Processing stuff

I am in the middle of an EMDR session and today I thought it would be helpful to journal as a part of the session. I listened to the song Change as part of the session too so… I am experimenting with different things and seeing what works. I have been feeling a huge amount of rejection and disapproval sensitivity today and sometimes I can’t quite tell if someone is irritated with me or they are a hig irritated in general or it is just something I am reading into things because I am more sensitive and seeing the potential negatives more than the positives. I was invited to ne around when someone came to visit todsy to pick up his dog that we borrowed and when no attention was paid to me after hello it felt like confirmation that I am just not liked… by anyone… and yet just my being here and receiving this hospitality is evidence that I have some potential for some degree of likability so… it’s confusing stuff.

I wanted to do a session on rejection and disapproval sensitivity and the craving for validation and how, the way it feels as it comes up now, it feels like my very survival is at stake. If I get some evidence that one or two people may have issues with me, it leads me to fear that I am totally disliked and word must have gotten around and everyone has an issue with me. Then no one will be there for me ir support me and it feels ungrounding in the root chakra like my very survival is at stake and my desire for survival, too, my willingness to fight for my life, seems to suffer as well. I don’t always feel this way but it is coming up like this very strongly today. When I hear a calmer or more gentle tone of voice from someone I suspect has unknown issues with me I am immediately more at ease at least for a bit until my fears rise up again.

Triggers for this issue, aside from what I experienced today, are things like, being told by someone I loved that she could never talk to me again on the phone in a towing company parking lot. Waiting for an email that never comes or remembering the last emails sent to me by my first love. Some of the stuff I was going through when Crystal and I were together: I could have benefited from things like EMDR then! If only I had known about this sort of stuff it might not have piled up to all eternity as it seems to have done. Memories that feel dissociative, like both of us were dissociating at the same time, in that first relationship. Memories of Ireland. Memories of a couple of communities where I seem to have outworn my welcome…

As I got into the session and processed those triggers everything kind of started revolving around the first time I went to this 10-day long summer camp. Actually it started revolving around what happened immediately afterwards: my brake line snapping in the wind and the rain going down a mountain in a way that certainly should have killed me. I hit a mailbox and my bicycle fell off the rack. The owners of the house whose driveway I had miraculously landed in when I should have been dead said, don’t worry about the mailbox, it happens all the time. But I should have been dead.

Maybe this was the first time I realised how truly precarious my life is: I had just gotten back from this camp where I felt potential supports coming from every direction and my whole life felt healed and transformed, but right afterwards, I experienced this trauma. I uad no idea what to do when I was far away from anyone I knew (or at least far away from anyone ai had known for more than two weeks). What do you do, how do you find lodging in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and how do you get your car to a place to be fixed? Who do you talk to to get help? It was so confusing and I felt like I had just escaped death and was stranded. I felt shame I think when I called the camp and said I had been in an accident and could I please return. I didn’t know what to do, I was freaking out inside but felt like I had to be calm or they would reject me. They were matter of fact about getting help with the car, knowing of a mechanic nearby, but I have no idea if anyone comprehended that I had almost died and what that meant. I wished someone would sit woth me and process of something, be gentle with me… that would have been a time, if they knew what I had been theough, to suggest maybe seeing a counselor. I mean, it probably wouldn’t have helped me then, either, but the suggestion in that context would have felt beneficial because it would have been a recognition that I had been through trauma and that my emotional experience was not something that could just be shrugged off. I had no idea how to express that I needed help feeling safe; that I needed gentleness and to know I wasn’t going to be abandoned. It all felt too much to ask from people I hardly knew and that was way beyond my limit of knowing what my needs were and how to express them. I don’t know if they had any idea how lost I would have been if they hadn’t been there or said you’re on your own, and it was hard enough not being assured, it’s okay, you’re safe, we’ve got your back, wel’ll make sure you’re taken care of… because I did not know how to express my situation I felt at the edge of my welcome and like I was an inconvenience to them for having this near fatal accident.

I started unexpectedly processing that, and some things that happened around it. There was asking to be sent a sign in North Carolina after my car was fixed and immediately seeing mailboxes in the back of something like a pickup truck? A strange and unusual place to see mailboxes. I connect this to my sudden desire to post an image of two trucks labeled Taylor and Swift side by side. Then there was that cuddle in the temple with who knows who and… that accident might have thrown my whole life off balance. I went through a period of extreme paranoia like somebody there might not have liked me and cut my brake line on purpose, and though I am thinking that probably didn’t happen, the fear of that being even a possibility was terrifying.

