Feeling Trapped in the Treatment Process

[joeylittle]

FWIW - The way you're describing the disclosure process reminds me very much of what I went through. I also was thinking, initially, that I could sort of skate around some details. I also remember feeling relief after I finally just let it out, and then a rising uneasiness about having opened the pandora's box of my life. That sense of discomfort lasted about six months, and was accompanied by an escalation in symptoms. You know, the 'it gets worse before it gets better' thing? It was exactly that.

I know I’ll never be able to share the details with him, here, or with anyone. I think maybe part of my fear is that we won’t be able to find resolution because I can only share at a high-level; if we can’t fix it and I can’t just put it away, I worry I’ll be trapped in this state indefinitely.

I also believed this, completely. It turns out, I was wrong. Over the course of working through it, I can't say I became comfortable opening up the layers of what happened...but I did become capable of articulating much, much more than I thought I would be able to - even the more visceral or obscene things - the elements I wasn't sure I'd be able to handle thinking about, let alone remembering and expressing.

There are a whole bunch of mini-steps that you'll be taking, the more you begin talking about things. But everything you give yourself permission to put into words, is one more step forward. This is all just to say - I'd encourage you to not worry about whether or not you'll be able to share details. Your relationship to the events will continue to shift, as you continue to work. It's hard to know where you'll be with it, weeks or months from now.

 

[piratelady]

Thank you.

I also remember feeling relief after I finally just let it out, and then a rising uneasiness about having opened the pandora's box of my life

It is good to know I’m more typical. :)

even the more visceral or obscene things

Really? Did you feel embarrassed? Or ashamed? Did it make it feel more real? “Real” might not be the right word, but I’m at a loss as to a better one right now.

Also, Part of me is afraid anyone who knows will start to think differently of me. Either I’m broken, disgusting, tainted forever, and of course they’ll take pity on me. I don’t know if I can handle that.

There are a whole bunch of mini-steps that you'll be taking, the more you begin talking about things.

Your relationship to the events will continue to shift, as you continue to work.

This I believe. We talked more about this today. I still couldn’t give him much in regards to details, but we at least talked about my relationship with my step-dad and what aspects of the abuse I’m ruminating on. Without the details he was able to get me to see it wasn’t a loving relationship, it was manipulative. So that’s progress.

After my session I did send him an email with some of the details leading up to the really bad part.

So I can see some hope. It’s still so daunting and overwhelming though.

 

[joeylittle]

Really? Did you feel embarrassed? Or ashamed? Did it make it feel more real? “Real” might not be the right word, but I’m at a loss as to a better one right now.

I'll tell ya...it was not nearly as bad as I had anticipated it would be. Something that I was deeply, deeply shamed by was likely to come up in our trauma work, in the next session. I had already spent a few sessions talking about how I would never talk about it, and my T doing a good job challenging my distorted thinking - which mostly was around three things. One, I was very afraid of whatever intrusive thoughts would start to pop up in my life after I started talking about it. Two, I was certain that my T would drop me as a client, because he would be too disgusted. And three, I believed it was impossible for me to even make the words come out of my mouth, and it would turn into some kind of sinkhole in the narrative that I'd never get past.

When the session was finally coming up, and I had agreed to at least try...I decided to just write it down instead. After being reassured that I wasn't going to get dropped as a client, he suggested that I use that document to read from, and we worked from there.

I think the worst part of the entire process was my anxiety leading up to disclosing it. Once I had actually made the decision to put it out there - then it was just keeping my nerve, instead of having to build it up (if that makes sense).

In some ways, it makes all of it more real. These are things that I had never spoken aloud about to another human being, and they had been buried for years and years. Now, I was saying them out loud. Someone was hearing the words. That makes it more real, in a way.

But it also made it possible for those things to become memories, instead of remaining stuck as these horrible hauntings in my head.

It's important that it's you making the decision. I believe that completely. Only you can decide to disclose something. Your therapist should be able to both handle it, whatever it is - and also, they should help you work out that decision. But it will help you the most to know that you get to decide whether you let it out.

Something that helped me with that, too...it's ridiculously simple, but also very true: I was choosing to go to therapy, and I had chosen to start this process. So if I was going to be showing up there, I might as well decide to try. Just to try and talk. More often than not, that has worked for me.