So it seems that watching movies may not be the best activity to promote internal peace for me. Earlier this week, I went to the movie theatre, and ended up having a pretty major mental break. Of course, it wasn't just the movie. Background first - a couple of my friends are about to get divorced. It's running fairly amicably, so far. They decided to go to the movie together, for some reason. Her... boyfriend, for lack of a better term, was going too. So when the husband called and invited me, I got the impression he might need someone there as a buffer, so I had to go. Well, I dragged along my boyfriend, and several other people showed up as well.
So there were several factors going into this thing - the tension between the divorcing couple, the tension between her boyfriend and her husband, and several people there that I had never met. Also, I had had a horrible day at work, so I was already feeling a bit tense and unhappy for myself. And I had had to reschedule plans already made for the evening in order to attend, which will often make me grumpy.
Added to that, my boyfriend expressed some concerns about me watching this particular movie. We were going to see Sucker Punch. If you haven't seen it/heard about it, it's got a lot of surreal qualities and abuse themes and it's dark and weird. And partly takes place in a mental institution. Remember my problems watching Dragonfly because it was in a hospital with the surreal feeling? Yeah, much much worse. So he was right; this was not a movie I should have seen.
Getting through the movie was a little twitchy, but not horrible. But when it was over, I just had a mental break. The last things I remember clearly were walking down the hallway at the theatre clutching my coke in front of me like a life preserver, and the clock in my truck reading 9:41, and a feeling like I needed to cry. The next thing I remember really clearly is going to work the next morning.
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This is Counselor, now, and I'll have to write the remainder of this post for M, as she wasn't participating in the rest of the evening. The movie made us - as a sytem - profoundly uneasy. It was too violent for Kiara, enough sex to attract Sam, enough violence to attract Rubi, girls in sexy outfits that tickled Jarett's attention, and a clinical setting that both interested me and made Silent One twitch. The movie characters seemed to dissociate between one reality and the next rather freely, which triggered our system quite severely.
When we left the theater, M had already made plans to go to a friend's house afterward. So her boyfriend left, and everyone else left, leaving her/us alone in the parking lot. We sat in our vehicle for a while trying to either cry and get it out of our system or recover, but that wasn't happening. So we went driving for a while; taking the longest possible way our friend's house. We went approximately an hour out of our way, and were still quite shaky when we arrived. Sleep was out of the question at that point, so pizza was ordered and a kids' movie was put on. Kiara finally emerged for most of the movie, and through her we were able to eventually sleep.
I am considering putting a hold on all movie-watching for a while, as this makes two movies that have triggered negative episodes lately. However, all that does is push off dealing with the issues. So the alternative is to wach some potentially triggering movies, deliberately setting off any negative associations, with some controls in place. Having a kids' movie handy to watch afterward seems to be a valid mechanism for overwriting the negative experience. I'd like to have at least two people with us that can deal with any alters that emerge, and watch the suspect movies early in the day when there is plenty of time to recover before bedtime.
It has been several days now since the movie, and we're still a bit weepy and on edge. We've not slept well all week, but it's difficult to determine which is cause and which effect. So we'll push through. We'll spend as much time as possible with positive people around us, and ask for some compassionate moments with those people. And we'll stay busy as much as we can. If things go really well, perhaps we can get a good night's sleep - or two nights, even. Then we'll see if our moods even out.
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