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.