In a recent social media post, I wrote this: In high school, while running cross country, I knew about ‘mental toughness.’ I’m realizing as I get older that I am somehow losing that. So, the other day I was attempting dumbbell floor press to failure and kept thinking ‘it hurts, but it’s still possible.’ Today, I did the same thing on the rower. ‘It hurts, but it’s still possible.’ Real mental toughness CAN be exercised in the gym, but it truly comes down to doing the hard things whenever, wherever, and however it hurts!

This blog post will hopefully shed some light on an upcoming challenge I am trying to muster the courage and mental toughness for.

I’m finding lately that between nightmares, weird dreams, and anxiety about the whole sex therapy thing, I’m not sleeping well at all. I’m probably getting adequate sleep, though, at the low end. The problem is that it is not restful. My heart rate is regularly hitting 145 beats per minute while I am asleep. My resting heart rate during sleep is higher than my resting heart rate throughout the day! The lowest it goes at night? 82 beats per minute. The lowest it goes during the day? 64 beats per minute.

It’s not just that my sleep is disturbed by that stuff. I’m also struggling to respect the people in authority over me as I once did. I’m noticing a lack of integrity and a shift in focus from seeking solutions to self-serving, self-interested priorities. I can’t get behind that. I love my job, and I’m finding myself looking for something different. Then, there’s this weird predicament I found myself in. I somehow went from being an assistant coach to a head coach to serving on the Board of Directors for a non-profit to being President and in charge of everything that comes with that role. This is a totally different set of responsibilities for me, and one I am not even remotely familiar with or comfortable with right now. I’ve made positive changes, including a new set of bylaws and director positions, and I have a great board working with me. BUT the more I try to resolve smaller issues, the bigger they get. I didn’t know it, but I inherited an absolute disaster, without getting into details. It’s just random daily stress, and I’m handling it quite well — thanks to being able to vent/troubleshoot with my husband and a couple of very close friends.

Now, if I can beat a dead horse, the whole thing with sex therapy has been feeling frustrated. I think I’m still trying to grasp what it is and the process, while also living this weird life where I feel like I am a teenager. It’s as if I’m trying to exercise some form of independence — trying to make my needs or wants known. I’m also trying to trust myself to know what I need. The problem is, I don’t feel like anyone is listening. I’m trying to decide (still) if I need to trust everyone else, believing they know what I need or what is best, or if I really need to fight for myself this time. I am fully aware that this new exercise in trying to have agency is trial and error, but it’s already proving frustrating and confusing across everything I’m trying to deal with. And in the meantime, I am trying not to be a teenager when it comes to throwing a temper tantrum. You know, slamming my door, refusing to come out, and yelling, “FINE!” I want very much to figure this communication and agency thing out before I die.

And that brings me to the real reason I sat down to write today. I think I learned early on that people could be kind and loving, and it felt good. But I learned that the kind, loving experience could be withdrawn, conditional, or quickly and violently switched. It was inconsistent and confusing. Love, attention, affection AND suddenly anger, hatred, chaos, and manipulation. Or the love, attention, affection, etc. came with conditions. It’s weird. You settle into the food and just as you think things might be different this time, it turns again. You learn to appreciate the positive times, but expect the terrible times. I learned not to trust, for many reasons, but I also learned to trust too much. And each time it felt both surprising and expected. So incredibly confusing. Eventually, I learned to both hate myself and resent the people who did this.

That was the background. What’s happening in real time is a not-so-subtle reexperiencing of that. When Dr. C. told me she was not trained to address issues a sex therapist addresses and therefore felt it would be irresponsible and unethical to work with me, I respected that boundary. After all, I can’t argue with where her training lies and where she feels competent and confident. But there was so much going on below the surface for me beyond that. 1. I wanted her to at least listen to what I had to say. I wanted to try to articulate something very specific and bothersome to me. 2. It felt so abrupt and out of the blue (notice I am saying it felt unpredictable). 3. It fits a trend of me talking about trauma and feeling abandoned (albeit a very different situation).

The familiar feeling of someone being there, and suddenly, seemingly NOT being there, was incredibly triggering. And the additional triggered sense of abandonment when I had finally put words to what happened was the exact fear I had been carrying for years, and one of the reasons it took so long for me to find the courage to talk about my experiences in the first place. I spiraled completely out of control. I was angry and afraid, and I was crushed. I wanted to end my life, or at the very least, self-harm in a way that could potentially end my life. I was struggling because I wanted the world to know that I tried but couldn’t keep going. I was struggling because I wanted everyone to know just how hurt I actually felt. I spent countless sleepless nights trying to sort out how to communicate my distress and felt sense of abandonment without externally lashing out and attacking or internally attacking myself so powerfully that it came out in the form of suicide. The lack of sleep exacerbated the already heightened emotions and made it difficult to regulate at all.

I have never had a good sense of what to do with anger, and it had started to take over. I’ve used physical exercise like running in the past, but to an excessive and harmful degree. I’ve used silence that turned on me and caused me to self-harm. I’ve used physical aggression against punching bags, brick walls, or really anything I can punch without hurting someone. And on occasion, I have tried to use communication. But communicating when I am angry has never been pretty. I don’t have great examples and never have. I also haven’t exercised the skill much. In fact, I’ve told Dr. C. a few times that I have no idea what to do with anger or how to control it. She has told me I don’t need to control it, but I think I do. I think I have a very violent, nasty part inside of me that needs to be controlled.

I tried to communicate my experience, or how I was experiencing everything, and that angry part, as much as I tried to stifle it and rehearse my words, lashed out. I don’t recall what I said or how I said it, but Dr. C. told me I was being mean. I’m sure I was. I know what I am capable of, and I know I was horribly triggered and fighting to keep myself from killing myself. And the only way I know to keep myself safe is to externalize the anger rather than internalize it.

I recently started back with Dr. C. I’m noticing I am extremely anxious in her office. At first, I wasn’t sure why. I thought it was just the transition back, along with the other things going on in my life, and the lack of good sleep. I have since come to realize that there is more to it than that. I’m poised for the shoe to drop. I’m afraid to be vulnerable. Before I can continue my work, I need to work to repair a rupture. There’s a little more to it than that, but I believe that is all that should be shared. This next conversation with Dr. C. will be difficult. It requires courage that I don’t feel I have. But just like in the gym, just because it’s hard or it hurts doesn’t mean I’m not capable or that it is impossible.