holding it together as I journey through therapy – a personal account of what it's like to be in long-term psychotherapy navigating the healing of C-PTSD, childhood trauma and neglect, an eating disorder, self-harming behaviours, as well as giving grief and cancer an occasional nod.
I’d like to say that the reason I haven’t been blogging much lately is because life is so abundantly filled with exciting and fun and happy things, that things are so smooth and easy, that I simply haven’t had the time to write. I so wish that was the case. But we know that’s not how my life works, don’t we? It’s becoming a bit of a joke between me and my friends that my life just lurches from one big stress to another, and the times of calm never last all that long, or certainly not long enough to regroup and regain my footing, or heal the past. I literally feel like I am endlessly running barefoot through a war zone being shot at and trying my very best not to sustain any more wounds and actually, let’s be real here, just trying very hard not to die. Sometimes I feel like just stopping, giving up altogether, and admitting defeat. Maybe I am just not cut out for this life and this world?
It’s hard navigating the day-to-day fall out of complex trauma: the endless hypervigilance, the lack of a felt sense of safety (both internal and external), the exhaustion that comes from the black void inside, trying to keep all the little parts inside from melting down, feeling broken… but most of the time I am able to manage that – that’s why I go to therapy. Therapy is basically the scaffold I put around my week so that I am able to get on with my adult life and manage all the responsibilities I have as a wife, mother, teacher, friend…blah blah blah… but then sometimes, oftentimes, life throws and extra-large dump of shit on me and I just don’t cope.
That’s where I am right now.
Not coping.
I have spent the last week in a freeze.
I have so many things piling up around my ears because I have literally only managed the most essential tasks- i.e my job because…money (but not enough money). Everything else has fallen apart. My house is a colossal mess. I started putting up Christmas decorations a couple of weeks ago and it’s all ground to a halt midway through, I just can’t find any oomff to do the rest… and yet I have kids, and I want to at least make it look like we are functional even if I feel a million miles away from it. I don’t want me children to be burdened by my failures.
It took everything I had to go to the supermarket this week to buy food, cooking it has been a trial though, and for three days I just didn’t/couldn’t eat at all. I fed everyone else…but stress and anxiety had taken root so deeply that I couldn’t put anything in my mouth without gagging so in the end I gave up trying. I had to be so very very careful not to allow that to trigger the anorexic part of me because when things stressful and out of control anorexia has always been a go to and right now everything is out of control and stressful.
What’s up?
Last week we had a car accident. It was horrible. Noone was hurt but it shook us up, terribly. I keep getting horrible flashbacks and it’s really upsetting me. The car is being written off by the insurers and living rurally there’s no back up for transport with buses. We are in a privileged position that both my wife and I have (had!) cars but it’s meant that I have been doing an hour round trip twice a day to get her to and from work as I also need mine to get around.
We’re in that crap position where the car isn’t worth much because it’s a few years old now but it’s worth a lot to us. It’s reliable and in good condition – or was! What the insurers are offering is nowhere near close to be able to buy a replacement of the same age or mileage and so we’ll have to take out another loan to get another car whilst still paying the loan on the one we had for another three years… of course this is all debt we hadn’t accounted for and really can’t afford…and with my wife’s job being very volatile it feels extra scary as there’s not guarantee her job will be ongoing although she is looking around for something else.
Money.
So yeah.
2025 problems.
It’s always money.
But money = security.
But nothing feels secure when there is no financial buffer. When you live from month to month as it is and still struggle, the idea of not having an income is terrifying and it is filling me with dread and anxiety. I am waking every night with anxiety and last night it escalated into a full-blown panic attack. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. My heart was racing. It was terrifying. And yet I simply don’t know what to do to make things better.
Even when employment is stable, it seems like no matter how many hours you work, or how many promotions you get the cost of living is accelerating so fast that it’s almost impossible to keep afloat – it’s not even treading water, it’s trying not to drown. All my millennial friends are in the same leaky boat. We’ve all got degrees, we all have professional jobs, we have smaller families than we would perhaps have liked, both partners are working, we don’t lead extravagant lifestyles, and yet we are in a cycle of propping life up on personal loans and credit cards just to cover the basics. Kids feet grow and they need new shoes, trainers, and football boots for PE and that knocks you back.
It feels soul destroying to be perpetually chasing our tails and trying to figure out what can be cut to make ends meet in our forties. Like this isn’t the deal we were sold. We were told that if we worked hard at school, got the grades, got the degrees and the professional jobs, that we would be set. Our parents had the luxury of being able to support a family on one average income, buy a house, a car, have a holiday even, and now that is simply impossible.
I fear for the future too. Savings? Pensions? Will we ever be able to retire? Elderly care? I feel like we’ll be on suicide pacts with our friends at this rate and our student debt and loan and credit card debt will be there forever. Like I just feel thoroughly beaten down in the here and now and as I look forward into the future.
I don’t know what the answer is. But it isn’t about cutting coffee and avocado on toast, or Netflix – let’s be real people have already cut that. The issue is bigger, far bigger than the media would have you believe, and it’s frankly insulting to suggest that to anyone struggling. It drives me insane that older people tell young people that that’s the way to be able to afford a house or whatever. I honestly feel like after working all these years I didn’t ought to have to think about buying a treat here and there. But I do. It’s Christmas and my budget is minimal. I will buy for the kids but that’s it because I still don’t know how to sort out the car, the insurance and all the other things that have now hit as a result of the accident.
I get I am moaning and it all sounds like first world problems. And I also get that there is one expense each month that is crippling us: therapy.
But what do I do? Quitting therapy would significantly ease my financial worries but how would that work for the rest of my life? I am barely hanging it together with my rubber bands and chewing gum as it is. As I have said, therapy is the scaffold I have around my life to make my life doable…but then life is not doable right now and the money worries I have are making me ill.
This is the very real cost of trauma. I’ve talked about this before. Not only do we carry the debt in our bodies and nervous systems, we continue to pay for it financially for years and years in the therapy we need just to be able to function enough to work and exist.
I honestly, don’t know what to do. I have a feeling that before too long my circumstances will force my hand and leave me no choice but to quit therapy or significantly reduce my contact with Elle. That fills me with absolute dread and panic… but…what can I do?
At the end of the day my relationship with Elle is a paid for relationship. Without money we do not/cannot exist. And that is reality to swallow. Because whilst we, as clients, have money to pay our therapists we can keep up the masquerade that the relationship is ‘real enough’ to do the healing work we need and that we are safe and not going to be left (ahem!!).
So much of our wounding comes from the early experiences of being emotionally and/or physically abandonment and not feeling worthy enough to be loved and cared for in the way that we so badly needed as children, so it’s totally shit that the moment we can’t pay for therapy we are abandoned. It is cruel really, that we have to once again endure the feeling of an attachment figure leaving us (even though it’s not quite that) because we aren’t allowed to stay unless we have something to offer other than ourselves. And of course it makes sense. Therapy isn’t a friendship. Our therapists are not our family. Therapy is transactional. And that completely rams a knife into the wound when it ends for financial reasons. Because so much of our system needs to believe we matter in spite of the money.
So yeah, right now I feel angry.
And upset.
And deflated.
And lost.
And just really really sad. Because had things not gone so terribly wrong with Em and then Anita, maybe by now I would be far closer to not actually NEEDING therapy. The damage that has been done in the decade with Em and Anita is huge ON TOP of the damage there already was that sent me into therapy in the first place…and the financial cost of all those years of therapy means I am not in a strong financial position now… because let’s be real £500 a month for a decade…is…eye watering. Not only would I be debt free had I not been in therapy, I would actually have some savings…
So yeah.
I feel flat.
And money is only one thing dragging me down right now… but rather than bleat on about the rest of it. I’ll end this here and maybe speak about therapy and the two year anniversary that happened back in August, and the ongoing repair of the rupture that Elle and I had, and the anxiety about Christmas break coming up, and you know…all the attachment stuff next time.
I feel like this is the biggest depressive post I’ve written in a long time. But that’s the reality. It’s all been too hard for much too long.
It’ll come as no surprise to those of you that read this blog regularly that I am struggling…when am I not?! Since my last post where I learnt that my therapist, Elle, had lied to me it’s been really tough going and it’s completely caught up with me this weekend. It’s been a month now, and I still feel completely at sea and my system feels really dysregulated even though we have more or less repaired the rupture. This post is an absolutely wild ride of up and down and back to front emotions so…yeah…go me!
At the moment, I seem to swing violently between a flight and freeze response – there is very little sense of feeling safe or grounded, and I guess that’s no surprise because so many parts of my already wounded system have been impacted by Elle’s mistake. Honesty and trust are such important aspects of a therapeutic relationship – and I think this is especially so for those of us with complex trauma who really need to know where we stand, and so to have that side-swiped by an enormous wrecking ball is pretty disastrous, really.
Interestingly it’s usually us, the clients, that are told how important it is to ‘be honest’ and truthful in therapy. We are supposed to be vulnerable and brave and be willing to have the hard conversations and to expose the things we might feel shame or embarrassment about in order to get the work done… a therapist’s honesty is just a given, right? Well, you’d hope. I don’t mean that our therapists should tell us everything about themselves and be completely transparent in that way, all I mean is that they shouldn’t actively mislead us and tell us lies.
Anyway, after my enormous meltdown the other week when Elle told me that she had just been invited away for a last-minute long weekend and so couldn’t do our Friday check (despite my knowing she had something planned weeks in advance due to the shared calendar alerting me to the cancellation). It was time to go and see her face to face. Ugh. God. Just thinking back to that day makes me feel horrible in my stomach.
Having gone quiet and retreated deep into my shell over the course of the weekend while Elle was away – because I wasn’t about to start making a fuss and make Elle’s weekend difficult especially after what happened in May when I had contacted her and thought she was home when she was still away – the next contact we had was when I replied in the afternoon to Elle’s Monday morning ‘personalised session reminder’ in which she acknowledged how fragile trust now was for me and how frightened I probably felt.
I said:
I’m really struggling with all this and I’m trying really hard not to run away but I’ve convinced myself that something terrible is going to happen. I’ll try and be there tomorrow but I feel like I am working against a whole bunch of protectors that absolutely won’t let me. I feel lost and so sad.
