Stream of Consciousness

*Trigger warning (sexual content)*

Knocked The Wind Out Of Me

Right now I’d be going to session if my therapist wasn’t on stupid vacation. I’m still super irritated with this whole thing. I’ve never been thrilled when she leaves but I usually just suck it up and block out anything I’m feeling until about an hour or so before I see her again.

But in an effort to stay connected to the work, to her, and to what’s important about all of that, I’ve been actively pushing myself to stay present with whatever feelings come up. Which sucks. I had another dream with my therapist featured in it last night. I don’t remember much of the actual material, but I know that I felt scared (not of her, but of someone or something) and she was there. I can’t really explain it, but something about the dream felt very intimate. We were in a place that was emotionally closer than I’ve ever felt with her in real life, at least not that I’ve ever been consciously aware of anyway.

She often tells me that my extreme fear of intimacy is what generally leads me to pick fights with her or sabotage our conversations. I always find that strange because I think I’m a person who generally embraces intimacy. I have a beautifully intimate relationship with my wife along with several close friends. There are certain people that I don’t ever really censor myself for when I’m around them. But maybe that’s a different kind of intimacy, or a false intimacy or something.

Beaming

My session yesterday went very well. I’m a little surprised because I was so anxious going into it, but I think all of the writing and talking I did throughout the weekend helped me feel more confident.

Before heading into session, I started to regret not making an exhaustive bulleted list of everything I wanted to cover (which is my usual routine). But then I remembered my posts here and all of the important dialogue I had with my lovely readers, and I started to calm down. I reassured myself that I knew what was important to me and found some confidence that I didn’t even know I had.

I opened the hour by saying,

“I feel like it’s been forever since I was here…I’m like ‘wait, what were we even working on?’ But it also seems like I never left. It kinda feels the exact same…like we’re just hitting the replay button or something.”

She asked what in particular I was feeling.

“Anger, I guess. Like…I feel okay-ish outside of here. More optimistic, to be sure. But then I come in here and sit down and I just feel so pissed!”

She speculated that my anger comes from all of the tension and difficult emotions surrounding our latest discussion about boundaries. This is when I felt my throat start to tighten. I was so worried I would say the wrong thing and lead us back into an argument. But I also didn’t want to just surrender, so I said:

Scary Movies

As I mentioned yesterday, I told my therapist how much I love that she allows me to put my feet on the furniture in her office. That interaction led to a slight rupture that we (luckily) recovered from, offering me the chance to explain more about this particular topic.

Growing up, I was this little monkey kid. I loved to climb and hang off of anything and everything, especially furniture. I loved to sit on the arms of chairs and sofas; I’d hang upside down or climb over the top of recliners and lay in a strange twisted position. My feet are rarely ever touching the ground if I can help it. I don’t like that feeling, for many reasons.

One reason is due to my parents: my father especially hated when I sat on the arm of a chair or sofa, or put my feet on the furniture. My parents could never understand why I flat out refused to just sit normally in a damn chair. I guess I just didn’t want to. It infuriated them and they’d scream at me for it constantly.

So I did it even more.

Mixed Emotions

I’ve been thinking a lot about the emotions that came up at the end of my last session. It’s hard to really pull apart what happened because I experienced a mixture of different thoughts and feelings.

My initial thought is that I felt ashamed of my dream. It was extraordinarily difficult for me to share that with the therapist. She’s quite interested in dream interpretation and has much more knowledge about this topic than I do. I was worried she would see something in the dream that revealed more about me than I wanted her to know (or that I want to know about myself).

As far as I can tell, she interpreted the dream as a subconscious reaction to our increased intimacy. Yet I still worry that the dream is perhaps more literal and reveals something terrible about me.

So the sexual nature of the dream was particularly agonizing to reveal. I worry so much about how my trauma has affected me. I often wonder if it has irreversibly contaminated or perverted my worldview. I worry about being an abuser myself in some ways, or the implications of the link between abuse and pleasure that I sometimes experience.

