Healing preview

I thought I should map out a rough idea of where posts are going for the next few weeks.

A lot of this will be familiar if you have been reading this blog for a long time and have an excellent memory for things you read about someone else's life. The combined unlikelihood of that makes some review necessary.

You may of course remember some things that resonated with you personally, but remembering all the pieces and how the fit together is less likely; you have your own issues. Even for me, I understand how they fit together differently now.

The parts that I have visited pretty regularly are events that happened when I was in first grade, ninth grade, and 11th grade. Normally I think of those in chronological order, but I decided to do a section of expressive writing for each of them, and I did them in reverse. 

I don't know that taking them in that order mattered so much, but it felt like the way to go, and intuition has been a big part of the entire journey... combined with a lot of reading.

The expressive writing (I will go over that term, I promise) first round happened in August of 2020. Another three life events that happened between about 3 and 6 years old took on greater importance, but again, those were things that I had written about before. It wasn't that I didn't know, but I knew them better.

As I write this now, it seems significant that I started doing this again shortly after getting Mom settled into memory care. It seems relevant, but I had been working on my emotional health for a while so it felt like a natural extension of what I was doing. 

That's the thing; there is always more to notice.

Therefore, it should not have been particularly surprising that in October I started another round of expressive writing, this time focusing on a deep depression I went through on my mission, and contributing factors that I had never noticed. 

That was followed by a big life shift in early high school that I did not recognize as a reaction to what happened in 9th grade at the time (but it very clearly was) as well as something pretty critical that happened in second grade. 

Overall, some of the writing took things farther out, and some of it filled in blanks. It turns out everything is connected and super-logical, though largely in a sad way.

This gives us six life event themes, I guess, but also several books as well as one really important technique with the expressive writing. 

I am also going to write about three other techniques. I don't believe a single one of them worked the way they were supposed to, but I nonetheless had valuable experiences with them. 

Here is an important caveat from one of my favorite books, A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis:

“What Richard Selzer, M.D. once wrote of surgery is true of therapy: only human love keeps this from being the act of two madmen.”

If it can be hard to find a therapist who is a good fit, surely there are also risks to becoming your own therapist. 

I cannot swear to what is a good idea for anyone else. I used a cycle of reading and intuition; that's intuition about what to read and what to use. There are techniques I have never tried that could be good, but they haven't felt like priorities. 

I can only relate what my experiences have been. When there were fears or safeguards in place, I will include that information in the posts.

For the record, my counseling referral never came through, and it might not even be that useful. I am not depressed now, and I understand why pretty well.

I still do not rule it out. There are some practices that can't be done on my own and would need a facilitator. There could be unrealized benefits from them. When writing about my 11th grade trauma, I discovered a gap in my memory. Would EMDR bring it out? I don't know. I also don't know if it is important, but I don't rule out that it might be.

That just reinforces my commitment to universal health care with mental health parity. For now, I am working with what I have.