Retracing My Steps

One of the side effects of my February hypnotist disaster has been the tainting of my hypnosis fetish.  I had only been exploring hypnosis for a little under 3 months when I started working with him, and a ton of what I learned that I liked and what worked well for me I learned with him.  Not everything, thanks goodness, but enough that for the last month it has been really hard to be in trance without his specter sort of lurking in the back of my mind.  Mind you, this is after the other person with whom I work helped root all the left-over suggestions etc that had been left behind out of my head.  I decided that I needed to re-write the program, as it were, so that is my new adventure.  Same as the old adventure, just from a different direction and, unfortunately, without as much trust in myself or for new people as I had.  I miss the kind of innocent enjoyment I was able to bring to things before, and I may never forgive him for the loss of that, but I know that I will be better off this way.

So, I went back to the beginning.  Which for me, was YouTube (you can all stop cringing, there are worthwhile videos to be found there.)  I'm re-learning how to go into trance trusting myself, and I am trying to do the same with my other friend/hypnotist, who has stuck by me through all of this and has been a rock and a pillow all at the same time.

The hardest part has been having the sheer joy I found in the erotic aspects of hypnosis be diminished.  When I lost my trust in people that was the first thing that was affected, and has proven to be extremely difficult to work through.  I was never interested in being the person who tranced alone from a file to get my rocks off, I relished the human connection that I had found and even more the friend that I thought I had found through it, and losing that broke my heart.  It also slammed home just how lonely I had been before I started my hypnosis adventure, and made me enormously grateful for the friends I have made who didn't disappear on me, even though I have been weepy and whiny, selfish and scared, and more than a little bit over-sensitive.  (Or, as one person put it, complicated.)  I am a very, very complicated person.  Yes.

The other major thing that has been bothering me is that (because I am insecure) in my imagination my ex-hypnotist tells other people to stay away from me, that I am bad news, that I am crazy, that I am the kind of person you don't want to get mixed up with (which is how he made me feel about myself when he left.)  There are a couple of people who, before I met him, I had been interested in getting to know, in being friends with, and because I know he is friends with them/associates with them I feel like I can never pursue that avenue.  I feel like I have my own version of the scarlet letter floating ahead of me everywhere I go, and that this herald of my presence will color every interaction I try to have in the future.

But I do understand that I feel this way because I lack self-confidence.  I do understand that I am insecure and that most of the time no one will care what has happened to me in the past or about with whom it happened.  It's the one person who will care that I think about.

My friend last night told me something amazingly and agonizingly important:  feeling this way, feeling in general, IS COMPLETELY NORMAL AND ACCEPTABLE.  (I had to capitalize that for myself, to help it sink in a little more.)  Feeling how I have felt over the last month, and the way I felt through the 5 weeks before that--all completely normal and acceptable.  And it's not my fault if other people can't deal with it.  The only things within my control are how I feel and how I choose to react to those feelings, and I have handled that in the most honest and ethical way that I know.

And for now, that is enough.