Pain, Anger, and Helplessness

I'm going to try my best here. Hope you can follow along. If you can't, I totally get it.

Anyway, my therapist tells me I should journal more when I have days like I had yesterday. I'm good at nurturing myself and doing my self-care, but not actually processing what's being brought up for me. Long story short, an abusive partner to one of my clients completely violated the therapeutic safety of my office through sneaky, borderline illegal means. I felt angry, powerless, and disappointed in myself for letting it happen (I know that's not true as I am not responsible for their actions, it's just where my feelings were).

I could barely contain my reactivity while my client was in session with me. I felt like I was going to explode afterwards as I wandered the hallways looking for a supervisor to resolve the professional end of the problem. After I did that, I vented and ugly cried with my very good friend and bridesmaid Lauren. Then I set up some home self-care with my husband, ate something, drank something, and did a "loving kindness" meditation (which gave me a lot of mixed feelings because it made me picture someone I dislike and direct loving kindness towards them.... grrrrr). I did the self-care thing as well as I possibly could.

What I didn't do, which my therapist pointed out to me, was process what the situation was bringing up for me - my painful childhood. I hate acknowledging it. I hate that it means anything about me. I hate this thing that's a part of me that I didn't do to myself. I like to ignore it, and my therapist says I actually do really good things while ignoring it, it's just that the central problem never gets resolved and so it makes it more likely that it'll get triggered again at a later date in a similar way.

Professionally, I know he's right. Emotionally, I don't want to go there. I'm a therapist and I see my clients do this all the time. In my last entry I talked about my reluctance to engage in further work if any more relational trauma should happen to me. Maybe that wasn't the most therapeutic way of thinking, but it was honest. Still, I think I want to do the work now. Let me begin:

Some of you know, but for those who don't I am a survivor of child abuse. It didn't happen every day, and it wasn't life-threatening, but it was insidious and there were times I truly thought my abuser was going to kill me. I had to lie about why I was sad. I had to lie about bruises and welts and scabs. As the title of this entry suggests I felt pain, anger, and helplessness because of what happened to me. As a child, I was unable to conceive of the fact that what was happening to me had nothing to do with me. I received the message that I'm bad, that I shouldn't do this, and I shouldn't do that, and it was important for me to know these things because it seemed like it was a matter of my survival.

I don't know if I'm doing this right. I think I'm not going to the feeling place enough. Anyway...

It wasn't until about 7 years ago I started to realize that the trauma I experienced actually made me forget about things that happened when I was a child. These memories have come back over the years and... it's not been pretty. I feel pain. I feel anger. I feel helpless. I feel frustrated because I feel these things. "You shouldn't feel that way," I've told myself. "You should be better after over 7 years of therapy. You should be better because you're a therapist and your clients deserve better. You shouldn't be so reactive."

Yeah, I'm pretty harsh on myself so it helps to turn it around and imagine I'm saying this to a 3-year-old. That's probably when the abuse started. Of course, that's absurd. I would never say those things to a 3-year-old, but that's the age I was when this started and it didn't end until I was around 13. I wouldn't expect any of my clients to get over a decade of abuse in less time than the abuse occurred - or ever. You don't really get over this stuff, really. You just build greater understanding and learn better self-care.

Where else does my mind go? "You're not good enough. You're certainly not good enough for men, so keep irrationally wanting their approval." I was surprised at my insight with my therapist here: my father was gone by the time I was three years old. Growing up with the abuse I did it I coped in part by projecting my desires for a safe, loving, approving parent who didn't exist. Had my father stayed he wouldn't have been that man for me. Even knowing this, I get angry and embarrassed. What is wrong with me? I shouldn't feel this way!

It's all the same. I'm tired. I feel like I've done enough for the day.

Oh, but in closing, that's why I had such a bad reaction to an abuser violating my therapeutic space I tried to provide for my client. I work hard to understand abusers and I know they can change (mine did) but when I'm triggered I just want abusers to stop breathing my air.

Yeah, that's it for now. Time for bed.