i can't believe it. he is helping me so much. with the emotions, sure. but with the understanding too. all i wanted... all i wanted... for a great number of years... was for someone to WORK WITH ME. and nobody would. or if they did they felt like they had to change my feeling change my feeling all the time. cognitively restructure it or whatever. nobody would hold the emotion. nobody would let me experience it and just kind of move on in and hold it and show me it was ok. i thought that nobody could do this because my emotions were too powerful. they literally couldn't do it. like they are eating me up and killing me they would eat up and kill anybody who allowed themself to feel them. i kind of rationally knew that this wasn't right... but over and over and over my experiences in therapy were like this (people trying to cognitively resturcture my thinking and stuff) so i guess i really had a hard time not believing that.

and now i've found him. ((((my t)))). and he isn't afraid to be there with me and he isn't afraid to hold it. in fact i think he feels a little pissed when the sessions don't go that way. it seems to be something that he is continually working towards in our sessions. having me feel something and being there to hold it with me. and i've just seen properly now... that he isn't holding ME. he is holding the emotion i'm experiencing. there is a distinction. i know rationally i'm not my emotion but it surely feels like it consumes me at times.

i don't know that i do have DID... been thinking about that a lot for a great number of years now. read a great deal about it. but just recently (over the last year) i've found this whole other literature i never found before. Schore and people like that. Opened up a whole other way of viewing things. Well, it opened up another dimension to my way of viewing things. I think he is starting to see that maybe i'm not... it is hard to say... you know, i found this thing last night about the continuum... amazing... its something i'd kinda come to before but never really properly thought about it. here it is:

> Laub and Auerhahn (1993) organized the different forms of knowing along a continuum according to the distance from the traumatic experience, each form also progressively represents a consciously deeper and more integrated 'level of knowing.' The different forms of remembering trauma range from 1)not knowing; 2) fugue states (in which events are relived in an altered state of consciousness); 3) retention of the experience as compartmentalized, undigested fragments of perceptions that break into consciousness (with no conscious meaning or relation to oneself); 4) transference phenomena (wherein the traumatic legacy is lived out as one's inevitable fate); 5) its partial, hesitant expression as an overpowering narrative; 6) the experience of compelling, identity-defining and pervasive life themes (both conscious and unconscious); 7) its organization as a witnessed narrative. These various forms of knowing are not mutually exclusive.

> The critical issue is to introduce the capacity to flexibly remember the trauma. In order for this to occur, some new information that is incompatible to the traumatic memory must be introduced (Foa et al., 1989). The most important new information is probably the fact that the patient is able to confront the traumatic memory by a trusted therapist in a safe environment (van der Hart & Spiegel,1993). In order to help the patient regulate emotional arousal, secure attachment may be even more important than evoking the traumatic memories. Therefore, it is important for the patient to establish and maintain an emotional connection with the therapist.

http://www.trauma-pages.com/a/vanderk.php

i guess mostly i'm at that third stage. i think... its probably not useful for me to worry about what is to come... maybe just... keep ticking along...

i guess i do trust him.