Client Journal: Protecting

Yesterday I was thinking about how I protect myself from being intimate and vulnerable. The question, “Who are you when you aren’t protecting yourself?” popped into my head. I started crying. I started crying because I don’t know who I am when I am not protecting myself. It hurt to feel that way. Then I asked myself, “Are you sure?” I guess what it comes down to, is that I am just, me. An emotional person when I am not protecting myself. I feel a bunch of different emotions at the same time, not just one or two like I thought. I guess that’s why I felt overwhelmed and scared? I am scared of my emotions. I am scared to feel the depth of them. I am scared of them, because it makes me vulnerable and I am scared to be vulnerable because I have been around a lot of people who have hurt me when I was vulnerable..

Another memory I have, was during that period of isolation when I was little, I started to write poetry. I wrote one poem in particular about how nobody sees me, nobody pays attention to me, nobody knows I exist. My mom ended up finding that poem, she read it and didn’t really have much of a reaction to it other than a generic, “that was a nice poem,” response. It felt even more sad and more hurt and more alone. Because she didn’t acknowledge or ask me about my feelings that I had written down. It was then, I started to talk to people less about how I felt and write down more about how I felt. I remember feeling that “At least the paper can’t ignore me.” and that what I wrote down was “proof” about what was happening to me and what I was feeling. Because then, I started to not show my feelings as much. Except for what I thought was happiness.

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