Posted by Annabelle Smith on January 30, 2011, at 11:24:40
Sometimes my chest just aches, right in the center. It is like an unnameable chaos, loneliness, depression, and confusion all become heaped upon this center, and it feels crushing.
When I try to go to places and events to help myself, I often leave feeling more ache and loneliness and chaos. This is how I feel when I go sit for an hour at a mindful awareness/meditation class once a week (when I can stand it). This is also how I feel right now, after I have just returned from a church service. The priest administering today is a psychotherapist and also the leader of the mindfulness class that meets weekly. His sermon talked about therapeutic themes in relation to death/resurrection and new life/awakened consciousness and in particular was about what happens when the survival mechanisms that used to work for us no longer work and now even hurt us. I could intimately relate to all that he was saying to my sitution. But being able to do so, made me feel chaos-- there was nowhere to release all of this.
That is what is wrong with me. My survival mechanisms no longer work-- they never did that well, but they at least got me to this point. Being like a mirror, faking it all the time, never being able to be honest with anybody, acting different ways for different people, and I think, unconsciously becoming helpless to get somebody to help and to be close to.
It makes me sick and despairing to think of all of this, but I think it is all true. I left the service feeling a deep ache-- a physical ache-- in the center of my chest, not quite nausea, but verging that way.
I will say this right here:
It happens off the charts in my sessions, but also happens with other authority (particularly male, but sometimes female-- priests/religious leaders, professors, doctors) figures in my life. I want to feel close to them and to get their help. These problems were all there before I entered therapy last year, but upon entering therapy last Feb, everything became so much more intense-- I regressed. I now think that the deep depression and intense suicidal thoughts and other forms of self harm were and are related to the ebb and flow of the therapeutic relationship-- arriving, leaving, closeness, distance. My life became centered upon my session each week-- it became an obsession. Entering the room was safety and salvation, leaving was death. It still is. In sessions, I often become helpless-- not on purpose; it just happens, but I am aware of it happening, and feel powerless to control it. It is a part of me; but also not a part of me.
But here is what I think from research and introspection. I think it makes me bad to admit this; but I will offer a counter voice that says, no, this has just been my survival method and I am doing the best I can. I think my unconscious helpless role is induced in order to become close to my therapist. When I feel depressed, despairing, anxious, and suicidal, then I feel the most connected to my therapist-- it is an at-one-ment. Maybe this makes me afraid of getting better, because this connection will be lost. I need it-- this connection-- to survive. It is the only real connection I have.
And so the pattern repeats itself. And as I fear that my therapist is gone or backing away, these feelings increase.
poster:Annabelle Smith
thread:978259
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20101228/msgs/978259.html