#therapypost

[fencesandfrogs]

we also talked a bit about my anxiety dreams and i was like "yeah when i get enough sleep to have dreams i have terrifying hyperrealisitic anxiety dreams where i wake up unsure if they were real or not" and then i had to explain "no i have dreams where i'm doing laundry with all the weight of a panic attack. there's no pattern or tendency they're based on whatever but i wake up with a cold fear about something that really did just happen as far as my memory is concerned."

[fencesandfrogs]

One thing I didn’t mention abt therapy today was also that I (admittedly briefly) touched on my grief about childhood mental illness.

(Tw below the cut: discussing suicidal ideation, from a child)

It’s been about ten years since I first wanted to die.

I don’t really know what to call the emotion that thought brings up in me. It hurts. I think of mini me, ten years old and in so much pain I didn’t see an end, I just wanted it to stop and let me go, and I just…no child should ever feel like that.

Because that was my childhood — because my childhood was scratchy throats as you answer the stupid screening questions you know you can’t answer honestly (“promise me you’ll never try to kill yourself”) (“I’m only allowed to report if you’re going to hurt yourself, another child, or an elder”) (“everyone who tries fails and regrets it”), was not seeing a future, was believing my life was half way over — I never really appreciated the horror of it.

Honestly, I’m still not sure I am. I have a feeling in a few years I’ll look back on this again with more upset.

I legitimately don’t have a name for the kind of feeling this brings up. It’s grief and anger and exhaustion rolled into one. I stumbled onto the internet and was told I was fighting the hardest battle and I was brave for fighting and I was a child and I was tired and I didn’t want to have to fight.

It does something to you to have been taught DBT and CBT skills when you were also learning algebra.

There’s not really a takeaway from this. I think I just…it’s an isolating feeling. The specific kind of grief and loss and anger over a loss of childhood like this. And I guess I wanted to put it all out, both to get it off my chest and to say to anyone else that yeah, I feel this too.

[fencesandfrogs]

also my therapist says when i post on tumblr it's "processing" and not "being a terminally online bitch"

[fencesandfrogs]

sighs in it took me like 12 hours to recover from this therapy session and that sucks

[fencesandfrogs]

some more therapy thoughts now that i'm a little less "holy fuck i sure do have a lot of emotions":

went into the session like. completely dissociated. i was feeling completely unreal and floaty and was literally lying with ice packs on me trying desperately to feel something so i wouldn't be a complete mess in the session.

completed reprocessing of one memory! it only took. many, many months.

i feel very odd about this? okay let me break into paragraphs for a bit.

this memory was supposed to be a not very intense one. i don't really have a lot of triggers around it. i don't really: the memory is there and it certainly was a lot of unfun to think about, but it was a fairly "simple" memory.

it was not. it was a lot.

(i don't know what it's going to feel like when we do a memory that's more intense. i'm. that's a little scary.)

anyway. i struggled with "zero distress" because i have a lot of residual distress. a lot of parts have a lot of emotions about the memory. and it was hard to sort out...i cannot fully express how badly i was doing before the session, and so it was kind of hard to sort out everything. parts felt trapped in the past when they weren't even a huge part of this memory. i dissociated a lot. it was a harrowing session for something i wasn't very distressed about.

one part straight up refused to accept that we weren't living in that past moment which was uhhhh. i don't know what to tell you kiddo? that's not a problem u normally have? but he was scrunched up and i think i probably will need to do some work with some of my inside memories for that. because i don't think that fear was actually attached to the memory, because the memory feels...idk, dark? hard to explain.

there was a bit of last minute denial which was weird to work through. but that's a present emotion.

it was kind of hard to explain to her that like...i can't emdr my way through the grief of accepting my father was abusive. girlies' gonna need time to come to terms with it and emdr is very...harsh? throwing the memory at her over and over again is not going to help her. this is a present emotion, it's not actually about that memory, and it took me a little bit to figure out how to explain...i've got all of the emotions in the present now. they're not gone, but they're not tied to the memory.

(which is why i felt so extra exhausted after it. i had fourteen million emotions running around me and just. needed to hold something soft and let myself be.)

anywhere where was i going with this. right. i have a lot of present emotions that are raging fairly intensely, so hopefully in my next regular-therapy session nothing urgent will come up so we can do a table talk about it. but the memory itself is fine. quiet. chill.

i'm so. uh. it's a very small piece and i don't...fuck. i have so many emotions, i have so many emotions. it's a little scary. but.

it was a pretty big session. i've spent the past few days feeling very out of it, and so i went in very detached, and now i'm just...tired. exhausted. i can basically feel my brain chewing things up.

[fencesandfrogs]

One last therapy reframe: doing any destabilizing session right now is a trash idea because I don’t have therapy for a while. That makes sense. Not every session has to be the deepest possible work.

[fencesandfrogs]

🙃🔫 guess who didn’t bring up anything important in therapy and now doesn’t have another session for like a month

[fencesandfrogs]

my therapist told me repressed trauma manifests as pain and i pointed out i have unexplained chronic backpain