Tag Archives: therapy

Reinventing yourself

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People who have known me since I was a kid tell me that I don’t seem like the same person any more; I have changed so much. I changed a lot in my time in the scene, then being a teacher was a huge shift, being a parent has kind of forced me to complete a lot of huge seismic level differences in my life.

For the first few years I had kids I went through a Madonna/whore problem where my body stopped wanting sex or bdsm. It was the way that my brain managed to pick a path through my personal history of having no healthy boundaries around sex. It wasn’t a healthy response because it was bad for my marriage.

But I grew up watching all of the adults in my family have sex. I needed to have some kind of shift in my brain that ensured that my children would not see me have sex. My kids have still never walked in on me having sex and I’ve been doing this gig almost a decade. It is a huge accomplishment for someone with my background.

I think that my libido partially shut off because that was a lot of what I saw happen to my mom’s life. She had a few boyfriends (all of whom I saw her have sex with) and she realized that I was acting out a WHOLE LOT and she… shut it down and to the best of my knowledge has never had sex again. I think she stopped when I was around 10. That was a quarter of a century ago. I’m pretty sure my mom has been celibate because she decided she didn’t know how to have a healthy sex life.

She might be right. She picked some awful people.

I feel this kind of long drawn out pleasure and shock that the vast majority of people I slept with are really awesome people and they are still all invited to my house if I have a Christmas party. Only a few people have fallen off the list because mostly… gosh I picked good people.

I read in a book about postpartum recovery that it takes a body 4 years to fully reset after having a baby. My libido came back like a sledge hammer about 5 years after having kids. 4-5 years is a natural child spacing in nomadic societies so it isn’t that shocking that my body picked that window for saying, “Moar seks please.”

It’s been complicated since then. My poor husband has adjusted from the extreme hypersexuality I experienced when we first got married and before our marriage to me shutting down completely to me being a bitch and fucking lots of people as my libido exploded and… now I’m pregnant again.

What is going to happen next?

I don’t know but healthier sex has to be part of this experience.

It is complicated for a masochist to stop something because it hurts. But there are kinds of pain that are positive/emotionally expressive for me and there are kinds of pain where I shut down my brain and go to a bad place. There are kinds of pain that increase my general feeling that I should die because I have no other escape from pain in this lifetime.

My kids and my husband tell me all the time that they want me to live for A VERY LONG TIME and I’ve tried to change how I live to reflect the fact that they don’t want me to die young.

I have to figure out how to convince my body that I can be in less pain. (Fibromyalgia makes this super complicated.) I have to figure out how to stop shutting down my self-protection mechanisms during sex. Because the specific pain I have during vaginal sex sometimes (it’s not all the time) is a problem. It is directly tied into the abuse from my father. It is a mainline to my internal reaction that I was born from rape; I was born to be raped; that is all I should deserve to expect until I die.

I have changed so much about my destiny. I didn’t think I would ever have a forever home. I didn’t think I would ever be part of a family.

I have a really cool family. I mean, we are all flaming weirdos… but we like each other a lot and we spend a lot of time together and it is all so intensely positive…

I didn’t think someone like me would ever get this far, let me tell you. But I did it.

My current shrink is probably the most bdsm aware/positive shrink I’ve ever seen. They suggested that I’m going to have to face my dissociation head on and in their opinion I am going to have to do it within the structure of my M/s relationship.

Now that’s some awesome feedback to get from a shrink. I’ve never had a shrink talk so specifically about the difference between therapy and therapeutic and bdsm can be so very therapeutic…

I know. I used to not be able to set any boundaries at all with my body. Bdsm taught me how. My beautiful friends and play partners taught me how. Very therapeutic.

It is complicated on so many because having my husband hit me a lot is different from having my lovely friends hit me a lot. My husband is the only person on this god-forsaken planet who has given me any real safety. It’s complicated when he hits me. It isn’t that I never like it. It’s that there are so many layers of psychological events that happen around the physical events that… it’s hard to manage that and bounce back into my life.

My life is very constrained. I have to “behave” and project a kind of behavior that is very hard for me. I believe that children learn primarily through modeling and if I want to show my kids making good choices I have to make good choices and I’m really more inclined towards being a fuck up and doing everything wrong.

But the children. Sigh.

My kids are the reason I get up in the morning. My kids are the reason I put breathtaking amounts of effort into being a healthier person. My kids are the reason I’m trying to learn how to stop hurting myself so that I can handle being alive long enough to watch them grow up.

