Archive for the ‘Julie/s’ Category

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Therapy Nutshell

May 23, 2009 at 10:19 pm. Written by (and/or talking about) Julie/s. Tags: , , , , . 0 Comments

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

“Have To Get The Sad Out Of Us”

May 9, 2009 at 9:18 pm. Written by (and/or talking about) Julie/s, us (lc) and usz. Tags: , . 1 Comment

Just needed to share something, however short it may be. We had therapy earlier today and we showed her a collage that gives a general system overview in many ways. We have also been talking a little bit the last several weeks (i think several weeks, not sure) of various things relating to this neighbor boy who abused us. We discussed inside a little bit earlier today as we thought about writing a journal entry, and I thought we might say his first name, but apparently we’re not going to just yet. At any rate, we’ve begun providing some general history of things we’ve known about for a long time, but haven’t fully processed to some kind of healing state.

I questioned and pondered aloud the time before last when I saw Kathy (therapist) as to how does one know and distinguish between a memory that is healed and unpleasant memories that are a part of my past. I am not even coming close to the way I originally phrased it, but that’s the general gist of it, and honestly, it sounds utterly stupid to me now as I type it… like it should just be a duh thing, but it isn’t. At least not the way we were phrasing and wondering about it when we spoke with Kathy.

So we are making slow progress I suppose and are trying to carve out a pathway and plan in our healing as we partake along this new path and new journey of therapy with Kathy. We spoke a lot about the shame and badness that we have and how it is particularly attached to any of the abuse in any way (indirect or direct) by the neighbor boy. We left therapy fairly triggered with a lot of emotions and things close by, along with the us and usz groups very close. They wrote a letter to Kathy and one of the things that was stated in the letter was something about “having to get the sad out of usz.” For some reason it just spoke volumes to me, in that it was something so precious and heart breaking in the way it was worded and shared by the younger ones. I can’t quite put it fully into words, but it touched me and many others inside.

So we are embarking along a journey to “get the sad out of us” and one of those things we’re realizing (once again many times over) is that we need to write down in every detail that we can the various memories we have that surround the abuse and any piece relating indirectly or directly to it. We have a lot of pieces that provide information on what happened and the dynamics with our family and what kind of impact it had on us. I don’t know… I keep feeling like I’m not expressing myself in the way that I need or want to do so.

We’re fighting through the blocks we’ve been having with writing. We’re also continuing to work on a way to have greater access to our computer or one of Sean’s work laptops so that we can continue to push forward in journaling as well as working on our website, etc.

So this note is longer than I thought, but shorter than what all we really need to say ultimately.

Julie/s

Slow Moving Transition

May 4, 2009 at 10:45 am. Written by (and/or talking about) Julie/s. 0 Comments

I feel frustrated by how slow it seems we are moving through many transitions. It seems we are constantly trying to “catch-up” and “get our life together.” It’s like the theme of my adult life that has become so pervasive. I’m tired of it… we are tired of it. There have been so many changes that have taken place this last year or so. We’ve been dealing with them slowly and trying to pace them to our ability to handle all of it, but it is hard to be accepting and gentle with ourselves about it. Everything gets to be so overwhelming and so filled with anxiety as we try to manage the changes, do the changes, take care of these things that have been long overdue in “getting our life together” while at the same time trying to cope with everyday life amidst a myriad of things related to our daily functioning and whatever else that make this so challenging.

So much and so many people and things end up by the wayside–they remain in our hearts, our intentions, our thoughts, our never ending to do list, but after awhile, we’re just a disappointment, a frustration, and numerous other negative things that flow through our thoughts. We’ve realized that we can only handle or juggle so much and in the midst of changes, things just don’t get balanced quickly. The focus of balance gets put by the wayside while we try to focus on doing what is right in front of us or staying in contact with people who are right there in front of us. The hope is that when x, y, and z are done, then maybe we’ll be in a position where we’ll be able to tackle balance and everything else that has been trailing behind us by the wayside.

The image we get is a whole bunch of stuff attached to us through rope or some other means and just trailing and bumping along the rode behind us as we walk with a heavy load on our shoulders and weights attached to our heart that pull us downward into sadness. So the heavy load on our shoulders is whatever we’re dealing with right now, everyday life, whatever stress is going on, etc., and the weights attached to our heart is everything left unfinished and untouched and desperately needing attention and help and healing from trauma, etc. The wayside of things would be what is attached to us trailing behind us, making noise, bumping along, getting hurt and bruised by us unable to do something about it and having no more room to manage it on our shoulders.

We wish that getting x, y, and z done would be so simple and easy to do. It seems like “normal people” can handle x,y, and z so much easier or quicker or something while it takes us a million times longer to do it. Okay, a million times is an exaggeration but the feeling of it being like that is pretty accurate.

My mind is blanking, sleep is calling us and beginning to take over. I have to wonder how much of it is avoidance or some other dysfunctional coping skill or is it not dysfunctional but self-care??? What is the line? I don’t want to go back to bed to take a nap and sleep. In fact I’m annoyed that my body is feeling this way. We scheduled an appointment with a new dr. and got a new CPAP nose pillow mask to use with our CPAP machine. We’ve been working ourselves into a commitment to use it once we found out that we still have sleep apnea. So it is such a disappointment that we’re not seeing immediate results through using it and thus, this means one or both of these things is still likely a reality. We were told by our psychiatrist that we have Treatment Resistant Depression and her options to us at this point in terms of the next steps in treating it are not at all what we’re interested in doing– more medication and the kind that scares us with so many side effects or health ramifications. Besides, we’re not convinced that the remaining symptoms of our depression are all bio-chemical, but rather grief and unresolved trauma that will resolve as the PTSD and other things are worked on in therapy and life. Then there is also the diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that we have gone back and forth on and was hoping that by using the CPAP machine, that it would indicate to us if the constant fatigue was more related to our sleep problems rather than CFS/CFIDS. We’ve always attributed the fatigue to our depression, but since our suicidal ideation has gotten so much more manageable with our current medication and life changes (Sean in our life), we began to realize it may be a physical issue. So anyway, if we’re going to continue being ridiculously exhausted even with using the CPAP, then I guess we are going to have to accept that we do have CFS. Some of us think it is very likely as the symptoms do fit, but others of us are not sure if enough physical things have been ruled out. We’ve had some blood work, but not sure we’ve had enough done.

There’s many other things to talk about, but I guess it will have to wait. We’re glad to have at least written and finished enough of a post.

Julie/s