Needy, Needy, Needy

I love this cartoon. First, it reminds me of an awesome Dixie Chick's song "Hole in my head! Hole in my head! I need a boy like you like a hole in my head! Let's just say we will and then DON'T instead!"

Secondly, I feel like a giant, shapeless mass of neediness lately.

That sucks.

I feel like I am a bottomless pit inside and I just need to be filled, but there is nothing to fill me right now. I'm afraid to get too near to people because I feel like I will suck the energy right out of them because I'm so deficient.

The therapist mapped this experience I'm having out for me on a piece of paper. He calls where I'm at "No Man's Land." I've been so low for so long. Then... then, I found a way to cope. It gave me really extreme HIGHS (no, not drugs!) followed by plummeting lows. I would keep going UP and dowwwwn in a downward spiral. Now I've stopped the unhealthy coping mechanisms but I'm lower than I was when I started. Also, it's going to take a loooong time before I start seeing results from my current growth and actions.

It really sucks. I miss the highs. They comforted me and made me feel better. But he promises that if I hold on and don't indulge in unhealthy coping mechanisms that EVENTUALLY I will get higher than I was emotionally in a healthy and productive way. I just have to do a lot of work to climb out of the hole I'm in (both from my own actions and from my husband's actions...)

So. This therapist I'm seeing is pretty great. I love it when you can't shock someone with anything you think or feel. I tell him a lot of shocking things.

For instance, I told him today, "I consider myself a pretty sensitive person. Sometimes I lay awake tossing and turning at night just at the possibility I may have said something that might have hurt someone's feelings...but when my husband of 13 years tells me that I have broken his heart and our marriage I think 'well, too bad, so sad my friend, sorry 'boutcha luck!' "

I made eye contact with Mr. Therapist after I said that expecting to see concern or dissapproval. He just shrugs his shoulders nonchalantly and says, "Yeah, that's a healthy thing. If you cared too much you'd get sucked back into the whole abusive cycle again. Shame, blame, pain. You are protecting yourself. Keep doing that right now. You're vulnerable."

Sigh of relief.

This guy is much more extensively trained than the last therapist. He has a PhD is trauma and abuse and addictions and all sorts of delightfully wicked and painful things. Anytime I think I'm springing something totally crazy and shocking on him, he pulls up a slide on his laptop and puts words to my pain and my experiences and explains why I reacted that way or feel that way. Hello!? Where have you BEEN all my life? And the BEST part???? He knows how to fix me! He knows how to pull out all the junk and re-build me from the inside out. A new improved model of me.

Unbelievable.

It's nice to have someone who understands and can see the pathway out of this mess clearly. He puts it all in a gospel perspective as well. Putting my feelings and experiences into an eternal perspective and a God vs. Satan context that I can understand.

I told him I felt self-indulgent sitting around whining about my problems and discussing them ad nauseum. He said, "Nope, it's more self-indulgent to be co-dependent (note: therapists LOVE that word!) in an abusive relationship. Wanting to please someone who is hurting us so we can have our needs filled." Oh! Okay.

Here's the truth. We all have a breaking point. If we don't have the proper tools to handle trauma and abuse and pain and shame... we break. That is just a fact. No way around it. The only thing that differs is the method by which we break.

The day I broke turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. I feel like it shattered the lie I was living and allowed me a new landscape to heal on.

Therapy. Don't knock it 'til you try it kids!