Pegasus,

Thank you for the encouragement. As down as I get sometimes, I do notice that each time around the cycle, I seem able to tolerate a little more pain. I get to the "I've absolutely had it! I quit!!" stage, but once I calm down, I see that I've traveled farther and endured more than the time before. For some reason, as bad as I feel, I manage to continue on.

I know I need to find strength inside me, but it is hard. I've learned to do self-soothing activities and DBT skills, which do help some, but they don't seem to satisfy the part of me that feels like a traumatized child in danger. Most of the time, I am not aware of feeling that way. In normal day to day life, and even in therapy, as long as I can stay in my adult frame of mind, I do fine. I even give the appearance of being strong and having everything under control. It is only when I get triggered about my past and dissociate into a state where I feel like a child in crisis that the pain becomes too overwhelming to handle. It's at those times when I feel like I need t to rescue or physically comfort me. And when it does not happen, it feels like I have just re-lived my trauma from childhood. I end up feeling extremely depressed.

Then, once I regain my composure and am back to my adult frame of mind, I'm fine again and feel no need for comfort. I wonder why I buckled so much under pressure and feel that the next time I am triggered, there is no reason in the world why I should not be able to pull myself together without needing t to comfort me. . .until the next time that talking about traumas or working on them in therapy brings out that scared child side of me again. Then it happens all over again. It's weird.