Couch 52 - Are you being served?

I'm lonely tonight. I should be enjoying having the house to myself tonight but its really turning into too much thinkin time.

Crow poo is foul. Baby crow poo is even worse! I had to do a fecal exam on one yesterday and the smell made me cross eyed.

The robins, grackles, and ducks have slowed down now, but the jays, cardinals, finches, and other songbirds are picking up. Pretty soon, we'll start to get chimney swifts and the second clutch babies. Ah, baby season.

Sorry you're lonely RTS. Ike's house is teeming with excitement. D's best friend since we moved is a Japanese exchange student, who moved in with us Monday. She leaves first light Friday AM. D will be so upset when she leaves, but I can't help thinking how much her parents have missed her and will love to see her home. She also brought her cat, which has been the cause of much excitement, My golden has not been exposed to cats, and he wants to be friends. The cat is ambivalent. Right now they are calm, two feet away and watching each other intently.

((( RTS ))) - During the summer, my daughter usually spends 4-5 weeks at my sister's house (Mon - Thurs) as my mom would watch all her grandchildren there while we all worked. I was a single woman at that point - divorced, childless - and instead of using that as an opportunity to explore life and freedom, I was in the throes of my deepest bouts of depression. My T is concerned that by me starting to do trauma work now with summer right around the corner, I will have too much free time on my hands to ruminate. He reminded me that I need to make a real effort to do what's good for me even if I don't feel like doing it. Making plans with friends, taking on a class or activity, etc. Easier said than done.

My daughter is at an event tonight, and I am not getting much done in the cleaning department. Sciatica and exhaustion are contributors - but also the fact that I'm feeling those twinges of sadness and desperation, now that the trauma stuff is being explored.

Memories suck.

Grounds for appeal?

Mue... my thinking started to go down an old path...saying old things to myself and I just talked to myself and said ...I know that's not true and I'm not going to think it... and I found a tv show to distract myself and amazingly it worked....

Yes I have been working too on doing stuff that I need to do whether I feel like doing them.... trying to push past the feelings...allowing them to be there...acknowledging them but not changing my actions.... oh so hard to do...

That's great that you were able to counteract the negative self-talk. I find that when it starts, it's very hard to stop. Glad that you found something that worked!

Sounds like you're making progress in that area....

I see T tomorrow, and I am dreading the idea of going back to trauma stuff. Talking about it sucks. And it brings up all of those old feelings, and I end up numbing the feelings by medicating. Not a very healthy way to go about it, but it just feels so intolerable. Hopefully, someday, I'll get better at tolerating the feelings, acknowledging them, allowing myself to have them but not become incapacitated by them.

Time to go pick up my daughter and drop her friend home....That should help change my mood. I am in desperate need of sleep. The bags under my eyes are so apparent. I hope my daughter is able to wind down quickly.

i read so much about trauma work here and on the boards .i just don't understand what it is all about .really i am curious.maybe i am just not there yet .i see so many peeps say that they are dealing with trauma and how they don't want to go to T,or they cant handle what they are talking about,or how crappy they feel . why do you do it . i am not sure the best way is always through.it seems to cause so much pain. i know the few times i have talked to T about things in my past it was horrible. i often wonder if it is necessary and is it always this horrible .and if so why do it .there has to be a better way.my T has always been very big on not re traumatizing me

I think you talk about it until you don't have to talk about it anymore. Long term t used to hardly talk at all during my sessions. She would just say, you're doing fine by yourself. Then she got mad at me when I got married one weekend without talking it over with her beforehand. So current t validated that she didn't validate me. I was asking questions but she never answered them. I like my current t's philosophy better - that it's the relationship that heals. That having the r/s can make a difference in how you perceive things. It can't change your past, but it can help you stop seeing the present and future in past-colored glasses. Get off that ride and get on another.

T tells me that by not talking about it, I'm keeping it alive...and that it's not fair for me to carry the burden of it by myself. He tells me that I will go from feeling demeaned, nauseated and injured to feeling angry to then feeling a sense of peace by going through this process. I don't see how that's going to happen, but I'm going to try to trust in the process. It just feels yucky at the moment, and that's to be expected. He said that I need to expect to feel awful for a few months and that we need to put a game plan together of how to deal with the craziness that comes from this work - what to do with my daughter so that I don't feel like a bad mom, how to tolerate and tackle the emotions, what to do at night when I feel so out of control. So much to consider. No wonder I've been putting this off.

And about retraumatizing....that's another issue. T tells me that we need to do this in a way that keeps me from feeling retraumatized. I'm not sure how that works. But one thing that seems clear to me now is that the anxiety, shutting down and dissociating that's occurred in group T are all signs that it was traumatizing for me to be there - but apparently that's because I avoided doing the real work involved in dealing with my fear of groups. We never made the connection before, so who knew? If I would've talked about my past trauma with T, then it would've been clear. Oh well.

My daughter was so tired when she got home. She just fell asleep and I started to doze off when my niece called me. Her calling me at this hour usually means she's upset and needs to talk to someone. So, I answered. Surprisingly, she just asked if she gave me the materials if I would make a bracelet for her that she wants. I'm glad it wasn't what I was expecting, cuz I'm too sleepy to be supportive to her at the moment.

