Counseling Again
I know I don't have to share everything, but for some reason I am compelling to share my healing journey. I need to make sure I am not hurting myself by what I say, or exposing myself to feeling alive and connected in some strange false way. I only want to share if it is healthy and helpful - not only to others but also to myself, and my family.
When a person is deeply physically injured - like from an IED explosion - the bleeding is intense and most often it is pouring out from many bodily sources... limbs may be mangled or missing. Triage is lifesaving, not cosmetic. You simply must act quickly. Pressure needs to be applied to stop the bleeding. Instinct must take over. It is either do or die.
This is what my first 10 years of trauma therapy was like. I didn't much have a choice. I was emotionally bleeding everywhere, on everyone and at anytime. Being around me was not easy and being my friend or family was painful a lot of the time. Enduring therapy was like having tender scabbing wounds picked at or even ripped open. Sessions were rarely enjoyable; often I felt like I was re-entering the trauma and I very badly did not want to go... but I was compelled to go for my family.
I knew I needed to heal to stop hurting them, and "hurting them" I could no longer endure. I would have rather died than to continue to hurt my family - that was the turning point for me.
Since taking my life was not a choice God had given me, I had to get trauma therapy help. And now almost 12 years after my beginning counseling sessions, I am so glad I did it.
Now I am in a different place. I am coming off of the medication I needed to endure the trauma therapy. I have been slowly, very slowly tapering off my medications with the help of my doctor over the past 18 months.
But it is time again for therapy.
I don't think it will be deep level trauma therapy like before. It will be at a different level. For the past 2 years I have been trying to start again, to in a sense pick up where I left off a decade ago but of course, people and times have changed. I am now in my fifties. I started therapy in my late 30s. There is a HUGE gap of life I--in many ways-- survived, not really lived but existed, again... a lot like my first 18 years of life. Only I was not being injured; I was healing from the initial child abuse injuries.
This time in therapy I am facing my life in the present. I am assessing where I am, who I am and what I need to be doing with the days I have remaining in life.
It is time for me to press into God but in a much different way.
I going to be learning how to LET GOD LOVE ME, to let HIM FILL ME, to experience HIM in my core and to be grounded in HIM, anchored in HIM.... not mentally/intellectually or hanging onto to Him (ha - let Him hang onto me is more like it) as I travel the turbulent storms of trauma therapy. This time I am going to press into HIM and SIT! Absorb. Rest. Learn to be STILL. And receive all that I lack and so much more that I can not begin to imagine.
So today I step off the ledge in a totally different way, and free fall into God. I want to soak in all of Him I can and thereby to be transformed.
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| by belxphoto on deviant ART |
When a person is deeply physically injured - like from an IED explosion - the bleeding is intense and most often it is pouring out from many bodily sources... limbs may be mangled or missing. Triage is lifesaving, not cosmetic. You simply must act quickly. Pressure needs to be applied to stop the bleeding. Instinct must take over. It is either do or die.
This is what my first 10 years of trauma therapy was like. I didn't much have a choice. I was emotionally bleeding everywhere, on everyone and at anytime. Being around me was not easy and being my friend or family was painful a lot of the time. Enduring therapy was like having tender scabbing wounds picked at or even ripped open. Sessions were rarely enjoyable; often I felt like I was re-entering the trauma and I very badly did not want to go... but I was compelled to go for my family.
I knew I needed to heal to stop hurting them, and "hurting them" I could no longer endure. I would have rather died than to continue to hurt my family - that was the turning point for me.
Since taking my life was not a choice God had given me, I had to get trauma therapy help. And now almost 12 years after my beginning counseling sessions, I am so glad I did it.
Now I am in a different place. I am coming off of the medication I needed to endure the trauma therapy. I have been slowly, very slowly tapering off my medications with the help of my doctor over the past 18 months.
But it is time again for therapy.
I don't think it will be deep level trauma therapy like before. It will be at a different level. For the past 2 years I have been trying to start again, to in a sense pick up where I left off a decade ago but of course, people and times have changed. I am now in my fifties. I started therapy in my late 30s. There is a HUGE gap of life I--in many ways-- survived, not really lived but existed, again... a lot like my first 18 years of life. Only I was not being injured; I was healing from the initial child abuse injuries.
This time in therapy I am facing my life in the present. I am assessing where I am, who I am and what I need to be doing with the days I have remaining in life.
It is time for me to press into God but in a much different way.
I going to be learning how to LET GOD LOVE ME, to let HIM FILL ME, to experience HIM in my core and to be grounded in HIM, anchored in HIM.... not mentally/intellectually or hanging onto to Him (ha - let Him hang onto me is more like it) as I travel the turbulent storms of trauma therapy. This time I am going to press into HIM and SIT! Absorb. Rest. Learn to be STILL. And receive all that I lack and so much more that I can not begin to imagine.
So today I step off the ledge in a totally different way, and free fall into God. I want to soak in all of Him I can and thereby to be transformed.
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