I've been going to counselling for a while to help me deal with the grief over Mum's death. It seems to be helping although there are still good days and some very bad days. It will be a year next month since she died and I know May is going to be a very rough month for me. My counsellor is great, though, and she's definitely giving me some tools to get through it more easily.
One thing I didn't expect from the counselling sessions was to discover childhood issues that affect me to this day. I was bullied by my friends pretty badly in primary school and it never occurred to me that I'd have leftovers from that 25 years later. I mean, we're all screwed up by our childhoods, right? But in examining things is great detail, I've learned that a big part of why I'm very cautious at making friends, and rarely put myself into vulnerable positions with people until I'm really comfortable is because of the way those "friends" treated me. Go figure!
Anyway, the gist of the whole thing is that I did a bunch of intense processing and have managed to let go of a pile of those issues and will hopefully be able to move forward with fewer hangups. I feel lighter and freer and it's pretty cool.
