I want to throw my arms around all of you and say thank you a thousand times for your ongoing support. I cannot begin to tell you how much I need it...seemingly more all the time.
When I started therapy in the fall, I thought I'd be "done" by the new year. In January, I thought I'd be fine by Spring. As Spring progressed and the flashbacks and memories kept getting worse, I guess I started to realize that I actually have a big problem and need to keep practicing all these strategies I'm learning to try to cope with it. The hardest strategy of all is reaching out and trying to build a network of support for myself...people I can lean on pretty heavily until I can process all this chaos that has overtaken my inner life. This is so hard because I assume that nobody wants to hear about any of this stuff, and I don't want to be a burden to anyone. I'm trying to change that thinking, but it is very hard. I do wish that more and more stuff didn't keep exploding to the surface. Every time I think I'm getting a handle on things, I get thrown for another loop--either with another piece of memory, or something external like what my mother said to me.
I wish I understood better why her comment hit me so hard. Although it is the first time she has ever been so bluntly direct with me (not cloaking comments or behaviors with "it's for your own good," or "I'm only telling you this because I love you," or "You know I'm just kidding," etc. ), it's not as if the hurtfulness is particularly new. When she said it, my initial reaction was to excuse it and forget it, as I have so many things for so many years. Perhaps it is because of all the work I've been doing to be present in my body and try to feel my emotions, the poisonous truth of it penetrated me and I became fully conscious of it. It was like the slow-motion experience of after you realize you've hurt yourself badly, but the pain doesn't kick in simultaneously...there's a moment of denial and disbelief. I guess I've been stuck in the denial and disbelief moment for my whole life until now. Now it is all coming out...sometimes exploding, sometimes a slow seeping out. And I feel like all I have is a box of band-aids to cope with the devastation.
I slowly came to realize how utterly bizarre my childhood was...NONE of it was my imagination, heck, half of it I still have yet to remember!
I empathize totally. Every day seems to bring some new bizarre memory that I find hard to believe. I feel like I was brainwashed and it has taken 50 years to start to emerge from it. I think I've known since I was a teen that both my parents were mentally ill, but I couldn't have explained it. I'm only now beginning to understand how severely ill they were/are (father is dead now). It does help to recognize that.
