Usually after therapy, I’m activated. It varies in degrees depending on the week, that specific day, external, and internal happenings, and lastly what we discuss.
Yesterday I was activated a little more than usual mainly because of content. I had two triggers over the week and they were for things that are rooted very deeply in my trauma.
Trying to get everything out in an hour was extremely difficult and honestly I didn’t manage it. I often feel like in order to be understood I need to give someone step by step and the cause and effect before I can actually get to that single sentence of what triggered me.
I don’t know if that’s a trauma response, or how my brain works, but likely a combination of the two.
So after sessions like that I generally try to do nothing. It very rarely works out for me. Even when I make boundaries of, it was a rough session and I need to not do anything. Often times I let that boundary slide, mainly because it winds up easier if I just do the thing, or to keep myself in practice of still like eating when I’m feeling overstimulated. Because once I move out, even the rare occasion of someone else making me food, isn’t going to be a thing.
Other than that though, I try to just not think about anything. To give my feelings a break. I’ll put my noise canceling ear buds in and scroll through tiktok for a few hours or info dump with someone.
The next day is for processing.
Got up at 5am again to hit the gym. I almost let myself sleep in since this is an extra day, but yesterday I had been feeling motivated. Pushed through and still went.
However, in the few hours I’ve been awake, hitting weights, and then walking the dogs, my brain has already been poking at big revelations and untangling the deep roots.
How do people focus on a single thing?
I had 3 different ideas on what I wanted to focus on for a blog post to process. Should have wrote them down as I was thinking on the full thoughts , but also didn’t want to be focused on my phone.
I have noted new phrases that gave me the “Ahha!” moment. Like:
“I’m not responsible for your happiness, you are.”
Or various variations of that phrase.
That one definitely traces back to childhood and still today, and was one of the few things that had hit me so hard during an argument/heated discussion/emotional charges conversation with Rochester when we broke up, that I actually lost my grip enough to not contain my physical reaction.
Which honestly scared me so bad. My bag had been falling off my shoulder and instead of just trying to fix it, I had let myself toss it across a parking lot (not towards anyone, but away from me because I couldn’t deal with the weight and the slide of strap across shoulder. Everything was too much).
Having had the threat of violence over my head my whole life, both directed at me and watching people harm themselves, I distinctly remember my absolute horror of giving into that moment. The shame. The terror that I was becoming those people. Panicking over making someone else feel unsafe.
In my experience, when someone has expressed that they’re not responsible for someone else’s happiness to me, it’s directed at me, and normally around the fact that I’m actually standing up for what I needed. Other times it’s about someone else, and those times can vary on who the unreasonable party is.
With me, there is all this pressure and expectation that I will take care of someone else, but the moment I ask for the same, well, me being unhappy if my own fault. Nothing to do with them. Even if it’s something they are or aren’t doing. Things that are out of my control so I try to talk to them about it to see what’s going on or asking for something to change because it’s hurting me.
My thought is always, you are not responsible for my happiness, but if you don’t want to be a part of it or do things to help it along, why are you in a connection?
If your only goal in being with me, in whatever form, is so that I help make you feel good, validated, and taken care of and you can set me aside when I become “inconvenient”, well you’re a shitty person.
If you don’t want to contribute to or see my happiness, than what are you? If you just keep taking and don’t meet me halfway, don’t give more than the bare minimum, that’s just a parasitic connection. I don’t need that in my life.
Thought gear shift –
This morning I’ve also been spinning on trying to figure out what about me makes others so insecure. There are times I feel like I’m a walking trigger for other people, and I don’t understand how or why. It feels like I’m often labeled as the problem and disposed of instead of that person confronting their insecurities.
Which both things are attached to topics in therapy of my ability to read people, but then also being told by others that I’m “crazy”, “over sensitive”, or I “just don’t like the person”. Which like I guess to a degree each of those things are correct but also extremely wrong.
I’m not crazy, but I am mentally ill. And those illnesses come with built in pieces for survival that most others don’t have.
It’s like….we’re standing in the same forest and it’s at night, it’s dark. Because of how your brain works, you have enough vision to see you’re in the forest, and there’s trees, but that’s all the sense you have of the space and that’s all you see. Because of how my brain works, I have better night vision. I see that we’re in a forest and there’s trees too, but because I can see better…I see that those trees have things in them. Some of those trees have fruit, things that are good, helpful, that would be healthy for us. Others, have predators. There’s birds of prey, big, wild cats among the branches, and scratches along bark that warn that this tree is not safe.
So I try to tell you what I see. But because you can’t see it, you tel me it’s just a tree and I’m imagining things. I start to doubt myself, keeping one eye on that tree with the predator and keep hoping you’re right and I’m wrong, but eventually you to we walk under the tree, and the predator strikes.
I am over sensitive. To people and their patterns of behavior. Because years of trauma. Years of being told my worth is what I can do for other people. Years of being told I am actually responsible for someone else’s happiness even though they’ll never be responsible for or try to help with mine. That means I pick up on so many subtle cues because I was taught that I had to be able to analyze, predict and manage someone worse wants/needs/desires. If I didn’t, then I was ungrateful, spoiled, inconsiderate, and selfish.
Finally, “I just don’t like someone”….well that’s usually because I’ve already seen patterns of behavior that my brain is telling me isn’t safe for me. Or my jellies are signaling something isn’t right even if I can’t point to what it is specifically. I see the claw marks, but I don’t know what type of animal it is or if it returns here. But I’m going to clock that there’s potential danger here and to be more vigilant.
Though again, what does the last point matter when the first two have already been determined by someone else. It makes me hesitate to say anything anymore. Definitely after having people I’m seeing through constantly gas lighting me and the people I’m trying to warn. Shifting it back to me being a bad or manipulative person to cover their behavior that is exactly that.
I want to protect people I care about, but it is also not my responsibility to make them see reality.
Paraphrasing Teapot. They pointed out that when we have a different set of tools or when someone is just not willing to see reality, that doesn’t mean I need to take on the burden of proof.
They also asked how I handle knowing the reality when someone else doesn’t. How do I feel and react when that person finally comes to that same reality?
I told them, I was just sad. That there were layered emotions of broken hope, because I wasn’t wrong, I’d really like to be wrong about people. I’d like it to just be my trauma over compensating, but that’s usually not the reality. I’m sad that the reality of thing I saw is now actually hurting the person I care about because they’ve truly become aware of it. I’m sad that I can see these things at all, because I feel like there’s so part of life that I can no longer experience.
Whelp…this sat here, open, for a couple of hours. I will take that as a sign that my brain is done thinking about these things for now.
The Procrastinating Penman 