And honestly, I was. This whole thing just shattered my trust in Elle, who I thought she was, and I guess most importantly, what I thought our relationship was and what we mean to one another. It’s been totally devastating and had completely derailed me.
Elle replied that she really understood how hard it was and tried to reassure me – she really was trying – and then said that she was on her way home and would be back in a couple of hours if I thought it would help, we could have a call when she got back around five. This was exactly what I needed but there was a part of me that had got into the headspace about being ‘too much’ and not being difficult and needy and demanding or taking up too much space so I replied “Just see how it goes. If you’re back, great. If not don’t worry.” But of course, I wanted to speak with her – needed to speak with her.
So, I moved some stuff around with students to be able to have to call and then shortly before five I got another message saying that whilst Elle was now home, she was tired and was trusting that if we didn’t talk that it would be ok and that we’d see each other the next day.
That felt like a huge sucker punch tbh.
Like I do totally get that my message to her was really open and would totally make her think that it was a take it or leave it sort of a situation. But it really really wasn’t. Having been holding onto all this stuff for six days at this point and not having had any kind of check in before she left what I really needed in that moment was a five-minute call and a tangible reassurance that this was fixable and that I did actually matter and was not just an afterthought or someone who is easily discarded and forgotten about and basically just a bit of an inconvenience.
So not having the call hurt as that’s exactly the messaging I was getting from her having forgotten to tell me about her break and the lie she told to cover it…
And I get she was tired. Had been travelling. All the things. And it was nothing at all about any of my insecurities. But I was also tired, emotionally strung out and hurting and it just seemed to completely replay so many messages from the past. My need isn’t important enough. I am easy to push back or postpone or forget and once again I was left and I just need to find ways to suck that up and cope.
I know it wasn’t lack of care from Elle. Or part of me does. But the young parts that have been so scared by all this just saw it as confirmation, once again, that even when adults hurt me and it’s not because of anything that I have done wrong, it’s still me that has to find a way of holding that for myself – Little Me has always had to find a way to self-soothe and make sense of why the people that are meant to take care of her just don’t, and will always prioritise their need first. And don’t get me wrong. I know what it is to have nothing in the tank at the end of the day, I just don’t understand why Elle even offered the call if she didn’t think she was up to it.
So yeah. That sucked.
With all that on top of the shit pile that was already there, it made even getting myself to go the session hellish. It felt like I wrestling an angry, overtired toddler who didn’t want to put its shoes on but also one who really needed picking up and holding close. The offer of a call had felt like an invitation back to the closeness and safety I had got so used to, and then to have it not happen…well…it felt abandoning on a level.
I felt sick with dread on Tuesday morning heading into the city and was so upset. The teen part of me was fucking angry that I had had to hold onto this stuff for a week, that Elle thought it was good enough to give a symbolic band aid via emails when this wounding had needed a proper bandage – like surely there must’ve been a fifteen-minute window for a phone call somewhere in that week to patch things up and stem the bleed?
Clearly not, or if there had been, I didn’t warrant the time and effort… and yet now I was having to go in and pay to fix a rupture that was not in the least bit of my making. Like fuck that! Don’t get me wrong – Elle does a LOAD for me and gives me a lot of her time, adult me totally sees that but my hurt teenager didn’t.
I ended up being a couple of minutes late to the session because just as I was about thirty seconds away from Elle’s building, I got an overwhelming feeling of nausea and had to stop and sit down on a wall and breathe so I wasn’t actually sick. So, I was pretty worked up by all accounts.
Typing this out now, almost a month on, is really hard because I am so fucking upset that any of this has even happened and that I am still trying to navigate my way through the aftermath of the storm even though the storm is seemingly long gone and to anyone looking in, the sun is out.
I don’t know if things can ever fully repair, some days I think it’s ok and then others I just feel so lost.
It’s like cosmetically the boat looks fine now, but underneath there’s a fucking great hole in the hull and I am really aware that I’m taking on water and slowly sinking – but because the hole is concealed, I think that Elle is blissfully unaware of the situation and I don’t know how to tell her because my confidence in the relationship is so damaged. More than anything I need her to understand where I am at so we can try and really fix this. We need to get the boat out the water and put it in a dry dock and seriously attend to the hole in the hull.
I did ought to be able to tell her. I know this. Two years of steady work and relationship building should mean I can bring this to her. And I want to. My god I’ve been doing therapy long enough to know that the only way out is through.. but …and it’s a huge BUT… I am so aware that it’s times exactly like these where I have pushed myself to talk about my experience of being upset and hurt by a therapist that they often double down rather than accept that they are at fault. They refuse to see how damaging their behaviour has been and because I can’t move on or let it go, it’s now framed as a me problem. It’s my overreaction. It’s my attachment disorder. It’s my not understanding that this is only a therapeutic relationship… and so I’m now braced for the retreat, and the “too dependent” comment or the “like a tick” comment when actually the only reason I ever get super needy and super clingy is due to fear of abandonment and ruptures and in this case I think it’s understandable that I am scared and dysregulated.
Anyway, back to the session.
When I walked into the building Elle was there and honestly, she looked relieved. She said she had been just about to text me and thought that I wasn’t coming. I guess two years of never having missed a session, or cancelled or having been late shows how my not being there on time is a big deal.
I had hoped that I would be able to go in and be open and start to process what had happened but I should know by now what deep hurt does to me. We sat down and Elle sat facing me on the couch and started to apologise. I immediately said, “I don’t want to talk to you”. I don’t know which part that was, maybe the teen again, but actually maybe in part my adult self who has felt so incredibly let down and felt as though I have really done my young parts and system a massive disservice by allowing myself to be so vulnerable and exposed with Elle. My guard has been so down for so long that it’s been really hard having this happen. Like I rely on my wise self to navigate relationships for all of my vulnerable parts and here I am again in pain because I haven’t read the room right…or something like that.
I was quiet for a long time but my heart was racing, and I was physically trembling, and it just felt unbearable. I really needed Elle to reach out for me or say something but I think I was giving off the biggest ‘stay the fuck away from me’ vibes because she checked in and asked if it was ok for her to be sitting next to me. In the end I managed to tell her, “I am so upset and angry with you”.
Elle said she knew.
We ended up having a long long talk about lies and the damage they do to my relationships – how when you lie you are deliberately stepping out of connection with someone and denying them an opportunity to respond to whatever the reality and truth is – and how I can’t trust without truth. Even though it was hard, I was able to express at least some of how I was feeling. I didn’t feel connected to Elle, though, and some of what she said made me feel really sad like it didn’t feel like we were quite hearing or meeting each other or perhaps she just wasn’t saying what I needed to hear in that moment. It’s hard for me to tell when it’s like that whether my protective bubble is working or whether it’s actually stopping me connecting.
Either way, I felt like I had listened to what she said and realised that somewhere along the line during these months and years had completely fucking misunderstood what was going on with us. I sat quietly for a bit, thought about getting up and leaving, and then said, “I feel really stupid”. She asked me why. And I said “I thought that this meant more than it does”. My heart felt completely broken in that moment because I have taken so much time and care to build this relationship with Elle and yet I must have been viewing it all through rose-tinted spectacles. Here I was again, so desperate to be loved that I’ll imagine something that just isn’t there.
Elle asked me to explain what I meant by that and I said, “It didn’t matter”. I wasn’t about to tell her how important the relationship is to me, and how I love her and how close and connected I feel to her at times and how much I value her… because what a fucking fool I have been to have believed that this wasn’t a completely one-sided interaction. What a fucking idiot for starting to believe that I actually mattered to her too, and had a space in her heart and that she wasn’t like all the others. I was not about to expose myself in that way.
So, instead Elle asked if she could tell me what it meant to her and that I could choose to believe what she said or not.
And wow.
Ok.
What came next.
That was the gold.
I could feel myself soften because what she was saying is what I had felt to be true…like this was my Elle – the one I had needed all week. I won’t repeat what she said here because it was such an honest and vulnerable moment that I think that stays with us.
But those are the moments I need. I really need the times when she is so explicit and clear with her words that I can be in no doubt what is felt on her side because clearly, I lose sight and hold of that when I am not with her because doubt and fear and shame fill the empty spaces like a thick fog that creeps into every crack and crevice of my being as well as the space between us.
And it’s so funny… I’ve felt so upset and angst filled writing this and then I remember those few minutes and it’s like the dial has been wound back round to low for a minute. Elle does care. She does love me. I do matter to her…a lot. Oh, I so wish I could make that stick.
Elle is truly sorry for hurting me and letting me down. She knew that she had caused a serious amount of damage and that it might not repair but I felt like that mattered to her. We talked a lot about what happened and why. And I really got it. Like it was a real and honest and open conversation and connecting even though it was hard. But, of course, there’s a lot of processing to be done still.
I am still obviously really activated and upset and triggered and all the things at intervals (especially today!) because I have a system that isn’t straightforward for healing and repair. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF MY PARTS needs to be able to hear what Elle said to me last month…or have some kind of reparative experience that is appropriate to them and not all of them have yet.
So, despite it being as good a repair as it could have been in the moment, I’ve been left feeling really lost and alone and disconnected at periods since. I feel like Elle’s stuff is taking up her time and energy (and I do understand why) and so I haven’t wanted to impose or be difficult even though my need has ramped right up due to the rupture. Because I feel more insecure, I need more from her at the moment and yet don’t feel like I can ask. I am not channeling my inner Brene Brown at all!!!
As a result of all this I find that read more into the silences and times we aren’t in touch because I am coming from a place of fear. I sense a distance between us (rightly or wrongly) and part of me worries she is choosing to retreat and pull back even if there is no evidence for it. It’s just that right now the space between us is too much. Friday check ins don’t feel anything like enough online and I feel too embarrassed to ask if we can meet face to face because…I don’t want to take up more space or get a no which would also feel rejecting.
Sadly, I need more of Elle right not, not less. And so, this has been desperately hard for me. We had got into such a good place before this rupture happened and I just cannot believe I am here now. But this is what happens. I have complex trauma. I have a structurally dissociated system. I have attachment issues. This was never going to be a magically repaired in a session because it has hit some of my deepest wounds and fears.
