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.