From October 2009:
I kinda got dragged into therapy. It started out with members of our family seeing the therapist because of a family crisis. Then, during a session where it was just me, something really triggering happened and it seems like the next thing I knew, I was having weekly sessions and trying to finally process my rape. I thought 6 sessions would pretty much fix me. I thought we'd deal with the rape only and then everything would be hunky-dory.
Wrong. I can't believe how wrong I was.
Somehow, in the context of dealing with my PTSD and rape, reading stuff, and trying to work through this mess, all these other issues started coming to the surface. Stuff I thought was no big deal. Stuff I thought I was long over. Stuff I was in major denial over. Somehow my mind-reading therapist knew all that stuff existed and was even able to figure out what some of it was before I told him.
That's bad enough. But the really hard thing is that Randy is not in favor of leaving things sealed up in a box, deeply buried. He seems to belive that some sort of toxic mess manages to ooze out and poison the rest of my life.
So yesterday we were dealing with the contents of one of those boxes. After I'd finished reading my journal to him, he started restating what I'd written.
I tried to argue with his choice of words, but I had to admit he was being accurate.
"You're making it sound so horrible!" I protested.
"It was horrible," he said.
I left the session feeling, for the most part, that sense of relief that comes from unburdening painful secrets and not having the therapist gasp in horror and disgust. Unfortunately that didn't last all that long. Feelings I didn't even know I had hit me like a sledgehammer.
The grief and anger is kinda overwhelming right now.
I've spent all my life carefully maintaining this fiction that my family was near-perfect and I had a near-perfect childhood that was marred only by school. My parents were wonderful. It made no sense that we had issues because our parents were the best parents in the world. My brother was the best brother.
For some reason, Randy wasn't buying this idyllic picture. He didn't think, for example, that my depression at age 14 was just teenage moodiness brought on by my making a big deal out of nothing. He didn't think I was humorless and over-sensitive.
Gradually stuff has come out. I've disclosed some really painful stuff. He has used awful words to describe it, words I never wanted to attach to my family, words I'd like to argue with but can't.
So I'm grieving over the loss of that near-perfect family. I'm grieving over having to admit that some of the people I love the most in the world hurt me in ways I can't bring myself to write about. I'll never have an answer to my question of "Why did you do all that? How could you?" I've lost this pretty picture I had painted and, in it's place all I have is confusion, grief, and anger.
It does get better. It's a painful process, facing the ugly truth, but it is the only way to healing. It's worth it...eventually.
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