Or maybe therapy is a bunch of consecutive journeys to a bunch of different destinations because once you get to one destination you realize there's another one to go to next. And then another and then another. Or some other kind of metaphor for the fact that the importance of going to therapy is doing the work as much as it is getting to a better version of yourself. I mean, in my opinion, if you're doing life right, there will always be something new to work on. Continual self improvement!
I am a fan of people going to therapy. I feel lucky/grateful/pleased/whatever to have other adults in my life who not only are also going to therapy, but are willing to talk openly about it. The more we make going to and talking about therapy a safe, run of the mill thing, the more people will embrace it. We don't shame people for getting procedures and medications for physical ailments, so we shouldn't do the same for mental ones. And I sure as heck would not say no thanks to treatment for a physical ailment because other people might respond negatively, so I shouldn't worry about the mental ones either. Any kind of treatment is going to improve your ability to function in your life, so the place in your body that needs healing shouldn't matter. Trevor Noah did a virtual Q&A with my company and is a big advocate of going to therapy, even if it's just a check up like you would do with preventive physical health. He's great and I love his advocacy for mental health! (Also, yes, humble brag that I was on a video conference with Trevor Noah.)
I first went to therapy in 2018 because my anxiety got so bad it was negatively impacting my ability to function day to day. Honestly I regret not going back when I was in college, but I was afraid that I would be told I was too messed up to continue college and get kicked out, so I didn't go. When I finally went I had a whole 34 years worth of stuff to chose from, but the more recent few years of work stress and burn out were definitely the biggest influences on my anxiety. Maybe all the crazy grinding and expectations put on millennials was enough to finally make us crack and be "no more!" we're going to therapy and doing our own shit!
My first round lasted until around late into 2020. Because of the pandemic stress I had a really hard time making phone calls, so when my therapy office stopped calling me to make appointments, I kept meaning to call for months and then finally it got too long that I just decided I couldn't call again. I restarted therapy in April 2022 because thankfully my company had something set up with Betterhelp that I signed up for. I like that I can make appointments online, but also my therapist remembers to make my next appointment at the end of each session, which I really appreciate.
Over the span of my adulthood, I've done some self awareness and personal growth work on my own. Not everything necessarily needs a therapist to identify or work on, but I think of it like a car - some maintenance I can do at home, but some needs a professional. I have also learned that getting mental health help during trauma instead of after trauma makes a big difference too - like getting your tired fixed as the air is going out instead of driving around on it indefinitely after it's gone flat.
This year I learned some interesting things in my continuation of self-healing and improvement. I learned about boundaries. The nice thing about going to therapy is I have worksheets that I can do to learn new concepts and explore how I relate to that concept. It's homework, except I'm the subject and as long as I'm honest, there's not wrong answers. Even before my 1st round of therapy I had done a lot of self reflection and work on how I felt like I needed to be put together all the time and I shouldn't let people know I was struggling. As an overachiever from a young age and as someone who was compared to other people my entire minor life, I learned the bad lessons that to be accepted I had to be like other people and my best was never good enough if someone was better, but also I couldn't let other people know it was hard because I did so much better than most people that it would be bad to complain or show weakness. For several years I worked on opening up more to people and making the intentional decision to trust specific people and open up.
With new work done back in late April I learned some interesting stuff about my history with boundaries. Turns out that I learned bad lessons about having my boundaries respected. From a young age I learned that not to speak up about things that bothered me. Because if someone learned that something bothered me, they would then exploit that and do it over and over again, even against my protestations. So I learned that I shouldn't say something bothered me because my boundaries would not be respected. And once someone did learn about a weakness or dislike to exploit, I just had to accept that now that person knows and can do whatever they want and I cannot control it, so I have to just deal with it.
I learned that there are many different types of boundaries. Honestly, learning about each type, and doing the worksheets on how I handle those boundaries and have had those boundaries violated in the past was very difficult. I literally sat on the couch one day and just sobbed because my mind was flooded with decades of examples of people violating my boundaries and me feeling like why did so many people want to mistreatment me when all I ever try to do is be a caring, loving, empathetic person.
