Month: August 2018

One Year In Blogland.

rubberbandsandchewinggum20 Comments

I’m a bit behind time with this post because, actually, the one year blogiversary or whatever you might call it was 21st August and ummm I think it might, actually, be September tomorrow. Ha! Thank goodness I am a little better at acknowledging real life anniversaries and birthdays.

So, Rubber Bands and Chewing Gum just turned one. She’s growing up. Sort of. But she’s still very obviously in the diaper wearing, food flinging, and tantrum throwing stage of development. There’s still lots of emotional turbulence to chronicle.

When I started writing, this time last year, I wanted an outlet to process (dump!) some of the therapy stuff that was coming up for me that I didn’t feel able to talk about with people in my day-to-day life. I also wanted to keep a record of where I was at, a kind of ‘therapy’ journal I suppose. And I wanted, hopefully, to create a space that people could come to read an experience of what is can sometimes be like in therapy and perhaps make people feel a little less alone in some what they might be experiencing in their own therapeutic relationships.

I’d recently stumbled across a blog that had pretty much changed my life. You know what it’s like, summer therapy break is in full swing, the wheels are falling off, you turn to Google to search ‘I miss my therapist’ or ‘I love my therapist’ or ‘I keep dreaming of my therapist’ or ‘my therapist doesn’t care about me’ and a string of mental health forum threads come up as well as a series of blog suggestions. You click into a blog, start reading, and there you are immersed in someone else’s experience that resonates with your own. You suddenly feel like maybe there are other people just like you out there, struggling with similar issues. For me, that was a massive leap forward.

Before long I found this, what is it?- merry (ha!) band of mental health bloggers and started to follow some people and saw that, indeed, there’s a whole load of us working through very similar issues #motherwound…of course everyone is different but when you boil it down there’s a group of people that really ‘get it’, they know what it’s like to sometimes feel worthless and unlovable. They know what it is to feel up and down and slightly ‘mental’ (!).  They know shame. They battle valiantly with the inner critic, with self-harm, suicidal thoughts, and eating disorders – but they also have good days, good therapy sessions, experience balance and importantly they GROW – and that is so valuable to see.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that after about a month of reading and commenting on other people’s posts I finally got my head round WordPress templates and had a go at writing myself and this is what materialised – 74 posts! When I started I had no idea I’d be sitting here now with so many people choosing to read what I churn out!

I don’t want to be all gushing and OTT here but so much good has come from this blog.

There are times (pretty much all the time!!) when I have been in a pit of attachment pain hell, depression, or caught up in the throes of the eating disorder and I can’t tell you how much a validating and understanding comment can make a difference. So thank you for those.

I didn’t expect this to happen but I have made some wonderful friends here and some that have translated beyond blogland and into Brexit Britain! Ugh!

What else?

Well, I love it when people reach out and get in touch to tell me that what I have written has made them feel less alone. I’m not convinced that this place/experience (get ready for a mixed metaphor) is a boat anyone wants to be in, but if we are in it together then maybe we’ll steer our way to shore eventually bailing the water out with our hands and that has to be better than feeling like a solo sailor on a sinking boat in the middle of the ocean.

Ok, that was way worse on the screen than in my head!

The last few months has seen me having to adjust my expectations for this blog again and again. When I first started writing I had a lot more time on my hands than I do now. At times I was posting three times a week, then it dropped to twice a week, and more recently I’ve just about been getting a post written once a week….but not this last week, it’s gone a bit over. I think once the kids are back to school I’ll be able to find more time to write. I hope so, because I still really enjoy writing.

Next week sees a significant change in my therapy: (like there’s actually going to be some bloody therapy after 5 weeks!) I am going from one session a week to two. I am cautiously optimistic for what that will mean going forward. Clearly my bank balance is going to suffer but I really hope that some more concrete sense of containment starts to bed in and I can get past this horrible feeling of being abandoned the moment I leave my therapist.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. I know there’s still a lot of therapy to be done so here’s to another year in blogland too!

Thanks for coming along for the ride….and don’t worry normal service will resume next post!

