My Inner What?

from Chapter 2 of
"Don’t Try This at Home-The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder How I accidentally regressed myself back to infancy and healed it all" at AttachmentDisorderHealing.com/book/
In my last post, group therapy put me through the floor. “Start with the wounded child inside you,” Dr. Matt repeated. “Then introduce your care-giving adult to your hurting child,” so the adult can “take care of” it.  But the more I tried it, the sicker I felt.
I just couldn’t find a “child.”  Was he talking about my grade school voices coming up from the back seat of my parents’ car decades ago (see last week's blog) ?  They just popped up and disappeared, a one-shot shock ‘way out of my control.  But I couldn’t find a “child” as a personality.
My Dad died, but I couldn’t cry, remember? That’s why I took the plunge and went to therapy. Yet that grief failure was never addressed; instead came this “child” agenda. And all I knew was: here I’d gone for help, but I was feeling worse.
Where was the Adult Attachment Interview, needed for anyone starting therapy?  It’s been around since 1994. [FN1]
Finally I told Matt, “My husband didn’t love me for nearly 30 years, the rebound guy didn’t love me, and now it looks like maybe my parents didn’t do emotions much either. And you’re telling me ‘Go love yourself”? At least with the rebound guy I didn’t feel so alone.  I can’t feel any such child, and the more I try, the more anxiety I feel. It’s like being asked to go have a homosexual relationship with myself; there’s something pornographic about it.”
“If you really find hugging your own child to be pornographic, you have severe trauma and need serious help,” he said. It didn’t sound like, “That’s bad, we need to get you more treatment.”  More like, “You’re uncooperative, try harder, or you don’t fit in the group.”
Think of me as a frog on a lab table, torso slit open in front. Delving into my 2008 notes today, I can see what happened and report it. But at the time, all I knew was it felt like my belly was being slit—and no one could understand that simple fact when I told them, nor tell me what to do about it.  They treated me like a broken widget refusing to behave as expected.  Never any question about their methodology.
The emotional pain was bewildering, so back I went to the web and the phone.  On August 1, I got a second opinion from Pam, a divorce counselor at a local church. “Your hurts go too deep and are too many,” she said with empathy on hearing my story. “Support groups are inadequate.  Stop the Superwoman act and take care of yourself; get individual therapy.”
Now it was deep in the Crash of 2008, I was out of work, and horrified at the expense. But Pam convinced me by a sheer compassion which stood out like a lighthouse in the pitch dark of all others’ indifference.  I never forgot that call; to this day I love her.  She even found me a referral to a local agency.
I was in a second therapist’s office for individual treatment on August 5, the emotional pain was that intense.... READ MORE (and it isn't pretty but boy did I learn stuff).....