Therapy and Other Helps

Last week turned out to be an okay week.  But the two weeks before...Woo Boy!  I was dangerously close to crossing over that oh so subtle line between sanity and not sane.  I seriously considered returning to therapy.

I've been in therapy before.  I've had breakdowns before.  Life has been traumatic at times and I have needed to seek outside help.   But this time I realized that I simply didn't want to go for therapy yet again.  No indeed.  In looking back at my therapy sessions over the years, while I feel absolutely no shame in going, it was suddenly too tedious to have to explain to yet another person why I am who I am, why I feel as I do, who my mother is, why my husband isn't the enemy, why my weight isn't the issue, etc.  

I mean seriously, at 61, the whole idea of going back to therapy, working out the therapist's misconceptions and my own troubles, giving all the back stories behind why I feel as I do, listening to yet another offer of a prescription pill that I have told them three times is not for me, fighting to be HEARD...No.   I just don't have that sort of energy in me for that task.    

And second, I realized that the knowledge of how close to the edge I'd gone once more wasn't enough to turn me around exactly but was enough to make me realize that insanity is when you no longer remember there is a line there between the two.  It's stepping over into the abyss and thinking you are normal when you most obviously are not that is insane.   Truly I believe sanity is when you realize how thin the line between the two is...

I also realized that a recurring fantasy I was having was more telling about my relationship with my mother than I wanted to admit.  In my fantasy, which usually occurred at night when I was trying to go to sleep, we were on one of our days out and Mama would get angry and begin to beat and pound me.  I always ended the fantasy with getting out of the car and leaving her right there in the middle of traffic...

It's been many years since my mother has become physically violent with me.  Not as many as it ought to have been, I'm sorry to say, but it's been about ten years.  

But it's not the fear of physical abuse...I realized early this week that the 'beating' was symbolic of what her words do to me, what my own feelings are doing to me. And it was time I said, "Enough.  No more."

I haven't seen her since the birthday party.  We did have a brief phone conversation this week and for once it was not a screaming match.  I won't go into the games she continues to play nor my fear for my son's good reasoning as he's now 'golden boy'...but I will say that it really matters not whether I have seen or not seen her.  She is still the loudest voice in my head.  There is still a flood of memories of abuses, of incidents, triggered by the simplest things.  

I cannot say I will not see her; only that currently circumstances sort of preclude any visitations.   I'll have my infant grandson here for a month each weekday to watch over and I won't be making any trips I can avoid.  It's much too hot and things still unstable enough I wouldn't care to take a small child out unnecessarily. 

I do think that allowing myself the venting place here is helping as well...I must remember this isn't a place to shame her but to heal me.