Shedding 100mg of emotion

I have an overwhelming feeling right at this moment and all I want to do right now is pull the blankets over my head and hide and do nothing.  I don't want to open my journal to write about my therapy session today.  I don't want to talk to anyone.  I don't want to do anything but curl up in a ball and let sadness become me.

I was reading a plaque on the wall at the center about healing from trauma before my appointment and it made me focus solely on that word:  trauma.  Maybe it was a KEYWORD that I needed to see today to encourage me to release some of the depression surrounding my experiences with trauma.  I've covered it before in other sessions, but maybe it was the 100mg less of a pill that really allowed me to release tears and let my therapist see my physical agitation of associated feelings deeply affecting my mind, body and soul.  She asked me one question that I don't think I've ever been asked so directly before and man, the dam burst and years of agitation shivered out of me and tears rolled and rolled and rolled off my face and followed me on the train and bus rides home.  There's nothing worse than crying on public transportation.

Birth trauma is something I have not really discussed with too many people.  I had never heard much about it, and even after giving birth over six years ago, I still haven't really encountered the appropriate measures to talk about perinatal loss and release the years of layered emotions that I carry with me every day.

The thing about trauma is that it does not go away.  I am going to forever remember the doctors, the ambulance, the contractions, the delivery, the legal questions, the religious questions, the blood, the way my body responded to an abrupt change and how my body changed from those few days in the hospital forever.  Leaving the hospital with no child in my arms.  It happened over six years ago and yet at times the grief feels like it just all happened again a few days ago.  I carry this with me.  Every day.  

I think about the child.  I've had dreams where I'm a mother and the happiness I feel in those dreams resonates when I awake.  I will never forget the sound of the baby's heartbeat.  And I will never forget the nurse showing me the baby's heart in the ultrasound monitor and how it was no longer beating.

Suppressing emotions of sadness and grief and masking the body's natural emotional response with loads of psychiatric pills doesn't work for me.  Maybe it works for people who just like to mask their pain, kind of like an acceptable form of "self-medicating," but I need to allow my body to release this stuff.  I need something different.  

I need optimism, because this is very heavy stuff.  I'm getting there, but days like today are grueling and exhaust me.