***TW: sibling abuse***
I took this from my first post so people wouldn't have to search for it and hopefully I won't have to repeat too much.
I have been seeing my T for 3 years now and last week i had my first real nitty gritty session.

Two sessions ago I was telling my T about an incident recently where I hit a lover in the head for touching me in the wrong place at the wrong time while we were having sex. I started to dissociate and T asked me what I was feeling in my body, which was a heavy sensation and I felt cold. He asked me if I had felt like that before and I couldn't quite remember, it was at the edge of my consciousness and I couldn't quite recall. I left feeling really unsettled and a few days later I remembered various times I had felt that way. One was when my brother used to hold me down and burn me with his cigarettes. I was about 9 or 10 and my brother about 12 or 13. I really wanted to tell T this first before we got to the more serious times I remember.

Last session I arrived and I really felt that I couldn't tell my T this. I sat there and stuttered and said that I really felt I needed to tell him something but I didn't know if I should as it felt as if I told him something bad would happen and that I didn't know why I was so afraid as the person concerned was dead. I also said that I wanted to tell him but without all the feelings. He went through a list of financial, legal and physical consequences and we talked around the issue until he said that we had been talking for 25 minutes already and if it was something that could be dealt with in the next 25 mins he encouraged me to say something.
This was the hard part I struggled and finally just blurted out what my brother had done. He asked if this was the thing I wanted to tell him. I said "yes". He said"Congratulations, well done" and smiled at me. This made feel extraordinarily relieved and a little proud of myself. He wanted to know what I felt. I said "Well, I'm not dead yet." He went on to say that the sun was still shining, the sky hadn't fallen in and to check that I still had a pulse. He asked me questions around the incident and said we'd probably do EMDR.
Now I feel like I shouldn't have told him this as it seems disrespectful to my brother.
This is the crux of the session I really don't remember it all he made an analogy about plane landing gear and planes flying in holding patterns in relation to the process to illustrate that even though it seems as if nothing is happening in sessions it all serves a purpose in the therapeutic process. I think he was talking about the building of trust and "testing the waters"
Thanks for reading.

Now for this weeks session. It's a bit vague as I was feeling very dissociated but T talked about the incident and asked questions around it like frequency, what my brother did, how he reacted. I started to panic and desperately wanted to protect my brother, I can't imagine why.
Anyway what my T was getting at was that my brother didn't appear to feel remorse or guilt over it, and apparently guilt is like energy and cannot be destroyed but must be passed on. So it gets passed to me. This, according to my T is a guilt debt. But I can't seem to apply guilt to this situation. I know what it is, I just can't make it fit.

I started to get confused/distressed so he switched to talking about my family. I'm talking away when he said "You just had a complete mood change" I kept on talking because it really didn't register til later. Considering I have a mood disorder and mood swings are a part of this obviously, why would he draw attention to this. More questions to ask him.

[FeelTheBurn]

Wow, that's a session that's chock full o' stuff. You've obviously hit a rich source of feelings in exploring your memories/relationship with your brother.

Sounds like you have a lot of questions and feelings left unresolved from the session. Maybe you could write some of those questions and feelings down, and take one at a time, very slowly, with your T. They are obviously powerful, and you deserve to release any guilt or pain or anger associated with them.

Be gentle with yourself, this is heavy stuff that touches you in many ways. You're doing great in continuing to work through it; don't push yourself to figure it all out at once.

[growlycat]

Those kinds of sessions are what my main T says is where the real the real work is done "Where the rubber hits the road". You can feel good about that.

Be sure to ask your T for the support or whatever you need when talking about such difficult stuff.