Adventures In Therapy

There was a long period of time where I defined chronic pain as merely physical.

I'm pretty sure I've written about my physical pain. Chiari Malformation led to spinal cord degeneration in my teens, which led to fifteen long, agonizing years of pain in my nerves. The pain is still there and getting worse as I age, but last Fall I found a device to control it. Thank God someone in this house watches TV and learned about this device! I bought it on a whim and the rest is history.

But that's another story.

Soon after my physical pain began to feel manageable, I found myself falling into a deep depression. This was the opposite of what I expected to feel, after so many years of constant pain coming to an end.

So I went to counseling. The first few months were uneventful. It seemed I was getting nowhere, and I thought I just had a bad counselor. In fact, the only realization I had in the first few months was that our emotions are buoys at the surface. The only time they go under the surface is when something heavier comes along to push the buoy under. For me, physical pain was much heavier and screamed for attention 24/7. So my emotional stuff never got the attention it needed. Anywho.

So I got an appointment with a psychologist who was very good. I only saw him twice, because that's all I needed to jump start my healing. During our second session, he asked me why I am here.

That seemed like an ambiguous and philosophical question, so I blathered on about irresponsible parents and my mother's history before he stopped me. He said, 'No, you are here because your parents had sex.'

So simple. At that moment, I started to understand that my existence is not my fault. I don't need to feel such guilt for being alive. I don't need to feel that I'm a nuissance and a difficult person just because my family treats me as if I am.

I forgave myself for being here.

Almost immediately, the need to justify and accept my family's behavior dried up and blew away. I did nothing to deserve it.

A healthy person does not run around hurting people as revenge for their hurts.

So I went back to my counselor and started to work through this. One major realization I had is that all my life, I believed that my accident (age 6) was my trauma. But it wasn't. I drug that identity around with me, and 'because of the accident' became everyone's go-to excuse for me being, well, Me.

But in fact, I was treated as a Less-Than long before the accident occurred. What really happened is the accident became a convenient excuse for everyone's behavior. Even mine, they said. 'She reacts this way to our mistreatment because of her accident.'

But it was bullshit. My accident affected me, yes, but it didn't define my life as much as I was taught to believe. The way I'm treated by my family has nothing to do with that event.

All these years I have known that something was off, but I didn't pinpoint it until now. I used to think I wanted to be 'normal' and to fit in. The truth is that I wanted an identity outside of my accident. I want to exist as a human being with needs and reactions and a personality that are not dependent on an event that took place 22 years ago.

Don't we all? No matter what happens to us, aren't we all still humans with the same basic needs?

I realize that it wasn't the choices I made when I was younger that took away my chance at healing. It was my pain. I would never have had the chance to effectively heal from my past if it weren't for my device.

So I ask... what's stopping you?