Life Integration Therapy

When I first met my counselor I wasn't sure it was going to work.  I know that not every counselor works for everyone so I decided to go more than once, and I am glad I did.  After listening to my story my counselor told me she was going to put me through life integration therapy.  I would highly recommend it to anyone.  She had me write down my life as bullet like points, starting at my birth and including major events for each year to the present.  Then she went through my life story over and over with us talking about it in between.  The idea is to get you used to hearing and reliving these events, the traumatic ones, so you can handle the next phase.  The first time I heard my life story repeated back to me I cried.  I knew I would cry when we talked about R's death, but I had no idea how much pain I had locked away inside me from my childhood.  I had also never really talked about it to anyone.  To finally talk to someone about it and see their reaction to it did wonders.  It was as if someone had told me for the first time that what I went through as a child was not okay and it had a profound affect on me.
The next phase of the therapy is choosing a specific traumatic memory from your childhood and focusing on it.  When you get to that moment you stop and, this is where I thought it would be weird but it works, bring your adult self into the situation.  You the introduce your adult self to your child self and explain to them that they aren't stuck in that situation anymore.  You also tell them that what is happening isn't okay.  At this point you tell your child self that you are going to show them that they aren't stuck there anymore and you take them with you as you go through the rest of your life story.  When it is all done you take your child self to a safe place, hopefully your present home, which for me it was.  Then you thank your child self for carrying the burden of that trauma and learning to cope with it so you could grow up.  Then you tell them that they don't have to carry that burden anymore and they can give it to you, because as an adult you know what to do with it.  You also take some time to listen to your child self and see if they have any questions.  I had the same thought, "Uh okay".  Without any thought of what would my child self say to me the thought came to my head, "Is it safe?".  My child self actually wanted to know if it was safe at my present day house, and of course why wouldn't that be the question with the childhood I had.  After the first day I went through that therapy session I felt so much better as I drove back home, there was this tremendous weight that I had grown  accustomed to carrying that was now partially lifted.  I went through the same therapy session several more times, multiple times for each traumatic event I had listed from my childhood.  In fact as I type this I will probably schedule some more appointments to go through it again.

This was the beginning of the healing for me and it helped me to handle some of the future events.  During my therapy sessions I had finally fallen behind enough that the bank was ready to repo one of our cars, the truck showed up and towed it and my wife realized how bad my situation had become.  We were able to get the vehicle back and explain to the bank what had been going on and they helped us with a plan to get caught up. My wife and I came to the conclusion that the prescription I was taking to help me was actually hurting me in other areas.  While I wasn't dealing with anxiety attacks I also wasn't feeling much emotion at all, which in turn made me less concerned about falling behind.  I was embarrassed, sure, I knew I needed to get caught up, yeah I knew that, but there was no sense of urgency in those thoughts.  I wasn't acting like my normal self.  So then came the next steps I have taken in trying to heal.

Looking for Help

So there I was ignoring my bills and using every bit of energy I had to go to work and be effective, take care of my schooling, and be there for my kids.  I was trying to fake it to make it.  The first time my wife and I had a talk, because I was mostly a hollow shell, I talked to a peer support member.  They advised me to start with a visit to the doctor.  I went to the doctor and explained the past years events and how I was starting to get anxiety attacks when I went to work. (Later I realized it is likely because of triggers).  Since I can't do my job while taking any fast acting medication for anxiety my doctor put me on a prescription that has to build up in your system before it is effective.  This prescription, as many of them do, comes with its own side effects.  Now I am not against prescriptions and know that they have helped many people; they helped me, but they also compounded the problem.  My prescription helped with the anxiety attacks and made it easier for me to fake it, but emotionally I was dead.  Now this really helps in law enforcement because you can keep your emotions far away from the situation at hand, however it doesn't help with the family situation.  Plus I was so embarrassed about falling behind in my bills that the stress of that was making it harder for me to face those.  I mean I had almost perfect credit when we bought our house, and I had never been behind on bills, and now I was facing what seemed to be a mountain of them, and emotionally I couldn't give a shit.
The first time we got a letter from the bank about our house I snapped out of it a little and got got up, at the expense of falling further behind on others.  Then last year my wife's sister attempted suicide while she and her parents were visiting for Christmas.  This was a huge blow to me, but more so my wife.  My wife also was paying all of the bills at this time, but due to this she couldn't handle it anymore and she asked me to take over.  I knew inside that I was not in a good position mentally to do this effectively, but I stayed silent.  I could feel emotionally and mentally that I was spread too thin.  But I thought, "I'm a soldier and I was raised in a tough environment, I can pull myself together to take care of this".  I couldn't have been  more wrong.

