I want to share
 

what my daughter's therapist said to me today. Because I can't be the only one who needed to hear it.

"When you have experienced trauma and ugliness and pain, the necessary emotional processing of that trauma, ugliness, and pain is not going to look neat and tidy."

What she meant was: Intellectuals want to use talk therapy to talk their way through, we think that if we can understand and put words on it, it will go away. She said not so fast. That it's a drawn-out and ugly process, and if we understand that, we won't feel like failures when we have to pull over on the highway and cry until the highway patrol comes and asks us if there's something wrong with our car, because we will understand that IT WILL BE MESSY.

Processing what we've been through will be messy. Sort of like when you do a real deep cleaning of your home: It has to get worse before it can get better.

And that's OK.

Not being able to handle it all on a rational/intellectual level? Is normal.

That lifted my spirits today. So I wanted to share.

Thank you!

Lillamy,

It's amazing how a little perspective, a simple change of a lens, can make such a huge difference.

I am someone who, as a professional, packages information into concise, clear and sometimes technical little bundles. The reaction from those to whom I present this information is often, "That's it!" or "Exactly" and then it is done and we move on. So, putting words to something actually does make the task go away in my work life.

I, for one, have applied that system to what my boys (especially my oldest) and I have been going through. No wonder it often feels like we are getting no where.

Thanks for sharing this. It certainly lifted my spirits too.
Hugs,
MamaKit

Yup. Me too. There are times I've joked about being a magician: I find the right words for it and the job task goes away. Abracadabra. :D

Not so with those pesky emotions. :lmao

Yes! This is close to what my therapist told me. I had to walk THROUGH the wreckage to get to the other side. I couldn't walk around it or over it without learning how it got to be that way, and without learning the tools to "clear the debris." That was a powerful image for me. I actually had to deal with the wreckage from the storm.

Needed that after this past weekend. Thank you!

Just what I needed to hear. Thanks for sharing.