learning to separate

so my fish died sometime last night. found him floating in the bowl this morning. i think i know what went wrong though so hopefully i won't kill the next one. i wasn't going to show little buddy but while i was in the bathroom, before i could flush the poor thing, he ran in and saw it. so i told him to say "bye bye" to bob. he then proceeded to stand in front of the toilet saying, "bye bye bob!" over and over...made me want to cry. :(

so then we went to wal-mart and got a new bob.

the past week or so i've been having nightmares and flashbacks. i had been doing really well for a few weeks before that. i think it's partially because at my last appointment with my therapist we decided that we are going to get back into my childhood abuse crap. for the past few months we've been working on my communication and empathy skills. it's been hard...on both me and hubby, because i've been kind of a witch lately. i'm cranky and rude and on edge because i'm having flashbacks several times throughout the day...then sleeping like crap because of the nightmares.

today i am trying very hard to look more critically at my behavior. am i being rude? am i being crabby? i don't mean to be this way and more often than not don't realize that i am, it's just because i'm so stressed and on edge with the flashbacks. so i'm trying to change that. i don't want to take out my crap on hubby, it's not his fault. so i'm really looking at myself more closely. i'm hoping i'm doing a better job at separating the past from the present, at realizing i'm not six years old anymore and no one is abusing me right now. i'm trying to stay positive and to deal with the flashbacks better.

while packing i found an old journal that i haven't even started writing in yet. this is good because my therapist wants me to start journaling things as part of my therapy. before my next appointment she wants me to journal about the anger and grief i have experiences since the abuse. anger is an easy one. i've been pretty full of anger over the course of my life. but grief? i'm not sure where to begin. how do i mourn for my lost innocence? how do i even find the grief amidst the anger? it will really take some work to try to find that. i know it's there, but when i start to feel sad it immediately morphs into anger. perhaps learning to separate the two will help me learn to direct my anger in an appropriate direction, instead at hubby who just happens to be the closest person to me. it used to go straight to my parents and siblings....i want it to go in the right direction. it's going to be a tough thing to learn.

so how do i really find that grief? how do i mourn for my childhood, my innocence, what has been taken from me? where do i even start?