I’ve been in therapy for more than 20 years and have gone through various forms of therapy: behavioral therapy, psychoanalysis, and behavioral therapy again. I have worked through my family history over and over, in all kinds of places, in front of different people.
I’m not saying it was all pointless. But I never got to the core. I only ever poked around the edges and didn’t see what was actually causing all the fears and depression in me.
My body and nervous system reacted to every change in my life with panic, sleep problems, and all kinds of fears. It was especially bad after the birth of my first daughter and during my pregnancy with my second. I had fears I could neither grasp nor explain – but they felt existentially threatening.
I was trapped in a struggle that lasted for years.
After the first flashbacks last fall, I was endlessly disappointed about the way I had grown up, but at the same time I was also relieved.
To me it felt as if my nervous system had literally discharged, and as if, through reliving it, what I had been through was losing its horror bit by bit.
But the relief of finally understanding what had caused all the grief and physical complaints for decades was indescribable.
For a few months now I’ve been in trauma therapy, where among other things I work with EMDR. In it, distressing memories are processed therapeutically. For me, this process sometimes feels like a physical release. At the same time, I’m learning more and more that what I went through is in the past and that there is no real threat in the here and now anymore.
I find this form of therapy exhausting, but at the same time a relief. While memories and physical reactions are allowed to surface, I’m increasingly learning to calm myself again and find my bearings in the present. To me it feels as if my body and mind are slowly learning to deal differently with what I went through.
It’s exhausting, yes. But here, too, the will to face it is worth it. Today it can never get as bad as it was when it actually happened. Today I am safe. And today I know that I will never go back to a family system that I experienced as marked by power, manipulation, and denial.
I’m taking my life back – what was taken from me for decades.
Of course, not everything was bad. I acknowledge the good just as much.
I hold no grudge, no hatred, and no desire for revenge. I’m making a kind of peace for myself that I have never known before.
That’s why I’m grateful for every terrible memory that joins the ones already there or fills them in. Because then I can bring it out of me and, bit by bit, become the person I could have been if I had grown up under normal circumstances.