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File Under ‘Unread’

rubberbandsandchewinggum28 Comments

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So after two days of barely holding it together with rubber bands and chewing gum (I had no idea this blog name would end up being so apt!) today, at 11am, I found myself lying face down in my bed holding a pillow over my head convulsively crying about… yeah…you guessed it…feeling like my therapist doesn’t care about me after a pretty rubbish Skype session on Monday and a complete failure to acknowledge a message I have sent her since.

Believe me, there is a part of me that is seriously rolling my eyes and sighing in exasperation right now as if to say ‘for goodness sake, not this AGAIN’ as I type this.  Like really, this cannot be happening again can it? But it really is. And you’ve probably noticed by now – I tell it how it is…even if ‘how it is’ is fucking ridiculous and embarrassing. I tell it how it is in the here and now, as I experience it, even if in two weeks (or possibly even two days) I feel differently and can see things through an alternative, more rational lens.

I’m very aware that right now my left brain is offline and my right brain (where all the emotions are) is lit up like Piccadilly Circus. It’s probably not a great time to write a blog post but it’s either put it on the page here or start firing off upset/angry/needy messages to my therapist and that’s not a very good idea is it?

And so here I am again, trying to find a way through the difficult feelings in order that I don’t completely fall apart over the next two weeks. Does anyone have any glue to hold all my pieces together?… I am worried that the bands and gum aren’t up to the job this time around and am in danger of smashing into a million pieces.

I wrote recently about shame having just then started reading Patricia A. DeYoung’s book ‘Understanding And Treating Chronic Shame’. I’m no stranger to shame and having now read the whole thing, I have to say, the book is fantastic. I highly recommend it.  There’s heaps of really useful and interesting stuff in it and I plan to take it to my therapist and go ‘Here! Look at this. This is what’s happening!!’  (that is, of course, if one of the other parts doesn’t go to town with the text messages!)

Young suggests that shame is essentially caused by being ‘a self disintegrating in relation to a dysregulating other’. I mentioned in that post that I was concerned that I had somehow got caught up in a dynamic where my therapist was taking on the role of ‘dysregulating other’.

And. Yep. Skype session proved that point on Monday! More on that in a bit.

Basically, when a child is in distress it looks for connection and containment from the other to help regulate the distress. If all goes well the interaction soothes the child and the distress ebbs away. However, if the interaction between the child and other in some way misses the mark, is not attuned, a child is left feeling uncontained and out of control. It tries to place meaning on what is going on.  Basically, the child ends up blaming itself for the failure of the other to contain and connect.

It makes sense that when we need something really badly from an important person and they fail to meet that need often enough that we start to feel like there’s something wrong with us. Instead of blaming them we find fault in ourselves. It must be something we are doing wrong. Our need is too much. Feelings are bad. And so the shame cycle begins.  We see need as ‘bad’ and try and hide it.

So, we amble through life pretty successfully – well, you know, smoke and mirrors and all that! To most people I seem like a highly self-sufficient, high achiever, who ‘doesn’t need anyone or anything’  and if you’d asked me before therapy ‘I can do everything on my own and by myself. In fact other people are a pain and I prefer to be alone’. But now I see that actually I am not made of Teflon so far as emotions go and scarily: I have needs.

Who knew?!

Unfortunately, I seem hard-wired to feel bad about having feelings or needs and so in therapy it’s become a complete disaster zone because I have some very strong feelings towards my therapist and needs that I wish she could (although frustratingly know she can’t/won’t) meet.

I’ve noticed for a while now that I can go from ‘fairly normal’ to ‘away with the dissociative fairies’ in a matter of seconds in my therapy sessions. My therapist keeps asking for us to think about the process and notice what happens to make me dissociate and hide. For a long time I haven’t been really conscious of it, all I know is someone young comes online and then I am gone.

It’s like a switch gets flipped.

Because it’s been happening more and more lately I have been consciously trying to pay attention to the feelings that crop up and then what happens when I retreat inside myself. It probably won’t come as any surprise to you when I say it has its roots in shame. It happens so quickly and I am trying to work out how to stop it happening or how to get back from that dissociated, lonely space when it does.

