One of my clients (legal, I'm a lawyer) wrote this to me today. I worked with her almost twenty years ago when she was charged with killing her (very, very, very abusive boyfriend). She was able to plea to manslaughter and spent a very short time in prison.

In the past twenty years, she's struggled to rebuild her life, support her family, raise her children. She now has a new legal issue that I am assisting her with, and her ability to work with me has astonished and impressed me. She wrote this in the context of reading a draft of something I sent her. I wrote her that I was concerned for her, I wanted her to be in a safe place and have support to read it, because it was very graphic about her childhood traumas and of course, the very graphic details about the domestic violence that she experienced. I didn't want her to become overwhelmed and/or triggered by reading it.

She followed my advice and waited to read it until she had her safe space. Her reaction? She had been afraid of having to relive her life with her ex and remember all of the pain that came with that relationship. Of course, I'd basically told her in my preamble that this is how she should feel. Instead, she didn't feel the pain that was caused by that relationship, she now feels the healing that has happened, after all these years. For the last 20 years, she's been facing the painful events of her life in one way or another (like on every job application, where she has to identify her criminal record and explain to other people that she defended her own life, and then listen to them reject her). Today, her tears were the bittersweet kind of realizing that she's already at where she hoped to be one day. So today is her day. She so deserves it.

I have had my own internal shift in the past month or so, where the pain of my past has lost its grip on me, and I can tell my story to others (mostly my T, but also select wonderful people in my life) without being broken by it. I can manage the emotions that my story evokes in me without being lost in the chaos that used to accompany the story. And without being detached from my emotions or my story.

15 years ago, I left therapy and thought I was done with my past. I think I've continued to work on my past, because this isn't the first time that I've recognized that I share something, healing or a funky issue, with my clients. And I think I've also done work within the context of my mostly positive experience with marriage and motherhood. But I never anticipated delving into my past in the way I have done in the past six months in therapy. I never imagined that I would move forward in such a meaningful way by slogging through the details, which I have occasionally obsessively honed in on in ways that didn't make sense to me at the time. There has been a kind of fluidity between my past and present these past six months that has continued to surprise me. And I think it has even surprised my unflappable T, who has been there for me in every way possible and has modeled how to treat myself with tenderness and compassion.

Go back, continue to move forward. It might be a cycle I need to repeat in the future (like next week), but for today, I'm looking back but enjoying the view of having moved forward.

That's all. I don't expect applause.

Anne