*ponder*

I've started going back to the BUS board after staying away for a while when I was connected to the internet only at work. After nearly a month away, I'd forgotten how hard it is to go through all those posts, to read all the suffering and pain and anguish that literally hundreds of people are going through every single day of their lives.

And it's so frustrating! Some posters just seem to want to shove their scarred and bloody wrists in your face, to scream and rant and show you how hard it is for them. And I KNOW it's hard. I've been there, I am there, and I just want to shake them and tell them it's SUPPOSED to be hard. They want it to be easy, for all the badness to magically stop. They want me to make it better for them and I don't know how. I don't even know how to make it better for myself, let alone for them.


And I listen to their stories, and I hear about their fathers/uncles/schoolteachers/stepdads/cousins who raped them, hit them, insult them, ignore them, stub out their cigarettes on little twelve-year-old bodies, and little sixteen-year-olds come and post about cutting so deep that they needed thirty-seven stitches in their leg, all to make the hurting stop.

Had my first Cognitive Therapy appointment yesterday. Revelatory, I think, even though it was really hot. I was so nervous I shredded the paper towel Dr. Yap gave me because it was so hot into little itty bitty pieces. I'm pretty sure she noticed.

Funny how she pinned down some of the problems right away. Like problems with physical and emotional closeness. It's not like I didn't know it before, but I have *major* problems with any kind of close contact or intimacy, which have become even more painfully obvious since I started dating Poms.

I love the boy to death, I really do, and yet my first instinct when he touches me is to recoil. There's this horrible conflict in my head every time he kisses me, every time he puts his arm around me... It's pleasant, I know I enjoy it, and yet at the same time there's a part of me that's actually physically repulsed, and that frightens me more than anything ever has before. I want to be able to share that kind of closeness with him, and I find myself going out of my way to avoid it.

This is one of those moments in which, if you're the melodramatic time, you spread your arms and scream at the heavens: "God, what is wrong with me?"

Luckily I've never been into melodrama. ;)

I'm not even emotionally that close to my parents. Intellectually yes, and I even get hugs now and then from my mother, but as a rule I don't let them see what's going on. Most of the time no one has any real idea of what'S going on. Sure, it's not like I'm a master of dissimulation, but I've become adept at dismissing myself, of using flippancy as a defense mechanism, of constantly pushing aside whatever might be wrong with a joke, a sarcastic remark, an exaggerated metaphor.

Not sure I even know myself anymore. Isn't that dumb? Socrates would have an aneurysm and then beat me up thoroughly with a 2x4.

Okay, back to work now...

*ponder*

I've started going back to the BUS board after staying away for a while when I was connected to the internet only at work. After nearly a month away, I'd forgotten how hard it is to go through all those posts, to read all the suffering and pain and anguish that literally hundreds of people are going through every single day of their lives.

And it's so frustrating! Some posters just seem to want to shove their scarred and bloody wrists in your face, to scream and rant and show you how hard it is for them. And I KNOW it's hard. I've been there, I am there, and I just want to shake them and tell them it's SUPPOSED to be hard. They want it to be easy, for all the badness to magically stop. They want me to make it better for them and I don't know how. I don't even know how to make it better for myself, let alone for them.


And I listen to their stories, and I hear about their fathers/uncles/schoolteachers/stepdads/cousins who raped them, hit them, insult them, ignore them, stub out their cigarettes on little twelve-year-old bodies, and little sixteen-year-olds come and post about cutting so deep that they needed thirty-seven stitches in their leg, all to make the hurting stop.

Had my first Cognitive Therapy appointment yesterday. Revelatory, I think, even though it was really hot. I was so nervous I shredded the paper towel Dr. Yap gave me because it was so hot into little itty bitty pieces. I'm pretty sure she noticed.

Funny how she pinned down some of the problems right away. Like problems with physical and emotional closeness. It's not like I didn't know it before, but I have *major* problems with any kind of close contact or intimacy, which have become even more painfully obvious since I started dating Poms.

I love the boy to death, I really do, and yet my first instinct when he touches me is to recoil. There's this horrible conflict in my head every time he kisses me, every time he puts his arm around me... It's pleasant, I know I enjoy it, and yet at the same time there's a part of me that's actually physically repulsed, and that frightens me more than anything ever has before. I want to be able to share that kind of closeness with him, and I find myself going out of my way to avoid it.

This is one of those moments in which, if you're the melodramatic time, you spread your arms and scream at the heavens: "God, what is wrong with me?"

Luckily I've never been into melodrama. ;)

I'm not even emotionally that close to my parents. Intellectually yes, and I even get hugs now and then from my mother, but as a rule I don't let them see what's going on. Most of the time no one has any real idea of what'S going on. Sure, it's not like I'm a master of dissimulation, but I've become adept at dismissing myself, of using flippancy as a defense mechanism, of constantly pushing aside whatever might be wrong with a joke, a sarcastic remark, an exaggerated metaphor.

Not sure I even know myself anymore. Isn't that dumb? Socrates would have an aneurysm and then beat me up thoroughly with a 2x4.

Okay, back to work now...