I haven’t cut myself in over half a decade. I have burned myself in longer than that. I haven’t beat my head on concrete in a bit longer than that. I have made a lot of progress on my self mutilation.

I really want to know what happens to my kids. I think they are so neat. I feel so lucky that I get to have another child. These people are the best people in my life. I wake up and go to sleep seeing their smiling faces.

I did not believe that my children would like me. I expected to be the recipient of contempt and apathy. Instead my children adore me like I adore them. It feels like magic.

Is it magical enough to propel me through figuring out how to stop allowing more pain into my body that damages me?

Love my shrink.

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My shrink told me I shouldn't try to give up pot right now.  She said there is no benefit right this minute.  Yes, it's bad for my lungs.  It is better in the long run to have a while longer of this and not beat my children.  I think she is god damn smart.

She also told me to stop trying to be 'not angry'.  It'll pass when the things that are a problem for me end.  I should focus on that end of things.  I'm not so good at this "patience" thing.

Checking in

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Thank you for the phone calls. I really appreciate my friends. I’m trying to keep a more firm line in how much I talk about my shit with Shanna standing nearby. The last couple of times I have really unloaded about what was in my head repeatedly in a day she woke up with night terrors. Today I had the one outburst at my mom on the phone outside in the yard. Then I had one ~15 crying thing immediately following. Then I was calm the whole rest of the day. And Shanna didn’t have a night terror. That, to me, means I erred on the correct side of freaking out. I did a lot in the midst of my mom actively treating me like shit, but I did it outside and away from the kids. I did a little bit in the house with the kids nearby. Then I stopped. I was probably slower than average for the rest of the day, but I kept it together.

Mostly I did this because my friend, K, was due to come over in the morning anyway because she was coming over to babysit my kids while I went to therapy. Handy. Mostly at Jenny’s suggestion (Ack! Two Jennys! My brain is overloading and I will figure out that situation later.) I asked K to drive me down to therapy and they hung out in the park right across from the office. By the way, I’ve realized I’m going to have to do some work on my feelings around unsolicited advice. If I’m going to really do the blogging thing then I’m going to have to just deal with it. Oh man. That will make me twitchy.

And I’m up in the middle of the night trying to figure out what to think and feel about this latest development. I’m trying to decide how many cycles in my brain it gets to have. It doesn’t get as many as it wants right now. I have already decided I need a break from processing this kind of stuff right now and my mother does not have the right to override my decision making process. She doesn’t get to ruin my life anymore. I am on a semi-manic upswing right now. I am trying like hell to get upward momentum started. I can’t stop to obsess about this. Today I need to just get into my head that my mother is doing this to me because she is acting out the story in her head. She is not interested in doing the hard shitty work to break the cycles she has established. That’s not my problem. I am interested in doing that hard work. I am doing that work. Part of doing that work is stopping and telling the quiet, scared little girl inside me that she can’t actually hurt me anymore. Never again will she be allowed to send us to a monster. Tyra’s childhood was ruined too, but Shanna and Calli are escaping. My brother’s kids are escaping. One of my siblings absolutely continued the cycle but I have hope for Tyra. The way forward can’t be me staying up all night obsessing and it can’t be me feeling distracted and apathetic all day with the kids. That’s not acceptable. My life is good, wonderful, and I have all the possibilities in the world. I am not yet 30 years old. My life isn’t over yet. I get to grow up and be anyone I want to be.

Ok. I think I’m going to follow a few random paths for a while as I try to figure out which direction I want to grow in. But that’s ok. I have time.

I think I needed that.

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Today my therapist laughed at me. At some point we worked our way around to how to continue processing abuse stuff in a limited way in that little box over there in the corner so that there isn’t ‘leakage’ into the rest of my life. These are important things to consider when planning how to end the cycle of abuse or build a nuclear reactor plant. Just sayin’. I came around to the idea of a support group. Yes! That is what I need! A support group for mothers with mental illness or mothers who are survivors of abuse. Yes! Because then I can have people who are in the same place as me who can give me advice because I suck and I’m not figuring it all out. She almost fell out of her chair laughing. Apparently she thinks they don’t have much to teach me. We actually spent the rest of our time together talking about a workshop she has been dying to lead…and she has been trying to figure out how to talk to me about it. Because she thinks I have a lot to teach about doing this. She views my recent blip as as really… nothing to write home about when dealing with mothers who were victimized. No lines have been crossed. No one has been harmed. No actual damage has been perpetrated. Ok, my tone of voice sucks sometimes. Why am I crucifying myself? We spent a lot of time talking about victim/rescuer judge/(can’t think of the word but you catch my point). It was really neat. It was interesting having her point out on this little graph how I was moving around in my relationship with Shanna. We talked about specifics of how to step out of it and she said that really the only thing she would have suggested is what I started doing yesterday. It was very validating. She more or less gave me a check list of things to think about when considering parenting stuff and that was extremely useful. It was also nice to be reminded that as a parent it really and truly isn’t my job to ensure that my kids like me. Making them happy at all costs is really not the right road to a happy adulthood because they will be total assholes. But I digress. 🙂

