Thread: feeling scared
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Old Feb 28, 2010, 05:14 PM
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googley googley is offline
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Member Since: Jan 2009
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Fool Zero View Post
googley, I hope you don't mind if I try out putting a certain spin on what you're saying. Let me know how it fits for you:

googley: I'm not sure that she wants to hear the bad stuff. The stuff I feel inside.
FooZe: Maybe she's willing enough to hear the actual stuff but knows that as long as you're calling it bad you won't feel like talking about it. I don't want to talk about it because I'm scared she will think I'm disgusting. That she will think I'm awful like everyone else does.
googley: I was trying to tell her about how screwed up I felt inside.... And she was like "STOP! Don't say that."
FooZe: Again, it sounds like she just wants to know how you feel inside, without the "screwed up" part.

But the problem with this is that how I feel is "screwed up". It isn't that I feel what I feel is screwed up (ie I don't think my feelings of feeling worthless is screwed up, I feel screwed up in addition to feeling worthless.) I actually feel like the feelings of worthlessness are valid. Maybe she wants me to articulate the feeling of "screwed up" better?
googley: I don't want to tell her I'm still having bad thoughts.
FooZe: Wait, do you mean you don't want to tell her the thoughts you're actually having, or you don't want to let her catch you calling them bad? I don't want to tell her the thoughts I am having. I know she wouldn't want me to be thinking critical things about myself, but I just don't know how to make them stop.
I can imagine that if there were something I didn't feel ready to talk about -- or to think about, because then I might end up talking about it -- one way to avoid it might be to distract myself by thinking of lots and lots of other things that I also didn't want to talk about. That way, if I did end up spilling something it would most likely be one of the other things and not the one I most didn't want to talk about.

Besides, if I managed to freak someone out with one of my more harmless secrets, they might feel less like inquiring after the, um, good stuff next time.

I've kindof already spilt some of the beans, but I'm not sure that I can go back and deal with it again. So it just seems to be this thing that has become an elephant in the room. I know my T would like me to talk about it more, but she wont push it and she wont bring it up. I don't know if I can get myself to bring it up again.

When I only halfway trust somebody I usually start by carefully putting one toe in the water: I might ask them, "If I were to tell you thus-and-such, what do you think would happen?" If they don't give me a satisfactory answer I don't tell them. If they do, I try it out with, again, something relatively harmless and see if they're as good as their word. If I survive with one toe in the water, I might try going in up to my ankles next.

I think what helped me the most was giving up hope. As long as I hoped I could trust people, period, I kept finding I was mistaken. Once I switched to letting people show me in what ways they could and couldn't be trusted -- the toe-in-the-water approach mentioned above -- I found myself on much firmer ground.

Good luck, googley! See if this is OK with you or not:
Thanks for the support. I hate this trust thing because it keeps going back and forth. Especially during/outside of session. I may feel like I can trust her by the end of session, but then I leave and I go back to questioning whether I can trust her or not. Then I have to spend the next session figuring it out again. So we never get to the really uncomfortable stuff because I'm always spending my time figuring out if I can trust her. And it doesn't help that half the time I can't remember most of the session after I leave.