Monday’s session was a complete shit pile but it kind of gave me some answers.

I am not stupid, I know that sessions after breaks are often hard. It takes time to reconnect (I’ve been here before. I know what I’m like!). We’d not seen each other for three weeks. It wasn’t face to face it was Skype. And following the virtual stepping stone in the river crossing (therapy break) there is now another two weeks until a face to face. It was always going to be a challenge to connect with my therapist. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to but I have so many defences… ugh.

I know that I was certainly trying to keep buoyant and surface level because I knew I would be on my own again for two more weeks the moment the call was over and I couldn’t face the possibility of falling headfirst in the pit of attachment pain for the next few weeks if I let her see the vulnerable stuff and it not go well. Ironically, yet again I failed to notice that if I don’t let her in I feel shit too!!!

Part of me didn’t want her to know how much I have missed her and wanted to shut her out a bit. But of course it didn’t last because as the session went on, surface level chatting, I could feel things stirring. I could feel that time was ticking away and I desperately wanted to connect, or at least part of me did.

I asked my therapist what the time was and it was 11am. I thought ‘oh that’s ok time to talk‘  and then the moment the thought went through my mind I realised I didn’t know how to get what I needed from her. It didn’t feel like she was receptive or attuned to me. I desperately wanted her to come closer to me, to hold my hand, hug me, and tell me that it’s all ok…but that will never happen.

The need feels huge.

The young parts screamed inside, burst into tears, realising that she was there but couldn’t see them and that we were going to be left until September…

…and then I was gone…

The shame of having those needy feelings and the pain that shame generates is utterly unbearable and that’s when I dissociate. I can’t cope with the overwhelming sense of longing and need for connection and feeling like I can’t get it, that I am not worthy of it, that she doesn’t want to connect. I feel like there is something wrong with me.

Like I say this whole process happens in a matter of seconds.

The rest of the session was hard. I think I just sat there making the odd ‘uh huh’ ‘yeah’ ‘no’ as she continued to talk to me about what I had initially started talking about (filler!). I felt like we were on completely different pages and was kind of glad when I hung up the call – not because I wanted to be in the throes of a further two week break- because it was so fucking excruciating feeling the minutes tick away and feeling like I didn’t know the person sitting opposite me. She probably felt the same way.

I felt awful the moment the screen went black and took myself straight into the kitchen to cut myself. That’s how bad it felt in that moment. Sheer desperation. I didn’t self-harm, though. I took a minute and thought about why I wanted to hurt myself. It was the need, the shame, the feeling unseen…and also very clearly having a sense of ‘what’s going on’ when it goes to shit in a session.

So instead of cutting I made this:

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and then sent it to my therapist as a text along with a note to ‘File under ‘unread’.  The teen part was feeling sarcastic. Like, ‘fuck it, I’m sending you stuff to try and help me and you won’t read it just like everything else, so shove it why don’t you?!’

Clearly, she hasn’t replied…and I feel rubbish about it. Not just because she hasn’t replied but because I feel so utterly overwhelmed by where I am in therapy and the therapeutic relationship and the break.

It just all feels kind of futile right now.

I don’t feel like I am moving forward. I just feel like I am stuck in trauma.

The teen parts are definitely wounded and feel like texting my therapist to tell her ‘we’re done, because what’s the fucking point in all this if almost every time we interact I am left feeling inadequate and like what I want/need from you is too much. I feel physically sick when I think about how much I care for you and contrast that with how easy it is for you to leave me/ignore me when I am struggling’.

[Ok. So that’s the work isn’t? it]

I have no idea how the next couple of weeks is going to go. I know I will cycle through heaps of emotional states. I expect I will go to my session on the 3rd because the young parts are so desperate and attached that they’d have me swim through shark-infested waters to see her. But, ugh, I don’t know. I don’t know how much longer I can keep putting myself through this.

x

Limbo

rubberbandsandchewinggum14 Comments

I’m feeling a bit bleurgh at the moment (a technical term I’ll have you know!). It’s not a full-on depressive episode yet (I don’t think) but it’s feeling like a huge struggle just to remain in a relative coping place…but then when is mental health ever a walk in the park, really? It pretty much always feels like I am struggling in one way or other.

