Archive

Archive for the ‘ambivalance’ Category

Medication

jwd50 asked over on the Ask AG page why I had never spoken about medications. And I realized its mainly because I have been stable on my medication for a long time such that I don’t really give it a lot of thought.  But I know it can be an issue that a lot of people struggle with, so I thought I would share my experiences.

DISCLAIMER: I want to be very clear here that I am neither a professional therapist nor am I a medical doctor. What I am writing is based on my own experiences and reading, is anecdotal in nature and should not be taken as medical advice. Medications, their benefits and risks, should be discussed with a medical professional. People can also have widely varying reactions to this class of drugs, so I will not be mentioning the name of either medication I have used. Continue Reading

It’s not really about my mom

March 26, 2013 17 comments

Don’t want to leave everyone in suspense but between my schedule and the fact that I am in the midst of trying to understand what is going on inside of me, this will be brief (ok, admittedly, brief is a relative concept with me :)). While BN recognized that, of course, it hurt that my mother ignored my birthday, I was incredibly clear about the situation and completely understood what was going on. He pretty much nodded and uh-huhed his way through the beginning of the session. He told me later that he had not said a thing or offered any insight because I didn’t need any. That I was handling the hurt from my mom better now than in the past and that it would get better in the future. That maybe I was struggling to find compassion for her and maybe that would come easier in the future, maybe it wouldn’t but it was ok either way. Continue Reading

How do you protect yourself from the hurt?

March 18, 2013 27 comments

***UPDATE AT END OF POST
Greetings all, sorry I know I have been completely absent as of late. I am still working 10-12 hours a day, six days a week. Should be done in about two weeks which will be nice as I am missing having a life. But I am also very much struggling with being hurt and thought writing might help, so I am going to sneak in a post despite my schedule.

Continue Reading

Why keep going back?

February 14, 2013 43 comments

***Trigger warning: Religious content, I talk about my Christian faith in pretty specific terms late in the post.

A reader emailed to ask me a question whose answer I thought would make a good topic for a post. So with their kind permission, the question is below, followed by my answer.

I would like to ask how you got through it.  I mean when the feelings became so intense with your therapist, how were you able to keep going back?  What stopped you leaving?

This is a really good question. There were so many times I threatened to quit, or told BN I wanted to quit. I lost track of how many times I said (often out loud) “I cannot do this anymore, I can’t take it.” Sometimes on the way to therapy. I wish there were a simple answer to this question, but it was, as usual, a complex interplay of a number of factors. Experience, fear, attraction, desire, longing, faith, hope, determination and belief. One at a time, all at once, or some subset were what kept me going. Continue Reading

What I missed

February 1, 2013 22 comments

Since I’ve been on the topic of how we work through our grief for that which we did not have, I thought I would share some particulars losses I ran into and what was underneath them. As I’ve worked my way through therapy and uncovered the feelings I had buried so long, I also uncovered losses I had not been able to admit, let alone grieve. This is a very personal list. I expect that some of this will resonate with other people and some of it will be not true for them or seem like a significant loss. These are mine, what I needed to mourn, and I again offer the disclaimer that not everyone will need to do this the way I did. But I am hoping by being more specific about some of the issues I faced, that the process might be more understandable, even if my reasons to mourn do not resonate with you. Continue Reading

Sorting the Past

January 18, 2013 28 comments

In the comments after my last post, It’s still no, but still helpful, a number of questions were asked that I felt needed a longer answer than I would want to put in a comment and since they were all related, I decided to address them in a new post. They appear below:

Greeneyes: … how did on earth have you gotten through the struggle of accepting there’s so much we can’t get that we want? And how have you gotten through how painful the therapy boundaries are?

MetaMantraMe: How can we tell if we really are being denied something in the current time that we should be receiving? Or if it is, indeed, a projection of the unmet, and old, need from before onto today?

Liese: … when will we know that we’ve grieved all the losses from the past and that what is happening to us in the present is from the present? In other words, when will our feelings simply be about what is going on now?

Read more…

The Whole Story of the No

January 2, 2013 58 comments

In my post I HATE hearing no, I talked about BN saying no to something I asked for but didn’t go into too many details. Some of it was lack of time, but I suspect, gentle readers, that some of it was embarrassment. So now I’m going to tell the whole story, mainly because I am working very hard to understand what is going on within me and where I want to go from here. I see BN on Friday and I am struggling to discern if I am just trying to avoid loss or if this is something I can have in the here and now. I strongly suspect from the intensity of my feelings that BN gave me the right answer, but I’m not sure whether I am ready to give up the fight yet. But I’m getting ahead of myself… Continue Reading

I hate hearing NO

December 20, 2012 19 comments

Hopefully, later I’ll write a longer, more detailed post on my session yesterday as a lot of really good work got done and important things happened, but right now, I really don’t care. All the understanding in the world, of why BN needed to say no to my request, of where the pain and grief are really coming from, of just how compassionate, gentle and caring he really was aren’t doing much in the face of the fact that it hurts and I’m angry at having to watch other people ask and easily get from their therapists things BN won’t do. I don’t want to be mature and insightful, I want to throw a temper tantrum and get my way. And its making me even angrier to imagine just how understanding BN would be about all these feelings if I contacted him. At times like these, the line between the past and present gets so blurry and I don’t know who I hate more, BN or my father. My only clarity is in being reasonably sure that my father has earned it while BN has done quite the opposite. I hate what rejection evokes in me. I hate that voice saying “see, I told you not to ask, I told you that you’d only get hurt” when I know it was the right thing to do. But circling back, right and wrong don’t feel important at the moment, just that howling inside as I remember what it feels like to not be able to have what I long for. Despite my utter and complete gratitude for therapy and the healing that happens there, some days it just sucks. I think I need to be ok with just acknowledging that this is really how I feel right now.

And yes, I am pissed that BN was gently trying to warn me I’d probably feel this way yesterday. Damn know it all!

Sitting

September 30, 2012 13 comments

Greetings Gentle Readers,

I know I have been quiet as of late. News of both my brother’s death and my aunt’s revelations have knocked me off-balance and sent me back into my past in a way that has not happened for a long time. My work schedule has been quite busy, as well as my husband’s, so on top of the emotional stress, there has just not been a lot of free time, but I saw BN Thursday morning and wanted to post an update. I’ve been working on this post for so long that the last sentence originally said “I saw BN this morning.” I am somehow….gagged. As if attempting to voice what I feel inside is so impossible, that words fail and I simply turn away, again and again. So I am going to just finish this post and put it up no matter how it sounds to me, just so that I might speak. So if I sound strange or somehow not like myself, that is probably what you are hearing. Continue Reading

How do I fill the void?

September 11, 2012 60 comments

Dpblusee left the following question in response to the “Therapy isn’t enough” post:

I don’t believe I have ever felt true, authentic love in my life until it was evoked in my therapy (which, for me, feels more like I am perceiving it and asking for it than receiving, since the T can’t truly give the parental love, in that way as you describe, that is needed to fill the gap).

If I never received it and didn’t know what it felt like until now, where can it come from to fill the void that was left from childhood? I would imagine it can never truly be filled, so how is this wound healed?

Instead of responding in the comments, I thought this would make a good topic for a post, so with her kind permission, I am going to answer her here. For most of my life, I carried within me the sense of a terrible abyss, a void, which threatened to swallow me up and destroy me. I can still remember the shock when I realized it was no longer there, and my amazement as I shared that realization with BN. So, while there may not be a way to fill the void, I do believe there is a way to close it. Continue Reading