From my journal for April 24, 1996<\/p>\n
Driving over to Danville, Lynelle asked how I was doing, and I said I had been anxious until I got to the underlying sadness.\u00a0 <\/span>When I can feel the sadness, the anxiety goes away.\u00a0 <\/span>She asked if it was anything specific and I said it was feeling bad for Dana that he had got stuck with me.\u00a0 <\/span>The tears well up as I write that, as they did in the car,\u00a0<\/span>but I see now that I\u2019m sad for Dana, but not for myself.\u00a0 <\/span>What I feel toward myself is anger that I\u2019m such a failure, unable to love him back in the way he deserves, unable even to relax and open and let him love me in the way that he wants to.\u00a0 <\/span>The pain of that is so great, that I mostly don\u2019t let myself feel it, I\u2019m afraid I would die of the feeling, or that it would go on forever.\u00a0 <\/span>So there we have fear and grief and anger all tied up in a big tangle, and the anger is directed at myself for being a failure rather than outward toward the parents who failed me and damaged me.\u00a0 <\/span>Well, I don\u2019t know what to do with that.\u00a0 <\/span>I\u2019m caught in the same bind that Lynelle is, I\u2019m angry at the part of me that\u2019s damaged as though it were a moral failure instead, as though I could have done better and am perversely refusing to.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So painful. I’ve heard so many other people say similar things: can’t let myself feel it, afraid I would die from the pain, it’s my fault not my parents abusing me. But I remember that at first, when I was a child, I thought I was defective, and that everything that went wrong was my fault. I didn’t understand that I was wounded until I was 42 years old, when the Children of Alcoholic<\/a> information came out. I still had a number of years to go before I understood that my inability to have sex with my husband was due to early trauma and not to some choice of mine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From my journal for April 24, 1996 Driving over to Danville, Lynelle asked how I was doing, and I said I had been anxious until I got to the underlying sadness.\u00a0 When I can feel the sadness, the anxiety goes … Continue reading