Therapy Session Musings: Relationships And Unraveling The Past To Move Forward

I wrapped up week 37 of therapy recently, and I am moving into my 38th session. Sometimes it feels like just yesterday when I walked into JHJ Therapy, and other times it seems as if it were years ago. That is primarily due to the progress I’ve made in a little less than a year. So, I wanted to take some time to reflect upon all of the progress, I’ve made.

One of the biggest things that have been an unexpected plus is so many of my friends and readers of this blog have reached out to me about my therapy journey. All of them have said, due to reading about my progress, they have been motivated to seek therapy as well. That is HUGE, and that was one of my goals in sharing my very personal journey in such an open forum.

A huge aspect of my journey has been getting in touch with who I am, and that involved reaching in to heal past hurts, release suppressed emotions and feelings. That has been FREEING. All of this work will allow me to feel better about myself, have a healthier relationship with myself and others.

Relationships are a huge aspect of life. When I speak about them, I mean all relationships, platonic, romantic, spiritual, familial, and otherwise. I believe all connections are relationships regardless of their origin and foundation. The connections that I build with people are all, forms of relationships. Whether I build them at work as professional relationships, at home with a foundation in platonic friendship or romantically. They are all considered relationships to me.

I started on my therapy journey with the primary goal of dealing with the grief that had me reeling last year around this time. I can honestly say that although I was functioning in my professional relationships, I was struggling everywhere else. That was especially the case with familial relationships.

So as soon as I dealt with my grief, I wanted to start to figure out a way to build stronger personal relationships that were platonic, friendship, and romantic based. I additionally wanted to resolve some of my feelings about the broken familial relationships that I was born into, through no fault of my own.

Familial relationships can be tough because you inherit them, you didn’t choose them, and you have absolutely no control over what you will get. In my case, I had a particularly complex family dynamic layered in dysfunction, generational trauma, generational curses, weird competitive behaviors which [I believe] were due to childhood trauma, and childhood abandonment. It was a mess, but I knew it had to be dealt with if I wanted to ever be free to live my life in peace. After seeing my father suffer horribly and die right before my eyes, talking about how “wronged” he felt by HIS family, I know I needed to resolve this and put it all behind me.

After that conversation with my dad on his deathbed, I talked to my son. We discussed how it was just healthier for us to totally separate from the toxicity that was beyond repair in my father’s family. Although I felt as if that was the right path for us, I needed to do it healthily. Doing that would involve tools that I didn’t have at that particular time and that’s where therapy came into play.

For me to start dealing with ALL relationships, not just my family relationships, I had to dive deep into some of the things that built the foundation of how I dealt with relationships. The foundation of that was my childhood and family of origin issues. So I had to open myself to picking at a lot of childhood scabs that had been in place for a long time that was never totally healed. That was some of the hardest work that I’ve ever done because it was emotionally wrenching, but I knew it would be worth it. I’m lying. At the time, I was like, why are you doing this to yourself, Anais?

As I moved along in these many sessions, I gained an understanding of how my childhood had impacted EVERYTHING about my adulthood. I further realized that a lot of the choices I’d made in my romantic relationships were impacted by childhood. In recognizing this, I understood what changes I needed to make personally, to have healthier relationships. I additionally realized that it was time for me to open myself up to building stronger friendship-based relationships as well.

All of this led me to permanently and healthily remove toxic family members from my life, work on strengthening friendship-based relationships, and place myself in a position to make new romantic based relationships. I have been out of that dating space for quite a while, and WHEW LAWD, it’s crazy out here.

Even though it is a bit of an adjustment, I believe I am in such a much better place to be moving in this dating space. I can now go into any romantic relationship, knowing that I am NOT bringing remnants of childhood trauma into those relationships. That allows me to start with a foundation of healthiness on my part. I believe it will also allow me to display a healthy presentation for my potential partner. So, those with foolishness will recognize this, know I’m not the one for nonsense and games, then opt to keep it moving if they are about that life.

So, this is YOUR GIRL, getting back out there and opening her newly healed, balanced chakra, self to the masses out here in these cray-cray dating skreets. I may have some stories about that moving forward if I’m in the mood to let ya’ll get all up in my business like that.

I would love to know your thoughts on putting therapy session lessons to work in everyday situations AND what’s up out in these crazy dating “skreets.” Reach out, let’s chat on FB, IG, and Twitter. Until then, Peace, Love and Balanced Chakras.

 6,324 total views,  4 views today