This is a common tactic of mine, but it took me a while to realize I was doing it with what is probably the most tragic event of my life so far.
This came to me while I was listening to something someone else was saying in group therapy. An epiphany I didn’t share with the group because it was from my personal pain, not our shared experiences.
My (fairly justified) separation anxiety has given me coping mechanisms that sometimes make me worry that I’m a little too good at letting go of people when I need to.
What if it isn’t that I can put up the walls when I need to, but that I just can’t connect at all?
But apparently Kara believes this line of thinking is nonsense. So I’m probably just being too hard on myself. As usual.
Maybe you need to hear this, too.
Group therapy can teach you so much about yourself in the things you learn about someone else. Also, a few people out there definitely had to die in my brain before I could start over with them. That doesn’t mean we’re ever going to be close again, but they are fully not what they were before. And that’s a good thing.
I feel like I’ve been holed up for a while and I’m ready to come back out again.
This is both me feeling like I don’t have enough to contribute and feeling like I don’t deserve the help.
Both feelings are untrue.
This may have worked better as an essay than a comic, but this was where my mind was today.
The men in my support group are some of the most loving and supportive people I’ve ever met. Without them, I don’t know how I would have made it through the last year.
I’ve been avoiding telling anyone who it was who was responsible for the childhood trauma I have talked about at length here, but tonight I realized that the reasons I’ve been keeping this secret have had nothing to do with me and everything to do with protecting him and his family.
Sexual violence leaves a complicated fracture in our lives. A year in, I feel like I’ve barely begun to see the pattern, much less picked up any of the pieces. But I’m healing and I’m growing.
If you need help, please seek it out. You’ll never be sorry that you did.
Given what this person knows about me, a hug kind of seemed more appropriate but, at the same time, not.