No, I have never regularly attended therapy, but I did do two sessions a few months apart with the friend of a friend when she visited from out of town.
She was a member of my church, so we shared a belief system. I was very interested in the methods. She used muscle testing to focus on key ages as a way of guiding the issues. If you think that sounds hokey, I get it, but I had seen some things done with muscle testing for physical health that had impressed me, and I was at least open to it.
In fact, when I talk about things that happened when I was 6 and 14 and 17, it was those sessions with Lisa where it started to make sense to me why some memories were so sharp for me, and the significance they'd had.
That was over two sessions. One of the most important ages was 31, and Reed, because in fact I had turned 32 by the time the session happened. I still don't think it lasted for more than a year, but the time passed was significant.
As we got to the heart of my problem -- not merely feeling unloved but that love wasn't possible -- she took me through some things and asked me if I could know that I could be loved.
I could not, but I was also sure that if I said that she would want to talk about it more. I did not want to talk about it more. I believed she would try and convince me and I was not ready to be convinced.
So I told her "yes", but I did not mean it.
There are a few different issues here, so it does get messy, but I want to try and touch on them.
First of all, unwillingness to heal is a problem. With patients suffering from combat-related PTSD, there is often a sense that healing would betray the unit members that they lost. Survivor's guilt can be an issue.
It might be worth thinking about how an overemphasis on the value of the purity of a woman and analogies about chewed up gum might be damaging for people whose trauma stems from rape. That's not my issue, but it seems worth thinking about.
For me, I was used to knowing that something was wrong with me, and that was not tied to any specific event, but predated memory. Furthermore, it had been made quite clear through advertising and entertainment and other sources that beauty was a debt that women owe to men, and that beauty is incompatible with fat.
It was a lot of conditioning to get over in two sessions.
I think it was reasonable that I did not get past it then, but it does bother me that I lied. Honesty is important to me, and it is certainly important to healing.
There is another thing here, though, in that most of the times that I have lied, it has been because someone asked me something that they didn't have a right to know. There are certainly cases where refusing to answer is a very clear answer, but there is a lot to be said for being able to say, "That is none of your business. I do not owe you that information."
Though it is probably not the most productive way of answering your therapist.
It was my assumption that she would not let me stop there, not ready to move on, but I don't really know that. Not pushing people past where they are able to go is actually a thing that comes up a lot in therapy, and there is probably training about that. I probably could have been honest in that respect, though maybe admitting it would have its own pain.
I believe it can also be good to keep in mind that not being ready for something at one time does not rules out future readiness. Of course, that might have felt like hope, and hope was what got me into that mess in the first place.
At the root there was an unwillingness to be loved as I was; I wanted to get better and earn love instead.
Getting past that was going to require discovering my anger, and understanding my body better, and even before that finding many people who did not think they were worthy of love either. I knew they were wrong, but knowing it gave me this vague sense of being a hypocrite.
It has been a long path.
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