Today I had a great session with my doctor. Although my eyes were still burning from recent tears, as I walked out of her office, I felt like a large weight was lifted from my shoulders. I even noticed a subtle spring in my step. It's amazing how comforting it is to be told that all my thoughts and concerns are normal and given the appropriate context. My friends and family are amazing and I know they would allow me to vent my feelings but even I'll admit, my feelings of the past year are quite cumbersome for an untrained person. Like good friends they listen but they don't normally have any idea of how to respond or ease my anxiety. Everything is just feels so intense but my doctor specializes in these types of emotions and their triggers. All of her years of study and experience with many patients prior to me dealing with similar types of issues give her the wisdom to know just what to say at times for everything to make sense again.
A major topic of today's discussion was that despite everything that happened this year, my overwhelming feeling is that I'm back where I started. Looking at where I was a year ago and where I am now, I feel like very little changed. I'm not sure where I got the notion that I would be fully recovered in two years but I imagine I read it somewhere and decided to use it as an arbitrary time-frame. Now that a year has past, I began to feel incredibly frustrated by my lack of progress and overwhelmed by how far I still need to go. She quickly dispelled these concerns stating that recovery is different for everyone and that many people require one to two years just regain the feeling of safety again. After we talked, it seems completely naive to think that I'd be all better in two years. It took a solid three years to build the coping mechanisms needed to get through that relationship and then I spent another six to seven years living within it. To change almost ten years of thought and behavior patterns along with dealing with all the repressed emotions in just two years is overly aggressive.
It also help that she said that the kind of progress I've made this past year is not one that can be charted and measured. There's nothing tangible and concrete to hang on to or look back at thinking, "see how far you've come." As she said, the kind of healing I'm doing is cyclical. It requires progressive and regression. Things will need to be revisited time and time again until I have fully come to terms with everything and integrate it within me. We also tried a relaxation and focus technique of breathing and I had such a difficult time. I kept coming out of it because I felt "too vulnerable." I'm just working on feeling safe within my own skin. After all, my ex was only part of the problem; as much as he hurt me, I compounded it by continuing to place myself into the repetitive cycle and then berating myself for allowing it to happen at all. In many ways, I'm as much a victim of myself as I am of him.
I expressed my frustration and fears about still not having a clue about what I want to do for work. Again, it was a year ago that I decided against becoming a teacher and I'm still not even a step closer to having any understanding of what I might like to try. She told me that I'm not ready to be making those kinds of moves and decisions right now. It will be far more difficult to figure out what I want to do if I can't even sit still and clear my mind for more than a couple of minutes due to my vulnerability. Once I regain my center again, everything else will begin to fall into place. For homework, she wanted me to write down all the things I did learn or make progress in over the past year. I was going to write it as tonight's blog entry but it is clearly long enough. It will have to wait until tomorrow. Even without it though, I feel so much better about myself and where I'm at in this crazy game and that's what matters most at the moment.
No comments:
Post a Comment