I’m sorry for the length of this question and I’m sorry that I’ve been posting a lot recently. I’ve been having a lot of problems recently and I just got another one today. This required class I’m taking is dealing with stuff that I don’t know is safe for me to deal with outside of therapy and I don’t know what to do.

I’m a music student and one of my required classes that I have to take this semester is basically about finding your inner voice in music. Our first class was today and I have about zero confidence that I’m going to be able to handle this at all. The teacher started out by having us take out a sheet of paper and answer a series of super personal questions about our childhood such as “if I’d had a perfect childhood, I would have turned out like ______” and “if it weren’t too late, I’d_____”. Those questions along with others were pretty upsetting for me just to think about, let alone actually answer. It started to trigger memories of my childhood, along with mommy/daddy issues, abandonment issues, made me think about SI, and they made me feel very isolated. I immediately shut everything out to avoid getting at all emotional in front of my peers and I didn’t answer the questions.

He then asked us to share our answers with the class. I started sweating, my heart started racing, my mouth went dry, I started shaking, and my entire mind was screaming at me to run away. Luckily, he didn’t force us to actually share our answers with the class if we refused, but a big part of the grade for the class is in these oral reports we have to do. I looked at some of the prompts and they were all super personal like this. One of them is writing a letter from my 80 year old self to me, saying things that I wished I had done differently in my life. Anyone who has been following my posts knows how I feel about living until 26, let alone 80. Thinking about that prompt overwhelms me to no end before adding the added stress of sharing it in front of the class.

I literally don’t know how I’m going to handle this class. I have to take it in order to graduate, but doing these writing assignments and going to class is going to be insanely triggering and difficult for me. I’m so scared of sharing my feelings with even my T and closest friends and I honestly don’t think I can give an oral report on them. Ever. The teacher is a professional musician with absolutely no psych background. He’s not a T at all and I really don’t know if it is even safe for me to try and work through these assignments without constant help from my T. I only see her twice a week and I have a LOT of other serious issues to discuss with her. I don’t know if I want to spend the entire time working through my struggles pertaining to this class plus she can’t literally be there all the time just to help me do my homework. I will talk about this with my T, but I am at a loss as to what to do with this.