. Mom had a vision of becoming the next Edith Head and designing fabulous gowns for glamorous women and modeled for extra money while going through school. She was one term from her degree when she got married and Dad told her to quit as no wife of his was going to work.

It was a time when women did what their husbands told them to do. It is also how I was raised. Both my parents are gone now and I appreciate, ,so much, how hard they worked to take care of their large family as best as they knew how. Neither of them had been around babies and yet eventually, they had 11 of them. I was the oldest and the smallest of the bunch. There was a lot of trouble inside our home, but I always loved my family and did my best to take care of them.

The frequencies effecting speech and language also effect memory. Memories are tied to emotions and when emotions get stuffed; say when things happen to a child or in the field of vision of a child, and said child cannot handle them, they do hunker down inside causing damage. This is the type of thing that 'bubbled up' to the surface and is why, going into TLP, my provider asked me point blank, 'Do you have a therapist or someone you can talk to?' And I can tell you I surely do and I had to as even at my age, I could not have handled the emotional devastation this could have caused. Between TLP and therapy, I am very glad I am going through this as those feelings I buried so long ago can be free to leave. I'm grateful for the process where I can deal, grieve and heal from these invisible wounds.

Bye Mom...

My mother was a beautiful, classy, gracious lady, who was also a model and award-winning fashion designer, was married to my physician father, who was very well known internationally, in his field, and she happened to have 11 children. I am the oldest and smallest of the bunch and prone to run-on sentences. Since Mom had so many kids and I was the oldest, I was there beside her taking care of my sibs until I left home for college, got married and had my own family.

From then on my relationship with my mom was spotty. My husband moved a lot and I went with him caring for our kids. She didn't like my lifestyle and I did the best with what I had. She wanted my life to be nicer and not hard like she remembered her grandmother's life.

You see I've lived in places you have to drive through the river 3 times to get to our place. And our place consisted of 2 camp trailers and a wall tent. Or tents and a house that was condemned after we moved out because the electrical was original, when electricity, was first invented. Wires ran across the ceilings and down the walls. I've taken care of my family with no running water, or only running cold water I had to heat for everything; cleaning, laundry, bathing, washing my waist length hair, etc.

Then at times of extreme camping, we used a two seater outhouse, or the like, as we didn't have indoor plumbing. Then we lived, at times, 7 to 30 miles from the closest traffic light and even paved road.

I always acted like it was a big adventure, but it was hard.

I came from money and prestige and a well-educated background, full of talent and opportunity. Thinking I married the same, for all time and eternity, I might add, the gypsy life, of living under the poverty level, was nothing I was prepared for. It took the intelligence to learn new skills, and the perseverance to keep going, and the constant check on my attitude to keep my shifting household positive.

I have never owned my own home and only this last year was I able to own a vehicle free and clear.

I'll get back to the part where we were at least, finally able to stay in one spot for 5 years. When my husband wanted to move once again, after 60 moves I said, 'No, ' and sunk roots down in eastern Utah.

So he left and I began my own adventure of raising 7, then 6, then 5, then 4 kids. It gets creative at this point as my older kids came and went with and without their families, friends and pets. In 2007 I supported 17 people, mostly related. Now I have my 2 youngest, of 9 children, at home.

Fairly soon life could be easier. Danica starts sophomore year of high school next fall, Adam graduates in a year, Josh just finished his 2nd year at Westminster College with a 3.92 GPA. And all my other grown children are in 3 states working and following passions and have interesting interpersonal relationships with each other.

So why this post?

Mom died before I came anywhere near getting my life in any kind of even occasional peace and she knew it. I was still married when she left and struggling greatly. She said things to me like, 'a child who was never loved, will grow up to be an adult with no capacity to love,' to explain my loveless marriage. She said in an abusive marriage, the better of a wife I was, the more I would be punished. That people who hate themselves, despise those who love them, or at least will disrespect them.

I thought I could love my husband enough and surround him with amazing loving children, and it would melt his chilled heart, and open it to love us back. To their credit, my kids are loving and reach out to others, which is a huge gift to me to watch. But the marriage ended and badly and it has been a long road to regain self esteem and some modicum of periods of feeling safe.

But Mom left 12 years ago today and I miss her. I go to call her and she isn't on the other end of the phone, and I need her and she isn't there. I have never in all these years, had the time to mourn her passing. I didn't even get to go to her funeral. My own mother's funeral. I never got to say goodbye. I still don't have the life she wanted for me; living in my own home, with a loving husband, kids and grandkids gathered around and actively participating in the church she loved so dearly.

What I do have today is, I am surrounded by my kids and their kids, even through social media and phones. And I have amazing women friends of all ages all over the country. I've reconnected with my school chums who remember me fondly and I have a great love for things that flower fabulously and growing food plants in hanging baskets with food. (See www.youtube.com/roxycrossdesigns)

I also have a burgeoning ability to process things that bubble up to the surface. It may take a bit, but things do resolve better for me now. I am able to sort info and handle crisis at the time. And I really hope this continues to improve because it doesn't look like my life will be difficulty free just yet. I will keep listening to The Listening Program as it is helping and I've added weekly therapy sessions for professional guidance to sort through all these years of stuffed stress, trauma and emotions.