Brave Enough To Be Bliss

Chapter 5 — Only Human

“Yes, you will rise from the ashes, but the burning comes first. For this part, darling, you must be brave.” Kalen Dion

Kylee and I got through Christmas, but this was the one Christmas in her life where the joy was missing. I was grateful she was physically present, but I missed her. The next eight months were spent merely surviving. I worked and worried about her. She went to therapy and school and studied. We watched some shows and communicated about the basics, but really didn’t talk like we had before. Survival doesn’t allow for much beyond the basics. You get up, you do what you have to do, and you pray for sleep, so you don’t have to be pre sent in your life. She was staying alive because she didn’t want to hurt me, and I was doing the same for her. That’s it. And that’s no way to live. I saw Ginger in two-hour sessions and it was the key to making so much significant progress. Other therapists I had gone to only had a one-hour option and right when I would start feeling comfortable enough to open up, the session would be over. And at that point, it was just hanging out there in my mind for a week or two or three until I was able to see that person again and by that time, it wasn’t even worth going back into and they rarely remembered exactly where I left off. It was a game-changer for me, but everything with her was. Ginger gave me a list of tools to practice daily that could help me develop self-compassion. I think she saw the horror on my face after I skimmed the first one, so she told me I could just pick the one I was most comfortable with. The first one was called Compassionate Hands, where I was supposed to place my hand on my heart, head, arm, belly, or leg while saying a phrase like, “you are safe.” That one was completely out of the question. Nope, not gonna happen lady, I remember thinking when, toward the end of our first session, she asked me to close my eyes so we could do a breathing exercise. First of all, I wasn’t going to close my eyes, second of all I was absolutely not going to place my hand on my heart and absolutely positively I was never going to touch my belly…and breathing, I wasn’t really a fan of that at all. I liked to take up the least amount of space possible, not touch anything that reminded me I was alive and while I trusted her, one never knows what could happen if you close your eyes. Fortunately, she already k new me well enough that she said, that’s ok, leave your eyes open and pick a point on the wall to look at and let’s just spend a couple minutes in the quiet. Since this was obviously a better option than the previous suggestion, I managed to do it, but I r eally didn’t like the quiet at all either. It was sort of like not being busy. The quiet was not my friend, I needed something to drown out the voices in my head because they were very, very noisy, and still, very mean. Self-compassion was nowhere in sight yet. My self-loathing was deeply e mbedded into who I was. I couldn’t have a thought cross my mind without a tirade of verbal assaults being thrown at me, by me. The complete hatred of who I was, what I looked like, my entire being was at the end of free-flowing hateful thoughts that could cross my mind more quickly than one could imagine. Breathing was too close to living, and I wanted none of that. Putting air into my lungs, pushing out my stomach, even for an instant, why would I want to do that? I felt fat enough already. I would feel even more full…perhaps full of oxygen and oxygen was life. I wanted to feel empty, this vessel of a human didn’t need air, life…what was she trying to make me do? Live? Be fully alive? I would have none of that. Feel my chest and stomach. Absolutely not. Place my hands there and breathe. No and hell no. No one could make me do that. At my appointments with Ginger, I literally had to force myself to try and breathe deeply, although I’m not sure anyone who actually does breathe deeply would have referred to what I was doing as that. I sure wasn’t going to make any sound like she was demonstrating. That was just too much for me. That reminded me of how I never understood when lifting weights, are you supposed to breathe in when you lift or before you lift? Breathing was difficult and confusing and when I tried to follow instructions, it felt like I was doing it all wrong. Enter Ginger Rothhaas into my life…

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