I don’t like talking about traumatic and bad things that have happened in my life.
Surprisingly, this isn’t because of the bad memories that could get dredged up. I’m not afraid of memories. I don’t remember things very well anyway, and so it’s not like I get put into a television-esque fugue state whenever I remember something.
Mostly, it’s because by the time I’m ready to tell someone, it’s not so I can get help to deal with it. Usually it’s just to explain something that’s a part of me and how I function.
My therapist always tried to get me to tell her things. And I’d try to come up with things to talk about. but the truth of it is, is that I get better therapy in a room alone with myself than I ever talking to someone.
Maybe I have trust issues. All I know is, I only use people as a sounding board if they know more about a subject than I do, and I am currently the leading expert on me.
I have to think really hard to come up with something spontaneous.
So I don’t like talking about bad things, because for me, I’ve already dealt with it. But you haven’t. My old pain is your new concern.
It’s like this.
Say you’re walking through a forest. And you see a tree. About a hundred years ago, when this tree was young, a man built a fence by it, and over time, the wire of the fence got overtaken by the tree’s growth. Now this tree has a length of wire from this long-gone fence protruding from its bark. It’s a part of the tree now. It’s grown around it for a century. But you look at it, and you think, “That’s terrible. That poor tree, impaled by this ugly rusted wire.” So you get a saw, cut into the tree, and pull out the wire. As you walk away, you think proudly, “I did a good thing today. I saved that tree from that wire.”
You come back two weeks later to see the tree stunted and dead. Some well-meaning person has cut into its heartwod and damaged it irreparably.
What would have helped would be if you could go back in time and tell that long-dead farmer, “Hey, don’t put that fence there, this poor sapling is going to grow onto it.” Maybe he would have moved the tree somewhere else, maybe he would have made the fence out of something more biodegradable than wire.
But when you try to fix an old pain with a new concern, you aren’t helping at all.
mostlyokay 