I am rather confused by my t just at present. It has been a draining time for both of us I think as I have been edging towards the underneath feelings of what happened to me as a small child and those feelings are very real but I tend to discount them. Well, I HAVE discounted them for nearly fifty years.

WE have tried to nudge nearer these little hurt child feelings but when we do get near, I am a bit 'over the top' (my judgement - not his, I hasten to add - though I think he has once or twice said he is not so vocal or loud as I can be. Gulp. I do tend to make a lot of noise when I hit the small child feelings. I often wonder what his co workers think in the adjoining offices.)

Whilst this has been going on, I have been trying to work out for myself what these intense feelings are about. We know they are connected to be being burnt aged six months old and being trapped, we know they are about me being in hospital a lot until I was four. We know they are about me being in pain and feeling alone and abandoned over and over again as I had surgery upon surgery and graft upon graft. We know this. I just find it really hard that
1. these feelings are true
2. They really are from back then

I KNOW that neurologically I have stored body memories and emotional feelings.
I KNOW that I still have nerve damage that flares up into terribly pain when emotionally triggered.
I KNOW that when the nerve pain increases, I get more emotionally fragile which makes the physical pain increase.

I am just finding it hard processing and really believing all this. And of course then I throw at my very sweet T that he does not believe it either.

Also, all my life I have had to hide the 'childish' feelings I know that I have inside that occasionally fight for dominance. And I have consciously minimized this part of me. I have actively even denied and fought this part of me.

So I am having a lot of trouble facing all this and acknowledging it.

Yet at the same time I am writing about it and handing it to my T so that he knows what it is about and how to reach me and talk to me when it gets really bad.

I have even given in for a while now and gone and hidden all curled up under his desk where I feel safest. He accepts this. I accept this. It is just what I do when it gets really scary and I feel pretty vulnerable and exposed.

I even brought in last week some foam lagging that you put around pipes to stop them freezing and asked him to put them around his desk legs as they are metal and I fear that I will hurt myself on them when the explosive body feelings come out. This has happened twice so far and I think it has rather shocked us both, though he is really too professional to admit that, though he did say he was scared I would hurt my head at one point. I just seem to fall into the most closed off and hurting part of my mind and when that happens, I kick and thrash and wail like a small baby and I am really 'living out' something. It is hard and weird and time distorts as what seems like several minutes to me at the time, is only like 30 seconds when I listen to it later on the recording.

Last tim e it happened I reached out to him and ended curled up tight under his arm. He actually cuddled me while I shook with fright.

I think he finds it scary and I shall ask him about this tomorrow: "Are you scared?"

Last week he refused to talk about the littlest part of me, he refused to let me go there and feel it at all, so I had to shut down instead. I felt thwarted and confused and very 'denied'. He said it was because of a time issue in that technically we had only 20 minutes left, but we always run over so that doesn't really hold water. I think he is not being honest, he is actually needing more time in his own head to work out what to do, it is out of his comfort zone.

The frustrating part is that I want to know what is going on in that part of me, in a safe space with him being reassuring. I need to know. It is important to me, as this is the part of me that I have shut off. I feel he is worried I may not come out of it, or that I may damage myself - I don't sense that he is confident here.

I have told him that it is causing me huge pain to be having this drag on week in and week out and that I would rather we just face it. I know I am scared but I still would rather face it than this agony I am in. I keep asking him to talk to that part of me directly and he just can't seem to. He always asks what 'I" think the little me needs. he cannot talk directly to her no matter how much I ask him to.

I think I am seriously flagging. I have been ill for a couple of days, in bed, aching etc and am both dreading and anticipating tomorrow. Will he do what I need or will he stall again?

I actually tried to walk out of my last session with him and I told him I hated him and in the same breath told him I don't really but a part of me hates him vehemently right now for keeping leaving me in this awful pain.

I just wanted to post this here and see if any of you have any guidance or advice for this. Or any comments really. I will see him tomorrow and then I shall see if he is still stalling.

Knowing it is one thing, feeling it is another. I think your wee one is doing what she needs to by expressing what she couldnt all those years ago.

Poor T will catch on to what he needs to do. He just has to be there for you.

Your very brave in my book.

THanks Muff. So scared about tomorrow that I cancelled everything today so I could stay in bed and stop feeling so sick and worn out by it all. I trust my T very much but it is awful when he is bringing the full force of his clinical training to bear on me, I feel small and vulnerable. He also spotted that I can distract him from the topic at hand too if I want to and told me last Friday that he is going to stop me doing that. He won't shout at me, but he is going to stop me from doing that. That feels scary in itself. I wasn't consciously planning to distract him,I just found other things to talk about when he went too close to the painful stuff.

Brain will have the final say. If it needs to rest, it will.

