An Open Letter

The title is not in a good way. during my therapy session I was asking about handling conflict situations, especially with a specific pattern that continues to happen. She wanted to bring up childhood and address it from the source, and she asked me what I see when I think of six-year-old me asking my mom for something. Immediately one sad thing was I don’t even know what six-year-old me looks like. But I absolutely knew the feelings of being afraid, and I kept having the mental image of someone with their arm stuck under a pile of scrap metal. To stop the pain in the arm, you risk all of the metal coming crashing down on you. And so instead six-year-old me just learns to suck it up. Because every time I asked for something, she would take it out on me and I quickly learned that it’s not safe to ask. It sucks because that’s supposed to be where you learn what is ok, and I never got that. she also later told me how would I respond if someone told me that it was safe and that they wouldn’t get mad at me and I could bring up how I felt, and I almost started crying because of the visceral fear that started in my chest. I told her how all I could think about is the instances where someone tells me that, and the exact same pattern continues. And how I’ve started to associate that with confirmation that I am not safe if I ask someone to stop hurting me or anything like that. I’m glad I talked about it in therapy today, because I don’t think it always has to feel this way. It does however suck that I have to go through this extra effort to undo my childhood, compared to people that just get to have good parents. I know that it’s almost like a unicorn expecting that, and that pretty much no one has that, but it still hurts because I wish I did.