Therapy is like taking a broken arm that didn't set right and re-breaking it in order for it to heal properly.
Definitions:
“Successful treatment of childhood trauma or Complex PTSD requires the ability to work with parts and ego states. Within parts work therapy, you achieve trauma resolution by recognizing disowned parts and giving these parts a voice. The goal is to help you develop an embodied sense of self that can compassionately hold your emotions, vulnerable sensations, and young parts of self.”
“Brainspotting is a powerful, focused treatment method that works by identifying, processing and releasing core neurophysiological sources of emotional/body pain, trauma, dissociation and a variety of other challenging symptoms.” https://brainspotting.com/about-bsp/what-is-brainspotting/
It’s not always easy to sit down and write about my trauma. Some stories are easier to share than others. The easy stories are sometimes interpreted as “leading with vulnerability” but to me the personal histories I share of my life are cherry-picked and comfortable. I have lived with the fact that my family fell apart when I was 16 for 15+ years now. I have lived with this fact my whole life. It’s a part of me. Explaining it to people doesn’t phase me, almost as I disassociated from trauma...honestly, the person who hears the story is typically more affected than I am.
Inner child work… well, this shit is new. From the science perspective, I’m pretty sure I have been in some sort of dissociation with my body. As a trauma survivor, in order to survive, I very much avoided my “felt sense.” And when I sat down over the last few weeks with my therapist to do what is called parts work. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into… It was similar to brainspotting in the sense that I looked at a pin but it was much more of guided meditation through all the wounded versions of me that live inside.
There is a vulnerable little girl, a betrayed teenager, a violated 20 something all of whom have been pushed aside to create the very successful woman I am today.. This therapy opened a door for them to be cared for and soothed by executive functioning Melissa. It is manifesting in some unexpected ways. For example, there was a situation where I made a social faux paux, it was a very mild mistake but literally led to me crying on my couch, having an anxiety attack because I was so afraid to disappoint the people around me. In the same vein, I see my tiny friends (aka the children of my closest friends) meltdown.
I’m actively trying to live more consciously, which looks like having hard conversations with people (which I typically avoid due to a crippling fear of confrontation). It also means being willing to apologize if I feel like I’ve misbehaved. When someone apologizes, there are two paths the receiver of the apology can take. They can accept the apology and forgive or they can weaponize it and try to dig the knife of shame a little deeper. Unfortunately, in my attempts to take extreme accountability, I feel like the latter happened and it happened right in the middle of this therapeutic journey I’m on.
I’m also having really positive experiences. Where people are supporting me, respecting my new found boundaries (even when I haven’t) and showing up with so much love and empathy.
For the first time in a long time, I am able to cry, to feel the hurt of these experiences and to sit with them. I was also, after the anxiety and tears had subsided, able to stand back-up and re-parent myself. My biological parents often weaponized apologies, crossed boundaries and criticized the boundaries I tried to implement to keep myself safe...
While I don’t invite toxicity into my life, I don’t blame them for this. People are taught how to treat others, how to parent and frankly we didn’t have access to the kind of information the internet can provide. However, as an autonomous person, I choose who is and isn’t a part of my life.
I feel like I’m walking around with open wounds and I’m never sure when I'm going to accidentally bump into them. I’ve experienced quite a bit of conflict at the beginning of this journey. I think it’s partly because I’m starting to draw strong boundaries but also, I’m slowly healing and addressing these past traumas one trigger at a time . As Mark Groves says, the only people who don’t like boundaries are those who benefit from you not having them.
Not everyone can support me at this time in my journey, and they don’t have too. It’s been really hard to write in “real-time” if you will. On the other hand, these experiences made me so grateful for the unconditional love I do have in my life. It made me feel grateful to be surrounded by people who check-in, who love tenderly and ask very little of me which gives me space to fill my cup and hopefully return the energy.