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Page 4 of 6
2/19/99
I was able to rebuild trust with my T in our next meeting. He apologized and explained that there had been some other things going on for him that had prevented him from responding to me the way he should and wanted to. He asked if I could accept that he is fallible. The child feelings wanted to know if it was really ok to be angry or whether he was going to send me away. He said it is ok. Things settled down after that though I was feeling more child-neediness again and also very confused because being more open felt like such a fundamental change and felt so unsafe. I was able to come to accept the child-neediness more, and to believe that it was ok to fall into it because afterwards I come back to feeling strong again.
At the very beginning of February I spent a week away on a business trip. It was a very painful trip, I guess because of all the uncertainty I was feeling about myself plus the uncertainty of beginning a new work project (2-3-99). I came home quite shook up by how much I felt I had hurt myself by pushing myself through the trip.
I drew some pictures with birth imagery, and I kept saying to my T that I hated them because they were so positive and I didn't feel that way (1-23-99). One even showed me bursting through the ice of a frozen pond (2-11-99). A lot of what I have been struggling with is trying, not yet fully successfully, to let out my anger. Last week I had a session in which I went into a memory of my grandmother threatening me and then (moving from memory to remaking the memory) I rose up and pushed her away. I didn't know what I wanted to with her after pushing her away, but still it was a big achievement to be able to go that far. I got very scared and ended up in a child voice who said my abusers were going to kill me now, because I had stood up to them. Then I was angry at my T because he hadn't kept as close to me as I had asked him to do while I was acting out the memory and remaking it. I felt a lot of depression and despair afterwards--I even had a dream that someone was angry at me and yelling at me and I felt that the dream was my punishment for getting angry.
This past Monday I had an extra session with my T and I asked him why the blackness (depression, despair, sense of evil, anger) seemed so much like an outside force that overwhelms me. He just turned the question back to me, and I was gradually able to realize that my task is to claim the darkness as something inside me. I have to be able to divide it up into different levels and types instead of feeling either totally bad or that the darkness is an outside force that overwhelms me. The trouble with that all-or-nothing thinking is that since my abusers were motivated by anger I feel that if I feel any anger then I am just like them.
On Monday I had done a drawing (with oil pastels) just before the session, and as we talked the drawing was an important symbol of the issues I was struggling with (2-15-99). My T asked me about the process of drawing so afterwards I wrote him some details about how in these drawings I try to reproduce as accurately as I can what I see in my unconscious. I wanted to share that process a little more with him, and I had another picture in my mind, so just before my Thursday session I worked on a new picture when I was alone in his waiting room and I didn't put it away before he came out (2-18-99). When he saw me he said, in a rather loud, public voice "Creativity at Work." I was very upset by that.
I was uptight because because he is going away for a week next week, but there was a lot more to why I was upset. As I unpacked that reaction I discovered a lot about the ideas I grew up with about art. There is a whole set of beliefs about how art is not real, it is "using your imagination." Clearly as a child I tried to express my pain and my inner world in art and I was told I was so creative or so imaginative. I wanted to put a sign on my door saying "Don't Laugh at Me" but I knew they would just tease me more. I think in my family's world view art for kids is about imagination, and art for adults is about talent. In any case what is expressed isn't real. Adults who aren't artists don't do art because once you become an adult you know good art from bad art and you know you can't do good art. My mother saw the head I sculpted last summer and she commented on its technical failings. She has never said a word about the quilt I made in 1996 that hangs in our family room. I struggle with whether anyone can know or believe in my inner world.
4/25/99
In mid-March my T had to preach a funeral for a friend and he rescheduled my session on short notice (for the first time in three years of working together). I knew that would trigger a lot (particularly since I had been upset about him going on vacation at the end of February). What came out first when I went down into my feelings was a general memory of my father's death--all the adults around me putting up walls and turning away from me and leaving me alone when they went to the funeral and whatever else. I wanted this to be different so I asked my T to share a little bit of his feelings about his friend's death. He hesitated to say anything so I asked him for just one word about death, and he said "transition". From that and from my sense that his feelings about his friend were there serving as an umbrella to protect my feelings I was able to start to open up some grief and confusion about my father's death. My T said death was relief from suffering, and that didn't connect for me (it doesn't fit my father's death). Then my T said death is bittersweet, that in his pain he knew how much his friend had meant to him. That helped me feel that I didn't have to pretend that my father hadn't been important because otherwise it hurt too much to loose him. It was a very deep experience of "it's ok to feel this way." It wasn't a big explosion but I certainly went further in feeling my grief than I ever have before.
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