Riding a wave

[Phoenix_Rising]

@Former-Member I am heading off to bed now but super quickly...

I totally hear you about the shakiness. It is superly duperly tricky, but I know a lot of work is going on behind the scenes to de-shake the shakiness. 

I'm super glad you found the stuff on therapeutic parenting helpful. Healing IS possible bookish...it's just super hard finding the right helping person. I know the therapeutic parenting thing is what TTT is doing with me and I know that it can work. 

I know you are familiar with schema therapy. It involves "limited reparenting." Are you familiar with that aspect of it? 

Good night bookish. Thank you for validating the not-ok-ness of my current adventure. I so badly wish I could share TTT with you. 

[Zoe7]

I feel really humbled that you mentioned me as one of the reasons you are still here @Former-Member 

I do not want you to 'not be on here' as you are pretty special to me and I would miss you a lot.

I do understand completely how you are feeling that things here are 'shaky' but like little turtle I know that there is alot of work being done 'behind the scenes' to unshake the shakiness. I also know this doesn't help you (or I to a great extent) in the present - those feelings just don't go away because 'stuff' is being done to resolve some of those issues. This does however all take time and I do have a little faith in those that are dealing with all this that there will eventually be changes made that will enable this space to be safer for all in the future. This - as you can probably imagine - is not easy for me to put my faith in but I do have faith in the people dealing with it all - and that is pretty huge for me - especially with all I have been through of late! Nothing can change what has happened but there is alot that can be learned from it and hopefully processes/procedures put into place to ensure such things will not happen again.

I hope that my belief in all this can give you a little more faith also that things can get better on here @Former-Member because we all deserve support and we all deserve that in a safe place 

[CheerBear]

Hi in the ocean 🙂

I got lots of feels reading through here this morning. It's so great to see you @Former-Member, especially given that I understand it's hard for you to be here. Ditto to that with you @Zoe7.

I'm so sorry to hear you are getting what sound like those horrible "you do not matter" and "you are not worth it/as much/anything" messages that do damage. Too many people here have experienced those ones 🙁 I hear you also and like @Phoenix_Rising it comes from a place of having experienced it, also. I've been sitting on my "annoy bookish by tagging her to see how she is going" fingers (not well sometimes as you may have seen 😉) but I often find myself thinking of you, wondering how you're going, and wishing things were different as I have a feeling how you're going is not-so-good.

I've been thinking a bit about the actions speaking louder than words thing, which I agree with, but how it felt to me like we don't have much more than words here sometimes. I don't know about that so much now. We have actions (and I see them all the time) that say we will ride alongside each other through the ups and downs and rounds and rounds, and step in to big feeling puddles and giant waves with each other. And actions that say that people are worth hearing, and it's worth it to stick around so they can be heard. We have actions that say it's ok to come and go, make oopsies, be messy, vent, talk lots or not talk at all, and be hurt, scared, different, the same etc. All those actions happen because we matter and we're worth it. You matter and you are worth it.

(None of that can change or undo the other damaging messages, which isn't what I am trying to do above, but for me I would be in a lot more trouble without messages that counter those ones.)

I think you're great because you're you @Former-Member, and I'm sorry the world isn't as kind to you as it should be 💚

P.S.- I think we could add a cloning machine to the list of things to get when we find eleventy billion dollars and/or a wand (that cloning thing me feel so nice inside thank you - I just imagine a heap of CB's wandering around wondering where we are, what day it is, and what we're doing 😆). 🦄🦄🐐 (serious laugh at action unicorn goat)

P.P.S - It's TTT eve now @Phoenix_Rising. It's still more than two hands in hours but it's only one sleep.

Sending my biggest hoping there's good for all today.

[Phoenix_Rising]

Good evening @Former-Member @CheerBear Zoe7 and anyone else out on the ocean this evening. My inside told me to tag you bookish and it told me not to tag you Zoe7. I don't always know why my inside tells me stuff, but I know I can always trust my inside. 

I am feeling calmer today because I am so completely overloaded with grief, hopelessness and despair that my clever brain has shut down all my feelings to protect itself. Good job clever brain. 

Hey @CheerBear and @Faith-and-Hope, this came up on my FB feed today: https://thewhoot.com/crochet/crochet-dragon That settles it, I definitely need to learn to crochet. Can you please teach me @CheerBear??? 

