On being a victim

This post has a trigger and TMI warning for childhood sexual abuse.

Keep reading after the jump if you want to.

I would like to warn any friends who read this that this contains some very personal information that you might have preferred not to have found out.

I wrote this over a period from June 2012-now, which is why it's so long.

The broken refrigerator and its application to triggers

This entry was written after my first day of "therapy", but published well afterwards.

The counselling session opened with mindfulness meditation. (I mentioned I was nervous, he suggested we do a meditation/breathing exercise to get me calmer). That took me by surprise. It was just like Sam Harris' one from the Global Atheist Convention 2012, so I felt a little less weird about it since I'd had experience with that sort of thing before.

I noticed one interesting thing that my counsellor said that I could really relate to as a polyamorist.

He said, "Often when we feel negative emotions our immediate reaction is to run away from them or avoid them. But we would really benefit from looking at the emotions, or confronting them in some way and examining the reasons behind them. It's often just your body and mind trying to warn you about a threat, but in reality there's no threat there."

I almost said to him, "that sounds just like the broken refrigerator analogy for polyamory!". 

But I didn't. I wrote this blog post instead.