For now, at least, I feel like I have done with sliding down the hill towards rock bottom, which was what happened at the start of the therapy break, and have finally got a fingertip hold on something semi-solid that has allowed me to stop and take stock. I daren’t move though, rock bottom is still a long way off, thank god, but I feel like adjusting my position may result in me losing my precarious grip and careering at speed downwards again. I can’t risk that so I am staying here stuck in a kind of uncomfortable limbo.

Put it this way, I am not where I would like to be at this point in the holidays!

I don’t feel especially solid.

I’m certainly not grounded.

I can feel anxiety creeping around the edges.

I’ve woken up feeling queasy for the last four days.

The attachment pain is really there just before bed and any time I let my mind drift towards therapy.

It’s all a bit shit really.

Moan. Moan. Moan!

I daren’t look too far ahead because 3rd September feels like a very long time in the future and it makes me even more aware that I’m not even half way through the break yet – it’s still three weeks until I see my therapist in person – nooooooooooo! Having said that, I am meant to have a Skype on the 20th so I shouldn’t complain. I am just massively aware that it could go belly up next week.

I am experiencing the usual conflicting feelings:

I love you/I hate you

Please come back/Fuck off I never want to see you again

and what I really don’t want to happen is to have a Skype session that semi opens up stuff, doesn’t really do the job, isn’t especially connecting, and then be left for a further two weeks for phase two of the therapy break.

I think I just about have a handle on things right now but I’m not stupid, I’ve been here enough times to know that there is a real possibility of me trying to sabotage my therapy before September is here. The teen part of me that wants to give up is never far from the surface and on breaks, especially long ones, she gets quite vocal. She’s still angry about the last session before the break. Seriously, ‘imagine something you like doing’….FFS!

Feeling stuck in this limbo state/place is pants. My last session seems a long time ago (eve though it was actually only two weeks ago) and all the good things I feel about my therapy/therapist seem to have evaporated now…. and yet the crap parts haven’t, they remain there! It’s not ideal. I’m beginning to put my therapist in the bracket of people that reject and abandon me rather than who do their best to help me. (I do know how crazy it is – but it is how it is!).

You can probably tell from this post that my mind is all over the shop. In addition to this, I seem to have no energy at all. My motivation has gone on holiday (along with my therapist – grr!), and all I really want to do is lie in bed and sleep for hours on end or, failing that, sprawl out on the sofa and eat biscuits and chocolate. Essentially once the kids get to bed at 6pm that is exactly what I have been doing- filling my face with sugary things in some mindless stupor state in front of the TV and then crawling into bed and sleeping for as long as I can reasonably get away with (which, to be fair, with two young kids never extends much beyond 6:45am).

Put it this way, I’m not scoring big on the mindfulness and self-care scales right now! Although I am not over-exercising or under-eating (clearly!) so I suppose generally vegetating and resting shouldn’t be seen as a criminal activity. The critical voice in my head is starting to give me a hard time, though:

Lazy.

Fat.

Sloth-like creature.

I am just not particularly good at stopping and doing nothing. I always feel like I ought to be doing something, keeping busy, achieving things. I’m not working again for a couple more weeks as it’s the school holidays. I need to keep reminding myself that it’s A HOLIDAY – not just other people’s (my T, the kids I teach, my own children) mine too and that means a break from the usual drudgery of school runs, work, having to be in a specific place at a particular time etc.

As much as I moan about it when I am in it, I think routine does me good to an extent. I’m not great at this long drawn out time off. I do wonder, though, how much of this is because in the back of my mind (ok quite close to the front!) is the fact that I am on a therapy break and frankly I am not someone who does especially well without regular therapy. Ha! I mean I am not exactly willing the clock forward to September to re-enter the world of ‘Please put your shoes on! I’ve asked you four times already. We are going to be late.’

