I Told You Not to Date Me

Dating me is like dating a barrel of monkeys....but 9 out of 10 monkeys have rabies. Also the 10th monkey pisses on your rug and laughs at you when you try to correct said behavior. Okay, maybe it's not that bad.

I have this terrible habit of warning any and all people interested in me that they couldn't have picked worse. Once they announce they're interested in me, I sit them down every time and have the same exact talk.

"You don't know me very well. You seem perfectly lovely and I wish you the best but I am a whole lot to deal with and you just don't understand what it takes. You don't have to tools or the patience or the self confidence to survive all o' this. Being with me is like running a marathon, where at the end, instead of being celebrated and feeling fitter, faster, and fabulous…..you get punched in the face…by me. And somehow end up fatter. I don't possess redeemable qualities, I'm selfish and self involved, I'm not very attractive, I'm inconsistent, constantly emotional and in need of attention and love and reassurance, I get very jealous and scared, nearly everything you do will be called wrong at some point, and it's just not even half worth it. The only reason you're attracted to me is because of your own dysfunctions and attraction to being mistreated and feeling inadequate." I know. Best sales pitch ever. Also totally rude, totally pessimistic, and totally inappropriate. But I set it up! You KNOW there's a lot of alarms going off and this is not probably what you're looking for. On my end, I'm not teaching myself anything positive by repeating some pretty negative and self deprecating comments just to scare men away because men being interested in me scares ME. But the whole deal is a mess.

If I were my own friend (separate of myself) I would sit me down and slap me a couple times. Give me some bear hugs. And tell myself to learn to hush up, listen a bit more than I yammer, and try not to self sabotage myself by using insults as a way of insulating myself.

Trauma Focussed CBT

So, I'm of course a huge therapy advocate. I've been seeing this therapist since October and I'm appreciating being further into "young adulthood" and getting to sift through my still in-progress but more developed thoughts on my utter dysfunction. I like that, with age, I can tell I actually have trained myself (and healed myself) enough to become slightly less sensitive, and slightly more aware. Though, the more I figure out, the more I realize I still have a very long way to go.

I like my current therapist because she's a lot younger than therapists I've had in the past. Which makes her more relatable and less intimidating. She's also a "no bullshit" kind of person which I dig, because I don't really enjoy being coddled or half listened to. 

Despite the fact that I feel a lot of progress has been made, I still feel totally enmeshed in my day to day anxiety and bummed-outness about feeling inherently unlovable and gimpy. A lot of the PTSD stuff gets in the way of me having a functional day and feeling like and be fun and interesting and not exhausting to people. Trips to the gyno are way too traumatizing, people who sneak up from behind me to hug me terrify the shit out of me, and I have this assumption that eventually….I'm just going to get kidnap-rape-murdered. It's all very upsetting and unsexy. 

People frequently recommend I do something other than talk therapy. Which, honestly I always take as an insult  because I find therapy useful and don't feel like I'm some plateaued asshole who likes to listen to someone tell me I'm constantly right and fine and valid. I participate, ponder, and try to change behaviors. I don't always succeed, but I'm 22, so fuck it! I'm still doing pretty alright. EMDR is something that's usually recommended, which is a method of retraining your brain to reduce triggers. That weirds me out, probably in part because I'm unhealthily bonded with my triggers. They're like my freckles. Also, if I earned the triggers, I want to earn the right to say I healed myself….not that some mumbo jumbo weird overly simplified stuff did. Then I'd just feel silly. Hypnotism has also been recommended to me. That also sounds just plain awful and insulting. Though perhaps valid to some people, I'm not ready to hop on that train quite yet. 

My therapist recommended something called "trauma focussed CBT" which is cognitive behavioral therapy…..with a focus on trauma. My understanding of CBT was that it was all very low intensity and focussed just on thought patterns and behaviors- not the stories behind them. With this therapy, it sounds a bit like the opposite. What I'm supposed to do is go in each week with my current therapist (because she's trained in this type of therapy) and we sit together and first create a timeline of all the traumatic events that have ever occurred in my life. That I can remember. Then, we go back and pick one memory for the week and I write down/explain every single detail I can remember, down to the weather and the smells and whatever other horrific senses are involved. Then I read it back to her. She reads it back to me. We discuss it. Then I go home and read it to trusted (pre selected) friends and "family" over and over every day for a week. Then I go back and repeat the same process with the next memory. Until I run out of memories to discuss. It sounds both horrifically awful and gloriously relieving. I'm figuring word-vomit blogging out the process may be constructive, or at least sort of calming. Prepare yourself.