Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

Today, I saw my trauma therapist. I’ve been working with her for eight years, through her transferring to three practices and countless psychiatrists. She’s working PT now so I also have a primary care therapist so my time with Brittany is spent on trauma work.

After I told her I wrote a post about our previous discussion, she firmly told me not to do that this week – she wants me to process before I blog, not blog to process. So I can’t tell you what we discussed. It was heavy. Stop, Sue.

Eight years is a long time to be with a therapist. My previous record was ten years. The trail of psychiatrists littering the road since 2003 is like a post-Daryl Dixon array of walkers. My current guy is actually a psychiatric nurse practitioner whom I think is super great. He reads articles I send and offers feedback, he knows the pharmacy refill hustle and willingly calls them all in every month. He talks a lot about the intersection of physical health and mental health after spending over a decade in physical health.

I use a tool called ‘containment’ – I acknowledge the thought or memory or insight, then I contain in a metaphorical box. I actually use my hands to ‘draw’ a square in front of my body and seal that stuff up until it is time to process. It really works quite well.

If the thought becomes intrusive, I use grounding, distraction, household chores, and mindfulness although I really dislike mindfulness. The word, more so than the practice. My mind is full and I want to empty some of the thoughts, not fill them up. Silly, right?

Then I talk it out in therapy and usually that’s enough. For that thought, not necessarily the underlying trauma.

In my experience, there’s a distinction between using processing to treat PTSD tied to an event versus complex trauma or cPTSD. It isn’t a comparison, just a distinction. I’ve addressed PTSD incidents such as the time when my dog attacked me out of nowhere. The processing truly did put that incident into its proper place in my mind’s filing system.

Complex trauma feels overwhelming, what I feel like are loose ends rather than resolved traumas. In part that’s due to the ongoing trauma I’m experiencing demanding attention, that drags me away from the work on the underlying causes. In part, this is due to one experience leading to another that becomes more pressing. Or as we are currently doing, working on the generalized experience of abandonment and exploring individual experiences and incidents.

I visualize it like a library card catalog – pulling open a drawer, finding a reference, closing that original drawer not quite completely, moving onto the reference and having to really extend the drawer all the way out and leave it open while checking into the two other references until its a messy collection of drawers in various states of open/closure that would make a librarian quite unhappy. But it is necessary to do the research. Make sense?

Containing a completely disheveled card catalog is tough.

I’m doing pretty good here at not blogging about my recent trauma processing. This is sort of an end-run, but I’ll take it.

I’m of the opinion that everyone should go to therapy. Several folx tell me they don’t want to unlock the door of their childhood or other traumas because they fear what will happen. Healing will happen, painful as it might be. And they are not truly concealing their trauma anyway, it seeps out. It is their choice. That I do respect. Still, I wish they would set down the burdens they carry around that the rest of us can see. It is hard to watch someone you care about hurting and rejecting an opportunity to feel better because their self-created ways to suppress these things feel safe.

I realize I’ve got a freaky amount of traumatic experiences in my life, many due to growing up in a family dedicated to protecting a sexual predator rather than parenting (not just my parents.) So while I see and hear trauma experiences everywhere, I recognize that my filter is askew.

Destigmatizing trauma and destigmatizing mental health struggles requires more conversations and disclosures like this one. We all deserve good or better mental health.