It occurs to me that once I wrote about healing, and how to do it. I was talking to my daughter yesterday and we got onto that subject. Via my talking about a paper I did on suicide, PTSD, natural mothers and adoptees. Gotta love Abnormal Psych and it's subjects yeah? Anyway, I did well on the paper, not as well as I thought I should have, but that's ok. My professor told me in part it was because of personal bias. Well duh-how could there not be some personal bias in a subject so near and dear (?) to my heart?
I said that re-visiting our trauma's is a bit like picking a scab off of a wound. You can only do that so often, making yourself bleed, over and over just isn't healthy. Eventually you have to let scar tissue form, sure it might crack open occasionally and bleed a bit, but you have to be okay with that. I stopped picking scabs a couple of years ago, I found that having relived my trauma over and over, learning to deal with the emotions I had helped me to deal with that trauma. I can't change what happened, I can live with that. I truly believe that once you come to that point, further therapy really does no good. All you can do once you get there is rip the scab off again. Instead of good healthy scar tissue, you have a festering wound that just keeps bleeding. Why would anyone want to do that? I don't understand it at all..
If you feel as if you have gotten all you can get out of a particular therapy, then perhaps it is time to move on- if you have learned to use the tools you have been given, then why keep on going through the same exercises over and over ad infinitum? Does that make any sort of sense? I don't think so- but perhaps some of you have different ideas? Please share if you do. As for me? Well I think scar tissue is much better than an open festering wound you keep picking at, don't you?
4 comments:
I do.Most therapies have their limitations or end points where adoption is involved.Most counsellors/therapists can deal with loss, grief etc but there are so few expert in adoption/reunion work.Hopefully this might change in the future as adoption becomes a more open topic and the vast numbers of adoptees grow up.
In my view healing from adoption loss never ends, is never finished.
Since I study psychology, I know that what you say is true. Any good therapist or psychologist will tell you that there is a point where certain problems have been dealt with as far as therapy can take them. We, as people, must take care of those issues on our own after that point. You must come to a point where you are the one that is dealing with your every day problems.
There are, of course, certain kinds of therapy that are designed for a lifetime of support, particularly in the area of mental disorders that are biological - bipolar, borderline personality, etc. But even then the patient must be the leader in their own mental health.
I started going to counseling after my daughter's 16Th birthday. I cried for 6 hours and I knew I needed help. I would go here and there and it wasn't for another year that I got serious and started seeing the counselor every few weeks did I make any gain in it. She helped but mostly it just took me coming to terms with my life as it was and making small steps to feel more comfortable. It helped that I found my daughter during that time too. However, the counselor did get to a point with me where she said that she just couldn't do anymore. She thought I had made huge gains but suggested that some of issues were much deeper than adoption. I choose not to go into further counseling somewhere else because I just didn't want to explore it anymore.
I have had that happen a lot. I try something, it helps for a minute and then it just gets old, but I never seem quite... "healed" from my adoption wound. Nothing I know of works.
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