This is a Really Real Mental Health post.

I just feel like writing. Again, there’s no real goal in mind, maybe a couple of points I want to hit along the way, but no end in sight.

I started PHP/IOP yesterday. It is normally a Partial Hospitalization Program in non covid times, but due to it being online, and there only being 2 groups a day (instead of the normal 5 or so), it’s considered an Intensive Outpatient Program right now.

The best and hardest part of each day is group therapy. It’s where I do the most deep, difficult processing. But it’s also where I get to know the most about the other members of our little group. Sevenish snapshots into sevenish lives (the number of participants varies day to day).

The other group often feels redundant. It’s a coping skills class of some sort, often covering something I’ve been over half a dozen times already. Been there, done that. But honestly, if I knew these coping skills so well, I wouldn’t be back here.

Maybe.

I keep trying to remind myself that this is a new trauma, and therefore I have to go through the healing process again.

And I’m sure, given my life, that it’ll happen again sometime in the future.

I think I’m a trauma magnet.

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Kidlet just called. These days his calls are fewer and further between, so when he wanted to talk for a long time, I jumped on teh opportunity. Not hanging up until I had missed most of my second group, and my lunch had grown cold and chewy.

And I would do it again.

I treasure the moments we spend on the phone, the moments we spend chatting on messenger.

I miss him more than I can explain. He was supposed to come out next week, but circumstances changed that into sometime next year. It will likely have been 2 years between visits by the time he makes it here.

Hopefully I can go see him at some point, but it isn’t likely to happen any time soon.

I just miss him. And there is a grieving process involved with that.

Empty nesting isn’t easy, even though it has given me a chance to live the parts of my life that I missed out on because I was such a young mom.

I think it was worth it to miss my second group to have a chance to talk to him for over an hour. A chance that I may not get for quite some time if I go inpatient.

A chance that might not come around again any time soon even if I don’t go.

And I’m still weighing that decision. The thoughts of it no longer carry that heavy, unrelenting knot in my throat. I no longer cry when the situation crosses my mind.

But I don’t think I’ll make a final decision until the day that I get the phone call telling me it’s time.

My therapist is still working on more information for me, multiple therapists are looking into alternative treatments (including EMDR, a type of trauma therapy).

There’s a lot to weigh.

Part of it depends on if I go into crisis again between now and then. The thoughts have been quiet, dormant, no longer flitting through the back of my brain constantly.

But I know they’ll be back, it’s just a matter of how strongly and how good I am at overcoming them.

My main coping skill when I get suicidal is to keep myself in bed, it’s a safe space where I can’t hurt myself.

The problem is, being locked in my bed means I have nothing to distract me and I ruminate on the thoughts continually. They don’t typically pass until I get myself up and get involved in something. But that’s scary because there are potentially dangerous things in the rest of the house.

My goal next time (and there will be a next time) is to get myself up and involved in something quickly, even if it’s just writing out one of my long, neverending, posts about how horrible it feels.

Writing helps clear it from my system.

And not those quick, rapid fire, one sentence posts that I throw out as a lifeline when I’m in the thick of things.

But writing, solid, in depth writing, sometimes with no end in sight. No planned out narration. Just a stream of consciousness flow that twists and turns where it will.