I officially started trauma work

And it kinda sucks. And by "kinda sucks" I mean it's pretty awful and I'm not looking forward to this every week.

But it has to be done.

Today was my first full session of trauma work. It started with a brief recap of my past week and a half (which has been damn crappy with break downs, self harm, and tons of icky feels). Then M said, bluntly, "So let's talk about your childhood". I didn't know where to start. There's so much and it's overwhelming.

I started with my mom's fractured ankle. She fractured her ankle last Friday night falling down her stairs (I can only assume she had been drinking - she's done this before). I took her to the orthopedist yesterday and it turns out she needs surgery and can't drive for 6 weeks. Which means I'll be helping her around. Which means I have to have more interaction with her than I want to. Which raises my anxiety level and icky feels and makes me angry and uncomfortable.

I had a crap day yesterday. I only got one hour of sleep and I was in a foul mood. Then the above happened. I spent most of the afternoon crying uncontrollably. I wan't so badly to self harm. I had decided that anytime I feel like self harming I'd draw a butterfly on my arm instead. I ended up with 9 butterflies yesterday. I shredded 2 lawn chairs and threw them across the yard. I sat outside listening to music while it sprinkled on me (I was hoping for a downpour) trying to calm down, crying off and on.

And then something dawned on me. I started thinking that I was having a PTSD overreaction to something. Namely, having to help my mom out was putting me in the position of caretaker to her - the role I played growing up, taking care of her when she was drunk. Even though the situation for helping her out is different, emotionally I'm going back to when I was little. I'm dealing with childhood feels.

I told M this and he agreed that it was very probable that this is what was going on yesterday. It was a good segway into our discussion. Now, I'm not going to go into detail about what all was said. Not publicly. I'll probably write about it separately as I try to process everything.

One thing that did happen during therapy is that I emotionally shut down. I became guarded. I didn't want icky feels to flood me. This is something that I shouldn't do - I need to feel these things in order to process them, and I shut down. I'll be trying not to do that next week. I think I just had such a crappy week with feels and crying and such a horrible day yesterday with feels and crying that I couldn't take it today. So I shut down.

We spent our last 10-15 minutes talking about horses and horseback riding (I went riding last Saturday). It was a good way to decompress and try to release some of the icky feels.

This is hard, y'all. Trauma work sucks. I know it's necessary and that's fine - we'll muddle through as best we can. And hopefully I won't get thrown into a mood episode in the process.