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Me too   

To me, virtual therapy vs in-person therapy makes a huge difference.  I can't do teletherapy because there's something about sitting in front of a camera that makes me feel horrifically vulnerable, so I have to do it over the regular phone, and I hate it.  Your success with virtual therapy is encouraging, and I appreciate you sharing it.  Hopefully a better situation is coming soon for all of us 

That's good news about the kitten, and about the Littles being mostly comfortable with your T. That seems like real progress. I'm glad that you've been able to do so much with teletherapy. It is really hard!

Lots of love to all of you 

Thank you so much for your wishes and hugs, everyone   I'm happy to tell you that Thanksgiving was a lot of fun, and Face made it through the kiln.  The next challenge there will be glazing, something that I never enjoyed or was very good at.  Hopefully, my excellent teacher will have some good guidance. 

My anxiety is very high today.  I have confidence that I can cope.  Managing my energy and eating responsibly will be key.

I'm scared to write about things that touch on sex and sexual abuse.  It's an incredibly confusing topic for me.  I was not overtly sexually abused, but sexuality was much more present in my life throughout my childhood than it should have been, thanks to a mother who had no sense of what was or wasn't appropriate for a child to be exposed to.  Also, I now understand that my best friend during my pre-teen years had been sexually abused at some point before the age of 10, although at the time she spoke of it as having already had a boyfriend and having had sex with him, which, I'm afraid, was aspirational to me at the time, thanks to having been my sex-obsessed mother's confidante as well as the tag-along to many outings with her and her sex-obsessed mother in which they talked a lot about, well, sex.  So I grew up placing an outsized importance on sex.  That has led me into plenty of emotional and situational trouble throughout the course of my life.  There's still the potential for trouble there.  Not like it used to be when I was younger, but, oh yeah, still there. 

Further confusion about CSA and what it is results from my relationship with Other, who had some kind of a sexual relationship with a male teacher when he was a pre-teen.  I don't know much about it (I don't know many details about his history at all, I realise), but he has mentioned it a few times over the years and has always insisted that it was good and he wanted it, and that the teacher didn't do anything wrong.  Aside from my knowledge that his having wanted it and enjoyed it doesn't mean the teacher didn't do anything wrong, I understand why Other feels that way, but I've learned a bit about him this year that I didn't know before, and I've come to feel that it had a much greater impact than he realises. 

I hope this isn't offensive to anybody, and marta, I hope you don't feel that I'm hijacking your thread.  I have wanted to write about this for a long time and was too uncertain.  I never know where I fit in with any of these categories of abuse because everything that happened to me as a child was so weird.  My abuse comprised elements of all these things with no obvious pattern to be given a label and connected directly to my dysfunction.  Sometimes one of the things I'm angriest at is that I have nowhere for good or ill to "fit in". 

san, I'm so glad to hear you had that good day feeling recognising your success at taking small steps   It's a good one, isn't it?  I sometimes get really frustrated at not being able to take big steps, but really, the thing that matters is taking steps of whatever size you can manage.  I've started to feel that my measure of a good day is not whether or not I did, but whether or not I tried.  You're doing great!

Tee, when I was at the studio on Monday, she had not been fired yet.  I was going to go yesterday, but I had too much to do and didn't have the energy.  So I'm hoping to go tomorrow.  Thank you for asking!

It turns out that I have Thanksgiving plans after all!  The mother's husband took ill a few days ago and is in the hospital, so she cancelled Thanksgiving at her house.  My brother and I had originally thought that it was too late to plan a get-together, so we agreed to do a sort of substitute Thanksgiving some time in December, but my niece and nephew were really upset by the thought of not having proper Thanksgiving dinner on the real Thanksgiving day.  That was rather eye-opening.  We didn't know they cared.  I guess for the past several years, my brother and I have been too preoccupied with the drama of dealing with a holiday with the mother to notice that somewhere in there we managed to create some positive family Thanksgiving traditions that mean so much more than we realised to the kids.  This makes me feel vindicated in my insistence these past few years that giving the kids a sense of family was important enough that I should suck it up and deal with my mother instead of skipping Thanksgiving dinner so I wouldn't have to.  The weird part of all this is that this morning, I feel just as jumpy and anxious and burdened as I would if the mother was going to be there today.  I'm sure I'll relax later, but right now I'm fighting off urges to medicate.

