Taco and Irving Berlin feels like a good Wednesday track to have on in the background as I attempt to tell you all about this week’s therapy dance.
Therapy Dance.
The back and forth of epiphany and fearful refusal with an audience. I am fighting the malaise that always follows my sessions. Fighting my impulse to melt back into old truths, protecting people who aren’t here to be offended: so it’s true that they shoulda helped me. And they didn’t. I needed more. I had feelings that were real and legit and I was too little as a kid to have what I needed to process and let go. They shoulda and it didn’t work out that way and I created some coping mechanisms to deal and so now, when the child logic reptile brain coping mechanisms fuck me up, I gotta help me out with some actual real tenderness. And there’s a lot of seething, roiling masses within that are terrified about a universe where I’m loose and out of the straitjacket.
Metaphorically.
But that’s the way forward to open connection and intimacy and shit, surely? I sleep like a mummy, I don’t like the notion of a body and its mouth on walkabout whilst I sleep, I sit crosslegged and coil up. I attempt to disappear into the corner of the couch. What if, we didn’t, though? That does seem to be the ultimate answer of the therapy these days. What if all these things you do to yourself that are so physically unpleasant for you – what if we did them a little less? What if we stopped? Imagine.
I keep feeling like there’s these responses to lace up the corset, to step into the cage, to pinch my face back up into the smile that used to be there without a thought, but I can’t…do it automatically anymore. I can’t just sacrifice myself in that way again, I’m not physically allowing it. Which is a bit scary as an itinerant people pleaser to discover. I want to snap to, I want to get these ducks in a row, I want to know my limits and fit into the small, tight block that used to contain every one of my multitudes. And now, it’s sloppy and I’m not fighting that hard. I’m not afraid in the same way, which makes me afraid in a new way.
Soon, we’ll be without the moon, humming a different tune
I ended up with a bunch of big pronouncements and confessions for the therapist. Assertions. That I had evidence that I was alright, that I was deserving, that I’d worked on myself and I was a good person, a good soul. I wasn’t just this forgotten child, rejected because I was weird. It was so many things, surely in part something akin to RSD, and I’d come a long way from that. A whirling, insistent flamenco of a therapy dance.
It was nice to say it out loud, let it be in the air. Stand up for myself and my little head doing the best she could as a girl. If I could let every thought come and go so easily. I did some crying, but it was not *too* much. Even that seems silly to worry about, but I worry about it. The over-the-top catharsis somehow shaming me. I don’t feel that from the therapist, I feel it from me. Still, I am apart from versions of myself and ways of being I’d really like to reconnect with and if this what it takes…I’m there to try.
So, with that, the day has begun. I’ve read a little, I’ve earned some points in this gamification of my life, and post-lunch, unfortunately, my stomach has turned. I am unable to complete a paragraph or stay settled for a moment. Maybe it was bad beef shin in the pasta I bought. Or something. Mass exodus. One never knows when things go bad so readily here, refrigerationally. Maybe it’s the electrolytes and water finally flushing things in the system. Maybe it’s the therapy trying to wake me up, shake me loose. Apologies, I am delighted to share my gastrointestinal minutiae – far better than anything relevant to anyone.
The question that keeps spinning for me: By saying all this, thinking it, am I free? Am I at least on my way?
