Learning to love our inner selves.

First of all thankyou to those of you who come in and read our blogs. We know that we arent responding to yours as much if any but, our days are now about sixteen hour days with school sometimes taking up ten of those hours with travel time another two and study out of hours the remainder. it is a lot of theory right now. things like first aid and dietary requirements. its a lot to learn and that in itself can be exhausting. Yesterday was a rare treat we got to take apart a whole side of lamb. For me that was wonderful as i always wanted to be a butcher i was in my element. Whilst all the other people in my class went ughhh yuck we pulled it apart with ease and even cleaned up every ones scraps to make mince. Our teacher was amazed and kept saying maybe you can be a butcher after all. No one has ever seen a female butcher, but our passion of cooking also is something we cant give up on so we are now confused. What we do know is that we will finish our certIII and then decide, right now we are having a blast.

As for therapy last weeks session just brought back the rawness of pain that we had held so hidden for so long. We wake at night with one image our face behind bars and our little hands clutching them in the hope we might get rescued. But what we have found interesting is that we instead of letting it consume us like we used to have started to understand that acknowledging the child whose little fists are there is the first step to healing. Each time we see this image although it hurts terribly we also have the power to say you know what we acknowledge the pain you've held inside for too long now.

Its think this is made harder because for five years we lived in trauma with our last therapist Acantha. So last week when we first felt that terrible gnawing pain of hurt we started to panic terrified that we wouldnt be able to cope and that we would go into crisis again just like we used to. In fact the first sign of self doubt came in. This was the moment when Acantha would come in and take over and offer us 24 hours 7 days a week therapy. We realised that this was the first time in a long long time that we didnt have anyone rescuing us from our pain this was the time we needed to work on this ourselves. So at night we placed cuddles and otherr such self soothing toys for those alters remembering the cage and we started to put into motion what we had been taught.

its been hard im not saying it hasnt but its been rewarding also. We made a conscious decision two years ago to have no relationship with our therapist outside of therapy. We dont talk to them and we dont even think of them. Im finding that by doing this we are finding ways to soothe our own inner alters without needing to talk more than therapy time. But its scary changing so many things that youve had at your fingertips for so long. It was the first time that we realised how far we could have come had we done this earlier. Had Acantha been the therapist that let us feel the feelings and let it go then perhaps we wouldnt be in therapy now. but the fact is that we cant let that take over, Deshanti said the other day to rachel "i know its gonna hurt, i know its gonna feel like crap but im prepared to face that to let it go". So i think know we are really learning what letting go means.

us-etal