Since I wrote the mother the email telling her I was willing to correspond via email, we have exchanged a couple of letters.  I'm actually really happy about this.  So far I am getting what I want from it.  I am laying groundwork to tell her my truths in ways that will acknowledge her trauma without excusing her from causing mine.  The key factor for me to succeed at doing this will be keeping to my boundaries.  She is already asking to see me, and although I won't rule that out as a future possibility, it sure isn't happening yet. 

Got to get ready to go to my brother's now.  I'd really like to express my gratitude for this community and all the great people here, for listening, for sharing, for supporting, for working so hard to heal, for everything, but this is another one of those things where my fear of expressing my positive emotions blocks my words.  So...yeah.

I'm glad you have a happy plan for today, san! Sending love and appreciation on this day of Thanksgiving 

Tee 

[It's like having a number of different roads to go down, but each one has the same destination. Choosing which road to take isn't really a choice]

I don't think you had a choice Deep Blue. I think there was just the illusion of choice, which makes it feel as though it was your fault. It's like having a number of different roads to go down, but each one has the same destination. Choosing which road to take isn't really a choice.

This is so important, and so true! I have tried to express this a million times to others and even to myself, but did not have such clear and concise words for it.

san, yesterday at some point that I can't quite remember, I had a strange experience with the feelings about my body.  I was noticing the weight I've gained since everything got crazy, and instead of thinking "ugh, I'm huge, this is disgusting, I have GOT to lose this weight" I had the totally unfamiliar thought of "Ehh, whatever.  I'll lose the weight after a while and if I don't I'll get comfortable with being the size I am".  It's scary to even type that now, but that was a real thought, that I really had, and for a few moments it seemed completely possible and looked like a bright future.  And somehow...somehow!, it did not throw me into a binge. 

I just wanted to tell you that.  I hope that's okay.  And, thank you for being you 

Sweet Tee, I am here for you, too.  I struggle to speak but I am here listening and caring.

Hope, Tee, san, Snowdrop and notalone, I am still struggling, but it heartens me so much to have people here who hear me and who understand my feelings about these things.  I am especially grateful to be heard regarding the clay and the wonderful and exciting but also very frightening feelings stirred up by getting back into that world.  There is nothing but joy in working with the clay itself, the dense damp pliable humid wonder of it, but there's painful history surrounding people and situations in which I've done clay in the past.  The studio where I'm taking the class seems ideal for where I am in life now, but what if I'm wrong?  What if I mess up my relationships at this studio the way I've done before?  I can't do clay without a studio and people.  Tee, you hit the nail on the head with what you said about the fear of joy being ripped away. 

As for the house, I'm not worried about the architect anymore.  I feel comfortable with her, and feel confident that I can work with her without fearing that she will judge me or not take me seriously.  So that's good, but now I am beset with anxiety about My Person and I having to deal with all of our stuff.  Although My Person is generally quite well-adjusted, he and I have very similar hoarding tendencies.  It's one of the few life skills that neither of us have been able to help the other with.  And that's only the beginning.  I really want the remodel because I believe my quality of life here at home will significantly improve once it's done, but I expect a rough road getting there.

Oh, if only I could get decent sleep!

You did not deserve it, Deep Blue.  No matter what you said.  Your abuser is in your head making you doubt yourself.  She needs for it to be your fault.  Don't give her what she wants. 

It's good to see you 

I'm completely overwhelmed by life right now.  I don't know how I'm ever going to feel better.  It's cold and the garden is dead and I'm so tired. 

We're making plans to remodel our house, and there's an architect coming today to take measurements.  I spent a couple of hours yesterday and a couple of hours this morning frantically moving junk around in my bedroom so that she'll be able to get in to do that.  My Person is running around cleaning, as if there's the slightest chance that we can actually disguise at the last minute the chaos we live in.  I think he is annoyed with me because a little while ago I decided to just own the fact that I'm a dysfunctional wackjob with a slight hoarding problem, and that it's a waste of my low energy and high stress levels to spend any more time trying to make that two or three percent less obvious.  I'll need that energy to convince myself that I don't care if the architect judges me.  I'm terrified of this whole process

I've been taking a ceramics class at a local studio for the last few weeks.  I used to do clay many years ago, but haven't touched it since the year 2000.   The class I'm taking is for the basics of handbuilding with clay, and the first project was sculpting a human face.  I didn't think I would particularly want to sculpt a human face or that I would be any good at it, but to my surprise I really enjoyed it.  I'm a little bit in love with the one that I made and I'm anxious about whether or not she'll survive the kiln.  I don't have any reason to think that she won't, but I'm anxious anyway.  I'm already preparing myself for losing her.  What's up with that?