I am so superly duperly glad it is TTT eve. This time tomorrow I will have had the chance to talk to her about the oh so icky not-of-my-choosing adventure. I cannot begin to tell you how much I am looking forward to that. Right now I don't have the slightest idea how to move through this muddle and I'm super hoping that TTT will have some ideas. How can it be that yet again helping people have managed to completely fry my brain??? How can it possibly be that I am going to be using some of those precious funded sessions to deal with this mess instead of being able to get stuck into the already-enormous muddle that the sessions are supposed to be for??? Sigh...

I super hope everyone had some good in their day. Thanks to my clever brain, I don't actually know what I've done all day. But I've survived, and as TTT pointed out the other day, being alive is a prerequisite for her to be able to help me fix my brain. 

Goodnight Forum Land. 

[Faith-and-Hope]

Love the baby dragon crochet pattern @Phoenix_Rising ....... thank you ......

Goodnight ..... 🌙🐢

[Catcakes]

You’re doing so well @Phoenix_Rising and making this cranky head smile.
Have a great session tomorrow... is TTT’s office on Venus ?😜

[Phoenix_Rising]

@Catcakes {Giggle}. I WISH TTT's office was on Venus. I need a Venetian hour to tell my story. Poor TTT, I think her brain is exploding trying to make sense of all the different strands of my muddle. On the bright side, at least her first goal IS to get her head around the muddle, unlike (A) who didn't feel the need to do a case formulation and thus we spent seven months getting absolutely nowhere! 

[Phoenix_Rising]

Hi @CheerBear and anyone else interested in my adventures with TTT. 

I just got home from seeing her. This is all SO HARD. We made pretty much zero progress on the current muddle, mostly because I was so amazingly dysregulated. On the bright side, TTT believes it's super important that we stay within my window of tolerance, which works about a trillion times better for me than (A) constantly repeating the same thing when I'm already screaming and self harming! 

So...after I self harmed and managed to break yet another toy, TTT made me do a 1-minute plank and then stand on my head for a while. Then she asked me if I wanted to listen to some music. I said I super liked listening to stories. She asked me what stories and I told her The Gruffalo was one of my super favourites. She didn't know it, so I recited it for her. 

Then we did some drawing and talked a little bit about the muddle while we were doing that. The muddle is so so SO muddled. How could the person at the meeting last Wednesday possibly POSSIBLY have come up with the idea that she did, that puts the wellbeing of the one who did harm ahead of my own? TTT suggested...well...I'm not actually comfortable with what she suggested because I don't like using that term to describe anyone. I prefer to think that the person made a super sized oopsy and somehow we are going to figure it out, even though nothing in the world can ever change the fact that they genuinely value the wellbeing of the other over my wellbeing. Whatever angle you look at it, I simply do not matter.

Anyway, guess what @CheerBear? TTT is going to bring in Charlie and Chocolate Factory and we are going to read a page or two at the start of each session. Don't you think that's super cool? Have you ever met a psychologist like this before, CheerBear? TTT is SUPER cool! I super love that you helped me to discover that reading stories helps to settle big feelings! 

By the way, I really do want to learn to crochet, @CheerBear. Where do I start??? 

[Catcakes]

Sounds like there were some positives in today’s session with TTT @Phoenix_Rising.
I enjoyed reading your description of your session... especially the bit where you did planking and headstand 🤔

[CheerBear]

TTT is super cool @Phoenix_Rising 🙂 Hearing what you recited gave me the biggest warm fuzzies. Drawing, planking, music, head stands, toys, stories - so amazingly awesome. I very much wish more people worked like this. Thank you for sharing her with us like you do.

I'm sorry the person made such a gigantic oopsy and a choice that hurt you 😞

I'm SO excited thinking you want to learn to crochet (like this is probably the highlight of my day kind of excited)! I was taught through YouTube and if I was doing it again, I would start with learning how to chain stitch. I'd practice the chain stitch until I felt pretty comfortable with the hook and yarn, and my chains were reasonably similarly sized. I found this tutorial here for chain stitch, but there are so many of them if you don't like that one. The only things you'd need would be a hook (probably about 4mm aka size G) and some yarn (not chunky, fluffy, sparkly, overly shiny, or anything fancy because they can be fiddly and slip about a bit). Both of these things you can get from Big W, lots of those $2 kinds of shops, or Spotlight/Lincraft for a couple/few dollars 🙂