This Week In Therapy

Trigger Warning: Talk of sexual assault (does not get graphic)

This next post is a little hard for me to write but I thought it’s important you know what’s been going on with me. A few weeks ago, I started trauma therapy with a very trusted therapist. In my life, I’ve experienced several traumas, most of them sexual, starting at age 14, at the hands of several different men. Here’s how trauma therapy works: my therapist will ask me a bunch of questions to create a narrative. Then he will read the narrative back to me. Then I will go to another therapist who is trained in yoga. This type of yoga is designed to calm the parasympathetic nervous system and usually helps me relax once I’m all tense and upset. Then my therapist gives me a copy of the narrative to review at home and help desensitize myself. Soon it won’t be a trauma; only a story.

So far I’ve had two trauma therapy sessions. The first trauma therapy session I got hurt, thinking about how a place I once thought so safe I had been so wrong about. The second time I got angry (whether justified is probably a debate) about the school administrators and principal doing nothing to protect me from a predator.

I also started (or rather restarted) DBT Skills Training. DBT stands for dialectical behavioral therapy and it was developed by Marsha Linehan to help those with borderline personality disorders (but it works for a lot of other disorders as well). We were just beginning the Distress Tolerance module yesterday. The Distress Tolerance module deals with crises that have to be managed and attended to immediately.

Here are the goals of Distress Tolerance:

· Survive crises

· Accept reality

· Become free

Here are MY goals for Distress Tolerance:

· Don’t make impulsive decisions (I used to do this a lot)

· Self-soothe instead of using maladaptive skills

· Tolerate distress (duh): it will get better

· Master radical acceptance (this is one of the skills that helped me the most)

· Remove urgency (that one was stolen from my teacher)

One of the skills we tackled was TIPP (you’ll find in DBT everything stands for something. TIPP stands for Temperature, Intense Exercise, Paced Breathing, and Paired Muscle Relaxation), My therapist always recommended TIPP for me, especially Temperature. I would hold ice cubes over a kitchen sink. I would take a frigid face bath in ice water. I have even jumped into freezing showers fully clothed to stave off suicidal impulses. I also shoot hoops in the middle of winter until my hands can’t take it anymore (temperature and exercise. Bonus!).