My talk with my therapist was painful and difficult but I think it helped. I made a lot of notes. I see that my image/expectation of a healing process is that you get steadily better. You’d think I’d know better by now. First of all, a healing process takes place in the unconscious part of the mind. There’s absolutely no way to know how it works. “Not knowing” what to do is a trigger for me. I tend to get all freaked out. I just have to trust that it is working toward healing. Constantly checking to see if it’s working does not help the process. Secondly the actual process has ups & downs. Opening up a wound is painful, no way out of that. So accepting the downs, allowing them to happen, and if possible to “soften around,” to say “there, there,” “I’m here,” and to create a compassionate container. Sometimes that just isn’t possible. I’m so caught in the child. There’s no adult here to say “there, there.”
Finally, there’s the total willingness to hand the whole process over to God — I think that’s Step Five. The recognition that I don’t know how to do this, that I can’t do it on my own. My difficulty is in what I believe I’m handing “my will and my life” over to. If it’s God the Capricious, Malicious, Willful, and Untrustworthy, then of course I’m not going to be willing to let go. If I think of it as “Divine Process,” that helps a lot. Trusting the process comes much more easily than handing over to God.
In my list of “character defects” I have written a lot of things that I don’t believe are defects. They are dysfunctional behaviors learned from things that happened to me when I was a child. I believe that’s true for everybody. But whatever they are, they are making my life miserable and I want them to change, dissolve, heal, be left behind, whatever the process does so that they won’t keep tripping me up. I see that the biggest, right now, is my inability to take in, receive, satisfaction for getting something done. So, my part is to add “good for me!” and to try to savor the feeling of satisfaction.