The pandemic was a lesson for me about physical boundaries. As I have probably mentioned before, I was notoriously anti-hugs. And when the pandemic ended I thought I would be even more so having gone so long without hugging people. Except it was the exact opposite. I have become a prolific hugger. The problem was I was being hugged by people I didn't know well enough and who often didn't give me a chance to even consider consent. Turns out I just don't like non-consensual touching. But now there's become, at least in my social circle, a more normalized sense of asking people before hugging them or touching them in any other way. The work I did helped me further learn that it doesn't matter if the touching isn't considered morally bad. If someone doesn't want to be touched, don't touch them. I didn't have that respected as a child, so it took me a long time as an adult to learn that.
The Intellectual Boundaries section of one worksheet read thus: "Intellectual boundaries refer to thoughts and ideas. Healthy intellectual boundaries include respect for others' ideas, and an awareness of appropriate discussion (should we talk about the weather, or politics?). Intellectual boundaries are violated when someone dismisses or belittles another person's thoughts or ideas." This one stung. 9 months before I read this worksheet I had rattled off a laundry list of things that were said to me that got some not great labels put on them that all came rushing back to mind reading this definition, especially the part about how those boundaries are violated.
The Emotional Boundaries is where things REALLY hit home for me. And by hit home I am thinking full impact a runner rushing into home with all the force of a larger muscular athlete with spiky shoes. #SportsMetaphor. I identify as a highly sensitive person, meaning I experience physical and emotion stimuli more intensely than the average person. As a child I was really emotionally sensitive, and sadly as what happens with my sensitive kids, I was made to feel my crying and being sensitive was wrong. I put up a lot of barriers because of that to hide my emotions. I still cried and felt things deeply; I just hid it from people. Something interesting happened though during the pandemic. Because I was home all the time, I would just allow myself to feel and react to my emotions all the time. So by the time lockdown ended, I was so accustomed to being "emotional" that I unknowingly wore down some remaining walls. In the last 1.5 years of my adulthood I have cried in front of people more often than the rest of my 20ish adult years combined. Just several days ago a conversation I was having had me so emotionally overwhelmed, when I felt like bursting into tears, I did. Past me would have just held it in and took whatever was making me feel that way. But now I was like this is how I feel and crying would be express right now that I am overwhelmed and need a reprieve, so I just let it out. I do feel like maybe I have overcorrected some because of the isolation of the pandemic, and I now need to rebuild some healthy barriers between the world and my emotions. But for the most part I find sharing my emotions has been really healing and healthy for me.
This sentence of the boundaries worksheet was probably the most gutting: "Emotional boundaries are violated when someone criticizes, belittles, or invalidates another person's feelings." Imagine if you will an Amazon box that originally came from Amazon but has since been used for other packages. Under the current layer of tape holding it together is evidence of other layers of tape. Now imagine taking a big ole kitchen knife across that tape. That's how analyzing and working through emotional boundaries violations felt to a lot of my trauma, both recent and of old. Oh the joys of criticism. Because it turns out that if you criticize someone enough, they could start to avoid things that you criticize and become afraid of saying or doing anything you don't like, even completely unimportant innocuous things, just to avoid being criticized. I have a not that short list of things I have (re)discovered the joys of after having once avoided them because of criticisms. I will also eat pricey ice cream and watch trash reality dating shows out of spite if I have to. I'm not above that.
I think the biggest chunk of work and hurt around boundaries came with realizing all of the times my feelings were invalidated. Things that were only recently healed; things felt wrong in the moment but I couldn't say why; things that I thought were me being a bad person and I even apologized for: all came rushing back in this sea of learning that I had my feelings invalidated so many times. Sometimes it was just invalidation. Sometimes in addition to being invalidated I was made to feel bad because I expressed my feelings. It feels shitty to realize I apologized for making someone feel bad because I told them their traumatizing behavior hurt me. And sometimes there was just some classic gaslighting. Fun!