I went through a period of feeling extreme guilt for everything I had ever done behind the wheel, imagining horrible scenarios that never even happened, and there was something I never said. The actual thing that I feel so guilty about that led me to concoct all of these imagined scenarios and to feel like I was certainly wanted around the world for how terrible my driving is. This was a time I went to a retreat and came down a mountain. I was at the gas station at the bottom and immediately realised I had forgotten something. Something about my mother was making me feel extremely ungrounded and I felt like I had to get back up the mountain to grab something I forgot or there would be consequences and I would be uncovered about something or other, I no longer have any recollection of what. What I do remember is wanting to get up that mountain as quickly as possible, and not taking as much care and paying attention as I should have, when a car came in the other direction and zoomed past me. I do not know who was driving faster but the car zipped by fast and as it passed I could see, maybe from the backseat, the face and eyes of someone I cared about a lot who had led that retreat. It was like I saw their eyes for a flash of a second and I do not know what they were thinking but I think we were both thinking the same thing: when the cars passed each other, at that speed, they were way too close. Maybe I was a little bit over the centerline (on an unmarked road). I don’t know. All I know is I have felt guilty about this moment for years and felt like such a terrible person and to even try to tell them that I experienced this and felt so bad… the idea of it hurt too much, I was so afraid they would then condemn me as so bad. I was sure they already saw this as me driving badly or whatever but I thought that acknowledging it directly would drill the final nail in the coffin so ai guess ai did it indirectly by putting up walls.

So, I… did not talk about this, pretended it didn’t happen, and certainly I put up so many walls so I didn’t have to feel it when we were interacting. I really do not know what happened, but the idea that if the cars had been just inches closer, we might have had an accident and they might have died… was too much to bear. I have always been so sorry but I don’t even know if I did anything, just that I was distracted and the car caught me by surprise, snd I have been afraid if I told them, they would hate me. But there is a food chance they hate me now anyway. And so much of the walls I put up had to do with not being able to talk about this one little moment in time that I am afraid could have changed everything. I was afraid of being condemned if I mentioned it, which is strange, because if anyone in that car experienced my driving that way, they surely would have already known. Then I had all these fears like they did see it as a close call and knew it was me and they had come to the conclusion that I was a horrendous driver and that made me feel guilty about everything for so long. I was just so afraid they would use see it not only as an accident but a sign that I must be in everybway no good. What were connections suffered, I put up walls… I am sorry, and wish I could talk to them about it, but I don’t know id they will talk to me about anything anymore; or it remains to be seen…

And then the end of my session I processed my confusion and conflict around one of the main facilitators at that camp. I mean, I’m going back to it after writing this, so it wasn’t quite the end. I almost just took her off my Facebook, but then I saw that she was taking a break from actively using the sute for three months as a spiritual practice anyway, so the need felt less dire. I just do not understand: I asked her not to stay on my Facebook if she did not support me or understand where I was coming from; and clearly she did not, because for one, I regret where I was coming from when I made all this drama after unfair expressions of concern about me that led to exclusion. I never found out what those were about and ai so wish that I knew. In retrospect it is clear she did not see my perspective, how could anyone? But also, when I needed support most, and was going through an awful time, a few months ago, I reached out to her, and she said nothing. I interpret that as: she violated my request  to leave if she was not in my side, she is just sticking around to watch me suffer, or to keep an eye on me to protect the world because she thinks I am up to no good. Why else would she refuse to ‘unfriend’ me even when I ask her to, and yet not get back to me in a time of need? After all of that? If not a word can be exchanged between us, why stay?

Well, it could be something that happened since I made that request, or it could be what I said when I reached out, but having someone just be there, like a ghost, but never saying a word to you… it is strange and I wish I knew what it means. I wish we could have an honest, like, radically honest and transparent interaction where we could both share exactly what is real for us, but I am stuck in a position where she remains on my Facebook but, maybe it was something I said in my recent approach, she will not say a word to me. It is confusing: that doesn’t feel like support so I feel angry that she did not remove my account. What reason would she have to stay there? I wish I knew but I do not think she would tell me, since she woukd not respond to me when I was in the most dire need, and just wanted to hear from her. I honestly lean more and more towards, she doesn’t like anything about me and stays to watch a train wreck or to make sure I am not a menace to society.

Anyway, I still get invitations to their events and such, probably by accident, or just to confuse me, but she, and I reckon probably others, will not talk to me. I wish there were something we could say to each other. Maybe she is as confused as me. Maybe she thinks I am a horrible person. Why does it feel like I am not allowed to resolve this, either by having her self-select herself out of my life, or by talking to me? But staying on my Facebook and mot saying a word? It’s not like I would but I had a moment of thinking, I *could* just show up at one of these events; then if she is there, whether she talks to me or not, I will at least get some sense of how she feels about me. Anyway, I wish she’s just tell me the full truth: what does she think of me and she doesn’t she remove the account? Especially given the fears I had around maliciousness from some part contributing to my accident, being totally unresolved as far as her perceptions is a pretty unsettling thing in my life and one of the biggest things I wish I could resolve. I just wish something was said that is true, some statement that clarifies her perception of something, but then again I went off the rails when she expressed her perception the first time. I do not think she was in the right but my response was not very productive either. If she still thinks badly of me, and she is more likely to now, why woukd she choose to share it? Nut also why would she stay even marginally connected to me? It is so confusing. Why is what is happening happening? I do not get it.

Anyway, yeah, that was the last thing I was processing when I decided to interrupt my EMDR session to write. I think it was helpful. I guess ai’ll do a couple more rounds.