Posted by daisym on February 11, 2005, at 1:26:56
It is hard to explain this, so please forgive me for struggling through it.
I went to therapy today full of anxiety, feeling completely like crawling out of my skin. It actually started last night, that awful prickly feeling in my chest, jaw and throat. Like you can't breathe almost. I left therapy today a lot less anxious, but upset that I seem to have reverberated back so completely into parts and pieces.
I've been having bad dreams, funeral dreams, about my dad and about some of my friends. We talked about which parts of me were being represented by the deaths and about my feelings that I caused the deaths somehow. I told him how anxious I felt and how conflicted I was about continuing to do this work, given all that was going on. He said he could understand that but there was no way to predict the timing of the psyche and if nothing else, he had learned to have great respect for the wisdom of the unconscious. So if stuff needed to come out and get talked about now, there was a reason for that.
I told him that my dad had called to check in about my husband, and it was incredibly hard to match the man on the phone with the one we had been talking about these past weeks. And then I floated away. I had a complete brain freeze. My therapist let me struggle for a little while and then he asked a question leading away from the topic of my dad. It allowed me to come back, and reenter the conversation with him. He pointed this out (said I had to remember this rescue next time I accuse him of "always" leaving me to struggle) and I said I HAD noticed, but I also noticed that by leading away from the subject of my dad, it allowed me to squash little daisy pretty effectively. That it was her anxiety that was making it hard for me to talk because there were too many voices competing in my head.
He got quiet and then said very gently, "She hasn't been able to talk to me this week. No wonder she is anxious. What does she want to tell me?" So I talked about what she wanted and what she had been writing about and all these weird body sensations that were coming up. I told him that it felt like even my shoes didn't feel right yesterday. And I told him about getting swamped with fear while grocery shopping when a man came near me in the store. That has never happened before.
Then I heard myself talking about "her" and "me" and I tried to stop it. I tried to take control of things again. But my therapist observed that the fear we've touched seems to be coming from a deeper level and it must have been scary for little daisy to keep these secrets all the time. And out she came again. She very much wanted to explain that she was afraid that he wouldn't believe all of her stories and that she wouldn't get into trouble for talking about them.
I got sort of upset with him and told him that he needed to stop talking to her directly, or making observations that she wants to respond to. He said he thought she needed to talk, that she needed him to hear her stories and I needed to hear them too. He said he practically has to coax her out sometimes but it is always worth it, didn't I think?
I don't know what to think. I thought I was getting better about all of this being "me" but today it was definitely "her" and "her stories." Maybe it is just easier to allow all of this to have happened to "her" instead of me. Maybe I can own it better in the future. But tonight I feel like I need to apologize for sinking so quickly into talking about this as her and me. It makes me feel sort of foolish on one hand but it feels completely true and the best way to handle it on the other.
I'll talk to him about this too, but I want to know what you guys think. Is it the stress? should I fight it?
I'm also really, really tired.
:(
poster:daisym
thread:456153
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050206/msgs/456153.html