Posted by daisym on October 20, 2004, at 19:37:55
In reply to Re: It's raining, inside and out (trigger potential) » daisym, posted by antigua on October 20, 2004, at 16:11:17
Keep some of your strength for yourself, but I'll take you up on the offer of the rest. I am really struggling to remember everything you said. Thank you for saying it. It is nice to be loved.
I've been floating away all day, losing time, losing myself. I had a full-out panic attack during therapy...my poor therapist. He is doing more breathing than I am, I think. My sister has called or emailed me everyday for the past week. It seems that she is opening up herself to her own experiences, which sort of match mine, less the violence. But she dealt with it by going the alcohol and drugs route. She has been clean for 20 years but a family crisis sent her into therapy recently. I'm guessing that this has triggered in her a huge need to reconnect to me. I was always her mother. But the truth is I'm terrified by what all this means. The panic is about somehow losing my own therapist to her needs.
We explored this today, trying to sort out where it is coming from. She doesn't geographically live close, so it isn't reality based. Finally my therapist just looked at me and said, "I'm here for you and only you. You don't have to share." And I burst out sobbing that "I don't want to share you, but I feel so selfish." And then the room spun out of control and I went away. It took a good ten minutes for me to come back into myself and calm down. We need to go back and figure out what is under all of this, because it moves me back to the edge of that dark hole that I just sort of climbed out of. These feelings are really old, tangled up in my need to both protect her and get myself out of that environment. He suggested that perhaps "sharing" him is a way to describe the feeling of ignoring my needs again and I just can't tolerate that. So we practiced "you don't have to" and we talked about what my answer would be if she straight out asks about the csa. We've never talked about it to each other. She told my mom. I've never told anyone in my family. I'm not ready for the fallout, I might never be.
Just before I left today, my therapist said he gets most nervous when he senses that I feel that things have gotten out of my control. He knows how important that illusion of control is for me. He asked me if I could hand him the controls just for 24 hours, until we meet again tomorrow. I know it was metaphoric, but it was really hard to do. He said he promised he wouldn't do anything to tilt my universe, he was teasing, but he was gentle and sincere, so how do you say no to that? He said I need to rest and letting him have the controls would (hopefully) make me slightly less hyper-vigilent about EVERYTHING. I just needed to trust him. *sigh* I do, and besides I'm just so tired of all this.
OK, this was way more than I intended to write. Sorry, my fingers just run away with the words.
Mostly I wanted to say thanks for the support.
poster:daisym
thread:405006
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20041016/msgs/405294.html