For many many years before this year I carried around this narrative that I was bad at having hard conversations. I sucked at them, fumbled them, didn't know how to have them, was bad bad bad bad. Granted, I am generally conflict adverse - I'm sure a lot of things I've discussed above don't help. And when I have to discuss anything that could be less than positive I do feel icky about it. Being highly sensitive probably also makes hard conversations feel way more intense than they actually are. But here's what I learned. I would come out of these difficult conversations feeling like I did a bad job and had to learn all these lessons about how to better communicate and be a better person. And yes I've learned some good lessons that I will take forward with me because again, I am fond of continual self improvement. I can always be better. The problem is I realized I kept learning all these lessons about how I can treat people better, but I kept missing the lesson that I need to stand up for myself when people don't treat me correctly. Becuase the thing was I realized that all of these difficult conversations that made me feel scared to initiate, that made me feel really bad about myself, that made me feel like I royally failed, the thing in common where these were all people that were unsafe. And that the reason why it was so hard, so scary, so sucky was that these people didn't want to listen to what I had to say, these people were invalidating, these people cared more about asserting power, these people couldn't take personal accountability, whatever. When I started opening up the field of view to people that I trusted, people who were kind, people who could be validating, I found that oh actually I had had many difficult conversations that went just find. I just wasn't considering these conversations in the assessment of my abilities because since they didn't feel scary or feel hard or go badly, they didn't stick out in my brain as much. I've had difficult conversations that went well with people who I didn't really even get along with or like because we could both at least approach the situation as responsible adults in some capacity. So feeling really scared in these situations wasn't a sign of "I've got to do something I'm bad at and I'm scared" but rather a sign of "something about the interpersonal dynamic with this person is bad and my intuition is telling me having this conversation is unsafe."
NOTE: There are also sexual, material and time boundaries per the worksheets, but none of those resonated with me. I wanted to include them though in case anyone was reading this and thought the different types of boundaries are interesting.
Another concept I learned about this spring around boundaries involves having good boundaries, or having boundaries that are too porous or too rigid. I realized that in the past I put up a lot of rigid boundaries by not letting people see certain things about me because I had porous boundaries once people got close, so just don't let them get close. So I had already done a lot of work on breaking down the rigid boundaries. Now at this point in my life I have to learn how to improve my ability to assert my boundaries where they are too porous. Thankfully I have so many people in my life who I am close to that are generally respectful of boundaries so I don't have a lot of issues with it. That does though create issues with me getting opportunities to practice asserting my boundaries. It makes me nervous, especially with the whole dating thing. I already have one instance from earlier this year after I had learned about boundaries where I was very uncomfortable but didn't speak up for myself. I just don't want to find myself in a situation again where I don't like how I'm being treated and I make a bunch of excuses to why it's fine when it isn't.
Here are some other things I've learned about boundaries. I am allowed to change what is acceptable to me at any time. Just because I made an excuse for something before or just because I didn't speak up the first time, second time, twelve time, doesn't mean that I can never speak up about it. As time goes on I'm allowed to adjust what's okay based on how things have changed. A boundary is not set in stone the first time something happens and then must be that way until the end of time. I also don't have to bring something up. If I don't feel safe addressing an issue, I can chose to just distance myself from people instead. My therapist said that if I have an issue with someone, she can help me work on the skills to better stand up for myself, but I can also assess the situation and decide that speaking up will not be productive because of the way that that person treated me, and I can just decide to stay away. Granted, that is easier said than done because I've had some shitty experiences raising issues in the workplace, and sometimes you just cannot avoid people in that environment. But it's still good to know it's an option.
Another thing I have learned, and this may be more broad than just with my boundaries issues, but it's not my fault that I get treated badly. I didn't deserve the way I was treated by people who hurt me. My difficulties in calling out behavior that was unfair or harmful or that made me feel bad about myself was not my fault. If people treat me badly, that's on them. I don't have to call them out or stand up for myself for the behavior to be considered harmful. Bad behavior is still bad behavior. Now some people may not want to admit to bad behavior, or they may not want to do the self reflection it takes to realize they mistreat people, but that's not my fault.
