I once described my menstrual cramps as an angry squirrel
attempting to claw its way out of my uterus… well, that’s similar to how I’m
feeling this week, but worse.
I have reached a point in therapy that is nearly
unbearable. In previous posts, I have
referred to HEP (Holistic Experiential Process) as a journey through the levels of hell, but I had no idea then what still lay in store. My therapist says that I’ve come to the point
in the process where I am “coming into my body”. After a lifetime of disassociation, I’m
finally becoming grounded in my body.
Well, after 32 years of disuse, it hurts!
Whatever pain, trauma, tension, hurt, anger, rage,
sadness or any other type of emotion that has been stored in my body is now making
its way to the surface. I had a full on
panic attack (which I have NEVER had before!!!). Nervous breakdown? Sure. But, panic
attack? NEVER!!! This was especially strange because I have
been extraordinarily happy. Painfully
happy, actually. So happy it literally
hurts. This is where the panic stems
from. I’m afraid of being so happy. I started becoming irrationally delusional
about my apartment being infested with bed bugs (even though I didn’t see a
single bug in my place). It would wake
me up at night and I would spend at least an hour searching my apartment and
then another researching how to find the bugs which were clearly hiding from me
before I could go back to sleep. I would
feel bugs crawling on me throughout the day.
It was crazy – literally.
My therapist was able to talk me down when this paranoia
culminated in a total meltdown in her office this week. She said it likely stems from the fear of my
mother’s energy infiltrating my life.
The idea that because I’m happy, it will all be tainted or taken away by
an external force, much like it was when I was a child. The panic lie in the terror of waiting for
the other shoe to drop. I want to know
what is going to come take away my joy.
It’s so terrifying that I began creating issues in my own mind in order
to balance out the joy. I couldn’t be
that happy. There had to be something
wrong. I need tragedy to survive. Being happy is unbearable.
Over the past couple days, I have been able to get the
panic under control. Alyssa (my
therapist) pointed out that the feeling of bugs crawling on me was likely my
psycho-somatic way of dealing with the feeling of awakening in my body. I have been unaware of external stimulus and
now I feel the dirtiness of the world I’m in.
She said she went through something similar. I still feel the itching all over my body
pretty much all day, though now that I know the rationale behind it, I am able to
live with it and begrudgingly embrace it.
I still check the mirror frequently to see if anything is actually on my
skin… nothing ever is.
The rest of the time, whenever I feel happy, I also feel
like I’m being eviscerated from the inside out.
We all put up walls in our life to protect ourselves. After a while, we become comfortably
numb. Through therapy, I’m tearing down
these walls. This allows happiness to
get in, but these walls also kept all the pain in check. Now that happiness is entering, it is pushing
all the pain out, which means it hurts like a bitch! I am constantly flowing between flashes of
extreme joy that break into deep gut-wrenching sobbing. It’s quite the rollercoaster. I just want to tear my insides out, it aches
so bad. Getting through each day is a
slog. I want to quit. I want to go back to that comfortably numb
state. Unbearable. That’s what it feels like. I would rip my own skin off and pull out my
innards just to get these feelings out quicker.
I feel claustrophobic in my body;
that I have been sent to some strange prison that I am compelled to break free
from.
(Continue this journey through the underworld in the three part series Letters from Hell)
No comments:
Post a Comment