Well my therapist thinks I am one of the strongest people she has ever seen, but also that having to fight for every single thing all  the time for the last little while is taking a physical as well as mental toll on me.  She wonders if there is anyway I could just avoid the people who hurt the most- unfortunately once I explained she understood why that was just not really possible.

She commended me for not giving up, and expressed real concern over the damage other people can do to me.

She also told me that Jason is a really good guy who loves me a lot- as if I had any doubt about that part of the equation.  She thinks we are a really strong couple and will land on our feet.  That we are mostly there and the next step is to build a wall around ourselves so certain people can't hurt us anymore.  I hate to admit it, but I think in this case she might be right.  It is something I have been thinking about for years but I never really thought my therapist would tell me that sometimes it is a good idea to find ways to shut out the world when the world is too hurtful.  I just assumed that I always needed to deal with pain the way everyone else in my family does- head on and move past it and don't look back.

It never rally occurred to me that maybe for me there are other options.  Maybe for a lot of us there are other options- we just never really thought to go looking for them because we have been conditioned not to.

Starting next week she is going to work on helping me build a wall to keep out the hurt that comes from contact with certain people.