Of course, I don’t want to be doggedly hanging on to mistrust and fear but it’s almost like my survival instinct has been triggered. I can’t help but be hypervigilant. My system feels it’s in danger anytime I am away from Elle. This, I know, is not ideal! There a part of me that is also sort of mad. Here I am flailing around and sounding like an unhinged fucking nutjob and yet this mess wasn’t of my making. I didn’t cause the rupture and yet here I am trying really hard to figure it out without taking up too much space and time and energy.
The thing is, this needs space and time and energy to repair. Because I am freaking out about being abandoned or rejected or unseen, I actually need proof that I am not being abandoned or rejected or unseen.
Look, I know how dramatic that sounds. Elle made a mistake. She has apologised. I’m an adult. I can understand.
Only it’s not that simple, is it?
I wish it was.
Over the last month, our sessions have been ok enough – as in they look and sound fine…but because so much of me is hurting and in hiding at intervals the connection to Elle feels off. Even when she is holding me tightly, I feel far away because I drift so far away between the sessions. I can’t relax into being with her fully, or parts of me can’t. Elle says that she does she all the parts. I think her strategy is just to keep showing up and being there and hoping that at some point my system settles and believes it is safe to trust again. I think that could be a really long road.
I emailed her the other day and just asked “Are we ok?”
Elle replied with a holding message and acknowledged that she recognises that even when we are physically close, I can feel like the space between our hearts is a mile wide but that she doesn’t feel that way and assured me she is right there and that she feels close to me. She knows I feel lost but that I am not lost to her and she is right there. And that helped…but I feel like at the moment I need that kind of very clear and direct reassurance every day because so much of me is unsettled now. Like we might calm down one part but then another rears its head with its fears and mistrust and it’s back to square one. I get that it’s not realistic and I would never ask Elle for that, and I will just tough this out and hope that eventually things settle.
I think one of the hardest things for me right now is that I feel so incredibly needy and whilst I am able to reach out some of the time and ask whether we are ok or for a metaphorical hand hold and give a flavour of what I need and what’s really going on for me, I probably only do this 50% of the time. The other messages I send don’t seem to need anything at all and yet I would say that right now ALL my communications are really about reassurance and connection seeking.
I totally get that I need to be more direct. I know that Elle is not a mind reader and will go on what she sees from me. BUT it’s not easy to be really and truly how it is in this moment when my fear is that she will burn out or I’ll hit the threshold of ‘too much’.
I hate how awful the disorganised attachment push/pull thing is. I feel so much the need to be close but there’s also the parts that are pulling away and shutting down. All the old stuff with shame feels really potent too. And I hate this so much because it shows me how default programming is hardwired. I’ve been working so hard for that earned secure attachment…but…I don’t honestly even know it that is possible.
So yeah.
It’s a mess.
It’s fixed…but it’s not…
And I can see how fucking screwed up I am right now because I can’t even maintain a consistent fucking feeling in a blog post. But this is how it is, my emotions are all over the shop this is why I am struggling. Ugh.
There’s a fucking cruel irony here, that today I am writing about lies and betrayal in therapy literally straight after posting up my last blog about not being able to fully appreciate safety in therapy even though I am safe, and the one before that writing about harm in therapy caused by other therapists but being so grateful to my therapist for being safe and consistent and all the good things…but I am beginning to think the universe hates me so why am I even surprised at this point?
What on earth am I talking about?
Have I lost mind?
Well, yes. Yes. I have…
Not again? Ha! Yep. Again.
I am so dysregulated at the moment that I barely know what to do or say but I need to get this out somewhere before I explode. I’ve been so … unwell…since Tuesday after my last session with Elle that I’ve been barely functional. I feel like I have had my legs taken out from beneath me. My stomach hurts. I feel jittery. I’ve had a consistent migraine and tension headache for four days now – and it’s only started to ease today. My back has seized up. Sleep is appalling. Nightmares are rife. I wake up in the middle of the night and just sob for hours.
Like it’s a mess.
What the hell has happened?
Has someone died or something?
Nope. But I am grieving.
I don’t think it’s really very easy to explain just how destabilising it is to have someone you love and trust betray your trust by lying to you…and how much grief that stirs up – especially if you have the sort of relational wounds that I do.
Of course, in this case the ‘someone that I love and trust’ is Elle.
I am devastated.
But I am also locked in an internal battle with myself. I don’t know if I am completely overreacting here or whether what I feel is justified?
Perhaps what’s happened isn’t all that big a deal… or maybe I am just incapable, these days, of noticing when I am standing right slap bang in the middle of a red flag factory until I am fully wrapped in them from head to toe. Do I just not see the colour red anymore? Or is it a washed out pink now, and I am trying to romanticise the flags as pretty blush-coloured bunting?
I feel like this is really cryptic. It’s not meant to be. But my brain is all over the place. My system is in chaos and disarray and I just feel really fucking sad that I hardly know what to say here.
Part of me wanted to write yet another email to Elle today rather than blog. But she’s away and my telling her what’s going on since the last message we exchanged isn’t going to help matters any. I don’t want to disturb her time away. The last break we had was fine (still not written about that) but May was a disaster (finding myself on the online therapist forum)…and frankly, I don’t want to go there EVER again.
Right now, I am not sure if I can even make it to session on Tuesday, though. My system is off its tits and because it’s free to go spiral off in any direction it wants to for the next few days I am struggling to hold tight to the sense that Elle is safe at all, or cares.
I guess I should just cut to the chase, here, but it might take a bit as I can only focus in short bursts and want to escape this emotional agony and so keep getting dragged into ASMR rug cleaning videos, or anything else that will distract from the fact that my heart is broken…over what is essentially a white lie.
The thing is, does it even matter what colour a lie is in therapy? Therapy is (supposed to be) built on trust and honesty – they are the cornerstones of the process – alongside unconditional positive regard…and yet here we are.
I can’t actually believe it.
Right, RB, stop fucking about, just spell it out. Deep breaths…here we go. Brace positions.
A few months ago, Elle set up an ongoing Zoom link for our Friday check in sessions rather than having to send me a new link each week – makes sense. When she did that it meant that all our sessions went into an online calendar that was shared with me. I can see months and months ahead that our time is blocked out. No problems there.
A couple of months ago I got a notification that my session on Friday 10th October was cancelled and it had a line through it on my calendar. Fine. I figured Elle had something on that day and it was no big deal. We’d always said Fridays might change here and there so it was no sweat.
When I next saw Elle in person, she didn’t mention the cancellation and I assumed that at some point down the line she would tell me about it as it was still a way off. But I was certain she’d mention it, either just to confirm the skipped week, or perhaps we would reschedule the slot to some other time in the week.
The weeks have been rolling by and nothing has been said by Elle at all. Part of me wondered this last week if maybe the thing had changed again and perhaps the call was happening as there had been no discussion about it – although nothing had changed on the calendar to suggest that. And the Friday round Christmas got crossed out so I knew that Elle was actively doing things her end.
A week ago, on Friday, I was in session face-to-face with Elle. It was during that appalling week where I had lost the plot and basically felt borderline suicidal in my Tuesday session and had had a Thursday check in and then a Friday session too. It was a bad week! She said she was going away that weekend to see a friend and then mentioned seeing another friend this weekend…but no reference was made to the Friday being off or her being away in the week and so it confused me a bit as in that moment Elle must have been thinking about seeing this friend and knew when it was she’d be going. It was also a Friday morning that I was sitting with her in the room so it’s not like she could forget that we meet on Fridays.
She had to be avoiding talking to me about it – but maybe it was because I had had such a rotten week and the idea of telling me about it felt like it might be destabilising? I dunno. Either way, she kept quiet. Still, I just imagined she’d tell me on Tuesday that Friday was off – even if that felt a bit last minute and a bit crap given how hard things have been as it really didn’t give us much of an opportunity to put anything in place… not that I would have needed much. It’s only a check in and really a text message would have done instead.
Anyway, I went to my session on Tuesday and it was ok but something felt a little off. Perhaps I was just waiting to see if Elle was going to tell me about Friday. She didn’t. Nothing was said at all. At that point I wondered what the hell was going on and why she hadn’t said anything. Maybe she knew that our calendars were synced and I already knew?…but then surely, you’d always mention a break in person? Or at least via email or text?
Whenever I leave my session on a Tuesday Elle ALWAYS says, “See you on Friday”… like ALWAYS. Yet as I left on Tuesday she didn’t. So, I knew that Friday was off but she hadn’t told me herself.
Ugh.
Crap.
But I guess I already knew and had been bracing for it.
But why was she avoiding saying anything? I know breaks can be tricky, but our last one was fine and missing a check in isn’t the end of the world…
What I wasn’t expecting, however, was to receive a breezy email later that afternoon from Elle:
Hello lovely girl 💕🥰
I’ve just been invited away for a long weekend this week with a friend I hardly ever see, which means I won’t be able to make our usual call at 9 on Friday.
Sorry to not give you more notice, or write you something that feels holding, and I hope that feels ok and not too jarring? Rest assured I will return on Monday morning, if not refreshed maybe a little perkier and less coldish.
Tightest of squishes,
(and absolutely no Halloween gooeyness)
🎃👻🫂💕🍂
Elle xxxxx
To say my stomach fell through the floor is not an understatement. I was just about to go online and teach and as I read that I felt like I was going to be sick.
Because what was this?
She’d had all the time in the world to tell me about the cancelled check in, plenty of notice. She could have told me right that afternoon when I was sitting in the room with her as it was clearly on her mind given she consciously omitted her usual, “See you on Friday”. And there had been plenty of time to write something holding (not that that was at all necessary). We could have rearranged the call months back – like there were so many ways of navigating this. And if the message had have been the truth, yes it would have been a little jarring but nothing like the whiplash I was experiencing in that moment seeing that my therapist of two years who knows me so intimately, knows how important trust and honesty is to me, knows how badly harmed I have been by therapists and their lies, and how very difficult I have been finding things lately…had chosen to lie to me like this.