Having said that, I think with young kids, time off is rarely ‘time off’. Since my son’s birthday last Monday we’ve been busyish: swimming lessons, cinema, ice cream parlour, farm park, a couple of playdates, baking, making pizzas from scratch, a visit to a soft play centre as well as a fair bit of playing in the garden, oh, and we/the dog delivered a litter of puppies yesterday. It’s not exactly been a dull existence!

I don’t know what’s wrong with me really. I just feel a bit stuck. Whilst, clearly, elements of my life are carrying on as normal and I would say I’m doing a good enough job at parenting at the minute- the kids are happy- underneath the exterior of ‘with it and together mum’ the other stuff is bubbling away. I guess that’s the problem. Usually I have somewhere to let ‘the other stuff’ out and right now I don’t. I’m very much aware of operating of multiple levels. I find it tiring at the best of times and perhaps without my release valve I’m finding it all a bit more exhausting?

Who knows?

Maybe I am just getting depressed. Or maybe I am about to get sick. Or perhaps it’s just that my period is on its way… whatever it is I want to feel a bit more energised and less like I am going through the motions. I want to feel present in my life rather than as though I am spectating from the sidelines. The only saving grace is that no one would know I feel this way. It is not evident that I am struggling. I would hate for my kids to feel like ‘mummy is checked out’….and I guess they don’t know because it’s only parts of me that are. I guess maybe it’s part of the beauty of being fragmented – the bits that can’t cope aren’t really seen and the ‘carrying on with everyday life self’ is a damn good autopilot.

Errr what else? I’m scraping the barrel a bit with this post – no therapy to talk about!! haha.

I’ve been without internet for the last few days due to a cock up with changing provider. Seamless transition it was not! And so the one positive was that I haven’t been in this ‘bleurgh’ state and additionally whiling away the hours mindlessly on my phone flicking between WhatsApp, Facebook, WordPress, Instagram. Even NetFlix hasn’t been a possibility!

A social media blackout is not necessarily a bad thing every now and again. I do it at Christmas and always feel quite good having gone screen-free for a bit. You might be thinking, why not use your phone for the internet…well, I live in a signal/data blackspot and so have to go in the garden and stand in a specific place to get anything at all and it’s so intermittent that it’s not even worth it. It’s so circa 1995!

Everything went live again yesterday evening and actually it felt like a bit of an attack to the system. I have been off radar with a few friends this last week due to feeling so crappy and so I’ve been trying to be a bit present again. I just find it really hard.

I really have nothing at all to say today!… but having already gone more than a week between posts I wanted to write something. This, post, shall hereby be filed under ‘bleurgh’ and sink to the depths of unread trash!

Actually. I posted this on my Twitter feed the other day…and it says it all x

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Shame

rubberbandsandchewinggum25 Comments

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So it’s the summer therapy break and today signals my first ‘missed’ session of the holiday (god help me I can’t do this!!!). I suppose it goes without saying that I am not finding things especially easy, but this is particularly the case after a session that pretty much tanked last Monday and left me doubting what on earth therapy was all about, and if my therapist has actually listened to anything I have been saying for the last three years.

Why does this kind of thing happen at the worst possible times? Like really, when I absolutely need a connecting, positive session why does it fall on its arse? I, of course, had my part in it. I had emailed my therapist the link to my Mother Wound post in April and we haven’t got round to talking about it yet, but the last session where I told my therapist ‘I don’t want you to go away’ she mentioned that we hadn’t discussed it and that maybe it’s time? (She hasn’t read it yet) And so last week I re-sent her the link and said that although the idea of talking through the content of it made me feel a bit sick I think it’d be a worthwhile use of time.

When I arrived last Monday things felt a bit awkward. The elephants were in the room  jostling for position and making it very difficult to see my therapist through the mass of heavy creatures. The giant elephant called ‘Break’ who suffers from separation anxiety and is fairly twitchy was pretty much sitting on me and crushing me on the sofa which wasn’t ideal.