He is also saying, he will be there for you.

We do tend to dance around our emotions when the real stuff wants to surface.

It is a big learning phase to trust brain, to feel confident that it has done the right thing for you, and always will.

Go with it.

One hour to go and feeling sick with fear and dread.

Sadly,
I really hope it went ok with your appointment today. It sounds so hard.

Muff,

"We do tend to dance around our emotions when the real stuff wants to surface."

This is true...something keeps us from fully disclosing stuff.

That was brilliant. He just started by lagging the desk legs and putting cushions around so that I could not hurt myself and then talking to the littlest me. (I had been telling him over some weeks HOW to talk to that part of me but he had always talked to the grown up woman about that little me, which doesn't quite work.) I went under the desk and just let it all happen. I so trust him. I feel safe with him. I have been having dreams all week of feeling safe with him.

I let my mind go to the most scary place of all. And he just kept talking to me and letting me hold onto his finger and I found out how bad that pain is and how mute and 'enduring' I get.

He talked me through the experience of being burnt and what happened and how I was eventually found and what they did, once, and I felt it in stages, and then he went back to the worst bit, to the being burnt bit and I felt that and then went on to feel feelings I have not felt before, the feelings in hospital. They were very marked, I was in total darkness which was weird (why?) and I was in a lot of pain and then sleeping and then more pain and fear of people and trying so hard to endure the pain and the respite in between and how nice it was when the pain stopped being so screaming.
He was so good.
He was so steady.
He was utterly brilliant
I gave him a dog biscuit at the end and he gave me three stars for bravery and insight. I give him dog biscuits because he reminds me of golden retrievers, kind and affectionate and loyal and gentle. He gives me gold stars because I asked him to. I like it, it is funny but really nice to see him carefully and seriously giving me a gold star and telling me why I have 'earned' it. LOL It makes us both smile but it is a very sweet thing.
It took two and a quarter hours but it helped me so much. It is just so healing to face those pains with someone there. Most of the time I was only able to 'communicate' through the feel of his finger, his hand, the pulse in his finger and holding on a tiny bit tighter. That is all I could 'hear' ''know' - the rest of me was off line. Thank god I had the recording device on. It was mostly impossible to talk - it was just hearing and not really understanding, and then also feeling, through my hands and fingers, that he was there and that he cares. Those moments of touch spoke volumes to me. One tiny stroke by one of his fingers on mine and I could feel he cared and that although I was in terrible pain (physical because of course the nerve damage got triggered into being 'on line' again) I was comforted by the smallest touch on my hand or fingers. It WAS my only method of knowing that I was not alone in this torment of pain. Which of course, is what a six month old would feel.

T has a great capacity to give. That ripple effect of a good connection allows trust.

Many adults tend to think bubbies have no real emotion. We were more than blobs, waiting to be fed and watered.

We needed love, especially in the darkness of not knowing if we would survive the next minute in the "alone". It is difficult to describe the "alone." It was more a sensory loss of people and then self. Infants feel they are physically attached to their mums, so without them, and a good sense of love, bubbies fear a none existance, a complete loss of themselves. We call it death now.

I am not sure if this is what you felt. Regression took me there many times when I FELT no love from my past.

Are we not all brilliant to not only cope with our past, but to carry it around in our heads, and relive it through therapy?

I give you 10 stars for reaching out, and 20 more for making me cry.

Thank you Muff. I like the gold stars too
and yes, for me I have often fallen into the state of feeling annihilated and not known what it was about, it has taken quite a while to unravel.

back to you.

Me thinks the depression at that time was very challenging to.
T called it "Infantile Depression."
Are you there yet?

Not sure I am at the infantile depression bit, maybe I have been experiencing it intermittantly for years. Could you tell me more about it Muff? I feel a despair when the pain is very bad in my leg and I feel little. I also shut down inside. I am fighting that one at the moment and trying to reach out to T instead.

It was a sooky sad,futile feeling, and one that was hard to get rid of, despite distactions etc. I could only bear it in bits over the years too. It tended to make me feel something was going to "take me" out in the present day, so much so that I made preparations for the the event It felt like everything about me was closing down in some manner, and it would be permanent. Me thinks it was worse than grief. I was told by the parent, they hospitalized me at 6 weeks of age for gastro, but T thinks it might have been failure to thrive. One almost wants to go there and give in to it~ that darkness of the "alone," instead of feeling anymore no love. It seemed a lot more intense than clinical depression. It was a real bugger, but I managed to keep on working, infact work helped me to get out of that state, until I got home again.

Your doing great with your T. He sounds like one of those unique wee treasures, who really can care.

(((S))) So glad your P was able to be so present for you. I can't imagine what it must have taken to survive that as a baby and to re-experience it now. You're very courageous for doing so.