I’m always going to be kind of messy (like emotionally and psychically) and weird. But that’s ok. So is everyone else if I look at them closely enough. I am not a bad person. I want to stop treating myself like I am. No matter how much I want to believe that I am a monster in the making, I’m really not. I’m not abusing my kids. I’m not hurting them. I’m loving on them and giving them lots of attention and affection and support. Why do I only see the 4 seconds I yell and decide that is the only important 4 seconds of the day? It’s really not. All the time I spend patiently showing Shanna every step of ‘how to do things right’ even when it is challenging to let her do it. For every time I say, “Man you’ve been working on that! You couldn’t do that a week ago. I wonder what you will be able to do next week.” I see her. I love her. I don’t need to buy her love. I make a vow today, I will stop acting like I have to buy my daughter’s love. That course of action will result in both of us losing.

Picking up my basket

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I really like the movie “The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood”. It’s far from being a perfect analogy for my life but I see familiar things in it and ultimately it is a hopeful movie. Yeah, the mom fucked up pretty bad and she is hurt and ashamed by that for the rest of her life. And her daughter has issues, but she also has a pretty great life and a wonderful partner etc. It’s one of those, “Yes moms can be really imperfect and the kids still turn out somehow” sorts of things. Given how frequent a trope that is I’m pretty confident the worry exists in other minds as well, minds that don’t work like mine. Anyway. At one point the mother describes her own mental breakdown as “I dropped my basket.” Since I heard that line I think of it often when I’m having trouble carrying around all my shit. It’s like the basket got too heavy so I had to set it down for a while. For most of my life I have set it down as long as I needed to and slowly picked up one item at a time. But uhm, things are different now. I’m reading parenting books and near as I can tell every single one says, “Hey! You know how you behave when you are cheerful and doing ok? Yeah? Ok! That’s perfect! Do that for the rest of your life without let up and everything will work out!” Cause yeah, when I’m on the ball I do this parenting thing pretty well like I taught well. I genuinely enjoy interacting with kids like this. But it is hard. It is unrelentingly hard. And I dropped my basket. But Shanna has informed me that it is time to pick my basket up again. Her behavior is slipping. She’s acting out more. I honestly don’t know how it will work to just decide, “I am not going into denial or ‘stuffing’ my feelings I just need to set them in this box I look in once a week.” I don’t know if I have really tried this before. I can tell you right now that I am nervous. This is hard. Honestly this feels slightly like a step in the wrong direction in terms of worrying about multiples. 😛 But these thoughts are dominating my entire life and that just isn’t working. I can’t be that self-absorbed anymore. I had like a 7 week breakdown. That’s a fucking long time in the life of a child. It has to just end, now. *beat head against wall*

Called my brother

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So really what happened is I called my brother days ago and we’ve played phone tag since then. Anyway. Tonight we really talked. We talked for 45 minutes and there were so many little subtopics. He said he believes me absolutely 100% without question on all of it. I spent a while sobbing and spilling out my memories of our father and what he did to me. I kept apologizing to him because I know he doesn’t want to hear it but he told me that he is willing to listen to whatever I need to say. He considers my mental health more important than his momentary discomfort at hearing these stories. That’s huge. That’s monumental. I mean, it’s not like we are suddenly going to be close and spend time together. But I was just told by a person in my immediate family that the fucked up version of reality I knew growing up was indeed happening. I am not crazy. I am not imagining any of it. I am not lying. My mother and sister can go fuck themselves.

He believes me. He heard what actually happened and he believes me. He told me that yes, I am used as the scapegoat by everyone. My brother believes me.

