but slowly improving, and learning along the way.
Put simply: therapy sessions over the last 2 weeks have uncovered a horrendous incident that I had 80% forgotten and is taking a huge effort to deal with.
Driving away from my session, my seemingly settled head was hit with an overwhelming feeling of panic and anxiety and having just experienced the worst ever flashback and as if my brain was being squeezed into a walnut shell and as if I was on the brink of going totally mad.
Aaaaaaaargh
It took over 24 hours for the initial wave of fear or whatever it was to get below the 75% mark.
All of those cute orange ideas that I was writing about last week. Forget it. I was chain eating strong mints and clinging onto all of
the calming, grounding, mindfulness techniques that I could possibly find.
Keeping "Sam" in the loop, he was encouraging and reassuring me that it was not a totally unexpected reaction and that I would get through:
"Dust"....That's a polite word for what happened. But I get his point. My past can't hurt me any more. It's in the past.
Healing timelines have been hugely helpful in my battle to shove this memory out of the front of my mind.
This is a technique that I picked up along the way.
1. Down the side of a sheet of paper, write a list of each year between the incident and the present. 1987, 1988, 1989 ....
2. Beside each year write a happy event that happened e.g. holiday in Costa del somewhere beautiful
3. Go through the list in your mind. Stopping at each happy event for at least 30 seconds and remember as many details and feelings as you possibly can. This is a truly lovely thing to do and is a great way to remind the brain that lots of lovely things have happened since that terrible incident.
And now?
Still feeling fragile, taking great care of myself and about what I think about. Doing everything I can to ensure that I never ever feel like that again.
Sleeping surprisingly well - still no nightmares!
Big thanks to my amazing loving and wise family and friends. We've got this ♡
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