And so starts the crazy!

Work is picking up quickly. Lovely.

The weekend was full of some lingering anxiety of beginning a new year. Like I wrote before, the fall has been a very hard time for me in the past and I am worried of a repeat performance. My mind has been drawn to cutting a lot more than it has in the past, which just gives me one more thing to try and keep under wraps.

Today in session we talked more about what exactly my fears are of this fall season. My habit is to take my past experiences and use them as the foundation of future experiences without taking into account the fact that the situations might be completely different. In my case, I have been working HARD for about 9 months now on my healing, when before I was pushed so far back in denial. Basically it was just a forum for me to recognize the steps I have taken and the differences in myself now as opposed to a year ago. So often I forget about the actions I have taken to improve things in my life and focus so much on the things I cannot change. It just takes a little reminder sometimes.

I wanted to bring up the fact that I had noticed myself becoming angry with things that didn't nomally make me angry before. I felt like this was a subtle change in my personal balance with things, and I wasn't really sure what it meant, nor was I really sure how to react to it. We discussed a situation I gave her as an example, how I would have reacted before, and how I reacted in the present. We pulled apart the actions and thought processes in each time frame and talked about the hidden messages I was sending myself in how I chose to react. While anger may not be the right emotion for that situation, the anger is telling me something . Oddly enough, it's telling me that I am realizing that I want to be able to set boundaries with people. I'm not angry at that person for approaching me and expecting me to do what I always do, I'm angry at myself for not having the boundary to begin with.

Apparently that is a huge deal to reach this "step".

People who are sexually abused (especially as children) have a very skewed and misguided sense of boundaries. You are taught, shown, whatever verb fits that you have no personal boundaries; that someone can take from you whatever they want. A lot of the times, you don't even feel like you deserve to set boundaries. Either way, realizing that I just might have the right to want boundaries in my life is huge. I'm not sure how to set them, or what to do with them, but apparently I want them. Now all I have to do is learn how to set them.

Initially I didn't see the big deal in reacting in anger towards someone else. I saw it is a bad thing. Anger = bad. But as we were talking about the effect it has on me, I started to see that maybe I am changing for the better.