And not only that, but this was all coming from a therapist who says how important honesty is, and integrity, and trust…like wtaf was going on?
Please make it make sense.
And in the big scheme of things, I really get that it’s not a huge lie but my system can’t seem to differentiate between a whopper and a barely noticeable one because to the little parts of my system and the traumatised parts – a lie is a lie. And if she’ll lie about this what else has she said that isn’t true?
So, as I was just about to start work I fired off a quick reply:
I guess you don’t know that your Zoom calendar updates my end too for our stuff, and I’ve known that this Friday has been off the cards for weeks now. Please don’t lie to me. I can handle changes – because we always said Fridays would be moveable and not guaranteed. I’m less good at whatever this is. And I get you probably didn’t want to tell me because there never seems a good time when things are crap – but I’d rather know than you avoid telling me because you think I’ll react badly. I wouldn’t have.
That’s all I could say in the moment – but it was at least better than running away and completely retreating from it – which is what I wanted to do.
And then I had to try and teach three lessons on the bounce as my internal scaffolding collapsed and I wanted to run away and curl up in a ball and cry.
I can’t explain how difficult it is to be present online 1:1 with a student when my emotional world is in meltdown. There is literally nowhere to hide.
Not long after I sent that message email flashed up another notification. Elle again:
I’m so sorry honey, you’re right that she didn’t just ask. I’m so sorry I lied and said that. I didn’t want you to think I’d forgotten to tell you and for you to feel unimportant and like you don’t matter, But the truth is I had forgotten, and then tried to cover it up.
Will you forgive me for being cowardly? I feel as if I really fucked up.
Not long after this my phone rang and it was Elle but as I was teaching and I couldn’t answer and even if I could have I wasn’t sure if it was a deliberate call from her…or one of those accidental dials because she hadn’t text me, “Can I call you?” not that she’s ever called me unplanned before – and she didn’t leave a voicemail or follow it up with a text.
As it was, I was teaching until 8pm with no gaps and by the time I finished and would have been able to return the call I knew that she was off doing ‘the thing’ she does with my friend (groan) and wouldn’t have been available anyway. Not that I would ever call her ad-hoc even if I wanted to because ‘boundaries’ and ‘good client behaviour’ and all that stuff.
You can probably imagine, that by the time I got done with work I was in a right state so I just took myself off to bed. Sometimes there isn’t anything to be gained by messaging in an upset state and I also knew that I wouldn’t get a reply anyway as Elle wasn’t ‘there’ and that would have triggered me even more.
On Wednesday morning Elle emailed me again:
I’m so sorry I let you down lovely girl, and that I didn’t honour our trust.
Please know though that me lying was never about protecting myself from you or your reaction, it was (and is always) about me feeling like making mistakes or being less than perfectly caring means that I’m not enough.
I’m always fighting that programming, and when my resistance is low, like it is right now, I fuck up. I lie to cover the fact that I’ve been careless or clumsy, because in my world that was the worst thing I could ever do.
I know that for you a lie could mean that everything I have said is now being called into question, and that your trust in me has potentially been broken irrevocably. But please know that I will not and will never avoid talking about these things with you, taking responsibility and doing my best to mend your trust. Because this is just as important for me as it is for you.
I really hope you want to see me on Tuesday.
Elle xxxx
I didn’t really know what to say in that moment. I was so upset still. It’s hard to explain what a sucker punch to the gut being lied to by the person I have trusted the most with my most vulnerable self felt like, and I was without words. I could register that that was an apology but somehow it didn’t land. I guess there were so many parts activated that it would take more than an email to mend.
I had hardly slept on Tuesday night and so once I got the kids off to school I took myself off to bed again, lay under my weighted blanket and cried myself to sleep.
That probably sounds really dramatic but there’s been a lot of tears this week and a lot of crying in bed. But I think those of you that have deep relational wounds and are deeply attached to your therapists will understand what it might feel like for this to happen. It just felt so much like the special thing that I thought we had built, that means so much to me, in reality means nothing much at all to her…because I would never choose to lie if it meant risking our relationship – and from her email she as clearly aware what this might mean for my trust in her and our relationship.
And I know it was only a small lie…and she’s clearly tried to reach out to put it right…but is that enough? I dunno. Not for some parts of me. I was so far gone by that point all that really would have reached through this mess would have been to properly talk and ideally see her in person…and that wasn’t on the cards. If there is a rupture I will never ask for contact like that even if it is what parts of me are screaming out for. If Elle doesn’t offer if then I am not going to ask especially if I am already feeling the very things she didn’t want me to feel, ‘unimportant’ and ‘like I don’t matter’.
When I fell asleep I ended up having a terrible dream about being in a train where the sliding doors wouldn’t close. The train started moving and it was windy and unsafe. I knew I needed to raise alarm but I couldn’t get the control panel to work to stop the train. No matter what button I pressed the system wouldn’t let me raise the alarm. I tried to manually shut the sliding doors even though it was really unsafe to do so and once I did it I held it together with a tiny sticker with a handwritten note on – ‘broken- unsafe- do not use’.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see what that’s about. I didn’t feel able to reply properly to Elle’s emails or tell her how I was feeling but I sent her the dream and the Chat GPT analysis…because could it be any better of a metaphor?
Elle replied with something that felt sort of holding but also sort of scary…she told me that she wishes I could see into her heart and see what’s really there – which sounds fine – but then said that “I want to never let you down and to always be a safe person who you feel loved and seen by, but honestly I don’t know if that is possible” and all my alarms started going all at once.
Like total panic.
I had to teach again but I could hardly concentrate.
I felt sick.
All I wanted to do was reach out to Elle, to speak to her, to try and stop this going where my brain was going…and then I did the thing…and I didn’t realise that was what was happening at the time but I fell into the “Shit Shit SHIT she might leave, it sounds like she’s backing away, I need to not be too much and make this all ok before she gives up on me.”
How familiar are we with this pattern? Someone hurts us but if we so much as get a hint of their being wobbly we do all we can to make them feel better even if it means shelving our own hurt and pain. We must preserve the relationship at all costs even if that means denying our own need.
Ugh.
I thought I was being super adult at the time and untriggered (!) and actually all I was doing was fawning. My scared little girl part was doing everything she could to prevent herself from getting left and then went quietly away to her bedroom to cry on her own… again…
Like I don’t not believe what I said in that message, I do, but I didn’t give anything like enough space to the reality of what I was feeling, how much I was struggling, or what I NEEDED in that moment.
This is what I sent:
I think you set entirely too high expectations of yourself. As humans we are always going to make mistakes and let people down and forget things. Because that’s what happens… and when we’re tired and hormones are doing weird things on top it’s even harder. The thing is, all of this could have been so easily avoided by just saying, “RB I thought I’d told you this, and I’ve realised that I haven’t, but I’m not going to be here on Friday” and really what’s the worst that would have happened? Like I might have felt a bit sad about it but we would have talked it though and that would have been that. The world wouldn’t have ended. Instead, you thought it better to lie to me than tell me the simple truth. And I get why you did it. And I get that in some ways it’s not a big deal. But this whole thing is about trust and I have to believe that you don’t lie to me about stuff to stand a chance of believing that you are actually someone safe. Because how am I meant to believe anything you say if you’ll lie about something so minor? And I understand the thing about feeling not enough and having a reaction to feeling like you’ve not been perfect and so it probably feels big in the moment because of the old conditioning around that… but I’ve told you before and I’m saying it again now- I don’t need you to be perfect and I don’t expect it either – I just need you to be real and honest with me. However that looks. Because it’s hurt me that you haven’t trusted me with the truth. And of course it’s triggered all my stuff which I know is exactly the thing you were trying to avoid in the first place… so it’s a bit shit. In your message you said you hoped I would want to see you on Tuesday. And whilst part of me wants to run a million miles in the other direction because I’m hurt, of course I want to see you. Because this is the irritating thing about all this – I’d like to think by now it’s not so fragile that stuff can’t be worked through. But it feels sometimes when this stuff gets triggered – your ‘not enough’ stuff – that you retreat and everything feels different. Like you’re there but it’s not quite you. And I guess maybe there’s a little bit of you that’s hiding too. But I don’t say it lightly when I tell you that I love you and it’s not conditional. But I will have to force feed you soggy orange fondant if you lie to me again xxx 😘
Elle didn’t reply to that on Wednesday so you can only imagine how that felt. Like here I was struggling to even function, crying, and feeling sick and yet trying to make it better her end, trying to fudge a repair and she didn’t even acknowledge it. I didn’t send it late either, 4pm, but apparently it was fine to leave it or leave me in it.
I got that horrible feeling that the thing they (therapists) all do was happening – you know? Where there’s a rupture and the therapist pulls back? They start only replying in office hours, and then in a way that isn’t consistent with their usual tone and manner? The next thing you know you’re in for a boundary talk and everything that had been so much a part of the therapy gets taken away…and not because of anything you even did. The moment they feel the container is leaking or the frame is wobbly they double down. I really hoped that this wasn’t going to happen but I was ready. Been there, done that, seen it all before, got several t-shirts.
The next day Elle replied and she explained some stuff that we’ve spoken about before and I think it was an attempt to justify what had happened. And it made sense. Like we’ve all told lies and we often do it because it’s hard to be seen as we are – especially if we feel like we’ve cocked up. Like we try and cover our tracks and hope that no one notices. I won’t put that here because it feels especially personal to Elle and doesn’t add anything but I think I felt just a bit unseen in the whole thing – like I needed something that acknowledged my pain, not why it happened.
I replied:
Well, I think maybe it’s better to tell the truth and deal with the consequences which are probably always going to be way less bad than you imagine (these days at least – or at least where you and me are concerned), than lie and have the fall out of that. I think most people can cope with people being fallible and making mistakes but struggle far more with being deceived even if it’s meant well. Or that’s how it is for me. I’ve been lied to such a lot in these seemingly benign ways and then what’s actually underneath has been so bad and so painful that it makes me really scared. I don’t want to feel like I’m now having to watch really carefully for patterns repeating but it’s my default. Like this all looks horribly familiar to Anita’s burnout trajectory… even if it’s not. It never starts with a huge thing, it’s always small stuff. So, I’m on high alert for the next thing – which is generally a subtle form of retreat.
