Learned

I've talked before about learned helplessness. A lot of mental health and trauma is about what you've learned. I have a lot of knowledge and insight on mental health in general and my mental health in particular, but I still need a therapist to help me put some pieces together and force me to do the work I've been avoiding, so today Dr. Mooney put a positive spin on the things I view negatively about my mental health. I've already worked hard at understanding that my depression developed, in part, to rescue me from the intense feelings I had as a child going through horrific child abuse, but I didn't go so far as to extend that understanding and compassion towards the rebound effect I have: mainly numbing and suicidal thoughts.

Dr. Mooney's take on this is that these are learned behaviors. I don't remember my mom threatening to kill herself before I was about 15 years old, but she very well could have, given that my memory is not reliable about my traumatic past. I very quickly learned back then that this was my mom's way of shutting down the conversation. She didn't want to have difficult conversations or face what she'd done, except the very few times I can remember her calling me to her room and looking me over for the damage she'd done. She would cry those few times and hug me and promise she wasn't going to do it any more. She broke those promises.

Anyway, same goes for the numbing. My mom very clearly taught me that I wasn't allowed to feel completely rational things about my abuse, so it's what I do now. Furthermore, both of these reactions are only trying to protect me, as bizarre as it might sound to say thoughts about killing yourself are actually trying to protect. The truth is, I've never actually went as far as trying to kill myself. I've always stopped, because, in part, that was not part of my learning. To my knowledge, my mother never tried to kill herself either, only threatened whenever things got hard and she wanted to stop talking about those hard things.

My therapist also pointed out that these can't be bad things because I survived and thrived in part because of these protective factors. God, it's hard to love these parts of myself that I have only seen as incredibly ugly and upsetting, but maybe I'm building towards greater understanding of myself as a beautiful, strong survivor who learned what she had to along the way.

Next assignment: a letter to my little brother. I won't post that publicly. It's not for the public. It's for him.