Hi Brooke. 🙂
I can’t tell you how many times this month my TDLs have blown my mind. Here I thought I was so smooth with the model these last seven months and then along comes January and I realize I was only scratching the surface before.
Tonight I overate sugar to a degree that I have not done since committing to losing weight. I was conscious of what I was doing and watching myself, and still kept going until I felt physically sick. Then I sat down to do a thought download. By my fourth thought things took off in a direction I didn’t expect. I am hoping you will offer me some help with my model.
TDL:
I feel sick.
I probably just gained back five pounds.
That was some old school bingeing!
I don’t do that anymore. But I still chose to do it.
If I had taken the time to journal about the rape flashback yesterday maybe I wouldn’t have chosen to overeat sugar like this today.
I don’t call it rape in my head.
I call it “the nonconsensual sexual thing.”
Which is bullshit, probably.
But my mind refuses the word rape because he was drunk and not himself, and he’s the survivor of “real sexual violence,” and he’s the person I chose to be my child’s father, and I shouldn’t have even been with him that night, and also I should have been able to stop it.
It wasn’t even a “rape flashback.” It was a dream in which I still loved and wanted him, and I just woke up feeling sick and remembered what season it was.
It’s been four years.
Maybe it’s time to talk to someone.
Maybe it’s time to call it rape.
If I name what happened as rape, what does that change for me?
I don’t want [our child] to ever, ever know.
I don’t want to cause him harm.
But I want to move forward from this experience.
How do I turn this into a memory that does not have power over me?
No wonder I made myself eat all that sugar.
How mean. But I totally get it.
Feeling sick.
So, I first did some models that can be summed up best through this one —
C: memory of nonconsensual sex
T: maybe it’s time to call it rape
F: scared, in denial
A: try saying it out loud
R: feel pain
This track didn’t seem useful to me, so I tried a new model with the result my TDL revealed to me that I want. But I feel like I’m in a fog whenever I try to fill out the middle. This is the part I am hoping for help with.
C: memory of nonconsensual sex
T:
F:
A:
R: this memory does not have power over me.
(I think it matters to tell you that I ended the relationship with this person about ten months after this happened, and before I found out I was pregnant. He has a loving but minimal relationship with our kid, who he only sees when he’s sober — I raise her and have since she was born.)
Thank you as always for your help, and for the monthly work! I know myself so much better than I used to. And I’m so much more awake to all the pain, but i get to love myself while experiencing it. Which changes everything.
K