a new memory (maybe)

[sidptitala]

trying to have a plan to calm my life down. making room for exercise and pleasant activities. after 4pm on days i'm not working i'll do pleasant things- like read novels, write or draw or try some other artistic projects. swim or go to exercise classes or cycle around, or go to the cinema. im going to have to make a focused effort to do these things, but i am so hungry for them.

i feel so much lighter in the past week, i feel that emdr and those cbt exercises are really helping. my habits are still crisis ones, and it really is those i need to fix.

i'm going to try and develop self compassion because what little elements of that i have developed really seem to be helping. this coming year i'll focus on healing. knowing that so much more can be done once this weight is out of my body. i already feel it lifting, with comparatively little work.

 

[Falsch]

I feel so incredibly fraudulent about the things which torment me.

Odd feeling. Is it denial ? Is it because you should be so strong that whatever you lived through, that should be nothing or next to nothing and you should go on with your life? Is it because of the others' denial? When talking about denial, again, the onus falls on the "victim", but what about the village who knew and did not do a thing? What about the mothers who knew what their husbands or their sons were doing to children and did not do a thing to stop it, or just looked at those children-objects as they grew up years later with this sense of destruction and considered them as hindrances to their marital peace of mind, as a sense of bad conscience - is that not self-denial they feel? And that self-denial hurt the children-objects as much as the crowd that killed and raped. The village self-denial is condoning the acts and, if they are not the killers and the rapists, they are as bad because they know and don't tell - and you don't trust them and don't trust yourself. Where is the fraud? I am the fraud. They are the fraud. They kill memories.

Odd feeling:

I feel so incredibly fraudulent about the things which torment me.

 

[sidptitala]

i'm so tired. but still going through my days.

i went to counselling yesterday evening and it was really confusing. i had so much trouble articulating myself and im so ambivalent about what my body and brain are trying to tell me. she was telling me, i think, that i have to make a decision about whether i'm trying to look at things or simply say no to them and try to put them away. i understand i suppose that i can't make things go away- i have been trying to do that and it hasn't worked. i'm learning through emdr that facing stuff, in a controlled way and in the right way at the right time is a lot less awful than trying to suppress things until i can't anymore and then becoming overwhelmed by them. i said to her i do feel like there's a child version of me stuck somewhere inside me, who is trying to hand me information and i am trying to disown. i didn't say, but i do understand- that i've put that internal child through an awful lot of shit and of course she wouldn't tell me things when i would only punish her. i need to create solid ground, and a guarantee of love and care for that frozen child if she decides to give me more information.

emdr- i really feel like i'm getting somewhere. he said i'm measurably improving, based on questionnaire scores.

 

[sidptitala]

i feel so terrible and alone, and have all week. since emdr especially. when that ended and i felt those shoulder triangles of pain settling into me again, very much not the lightness i felt in previous weeks. what's weird is that i stumbled across what i wrote down after my first flashback, which was almost exactly a year ago now. and all of things i wrote are the images and feelings that come in emdr. but i never made that connection before. i don't feel like i remember flashbacks very well after they happen, almost exactly like dreams. anyway, those feelings are so alive in me. moving onto a new thing in emdr leaves me with almost a sense of grief. all of that felt like it was so real when i drew it up, but moving on underscores how far away that time is, when in spite of all the awful shit we saw i had a devastating amount of hope. that old grief, for those people in that place, is so real and so present now, because its going on again as we speak.

spoke to the other counsellor about my difficulty looking at my own face, and feeling of not wanting to be looked at or seen. my own face morphs into his in front of me, it's not my own face i see but his. not his face from now but from when he was my age, when i was tiny. i've found his face terrifying for at least the last 10 years. i haven't been able to look at it. sometimes i can't bear to look at myself in the mirror.

i feel so alone. i know i'm isolating myself. i hardly got any hours at work this week. i'm scared they are trying to encourage me to get another job but i don't think i'll do that. another additional one sure but i am not going to quit unless they fire me. i know i need to break open all of this denial and stuckness to get anywhere but im so terrified of crisis, and know i am not so far off it.

i was supposed to visit my mom this week but i didn't because i can't bring myself to walk into that house full of things that might cause me to remember. even phone calls with my mom, she often says things that make it so present for me, but i can't say that to her. she always talks about him to me. she almost always asks me to talk to him or talks about how good he is or was. i don't contradict her because im tired of having that conversation over and over again. i need to visit before xmas starts coming up, and i need to get my winter coat from her house because i'm freezing without it. the counsellor asked me this week if i had a picture of myself as a young child i could put at the corner of my mirror - and i do, and i remember the one that caused me to run away. there's a picture of the two of us sitting on the couch beside each other. when i went to therapy before it was to this point i got before sensing a deep darkness i needed to run away from, i pivoted away and went to work in a genocide instead. i happened upon that back then, when i was living with them, and i was so depressed and felt so unreal. after a little while of going to a therapist i looked at photos. and that one was just so hard to look at. that banished place where all my feelings go was overcoming me when i looked at it. and the overwhelming question was, what changed? i don't look unhappy to be trapped there in that photo. it looks like genuine closeness. what changed? what are the things i don't remember that i would need to know to account for how suffocated i feel now in his presence? how drowning and crushed.