Leftovers

Monday, April 27, 2015

I met with my therapist this evening.  It was something of a milestone session.  It was my one-hundredth session with him.  Some might not consider this something to celebrate.  If you are going to therapy some might conclude you are seriously dysfunctional.  And in some cases that would be true.  I personally have never felt as functional as I do now.  I am now finally able to deal with what I will call leftovers.

I asked my therapist to reassess me using the DSM criteria for PTSD.  I made this request because I wanted to ensure the documentation I may use for my work search contains accurate information related to my current health as well as my health history.  I was pleased to discover that I am indeed quite healthy now.  I was first determined to be sub-clinical for PTSD in January, 2014.  At that time I still scored on a number of criteria but I did not score enough to be clinically diagnosable.  My assessment this evening showed that I have continued to improve.  I barely score on any criteria now.  The main issue that still registers is my persistent sadness.

I experience frequent sadness.  This has been true for me for many years.  The big difference between my life now and in past years is that I now can easily acknowledge my sadness.  And as I continue to do so I feel that the heavy quality of my sadness is gradually fading.  But I suspect it will take some time to do so.  I believe this is only natural considering that I was walking around perceiving the world in a somewhat distorted way for many years.  Trauma can seriously distort our perception of ourselves, others and the world outside of our skin.  I have come to a profound appreciation of how my own experience of trauma blunted my capacity to effectively and deeply perceive the world with my five senses. 

My sadness is borne of my feeling that I missed out on so much.  Because I was not perceiving the world with my senses in a very clear way I experienced the world in a very attenuated way.  What do I mean by this?  Consider this example.  Have you ever noticed how sound coming to your ears has a profoundly different quality if you are under water as compared to mere air?  The medium sound waves travel through affects its propagation speed as well as how the ‘receiving party’ will experience it.  My perception of the world was distorted in a similar way.  I had psychic walls up to buffer myself from the world around me.  These walls attenuated what I tasted, touched, smelled, heard and saw with my eyes. 

My therapist asked me to spend some time reflecting on what is underneath my sadness.  So I will need to spend some time sitting with my thoughts of what I feel I missed out on.  There was a lot.