I can hardly believe that it has been three months since I last posted here. I’d like to say my life has dramatically improved and I have simply been so content and happy that I haven’t even thought about blogging… ha…that’d be the dream, wouldn’t it?!

Sadly, that version of events is nowhere close to the reality. I’m literally limping my way through life and am completely amazed that I haven’t conked out altogether. I may well do this week – Elle is on a break and ugh… you know the thing about the straw that breaks the camel’s back? It feels a bit like that.

I have, quite honestly, been surviving my way from one therapy session to the next since January – that precious harbour in the storm has been enough to just about patch me back up with my trusty rubberbands and chewing gum so I am not completely full of holes before sending me back out into the tempest where I am quite literally sinking week on week… or perhaps it more ‘man overboard’ drowning – although as per usual most people seem to think I am waving and in no need of assistance despite my screams.

So, it’s felt especially hard not seeing Elle this week. I mean breaks are hard anyway, that’s nothing new. But this one has a particularly bleak quality to it. I haven’t helped myself at all with this, though. I’ve known this break was coming and, of all the breaks Elle takes in a year (which are notably few), it was bound to be a fucking humdinger because it falls right at the time that everything so dramatically disintegrated with Anita three years ago. She went off on her holiday for her birthday promising that “nothing would change” and she’d “be back soon” — only to come back and tell me it was all ending…and yeah…make of that what you will.

Elle always goes away at this time of year for a week and so it triggers all the panic about maybe her not coming back…you know, history repeating itself…but also, you might remember last year that whilst she was away a massive rupture got underway when I found that Elle had posted about me (albeit) anonymously on a therapist Reddit group and I lost my absolute mind about it. It rammed a knife right into one of my sorest places and I was left floundering in that until she came back.

Of course, we resolved it, but anniversaries hit hard and there are enough of them that I can’t help but panic. I have a gnawing ache in my stomach and that nauseous feeling – a horrible hangover from a horrible time, or should I say horrible times?! As if on cue my brain is serving me up all the dreams to make it all feel a million times worse. Unsurprisingly my fears are coming out in my sleep and are totally related to the stuff I am churning over in my brain whilst I am awake.

Last night, I had one where I was with Elle and I just couldn’t seem to connect with her. We were together, walking where I live, and it seemed fine enough on the surface but on a level it felt like she didn’t really see me or understand what was going on. And to add insult to injury, she just kept talking about how much she loves all her clients and I felt myself getting more and more upset whilst trying not to be a baby about it (this was some of what last year’s rupture was about). In the end – in the dream – I pulled my jumper over my head and just curled up in a ball on the grass. Elle didn’t notice.

So yeah.

Not a totally awful dream but enough to set things on the wobble.

We all know that being one of many is one of my big triggers in therapy. And the fear of not being valued or important enough to Elle is huge…I know this is partly the age old mother wound stuff playing out but it’s also got roots in the more recent ending with Anita – where she continued to work with some clients but ended with me (and maybe some other complex clients?-so she says). It is still really painful (even three years down the line) that she continues to work and advertise her services listing trauma and you know *all of the the things* that would make someone complex on her site despite swearing blind that she no longer works with trauma clients.

Anyway, I feel like the fallout of this situation and ending with Anita is that I am always working doubly hard to be ‘manageable’ and ‘palatable’ and ‘not too much’ because maybe that way, if things go to shit in Elle’s life, I won’t be collateral damage. So, yeah. I didn’t mention that the break was a big deal, and I didn’t ask for us to put anything in place before she left like spraying Monty with her perfume, or writing me a note to open midway through the break…and so I am freestyling my way through this break and … it’s starting to look a lot like that breakdancer who was in the Olympics…and really didn’t seem to know what they were doing!

Ugh.

So yeah, this is a really bad month for feeling like I am not enough…and too much… and I just have to navigate my way through it and not get myself in a massive pickle (failing at that quite spectacularly!).

I was so sad this morning to wake up and realise that I have spent nearly as long trying to recover from the relationship with Anita and the damage of the ‘end but not the end’ as the time we were actually doing the therapy. It’s tragic, really. Any hope of a final meet has totally disappeared now, as over the last six months I have sent a couple of short messages to her suggesting that I would still like to meet to say goodbye whilst also acknowledging I don’t want to go back to therapy because I have a therapist whom I have a really good rapport with now.  

