This counseling thing is getting real now. To begin with, my counselor was just preparing me with tools before we go into the real battle. I have the deep breathing, the grounding, my safe place, and have been trying to change my thinking or use opposite thinking during situations. I also needed to built up trust with my counselor. All of these have laid out the framework for me to being processing something that happened in the past, something that really rocked my world and I never processed it in a healthy way. I just buried it deeper and deeper until I could forget that it even happened. But it DID happen and it's a huge part of what my life is now - some good, some bad.
To be honest, this digging deeper and reprocessing is HARD. We started EMDR Therapy (Eye Motion Desensitization & Reprocessing) today. It's hard to explain, but involves my safe place that I've created in my mind. I start out with deep breathing and picturing my safe place. It's called "The Field." There are thousands of sunflowers, the sun is reflecting off the brilliant yellows and oranges of the flowers, bees are buzzing, birds are chirping, the air is warm, the sky is a very bright blue. As we got deeper into the therapy, I had to answer a few questions and then she'd take me back to "The Field" where I had to think about certain details of the sunflower scene that I was picturing.
At one point, I broke down and actually felt scared and didn't know why. But it's all part of how my brain is pulling out those strands of trauma to help me reprocess it all so that when I think about what happened, I'll have a different perception of it and realize that I'm different now and don't need to hold onto it all. I think I was also a little fearful because I didn't want to go to those deep, dark places in my brain. I wanted to keep it all buried, even though I know that's not healthy at all. It's scary to relive what I experienced. I've always tried to justify what happened and take a good share of the blame, more than I should have. I was afraid of what people thought, I was afraid of their judgement and/or rejection if I talked about what actually happened. I trained my brain to think it was ok even though it wasn't.
Anyway, just thought I'd share on here. I'm sure I'm making no sense to some of you that have no idea what experience I'm talking about. That's ok. I don't need to tell you. It's pretty personal and I'm still working it all out in counseling. So -- maybe someday, I'll have more to tell, but for now, this is where I'm leaving you.
