Be not afraid of growing slowly. Be afraid of only standing still.
Chinese proverb
Two visits to my therapist
Last week my husband and I both went to see my therapist - on separate occasions. Partly, she doesn't do couples counselling, partly we wanted to talk to her separately anyway. My husband went first and two days later, I followed. My husband gave permission for my therapist to share whatever she thought was useful for me to know and she did. We talked for an hour about what my husband was feeling and then she gave me some advice. Now, my therapist is anything but directive, so when she talks, it's usually brief and to the point. "Why not," she suggested, "try and focus on the first part of what your husband's saying? Why not focus on the 'I was overwhelmed and stressed and I'm burned out,' part, not the 'and I might leave,' part?" Great advice. Easy to do? Absolutely not!
I don't know about you, but for me, fear of abandonment is one of my HUGE triggers. It hinges on so many other fears and is based not on things I think might happen, but on things that DID happen. I am afraid that I cannot keep myself safe because for many years, I couldn't. Bad things happened and I was powerless to stop them. From a rational/chronological point of view that was a long time ago. From the point of view of the part of my brain that stores trauma, it's still a present danger. "If you're alone," that part of my brain tells me, "you won't be safe." Only it's more like that part of my brain, let's call it the non-verbal part of the brain, has flash-frozen the memories of my earlier traumas and since it is non-verbal, that part of my brain doesn't understand time and I can't "talk" to it rationally, so it doesn't realize that I'm safe now. That is one way to think about how trauma is stored in the brain. And looking at the process in this simple way, helps to explain why "just" focusing on the first part of my husband's message without paying attention to the abandonment part of the message, is about as easy as not noticing the grizzly bear sitting on your couch. How am I doing? Even though it's been hard, I've taken my therapist's advice. The alternative was being so stressed out about the second half of the message: the "I might leave" part that I couldn't sleep, could barely eat, and was ready to leave myself, just to get away from the fear of abandonment.
So how are my husband and I doing? Well, we're still in the same house and we don't spend nearly as much time arguing. Maybe we aren't under the same umbrella yet, but at least we're on the same balcony. It's a start. Time will tell what the results will be. I'm proud of myself for being able to back off, give my husband more space, and - mostly - not bring up anything about the future. At times, I feel afraid and lonely and frustrated. However, as my therapist suggested, we can work on the fear together - she and I. A better idea than trying to work on it with my husband because fear of abandonment can quickly turn into anger - even rage - at the thought of being abandoned.
I still have a lot to learn about fear and PTSD. Fear is one of the most persistent aspects of PTSD, particularly complex PTSD, which I have. I searched in vain for an article online that had what I was looking for on this topic. I did find one, however, that does a pretty good job of discussing fear and PTSD. Meanwhile, I see my therapist again next week and we'll talk more about fear and what I can do to learn better coping strategies. And, hopefully, I'll have more to share with all of you. In the meantime, I will definitely get to that series on silencing trauma survivors that I've been promising.
