Although I am feeling a lot better today, my emotions are still running pretty high. It is quite frightening when you can feel everything bubbling just below the surface and have to try and keep a tight rein on it all. It’s at times like this when my reactions can actually be totally inappropriate for the situation and I have to be constantly on my guard.
It makes it extremely difficult at work. Normally, I can think things through properly before I respond, but feeling like this I find it really hard to think before I react. And reacting is all it is. But I am not in fact responding to what is said or done, at least not totally. My reactions are tempered by my past experiences and everything seems to be somehow far more personal.
Added to that, any reactions seem to be magnified a hundredfold. For example, something slightly amusing can have me in fits of giggles for hours, whilst something that is only mildly upsetting will make me sob. Controlling it is something I have been practising for years, but I am not actually sure just how healthy that is. Controlling my emotions is so close to hiding my true feelings and I am afraid of crossing the line from one to the other.
Don’t get me wrong. It would be much easier for me to just go back to hiding how I am feeling and it would probably a lot less stressful to those around me too. But if I have learned anything over the last couple of months it is the fact that I can only hide for so long before I explode. And with the anger and sense of hopelessness that is now a permanent part of my life, things can only end badly.
Until now, I had never considered myself to be irrational, but in the state I’m in now, there can be no doubt that if I let myself go and speak from my heart, nothing rational will come out.
It is also making it hard to concentrate on anything. Oh, believe me, I try. I pick a task, run through it in my head and get down to it, but within seconds I lose that vital thread of concentration. My situation is only made worse by the fact that I am in a pretty peculiar position at work and cannot afford to take time out to get my head straight. But it does worry me what standard of work I am producing. No-one has said anything yet, but it won’t be long before my lower standard of performance is noticed.
So where do I go from here? I am sure that is a question that has been asked my many victims of Child Sexual Abuse before me and will come up for many others in the future. I wish there was a way that we could all get together and share our experiences. But I can count on the fact that here in the UK at least, that is a long way off.
Hey Bella, how about letting the heart and not the head decide what is deemed irrational? That is the most "irrational" thing you can do, but who defines rational? "Normal people"???
ReplyDeleteYou can bet your bottom dollar, there is actually no such thing!!
What I really mean to say is, "Let it out" in whatever jumbled, f$%ked up fashion it comes out.
The only way to fix a birds nest on a fishing reel is to strip all the tangled line out - and then, and only then, can you actually find the one simple loop that caused the whole problem to begin with.
And it's only ever one single loop. It always is.
You already know the "loop" that has caused your problems, but in order to rectify it and get all the line back on YOUR "reel" you have strip it all out. No other way.
And the best thing is, you don't have to "know" where to start - you just find loops that pull away and start stripping. There is no order, just go for the loops that are right in front of you. You have to get each one individually out anyways, so it really doesn't matter which one is which, or the particular order - because there isn't any.
At least, that's what I see. Irrational?? We all are. You certainly aren't unique!! IMHO.
Start pulling at those loops, girl!!
And if the one you are pulling on starts getting tight and uncomfortable, find one that's loser. Once the loser ones are all out the way, you'll actually find that the one that became all tight and uncomfortable will now start to come out a lot easier... ;)