[InRealLife45]

Letter I intend to send my therapist:

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Dear T,

I am angry with you, at you.

For forcing an emotional attachment, for taking it away. For admonishing me not to attach to any therapist in the future, when that was always your doing. For thinking it was okay to stop trying, for thinking it was okay to not be emotionally present for so long, for thinking it was okay to walk away, for doing so and blaming it on me, on my energy. *I* trained you to not try? I trained you to not fight? I trained you to not engage? I trained you to ignore me and sit and stare at your shoes or my shoes or the wall?

Every day that I showed up to your office in the face of your open hostility was an invitation for you to try. Not to just physically show up, but to try. But all I ever got from you was new additions to the list of the things you are unwilling to do for me. Things you just won’t have from me. A list no therapist who cares about a client should ever have.

And so I am angry.

What is important to note here is that for the first time in my own awareness- I do not seek to push it away, this feeling of anger, this feeling of rage, this feeling that lends itself to out of control free falling, to self-destruction. I do not seek to suffocate it with remembrances of kind words, I do not seek to drown it beneath a melted bucket of strawberry icecream, I do not seek to bleed it out of my body with a razor blade. I do not seek to rid myself of it at all. For the first time that I am consciously aware of, I am feeling my feelings; simply sitting with the feeling of anger. I feel it in my jaw, the way my teeth clench every so often. I feel it on my face when my eyebrows and nose twitch into an angry countenance before it falls away in seconds. I feel it in the tight breaths I inhale, I feel it in each rapid beat of my heart. I feel it in the tightness of my muscles, in the brewing nausea in the pit of my stomach. I feel anger and I’m not afraid of it, and not trying to drive it away.

It feels like a EUREKA moment, something that has been on the edges of my awareness for years but I just couldn’t grasp- the concept of feeling my feelings, rather than distracting myself from feeling my feelings by rushing out to steal, to eat, to purge, to cut, to flee towards oblivion at high speed and with much urgency via xanax. I am realizing that there is another way out and it is through. Slowly. When you are feeling your feelings, there is no rush to get out. You just sit with them as long as they’re there, until they’re not anymore.

It’s about not running away from feelings so big you think they will kill you. When you stop running, you realize they’re not as big or as scary as you thought they were all these years. Normal people, they feel their feelings easily. They come, they go. For people like me, people who are the emotional equivalent of a burn victim; our emotional nerve endings are raw and tender. We feel everything a thousand times more intensely, and the feelings linger much longer-hours, days, weeks (months?). Sitting through such intense agony is difficult, but it must be endured or the nerves will always be raw and reactive, and I will always be running, frantic in my efforts not to feel my feelings, when feeling, recognizing and understanding is the only way out.

[wa(o)rrior]

Hi Friend

You have learned to accept yourself and do you know what a breakthrough it is that you have achieved? you need to learn to channelize an outlet for these feelings. find it and don't stop until you do....

[InRealLife45]

Originally Posted by wa(o)rrior

Hi Friend

You have learned to accept yourself and do you know what a breakthrough it is that you have achieved? you need to learn to channelize an outlet for these feelings. find it and don't stop until you do....

I'm not sure I've gone so far as accepting myself....I've just learned not to run from my feelings.

But thank you.

[Yellowbuggy]

This is beautiful! I was really moved. You have come a long way. Congratulations!

[PinkFlamingo99]

You're a great writer. I really felt everything.

[divine1966]

Great letter

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