((((((((((((((Rainbow))))))))))))))

I'm not sure that in therapy "doing great" = immediately feeling better.

I know that when I was struggling through the trauma stuff, and my feelings about the trauma stuff, T would tell me how brave I was being and what good work I was doing. And I felt HORRIBLE, almost all the time. But I was letting myself feel my feelings, and in the end, I really have started to feel better. Like Elliemay said, it hasn't been like on TV...I haven't had a huge breakthrough and felt better. It's happened bit by bit in imperceptible amounts - but those tiny bits of healing all start to add up eventually.

Maybe it's like growing out our hair. It's growing every day, and we can't see any difference. It always looks kind of the same. But after a couple of months go by, we can tell that it's longer than it was before. I think the healing can be like that. SO slow, much slower that we might want it to be...but still happening, and real.

I can imagine that it might feel like it would be easier to be able to look back at life and have some sort of trauma to pin everything on. But, even with a trauma history, it's not that simple. There is a lot of confusion and digging and discovering...and it's not so easy to make sense of everything. Like, I used to cut, and it seems like it would be easy to just say "well, I cut because I was abused"...but it's not that simple. There are multifaceted reasons for everything...and even if the abuse somehow led to the cutting - why? Not everyone who is abused self-injures. What is it about ME that led me down that path? Questions like that are hard to answer.

I guess I don't want you to feel alone. I doubt anyone's therapy can be tied up in a neat package with a bow (lol - I've literally used that exact phrase with T - that I wish everything could just be all neatly tied up in a bow ) People are just more complex than that.

I am trying HARD to let myself just know that this is a journey, and the journey, not the destination, is the point. I used to try so hard to move quickly through the things I needed to in therapy, with this idea that I could be "done" and move on. Now I know that "done" is arbitrary - there will never come a point where I will be able to say "that's it, I'm perfect now, thanks T ". I may reach a point where things feel "good enough" and I can take it from there on my own...but even then, I'll still be learning, growing, changing, and healing for the rest of my life.

to you, Rainbow. You ARE doing good work. I think this is what good work looks like.