Thank you so much for the feedback and thoughts, and especially for sharing your stories. It gave me some heart and fight to hear you have been there, struggled, and found a path.
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I think there is a lot of danger in tearing down defenses and opening wounds - especially when it's done intensely in therapy for an hour or two a week and then the client is left to deal with the fall out for the rest of the time.
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This is what my T said too, and he kind of gave me informed consent about how much this would hurt, and it does.
I understand we have to carry our own pain through the world, no matter who originally inflicted it and who wants to teach the skills to integrate it. I guess my prefrontal cortex comprehends that, but the whiplash between this shadowy safey office world in which kind blue eyes stare into mine and alternate really intense questions about way too intimate subjects with so much touch on language, metaphors and symbols, and then trying to pull it back together for sunny days, chitchatty world, 15 hour work days, puppies and boyfriend is like having two unrelated lives within one person.
My T says things like "I am right beside you", I am here with you, and that is what confuses me. It probably is a failure of object constancy in me that he doesn't share and maybe doesn't understand, but I never feel like he is with me unless he is with me.
Over time, a weird exhaustion is getting the better of me. I can't sleep, bc we dislodged nightmares and images that were walled off from consciousness, but the cheery every day world continues at its breakneck pace- daily life is the same but I am different- preoccupied with a childhood my T calls The Crime Scene whereas I never used to give this literally a thought and lived in the present intensely.
He says hang in and it will integrate, we will integrate it and tons of energy will come rushing back like a waterfall for daily life to feel vivid and meaningful again. I hope so. I don't have a sense of "we". We talked about the fall of Junot Diaz briefly, and his comment was whatever women went through, it is good his daughter will grow up in a safer world bc of # me too. This is a good example of me struggling with myself and my suddenly unreasonable feelings. My brain understands this and agrees, but my heart flinched bc he seemed to show his hand that he doesn't truly empathize, but his beautiful empathy is a skill set which makes is hollow or makes it hard to suspend disbelief and go with it.