*CRICKETS*

Like total radio silence.

So that tells me everything I need to know. So far as she is concerned it’s finished in her mind and she won’t honour the thing she promised back in May 2023. I am not surprised. She’s been so avoidant around this whole end/not end that I think it would just be far too uncomfortable for her to have to face what she did. I am sure the narrative she has in her head now is something that is completely different to the reality of what happened…which is disappointing but not surprising.

The feelings of abandonment and rejection are not as live as they were. I no longer think about what happened every day. But, it hasn’t gone away. Just like the pain of being called a “tick” by Em in 2020. That ending will never not hurt me. Most of the time now, these hurts and harms at the hands of therapists are manageable. I’ve healed enough around the shrapnel pieces for it not to cause searing white-hot pain every time I breathe or move – but there are times when I knock myself unexpectedly and it’s as agonising as the day it happened.

May is like being banged HARD against a wall. It hurts a lot…and then as a result all my fears and anxieties and crap around attachment get really big and I find myself in this place. It’s a place where the child parts are terrified of being left and I feel as though I am smothered in thick tar-like shame for still being in a place where I stupidly allow people close enough to hurt me. And by that, I mean therapists – namely, Elle.

Like, by now I should surely understand that this is the formula: the relationship is imbalanced, the care is real in the room but outside it… well… you’re pretty much on your own.

And of course, that is how it is meant to be…but it doesn’t change how the feeling of being left or put down for a period of time hurts and makes me doubt the entire therapeutic relationship. As much as I would like to be able to rationalise my way through what therapy is and isn’t (I know – I’m not stupid), that information hasn’t filtered down to the youngest parts who are so upset right now. No amount of explaining that Em, and Anita, and Elle were/are just talking to us because that’s their job makes any sense. The small parts love Elle..and Anita, still…and if I am really honest, even Em – despite everything.

Every time there is a break and every time an anniversary of an ending happens and really, any time I just leave the therapy room at the moment I am thrust deep down into the painful wounding of loss and grief, of being on my own, unseen, unsupported and I feel the stress and strain of just having to cope on my own acutely. And I get it, I am an adult and that’s what adults do and I am good at adulting – truthfully.

But this being left mirrors so clearly what it was like when I was a little girl and my mum would leave on a Sunday and not come home until Friday. The longing and the missing is real…and I feel it in my body. It feels sometimes like it’s a life and death situation like I literally feel like I am in survival trying not to die because it hurts so much. This week I’ve had the baby screaming and now I am back the little three- or four-year-old standing alone in the cold grey wasteland – and there’s no one there but her. She needs picking up and holding and taking somewhere warm and safe. I wish I could do that, but this one, of all of my parts in the system is completely inaccessible. She has her back to me and I can’t reach into that space. All I can do is observe. It’s hard to describe how visceral that feeling of loneliness, lack of safety, and sense of total abandonment is.

And it feels like Tuesday and seeing Elle is a terribly long time away… but then it is for the child parts of me. It’s too many sleeps. Six days may as well be six months for those little parts. And of course, the re-entry into therapy is rarely straightforward. False Adult usually shows up for the first couple of sessions because it’s way too fucking embarrassing to have to admit that, once again I struggled terribly with separation and felt the disconnect so acutely that part of me wanted to run away and end the therapy to stop me getting hurt.

The only good thing is that I know this pattern inside out. I know my system. I get what it does and why it does it. I have all the insight. I just wish, for once, things would be easier. I wish that I could go in Tuesday and Elle would miraculously know what’s going on and be able to reach straight down into the parts that are protected or in hiding… but that won’t happen. Not because she can’t do that. But because I will do such a good job of smoke and mirrors and “everything is fine” that she could never know.

I am lucky, I have some great friends whom I can talk to this about and who endeavour to remind me that it’s naturally going to be difficult right now and that just because bad things (terminations after holidays) have happened before doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to happen again… but … yeah I just can’t really hear it today.

The other day I wrote a letter to my friend’s child part, trying to reassure them about something that is hurting them. I may try and do that for myself…

Anyway, I’ve loads to catch up on here – but today I just needed to waffle about how hard it is and how bloody tough breaks are.

Ugh.