Hi Hellipig. Just wanted to send you a note of support and encouragement to say it sounds like you're doing an amazing job and making huge progress. In answer to your query a couple of posts ago, which you have since more or less answered yourself, grieving and processing aren't mutually exclusive processes that happen one after the other. Instead, they're both tied up together as part of a huger process of remembering, confronting, integrating, building, revisiting and rebuilding. At every twist and turn in the road there will be processing as you try to accept and internalise the meaning or significance of something, and as part of that there will be an element of grief for the hurt that was inflicted on you, for the suffering, for the things you had and the things you didn't have. Likely there will be other things - anger, fear, perhaps a little acceptance... then some more of all of the above at the next turn.
I say all of that to say that there are so, so many stops and starts along this road... what I afectionately call "the road to wherever", which in my mind symbolises the fact that I really don't know where it's going to take me next, only that I'm moving, and somehow, some day, i'm going to get somewhere.
And I understand too about that feeling of anxious "what have i done" that you experience after you have shared certain things, either here, in thereapy or wherever. I think it's a normal and to-be-expected symptom of how difficult it is to disclose in the first place, and it's natural to have some doubts and worries about that afterwards. But you're doing great in hanging in there, persisting, trying to think through and validate your own thoughts and feelings as you're doing in therapy, and just continuing to stay in touch. That all takes enormous courage and commitment, and you have all of those things.
Keep trucking mate, you're doing a great job, and it's great to continue to hear of your progress.
Maddog
Thread 'What do you think about the phrase 'trauma doesn't define you"?'
