Hi guys! I have another awesome update for you.  I thought I had posted about it and I think I might have but I can't find the specific post that included the information so I'm just going to share again. A little over a year ago we ended up leaving our church of 15 years due to a physical and sexual abuse scandal in our association.   Our pastor refused to apply wisdom in regards to how our church should proceed. The new church we went to is a different style of Christian Church where they believe communion is more than just taking the Bread & cup. They celebrate it by also having a potluck like how the apostles ate with Christ, and washing of each other's feet (men & women separated) like Jesus did to the apostles. 

Well the first time that I tried to participate in this type of communion I didn't even 100% think I was going to have any problems but my brain told me it was possible that it could trigger me because of a specific memory that had to do with my ex best friend, momster, who was a nail technician and had been doing my nails when my little guy had run in screaming and crying about monster boy "hurting him" and how she reacted knowing what I now know she did sending my then two-and-a-half-year-old back out to monster boy and not even letting me have the appropriate amount of time to comfort him partly because I was unable to walk because I had wet toes and fingers with nail polish. Anyways I had processed this particular story out with my therapist and shared how much guilt I felt about how that whole situation went down and I felt that I had sent my child back in to get abused. So fast-forwarding to the communion service with the foot-washing last year 2018, I sat down with everybody else in the circle and within a couple minutes of singing a song before anyone had even touched my feet and they had just started the process of putting water in the buckets, I flashed back to that day and had an extreme blackout panic attack and ran to the bathroom crying. The rest of the evening I could not even stay present because my brain kept going back to that night and creating anxiety in me and anger. I ended up using peppermint to get me through the rest of the service ( a smell that grounds me) however I still couldn't keep my brain from flashing back if my eyes closed. Needless to say that was a difficult night of sleep. BTW, I had warned the pastor and the pastor's wife and one friend at the church about the fact this might occur.

Anyways, once I realized this was a trigger for me, the whole women and foot washing thing, I decided to do exposure therapy for myself and every time we had a communion service inch by inch move myself to the circle again.  Most of the women at the church I shared a little piece with so they understood what was going on and why I was doing what I was doing and they were 100% supportive. I've been working on it all year starting with just being in the other room and listening to them sing, then moving to watching them in the other room while they did the foot-washing, then sitting outside the circle and watching, every single session crying and still having panic attacks but not as bad as the first time. But finally, this last communion service, I was able to sit in the circle with all the women without crying and without anxiety and even though I didn't do foot-washing it was nice to not be distracting them with my crying or panic attacks. It did help that I was holding a little toddler on my lap the whole time and I engaged with her attempting to help myself overcome my phobia even more by washing her feet, which again did not trigger me at all!

So while on Christmas vacation with my family in a different state, one of the things that I wanted to do was get a pedicure to see if I still had any triggers in regards to the nail painting and women touching my feet. I was able to take out the race card because the location I was in had white women doing pedicures. I am excited to tell you that I was able to get through an entire pedicure with not one ounce of flashbacks or panic and I even forced myself to recall the event to see if I had any anxiety but I didn't! I was even able to share with my nail technician a little bit about why I was there and we ended up exchanging stories of trauma in our own lives, on a very topical note of course. The only interesting thing that happened during the session is when she went to go paint my toes, I felt like I was flinching but as she painted my toes they were perfectly still. So I think I still have a subconscious reaction based upon the trauma but it was something I could easily handle and it didn't bring back the bad memories. My therapist is extremely proud of me and I'm very excited to move past this because one of the plans that I'd always had for my daughter was that when she turned 13 I would take her for her first mani pedi and her birthday is this month so I've been trying really hard to get past this trigger so that I could not let the monsters destroy my future plans!

I think I'm going to have to go one more time before I take her at the end of this month to make sure that when I add in an ethnic nail technician, that I'm not triggered because that is actually a piece I'm still a little concerned about. The visual and the audio because they speak their language might make me trigger but I'm hopeful that my brain is healed enough that it won't so we'll see.

But YAY!!!