Circles of Therapy.

This week my therapist described me to me, by noting that the previous week I had come in and discussed wanting to see the beauty in people in my past again.

My therapist has been with me for over five years now. During year one I had picked up a copy of Will I Ever Be Good Enough?: Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers by Dr. Karyl McBridge. Back then, I was 20 and it wasn’t yet common to recognize narcissistic traits in surrounding relationships, at least from my point of view. I was piecing together my experience with my mother while noticing the similarities between the stories in the book and the friends I had brought along with me in life thus far. I used to call this era “realizing everyone in my life was a narcissist” before a psychotic break that crushed my confidence and shook me to my core. Even before getting sick later that summer, I was incredibly anxious about the fact that in all of my predominant relationships at the time I did not feel loved.

It took me years, until June of this year to be exact, to finally walk away from the last of those toxic relationships. This was years of deciding the blame was on myself, as I had a parent call me regularly to remind me that the source of every problem that came up in my life was that I had failed to listen to her. I didn’t know how to be in relationships besides to carry the guilt, shame, and primary responsibility for bringing unconditional love and healing to our stories. For my therapist, to hear from me just last week that I wanted to see the beauty in the relationships I would never return back to, was a giant step backwards.

The truth is that healing has been unconditionally difficult for me. I can identify greatly with the term “three steps forward, three steps back”, and Olivia Rodrigo sang the context best. Being raised by people who made a point of placing responsibility on everyone but themselves conditioned me to relate to others the way I did, creating an entire trauma disorder for me as diagnosed in July of this year. It’s taken this long to recognize not only that pattern, but that that pattern enabled me to think that relationships mirroring that with my mother were loving, regardless of how I felt. In February of 2021, on the brink of reuniting with two ex-best friends and my ex-boyfriend, my therapist told me that my healing would be entirely determined by my willingness to go forth and be alone. I did not want to be alone at the time, the plot continued.

I was raised in a strict, right-wing, Catholic home, and homeschooled at that. The worst thing to be in that environment was to be someone who carried a “victim mentality” and expected others to solve their problems for them. The other worst thing to be was someone who carried resentment, a liberal, and a person who didn’t offer unconditional forgiveness with regards to abuse- regardless of extremes. “Jesus taught forgiveness, why can’t you?” My brain is conditioned to return to an environment that looks something like that even far after leaving religion and politics, which is where low self-worth and low self-esteem was born as a staple in my personality.

Having the ability to track and articulate the above narrative is progress. And yet, I still received a lecture this week from my wonderful therapist on how she absolutely did not want to talk about my old relationships again. Last week was a session mashed between stress with my husband, a family emergency, and oddly public bullying from an old friend. When I entered therapy this week with fresh eyes, a renewed sense of self, and a trajectory towards healing – I was shocked I had tried to go down the old rabbit hole to begin with.

Ultimately, self-compassion is the only virtue that must be unconditional. I was knee deep in describing to my therapist how I wanted to plant my own tree that was completely separate from those of my family, just to be shown a mirror of how I had diverged from those values just recently.

I have a bleeding heart for the pain of others, even those in my past who I know I was wronged by repeatedly. However, my realization this week is that those people have always managed to take care of themselves. They are tending to their own tree, as they should, and I will not be there to water them again. That means it isn’t selfish, narcissistic, or reaching to dive into nurturing my own tree. I don’t have to dive back into my judgement calls on people who treated me shitty to heal, or for their benefit. It doesn’t benefit me to return to an environment of gaslighting my feelings and my experience, either.

As I’ve stated, I’ve developed an entire trauma disorder around my history. It’s both daunting, and validating. My therapist described yesterday my struggle with dissonance, as to accept a diagnosis of C-PTSD, I have to also accept that I have experienced unrelenting trauma in relationships over a long period of time. This is what created a “me” that constantly wants to seek “self-improvement” by deciding I’m the one solely responsible for my pain in relationships. This is what created a person who will dissociate again in crisis and want to “white light” and “place rose colored glasses” back on my face to write a story that makes the world sound better even if I’m a villain. Ultimately, I guess this post is for me, and anyone else who had a therapist spend 4+ years convincing their clients they are not the problem.

I don’t realize how quickly I can slip backwards, or how deeply affected my psyche is by new stressful experiences to date. For me, that speaks to the importance of a relationship with self, as opposed to “other”. I’ve lost hours I could’ve spent on hobbies pouring over the drama of people that never truly loved me, or offered me common human decency. I’ve spent hours poring over psychology texts just to train the target on myself again. I’ve spent years of my life assimilating to truth in a family that didn’t reflect my values. This path is incredibly hard, but there isn’t ever going to be a way out- only in. Ultimately, the home and person I am looking for that needs my love the most, is myself.