Tuesday: Today I’m grateful for feeling…

Overwhelmed then pushed into grief. The internet cut out in the middle of my CODA meeting, which was devastating because I had been waiting days to share my trigger inventory that I filled out over the weekend. Instead I was left alone with this big emotion, like I had been all growing up, and that unleashed a grief/rage in me. I beat the shit out of my cushion and scream/cried a lot, then felt more settled but still sad. I suddenly had two open, uninterrupted hours that had no internet or partner to distract me. So I took on the scrapbook. It was heart wrenching. I could see myself morph through the years to being that angry kid my mom always describes, but the pictures were always of us playing. So it was this weird visual “look, happy things did happen and you had kid experiences,” meanwhile my whole body felt like it was under a weight thinking back to the terror and confusion of that time. They start petering off around the time the abuse got worse then end entirely before I turn 4. My mom made them “so I would know there are good memories to combat the bad ones,” which is not a feel-good reason. 

So fucking sad, all grief. I went into my therapy session not sure what the fuck I was feeling, just overwhelmed by those scrapbooks and unable to properly breathe. After like 15 minutes of talking, I end up wailing and sobbing for the next 45 minutes of the session. I was so embarrassed. I don’t cry in front of people but I needed to so it was a constant struggle between an inner child trying to “SHUT IT DOWN, STOP!! WE’RE NOT SAFE!!!!” and my LIP giving reassurance. I kept muting my device to cry then unmuting to answer a question then muting again. After 10 mins of this I realized I’m not helping myself. So I told my therapist what I had been doing and that I will probably just be crying this session but I’m going to need her to tell me it’s okay to cry, that I’m okay, super frequently or I’ll stop. She was an absolute champ. She said I’m grieving the “death of my childhood innocence, the death of childhood, and all those moments I was alone when I needed to be nurtured.” But fuck was I sad.

Tired, exhausted really, after that cry. I feel regulated, it was a good outburst, but now it’s just me and my latent grief minus all the energy I had earlier in the day. 

Conflicted. Ludvig’s wife texted again since I didn’t respond. Now that I’m in CODA, I have the language to describe all the ways that she felt off-putting to me in our most recent interactions. I had hoped she had used Ludvig’s death as a way to grow too but her message reminded me showed me she’s still doing a lot of the things she used to do. Maybe she’s falling back into old patterns because she’s texting me, I don’t know. But she seems to still be a true martyr- never taking time for her own needs and slowly resenting everyone around her for every time she neglects herself. And I don’t blame her, I’m codependent in my own obvious ways as well. But it always put me in this uncomfortable position because I didn’t know how to refuse her help even though it always felt like it came with emotional strings. So I’m asking myself how I want to move forward. Here’s codependence for you: I don’t want to cut her out even if she doesn’t feel very good to me because we’ve shared so much history. And here’s health for you: so I’ll keep her at a respectful distance, putting up boundaries the whole way, and keeping the line of communication open. She may not want me once I put up boundaries so we’ll see. I also find myself waiting for her to grow, to work through her shit as a condition of us being close again, which does not feel like a healthy approach according to CODA. She has asked for a phone call, which she did months ago and then ignored my message until yesterday. Will update on if that phone call ever happens. 

Devastated with grief. My last photo with my father was when I was 3 and I saw it today. I was standing on a railing and he was standing on the ground, arm wrapped like you would around a shoulder but around the outside of my thigh to keep me from falling. This is as far into the story that I got before I completely lost my shit. I was literally shaking, alternating between hyper-ventilating short, rapid breaths and forcing long breaths that came out in moans. My nails were scraping into my skin, trying to hold myself together as I convulsed next to Cubu while apologizing to him every time I had my wits with me for a second. This lasted maybe 30 minutes, I have no idea. At some point my body just went limp and I could feel myself slowly coming back to the room. I couldn’t have imagined my CSA. If nothing had happened I wouldn’t have had this, right? I’m not an actor, I would never make this out of thin air. I felt possessed. When I saw the photo, I saw nothing in it except his careless hand on my tiny body. I thought about bringing it up to my therapist couldn’t say the words and now I know why. As it was, I had to force myself deliberately to mention anything to Cubu. I feel like I touched the just tip of this iceberg of ravaging sorrow and horror. No fucking wonder I shut this shit down my whole life. Some tiny piece of me feels healed-ish though, or maybe feels acknowledged. God I can’t believe I’m going to keep doing this to myself, I must be fucking crazy. 

Feelin’ good…

I’m so so  grateful to have a partner that doesn’t begrudge me any amount of crying. During that last breakdown he just held me when he could and just stayed present when I was convulsing too much to hold.

River swim, as always, gets its mention. Today I watched a territorial squabble between two species of water herons and got to hear their call, which I had never been able to hear before because the river is usually packed with people. I got to save two beer cans from the river and it was sunny today so the swim felt whimsical. 

I saw my mom in a different light. Yeah she was neglectful and emotionally unavailable, but she really didn’t mean to be. She tried so fucking hard for us to have regular kid experiences, to have fun times punctuating the trauma. It’s hard to be angry with the fallout of her emotional neglect and parentification when I see how much she didn’t want to be that way. And the hours, the love she put into these scrapbooks. I’m grateful my mom was who she was because even with all I’m dealing with now, I love who I am and and excited for who I’m becoming, and I couldn’t exist without that specific mom. 

After the therapy and scrapbooks, my inner kids needed something comforting so I offered them Dairy Queen or Sonic, both favorite fast food chains growing up. They went with Dairy Queen and I did every whim, let them choose the flavor and pick out the brownie pieces, throwing it away before it was finished because they “just wanted the chunks anyway.” I felt so soothed, like what you’d want a parent to do after a rough day. I spent the rest of the evening soothing them in non-food ways.

The day went really well? The internet outage set off a unique chain of events that I don’t think could have happened otherwise. Internet cutting out during CODA meeting –> childhood feelings of neglect breaking down my emotional clog –> time and space for scrapbooks bc no internet –> primed emotional rawness for therapy, which was over the phone bc no internet —> being over the phone let me cry when I normally would have seen her and shut down. It’s entirely possible that without the shortage, I wouldn’t have been able to access that depth of grief and remained clogged. So I’m grateful for it?