Day 8 What’s preventing?

After reading @WesternShores day 1 post, i was inspired to look more closely at the timing between my Dad’s death, my extreme descent into pain, the gradual (6 weeks) subduing of lower back-pelvis-hip-leg-sciatica pain, and now the massive eruption of itchy skin (all over) and rash-boils (herpes?) on my private parts. It feels like i have been doing a lot of work on the rage, grief, guilt, regret around the deaths of my father (old age), my mother (COPD, UTI), my sister (breast cancer), and my brother (glioblastoma) and that now i’m going deeper. Things that never needed to surface are coming up. i decided to do the Day 8 letter excercise to my professor who took advantage of me on the river’s edge one flirtatious drunken summer night 25 years ago but i kept adding context rather than just accessing the emotions. What prevented me from recognizing the emotions connected to my pain? I think i’ve built such a strong wall of rational thinking that it’s really hard for my emotions to get through. It feels similar to my experience of dreams. Every once in a while i get a short small peek at a dream but its so fleeting that i have very little to work with. I’m on week 4 of my once/week psychotherapy sessions. I’m getting prepped for EMDR. At first we were going to do an EMDR session with my 5 yr old experience of boys stopping me on the playground and telling me to lower my underpants, but the grief, guilt, rage, regret that surfaced when talking about my sister’s death seemed to be where i was most emotively bound up so we’ll go there first. Maybe freeing that logjam will help free all (some?) of the others?

 

Possibly! I like the idea of connecting with your inner child - try and let them feel and be compassionate whilst avoiding going to logic and rational thinking (because your younger self really doesn't care about that!)