For forty-eight hours after my last therapy session, I felt utterly broken. I cried then slept. I slept then cried. Amongst the battle of words going on inside my head, a few sentences crystallised to describe how I was feeling and what I was realising .

It was not an entirely new thought – but it had never been so precisely articulated. The realisation was devastating and the implication radical. At a (mostly) unconscious level, these sentences have defined – continue to define – how I think, act, react, and feel.  Trying to move away from that will involve nothing less than a complete realignment of my very way of being.

How many can relate to precisely these emotions? How can thoughts that are so ‘unrealistic’ (let’s not use the word ‘wrong’, for fear of self-invalidation, even though that is how it feels) seem so utterly persuasive and legitimate?

And how – how – can we wrest ourselves from this way of thinking, without it simply feeling like compromising on life, sacrificing ourselves, and burying our desires?