This week all just feels like a double whammy of ouch. Maybe I’m just more sensitive to what you see as shrinking in for a second because I feel it acutely as a pulling back. It’s like you disappear, or maybe you’re there but only in 2D and in black and white. And it feels really hard because when this stuff happens all I want to do is disappear and I know that doesn’t really help me so instead I try really hard not to, but also try really hard to not come at things from a really triggered place and ground a bit first…and when I do that and can’t find anything but the hollowed out version of you or feel you’re gone altogether it’s really bad because I feel like I am putting my really vulnerable self out there only to be met with distance. That’s how it feels anyway. I guess it’s probably because in that moment so much of my not enough and too much stuff is triggered that I’m fearing the very worst.
It feels a bit like trying to communicate down one of those telephones with two cups and bit of string and I can kind of see you off in the distance but not quite hear what’s coming down the line and you’re too far away to see your face. I just want to hold your hand and know that this didn’t all happen because of something I’ve done wrong or because you’ve had enough and just need a break from caring for me.
😞
Elle replied and assured me that she wasn’t burning out and that what I feared was happening isn’t and that she’d be there on Tuesday.
But then if she isn’t burning out why did she choose to lie to me?
Knowing Elle was away now with her friend I didn’t bother to reply…and the great news about this not being fully resolved is that my system has had plenty of time to catastrophise about everything that has happened because Elle isn’t here, we haven’t spoken, and I am left hanging with this turning it over in my mind in a million different ways and looking at it through all the lenses of all my little parts like I am staring into a kaleidoscope of fear and heartbreak and turning the dial.
Tbh this all feels a bit like I’ve been in a hit and run and she’s gone, “I can see you might have a few broken bones there and it looks like you’re bleeding out from your chest, but just sit tight for a few days and we can get this patched up next Tuesday.”
And that isn’t great.
I guess from my emails it looks like I am largely fine, in my adult and can see this as a rupture that is perfectly navigable and survivable.
Only that’s not the whole story.
What’s written between the lines?
Oh my god, there’s a story.
The thing I keep circling back round to is that this relationship matters way more to me than it does to her. And I get it. That’s how therapy works. Like this is how it has always been. It’s us (clients) that get really attached and bring all our early wounds into the therapy and the therapist who becomes the stand-in parent. I am just one of Elle’s clients and I am her work. I know that. But to me she is such a lot. Like she is so important…and I usually feel ok about that. I usually feel like my feelings are ok, welcomed, not too much, and that they are reciprocated to a degree – but this week has just triggered the biggest amount of shame in me.
Like how do I find myself here again?
Why do I never learn?
Why have I opened my heart up to someone who clearly doesn’t appreciate what that actually means? I’ve always felt that Elle holds my heart and our relationship so carefully (and I really need to write about our 2 year anniversary and the break we had) but it felt like this week she had a choice to make: lean into and trust in the connection even if she did feel like it might cause a bit of upset or choose to disconnect altogether from me and the relationship in favour of a quick get out of jail free moment. And she chose the disconnect.
Clearly, I really struggle with lying (not just being lied to but even telling lies). It does things in my body. I feel physically uncomfortable. My stomach goes tight. My heart races. My mouth goes a bit dry. I feel a bit prickly behind my eyes. And I just don’t feel ok. Don’t get me wrong though. I am a good liar. Or I used to be, once upon a time. I used to lie like my survival depended on it. Especially when I was consumed by anorexia and was self-harming… I used to be able to look people dead in the eye and lie, because I told it like a truth.
I can’t do that now. Or I could. But I absolutely refuse to.
I have never once told a lie to Elle. I don’t deliberately withhold things from her. One of the things I have vowed to myself in my therapy is that even if the truth feels uncomfortable, it’s worth saying. It might feel scary or downright toe-curlingly shame inducing but I feel like if I tell the truth, and people stay then they are my people and there’s really nothing all that bad that I could ever say anyway. I truly believe that honesty and vulnerability are the only paths to true connection (ha, hello Brene Brown!)…and that’s what I want. I don’t want a half-formed ghost version of a connection. I want the real, warts and all one.
If I feel I have to lie or bend myself to preserve a relationship then I don’t really want it anyway because I’ve done that my whole life growing up. I did it so much with Em – I never lied but I held back a lot…until I didn’t… and the more I let Em see me, the more I told her my reality the less she could cope with me and my feelings. I could have saved myself a lot of pain and misery if I’d not taken years to build up to telling her how I felt. In the end she saw me as a tick but I had always been a tick hadn’t I, she just didn’t know! Certainly those feelings I had for her came about nine months after I met her and yet it took eight years for it to blow up and break the therapy because I hid so well. I won’t do that now.
When I saw Anita I went into it without my armour but as she started to lose her capacity I started to put it back on a piece at a time. I armoured up and withheld stuff in order to be ‘easier’ for her. I didn’t lie. I just didn’t always tell her what was going on because I didn’t want to push her away. I basically reverted to type. I made myself smaller. I hid my struggles and my needs to try and give her space to get through what was going on for her. It didn’t work though, did it? It just delayed the agony ultimately.
With Elle it’s been slow and steady work. I feel like it has been such an exercise in trust and bravery, especially given all that’s come before. I have opened up to her in a way I didn’t think I would be able to. And so to have her so easily lie to me feels like a kick in the teeth. I have tried so hard to connect in an authentic way…and I believed that she was doing the same. But now I just feel like ‘work’ and someone whom she can easily discard and disconnect from. And it hurts.
My most unkind protector – the Inner Critic is having an absolute field day spouting their most favourite lines “You absolute loser, you can’t even pay someone to be in a relationship with you and care. Can’t you see what this is? It’s a game that she plays with you for a couple of hours a week to make you think you matter but the reality is, you’re just money to her. You pay the bills. If you mattered to her she’d show you through the most basic behaviour. She wouldn’t like to you. We don’t lie to people that really matter.”
And it’s really really hard to disagree with that voice.
Part of me wants to think maybe it’s the very opposite that is true. Maybe Elle lied because I matter to her. Maybe she didn’t want to hurt me or make me feel any of this painful stuff. I don’t think the logic behind what she’s done is great but I can see why it could be the case.
Either way, this week has activated all my really painful stuff and I haven’t had anywhere at all to put it.
Part of me is really angry too – well isn’t Anger just Hurt’s bodyguard? Like, why did this have to happen? Why couldn’t this therapy just be what it said on the tin? What do I keep doing wrong to make it so that therapists treat me like this? Why can’t I just be safe and loved and matter enough to not have someone hurt me in this way?
It’s hard not to see Elle’s actions as coming from a place of just being completely bored of having to think about how to manage my attachment stuff. Like, her initial message said, she hadn’t had time to write something… and so in her mind any time she leaves I demand time and energy just to get a weekend away. So perhaps this is my fault. Maybe if I wasn’t so high need then she wouldn’t have felt the need to lie. She probably just told her other Friday appointments that she wasn’t available and that was that.
So, this all makes me feel rotten. I feel my usual wonderful combo of ‘too much’ and ‘not enough’. Too much need and too much work and not important enough for anyone to truly care or love me.
I don’t know what the answer is here.
It’s only Sunday. I feel broken…and it’s a long way til Tuesday. Of course, I have no sense of the Elle I know being out there at all now because this is what happens when there’s distance and a rupture. My brain is serving ‘danger’ and all the rest of it.
I soooooo want to believe that we will be ok. I want to believe that if I tell her how hurt I am that she will do her best to repair this and take the time to work through it with me – even if it takes a really long time… I need her not to be defensive or reactive…but I have no idea what state she is in and whether she has the energy or capacity to go with me where I need to go. Because let’s be real, this has hit on a very deep wound and it’s going to take some healing. I feel like this is something that will be dredged up over and over again. I will be constantly looking for reassurance and testing.
I hate this.
Part of me is reluctant to post this blog up because I’m worried that if Elle comes across it – now, or later – she’ll see it as a criticism of her, or somehow see it as sharing too much of what’s gone on between us with the outside world. I imagine she’d feel fucked off that I’ve copied some of the messages she’s sent to me here but I honestly don’t know what to do or where to turn for support or reassurance at the moment.
If Elle and I do make it through this I don’t want her to stop messaging me because she thinks our communications will only end up on the blog because that isn’t how it is. I’ve always been so careful here to not really talk any detail about what she says to me – I’ve protected her/us in a way that I never did Em or Anita because I’ve felt so protective of our relationship and what we’ve created together. I value her and the relationship such a lot…and right now I just don’t know what to do.
I don’t know how we’ll come through this because I feel like there’s a massive part of me that will struggle to trust her ever again. How can I be sure of anything now?
Perhaps a white lie is no big deal. Maybe I am just too sensitive. Maybe my trauma makes me too reactive. All I know is that I feel completely at sea and completely alone. I wish Elle understood how in a simple bending of the truth she’s taken a machete to my trust in her and set fire to the deep connection we were weaving together.
I’m sure Elle is having a wonderful time away, though…lucky her.
I think this may be the longest post I have ever written – shoot me now.x
Well, I can’t lie, it’s been a complete and utter disaster zone in my emotional world since I posted a couple of weeks back. What’s happened? Well, my righteous anger about harm in therapy that I channelled into the last blog, where I talked about how I had received an email from a reader about their hideous experience being terminated by a therapist that perhaps could have been Anita (but thankfully wasn’t) as well as harm in therapy more generally, quickly morphed into the biggest fear about being rejected and abandoned and activated all the ‘old’ stuff from Em and Anita but most horribly the absolute terror that something bad would happen with Elle went nuclear. Well of course that would happen, wouldn’t it?
Usually, I am absolutely fine when people share their stories with me about difficult stuff happening in their therapies but, strangely, not in this particular instance. It’s weird, though, because at the same time someone else I have known a while from the blog contacted me about some issues they were experiencing in therapy that also really closely mirrored some things that have happened to me in the past and it’s had no detrimental impact at all. I have received the messages in the way I usually do and responded as I always have…
So, what’s gone wrong then?
