Why won’t I go to bed?

Tonight is another night when it is well past midnight and I am up yet again. Why do I do this to myself? Why am I so reluctant to go to bed at night? At the moment I am so tired that I can hardly think straight, but I still can’t get myself to turn off the computer and lights, get ready for bed, and get into bed. So you all get to be subjected to my late night ramblings, I fear.

Really, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I take a medication that makes it relatively easy for me to fall asleep most of the time, so it isn’t like I toss and turn for a long time once I go to bed.

I don’t think that I have nightmares, but then I rarely remember my dreams, so maybe I am having bad dreams and I just don’t remember them?

My bed is comfortable and there is nothing off putting about my room.

Or is there? Because I am now aware of being a bit anxious about going to bed. I think that there are two things here… 1) When I am in the process of waking up from or falling asleep into a nap, I am vulnerable to memories coming up. I think that my bed is now slightly associated with frightening memories. 2) My husband shares my bed with me. I didn’t realize that I was avoiding bed partially because of him. It isn’t like he does anything threatening. In fact, he understands that while I may want to cuddle up against him for some physical contact right after getting into bed, I can’t tolerate being touched at all while I am actually falling asleep. He has learned to not take it as a rejection when I turn my back on him and move over to my side of my bed; it’s just that I have to mentally create my own safe space in our bed, or else I will either never get to sleep or I will end up kicking and striking out defensively as I fall asleep.

I’m not going to kick him out of our bed. And most of me enjoys sleeping close to him; in fact much of the time I sleep better when he is at home in our bed as opposed to when he is out of the house for some reason when it is time to sleep. I will admit the obvious, these parts of me are nervous because sometimes I make love with my husband, and at times that still can be triggering for layers of me. So I need to find a way to reassure the nervous parts of me that it is completely safe to me to sleep in the same bed as hubby. I won’t ever wake up with him touching me at all, never mind touching me sexually. In fact he would help to keep me safe from a threat, so I am safer with him in my bed than I would be alone. Ah, those 2 things may be the keys… While I have been trying to separate past from present for these parts and convince them that my hubby is safe, however what I forgot was to not just tell myself, “he won’t hurt me,” but to think through and help those parts understand how my husband does act. He understands that being touched while I am sleeping could be highly triggering for me and he is a caring and considerate person who will act appropriately on such information. I can’t even remember the last time he touched me in my sleep- it likely was more than 20 years ago- and he isn’t likely to change how he acts after this long, when he has a better understanding of why it is so important. Also, those young parts tend to think of being alone as being safer, if I can’t be with my mother. Well, things are very different now- my mother no longer represents safety in the now, and I am safer in my bed when my husband is also in it. He is a help to me, not a threat!

There is no magic cure here, but this gives me a couple of things to work with myself on, that I hadn’t considered before.

Who else here has trouble with going to bed? What have you done to help yourself solve the problem?

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