I have a feeling that I'm not going to have any problems falling asleep tonight....staying asleep, not having nightmares or flashbacks...well, there's no guarantee there. *sigh*

Goodnight, couch peeps.

how do you even start something like that. I'm curious. i mean in 3 1/2 years my T has only heard about maybe 3 incidences in my life .she knows nothing of the sexual abuse or the extent of the abuse from the mother. i guess my question is also .how do you even start to talk about this. it is hard to believe that you just say OK next week we are going to start trauma work. you then just tell your T all the horrible things that have happened. how does your T help you with this information. i really wonder about this big time .in all my years i have never been able to figure out a way to talk to anyone IRL about what happened to me .

Granite...I think what MUE was saying in the first paragraph of her last post was that you talk about talking about it... you discuss that it might feel worse before it feels better... you talk about what coping mechanisms and support that you have available if you feel out of control... and then once you know have those things in place...

you start talking... and its not like it has to be every appt or that you get it all out at once... its just you take 20 seconds of courage and tell your T something... I've sort of done it with a few incidents and I did it two different ways... I've outright just told my T about an incident...then we talked about how it made me feel...etc etc..

but then it was really hard to talk about these other things and so we sort of talked about an emotion...so my T would say tell me about a time that you were really afraid... and then I just shared one little thing and then it just sort of all came spilling out... that was a more helpful approach for me because the first time I shared an incident my T told me I sounded like a reporter...because i couldn't attach feelings to it all...

so starting with a feeling helped me ...

I don't know if that even begins to answer your question.

Welll you do totally think you are going to die of embarrassment, and this is coming from someone who told her t yesterday where he could get his balls ironed (new plastic surgery procedure in los angeles for older men). But then it eventually becomes something shared between you, like a cake, that you both keep picking at,; and then it just becomes a few leftover crumbs. But for that while, when it's a cake - it's like the saying "many hands make light work" - they are holding half of it or more, helping you carry the weight.

Eta: and baby I'm insulted! I'm as IRL as can be

I remember the first time I was dealing with telling T somethings... I spent a lot of time randomly crying... a lot of time in bed....but what really surprised me was that I thought the hardest thing to deal with was going to be "the thing that happened" but really the hardest feelings for me to deal with was where were the people who should have protected me and the anger I felt and grieving the things I didn't have in my childhood...

Hankster you crack me up... I really like you.

we on the couch are like each others psuedo therapists...

we can tell each other stuff because we won't see each other on the elevator the next morning...

This makes no sense to me - the therapist carrying weight thing. Well, the cake thing either, but the weight thing is a fairly commonly used description around therapists. I hear things like this, and I see people respond like they understand this sort of language use and idea and have experienced such or can imagine it - and I am left as though everyone else is speaking aramaic.

(This is not criticizing hankster - I am simply astonished at how I cannot - and I have tried- even come up with something close to it in my mind)

SD... did you ever have a secret...something really big... life changing...either your own secret or someone else's?

it was really really hard to have something so big that you couldn't talk to anyone about because it was life changing for you or for others.

It would just roll around in your head for months...with no solution... but then you make a friend and you share your secret...now your friend doesn't have anyway to fix it or undo it either but somehow it just seems to be less of a burden because someone else knows... you can at least talk about it with someone....

I don't think so. I mean there was the csa that no one knew about but I did not feel like it was such a big deal or life changing or any thing. Sometimes I don't have the same response to things that many others seem to have at the same thing.
I never found telling friends most things was that useful or comforting.

I call that building the true story of my life. Like you're making a movie. Its not just the bad incidents - it becomes about the roles of the other people, how they thought of you, how they treated you - they might have said one thing but done another; as a kid you might not have realized it, or just believed their lies or excuses. And it colors how they treated you as a teen and adult. My whole family is delusional. Seriously. I don't know how many lies my mother hs told everybody about me, because she never found my truth acceptable. I just want to be cremated, no memorial. All the memories would be wrong anyway.

I get the not having same response... because I didn't have big responses for me...

that is why I said it was life changing for others... sometimes things may happen to us but the "big deal" about the secret isn't about protecting us its about protecting other people...

like if I told about what was going on in my house - DFYS would have come and taken us out of the home... I didn't want to change the whole dynamic of my family.. but having no one to talk about it was hard so having someone to share it with who seemed to understand who had a f**ked up family too was a real weight lifted off of me...not that it changed my home life or anything but for the few minutes I was alone with my friend... I didn't have to pretend..

That tap on your shoulder tomorrow morning - ill be sure to post your screaming on youtube!

I would probably be screaming or may hit you....because I have a horrible PTSD reaction to being touched if I dont' see it coming first...

I don't think I have seen it around others either. And most of the time when I talk to people, they don't understand the point I am trying to make. That woman I see does not seem to understand my point either. Perhaps I go to see a therapist for reasons that are not weight sharing analogy appropriate. Or perhaps I am just odd or dense or an alien.
But it is fascinating to watch others talk about the weight lifting by sharing thing both here and in real life. I often feel like an anthropologist observing.

Have you ever eaten anything with your t? I brought in warm italian pepperoni rolls once. We were both moaning! As close as I thought we already were, this was a big surprise and educational experience for me.