Sunday, October 4, 2009

A little therapy for the whole family

It has been a week of highs and lows. Wednesday was extremely intense for all of us and Thursday was the brightest day we've had in a very long time. Friday was good, Saturday was just okay, today, Sunday, is teetering back and forth between not good and okay. I know this is a normal pattern for recovery but knowing doesn't preclude wishing for things to be better.

On Wednesday, when we had our session with the Team, Emily was reluctant to express just how much pain she is experiencing to them. She and I had talked about it the night before and I encouraged her to write down her thoughts to help her bring them up at our session, but she doesn't trust the Team members enough to let her real feelings out.

The Team spent quite a bit of time talking about the need for Emily to stop bottling up her feelings. In fact, all three of us have work to do on allowing ourselves to feel and express our anger, frustration, sadness etc., etc., etc. We are a trio of emotional suppressors and accommodaters, we don't like having negative feelings and we certainly don't like letting them out of pandora's box. But as we were told, unreleased anger and sadness causes more problems than it avoids. I am grateful that Emily will have the chance to learn how to deal with her negative feelings as an adolescence so that she won't have to carry those behaviours into adulthood the way I have. We are currently experimenting with letting our true feelings out of the bag while we are playing Trouble and believe me when I say we are getting lots of practice time in, like six times a day because we play at every meal as part of our 'distraction' from Ed strategy. I'd say that so far we have only scratched the surface of the issue of letting our feeling out, but I am planning to take it to the next level real soon. I can't wait to see the looks on their faces when they hear me yell out my frustration the next time one of them sends me home when I am only one space away from being safe.

Gotta go start lunch! Here comes those feelings of dread that she will find lunch too painful. Guess I haven't managed to let them go yet.

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