The learning about boundaries did have me doing an interesting thought exercise for my own personal experience. As I have mentioned before, I am highly sensitive. And part of that includes being very easily scared. Many people in my life have learned I can be scared and made to scream pretty easily. Embarrassingly easily actually. The thing is, I never thought to ask people who scared me on purpose to not do it. Working on boundaries and talking through my childhood stuff I realized that I just thought well if someone figures out I am easy to scare, they now have that knowledge and are going to scare me, and I just have to deal with that. So I started thinking about it and I honestly don't know if I'm okay with it or not. Like I know that I used to know this cute guy that would shake the back of my desk chair to scare me as he walked by, and I was okay with that because he was cute and gave us an excuse to talk. But I once had a boss when I worked retail that would try to sneak up on me and scare me, and I hated it! I worked nights and was usually alone in my section of the store, so having someone unexpectedly jump out at me was not fun. Plus I didn't particularly care for this person and he didn't know me like that. But them sometimes it's funny when a friend catches me on purpose, like when my one friend scared me while we were getting photo booth photos, and the last picture was pretty funny with me screaming. But then sometimes people seem to enjoy it a little too much and that can be annoying or scary. I don't know. I am allowed to decide what's okay whenever and ask to not do it if I ever feel like I want to. And I am allowed to be okay when people I'm close to and trust do it, but not be okay with it from someone who doesn't know me well enough.
If therapy work this spring was about boundaries, then therapy work this summer has been about fear! SO FUN! In late June some trauma got dredged up and I got really freaking scared. I also realized though that I basically had 3ish years of fear that I had not acknowledged and processed. Like objectively I knew I was scared at times. Granted there were times where I didn't realize I was scared. But like there's a difference between being scared in the moment, and then afterward being like oh crap I was scared. Or examining the implications of what the fear means. And I think that like there are different reason why the fear never got processed along with other stuff. First, the fear was really felt when I was in public around other people. I don't want to ruin my time around people by being afraid, and I don't want to ruin other people's time too. So overcoming the fear in the moment became an important thing to do. And then by the time I got home I wasn't afraid anymore. Second, there were times I was afraid and didn't realize it until years later. So the fear was just this metaphorical low-level humming always in the background but not perceptible enough, I guess. So while objectively and eventually I was able to point to behavioral changes in myself and recognize they were caused by fear, since I made so many excuses or disregarded so many things in the moment, I didn't catch the fear as it was happening.
I definitely didn't sleep well for like a month. Something about processing years of fear all at once made my brain wake me up multiple times in the middle of the night hella anxious. Waking up hella anxious is such a weird feeling because it's like I'm unconscious and then suddenly I'm awake and my heart is pounding out of my chest. And I'm like what was my brain even doing to get this way. I was unconscious!! And then just after I was finally able to sleep okay again, something else happened. So since I was like a teenager, when I get really stressed I tense the muscles in my chest. Sometimes it gets so bad it aches. Evidently one day I was so tense that I pulled a chest muscle, and it must have swelled badly or hit a nerve because it made my boob go numb. Of course I didn't think this was what was happening until after I got really panicked and went to the doctor. Thankfully everything seems fine. The muscle is still a little sore, but I am almost healed, thank goodness!! I did get stung by a bee this weekend, so I don't know when I'll next be injury free, but I guess as long as each heals okay, I will just deal with it.
Processing fear was very different from processing other emotions. Sadness is probably the easiest for me to process. Maybe because I'm a sad girl. Or maybe because I have always enjoyed crying or maybe because I can appreciate the beauty in sadness, even though it doesn't feel good. Sadness is an emotion I am familiar with. Processing anger has been an interesting experience for me. I have never really been an angry person. I think mostly I just get frustrated or annoyed. But being really angry has been unfamiliar. I get why anger is portrayed as red because it feels like this hot fire. Anger can feel emboldening, like come at my bro, I'm angry and I'm raring to go! Anger makes me incredulous that anyone would want to make me feel angry because I'm amazing and don't you know who I am, and why would you ever make me angry because then you'll miss out on all the things I have to offer. Processing fear felt the opposite of that. Fear is all vulnerability in the I'm going to be damaged sort of way. Fear feels like shrinking until I disappear, running away forever, shutting myself up and tearing myself down however much needs to be done to keep me safe. Fear is I have no control, no influence, no avenue for escape if something else happens, and I am just going to cower until it does.
Yoda said that fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to the dark side. Well, Dayna says fear leads to anger, anger eventually cools down and leads to sadness, and sadness leads me to ask why I haven't bought stoke in Kleenex brand facial tissues yet. But seriously, I've realized that fear is easier to overcome once I've actually looked it in the face and named it. I still have those moments when I breakdown into tears and admit to myself that I am still really scared, and continuing to put myself out into the world scares me. I think it helps that things have adjusted too so that I'm not put into situations that were triggering to the fear and put me right back into that headspace on a regular basis, even though the real scary stuff was over.
