A setback

After therapy this afternoon, I took a two mile walk, stopped and sat on my therapy bench while I texted with my sister (and shed a few tears), and picked up a sushi burrito for dinner.  Now, that I've eaten I want to try and put to words some of what I am feeling.

I was scheduled for Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) this afternoon.  I was really hopeful going into it.  I'm now 21 months from the day I moved into my own half of the apartment we shared at that time, 1.5 years from the day the divorce was final, and not a day goes by that my ex-husband doesn't still cross my mind at least once bringing up negative emotions.  I had hoped this therapy would replace some of those negative emotions with something more neutral.  

We had barely started ART when panic flooded through me.  I got really hot as the tears started to flow and my body tensed up.  It all happened as I was realizing that I didn't actually have any visuals of so many of the earlier memories and so I didn't know how I was going to play the scenes of our marriage in my head if I couldn't visualize the events I knew had happened.

My therapist stopped the ART session at that point and turned her camera back on so we could talk through what I was feeling.

I had held onto the feelings and a vague timeline of events and could fill in a few details from re-reading my journals, but I had blocked out visuals of so many events.  I suppose that was my coping mechanism.

And then the realization struck me that even my early years couldn't have been good with him if I felt the need to disassociate and block out memories going back that far.  I had told myself over and over throughout the relationship that we had such an amazing start to the relationship, that our "honeymoon" phase had lasted a long time, as if clinging to it might make that time period return.  But what if that time period never actually existed?  That realization hit me like a bag of rocks.

I'm exhausted.  I'm physically and emotionally exhausted.  I have a headache that won't go away, both literally and figuratively.  I feel like today demonstrated that I haven't progressed as far as I thought I had.  It feels like a big setback.  I'm disappointed.  I'm disappointed that after all these months, I still have this big of a reaction to a man that was never worth my investment.  I'm disappointed that I didn't get to see if this therapy could help me.  I'm disappointed that I wasted two decades on him.  

And I'm angry at how he really fucked me up.  How someone can do that to a person they claimed to love and still sleep at night is beyond any comprehension.

As I sat on my therapy bench and texted my sister, she sent me the following graphic which helped me take a moment to laugh at how true this is about so much in life.  I joked that I had fallen into the lake in that graphic.

Now, I sit here alone in my apartment.  The sun has set.  A cool breeze drifts in.  It's quiet.  And despite everything I wrote in the paragraphs above, I know that I will be okay.  Tomorrow morning I'll be back on my scooter with the wind in my hair and a youthful glee ready to face another day.