Layered Processing

[maryel42]

It seems as though in the past several years I get so disgusted with myself for feeling the need to go back over and over some of my past abuses. Some things that weren't even abuse, as such, and certainly not as bad as the majority of it. And I use that statement advisedly because if it's still an issue obviously it must be more important than I'm realizing.

I find myself asking that awful frustrating question that is so thoughtless when others say it. Why can't I just be over this? After all I've spent countless time in session and inpatient working on this. I got to the point where thinking about it didn't hurt anymore. Talking about it didn't make me squirm anymore.

Years later and I find myself right back to those early days of therapy. It feels as though I'm fifteen again, right now, although with the better grasp of what is going on with my head. And yet... part of me still feels every bit as freaked out by it.

I don't know. My emotions feel as bad. Suddenly this time around it seems that my coping skills have defaulted back to what they were. This time I know how damaging they are. I know what they could do to me down the line if I don't resist them with all my strength.

It doesn't always help.

I guess what has me wound up and not sleeping tonight is starting to understand that I have been feeling and talking about it in a whole new level. In the beginning I talked and it was still mostly in my head. I found the words to tell my story and I felt, but I could never find the words to really express it.

Now I'm feeling it with a new intensity. Like its all raw again, and I'm talking about it for the first time. Only this time I'm not holding the last little bits back. I'm letting everything out. How scared I am. How ashamed of myself. How I was forever changed by some stuff.

I finally went and said that everybody breaks. On more than just a physical level. It can be mentally too. There's a before, and there's an after, and your entire core self will never ever be the same because in that break you hit the absolute limit of what you can bear and you know that you'll do anything and be anything and believe anything at all just to make it stop.

And in my life and experiences it was even worse to realize in that moment that there was nothing in my power that would make it stop. The person doing the damage just didn't care. Or needed to do the whole job.

Maybe I'm finally feeling all the stuff I didn't dare feel then.

Will it ever end?

 

[kitty12]

It sounds like you're gaining a lot of insight into yourself and your traumas, and I think having that insight when all the feelings come up can help ground you and make the feelings a little easier to manage. They still feel just as awful, but it becomes a little easier to take a step back and kind of observe, instead of being completely consumed by them. Or something. I know that people usually go through the stages of grief over and over again... it makes sense that processing trauma would be similar.

I'm sorry that things are so hard right now. :( It sounds like you have done a lot of hard work in trying to get through this, and you have every right to not just be "over it". Take care of yourself, be patient with yourself, and try to remind yourself that you *have* made it through the awful feelings before, that they weren't so intense forever, and that you can get through them again.

 

[maryel42]

I think this is frustrating because most of this I literally haven't had come back in twenty years. So much other crap has come and gone but this has stayed put away until this year.

Most of all I want to act like my six year old son and stamp my feet, throw myself on the floor, and scream at the top of my lungs that I don't wanna do this anymore.

If I thought it would help I would do it.