I payed some bills and took care of some things until the second anniversary of R's death was approaching, I knew I would not handle it well and it was time to finally seek the help I should have two years ago.  I went to a counselor.  In my next post I will discuss how she helped some of the healing begin, and the  how with the help of my wife I have found more things to help.

Dealing with emotional trauma

So as I left off in My Story, I had shut my feelings away.  I also returned home and that added distance only assisted my slip into denial.  Since I was away from R I could fool myself into just feeling like we hadn't talked for awhile.  Naturally this was not the best way to handle this situation, and it began to take its toll.

At first I think I was able to fake it to make it.  For the first year after R's death I was able to handle life, I was in denial after all.  Even when some of the other guys tried suicide as a result of R's death I was somewhat emotionally detached from the situation.  My body had gone into its survival mode, and its defense mechanism was to cut off emotional feelings.  By the time the first anniversary of R's death came around I could no longer deny what had happened.  That first one year anniversary hit me like a ton of bricks one night at work.  Luckily it was at the end of my shift.

Now I could not shut away the feelings and I instantly had to deal with it.  Closing away my feelings had taken a toll on me internally and now it was starting to show.  I reached out to some peer support groups and was advised to go to my doctor and make sure nothing else was wrong, no sudden changes in health or anything.  After the doctor made sure I was in good health I was given an anti-anxiety/anti-depression prescription.  This did help me a lot at this period of my life, but I later learned it had a lot of adverse reactions as well.  I will say at this point that I did not allow this situation to affect my work.  I was still able to compartmentalize when I went to work, but now that the one year anniversary had come along it was harder for me to keep that buffer up.  I began feeling anxious at just the thought of going to work.  Since my job deals with trauma on a regular basis this added to the situation.  The medication I was put on helped with this and allowed me to continue to compartmentalize my feelings, but it also deadened my feelings a lot.

One of the biggest areas these events affected my life was my relationship with my wife and my bills.  I continued to be there for my kids and in many ways they helped me in healing a little bit too.  However, handling regular life was something I allowed myself not to face.  By not facing R's death it seems I had set a precedence for other aspects of my life.  I made it ok to hide from things that added stress.  You would think this carried over to my career, but because of my wife and kids depending on me to provide for them I didn't allow this to happen.  I did struggle with some sick time usage as keeping all those emotions locked away for so long caused a depression in my immune system.  I became more susceptible to regular sicknesses that had not affected me before.  Luckily I had the sick time to do this.

I have since gone to a therapist to talk about a lot of these issues and my therapist has stated that because of the traumatic events in my childhood I returned to some of my coping mechanisms that I developed back then.  When I was a child I would often hide under my bed when my dad became violent.  Later in life I reacted with a temper, but at this point in my life I was metaphorically hiding under the bed again.

We started to fall behind with our bills because I was ignoring them, it was all I could do to pull myself together and compartmentalize my feelings to go to work.  I was also finally using my GI Bill to go to school online.  I was exhausted from all of this and facing the bills was something I allowed myself to hide from.  There was more trauma to come and something needed to change.

