Posted by Annabelle Smith on July 9, 2011, at 0:55:35
In reply to Re: Do you cry in therapy?, posted by Lamdage on July 4, 2011, at 9:46:56
Lamdage,
Thank you for asking. I am just trying to hold it all together.
I feel so fragile, as if reading a certain book, watching a certain film, having a certain conversation, engaging in a certain experience could send me shattering into fragments. I feel like I am trying to hold the pieces together as best I can. Different pieces come out in different circumstances. But sometimes it feels like everything is on the verge of shattering and disintegrating. Sometimes even the words are hard to pull together, and I find myself unable to write and especially speak. I fear losing my language. Sometimes when I speak it is like I hear a voice, and I know it is mine, but I do not feel in control of it-- the words seem distant and foreign.
It's like I have to always tread with extreme caution. This has to do with feeling fake, feeling split, as if there are two or more parts of myself that come out as different ways of being. Inside I can occasionally feel one way-- a more true way-- while on the outside, I am faking it. The true self watches the fake self in disgust and heightening despair, but is uanble to act.
I feel like my therapist is the only center in my chaos, holding my fragments together. He is my touchstone to reality. Sometimes in sessions, we have spent time talking about how what I am feeling and have been feeling for the past year(s) is real. He tells me that what I have been feeling certainly is real and that I have felt it. He is so important-- essential-- to me because he shares a history with me;he is my only true witness to the hell and my only channel to feeling real. He has told me that I need to open up to others. I have told him that I know, and I will have to do so on my own time. I need to find a way to reintegrate the pieces or else I will shatter and crack. But to force them together is not true either and will also, I think, lead to disentegration.
I feel like there is a pearl-- my greatest treasure, perhaps my true self, depth, and reality-- that I have been cultivating all of my life. It can't be shared with just anyone, as over a casual dinnertime conversation. It develops over time as a real relationship unfolds. I am afraid of it being cheapened and trashed, tossed aside and ultimately taken from me, its worth stripped away. And being left with absolutely nothing.
Summer is a very painful season for me, only rivaled and perhaps even exceeded by autumn. It brings an unbearable longing, a grief and feeling of loss and an awakened desire for I know not what. There are images and whole experiences that come and go, sometimes rapidly and in succession, overlapping. They bring me feelings of grief and loss, and leave me with an emptiness and a need to mourn I know not exactly what and therefore even how.
It has something to do with windchimes blowing in the cool, fragrant summer breeze; sailboats on the water; balloons floating over the big city; the scent of fresh-mown grass; a hospital; holding my mom tight and smelling, nearly tasting her perfume; smoke from the grill; the loneliest sound of crickets chirping and the unbearable emptiness into which that opened; the aroma of supper cooking, wafting through the hot summer evening; running through the meadow; a little boy smiling the most beautiful smile, his eyes so full of color and life, being up against his body, feeling his moist, soft skin, inhaling the scent of his body amidst the grass and dirt. And then there is the morning air, the feeling of fullness and life, a feeling that comes from another place, a world that feels most familiar yet most lost.
My therapist is now on the second of his two trips for the summer. Our next meeting will be two weeks from the one before. That is almost impossible for me. He hesitantly offered to do a phone session or check-in on his holiday, but although I would of course have wanted that, I said no. I want him to be able to be away from all of this. He needs it. I don't know where he is at right now-- I bet he is in France. That has been my guess all along. I miss him so much. It will be 10 days until we meet again. I think I will make it; but it hurts.
poster:Annabelle Smith
thread:989784
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20110706/msgs/990601.html