Hi nosleep I haven’t really engaged with Reddit in a good long while but thought this was a worth while story. It’s not complete yet but I will hopefully be able to update at after my next session on Wednesday.
So a little bit of background is that I attend therapy, I have done so for the last 3 years but have only recently started with my current one. I have really been able to connect with her and we have been making progress I never thought I would be able to make (go to therapy guys it’s worth it). Now she’s a bit unconventional and often tries out new strategies in regard to my therapy, which is totally fine by me, I have ADHD so the novelty of a new strategy actually works well for me. Now the reason this is being posted to no sleep is because of my session on Wednesday, we tried a new therapy and I think something strange happened. I’ll break it down in order now but strange things have been happening to me since we started.
I forget the name of the strategy but essentially its around focusing in on your physiological feelings and then identifying the psychological causes for this, if any are there at all. Then you have a imaginary conversation with the parts of you and using the first thing that pops into your mind you can generate associations and try to find the cause of what might be causing the problem. It’s a pretty wacky theory if you ask me but I actually did gain some insight from it but I also gained something else, something I wouldn’t mind giving up.
So I’m sitting there eyes closed focusing in on my uneasiness (I’d spent the last few days with a bit of generalised anxiety, I work a very stressful job so this is normal) and I imagined a presence next to me, the personification of unease. It was like a shadowy version of me sitting with its head in its hands as though it was crying. I asked it if it was happy to talk and it gave me the vague sense that it was, looking up at me I felt a sense of sorrow and apprehension, like it was worried about what I would make it say. Again, the conversation went like this for a while I gradually dug deeper into what the purpose of the unease was and ultimately, we decided it was as a protective factor, to make sudden bursts of anxiety much more manageable. However, at this point things began to get strange.
I was directed by my therapist to ask the uneasy when it first met me and I immediately had an image flash in my mind of when I was a kid. A small memory one I hadn’t thought of in years. It was simple I remember we were renting a small house as we had only immigrated to Aus a few years prior and this was during the GFC so we didn’t have a huge amount of money. But I was walking through the house, and I ran past my bedroom, probably on some imaginary adventure, and thought I saw a man standing in the centre of it looking out the window. I don’t remember what he was wearing or any features other than a tall imposing frame which is why I think it must have been male. I stopped just past the door and quickly took a second look into the room but there wasn’t anyone there. I remember feeling strange about it at the time but didn’t tell my parents until much later. Why this memory came back to me I couldn’t say but after that I couldn’t get anything more out of the uneasy, my therapist explained that this can be normal as when the body is taxed it can shut down to digging deeper.
When we finished my therapist was asking me more and I realised that towards the end I felt like there was some other part of me standing behind me waiting, I don’t know what part it would have been, nor could I speculate but I remember thinking that the uneasy seemed to look behind me for approval before talking.
Honestly this could all just be therapy, but for the past few days I have seen the figure again. Just out of the corner of my eye when I walked past an empty meeting room at my office. Again, it was just standing there and again it disappeared when I tried to see if it was there again.
I could chalk all of this up to just a coincidence, but something feels off, like I am missing a piece of a puzzle. I’m going to hold off on trying the therapy again at least for little longer until my next session, but I really want to know if anyone else has had strange experiences with therapy and if anyone has tried the same therapy.