I also felt ashamed of needing to ask her to not harm me in the way the dream version of her hurt me.

But this is so complex.

Promise

I finally did it: I told the therapist about that damn dream.

It took me more than half the session to do so, but I did it. I’d made a list of important things I wanted to talk about so that I could warm-up to the session before I dropped the dream bomb. I talked about not being able to sleep. I brought in an adorable handwritten letter that my oldest niece mailed to Wife and I (and talked about the trigger sthat came from reading that).

Then, as an attempt to segue, I mentioned that I’d been having other dreams: dreams about food, money, school (the usual anxieties) and this other weird dream about doors.

She’s very into dreams so she listened attentively as I walked her through each dream theme. I knew that she knew I was building up to this dream about her (since Julia had mentioned it prior to this session), but she let me take my time and say it when I was ready.

After we discussed some of the anxieties keeping me up at night and how my niece is at an age that was very traumatic for me, I fell quiet for a bit. I was looking out the window and abruptly asked her if she regretted this.

“This?”

“Yeah. This. Being my therapist.”

Alleged

In light of new memories that have been surfacing, I’ve become obsessed with looking through my medical records (again). I requested them last year after I’d been discharged from a brief stay at a local psychiatric ward. I was infuriated at how poorly I was treated and, for whatever reason, that prompted me to want to learn more about how OTHER institutions had ALSO treated me poorly.

There’s quite a bit of paperwork to go through, most of that being boring shit they have to write about like my vital signs. But my older records, from when I was 17 years old, have more detailed notes. Particularly the discharge summary from my fourth hospitalization. I was unable to get records from my first three stints in the psych ward because that institution has since been investigated, shut down, bought out, re-opened, re-investigated, and re-shut down. I think it’s a daycare center now. So there’s really no telling where my records are, or if they even still exist (probably not). There’s a brief allusion to those hospitalizations with admission and discharge dates, but otherwise I have no information.

What stands out to me the most as I go through the notes over and over again is how frequently they point out that I was probably a big fat liar, specifically in regards to my trauma. Here are some screenshots, in the order they appear in my records (for those who don’t want to squint at a picture or are visually impaired, go here for the typed notes):

Believing My Own Truth

(Trigger warning for topics of child abuse. Not graphic, but still potentially triggering.)

I brought the van der Kolk book excerpt as well as my thoughts on Friday’s session to yesterday’s appointment. It went fine, but not great. Not because of her, but because of me. And mostly because it’s apparent that  I just can’t handle validation or empathy.

Her response to my reflections on session?

“Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I can see where the fear and the need to test comes from. And that’s okay.”

Her response to the book excerpt?

“This is great! And I definitely think this is what we have in here – or at least what we’re building towards. And if that doesn’t sound right to you, please share with me what feels missing so that we can figure out how to get that need met.”

Gah! She’s says all the perfect things! But I still felt super triggered and anxious. And something she said about “testing” triggered a switch to Anna that also triggered a new fucking memory about sexual abuse from my biological mother that I absolutely cannot accept as reality.

Which is what we talked about in session today.

Primal Touch and the Mother-Shaped Hole

A few weeks ago I lost some time. Turns out a child part, Anna, went to session. I didn’t come out until the final few minutes, after the therapist asked for me by name. I had lost a lot of time. I was confused and terrified. I remember standing there, holding tightly to myself, looking around the room in panic. The therapist softly asked me, “Is there anything I can do to help you right now?”

I didn’t respond. I just shook my head and made unintelligible sounds. But I was actually thinking:

Yes! Please hug me! Please hold me so that I don’t explode from the inside out. Please remind me I am real and alive. Please help me!

I did not say that. I didn’t even hint at it. I just took a few deep breaths and left. But I have been thinking about that moment ever since; how scary it was and how frighteningly close I came to verbalizing that need for physical contact. 

Which is a surprising need, really. When I am in distress like that, I tend to want the opposite. I want space. I want room to expand. Physical touch is unbearable. 

