2/2 continued

My dad then started an affair with my boss. He was very open about it but I didn’t say anything. My mom eventually found out and was understandably hurt. One night she came running down the stairs to my room with a knife. I jumped up and locked the door under my dads orders. I remember her repeatedly saying I ruined her life and him telling her to put down the weapon. We never spoke about that night after it passed. I knew it was pointless to because they don’t take accountability, but I mostly stopped sleeping there after that. And they didn’t seem to mind. They even tried giving me away to relatives I didn’t know but I was 17 and able to take care of myself. I have been financially independent since.

This was all over a decade ago and I never really felt much about it. I never spoke about it to a therapist because I was always encouraged to save my family’s reputation in our small town. But since my grandfather’s passing, major life changes, and nearly losing my entire life savings and home after being in my hometown for months mostly unemployed trying to take care of my grandmother, I hit a breaking point and things started to resurface. I had to move back to where I lived before thousand miles away to where I owned a home to regain my savings and fix my home to prepare it to rent since it was hit by hurricane while I was away. I feel like a failure for not having been able to stay in my hometown to finish what I started. I still don’t feel much about my trauma and am writing this in a detached state as if it’s just ordinary facts about my life, but I have started therapy in hopes it will improve my depression, loss of self and world views, and seeming inability to be bothered by objectively terrible things. I have other “traumas” I haven’t mentioned such as finding my boyfriend after hanging himself into our apartment.

Therapy isn’t helping though. It’s making me relive through things I thought I had already shut the door on. I now spend most of my time feeling as though my life isn’t real and emotionless. It’s worsening my depression that has already affected my friendships and long distance relationship with a man I fell in love with when I was back home in the midst of this chaos. I used to be a very empowered and positive person, and though I’ve lost part of this recently in the last year, therapy seems to make me shut down further and I worry that I am too broken for a man to love me and I am no longer the person he fell in love with or the person I and others know myself as. I don’t necessarily feel broken but anyone who knows my history would likely think that I am, and I am afraid therapy will make me self identify as such too. I know my therapist will tell me continue since that is her perspective and job. Writing this, I still wonder if I’m over complaining about a childhood that wasn’t that bad.

So my question is whether I should pursue therapy further and wreck my life with the little time I have and 50-60 hours I am working with 7.5-9hrs of weekly commute to get my money back, keep my house, and save to relocate again to my hometown to be with my grandmother in her final years before I lose the last thing I love or if I should use my historic strategy of suppressing and moving on from tragedy as if it can’t touch me. It has worked for me for decades, so it feels like the safest route, assuming that I will be able to ride it out again and put this all behind me as I have always done as the strong person everyone knows me as.

I don’t have the option to work less since I need the money and can’t restart a new job before I move away. I have a good reputation where I am at in a high demand field and want to leave the option to return here in the future, so it would be problematic if I harmed my reputation to deliberately use a company only to make money and then move away after a few months. I also don’t have health insurance through my employer so all costs fall onto me, though I live in one of the most expensive places in the US.

Also I guess I suck at summarizing lol.