2 Sessions So Far

[EloiseLandau]

2 Sessions so far, and I am up, down, my mood is dark, full of rage, then I'm okay, and then I'm bawling my eyes out 3 times in 24 hours. My vision's all funny. I didn't sleep much and I'm just very sleepy.

The guy's correlating my reactions with things that happened in my childhood. We'll also have to deal with trauma not necessarily in childhood or at least compounding childhood trauma.

I'm hoping this is all pretty normal, because I don't make a habit of being all over the place, emotionally.

 

[anthony]

Normal... if you aren't having heightened symptoms after therapy, then it means you're being lazy. It is an inadvertent way of saying, you are doing trauma therapy. Well done.

 

[EloiseLandau]

Well just to celebrate, I'll open a fresh box of kleenex!

 

[EloiseLandau]

I seem to have a greater awareness already of when my rages are picking up and I can communicate more effectively to other people that I am having them.

I am aware of sad, lonely and intrusive thoughts, better than I had been before.
Yup, still breaking down into tears too.

This sucks in the best possible way, I guess.

 

[ronin47]

What you're experiencing is completely normal. I know that my first few weeks of real therapy, I was a complete nervous wreck. I often tell people of how I seriously considered not eating anything on the days I had my therapy sessions because I would sit in the waiting room seriously feeling like I was going to vomit from nervousness

 

[EloiseLandau]

Well that good. Because I have an x-supporter I'm still living with who insists he's never seen me so bad before, and I just ignore him. Breaking into tears isn't fun but I've honestly had worse.

 

[anthony]

Breaking into tears isn't fun but I've honestly had worse.

That is exactly the correct cognitive processing for trauma therapy. Breaking into tears might be annoying, yet it is releasing, and by far nothing close to suffering trauma in the first place.

Right on the money with that logic.

 

[EloiseLandau]

A couple sessions later and we're into deep stuff. But therapy guy says it's far preferable I break into tears than rages. And I've made some progress that includes stories of when I was bullied and excluded (and fought back), when I was humiliated by my parents in front of the extended family, and some issues with the x-supporter.

I also got some free Irish soda bread. Bonus!

 

[EloiseLandau]

One girl who kept setting me off and setting me off and just triggering me for YEARS... I came across her recently and my body just reacted; I felt the triggering going on, and then she made it worse by being her loud careless thoughtless self; someone who didn't see past her own nose in the past, and barely does so now.

I have to now deal with her on a daily basis. I have never had a reaction like this; but I've never been so defenseless, and she tells me in the most condescending way I shouldn't be living in the past. I feel like I'm being kicked while I'm down. This same girl admitted she couldn't be bothered trying to correct her behaviour to make my life less stressful (i,e, don't shout so much!) because it impeded on her right to shout if she wanted to.

I feel like my life is surrounded by well-meaning selfish boors.

Even my therapist said I wasn't doing therapy right, since I wasn't concentrating on how things bothering me now correlated to my childhood. (I am going to tell him, "look, if you think I need to correlate a sexual assault when I was 20 years old with something that happened in my childhood, I'll have to start making up stuff, and really, isn't it bad enough that I was raped AND my parents blamed me?") Sometimes this childhood stuff is okay, sometimes it seems like bull.

 

[EloiseLandau]

Okay, course corrected. I'm back in charge, he's just guiding things along.

He does think it's progress that I cry more than release the emotion as sheer anger.

He was also impressed when I mentioned a moment when I became angry, but there was a space, a moment, a *pause* between the event and the reaction, that I immediately knew was the moment when normal people would have in order to decide how to act to what's happening to them. I can see a difference between the pause they have, and the dragon that is my anger suddenly being *there* and charging out of me. They have time to act. I have only ever experienced the react(ion), the moment when there is no pause and no warning and barely time to catch the tip of the dragon's tail.

That was...different.

 

[EloiseLandau]

On old assault memories and men who are not good...

Spent the last week crying so hard my face hurts and keening so much I was pretty much screaming. My housemates told me I was petulant, their rights to have friends over overrules my desire and need for peace, and that I was hopeless.

Also wrestled with the fact I've been an object all my life. My parents adopted me so they could have a cute doll to trot out for pictures and for people to say they were wonderful for adopting...then they got pissed when I had the ill grace to get sick. I'm been sexually used abused, and physically beaten, verbally abused, misused, neglected, and mistreated, and when I am demanding to be treated like a person, people try to shut me down.

I don't read tones and voice inflection well. Which means I need explicit words. I have been lied to, I have been told things are my fault. I am not going to carry that anymore. Not by liars. Not until they stop lying.

I cry to the point I am screaming. I hurt. I found myself re-enacting the gang assault on me. Remembering my parents blamed me, and that several guys thought it was "hot" and one even tried to get his friends to re-enact it, unbeknownst to me. The same one who forced me to have sex with him when he suddenly started talking about how he'd f*ck me so much it would get me over those rapes and after that any man could have sex with me if he wanted and I would love it so much I "could never call it rape." Because you "can't rape the willing." The same guy who asked "did you come" after I told him I was raped. The stupid f*cker actually thinks orgasm= consent!!! He started calling me his f*ckwhore.... and was genuinely shocked when I not only refused to see him again, I threatened to call the cops if he tried to contact me.

I want these foul vile things out of me. I want to know how it is that people are not treated like objects, but in a manner that is respectful and mutually sharing.

I can't quit. I can yell, I can scream, I can hurt, I can feel the agony in my veins, but I can't quit. I am not so unique that I can fix this without holding to what I need to do.

I think I'm rambling again...

 

[evergreen]

I want to congratulate you on the hard work you are doing with your therapist. I am just getting ready to start seeing one myself. I am terrified at times and excited at others. I know once I make the appointment, I will be filled with dread. So I admire you for going even when it wasn't easy.

Also, I am really sorry to hear you endured that rape and how you have felt like an object all your life. You really are more than that, and I hope you learn to realize it.

Thanks for posting this thread. It is inspirational for me. :)