Part 4 of 4

I went to my employee assistance program. I was told I could receive 5 free sessions of counseling. I chose a provider and made an appointment with huge amounts of anxiety about the entire process. I could not fathom telling the appointment setter about my problems so that the reason for my visit could be conveyed to the provider. I was overcome with shame just to begin the process, but I persevered because I knew that I could not let things continue as they were.

My first counselor as an adult was a very soothing and gentle older woman who called me pet names and seemed to think of me as a grandchild. She saw adults and children in her office. There were a lot of toys and games and things associated with child therapy, which was familiar and comforting to me from my own sessions after childhood sexual abuse. She taught me relaxation and self-guided meditation techniques, and she monitored my heart rate and pupil dilation with biofeedback mechanisms. She had me hold “the buzzers” to create soft pulses in my hands to generate the bilateral stimulation needed to process trauma.

She asked me to keep a calendar of how often I felt angry. I went fully “Type A” with this project and I color-coded various emotions to monitor my day to day. I had green for good, red for angry, gray for “blah for no reason” and black for rage above and beyond what the situation called for. I didn’t have any colors for joy and happiness because it didn’t occur to me. I didn’t see a lot of green on the calendar in those days.

Many days were a block of gray, a block of red, then a block of black. Most days were just gray because I always felt bad for no specific reason that I could place.

Nowadays, I have reams of specific reasons why I would feel bad during that time, and I talk about all of them openly and freely. I had been abused by everyone I knew for the first 30 years of my life.

I thank God every day that I felt that internal push to get help.

No one else encouraged me towards it. In fact it was not to anyone else’s benefit that I was going to get better. My shift towards reclaiming myself meant that boundaries were needed. Dysfunctional family systems cannot sustain authentic identities and boundaries.

My entire world flipped over and dumped out all the people who were in it, and I started to learn about what true work really is.