Posted by Partlycloudy on October 13, 2008, at 8:56:36
I started another women's support group. This one is much smaller and intimate. Very intimate. Feels quite soothing. There's a psycho education piece that's then followed by some yoga and meditation that ties in with whatever we've been discussing that evening.
The last meeting was the night before I left for a week's trip out of town. The subject was puberty, and, more specifically, our first menstruations. We were asked to recall (silently) what our experiences were. My mom was embarrassed by my changing body and managed to ask whether I'd been shown "The Movie" at school, and Did I Have any Questions? No? Thank goodness. My recollections passed without problem, just some sadness.
During the yoga part of the evening, the instructor told us of her personal experiences; the ignorance of what to do and what to use, and what happened during the course of the day for her. The descriptions were not graphic, but we each could feel her pain in telling her own story. She asked that we think about what had happened to each of us during our experiences that first year.
Out of the blue, I recalled an entire memory of abuse that I experienced. It was suffused with shame, guilt, fear, and embarrassment. I have never told anyone - not anybody - what had happened. I didn't tell my mother, because I feared her anger and accusations that somehow I had brought the horrible experience upon myself. I remember thinking at the time that it was all my fault, because my body had changed, and I had grown breasts. It was all my fault. In recalling the trauma, the same feelings came flooding back at me as clearly and as fresh as if it had just happened a moment ago.
I struggled to sleep that night. I called my therapist from the airport once I had arrived at my destination. Eventually we we able to talk (while I was traveling in a taxi with my husband - terribly awkward). I tried to journal a little bit but all I had to work on was some post it notes which I stuck into the book I had been trying to read - which, of course, I couldn't, all of a sudden. It became a long and difficult week as I tried to NOT think about this event.
I haven't been able to stop thinking about this for the last 8 days. I see my therapist tomorrow. This event happened 35 years ago, and I have managed to stuff it somewhere for all these years until the yoga instructor's gentle words coaxed them out of my mind's recesses. It's hard to process that this is *still* in my past.
poster:Partlycloudy
thread:857180
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20081005/msgs/857180.html