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LabRat27
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Member Since: Mar 2018
Location: CA
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Default Dec 22, 2018 at 03:47 AM
 
Today was... Intense.

I had been considering talking to him about my wish that he would express more emotions, unlike when we first started working together when I communicated that it was very important to me to not do so.
But in the end I didn't need to.
Possible trigger:
but that Wednesday when I had been feeling really bad I started with writing a list of basically all the things I blame myself for in how I handled things as a child. Things I feel guilty about. Some of it was pretty mean to myself I guess.
But that I'd then gone on to make myself refute those beliefs and write more reasonable or fair interpretations.
He asked me about sharing the stuff I'd written and when I got through the third item
Possible trigger:

He stopped me at that point to tell me this was really hard for him to hear.
I asked him what he meant.
He said it hurt to hear me say those things about myself.
After pausing for what seemed like a moment of self reflection about why he was feeling or saying this he kind of carefully said something about it triggering something for him. I don't usually see his processing of his own thoughts and feelings in real time like that.
He compared it to feeling like he would
Possible trigger:

I didn't really know how to respond so I was kind of half jokingly like "so I'm going to guess that means you would find that upsetting." He sounded sad when he said yes, that would be upsetting for him.
He said he didn't mean that I shouldn't share it and he was glad I was talking about it, but he needed to tell me that it hurt to hear. I don't remember exact wording, but it was expressing that it was something he thought it was important for me to know, not about a need to say it for himself.
I kept myself from apologizing because I didn't want him to feel like he'd made a mistake by telling me that.

After a bit of silence I asked if I could read the rest and he said yes and I did.
He commented again on how difficult it was to listen to.
He said something about me being a child and emotions or something, and, as I always do when he brings that stuff up, I made an involuntary face of disgust and curled up tighter and turned my head away more. He pointed it out, as he's been doing lately.
He said something about what I'd think if it was any other child or something.
Oh and he said I would not say those things to the child. I admitted that, while I never would, part of me would want to lash out and hurt the child with cruel words. He said yes, but that would be because I'd want to make her shut up because it was too painful to face those feelings. He hadn't put it quite so bluntly before. I couldn't look at him.

I don't remember exactly what preceded the transition, but I told him that he'd prefer the second half/find it better. He said "I hope so."
I believed him. It really did seem to have bothered him. I'm not sure if today was worse than usual for some reason or if he just wasn't intentionally not letting it show.
I read the second half.
It was things like
Possible trigger:

after, he said he was glad I wrote the second half. When I was finally able to look at him again he looked and sounded less upset and more relieved. I half jokingly asked if I had been right that he'd like the second part better. He said yes.
I told him I knew it was stupid and I already knew what he'd answer, but did this mean that he didn't agree with the stuff in the first half?
He said yes, he didn't agree with it.
I asked if he thought I deserved to hurt myself, and he said no.
I asked if he thought I was a bad child. He said no. I said it really really feels like I was. That there's just this deep sense that I was bad and wrong. He said that's common for children who are abused. That it didn't make it true. I may have wiped away a tear at that point.
I'm still not used to him calling it abuse. It feels like that's overstating it.

Also I can't remember at what point these things were said, but he said something about me protecting my safety and I said I knew I wasn't in danger and he said it wasn't emotionally safe for me to be vulnerable.
I also expressed the fear/belief that everyone on some level thinks like my mother and will think less of me for being vulnerable or emotional. He said he hoped I didn't include him in that belief and I was like ... um ... Sometimes.
At some point when he was saying it was hard to hear me say this stuff about myself I said it wasn't exactly fun to feel either. That sometimes I really really hate myself. And it's a bad feeling. I don't remember how he responded. Probably something about progress and changing that.
At some early point we talked about my feelings of detachment and numbness and how at those points the earlier feelings don't feel real and I feel like I must have been faking it or exaggerating.
He said I had learned to shut off and suppress the emotions because I couldn't handle them at the time.
He made a personal disclosure, which he does very sparingly and with minimal detail, about an experience he had involving very intense emotions that were too much for him to handle and that it felt like a dream, and that he was always aware of the fact that that was because his brain was protecting him from those emotions, and he never thought that must have meant he was faking it or something.
In a way it helped, but in a way it was also much more understandable for the experience he was describing.

I still don't really know what to think of all of this. I don't know why me saying those things about myself that I've said a million times before was different today. And if the difference was in how he felt about it out in what he showed. I do know that it helped though and I think I needed that. But now I have to wait 13 days until my next appointment and I'm seeing my father for two days right after Christmas. So it's definitely bad timing and I'm worried that I'll move several steps backwards.
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