I don’t know. I wonder if it’s because what’s happened with this other person has taken place in my city, and so it just makes the therapy world feel all the more unsafe here – I’ve had three therapists who haven’t been up to par, and now there’s another wreaking havoc…not that I ever hope to need to see any therapist but Elle ever again.
Maybe, and more likely, it’s that their experience around termination has so many similar threads to what happened with Em and Anita and so it’s just tapped into the wound more than usual. Like it’s uncanny.
I haven’t been very well lately (physically) either, and I suspect part of it is that my capacity is low. Like I am holding it together very tenuously with my rubber bands and chewing gum right now. It’s not being helped any by the fact that my hormones are really out of whack and so on top of the usual struggles I feel like my emotions are swinging wildly… don’t they say perimenopause is like a second puberty? God help me!
I have been in a really good place with Elle lately and my system has been leaning into the feelings of safety and trust in a way that it hasn’t in a very very long time. Like part of my system had stood down a little bit because maybe I don’t need protectors on duty ALL THE TIME. But then this interaction with this poor therapy client was a reminder, once again, that therapists and therapies that are long-term, deeply connected, supportive, affectionate, and say ‘all the right things’ blow the fuck up in next to no time and it can come almost out of nowhere.
The therapists that we think we know, whom we love deeply, and have trusted with our most vulnerable selves become someone else entirely, unrecognisable, almost overnight and they throw us out the moving vehicle and leave us for dead as they carry on up the road as if nothing happened. And not only that, it seems that it’s perfectly reasonable to disappear without a trace – or at the very fucking least, an onward referral to another therapist!
My total lack of coping and absolute breakdown this last week – looking at what I’ve just said – is due to lots of things all coming together all at the same time. I haven’t been able to think too deeply about it until now because the thinking part of my brain just hasn’t been available to me.
So, yeah, I have been really badly triggered and ended up very very dysregulated this week. Fortunately, I had told Elle about the emails I’d received because I could feel like I hadn’t quite been able to process them in the way that I might usually. I think Elle understood what a big deal it was, because last weekend she sent me a message to please look after myself because … it’s a lot. I assured her that I was totally fine. And in that moment that part of me was. Adult Me was ok. And Adult Me is usually the one that reads the emails and responds and that’s that.
But beneath the coping exterior of my adult self, all the alarm bells were ringing in my system. Essentially, my mini bus was on fire, I’d lost two tires from a blow out, the brakes had stopped working (I keep dreaming that I am driving my car at the moment and my brakes won’t work) and I was heading down a steep and slippery slope at speed in the dark and perhaps most worryingly of all – all the seat belts for the little parts of me had come unclipped. No one was strapped in and a big crash was imminent. This is not a good place to be in.
Part of me knew Elle was there and that we were ok because she kept contact with me a lot last week/weekend because she’s always been there when I have needed her to be – and yet by the time it got to Monday, no matter what I did I just could not ‘find’ or ‘feel’ Elle or believe that things weren’t about to go belly up in the most catastrophic of ways.
I almost cancelled my session on Tuesday last week. My body hurt so much. The anxiety in my stomach was physically painful and I was finding it hard to differentiate between anxiety and hunger. It was like everything in my brain and body was in a total malfunction. I couldn’t eat because I felt sick with anxiety, and then by about three in the afternoon my stomach would hit another level of pain…which I thought was just me getting more and more worked up but in actual fact was that I needed to eat. My system was buzzing with that horrible electrical feeling, too. I couldn’t sleep. I was having nightmares. It was rough.
Part of me wanted to send Elle a text on Tuesday morning to tell her where I was at so that I didn’t end up crashing and burning when I arrived. But a protector part, the one who was already fearing that I/we had teetered into the territory of being too much and that Elle was reaching saturation point decided that it would be a bad move to bombard her any further and the best course of action was to turn up and be ‘fine’ and mask my way through the session.
That part of me is a fucking idiot.
Like for goodness’ sake – don’t do that. Never do that! But it really shows how dysregulated I was. I could not draw on any sense that things were going to be ok – that Elle was ok, that I was ok, that together we were ok. It was just a huge fucking mess.
I can’t remember much about the session now – but I do remember how awful I felt almost the moment I sat down. I was terrified. Of course, there was a part of me that desperately wanted to connect with Elle, be very close to her, and to try and let her in so that I could be reassured that whilst bad stuff might happen out in the world and has happened in my therapies in the the past, in our world right now, there is nothing wrong and I am not about to be unexpectedly dealing with her dropping a termination on me.
The thing is asking for that kind of reassurance when I feel like things aren’t safe feels like a lot, because let’s face it, it is all the ‘crazy’ and it’s ‘hard work’. And I when I feel like this there is a part that doesn’t want to take up any space at all. I don’t want to be seen struggling or behaving weirdly. Tbh, in that moment, if I couldn’t find my way into Elle’s arms I just wanted to curl up in a ball on the floor and hide.
It was agony.
Elle and I always sit together on the sofa. We’re not even sat apart, like we are always physically touching in some way even if it’s just legs touching. I remember that Elle reached for my hand really early on, as she always does, and I pushed it away.
FFS.
Anytime she tried to give me a signal that she was there or it was safe I just retreated further and further into myself because it felt like I was behind glass and I couldn’t allow myself to get what I so badly needed because in that moment I felt so ashamed of having any need of her at all.
Elle asked me if I wanted a hug and I said no – actually I think I just shook my head and continued to stonewall her. Ugh. This is an absolute nightmare kind of a situation for me. Because I know, or part of me does, that if I say no to physical touch then Elle absolutely will honour that. And yet… it’s the very last thing I want. Like that protective part that is working so hard to stop me getting hurt actually is wreaking fucking havoc because my system is screaming for contact and co-regulation. Elle ‘staying away’ (although remember she was sitting right beside me and we were touching) feels like a rejection even though it’s me doing the rejecting. It’s unbelievably painful.
I was completely frozen and then I disappeared altogether. My brain went wild and served me up the most horrible trauma memory soup.
I know I sat in silence for a long time, which I think was probably hard for Elle to know what to do because sometimes I am quiet and there is nothing wrong at all, and then times like these are unbearable, but externally I look the same.
I have no idea how long I was silent for, because I was lost. I kept looping round to Four and she was absolutely distraught. I felt so disconnected that after lots of back and forth in my brain, I told Elle that I wanted to go home.
Ugh.
I didn’t want to go home.
But in that moment the painful feelings of disconnect felt too much to bear. I moved forward on the couch and sat on the edge with my head in my hands. Elle shuffled closer to me and put her arm on my back and told me that she really didn’t want me to leave and that she was there. I didn’t leave. I stayed rooted to the spot for a while but slowly I started to take in Elle’s presence… she’d been there all along…
After a while, Elle asked me to look at her, I think maybe I had let myself reach for her hand by that point, but I just couldn’t look at her. I was so fearful of seeing something disapproving, or angry, or cold…or you know, basically anything negative…that I couldn’t do it. Elle assured me that all I would see if met her gaze would be someone who loved me. But still, I couldn’t do it. There was something, too, about feeling like if I looked at her and she saw what was in my eyes then I’d be really seen and exposed and if she truly got a glimpse of what was going on inside me then that would be too much… and that felt … scary as fuck.
I was crying silently. I just felt so lost and sooooo fucking messy and embarrassed about being such a colossal wreck. I think I remember something about Elle saying that she knows trust is really really hard, and something about me being brave…
I can’t remember how I came out of that fucking awful place. Like there’s just a complete blank space where the memory of the session should be but I do know at some point I found my way back to Elle. I don’t think I said anything to her – who knows? But I do know that I ended up snuggled into her for a long time and that felt so much better. Like my system just calmed right down and I was able to tap into the fact that I am safe with Elle. Elle is not Em, or Anita, or Hannah, or anyone else’s dangerous and traumatising therapists – she is Elle…and we are ok.
It felt so frustrating though – because Elle had been there all along and I just couldn’t let myself believe that she was there for me, or that she wanted to be there with that version of me. It’s a no-win situation – I fear being too much because I am too needy and need to feel so connected all the time but I also know that my shut down is really really hard to be around.
Even though things were fine by the end of the session – I felt so desperately sad when I left. Like, I beat myself up that I had wasted my chance for things to feel ok. When things feel hard in my everyday world – which they really do at the minute – therapy is the one place in the week that feels safe to me. It feels like a refuge. It’s the space where the armour can be removed and I can just be… and yet I just couldn’t do it last week. Instead I left feeling like my opportunity to catch my breath, be safe in the life raft if you will, wasn’t maximised and so leaving the space felt like I was back out at sea drowning without having resourced myself to be able to stay afloat.
I mean it wasn’t completely desperate because I didn’t leave the room dysregulated and upset … I never have with Elle which is really something when I think about how pretty much every session with Em left me feeling distraught and unseen, and how many times I have literally run out the room with Anita.
Elle asked me to text her and let her know I was ok later in the day and I refused!! Ffs. There was still that loud voice going on about not being too much and taking up too much time and space. When I got home, I was checking my phone, and she’d text me and asked me to let her know I was safe and said that she felt sad that I felt so alone.
This felt connecting and reminded me that it is actually ok to take up space, and to ask for support when things feel difficult. And because Elle had shown me that I wasn’t too much in her eyes, I felt brave enough to ask if we might be able to have an check in before our check in on Friday. We fixed something up for Thursday and knowing that was in the diary was sustaining enough to get through.
So,clearly, Tuesday wasn’t great at all…but I think it probably put things in quite sharp focus for both me and for Elle. It shone a spotlight on the deep wounds and although it wasn’t at all comfortable it probably was important that it happened. I guess, also, on a level, it must say something about trust I now have in Elle, because I let her see that completely broken version of me that I keep so hidden from the rest of the world. That part of me sometimes reaches out in email but doesn’t make it into the room in that way very often.
After our extra zoom check on Thursday, I sent an email to Elle (of course!)… she’d said she wanted to know what was going on with me on Tuesday and that when the words eventually came and I felt able to tell her I could send them if I wanted, or talk it through – whatever workes.