Importance of friendship:

A quick note about healing from emotional injuries.  Never forget the power of true friendships.  Because of all the shit that has happened the past few years I became a recluse and wasn't dealing with things.  Today I have spent the majority of the day on a group text with my brothers. These guys are true friends to me and I know there are no expectations. Even though I haven't talked to some of them in almost a year we can pick up a conversation as if there was never a gap in our communication.  I can be myself.  This is incredibly refreshing and allows you to be yourself while you converse.  Also it helps a lot to know that there are people in your corner.

Objective:

With the My Story portion of this blog not yet finished, I wanted to give some direction on where all of this is going.  I did not anticipate writing so much about myself under the My Story part.  As you can see from my story, I did not have the greatest childhood.  I know there are people who have had it worse, but I am not here to compare.  Life has taught me one thing; people have different strengths and different weaknesses.  For one person, just having your parent raise their voice seems harsh for someone else that wouldn't bother them.  Some people can walk away from drugs others spend years in addiction.  I am writing this much about myself so that people out there know I can relate to them. 

As will be disclosed in My Story the childhood wasn't the only trauma, but because of the childhood some of the later trauma was mishandled.  Where I am headed with this blog as I bring the My Story page current is what I am doing to heal.  That's right I said doing not did.  This blog may turn out to be a part of the healing process. 

As for the name of the blog, I will explain a little.  In My Story Part V:  I talked a little bit about meditation, and how it seemed to help me find some clarity in my life.  In our daily lives, there can be so much noise that we lose touch with ourselves.  I am a husband and father of three kids.  I have a full-time job and I am going to school to get a degree in engineering so I can get into a job that doesn't deal with trauma on a regular basis.  This year was the first year that I sat and meditated in probably 5-6 years.  My children are also currently 10, 6, and 4.  It has been difficult to get up to those mountaintops and sit quietly listening to nature and just soaking it in.  You know just being out among nature can have an amazing grounding effect on the body, but you have to eliminate the noise.  

We are one of those weird families that doesn't have cable in our home.  We have television sets, but not cable.  I still get news by reading it online or picking up a newspaper or listening to it on the radio, but not from the telly, unless I am at a restaurant that has televisions on the news.  This I would strongly recommend to anyone.  You would be surprised at just how much the television clutters up your brain.  

Meditation can really help our brain, body, and yes spirit.  In fact, when I first started to learn meditation from my sensei, almost two decades ago, he taught me to enter meditation by first forming a triangle with my two hands.  The three sides of the triangle represent body, mind, and spirit and our goal is to have all three of them in balance. 

DISCLAIMER: Please Read.

First things first in this blog.
1. Adult content will be shared to include stories with adult content and expletives. If you do not want to read any of this stop here and leave.
2. I am not a professional counselor or doctor, I will speak my mind and opinions take them as you will.
3.  This is not my job. I have numerous other responsibilities in my life that will take precedence over this.
4.  This is being done anonymously and identities have been changed in order to preserve anonymity.
5.  This is my blog and I reserve the right to block anyone or remove anyone's post I feel is necessary.
6. If I ever recommend anything to include a product that has helped me it is purely in hopes that someone else will find it useful not for some marketing ploy. This blog is to hopefully help me as much as others.
7.  I do have a religious background and believe in God, as will be reflected in some of the stories.  I am not here to argue his existence and why so many bad things happen, refer to #5 above.

Some of you may feel I am being too much of a hardass, (there's the first one), and would like to send me long messages explaining why I shouldn't run my blog the way I do or talk the way I do.  To you I say I am not putting a gun to your head and making you read my blog, so if you have a problem with it, stop reading it.  I do not intend to coddle, mince words, or pamper to everyone's request.

All that being said.  I do hope that someone, or many someones,  may find the help they need through this blog.  I also hope that through this blog and helping others I will find more pieces to the puzzle of putting my life and myself back in order.  See I do have a touchy feely side to me.