We are exhausted. We had therapy today, initially an unplanned appointment. We really made use of the appt. though and made some more progress on talking about the neighbor boy memories. We still can’t quite say or write his name aloud, but we’re getting closer to doing so. We are trying harder to push ourselves to say his name in therapy and with Sean and group. I figure one day we’ll end up going back and at least tagging these entries with his first name.
It is shocking to me and sad and grief giving as to how many years we’ve been in therapy (17 years this August) and we’re just now really and truly talking about the memories of abuse by him and really making a concerted effort to stay relatively focused on this topic and the memories and feelings and thoughts that swallow us up in such misery. Hell, in many ways, I’m just now giving myself permission to realize how serious the abuse by him was and how much of an impact it has had on us. On one level I kind of knew, but we have consistently minimized it or avoided it like crazy to not really feel things about it or acknowledge the traumatic level it has had on us. Since we’ve known about these memories or rather basically pieces of various memories, we’ve really downplayed it as something to work on because we’ve known about it for so long now and we’ve mentioned a few of them to therapists in really generic terms before, but we’ve never really dealt with any of it on any real level. We are now. And it is so hard.
Someone is mad and saying I’m exaggerating about all of it, but I’m not. I don’t feel anything right now about it, but I know there are kids inside with immense pain about all of this. They were there in therapy today. I don’t remember much, but I remember they cried and crying comes easy to the ones who showed up in therapy.
This Wednesday is the last day we see Cec and so we will be saying our final goodbyes to her and we are still completely unprepared, but hopefully we will sit down and write a letter to her or at least set up an outline for ourselves to make sure we tell her the things we need to tell her, etc.
Therapy with Kathy is going very well. We are moving along with her relatively quickly and are very focused on trying to make the most of the time we have with her each time we see her. We are also working on trying to stay focused on our therapy issues and the things therapy brings up for us and trying to problem solve stuff like that in the background while dealing with the shit that comes up from facing memories and our past.
It sounds like we’re working our ass off. I’m not entirely sure about that. It helped that Kathy said we worked very hard today and I think she’s made inferences that we’ve been working hard with her. It also really seems like we did some releasing of some toxic stuff inside and some deeper processing and release of emotions and things like that…. the kind of stuff those inside…especially those from the us and usz groups… are always needing and crying and desperately craving the time and chance for…. and today a few of them were brave enough to come forward in therapy and do some of that work.
I’m surprised we wrote this much as the exhaustion is pretty strong right now. We haven’t really had a chance to take our usual nap after therapy or any real downtime until now. We just needed to say something, even if it isn’t really saying much of anything and is so general… at least we are making ourselves write something. I honestly thought we’d only write one or two sentences, but once we got past that first hurdle, we ended up writing this much.
Really need to go for now.
Julie/s
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