THERAPY THURSDAY | July 2016

I started therapy before my Dad died, before I quit my job, before everything got really bad.  I am still here and I am desperately trying to finish what I started.  I have quit a few times only to return in need of help.  I went with the goal of receiving and completing EMDR Therapy (what is EMDR? click here to learn more ).

I am currently pretty much smack dab in the middle of reprocessing.  I am in the third and final stage, the home stretch if you will, and I hate it.  I want to be finished.  I want to be finished and I hate it not because of the therapy itself but because of how I am feeling physically and emotionally towards my environment and surroundings.  I am starting to see certain people for who they are and it makes me very sad.  I hate living in the my mother’s basement and I need to get out.  I should have gotten out a long time ago.  I should of used my inheritance to get myself out of here.  This environment is crushing my soul.  It is very negative, tense, and close minded here, it makes me feel like I am suffocating.  My boyfriend lives with me and for that I am forever grateful.  Without him I would crawl into bed and just stay there.  But we both know we need to get out of here.  We want out so bad.

EMDR has been monumentally helpful to me since the very beginning.  What is hard is seeing people and situations differently.  Realizing you need to and want to make changes but you can’t yet.  Feeling yourself change.  I am feeling myself change.  I was really worried about this change in the beginning – who will I be? what will I like? will I like me?? – essentially WHO THE HELL AM I REALLY? but the more we press forward in EMDR the more solid in myself I feel.  The more I understand why I feel so overly sensitive, why I decided to silence myself and essentially just give in to the constant yelling.  I understand why I was giving up.

A person can only take so much before they give up and after living through multiple traumas since the age of 2, by 28 I was out of gas.  I was out of gas and my best driving buddy – my dad- had just left me.  Needless to say, I trashed the [metaphorical] car.  I stopped sleeping, I stopped eating, I started drinking because nothing would take the pain away.  I looked worse and worse, I bleached, coloured, and dyed my hair so much I had to chop it all off a la pixie.  Somewhere along the line I plucked almost all my eyebrows out, which I am STILL trying to grow back.

It was in that time period when I looked and felt my worst that an Angel came to me.  To this day I truly believe my Dad had some hand in it, I think he was watching from above and knew what I needed.  Who I needed.  It was a few weeks after I had started drinking. I was already (back) in therapy but I was struggling.  At this time I should also note that my father was an alcoholic and I never really enjoyed drinking, I stayed away from it, everything about it turned me off.  Then one day I just stopped caring.  I found a bottle in the house and just started drinking.  My days became a routine of waiting for the liquor store to open so I could get home and drink … Until it dawned on me to buy BIGGER bottles (oh geez…).  I spent a lot of time alone, with my short hair, drinking on the deck listening to the oldies.  I do believe that is one of my most sad times in my life.  I was very sad and I felt very alone.  I felt like I was dying inside.

And then something happened.

One day this lovely and incredibly handsome Facebook friend I had insisted we meet at the beach.  We had been fb chatting and texting each other for months but being so preoccupied in my grief I didn’t want to think too much of it only to become more sad if he wasn’t interested in me.  Luckily he had caught me before I made my first drink of the day and I could still drive.  I blogged about it here!

I did not know then but I know now that he was my Angel.  I did not drink that day.  Nor did I drink the day after.  He became my other half and inevitably saved me from going down a very dark road.  He built me up when I was weak and enabled me to continue therapy, he inspires me to get better and to do better just by being there and caring.

My therapy sessions improved immediately.  Finally feeling like I was loved and supported made it so much easier to go to therapy, to actually want to do the therapy.  See, I did not realize then and I am just coming to realize NOW how little love and support I was feeling and getting before he came along.  I was made to feel like my feelings didn’t matter, my anger was unreasonable, that I was being dramatic, when really I was crying out for help.   He could see it and he did not run away from it.

My therapy session this week involved this topic of feeling very dismissed by certain people and learning that it’s not really their fault.  They simply do not have the capacity or willingness to understand my feelings.  This saddens and angers me but at the same time has brought me the decision that those people shall not need to be informed.  They cannot understand so why waste my breath?  It is a new and interesting decision for me but I want to be happy.  I am sick of being weighed down by other people and their ignorance towards mental health.  Especially when those people are family members.

I now need to focus. Focus on finishing therapy and building my life with my Angel.  I am terrified because I do not know what is on the other side.  At the same time I am grateful because without therapy and his love and support through all of this I cannot fathom where I would be or what I would be doing.

That’s all I have for this, my first instalment of “Therapy Thursday”.  Today I just let my thoughts come out regarding this week’s therapy session.  I am not sure where this series is going but I plan to keep writing and find out!

Thank you so much for taking the time to read what I write, I appreciate it more than you know.