Sentry

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Right now I am sitting sentry duty next to my elder daughter’s bed. Her beloved bed. You see, it is a Big Girl Bed! She even climbs a ladder to get into it. Picture an overly intense cherubic blond haired blue eyed german ploughhorse. She’s stocky and perky and deliciously incongruous. She wants people to love her so much. We shower her with love constantly. I carry her until my arms give out and then I put her in a carrier and keep going even now that she’s my big 30 lb going-on-three-year-old. Even while her baby sister is on my back. I do this because I remember that agony of need of assurance of love. I remember feeling no one in the world would ever love me enough and desperately clinging to my mother. I was so very attached to my mother. On MDC they think that is a good thing but I’m not so sure it was good for us.

I think of my beautiful child. And I think of my mother. And I think of the power she had over me. The power I have over my beloved, adored, forever wanted Shanna. I begged God for her. I named her and wanted her when I was 13 years old. To think that my mother most likely received the exact same blind absolute trust and love. My mother saw that in her child’s face and let a monster violate her. I can feel my whole body quake with hate and fear and rage. Most of the muscles in my body alternately cramp and flex. This hurts so bad. I hate her. I think if I drove to her house right now I would honk the horn until she came outside and run her over. Oh god. I’m trying to calm the panic attack closing my throat. You fucking bitch. I hate you so much. You did this to me. At the end of the day you stupid bitch. This is all on your head. I hate you. I hate you so much.

Why didn’t you love me?

And that question will never be answered. And no matter how much terror I feel. No matter the nightmare I face sitting next to her bed, my baby needs me to be happy. My baby needs me to take in her love and return it to her as joy. It is so hard to appreciate her like she deserves. I wish that my sweet girl didn’t have to show me her remarkable empathy so often. I wish my baby didn’t offer me hugs and kisses to feel better.

And every time one more person tells me more reasons that who I am or what I am doing is bad or wrong it just makes it one little bit harder. Like what I am doing is not hard enough.

Confirmation

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Today my oldest friend in the world came to visit with her mom. We were born across the street from one another and we are 4.5 months apart in age. So I asked the mom if she knew what was happening to me when I was my daughter’s age. She said yes. She said that all of the kids’ rooms had locks on the door and she asked my mom about it. My mother told her that the locks were to keep my father from molesting us, but she knew they weren’t terribly effective. I asked her why she never turned my mom in and she said, “You weren’t neglected. You were always clean and well dressed and you didn’t go hungry. There was nothing to turn in.”

I’m uhm, predictably not doing so hot. So far I have been assuming that the abuse started then because I remember my acting out starting so young. People knew. It wasn’t the secret I thought it was. They just didn’t stop it.

Food for thought.

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Today my therapist said something very interesting. When I am meeting new people I should basically have it in my head whether I am facilitating Shanna having friends or am I looking for friends for me. Basically if I want Shanna to have friends I should deliberately not befriend the parents. I, somewhat predictably, have mixed feelings about this.

So I got dumped yesterday.

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Not by my husband, by one of the women in my mom group. I got sent a rather hurtful email. To be defensive, because I always am, the hot sauce comment was not even vaguely serious. I would never do that. It was an unkind thing to say at all, but I don’t think this level of response was appropriate. And the ‘cold baths’ were tepid, just not warm and fun. I took zero pleasure in them and I don’t feel they were cruel. They were business like and not *fun*, but Shanna was not harmed in any way and despite not being fond of them she doesn’t seem traumatized by being in less than super warm water.

Continue reading →

I miss Traci

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So I’ve been seeing this woman (that sounds more interesting than it is) occasionally since the first miscarriage. She’s not a bad therapist, but she has a strong focus on EMDR and some weird thing where you pinch the bridge of your nose and tap on your third eye. Not so into the talk therapy part. I feel like the EMDR worked pretty well for me when it came to things like Francesca’s death, and losing my baby, and Traci’s death. Those were fresh and new hurts that were pretty easy to isolate and treat. But right now it’s just not working for me. The last time I saw her she had to ask me, “And who is Noah again?” If you don’t even know who Noah is then you know nothing about me. I’ve been seeing her periodically for over a year and she doesn’t know my husband’s name?

I don’t really have anyone to talk to about the super hard stuff right now. I have Noah, who has nothing more to give. And I have Sarah, who is also really at max capacity. I just can’t unload on them anymore than I already am. I don’t have a space where I can talk about my Byzantine feelings about my children and myself and my future and my family. (Noah’s not really on that list because other than occasional minor irritations he’s just not any kind of problem.) I miss Traci. I hate that I feel so bad for how much I miss her. It wasn’t exactly a ‘friendship’. But she did care about me. I saw her basically every week and some periods more than once a week for over 3 years. She knew every single terrible, horrible, disgusting thing about me and she never blinked. I’m pretty sure there isn’t a person on the planet who knows as much about me as Traci did, not even Noah. It feels kind of pathetic to say that.

