A little bit of genuine resolution goes a long way...

I did the shopping early again Sunday. Now I know more about why I would usually wait and do it in the middle of the night. There are actually two parts to that. Part one is that I was waiting and doing it late because I was procrastinating it because of the agoraphobia. Part two (not being especially fond of people) added to the procrastination, but the agoraphobia was the much bigger deal in the case of shopping, errands, etc. I mentioned the evaporation of the agoraphobia on this blog a while back, but I didn't really go into detail about how that came about. I guess it seemed unimportant because the agoraphobia had become a non-issue. It's a strange feeling for me to have something so big resolve itself so quickly without it having been a false fix born of dissociation. I wonder too, if I waited so many weeks to blog about it because I wanted to give enough time to make sure that's not what it was. Probably. You know what else is odd? I wasn't trying to 'fix' the agoraphobia. I wasn't working on it at all. It left me after something was resolved around a very specific part of my traumatic childhood.

For many years now, I have employed various techniques and tricks to be able to do the shopping. None of them (save for blatant dissociation) were able to ease the anxiety, they simply helped me get my butt into the store and do what I needed to do, miserable and riddled with terrible anxiety the whole while. It was truly awful. Quietly, on the inside, I was overcome with the awfulness of forcing my feet to move my body through a space that I did not control. It was pure terror most nights. All the mindfulness that I had ever applied to that situation simply had to be repeated every single time because mindfulness was not a resolution, it was just even more work and another distraction that moved my feet through space. Mindfulness schmindfulness, I managed to cart myself to the store with it or without it. When that was not the distraction, then something else was and the end result was pretty much the same. The bottom line for me is that I was miserable forcing my feet to move me through that space that I perceived as dangerous and it was a regularly recurring hell that never did 'desensitize' even after years of doing it. I truly felt those feelings and my mind knew that they couldn't really be about shopping, but that knowledge did not take the feelings away. Accepting the feelings did nothing. Accepting that I felt like shit still left me feeling like shit and nothing changed. It was the same week after week.

The agoraphobia was with me until after I wrote this to New Guy right before Old Guy came back from vacation and I was all mixed up about the upcoming appointment with him --
I'm trapped between the desperate little girl and the rest of me. Do you know what this business of (Old Guy) feels like to me? It feels like when my father used to say, "Come here. If you don't, it will be worse. If you try to run, I will hurt you worse. Come closer." I was sick a lot and couldn't run. I just wanted to live. I had no choice. I'm scared. I'm really, really scared. Please don't go away, okay? Please don't go away. I'm so afraid.

I wrote that and I felt the very familiar brand of anxiety and dread that was the cause of the agoraphobia. My childhood home was the space that was not mine, the space I could not control. All space outside of my home and car felt this way to me with the agoraphobia because they were not mine to control and that made them feel very dangerous. And yet I had to move my feet toward the danger anyway. Just feeling the fear could not resolve it. I had to be allowed to know where it came from and express my true feelings about its origin. Which is why I went to New Guy with it, because I knew I wouldn't get hit with some stupid breathing exercises, assaulted by a bunch of fake baloney or otherwise invalidated which would have simply caused dissociation and prevented this healing and sanity-restoring connection. I hoped New Guy wouldn't tell me to take a bubble bath or go for a walk in nature. He didn't have to do or say much at all, he just had to not block integration with some intervention - THAT'S ALL he had to do. And he did it. And now I can shop and run errands and do the banking with true ease. Sure, I did those things in spite of the way I felt, but now I feel better doing them. I can even go to restaurants without feeling like I'm going to throw up, sitting on the edge of my chair, wishing my family would eat faster so I can go home, poking a few obligatory bites down my throat and asking for a doggy bag... I CAN ENJOY. That is something that therapist-speak and stupid techniques could never give me. Those things could never release me from anything. Only pure honesty and connection, deep down on a wild and messy feeling level that truly connects to the truth could do this for me. Now I have more freedom. It might seem like a small thing to others, but to me it is wonderful. I have had only one twinge of this monster since and it was when I was triggered by a rock in a landscape. I empowered myself to take specific action and New Guy helped me. And I know and can FEEL that encountering a specific trauma trigger does not threaten my new freedom. I am so much better off now than I was with the agoraphobia. It can be a truly miserable condition.

Do I still have trouble with other things? Yup. Am I likely to become a world traveler? Anything is possible, but I kinda doubt it. And I don't care right now. You know why I don't care? You'll never guess what I was thinking about in the grocery store. I was thinking about... groceries! Can you imagine? And it wasn't because I had to make myself, it was because I was freed up enough to do it naturally. Who knew that it could be natural and effortless to think of groceries in a grocery store? I never knew that.