I have connected some dots!

Sometimes I can go months, even years, exhibiting some 'behavior' or 'fear' and not understand why I do what I do. Each night, when the clock strikes 11pm, I, the adult, logical Grace is GONE and there is no reasoning with whoever takes over...be it the angry/defiant one, the sad/frightened one, the cynical one....etc.... And the next morning I typically awake to find I have done some less than rational things the prior night.

Now, when I say "less than rational" ~ I'm really being polite. This is NOT a situation like Cinderella, where my fairy Godmother appears and waves a magic wand, and *POOF* I'm suddenly at a grand ball dancing with prince charming. This is more along the lines of the liquor cabinet being emptied, the supply of ativan & klonopin greatly reduced, perhaps some self-inflicted blood shed... and many, many, MANY irrational emails sent to dear therapist. Often times I awake around 3am to find myself in a place I don't remember going (outside on the back deck, in the basement, the den...the hallway...anywhere other than my bed, beside my husband), or I will wake up in bed...not knowing when or how I got there.

There are different girls who will take over but the past few months it has been the angry defiant little girl who wants to express now what she couldn't express then. And she ensures she recreates the same situation of abandonment she experienced as a little girl night after night. My mother and father were alcoholics. Cheap, dark-eyes, vodka was the drink of choice ~ straight up, in those cheap glasses that jelly used to come in. Mother couldn't handle the booze like her husband so she typically passed out for the night around 10...and it was after that when he would come into my room...and I would silently cry out for my mother to come and save me...but she never heard me, she never cared, she never came.

Now, I recreate the same scene with DT. When I begin to relive the past in the now, and I can feel him and smell him and hear his voice in my ear...it's 10:30 or 11pm, and DT is only available until 10...we reach out to her, even though we KNOW (rationally/logically) that she isn't going to be there, and we beg her to help us, to save us. And when she doesn't, we say to her every malicious, venomous, horrible thing we wanted to say to mother. But the middle of the night is not when we should say these things. These are the things that should be said in the safety of DTs office, where she is actually present, where she can contain it, where we can't completely go off the deep in and actually follow through on some plan of destruction that cannot be undone.

I am recreating the past! I am putting us a situation where it will appear as though DT IS abandoning us ~ because it's past the time of her availability, and she isn't going to be there.

So the key is to get our behinds into bed before 10 so this dosen't happen! And it is a struggle every night. Each night I put the sleeping meds out on the table at 8:00pm...and the internal battle begins at 915....
"Take your meds, Grace."
"Just 15 more minutes."
"No, I don't want to take them. I don't want to go to bed. You can't make me."
"You know what will happen if you don't take them."
"Just take them - you'll get some rest, you'll feel better in the morning."
"But I don't want too - I'm not tired. I'm not going to do it."

Some nights rationality wins out...some nights defiance takes hold and we cross our fingers and hope to wake up the next morning....

The key is getting "all" of Grace into bed before the clock strikes and rational Grace runs out of the ball, leaving behind reason in the form of a glass slipper...and returning to the abandonment cloth of rags from the past.....

How do we do that?