Posts from — April 2009

So much is happening right now and I am not at all capturing it in this blog, but I have a tidbit that I want to record about my healing process because it’s remarkable.

One of the things we know about my childhood is that I had a speech difficulty and it was hard for me to be understood.  Thankfully, someone my parents knew recognized this and encouraged them to send me to a speech therapist.  However, back at the time I was treated the focus was on basics of improving the basics of my speaking.  How to say my letters, etc.  In the years since they have learned that emotion drives speech and the entire brain system behind expressing oneself.  This suggests that my problem wasn’t just that my lips couldn’t move in the right ways to form a letter.  There was also a lack of emotional development that was underneath my speech difficulties.

I think before knowing about all of this, in my early days of therapy, Andrea would say that I (and I’m getting a little fuzzy as I write this) was not communicating much about what was going on inside of me.  This was irritating to me because there was no one else that I had felt as close to or felt as comfortable sharing myself with.  

Over the years she has noticed when I have come across more clearly to her.  I remember her saying a year and a half ago that my e-mails made a huge jump in their comprehensibility.  

Well, something fascinating has started to happen in the last week or two.  I will share something with her or my husband, and I get the sense that I need to share more – more so that they will understand and more because they want to know me more.  

I think the change is happening because I am at a new level of differentiating myself in my head from my mother and by extension other people.  I don’t see myself as enmeshed with others so I understand that I will have to share more of what I am thinking so that they can know me and my thoughts.  My work with Andrea and my young parts that I have talked about in other posts is also showing me that I can be enjoyed by her.  So I also have the sense that others want to know more about me and what I am thinking.  

It’s really weird to have the sense within myself to express more.  It’s like there’s a billboard in my head that says – say more! – and I have the distinct awareness in that moment that the other person is not inside of me and that they can’t know what I am thinking unless I say it.  It’s been delightful to try this out with my husband.  On a number of occasions I have been able to see him being delighted in me.  I can tell he loves me even more because I have shown him more of me.  I feel really good inside because more of me has come out, more of the me I know is inside, more of the me that I guess I may have only really known about.