Thursday’s Zoom was … I dunno…ok…but not enough. It’s Zoom. And it’s fine… but it’s not the same as being in the room. And whilst I would rather have Zoom than no contact at all, I do need to find a way to get more of what I need from those contact points. I find it so hard to connect when I have needy child parts activated because they tend to go into hiding and then feel unseen and unattended to which is really difficult to manage.
So whilst it was nice to see Elle, it was also kind of traumatic because I couldn’t physically reach through the screen and touch her and that’s what the little parts of me really need. Whenever I see Elle on screen there’s always some really young stuff that wants to come out but it feels sooooo embarrassing. Like I want to say, “I wish I could hold your hand” or “I wish there was a way of having a cuddle today” or “I miss you” or “I love you such a lot” or “do you want to see my teddy?”… I don’t think I could ever say all that on a zoom call. It’s much easier in an email…and sometimes if I take a running jump at it I can say some of that in person but mostly Elle will tell me she loves me as we end the call, and sometimes I will say it back but more often than not I just disconnect the call like I am too cool for school and then cry.
Elle asked if I wanted to still see her on Friday seeing as we were talking on Thursday. I said I didn’t know. Ugh. Once again, that part of me that doesn’t want to be seen as too demanding and needy was fronting but later on in the call Elle said that she would be in the office on Friday if I did decide I wanted to see her. Of course I wanted to see her but I didn’t say anything at the time.
Anyway, after the call on Thursday some words came but I was so filled with anxiety and embarrassment at the time that I couldn’t even proof-read the email, I just sent it. Here’s what I sent:
The words aren’t wording because Brian is fried…and I don’t want to read this over as I feel sick.
Can I come in tomorrow? – and bring drinks.
For the record I will always want to see you in person when I can. I don’t know why I feel like I disappear on zoom, because I don’t feel like that when I am at work at all… and you’d think having teenagers staring at me all day I would feel super self-conscious and want to shrink away and I just don’t. I guess maybe it’s something about knowing that I am good at what I do and I am really good at building relationships with my students…but teacher me is brave and knows stuff and knows what other people need…I think part of me hides when I see you and then I just feel really like I can’t really find you and that feels horrible – sometimes, at least.
Everything feels really disastrous right now and I feel like I am tumbling down in a big hole. I have to hope that at least some of this has to be down to my body giving up on me recently because if that can’t be 50% of the reason then I might as well give up because I am so sick of this cycle and spiral.
I think some of it has to have been triggered by those emails the other week but actually that stuff is always there to an extent anyway shoved into the back of a cupboard with the door wedged closed and me leaning my full body weight against the door so it doesn’t ping open unexpectedly. Only it has.
It’s a bit like that scene in Friends where Chandler discovers Monica’s cupboard and it’s completely full of shit and she’s horrified because everyone thought she was a neat freak and had everything under control and she doesn’t. I mean I’m not pretending the cupboard isn’t full of shit, or that it doesn’t exist… I just can do without everything piling out all at once when I have to actually function.
Tuesday was really awful…well, you know, you were there. It felt like I was cycling through so many memories or feelings where I have felt alone, or abandoned, or disregarded and it’s awful because it’s not like getting wedged in one awful thing from one time, it’s like a video montage. And the scary thing was, after a period of time my brain just couldn’t cope with it anymore and took me off to the cliffs. I find that really scary because there have been loads of times when things have felt really shit (I used to imagine driving my car into a wall when I’d just passed my driving test just to make it all stop) but generally speaking I have enough of a sense that things won’t feel terrible forever and that I should just go and hide in my bed and be safe that way even if it feels unbearable – I don’t have any thoughts about actually ending it all. And I really don’t want one of my favourite places in the world to escape to now feel like it’s almost dangerous.
I know I have been feeling burnt out and exhausted and all the day-to-day life stuff for a while and I think my capacity for holding the cupboard door closed has reached an all-time low – like maybe the thing has just come off its hinges this week.
And I don’t want to shut down or push you away but at the same time that whole thing about being too much/not enough is massive. I feel like I am just being really negative and boring and it’s just really crap because no one wants to be around that. And not connecting with you makes it feel a million times worse but the fear of being seen and then being sent away is real…and that’s what’s happened. I want to trust that it wouldn’t…but it’s hard to believe it. And then I just feel really pathetic and needy.
Then to top it all off there’s the crippling feeling of shame and embarrassment because by now I feel like I should do so much better than I do and not get side-swiped. But it’s like all the alarms go off all at once and I can’t seem to do anything about it. I guess maybe try and tell you…which is fine if there are words and I am half way present but impossible if I am stuck somewhere else entirely. I feel like I need a human version of a retractable dog lead so that when I disappear and feel lost I know that I’m not really. It’s a bit like the story with the invisible string… only that now makes me feel sick.
I love you x
Elle replied with a really holding message and asked me if I would like to do an hour long session instead of the thirty minutes – yep!
So, Friday felt way better. I wasn’t a complete fruit loop. I felt connected to Elle. In the week, I’d bought her a novelty gift based on something that has happened recently and she too had bought me something funny. It felt really nice to feel like all the anxiety and stuff from outside the room was left outside the room and we could just connect as we do. I could lean into the feeling of safety without then being triggered into, “this won’t last, you can’t trust it”. I so needed that.
I am really aware of that pattern lately, though. I can feel so safe and so connected and so calm and then all of a sudden, I feel like the wind changes inside me for no reason at all, and I feel massively anxious and triggered even though ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAS HAPPENED OR CHANGED. It’s almost like my system wakes up and goes, “What the fuck is happening here? What is this feeling? This isn’t familiar – it must be dangerous!”
I think it’s going to take a while for my nervous system to see that safety can be trusted and that being exposed/vulnerable doesn’t necessarily mean something bad is imminently about to happen and that I need to get my shit together and brace for impact.
I think this experience is pretty common for those of us that have experienced trauma, especially attachment trauma whenever we start to experience a felt sense of safety after a lifetime of being unsafe. Until now our entire being has been constructed around adapting to others and the risk they pose to our safety- emotional or physical or both. So of course, sometimes the unknown- feeling safe, held, contained – feels really dangerous because all we’ve ever known is fear, or anxiety, or shame, or disconnect. We have no internal shelf to house safety…so it doesn’t belong.
And because of this, oddly sometimes feeling unsafe feels safer than actual safety because at least it’s familiar. We know it. We have entire rooms dedicated to the different ways we can experience and know lack of safety. It’s like an exquisitely curated library. We have strategies we are able employ to work with being unsafe and we know which shelf each one is on. We know to make ourselves small. We know to shut down. We are excellent at dissociation. We know how to people please and fawn. We know how to overextend ourselves. We know how to pretend we are fine…and on and on…And whilst this all feels pretty horrible, we know that we are protected – to an extent.
I’ll admit it, I feel a bit like I am fumbling around in the dark when I feel still, and safe, and content with Elle. Like what am I meant to do with that? Just enjoy it and be in the moment?! I guess, what I would like to do is build another room in my library dedicated to being safe rather than being unsafe and begin to fill it with all the different ways I know that I am safe – or safe with Elle at least.
I might start that catalogue this week, actually…and if I am brave maybe share it with her!
Anyway, this is enormous and I actually haven’t really delved quite into where I wanted to go – but this has been languishing in my laptop most of the weekend and if I don’t get it posted it will just wither in the depths for another few weeks.
Well, in case anyone is wondering, I’m still alive, folks… just about! It’s been months since I last posted anything here. I have been in a total freeze where life and writing is concerned. There’s been lots of times I have wanted to blog but I simply couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even turn the laptop on, let alone start tapping at the keys or come up with anything on the page. I don’t know why exactly, because there’s so much I could have documented – I just couldn’t physically do it.
I have told myself today that I just need to write something, anything, it doesn’t need to be any ‘good’ – I just need to break the back of this horrendous block that I am experiencing. Like I said, the craziest thing is, there is loads to write about – some great and some not so great – but stuff that definitely needs to be here:
Elle and I had our two-year therapy-versary back in August and that was really special
We had the summer therapy break (groan) but Elle absolutely nailed it this year by writing me a letter to open during the break and recording a massive eight hour long story for me to listen to whilst she was gone
There’ve been a few little bumps in the road (a forgotten/mistimed phone check in) but largely it’s been really good in the room with Elle – and out of it
Sex dreams with Elle… god help me!
My life has been rough going – body is not behaving- but it’s getting dealt with
I managed to lose Monty Mouse the transitional object that Elle gave me last year and basically lost the plot last week
Like there’s plenty I could be writing about and there’s probably heaps I have forgotten about now too… but I just haven’t been able to do anything here or actually in my life if I am honest. I will get to it though. I need to get back into processing like this because it’s such a helpful outlet for me…when I am not frozen!
I experience the freeze response such a lot these days and spend so much of my time trying to circumnavigate my complete inability to function in my free time. Like I am literally shouting at myself to get my shit together and yet I just cannot move. I feel completely burnt out and anxious almost all the time – and even the summer holidays haven’t helped.
The only thing that is at least a part positive is I can generally turn it on for when I need to work… but my own ‘free time’ is a shit show. I waste hours doing nothing. Stuck. Knowing I have stuff to do and yet am completely unable to do anything is so infuriating. When I am like this I don’t think,“Ah well, fuck it, I’ll just give myself permission to do nothing and rest today” instead I feel like the weight of everything is sat on my shoulders and chest and I continue to beat myself up.
Until reasonably recently, I have always been able to keep on top of things at any cost (and there is a cost!). I am used to running on empty and powering on through. I know I need to do the laundry, clean the house, get the ironing done, go to the supermarket, sort out life admin all around actually doing my job…and I just can’t. It’s just fortunate, I guess, that I also have days where I am totally ‘on it’ and just go all out for four or five hours and clear the decks…but it’s all exhausting.
I want to be able to switch off properly, power down and rest. But my system just cannot do it. I think for so long I have had my self-worth tied to the idea of productivity and serving others that it is taking quite a lot to move out of that place. Like my conscious brain is wanting to do the self-care, give myself space and time, allow myself to be human rather than trying and failing to be superhuman … but my system hasn’t got the memo yet.