Almost immediately as I sat down, my therapist drew attention to the email link I had sent her (I hate it when she does that without discussing anything else first because I feel like I’m going to get told off or something!) and said given that I had said in my message that her bringing up the blog post last week had made me feel sick, that perhaps today wasn’t the best time to dive into it given we only had the session and then the break and I would be left holding things for longer. She, also, then said that it might be that talking it through might free some space up and make things a bit better but that given I said I’d written it back in November and it was still relevant that it would probably wait a bit longer.

What I heard was ‘let’s not open up any big stuff’ and in that moment all the vulnerable parts that had wanted/needed to talk and connect went into hiding. Adult Me stepped up and I switched into that place that is incredibly annoying: the autopilot that talks freely about stuff that appears relevant but actually is just filler. I spoke about a row I had had with my wife the previous day. I rarely argue with my wife and hardly bring my current life/relationships into the therapy as actually my here and now is pretty ok so far as home goes.

Anyway, I rattled on and on about that and then with about fifteen minutes to go I dissociated. I felt like I had fallen down a rabbit hole. It was horrendous. I could feel the anxiety of knowing that time was running out again and that I was staring down a five week break with absolutely no chance of feeling connected or safe in the therapeutic relationship.

Seriously, my brain is utter crap isn’t it?!

My therapist noticed something had changed and tried to get to me to engage but it didn’t really work. I was already so far gone that I think anything short of coming and sitting beside me and giving me a hug (as if that’d ever happen! Sigh!) would have missed the mark.

With five minutes to go my therapist suddenly remembered what she’d said last week, only not quite…

Last week when I had told her that I didn’t want her to go away and we had discussed how the break was making me feel and my inability to hold her in mind when there was a holiday she suggested we could do something to try and enhance the positive feelings and connection between us and perhaps that might help with the break. I had felt pretty good during the week knowing that although the break was coming that maybe, just maybe, this time things might be a bit better if whatever she had planned worked out.

So when she said ‘last week I said something about enhancing positive feelings’ everyone’s ear pricked up. Yes it was the eleventh hour but maybe something could be salvaged from this shit show and at least she had remembered in the end…

Imagine my dismay, then, when she didn’t mention our relationship or anything to do with connecting with one another and instead suggested that I try and think of something that I like doing that makes me happy, like a sport, or watching a comedy show, or perhaps recalling the birth of one of my babies and then tapping my knees bilaterally – a kind of EMDR technique, I think.

She lost me right there.

That was me done.

‘Here we go again’, I thought.

The thing she really doesn’t seem to get is that on a break Adult Me is not just a bit depressed and in need of a pick me up; when things are bad I am not in adult at all. I am cycling through very very young parts and all of them are screaming in distress. The anxiety I feel is huge and my body is overcome by fear that she is gone and not coming back. If I were able to ‘imagine’ the birth of my child at that point maybe I’d be onto a winner but, frankly, those young parts have no idea that I am a parent or an adult at all! There’s a tiny baby and the others are two, four, eight, and eleven years old…even the teen parts haven’t got a clue about what lies ahead of their age. So asking me to imagine any of those things when I am in those young states is utterly ridiculous to me. Not just ridiculous but actually IMPOSSIBLE!

I wasn’t able to say any of that in the moment because we literally had no time to talk it through. She had clearly forgotten about what we’d said last week and had quickly tried to rescue the session but in doing so left me feeling unseen and as though we were on completely different pages. I wish she hadn’t bothered because what she said really unsettled me. I know that these sessions leading into breaks can be difficult but usually we actually manage to do some pretty good work right on the edge of a holiday. I don’t know what happened this time.

As a result I spent the early part of last week feeling very much at sea and cycling through various emotional states: huge anger, sadness, longing, neediness, apathy… it hasn’t been much fun tbh.

Right now I just feel lost… and ashamed.

I feel ashamed that my need is so big and seemingly too much to handle.

I feel ashamed for needing my therapist at all.

I feel ashamed that I can’t manage these feelings on my own.

I feel inadequate.

I hate myself.

I don’t want to do this anymore.

I feel sad.

It feels like even when I try and overcome or sidestep the shame and ask for what I need for whatever reason what I need isn’t possible to conjure up. I totally get I can’t have the physical holding I actually want (but then I haven’t talked about that), what I mean is this kind of thing, trying to explain how much breaks affect me and to ask for some kind of strategy to help and yet what she comes back with makes me feel stupid and pathetic.

