annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gosh I had EMDR this morning - it's weird fucking stuff, I tell you. Today was focused on the time when my parents moved house, leaving me behind. I'd been sent to a weekly boarding school from the age of 11, which I expected my sister to also attend when she reached 11, but no, she stayed at home. Then the whole family moved, when I was 14 and we all lived together for 18 months before they moved away, taking my brother and sister but not me. I went into lodgings, with a family. At the time I told myself I didn't care, that I was lucky, not having parents interfering with how I wanted to live my life, but looking back from here I see that I started having s3x as soon as they told me they were moving, and then became promiscuous for the next too many years. Once we get started with the EMDR J, the therapist always asks me what belief I have about myself at this time and I then I felt that I am worthless, of no importance to anyone, unloved and unlovable. This has lingered, in my emotional beliefs if not my intellectual ones or, to put it another way, I know this is untrue but I rarely feel it to be untrue. In the EMDR process the 'healthy adult' that now exists as part of my make-up, somehow shows the past, vulnerable part, that it's OK now, that they were fuckers, that I deserved better, that it's on them not on me. And the bit that stuck with me, the words that fell out of my mouth were that I'm as good as anyone else, I deserve to be treated as well as anyone else, and I deserve love like anyone else. And that I might not get it, and that's OK too. Wow. That's huge, that sentence. That my value is not dependent on whether I am loved. I came out feeling very light headed - I'd done a 7am HIIT class, driven an hour in the rush hour, had 90 minutes of intensive therapy and I was done. So off to waitrose for a fry-up - mental that that's one of the cheapest places to get a fry-up in this fancy-pants town. Home and sleep, sleep, sleep. This evening I've been to a book launch, lovely William who ran the pop-up bookshop where I worked, and is also a top notch crime fiction writer. Looking back I can say that I didn't have any of the customary imposter syndrome, feeling that I shouldn't be there, or I wasn't doing it right, being there. I knew that I'd been invited because William likes me, we had a good time together working in the bookshop and he respects my abilities as a writer and a teacher. When I led writing groups in the evenings, he was there to let me in and lock up afterwards and was meant to be writing his work-in-progress but joined in with the tasks I set - did us all in when he read out what he'd written, he's brilliant with words, but anyway, tonight I felt good. Bed now. I hope you're all well. Thanks for reading. 11:57 p.m. - 19.07.23 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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