Ew, Feelings.
I'm in a difficult spot right now. I can see that in the coming months I will be leaving outpatient treatment at CFD Houston and potentially returning to Austin in the spring. The thought of this terrifies me. I have been in this program for four months now and it has become my second home. It took me a long time to come out of my shell there but now that I have I am really attached to everyone there, staff and clients. I know I am not leaving that soon. I am still in PHP right now and I have to step down through IOP (half-day) and then decrease the frequency of the IOP until I am completely discharged to outpatient. I still think about it a lot, though. The thought of coming back once a week to the public Support In Recovery group where I would be seeing my old team and the space I grew in for weeks and weeks hurts so much. I can feel the pain now despite it really being something I will encounter in the future, not the present. But leaving the city entirely to go back to school seems impossible to do without the help from an old frenemy.
Thinking about how transitions like this will continue on for the rest of my life and that I will never be able to escape these seasonal feelings makes me feel really hopeless. These thoughts are all consuming and prevent me from enjoying the time I do have with the people I form connections with. It makes me want to give up and end it all. Then at least I wouldn't have to be sad about anticipating their inevitable ends, the ends themselves, and the aftermaths of their endings.
I have spent a few days thinking about this topic and today, with the help from a process group, I learned that I am not allowing myself to really go far enough to feel the emotions in the moment I am speaking about them. I appeared to have been shutting them down just before they were able to break the surface, thus bringing my chance for deep connection with the group to an abrupt halt. The group facilitator said that this was likely a reason for at least some of my loneliness. After being asked how I felt about sharing about my loneliness, I said I felt really guilty and shameful for saying how lonely I felt in a room with people I spend many hours every day with. I didn't want them to think I didn't care about their company and presence. In reality, those people, fellow clients, are the only thing keeping me sane. I can see his point, though. About repressing the emotions just below their threshold of visible expression. I have been doing it passively for so long that I don't know how to not do it anymore.
A lot of the work that you do in treatment revolves around learning how to feel emotions and process them in a healthy way rather than suppressing them until they have to be let out through destructive behaviors. As you can imagine, it is often the less comfortable core emotions such as sadness, anger, and fear that are avoided or repressed. Learning to sit through them and feel them fully is a monumental and revolutionary task in the name of recovery.
I have my own expectations for how this should look like. For instance, if I find myself angry at my parents for treating me a certain way, I would expect my head to pound and my breathing to get heavy and my heart rate to speed up. If I felt anxious or afraid I would expect to feel knots in my stomach, a sense of restlessness to come over me, and I tend to hold my breath. Finally, if I feel sad, in order to really feel it I expect myself to cry. When I don't get the lump in my throat and the shaking in my voice that come with the warm tears streaming down my cheeks, my sadness feels invalid. I have recently been in a drought. The longer this drought of salty droplets draws out, the less connected to my emotions I feel.
I used to cry, not very often, but I would. I cried on the last day of middle school. I cried when I did poorly on a state practice test in second grade. I cried like a baby after graduation practice in high school and after leaving the theater black box for the final time as a student. I frequently feel the need to cry. My emotions are strong enough at the core, but I am not able to feel them all the way through. Since I started treatment I have shed a few tears, but they never came without deep concentration and focus. I really have had to try hard to cry and this leads me to extreme frustration with my body and why it won't let me physically express what I am feeling on the inside. It has recently led me to resort to feeling anxious which is (apparently) a secondary emotion. This past week I have experienced daily occurrences of of extended restlessness, a knotted stomach, and above all, a head of racing thoughts. I was trying to grant the causes of these episodes to varying daily situations rather than acknowledging they were the result of something deeper and stronger than I wasn't capable or comfortable expressing.
Overall, I have been pretty uncomfortable with my emotions. Hopefully this is a precursor for growth. I feel incomplete and lost even when writing this post. However, I am not going to use that as an excuse not to publish it. I may not share it with people initially, but I have to post it to even allow for that possibility in the future and I don't want to inhibit that. I will not let those voices and negative self-talk rule me, not when it comes to my creative space, at least.
Glo
Thinking about how transitions like this will continue on for the rest of my life and that I will never be able to escape these seasonal feelings makes me feel really hopeless. These thoughts are all consuming and prevent me from enjoying the time I do have with the people I form connections with. It makes me want to give up and end it all. Then at least I wouldn't have to be sad about anticipating their inevitable ends, the ends themselves, and the aftermaths of their endings.
I have spent a few days thinking about this topic and today, with the help from a process group, I learned that I am not allowing myself to really go far enough to feel the emotions in the moment I am speaking about them. I appeared to have been shutting them down just before they were able to break the surface, thus bringing my chance for deep connection with the group to an abrupt halt. The group facilitator said that this was likely a reason for at least some of my loneliness. After being asked how I felt about sharing about my loneliness, I said I felt really guilty and shameful for saying how lonely I felt in a room with people I spend many hours every day with. I didn't want them to think I didn't care about their company and presence. In reality, those people, fellow clients, are the only thing keeping me sane. I can see his point, though. About repressing the emotions just below their threshold of visible expression. I have been doing it passively for so long that I don't know how to not do it anymore.
A lot of the work that you do in treatment revolves around learning how to feel emotions and process them in a healthy way rather than suppressing them until they have to be let out through destructive behaviors. As you can imagine, it is often the less comfortable core emotions such as sadness, anger, and fear that are avoided or repressed. Learning to sit through them and feel them fully is a monumental and revolutionary task in the name of recovery.
I have my own expectations for how this should look like. For instance, if I find myself angry at my parents for treating me a certain way, I would expect my head to pound and my breathing to get heavy and my heart rate to speed up. If I felt anxious or afraid I would expect to feel knots in my stomach, a sense of restlessness to come over me, and I tend to hold my breath. Finally, if I feel sad, in order to really feel it I expect myself to cry. When I don't get the lump in my throat and the shaking in my voice that come with the warm tears streaming down my cheeks, my sadness feels invalid. I have recently been in a drought. The longer this drought of salty droplets draws out, the less connected to my emotions I feel.
I used to cry, not very often, but I would. I cried on the last day of middle school. I cried when I did poorly on a state practice test in second grade. I cried like a baby after graduation practice in high school and after leaving the theater black box for the final time as a student. I frequently feel the need to cry. My emotions are strong enough at the core, but I am not able to feel them all the way through. Since I started treatment I have shed a few tears, but they never came without deep concentration and focus. I really have had to try hard to cry and this leads me to extreme frustration with my body and why it won't let me physically express what I am feeling on the inside. It has recently led me to resort to feeling anxious which is (apparently) a secondary emotion. This past week I have experienced daily occurrences of of extended restlessness, a knotted stomach, and above all, a head of racing thoughts. I was trying to grant the causes of these episodes to varying daily situations rather than acknowledging they were the result of something deeper and stronger than I wasn't capable or comfortable expressing.
Overall, I have been pretty uncomfortable with my emotions. Hopefully this is a precursor for growth. I feel incomplete and lost even when writing this post. However, I am not going to use that as an excuse not to publish it. I may not share it with people initially, but I have to post it to even allow for that possibility in the future and I don't want to inhibit that. I will not let those voices and negative self-talk rule me, not when it comes to my creative space, at least.
Glo
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