Like does that imaging something good stuff work for everyone else? Does that sufficiently hold them in breaks? Am I just crap at therapy? Are my needs too much? Is all this attachment stuff just too complicated to work with? Is there something wrong with me? Do I expect too much?

What happened on Monday felt like it totally missed the mark. My therapist is really clear that my problems stem from ‘a very early injury’ and it’s all about relational trauma. From what I can gather, relational trauma needs to be healed in relationship, so how on earth does me imagining something that made me laugh on the TV ease that attachment pain when I am away from my attachment figure? Am I missing something? I don’t understand how when I missing a person/relationship how anything short of being able to internalise some felt sense of them would be helpful. Like isn’t that the point of transitional objects? To try and help maintain connection?

If she’d have said, ‘I want us to think together about a time when therapy has been positive and you’ve felt connected to me’ and then tried to really key into those feelings, I would have sort of got it. But wtf happened on Monday???

Ugh. FFS.

Anyway. I am on my own now until the 3rd September. And in order to pass the (very long) time I have now cracked open the first book on my summer reading list: ‘Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: A Relational/Neurobioligcal Approach’ by Patricia A. DeYoung. I obviously went for it due to its catchy title and intriguing cover (actually the cover is pretty good) in hope of a great page turning storyline! 😉

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Seriously, though, I read a lot psychotherapy books outside of my therapy and find it helpful to understand things from a theoretical perspective (makes me feel less crazy: I am mental but it’s ok because so are other people and there are books about it!) and so this one really grabbed my attention. Who wants to read chick lit anyway? Certainly not me with my boring ass Masters in Victorian Literature…

My therapist and I have long been aware that shame (and embarrassment) form one massive great stumbling block in my therapy and so having a book that directly addresses the concept of shame and how to work with it seems like a worthwhile area to spend a couple of hours of my life. And it’s good stuff. Really good stuff.

DeYoung defines shame as a relational experience: ‘Shame is the experience of one’s felt sense of self disintegrating in relation to a dysregulating other’

Do you ever read stuff and shout ‘YES! That’s it!!’ or is it just me?

There’s a brilliant bit on page 21 that made me go ‘uh huh, yep, that’s right’:

‘In brief and speaking from the perspective of a child’s regulated self, a regulating other is a person on whom I rely to respond to my emotions in ways that help me not to be overwhelmed by them, but rather to contain, accept, and integrate them into an emotional “me” I can feel comfortable being. A dysregulating other is also a person I want to trust – and should be able to trust – to help me manage my affect or emotion. But this person’s response to me, or lack of response to me, does exactly the opposite: it does not help me contain, accept, or integrate.

Then I become a self disintegrating in relation to a dysregulating other. This is what happens: as an infant, when I am in an affective state of distress, or as a child, when I am feeling a rush of emotion, the other’s response fails to help me manage what I’m feeling. Instead of feeling connected, I feel out of control. Instead of feeling energetically focused, I feel overwhelmed. Instead of feeling that I’ll be ok, I feel like I am falling apart.

This kind of experience is the core experience of shame. All of it has something to do with needing something intensely from someone important, and something going wrong with the interaction between us. I feel, “I can’t make happen what I need from you”. If the sequence is repeated often enough in my development to become and expectable experience , I will have a core propensity to feel shame whenever I have strong feelings, need emotional connection,  or feel something is wrong in an interpersonal interaction. In all of those situations, I will be likely to conclude, consciously or unconsciously, “There is something wrong with what I need- with my needy self”.

I’ve only read the first 33 pages but I’m so glad I stumbled across this book. Slightly concerned that I have placed my therapist in the role of ‘dysregulating other’, though!

I’ll probably come back to this at some point and discuss further once I have finished the book – but today is my son’s birthday and so right now I need to shutdown the computer and launch myself into a functioning adult state and forget that it’s Monday and at 10:30 the room I want to be in is empty.

Deep breaths.

Maybe I just need to tap my knees and think about playing rounders?!