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So I want to write a little bit about what I'm doing for treatment/self-support right now.

I've been seeing a therapist again since February. I've been fine with that, but haven't felt like she gets me/has the toolkits to help me.

I feel like my approach to treatment keeps vacillating depending on whether I'm insisting that he did *so* mistreat me, in which circumstance I look for help for abused women, or whether I'm thinking about my issues as a larger gestalt, in which case I reach for spiritual helpers.

There are two defensive points I (feel like I) need to make. 1) he abused me for nearly a decade, and it was not the case that we were just a couple that both had issues, he was cruel and manipulative and it is not okay that he treated me the way that he did, and it is NOT MY FAULT. 2) The language and approach of energy workers, mediums, and other practitioners of the arts of "woo" are so much more evocative for me that the language and approach of modern psychiatry. This is cultural: it's what I was raised to. I have shame about it, and medico-scientific terminology comes easier to my tongue. But it's not really what I mean. I think "Christian Therapy" is episteme-closing bullshit, but I still respond so much more to my grandparents' religious practices than I have to years of psych work.

I want to speak in my own language, in my own way. I want to be public about who I am and where I come from - and being the medium's granddaughter is a big part of that. So.

I will write more about specifics later; i'm feeling too nervous about everything to go on now. Talking like this makes me feel so terribly exposed; i suppose that means it's important to do

no subject

Okay, after that introductory blather: I'm working on dealing with my angry inner child.

The woman I'm working with practices shiatsu, but I don't actually know what the lineage of the program we're doing is; we've been talking about Campbell, a bit, some kind of Jungian thing, she's sort of Caroline Myss-y. She helps me protect and elevate a space where I can be honest about the things that I know in my spirit. I like working with her, because she lets me use my own words and images, and I feel like when I tell her no or want to adjust understandings she listens and quickly groks my objections. She praises me for being brave. It's nice.

The last few years, I've been haunted by this sense of my inner child. A lot of the inner-child stuff that's out there is about accepting the child, or forgiving the child, but I've had the opposite problem: I see my child self as a blaze of power, and I'd been feeling like I'd gone and killed her, her pale ghost would show up sometimes to rub my nose in what I'd done. We're angry at me for losing ground to stupid stereotypical enmeshment with a man; we were supposed to be better than that. She's a snob, really, thinks we have to be held to a higher standard.

So at this point I guess I've got help to break through some of the frozen horrified paralysis I'd been experiencing when I'd seen myself as her murderer, and she and I are maybe going to have a bit of a fight now? Hopefully it will be one of those productive ones where things get hashed out, and I'm hoping it will help me understand why I've been experiencing so much self-perpetuating emotional pain.

I will write more about the child's anger, what language she uses and what I think she might really be angry about underneath, later, but this is all I can do for tonight. It's been awfully hot here the last few days, and the north wind didn't roll in last night until after 4 am, so of course I didn't sleep, haven't slept. Starting an essay on A Wizard of Earthsea, which is, you know, apt. Rereading Le Guin's excellent "The Child and the Shadow" first.