Healing and Hurt

The last few days have been kind of difficult. I’ve had a lot of grief bubbling up. A friend and I discuss a lot of things in depth. We go down rabbit holes about psychology, embodiment, trauma... all the things, really. There is some overlap between her and a therapist I used to work with, so sometimes just her presence can trigger the grief on its own. But really, it’s our conversations that bring a lot of it up. Today she sent me a video of an autistic therapist talking ab

I really don’t know how to cope with the kind of pain that is coming up in therapy. With no support system outside of therapy, it’s hard to feel like I can make it through it. I’m so exhausted and scared, and I want to believe it gets better. But right now, it feels like I’m suffocating on my own fear. I need help for my emotions around getting help. I need the pain to stop.

I’m experiencing a lot of distress right now, and I’m not sure why. My session wasn’t anything deep. I know I need to talk to her about the pain my attachment system is causing me, but idk how and idk that it would help. I’m trying to remind myself this is part of therapy, and that hopefully if I do enough work, this pain will subside. But I’m scared it won’t, and honestly it’s making it really hard not to pull away. I know that one of the main problems is that I don’t have a

I just got out of a therapy session, and I feel like I'm losing my ability to engage with the world. At the same time, I don't know how to let my therapist in. Most of the time, I physically can't. I don't know how to cope with all of this grief anymore. It feels never-ending—a constant loop of grieving multiple people. I feel alone in the world, like I don't have anyone who cares about me or loves me. Sometimes I just want to let go because I don't see things getting better.

A really big part of me wants to reach out and ask for a closing session. I'm not going to. It's been a year. I did a lot of things that would make it a big clinical and professional risk for a clinician to feel enough comfort to be open to that. Whether I agree with every decision that was made or not, I can understand that. Mostly, though, I want the closing session because I want to understand. I want to understand what was happening in her mind. What she was thinking and

Something in me wants to self-sabotage. I can feel it. I can hear it. It's attached itself to something that has been relatively innocuous for a while now, but because I am more terrified of loss than I have been in a long time, the thoughts are suddenly louder. They're pushing me to bring it up. To start an argument. To create a rupture and force an ending before an ending can happen to me. And for the first time in my life, I can hear it while it's happening. This level of

Yesterday I found out about an overlap between my personal life and my therapy, and I am terrified that I will lose my therapist. All I seem able to do is cry and try to figure out whether talking about the fear would help or whether keeping my mouth shut is the better choice. Carrying the fear alone is hard. But I'm scared that if I talk about it, that will be the thing that causes everything to fall apart. I'm not naive. I know there are other therapists out there. I know s

I’m hoping this month, this year, is kinder than the last two. Earlier today I read a post from a therapist about affirming therapy. They wrote about how, when a client from a population you don’t belong to tells you how they feel, you can’t respond from defensiveness. Reading it brought something back to the surface that I thought had settled. I felt angry. My first instinct was to let that anger rewrite my own story, to make the post about what happened between my former th

I just read a Reddit thread about someone who emailed a therapist pretty venomously after the therapist told them they couldn’t take them on pro bono. I could see the shame in the post and, while their behavior was toxic, I couldn’t help but feel for them. The situation is different from mine, but similar enough that it touched something in me. Of course, they’re being eaten alive in the comments because their behavior wasn’t okay. And while I understand why people are respon

I’m reading a psychologically oriented book, and it’s bringing up a lot of anger about one of the therapists I worked with. It’s talking about things in a much more nuanced way than I experienced at times in her office, and it carries a level of humility and compassion that I wish I could have received in the final moments of our work together, the moments that ultimately left me feeling harmed. I don’t really like saying she harmed me, but I also know what I’ve experienced s

I just realized… or rather, was finally able to feel, how much my therapist matters to me now. I know she always has in some sense, but the full weight of it really just hit me. Like, fuck. I can count on her. She’s the one stable, consistent person in my life right now, and the way I need that feels like a water lily sitting in the middle of a desert. I’m crying as I write this because it scares me. But it also feels profoundly healing to be able to feel that she matters. I

Moments like this are what sometimes make it hard to want to keep going. I have linked grief. One area of grief triggers another, and suddenly it isn’t just one loss I’m feeling. It’s all of them. I have experienced a lot of loss over the past three years. Some of it expected. Some of it sudden. Some of it entirely my own doing. None of it feels fully resolved. One memory brushes against another. One goodbye wakes up ten more. One ache reminds me of every other ache I’ve been

I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts for a couple of hours now, but it’s been difficult because I’m pretty dysregulated. I had a session in person today because I was already in the city for a doctor’s appointment and wanted to take advantage of being able to go in person while I was there. The thing is, in-person sessions are a lot more activating for me. Especially now that my attachment system is activated with her. Leaving causes a surge of grief that feels suffocatin

It didn’t hurt any less today. Every step I took replayed in my head on the drive to donate plasma. I hate who I was in those moments. I was caught inside a perception that felt completely true. A reality I couldn’t see beyond. And by the time I realized it was only one lens among many, the damage had already been done. I don’t know when I’ll be able to escape the shame of that. Or if I ever really will. There are versions of me that haven’t existed in over a decade that I st

Grief is sitting with me heavy tonight. I can’t bring myself to write it out. To let it live beyond my mind, because I fear it’ll hurt worse. As I typed that, it felt more like a need to let it out, but I’m filled with fear of opening that door. When I came into my room tonight, my mat was hanging on the wall. The poems I never took down from my bathroom sink are still up, untouched. They remind me of one of the moments of kindness shown to me throughout our work together. A

There are moments where shame stops feeling like an emotion and starts feeling like an identity. Today feels like that. Everything keeps replaying in my head... every mistake, every loss, every moment where I was too much, too emotional, too dysregulated, too needy, too intense. I keep trying to understand why I react the way I do, why I struggle so much to regulate myself when emotions become overwhelming. Part of me thinks if I could just find the answer, maybe I could fina

I had a dream about my second therapist last night. I don’t know why, but whenever I dream about her, she’s always a teacher. Usually, I’m a student in her class, and she’s really angry with me and won’t talk to me. The not talking to me part makes sense, given everything that happened. I just wish I wouldn’t dream about it, because it wakes up a deep grief that I don’t really feel unless I have dreams like this, or something reminds me of the work I did with her, or I start

Today is my ex’s birthday, and reflecting on how good of a person she is, how much she adds to this world, has also brought up grief for me. The grief of losing her as a partner. Alongside that grief, there is also acceptance. There is understanding. And it still hurts to sit with that reality. The more internal work I do, the more the layers start to peel back, the more I realize how hard life with me can be for other people. I don’t mean that in a self-deprecating way, just

I’m having a hard time right now with letting go of the fact that there’s not much chance for my ex and I working things out in a way that puts us back into each other’s lives as romantic partners. We had a heart to heart where she told me she doesn’t know when she fell out of love with me, but it’s been for some time. That’s fair. I haven’t really been much of a partner to be in love with. I think it still hurts even though I know a lot of the downfall is on me. I made a lot

You know how in horror movies, when someone is abducted and kept in a house, it’s always a locked door that leads down to a basement, which leads to another door, which leads to a long dimly lit hallway, and then to another door where the person actually is? And then every so often in those movies, the person who was abducted manages to escape the room. They make it through the hallway, up out of the basement, and to the front door of the house. Sometimes they even make it a