#therapy stuff

Alterhuman experiences in therapy & lessons to take with me (TW: mental illness, SA, sexual trauma/shame, themes of intimacy)

Being an alterhuman has played a big part in my therapy journey as of late, and my therapist uses it to drive home my lessons and homework.

“The wolf side of you makes you confident. Focus on that so it drowns out the shame your human side experiences.”

it's totally normal to view most of your interactions with other people similarly to how villager interactions in Minecraft work (I give you something and you give me something, transactional relationships)!

this is mostly for my fellow cluster B's who struggle with feeling like everyone around them is an NPC and that their interactions are incredibly superficial

Anyway, I spent most of therapy talking about her and how my relationship with my partner has actually decreased my phobia of her. Telling my partner about "Delilah" and having her respond with "she sounds like a little me" just shifted my entire perspective.

My therapist was so respectful in trying to create a place that felt safer for this part. She didn't even use the word "safe space" because she recognized how insulting that felt to a part who feels like the entire world is unsafe.

But we got to a place where I could meet her there in that place and offer her some reassurance. But she still feels like a ghost to me and I think I still look like a monster to her. Strangely, I found two teenager parts I know very well were able to enter her space freely, and they behave like they know her well, like they've always known her. I'm smothering down the urge to react with "Well you could have told me!"

The other surprise was the reaction to my therapist asking if she needed anything. This part feels so small and passive and weak to me. But immediately the answer was an image, not words, and image of weapons - blunt instruments to fend other people off. I felt so unsure that I asked my therapists permission. No one has ever asked for weapons in their safe space before. Well, Rory asked for a bat, but that felt different. My therapist said of course, she needs to defend herself, but I can't imagine her wielding this weapons. I don't think she could even lift them.

My therapist: Okay, but the ways you were feeling sound completely normal and reasonable to me given the circumstances.

Me:

imagine the sun.

This is a very reductive view since it's only in one specific wavelength, but it will serve to get the idea.

The sun isn't solid. It's a giant ball of plasma. It doesn't have a smooth surface. Oh, and it's spinning.

If something isn't solid and it's spinning, then not all parts of it have to spin at the same speed. We're used to that, we've all stirred stuff or seen clouds and felt wind before. (or at least one of those, I guess.) So, that plasma that is our sun spins faster at the poles than at the equator. that is also a somewhat reductive view, but it gets the point across as well so, whatever.

Plasma is not like other forms of matter. plasma is what you get when a gas is so energized that the electrons become more of a communal medium than any kind of one-hydrogen-nucleus-one-electron nonsense. It's basically electron broth, proton soup.

so the sun's electromagnetic field is a bit of a tangled mess. Earth's field is, broadly speaking, a big ol bar magnet with a few bits of localized fuckery. The sun's electromagnetic field is like.

kinda.

these tangled field lines are places where plasma creeps up and out, drawn along the field to make tangled loops in the sun's corona. the bright spots in this wavelength are sunspot regions. sunspots form in pairs at either end of those tangled field lines. sometimes these tangles get SO tangled that they bend and snap and erupt and the sun belches out a big ol burst of plasma all at once.

I have been in trauma therapy to unravel a lot of very old stuff. Some of it is from a traumatizing childhood experience (or at least, it's centered on that) and some of it is because I was an undiagnosed adhd autistic kid and some of it is because I've known I wasn't cis/het since I was about thirteen and sussed out that I'm genderqueer when I was about seventeen and also I live in the southern US.

Sometimes, that therapy looks like my therapist checking in, noticing I'm mostly stable enough, and we can carefully pull on one of the threads of underlying trauma to sort of map out some of the connections in my brain to release some of the pent up energy in those connections. (More or less. As I understand it.) Bit like detangling the field lines from one of the calmer regions of the sun.

Sometimes, though, there's a really big obvious angry snarl where something else has already yanked one of those threads loose. Then it feels a little bit more like we're trying to detangle one of those sunspot regions before it blehs plasma all over everything.

today was a bit like my therapist looked at me, had an internal "okay, there's what we're doing today" cause there was a big ol sunspot region right front and center.