Revisiting

by Charity

Our Skype session went well.  We felt that our T understands some really basic core elements of our trauma history and how it affects us now.  Brother number two's new apartment is not only in a neighborhood we don't like.  It's about six blocks away from where our father grew up, and we spent a lot of our childhood there.

Neither our father nor his parents were abusers.  In fact, they were the "good" grandparents.  They were far from perfect, as we learned during our father's final years.  But they were light years better than our mother's parents.

Our father lived in that house from infancy until he married our mother.  Our grandparents still had the house when our grandfather suicided in 1973, when we were 11. And our grandmother stayed in that house until she entered a nursing home circa 1983.

So while nothing bad happened there, we still spent a significant part of our childhood there.  We don't want to revisit any of our childhood.  We don't have to pass through that exact neighborhood to reach our brother's apartment, but being in the same town is bad enough.

Brother number one is in town this weekend and will be stopping by to visit B2 tomorrow morning.  We promised both of them that we would be there, although we did tell B1 privately why the situation is so triggering.  Our T suggested that we verbalize a feelings check to B1 sometime during the visit, because verbalizing feelings to someone trustworthy helps prevent the feeling of bottling everything in.

So we'll see how it goes.  We have to resolve this one way or another.  We can't live in the grave dysfunction of our own fear.