Posted by Tamar on October 2, 2005, at 17:42:49
In reply to Re: Shame new trigger - long reply » antigua, posted by daisym on October 2, 2005, at 15:23:22
> ***Is this really OK? I DO want to tell my therapist all the stories, all the little things and I want him to know all about the fear. I wrote this whole thing about darkness, what is scary about the dark, what kind of dark is OK and what happens in the dark. After I gave it to him I felt stupid. I might need to go through all the details but certainly he doesn't. He gets it: lots of bad things happened. He knows the list of acts and I think he has filled in the rest of the blanks. Sometimes I think I'm torturing myself by going through it like this, punishing myself somehow. I don't want to punish him too.
I was thinking about this recently: about whether they get it, and whether they need to hear the details. I dunno… I came to the conclusion that they *do* need to know the details; that knowing ‘lots of bad things happened’ isn’t quite enough for them to truly get it. And filling in the blanks themselves isn’t really possible; it’s only ever an approximation. The only way the blanks can be properly filled is when we tell them the details in our own words (avoiding all those nasty words we hate, like ‘victim’ or ‘trauma’ or whatever!). And I do think they want to get it; I think they know they can help us best if they really get it. So I don’t think it’s punishing them to tell them the details; I think in a way it’s helping them to help us.
Just my two cents.
Tamar
poster:Tamar
thread:560850
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20051001/msgs/562021.html