Had a phone session with my T this morning. Ever since I've gone back to university in August, I've been too far away to do our usual in-person sessions, so we've been doing sporadic phone calls every two weeks or so instead. Usually at the end of each call, T says she'll be in touch to schedule our next one. Our last appointment was a week and a half ago, and days went by and she never texted or e-mailed about scheduling another call. That was fine, I told myself I could wait, even though I was having a hard time. I'm horrible about asking for help when I need it, so even when I started to feel upset I was adamant that I wouldn't e-mail her. I worry a lot that I'm a burden to her.
Except then, over the weekend, things got bad. I was so depressed that I couldn't get out of bed. I had horrible intrusive thoughts, and my mother came to visit, which brought up a lot of traumatic memories. By Sunday, I couldn't take it anymore, so I e-mailed T in desperation and asked if we could talk sometime this week. She immediately responded and said she could squeeze me in the next day (today), which she's done before when I'm really struggling but still shocks me. The amount of empathy she has and how much she's done to help me makes me tear up every time. So when we were on the phone this morning, she asked what was up, and I explained all of it and mentioned that not only had it been really triggering, but that I'd even unearthed a horrible memory that I guess I'd been repressing before.
Possible trigger:
When I was younger, maybe starting when I was around 8 or 9, my parents would tell me the story of how I was born on every birthday. My mother went to the hospital with high blood pressure during the 7th month of her pregnancy, and it ended up being pre-eclampsia. They induced labor to try and stop it. It was very traumatic for her in many respects, and according to my dad, she didn't go to visit me right away in the NICU after the fact. He always told me, "If I wasn't there, nobody would have loved you when you were born." Who in the world would say that to their daughter? A child at the time? How did I never see how awful that was? How could I just forget about that?
It gets worse. Multiple times during her labor my mother said "Get this thing out of me." (referring to me). The doctor also continually scared her by telling her how much of a risk this was posing to both me and her and how we could both die. One of the first times I heard the story, I, being young and curious about the situation, asked, "if they had told you that you could only save one of us, who would you have picked?"
My mother hesitated. My father swooped in and said, "I would have done everything I could have to save both of you." And I can't remember exactly what he said next, but I have a feeling that it was something along the lines of "Your mom wouldn't have saved you." because ever since then, I have had a strong feeling that if she had been alone that day, if the worst had come and she was forced to choose, she would have saved herself instead of me.
I told all of this to T and was trying not to cry, and she said, "I wish you could see my face right now. Every time you say what he told you, my stomach drops." We talked more about that and my childhood as a whole, and I finally braved up enough to ask her: "My point of view is so warped, I don't know what's normal and what isn't anymore. You don't have to answer if you don't want to, but please... how bad was it?" (it being
all of it, not just the story.)
She paused for a minute. Finally, she said, "It was really bad.
We finished the phone call a few minutes later. T asked if it would be better if we put a date on the calendar for next time and I said yes. We picked a date at the end of next week, and she told me that I shouldn't hesitate to call before then if I was struggling again. I'm very grateful for her. That's all I could think as we hung up.