Therapy and the Starvation Response in the 'High-Maintenance' Woman

As a person who was denied the most basic comforts from adults when I was a child, it triggers me terribly when I hear ANYTHING in therapy that smacks of 'you should take care of that on your own'. I am really considering quitting therapy altogether because this sort of thing is just too retraumatizing for me to deal with. It is very damaging and it hurts me more than I can explain. I think it is a terrible lie of therapy that people should always be able to take care of things on their own. It is so isolating to feel like you are not allowed to need comfort from actual humans and your only legitimate comfort in life is an inanimate pile of blankets when what you really need, finally and after a lifetime of ostracism, is a kind and accepting human being who won't hurt you. The pile of blankets doesn't give one shit about me. There is no reciprocation, it has no comforting words, it cannot sustain a belief in my abilities with me and it cannot comprehend my pain. Whatever dissociative relief I gain from spending an entire day clutching a pile of blankets is not portable and cannot be incorporated into my person. The thin slip of comfort I can manifest in that way disappears completely the moment I release the blankets and get out of bed. I suppose this is why I have been spending around 18 hours a day with the blankets since Tuesday and have accomplished absolutely NOTHING. Because that is what I have to do just to stay alive and halfway sane in the absence of real human connection.

I still have not been able to eat much of anything. I ate a few bites of chicken and a couple of crackers yesterday. If it weren't for the carbs in beer, I'd be in even worse shape than I am. And yet - we all know what therapists really think of beer, don't we? They don't bat an eye about their clients being silenced and killed by psychiatry (because that's easier for them), but god forbid they should drink. Fuck 'em. I'm going to drink all I want. As long as I don't need someone else to hold the beer bottle to my lips, I consider it a form of the all-so-sought-after SELF SOOTHING that is the holy grail of deaf and uncaring trauma therapists. Personally, I think the therapists should appreciate my beer-drinking. It kills some of the pain that would otherwise bother them.

When it is implied to me by someone I look to for understanding and emotional support that I am inconvenient, that my needs are silly and that I should be perfectly fine in isolation? Well, it triggers bad things. Because part of me agrees that I should be able to meet all of my own needs (probably a side effect of my parents and too much therapy). Part of me agrees and so I enter starvation mode and it is partly healthy. It is partly a defense against this lie that becomes so prevalent in therapy when the shit hits the fan. It is a way to escape the poison being offered by the therapists and retreat into myself. I'll bet the therapists would not feel the same way about people needing to take care of all their own needs if I needed a bypass or an appendectomy, which I totally would not have - I'd just die instead since no one can help me get through all the medical trauma I have endured. But like I said - fuck 'em. It is in moments like these that I am convinced that therapy is a poison. And I would rather starve than ingest it.

And here I am. Starving. Literally and figuratively. I refuse to be hurt and ridiculed for needing other people, so I feast on myself since therapy has made it so very clear that I am all I have. And with my pile of blankets, like any person in a famine, I have no other food. Only in this instance, no one laments this fact. It is seen as what should be. There are no telethons, no public outcry and no one gives a flying fuck.

Do you know what happens to the body in starvation? It begins to break down fat, then muscle tissue, bone and even vital organs in order to manufacture enough glucose to maintain basic functions for as long as possible, perhaps in the hope that food will soon materialize. But it won't. No uncontaminated food will materialize. This is what I have learned in my now 44 years on this planet. My body will be left to cannibalize its own flesh until there is nothing left. It is the same with the soul. And it hurts so much. And guess what happens when the therapists see my weakened condition that has been brought about by self-cannibalism. Go ahead - guess. That's right. They tell me I need to be strong and rely on my 'inner resources'. No one ever gave me much in the way of inner resources. They mostly just took. And therapy directs me to eat up what I do have just so I can wash the dishes and write the checks that pay my bills. I think I'm going to have to quit therapy. I'm tired of being whipped to keep pulling the plough when I am starving to death inside. I cannot get healthy in a system that operates like the Federal Reserve. No matter what anyone says, two plus two will ALWAYS equal four. It will NEVER equal five. Not even when delusional and dissociative therapists and politicians need it to. And yet *I* am considered the 'crazy' one. Whatever. At least I'm not broke and breaking my ass to pay a mortgage. I have properties, but I don't have any mortgages. I saw that train 'a-comin' and got out of the way. Which is what I guess I have to do again with therapy. I am not willing to give up any income-producing principal (muscle, bone, organs) for the sake of some dysfunctional belief system to which I do not subscribe.


(Did I ever mention that I had the listing right next door to Johnny Cash's summer home back when I could still work a 'normal' job?)