Yesterday, I spent two hours at the therapist’s office. The first hour was the actual meeting, and the second was recovering from the first. In a nutshell, she got me to open up about how what happened in my life made feel. I can go on for days about what happened. I don’t even flinch when I talk about it. But how it makes me feel is forbidden ground. It’s ironic how I’m an open book about most topics, and I wear my heart on my sleeve, but it’s almost impossible for me to express my emotions, especially when I really hurt. When looking at everything I’ve been through, maybe it’s not so odd.
We started…is it mindfulness compassion therapy, or mindful self-compassion therapy? Mindfulness is in it, and so is self-compassion — both feel very selfish to say. From what I understand, something that helps you turn compassion inward. I’m known far and wide for my kindness and willingness to help others. I’ll stop what I’m doing to make sure someone’s got what they need, or at least have access to the place to get what they need. I know that sounds like I’m not humble about it, but it took years for someone to drill it into my head that how far I am willing to go for others isn’t common, and I should recognize myself for it.
When it comes to showing that treatment toward myself, I don’t. It’s like I need permission first. There’s a mean voice in my head that tells me that my own voice don’t count. It feels really good when I am nice to myself, it just feels like I don’t deserve it. The mental gymnastics I have to go through to get self care done is exhausting. Going backward into those moments from my past, where my resilience cracked a little bit at a time, pinpointing the situations that caused me to lose my sense of self, it crushed me a little bit more just to say how guilty and how shameful I felt each time.
None of what happened was my fault, yet here I am carrying the burden of it, and I have been doing so all these years. Learning how much I’ve been hiding, especially from myself, was eye-opening. Audibly confessing it to someone made everything raw. I don’t want to let people know how much it hurts. I don’t want anyone worrying about me. So I was shaking for about an hour after, since I did just that.
Before she let me leave, she gave me a mission: do the morning routine I’d talked about in a previous session, make my bed, give myself a hug, and then put all the compassion that I have for others into an imaginary friend of sorts, and have a conversation with them.
In order to frame the compassion she wanted me to project, she had me pick a person from my life and talk about how I feel toward them, listing the emotions I feel, my thoughts and my hopes for them. We then built an imagined person in a chair, and that was my manifestation of compassion. She had me observe this person, who had no real shape or form, and I breathed life into it by telling it all these things that I just shared about the real life person, but without the person present in mind.
Transitioning from real person to an imagined aspect of myself was difficult, because I didn’t want myself to be there. Recall how I used to binge drink because I didn’t want to exist. This was those feelings without the alcohol to help. I eventually was able to, through hand-holding (not literally, I closed my eyes and reached out to the imagined person in the chair, and basically sobbed for five minutes before I could hold it’s hand). We did pause when I held its hand, and she guided me through a forgiveness practice toward that part of myself. Perhaps the guilt and shame is from my inability to protect that part of myself from everything that happened. Then I told it all those things that I reserved for other people. I told it that I wanted it to hold onto those things. When it started to take shape, I could see that it started to look like me, but with an amber aura.
So today, I woke up, started a cup of coffee on the Keurig (which is in my bedroom), while that was brewing, I showered, did my hair and skincare routine, get dressed to shoes, and then I get my coffee. Essentially, I got 90% of my personal needs met for the day before I was fully awake. I then made my bed, gave myself a hug, and told my compassionate self, which is now walking next to me, in a way, how happy I was to have gotten that done. And it reflected back that it was happy, too. It was like I pulled a radiator full of love out of my chest and gave it to the part of myself that needed it most. I felt so good after all of it was done. It set the tone for the rest of the day, and I did have a doozy of an event happen (other people’s drama, can’t talk about it here), too.
Since it took a bit of planning and subterfuge to start it off, I’m calling it “Radical Stealth-Care.” The only problem is that I have to go to bed mentally prepared to do that. Which…I did that, too. Fell asleep rather easily after finding a good audio drama.
Seth 1, asshole ptsd – zero. Now to do this again, tonight…
I’m glad my therapist and I are focused, now, and it’s no longer a getting-to-know-you session.
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