Nurturing that little girl

So, therapy continues to be interesting.  We've still been working with the different parts inside my mind and the roles they play (and the roles they THINK they're playing) and I'll be honest, it still kind of freaks me out sometimes.  I feel weird imaging and talking to all these different "parts."  But, we've discovered something.  After working with several different parts, we have discovered the "little girl" in me, and a lot of the parts seem to think they're supposed to be protecting her.

This little girl is terrified, and she's alone.  She's trying to protect herself, which is when a lot of these parts have developed, and they work hard to protect her.  One of the exercises I was supposed to work on one week, was just to try to comfort and nurture that little girl.  Give her a hug, let her know she's not alone and doesn't need to be scared anymore.  But every time I tried to get near her to try to comfort her, all those parts became active again.  The depressed part, that raging storm outside the house, would be begin to destroy anything and anyone that tried to get near the house.  The little girl would hide in a corner, protected by my scared, lonely, controlling, and dark parts in particular.  She's still scared.  She's scared of the things outside her bedroom door, she doesn't want to keep getting hurt.  She's trying to protect herself from the bullies when she was younger, from the hurtful comments that even the people closest to her, and were supposed to love her most, made all the time, from the actions of others that terrified her to hiding in her bedroom curled in a ball sobbing, not knowing how to deal with it.  She's protecting herself from the "friends" that destroyed her, from the feelings of worthlessness and not feeling good enough all of her life.  She's created this protective bubble and won't let anyone or anything near it.  Not even me.  She just keeps hiding.  She's still terrified.  She still feels completely alone.  She's still hiding in a corner in her bedroom sobbing.

It's been really hard to handle, honestly.  Whenever I try to hug her and let her know she's not alone and doesn't have to be afraid anymore, all those parts start to become very active again, even if I had managed to keep them calm for a little bit.  The parts that are most difficult to deal with are the depressed and dark parts.  Those parts become active, and all of a sudden I'm back to sobbing and not being able to get out of bed, I'm keeping a distance from people and shutting down, I'm struggling to not self-harm and fighting suicidal thoughts.  And then that little girl just starts feeling worse.  It's been quite a battle.  While everything that we've been doing in therapy is good, it has also been very hard.  I'm trying to find ways to slowly approach this little girl, to help her see me and trust me so that I can get close enough to nurture and comfort her because there was no one to nurture or comfort her ever before.

As weird as all the "parts" stuff is, it's helped me become a little more self-aware and present, it allows me to step back from everything and try to see and understand what is going on and to "talk" to these parts so that they can also understand what is going on and that maybe sometimes they just need to step back a little bit.  In all seriousness, if you have not seen the movie "Inside Out", you should see it, the whole "parts" thing will probably make more sense after that.

Parts Therapy: Finding Worth

Therapy has been...interesting lately, to say the least.  This "parts" therapy is kind of weird to get used too.  It starts off with a breathing exercise to kind of "center" myself.  Then I'm asked to visualize some of the parts we've identified.  The first session we really did this, we started off with the depressed part.  I've always visualized my depression as a raging, threatening, thunderstorm with tornadoes.  I was supposed to visualize myself separate from the part, and we talked to it.  It was really kind of weird at first, I felt crazy, honestly.  As we've talked to some of my parts, we've discovered other parts in the background.  A lot of my parts seem to have some sort of connection to trying to keep me from getting hurt.  My depressed part tries to keep me from being around other people and situations, my self-critical part keeps me from trying to succeed because it's afraid of failing and not being good enough for the people around me, it also thinks that by repeatedly telling me I'm worthless that it'll hurt less when other people say it.  We discovered another part recently that we've been calling the "dark" part.  This part seems to collect all triggering images I've seen (like from movies and tv shows) and holds on to them, it's also where the suicidal thinking and self-harm seems to reside.  Then, in my darkest moments, it likes to bring them up because apparently it 1.) thinks it's helping my lonely part by trying to tell me I'm not alone in what I feel, and 2.) it feels it's protecting me by showing me a solution to how I feel.  The questions seems to think why does it that would be protecting me.  There's a quote I found quite some time ago by David Foster Wallace that I've used a few times to help explain how I feel, and I think that maybe this is the idea that this "dark" part has-

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

This "dark" part is more afraid  of the darkness (aka the flames).  Since starting therapy, and since my medication dosage increased, my okay days have increased, which I'm grateful for.  But I'm still having plenty of rough days and days.  Since talking to the dark part in therapy this week, it's actually been very active, and it's very difficult to deal with.

Besides all that, another big thing we've been working on is trying to find worth in myself.  My therapist had me visualize "letting go" of the thought that I am worthless, and find ways to replace it.  So I've been doing my best to focus on the positive things that my friends around me say.  I have a folder filled with cards and letters from friends and I've even written down some really sweet texts they've sent and I keep it all together for me to remind myself of often.  Now I'm trying to find the same worth in myself.