I started my session by saying I'm kind of mad that I've been doing this long enough to recognize a cyclical pattern to this whole healing process that I'm going through, and that I'd rather just get it over with all at once and be done. That made t laugh. I talked about the way that coming into a new place of center, balance, peace also seems to bring about new grief and anger to process. We circled around to this idea at the end of the session. I likened it to a window with layers of that opaque window film. Each time a new layer is peeled off, I can see my joyful life more clearly but that clarity also brings the grief and anger into new light, and I don't want to see, look at, deal with that part.

She reminded me that this is what it's like. She says, A bite at a time.

I talked about how I felt that I'd failed in some way. About trying to find the balance between being fair and being selfish, and holding myself to my own high standards of what is right and fair. I can't step outside my own head to see where I am being fair and where I am blinded by my own perceptions.
She offered some gentle reframing a few times during this conversation. Instead of stupid, hopeful. (Which completely undid me.) Instead of selfish, self advocating. Finding my voice. Being strong. It felt good, genuine, because my t is pretty good at letting me wrestle my own stuff, and is not one to throw out affirmation just to fill the space. Maybe I was just being extra hard on myself that day. She mention at the end of the session that I am an expert at beating myself up, which is an ongoing thread.

I started trying to talk about the ways that the conversation I'd had with the kids' dad left me feeling greater clarity and less safety. I talked about locking my door, and that his response was that he thought I'd have been further along in my recovery right now. I know that it is laughably ridiculous, but I can't get to that space because I am also distressed by it. It's stirred up the flashback-y stuff, the memories, worst when I am drifting off to sleep and my mind is unguarded, and how I am sometimes overwhelmed with a sense of WHY AM I STILL HERE??? as though I need to escape. But it was all hard to speak about, stilted, I couldn't get to...something. I felt blocked and off.

So we started talking about something else. My dreams, I think. And then t started talking about....something. I could hear that she was talking but I couldn't focus on what she was saying. So I asked her to hold on, that I needed a minute. That sometimes when we circle close to the ugly stuff, I seem to have a delayed reaction. I felt short of breath and my stomach hurt and my face was hot. I remember vividly the way my fingertips felt cool when I pressed them on my cheekbones. Then I just started talking, partly to keep myself present...about how angry I was, and not knowing how to be productively angry, so I am stuck with this anger that doesn't have anywhere to go.

I suddenly started talking about the whole chain of events and behaviors that I can see in retrospect, and how seeing the escalations all strung together makes the whole thing seem somehow inevitable. So why couldn't I see it and stop it? But it's SO easy to see in hindsight, not in the middle of all of the cycling and irrationality, and that the uncontrollable unpredictable nature of it makes me angry too.

I didn't even know that was there. (Like I need something else to be p*ssed off about. Better out than in, I guess.)

Then we started talking our way up and out. About how it's not just the grief and anger that gets uncovered and that I feel I am peeling off the layers and getting closer to my joyful self, about parenting teens, about a few other odds and ends. She told me that this is the first time she's heard such concrete clarity from me about the future. And we wrapped up. It felt like we'd been talking for four hours instead of one.

I came home and talked to my kids, and then shut down completely.