Speaking of scary stuff and triggers, this was not a good time for me to finally watch the movie Midsommar. I enjoyed the movie a lot, but there were definitely moments where Florence Pugh did or experienced things that made me go "I've done that. I've experienced that." But also made me go "I've seen other people do that." It's sad and scary how even the most seemingly innocuous thing can flip that trauma switch because of the association between what happened and what is conditioned to come next, even if the initial behavior isn't coming from the person that was traumatizing.
I love learning psychology, although less so when it makes me realize painful things about myself. One thing I have been thinking about lately is about fight or flight. I learned that in addition to fight or flight, there's also freeze or appease. So basically, if faced with a threat (this can be a physical one but probably more likely a mental or emotional one) people's instinctual responses are to fight the thing, run away, freeze up, or try to appear the threat into not hurting you. From some of my personal experiences I kind of see fight and appease as related, and flight and freeze as related. It's like I've seen people who were threatened and would most of the time go into a fight response. And these don't even have to be like legitimate threats, just things seen as a threat to ego, position, opinions, etc. But sometimes, and I don't know if it's the person or a mood or something else, but the person instead of fighting would appease. Instead of puffing themselves up for a fight, it was tearing themselves down to seem more pathetic so the threat would no longer see the need to be threatening.
I have been noticing my own experience with flight or freeze. I play a lot of horror video games, and one of the things I've noticed I do is that when something scary comes along that chases me, my logical brain shuts off and go into lower brain instinct mode, which means I just run away in whatever direction is the closest. Then once the danger is over, I have to figure out where the fuck I ended up and what I'm going to do next. But if I hear the fight is coming music and cannot see the enemy, I may also just freeze up until I know what way is safe and what way is danger. I have noticed that this pattern is the same for me in real life. I have had situations that felt overwhelmingly emotionally threatening to the point where my brain is like "nope". I have tried to walk into rooms and my fear brain will take over and walk me out of the room before I even have a moment to think if I want to stay or not, and how to make myself do that. However, there have been times when flight is not possible or where it would be too awkward to run away, so instead I just freeze. When I freeze it's like I shut myself up in my body and all my focus is on just staying in one position as quietly as possible until the threat is gone. I swear if anyone tried to talk to me during these moments I may just not hear because I'm so in my head. On the lighthearted side, I have amused my self with how klutzy and silly I must of looked trying to discreetly run away and instead awkwardly tripped myself in my haste.
At this point I am really trying to not let fear hold me back. I've been trying hard to listen to my fear and interpret it reasonably. Like I recently started taking singing lessons. I have always loved to sing, and have gotten over a huge fear of singing in public over the last few years. I am finally getting lessons to really understand and tune my instrument. That all really scares me. But I found a great teacher and I am brave enough to push through, so even though it's only been 2 lessons, I am so committed and grateful that I am putting myself out there. The whole dating thing is more difficult. It's hard to know if the lessons I've learned about being mistreated and what different behaviors are will help or hurt. I still need to work on standing up for myself when I am uncomfortable. But I also need to make sure that I am not interpreting innocuous behavior as something worse. Because it's not necessarily once specific phrase or instance that is harmful, but rather patterns of behavior. And as I learn to speak up for myself better, reactions to that are also very telling.
I think the biggest general lesson I've learned is that healing take time, it doesn't happen in a straight line, and it doesn't happen all at once. I just have to keep trying, keeping talking, keep working on the things my therapist suggests, keep letting myself feel my feelings, keep giving myself grace. Eventually all the things get uncovered, named and processed. But sometimes I don't know what I don't know until it's labeled, explained, gets a chord unceremoniously struck. There have been multiple times with different things where I've brought up things in a session that were just normal for me or I felt kind of petty for holding onto in my mind, but walked away from feeling heavier realizing my mind hung onto those things because they were not okay and it explains some other stuff. So as hard as it is, and as much as I worry it's taking too damn long, I will let myself heal however it takes because I know I am doing the work, however hard and messy it is. I don't want hurt to hold me back, and I definitely don't want to reenact my hurt onto others, so here I am, taking the hard road. But you know what? It's so much easier to face it and heal than to live hiding from it; people just can't always see that until they've started to climb that big ole scary Healing Mountain.
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