Hey there,

Nice to meet you! I don't have to time to reply now but just wanted to welcome you and say hello.

Liese

Hi there. Just want to welcome you to the site. Lots of great people here.

I can't tell you what to do in this circumstance, or would even try to tell you. I think you know deep inside if this is right for you or not. When I deal with my past it is horrendous for me. I always want to die and run and hide. I hate myself and everything about my life. I want to quit T and never look back. BUT..... I also know deep down that if I don't get this stuff out in the open and let it go its own course, I am going to be stuck here forever. It hurts, it's confusing, and it certainly sucks, but by sticking with it, I think it will finally at some point be done. I know I am not ready to give up on T just yet. However, the option of leaving is always, at some point gonna be there.

I think you should do whatever you feel is the thing to do. Maybe you just need a break.

Smiley

quote:

How do I stop being so distracted and how do I will more of myself to be present? At these times Im observing but not present. Is it good or bad that young parts of me waant a voice in counseling? Will those parts move me forward towards healing or away? I dont trust them either. I always believed that hating those young parts that remember and ignoring and not needing or wanting them would take away their power and keep me more whole. But Im trying to learn to love every part of me for better or worse. I dont know if Im moving towards healing or away from it.

Hi Remember,
It’s ultimately your decision about how you handle your healing and the answer I’m about to give you is directly from my experience and may not be true for you, but since you asked I want to offer what worked for me in the hope it might help you.

Counter to your experience, which I know is difficult, painful and confusing at this stage it is a really good thing that the young parts of you want a voice. Your experience of being distracted and not able to be present is a very strong indication that you are disassociating. It is a common defense mechnism and especially common in people who experienced long term childhood abuse. We learned to not be present in order to endure and survive what was being done to us. Do this long enough and you also split off your experiences, storing them away from conscious memory because they were too overwhelming and terrifying to deal with at that time because of a lack of resources from being very young, and in the case of abuse from a caregiver, the person who should be helping you to deal with overwhelming experiences is the person actually causing the overwhelming experience, so you have NO way to deal with your emotions. So you put them away. Do this long enough and often, we start to split ourselves into states which we experience as younger parts of ourselves. Each of these states often has a purpose and stores the memories related to that purpose. The purpose of therapy is to bring these states and their memories into consciousness so that we can integrate those memories and parts so that we are a whole person.

We often hate and don’t want to listen to these parts because they hold the pain and memories we don’t want to know, but whether we listen to them or not, they are still a part of us. And the unprocessed memories and feelings take an emotional toll on us. You are not consciously aware of it, but it takes a great deal of energy to hold all that down. Not to mention that since you are staying away from whole parts of yourself, there are also many kinds of situations and choices you avoid because to go near them would evoke the memories you’re trying to avoid, so you become rigid and inflexible in terms of how you deal with life. Essentially you are still behaving as if you only had a child’s resources and a child’s choices because to do anything else can feel too dangerous.

Letting the little parts of you speak, and learning to accept and learn to love them, is essentially learning that all of you is acceptable and worthy of love. And as you let them speak and are able to express their memories and emotions with your therapist there to hear and understand, you will also learn to understand yourself and why you do things, and be able to make changes. And as you clear things out, there is less need for you to “go away” and you’ll slowly learn to stay present, even when dealing with intense emotions and memories.

You are in one of the most difficult stages of therapy, I think. You are starting to let go of your old defense mechnisms, of splitting and disassociating, but you have not yet learned new, healthier ways of coping. That’s part of the really hard work of therapy, being with your therapist and learning how to do things in a new way. You are also letting things come out that you have held down for years, and it would never have been put away like that, if those memories weren’t really difficult, painful and overwhelming. My T often talked about how people come to therapy expecting things to get better, but in the beginning, it usually gets worse before it gets better.

I do want you to know though, Remember, that there is another side and it’s possible to heal. Not very easy and this won’t be the first time you question whether or not you should put yourself through this, but you will feel better. I have been where you are and am really grateful that I went through it as my life is much better for it. And this forum is a good place to get support while you’re going through it. Hope this helps and please feel free to ask any questions it may bring up.

AG

AG thank you for that wonderful and easily understandable explanation of something that is really hard for me to articulate even though I do understand what happens and the process. You were able to put it into words for me. So thank you

Hugs
TN