So not only was this need alarming to me, but it was intensely shameful as well. And I have been holding onto the emotion surrounding that moment ever since it happened. I didn’t know how to bring it up. 

But today I read her my post from yesterday. As we processed it and talked about needs and expectations and how scary it can be to experience vulnerability, I thought of that moment. So I explained what happened and shared my desire to be held and physically contained in that moment.

She said that, interestingly, she had been trying to do the same, but with words. She said she is working on how to use the space and resources we have available to us in sessions to create that same sense of feeling held. I appreciated the way she talked about it. It felt safe and protective. 

Then we talked more about hugs. She said that she envisioned me having a very primal need to be held – something often seen in survivors of child abuse. 

I explained that I was not lacking in affection throughout my childhood. I was often hugged, held, rocked, kissed, and told I was loved. But I was also violated and hurt by the same people, so it was very confusing. Physical touch was a source of tremendous anxiety for me. 

I have spent my entire life searching for someome to replace that need for primal touch; for the safe, nurturing hug of a mother.  I have it now in as much as I possibly can. The woman I now call “Mom” always hugs me when I see her. She holds me and rubs my back. She tells me how absolutely loved and cherished I am. She soothes me. She says, “You are my daughter and I am your Mom.” She says she loves me like her own children. 

And I believe her, in as much as that can be true. As I was explaining this in session, the therapist said, “But you don’t have the same history with her as a mother and child…”

Exactly. She is not my mother. And although I have wished for a mother since I was a small child (and specifically for this person to be my mother since I was 16) I know now that I will never be able to replace mine. I spent so much time chasing an idea of Mother. But when I finally got what I wanted, it felt nothing like I’d imagined. The reality does not match the ideal. 

Which is not my fault. Or hers. She is lovely and our bond is special. But it will never be able to replace the bond between my biological mother and I. Nothing will.

The therapist acknowledged the heaviness of my grief and said that although the “mother-shaped hole” may never be filled, it is not hopeless. She believes that the ideal I search for is within myself. By reframing the distortions and lies I was fed, I can begin to unravel some of the self-loathing and fill in the space around that hole with self-love. 

I need to be the mother I always wished for. I need to love myself wholeheartedly and unconditionally. I need to protect and defend myself. I need to nurture and soothe myself. 

And I need to forgive myself for not being loved by my own mother.  

Is It Important Enough?

As I prepare for this extra session (that I specifically asked for) later today, I feel nervous and worried. When I try to dig deeper, I realize that I keep thinking of my Mother…

I’m remembering being a little girl and vying for my Mother’s attention but her refusing to acknowledge me. I’m not sure if she’s deliberately ignoring me or if I generally fly so far under her radar that she just doesn’t remember that I exist. Either way, I push harder and harder for her to notice me. Eventually I annoy her to the point of finally gaining her attention.

“What?!” she snaps down at me.

I feel terrified. Why is she mad? Why is she yelling? What have I done wrong?

“…nothing”

“Oh no. You obviously wanted my attention so badly that you rudely interrupted me to get it. So tell me, what was SO IMPORTANT?!”

“Uh…I…nevermind.”

My heart is racing and I can’t figure out what is going on. I can’t even remember what I wanted to tell her anymore.

“God, Andi…why are you always being so dramatic?!”

“I’m not, I promise, I…”

“Get out of my face. I don’t even want to look at you right now.”

And I did. I left. I got out of her face so she wouldn’t have to look at me.

Reading it back to myself, this story reminds me of how completely invisible I often was as a child. My needs were never prioritized. I was never important. And when I had the audacity to “demand” attention from my primary caregivers, I was ridiculed and chastised for it. It was a terrifying experience to get my needs met, even in the most basic ways.

I think this fear around going to session today stems from that old script replaying. I don’t imagine the therapist saying such things to me, but I do feel a similar line of internal questioning. I keep asking myself over and over again what was SO IMPORTANT that I needed to ask for an entire extra session? 

Is it important enough? Or am I just being dramatic?