I feel very alone and very lonely. And I feel like no one sees me. I miss Traci. The new therapist emailed me today to check up on me. The last time I went in to see her I really really needed to talk and she shut me down to follow her EMDR script and I felt so upset. I’m sorry, visualizing myself as a little girl and giving myself a hug is not going to solve all of my problems. She seemed very aware that I left the session more upset than I arrived. I should respond to her but I don’t know what to say.

How did you hurt your back?

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I remember how blue the sky was.

Movies like to concentrate focus in a way that is just off center. Like when you see the boot lying on its side under the bed and hear springs bouncing so you know they are having sex.

I remember how warm the rock was.

I remember watching the snot roll down the rock because I was crying.

I remember fighting at first and then not at all.

I remember white hot pain that made me want to die.

And my back has hurt to one degree or another every single day for about 20 years. I’m not sure I will ever stop hurting. I don’t remember what exact position torqued my back. At this point I truly believe it just doesn’t matter.

Thinking about judgment

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So everyone has times when their behavior doesn’t exactly match up with their stated positions/world views. It’s a normal thing. There are a few ways this can be dealt with. Someone can more or less subconsciously refuse to look at the discrepancy and continue on their merry hypocritical way–I think this is the majority reaction really; it is certainly the easiest. You can examine your world view more closely and decide that it no longer works for you and you should change it to align with your behavior. You can examine your behavior more closely and decide that it is inappropriate and you need to change it to align with your world view. Or, as Noah points out, you can look at your world view and behavior and decide they both kind of suck and change both. I think this last one is uncommon and maybe a bit drastic. 😉

This got really really long. Continue reading →

Yet more processing

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This morning is hard. I had a ‘moment’ where I realized that my first sexual acting out was at about three and a half. My rather clear memories of that were that I was just ‘supposed’ to do that. Now, as an adult I realize that in order to have such a clear sense of place associated with sex acts I was probably being molested at about Shanna’s age. I simply cannot conceive of anyone being such a monster that they would hurt a baby like that. But someone (someones?) did. It is becoming harder and harder for me to continue to have the self-narrative that I was just sexually precocious and any of what happened to me as a kid was by choice.

This is really really hard.

Something else I’m thinking about

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I’ve noticed that with a couple of friends I have a particular issue. So my friends are eldest children and they were assigned a lot of child-minding duties growing up. They very automatically step in and start doing what feels like parenting my kid. I have mostly bit my tongue about this but I’ve felt kind of butt-hurt. Recently I started talking to one of the people in particular and I think that I’m having the feelings I’m having because I have so many issues with my own sister and her attitudes around doing the same thing. But I don’t like that I’m feeling this way about my friends. They aren’t my sister and they don’t behave like her at all. Even if there are some surface similarities in ‘caring for nearby children’ it’s just not the same.

Ok. I’m going to make a resolution for myself. I’m going to work on my butt-hurt feelings. In all seriousness these friends who take these kinds of self-imposed caretaking roles are going to be the closest my children have to family experiences. I really want my children to feel what it is like to have people other than me who love them and take care of them. That means I need to get comfortable with it and not fuck it up for them because of my issues. I really wish that the list of ‘shit to work on’ was getting smaller instead of longer.

(Shanna asked to watch videos so I got to type again. 😛 )

Cycles.

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I notice that when I feel bad about something and I don’t act on it because I feel confused/anxious/uncertain about how to handle it I tend to get very fussy and anxious overall and it bleeds over into way more of my life than it should. I tend to hold on to things for a long time in that state building it up into my head until I am so frustrated by it that the smallest hint of an infraction in that direction feels like THAT’S IT!!! I’M DONE WITH YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!!! Often this doesn’t go all that well. When I completely over react like that I feel terrible and guilty and like if I were just a better person I wouldn’t blow up like that. But the situation doesn’t really get resolved and it continues on and the cycle continues.

But if I manage to say my piece in a way that is maybe not perfectly polite but not a complete and total overreaction directed at one person I feel way better about myself. And I will have an easier time enforcing that boundary for a long time afterward. I’m always super happy when I manage to do this.

And just because this is the kind of thing I almost never say–I’ve been doing pretty well lately. I’m having lots of emotional cycles but I’ve not been depressed in quite a while. Frustration seems to be ever present while pregnant though. 🙂