Wait, what? When did that happen?
31 therapy sessions. [Actually thinking about this number, I’d say its probably more like double that]
That’s how long it took me to spill some mega trauma from my childhood to my therapist.
It’s also how many therapy sessions it took for my very hard to rattle therapist to make a face of shock and maybe a smidge of horror.
I’m usually a pretty concrete thinker, I tend to relate my emotions to tangible concrete ideas so that make more sense to me. This has worked out in the past as far as understanding my feelings and the reactions I have, but it also has made me deal with things in a very matter of fact manner.
I was continuing a conversation about my lack of “daddy issues”. In our previous session we had touched on my distaste for white men. She asked where I thought that originated from and my initial response was “I don’t know, it’s not like I have daddy issues, he wasn’t even around”. We didn’t really go into it much after that until my next session. The big 31! During the time between the two sessions I took time to reflect on where my uneasiness around white men came from. I dug up some old memories that I had buried, mostly because they didn’t seem to matter, until they did.
One of the memories was an incident where my dad physically abused my mother. I can’t quite remember the what started confrontation, but they were arguing, which wasn’t really out of the ordinary. I can so vividly remember my dad grabbing my mother by her neck and shoving her against a wall, pushing up, causing her feet to barely be touching the ground. I am sure that was traumatic and all, but what stands out the most to me is what happened after that. From what I can remember and piece together, my mom called a friend of hers, who showed up at our house with her husband a short time later. When I close my eyes I can see him standing on our front porch, with a damn big pistol in his hand, yelling at my dad. Eventually, if I remember correctly, my dad ended up leaving that night, presumably to avoid being shot. This memory was so well hidden, I treated it like it never existed, until I needed to find some understanding of why I feel the way I do sometimes.
I started writing this on March 13th, since then I have had at least 14 more sessions. And just this past week, on July 5th, I told her about an on-going incident that happened to my sister during our childhood. This is another one of those moments in my life that I obviously remember and I haven’t completely blocked out, but it just wasn’t something I really wanted floating around in the active part of my brain.
When I left that session, I realized there’s more, events, trauma, memories, so many things that I avoided letting myself remember, so many things that have made me the way that I am, so many things that I need to discuss with my therapist, so she can help me find a way to process all of this funk that I have stored, pretty damn well, for so many years.
