Rubber Bands and Chewing Gum

Dear New Therapist – Hello And Welcome To The Shit Show!

Given where I am currently at, staring down the barrel of three consecutive failed therapies, I thought it might be interesting to write an open letter to you, Elle, my ‘latest’ and ‘newest’ therapist (*yeah – I must be fucking insane!)…so buckle up.

To be honest, how I am feeling about your profession right now isn’t great. I feel like I have been thrown out a moving vehicle, run over, and left for dead one too many times now. How I am still here is anyone’s guess. I reckon I must have some cockroach DNA in me somewhere because I simply refuse to give up and die…are ticks and cockroaches related I wonder? Either way, it seems I’ll be here after the apocalypse because I just don’t know when to stop trying, to stop hoping that there is a way to heal this… this…devastation inside…in therapy…even if it has been exacerbated by your therapist colleagues.

I may look ok enough on the outside. I may smile and make light of my situation, but the reality is, internally at least, I am not in one piece at all. I am shattered. I have tried to patch myself back together with my trusty rubber bands and chewing gum but, in reality, I have desperately needed some plaster casts and bandages –  surgery even – I really need someone to help me glue all my pieces back together and instead have been left bleeding out, alone. I honestly don’t think I have it in me to be in a hit and run again and so this is it…this is the last time I am doing ‘therapy’ and so I guess I am putting a lot of faith in the pair of us, and our ability to form a relationship, to get this right…no pressure, then!

Ultimately, there’s still a part of me that hopes, that somewhere, out there, well actually not out there – right here- there is a therapist who genuinely cares about their clients’ emotional well-being and wants to do the deep work that’s not always a walk in the park. I hope that you will be a good fit for me, and that you will want to work ethically and effectively with me and be able to go the distance without you crashing and burning at some point along the line. I know we can’t predict the future: Anita didn’t mean for what’s happened to happen but she was blind to her ‘blindspots’ – and so I hope that you are self-aware enough to know when you are on ice and to put things in place to support yourself before they spiral out of control leaving me and our therapy as collateral damage.

I’d like to think that you are a therapist who doesn’t always seek to work with the ‘easy’ clients who can be turned around in six or twelve sessions and are then out the door ready for the next one on an endless therapy conveyor belt. I would hope there’s a part of you who enjoys doing depth/long-term relational work with those of us who are so often labelled ‘complex’, and probably behind closed doors ‘difficult’, ‘needy’, and ‘attention-seeking’. I’d like to think that rather than being intimidated or scared by those of us who’ve got a lot going on in our emotional worlds that we might, instead, be seen as people who are actually a bit interesting and people who you can learn from, too.

Please know that it takes enormous amounts of courage for us, as clients, to enter into a therapeutic relationship…and especially if we have already been hurt in therapy/by a therapist (or in my case, therapists). I mean there’s a part of me standing off to one side at the minute shaking her head in disbelief that I have searched you out and want to try AGAIN. Like what the hell am I doing?! I must be nuts…which is why I need the therapy, right?!

I feel like I gave my last two therapists (A and H) a pretty good road map of ‘me’, having been body-slammed by Em and yet here I find myself, in your office, having to start over again. The good news is, so far, I think it’s going ok. I feel like you are on the same page as me and I like that you haven’t been freaked out by the fact that I write. I’m glad we got that cleared up in the initial email as it means I don’t have to second guess myself or feel like I need to keep secrets from you. I really feel like honesty is massively important and I feel like I need to be completely stripped back and authentic.

I know that, so far, I am doing the brain thing…intellectualising…but also maybe distancing a bit. That’s not being dishonest – it’s just trying not to fall apart. I’m not surprised. Whilst I really want to let my guard down, it’s going to be really hard to get close to the reality of the pain ending with Anita has caused me because it’s raw and the parts that are impacted are so very different to the person that has been sitting in front of you so far. I know I’ve told you a bit about what’s happened but what’s there is HUGE and I don’t want to frighten you away. Although I get the impression you can handle whatever I bring.

Please, please be gentle with me…and please can you not go online in December! 😉

RB

P.S- I like your shoes.

*Sometimes the universe just seems to deliver, doesn’t it? Everything went belly up with Hannah, she hadn’t replied to my email about her blog ultimatum, and so I took it that she wasn’t going to come back to me with a ‘let’s talk this through and have a proper end’ which is what I was hoping for. I knew we probably wouldn’t find a middle ground but a session to end properly would have been nice given everything that has happened with Anita and Em. Alas. It wasn’t to be.

I ended up texting her the day before the session we were due to have had to check whether she had received my email. She had. She text back and said she had and that she respected my decision and the message was much like I had thought it would be – short and to the point, but essentially washing her hands clean! I was a bit disappointed that I had had to chase her on that and that it seemed that she was potentially not going to acknowledge my email…but then I guess that’s another indication that it wasn’t quite right.

Fortunately, by the time I got her reply on the Wednesday I was already set to meet with Elle later that day and so whilst it hit hard (much harder than I had anticipated after only 8 sessions), alongside an unexpected text from Anita (more on that another time), I at least had something in place and wasn’t left in limbo. But let’s just say picking up two texts from two ex-therapists in a swimming pool changing room and ugly crying in the cubicle for ten minutes wasn’t on my bingo card for that day!

How did I come across Elle? And what made me decide to take one last leap into therapy having sworn I would NEVER go there again? Well, I was online randomly googling (as you do) and a blog post came up that I found really interesting…I liked what the writer had to say and loved their style of writing. I proceeded to read and like a few posts and saw that the writer was a therapist… IN MY CITY!

So, I thought, well, she writes so I wonder what she would think about working with someone who writes too? I mean I know it was not a problem for Em or Anita but after what’s just happened with H I thought it would be sensible to talk about it from the get-go.

I fired off an email outlining what has happened to me with therapy ending with Anita and then the impasse due to the blog with Hannah. Elle responded warmly and insisted that my blogging would not be a problem for her at all – PHEW – and she said that even if I didn’t want to meet with her, she’d be interested to have the link to my blog if I wanted to share it. It felt like a massive relief knowing that, the blog was not going to be a problem. So we agreed to meet that week.

We’ve met twice now, and I think this might actually end up being a really good therapeutic alliance! It’s going to be really different from Anita – but perhaps exactly what I need for the next stage of the journey. The only downside is that she’s contemplating going online from December…and that really doesn’t fill me with joy.

We all know how terribly I did when it was lockdown and online with Anita. But now, there is an additional issue: privacy. My wife works from home most of the time and sound travels like crazy in our house. There is literally nowhere that I could have a completely private conversation and – let’s face it – the stuff I have to talk through requires my being completely relaxed and not worrying about being overheard. I really think the in-person energy is really important and so I really hope that she changes her mind on this… but then I’d rather have someone who really gets it online than an in-person who doesn’t quite.

I guess we’ll just have to see what the universe delivers but keep your fingers crossed for me x