Yaku,

I know this stuff is so, so incredibly hard, but I really think you're approaching a turning point in your therapy. Writing or speaking aloud feelings about CSA - acknowledging what happened to you - is a huge deal. It can awaken a stew of alarming emotions and hit the panic button on your psyche. A few months ago, I wrote an email to a friend laying out my struggle with my dad and what he did, and two days later I could barely get out of bed. Just seeing the words in black and white rattled me to the core. It was a rough couple of weeks after that - and a lot of processing with T.

When you begin to name the abuse and accept it as something that actually happened, you begin to realize that it was not your fault. It couldn't have been your fault. And that can be a very frightening realization, because it means admitting that you were totally vulnerable and lacked any ability to control the situation. The self-sufficient survivor's mind doesn't want to accept that because it assumes that if you lacked control to prevent someone from hurting you once, it could happen again. That's what makes attachment situations so threatening: it involves a type of mutuality where it is impossible to control the other person's feelings. And attachment makes us face this reality head-on.

I know it feels impossible at the moment to move forward. Just give it time and process the feelings slowly. The intensity will begin to subside in a few days. As AG always says, "The good news is, the pain won't kill you." Don't make lasting decisions in the heat of the moment. It sounds like you have an amazing T who can help you work through this. There's nothing you have to protect him from. The monsters are in your past. They aren't you.