The only saving grace is that at least some of this (exhaustion, anxiety, brain fog etc) might actually be down to/exacerbated by the fact that my blood chemistry is a bit out and not simply perimenopause and trauma. I found out this week that I am deficient in some areas after going to the GP and getting some tests done. I am hoping that the supplements I have to take will see me bounce back to a more normal state … even if my normal is still a bit whacky! I can’t spend my whole life stuck in a freeze, that’s for sure!!
Anyway – that’s a load of unnecessary preamble… it’s just an explanation of where I have been – if anyone has even noticed I’ve been AWOL. Tbh, I feel like blogs have died these days. Very very few people that I have followed here for years write at all anymore. I miss them and often wonder how they are getting on having been lucky enough to witness parts of their journey. I sincerely hope that life has worked out and they are happy and have no need to write because things are so great, now. But I wonder, too, if like me, people just don’t have time/capacity to post anymore especially when it feels like you’re sending your deepest most vulnerable self out into what can feel like an echo chamber.
I do wonder a bit, too, if the death of blogs is about the way social media works these days and how we consume it. We need to be grabbed in seconds and have about a ten second window of attention before we scroll on by. I know that I get a lot more engagement with my mini-posts about Monty over on Instagram and it takes next to no effort or time to keep his page active. Maybe long written posts just aren’t what people want to read anymore – or perhaps we read them but don’t engage/comment. My stats would suggest this page still gets tonnes of traffic… so who knows?
I guess the place I have always come back round to, is that first and foremost this blog is for me. It is a place for me to put my stuff and have a record of what’s gone on in my therapy and mess of a life. And so, it really doesn’t matter if I blog weekly, monthly, or only occasionally…it’s always here for me. And if it helps anybody else along the way to feel less alone, or get an insight into what therapy can/should/shouldn’t look like then that’s really great.
Like I said, I am definitely going to spend some time and write separate posts about the lovely things that Elle and have done this summer to celebrate our relationship and remain connected but today I want to double back round to something that has come back round to front and centre again for me this week and that is HARM IN THERAPY… and it’s taken me a thousand words to get here – that ten second window has most definitely expired for piquing anyone’s interest. Lol.
Still – fuck it- I’m here so I am going to say it once again:
It never ceases to amaze me what a fucking shit show the profession of counselling and psychotherapy actually is, and the absolute carnage and devastation that therapists leave in their wake after enacting the most heinous gaslighting bullshit on their most vulnerable clients…there should be some serious consequences for that!
It’s almost unbelievable (yet also not unbelievable at all, sadly) what I hear from people who reach out to me when they have come across my blog. So often it seems that having read my account of what’s happened to me over the years they at least feel like they are not alone in experiencing the utter devastation and grief that comes with being unceremoniously, and often unexpectedly, terminated by a therapist who has promised to be in it for the long haul, “no matter what”.
I wish it wasn’t the case. I wish that my experiences with damaging therapists were isolated, that I was just unlucky, or that what’s happened happened because it’s fundamentally a ‘me problem’ and that’s why things have gone wrong with those whom I have invested time and energy and love into to try and help me.
But no.
It’s not just me.
I’ve met so many lovely, yet wounded clients that have been basically left for dead in callous hit and run jobs via this blog. And every single time I get an email about a rogue therapist it actually breaks my heart a bit. I hate that we, as clients, go and seek out therapy for wounds that are already incredibly painful and are then made a million times worse in the therapy.
There’s a reason the wounded child parts of us went into hiding when we were kids, why we shelved our needs, why we overcompensated, why we were so compliant, why we suffer with eating disorders and addiction…we’ve tried to adapt and morph ourselves into something that allows us to survive what in reality is unsurvivable unless we severely contort ourselves and armour up and DISSOCIATE THE SHIT OUT OF OUR LIVES. Attachment is key to our existence as kids and we will do whatever we can to preserve even the worst kind of connection to our caregivers- even if it comes at the expense of our soul.
Therapists know this, or at least, therapists SHOULD know this.
Relational trauma is serious shit… you can’t just wing it and hope for the best as a therapist. It’s not good enough to be well-meaning and think that just being warm and compassionate will be enough.
I mean you’d think that was self-evident. So why does I find my inbox peppered with heartbreak time and again year on year? Why on earth are people still getting so badly hurt and harmed in therapy? Why, when these therapists actually say they are trauma informed, specialise in complex trauma, and even work with an IFS leaning do they fuck it up, fuck us up? Why do they not learn from their mistakes?
Sometimes it really feels like it’s the clients that are the sane ones and the therapists that are completely screwed up.
I do wonder, though, how many people go into training as therapists unconsciously looking to heal their own wounds?
I’m not against the concept of a wounded healer at all. In fact, I think sometimes it’s really helpful when a therapist has a lived experience of some of what their clients are going through — but if this is the case it is absolutely essential that therapists are VERY AWARE OF THEIR OWN SHIT, UNDERTAKE THEIR OWN THERAPY, SEEK OUT PLENTY OF SUPERVISION where they tell the fucking truth to their supervisors, and most importantly don’t start unconsciously working out their own shit in their client’s therapy.
We are not there to be their relational guinea pigs. We are not there for them to enact their fucking rescuer complexes… and when we trigger their own wounded child and disgruntled teen and all the other parts, we sure as shit are not there to bear the brunt of their anger, their frustration, their unacknowledged inadequacies, and god knows what else! But it happens all the time.
It is so incredibly traumatising – or retraumatising – to the client when therapy goes wrong. My biggest fear about myself is that I am ultimately “too much” and “not enough” to be loved by anyone. And my therapies with Em and Anita did an epic job of driving that message home. Rather than rewriting the narrative they wrote it in permanent ink – tattooed it into my skin. I can’t just scrub it off. It feels like the core messaging has been backed up time and again.
So what do I do after every rejection and abandonment yet still crazy enough to believe that therapy can help me if only I find the right person to work with?
I go to therapy armoured up. My system watches carefully to see whether a therapist seems safe or not. It’s very hard to bypass my protectors. But steady work, and reassurance that I am cared for, that I matter, that this time I am not going to be left or punished simply for having needs means that I will eventually remove my armour…and be completely vulnerable. And be needy. And let’s be clear, I have a lot of unmet needs from childhood…and life, tbh. And for a long time that’s no problem… until one day it is.
It’s always when a therapist is burning out in their own life that I start to trigger them. What used to evoke compassion and care now provokes scorn and the need to distance and self-protect. Anita said that her own inner child was struggling and she couldn’t deal with mine. That’s not my fault. It’s hers for not getting into therapy and attending to her own inner child. She ignored her wounding and then bled out all over me. It was me that bore the brunt of her failure to look after herself.
It was slightly different with Em. I don’t think she ever really liked me much. But I am certain my very active and vocal (in email!) system triggered the shit out of her. I became so aware of my parts and how they operated that I think it freaked her out. I truly believe that she hadn’t done enough work on herself and my need of her scared the shit out of her. I think she spent her working life in False Adult or Acting Professional Adult but underneath was a whole heap of exiled young parts.
I think what spooked her more than anything wasn’t my ‘tick like’ need for her and the attachment – we’d been working on that for years. It was my suddenly feeling brave enough to bring my anger and dissatisfaction to her. It was when I started to challenge what was going on in the therapy that she found an entirely new level of cold and distance – despite telling me it was safe to bring my anger for years and that there was nothing I could do that would make her end the therapy aside from physical violence…which would never ever happen.
But what happened when I got justifiably angry but in my very measured and clear way? What happened when I really started to advocate for myself? Withdrawal of already (lukewarm) warmth as a punishment…followed shortly after by a character assassination and termination.
It’s all here on the blog. It’s not new news. All I am saying is, this stuff shouldn’t happen. And it does. Time and again.
The reason I am writing today is actually because someone reached out to me this weekend who is going through the wringer right now and it’s made me angry. I am mad that yet another vulnerable person is suffering at the hands of professional who thinks it’s fine to wash their hands clean of them when the going gets tough.
This person had read enough of my blog to consider it possible that their therapist might actually be Anita because there were so many similarities in what had just happened to them and what happened to me and it seemed we are in the same area of the country.
I can’t lie, part of me felt sick at the idea that Anita might still be working with someone with complex trauma after her swearing blind that she no longer did that sort of work, and the idea that she’d possibly let me go and kept this person on, felt sickening. But, of course, it wasn’t Anita. It was another fucking rogue bastard ‘therapist’ in my city behaving in a completely terrible way and leaving their client in a state.
Like me this client had already experienced harm in therapy before and so it is even more galling that the current therapist is reenacting the same old stuff.
How on earth does this keep on happening?
I think part of it is that the world of therapy is so closed doors. Who really knows what happens in these rooms unless we say something? Most people go to therapy and trust that the person sitting opposite them knows what they are doing. Most people see that these therapists belong to a professional body and therefore, surely, that means it’s safe enough.
Only it’s not.
So often it’s not.
Because what happens when things go wrong? Most of us just leave with our tail between our legs and go off into a dark corner to lick our wounds. I have never made formal complaints about either Em or Anita…and maybe I should have. Therapists have told me I would have a very strong case against them both. But I have zero faith in the system and governing bodies to act appropriately when faced with the evidence.
I know that Em and Anita would do everything in their power to save their skins rather than take any kind of accountability for what they did to me. And not only that, in those attempts to protect themselves they would have thrown me under the bus, labelled me, blamed me, shamed me, and I know I would not have survived that.
It seems to me that unless a therapist has crossed a sexual boundary everything else is garners a little slap on the wrist and some advice to seek out more training and supervision for the therapist – especially if they say they were ‘stressed’ or ‘burnt out’. There is nothing in it for the client…and let’s be real here, even when we have been hurt really badly we don’t suddenly stop loving these people. We don’t want to hurt them…we just want them to say sorry and admit that maybe they fucked up but it wasn’t because they didn’t love us. But they’d never utter the ‘L’ word again and I think that would hurt us such a lot.
So instead, we try and navigate being suddenly cast adrift. We are terrified, traumatised, triggered. Panic floods our systems. We are left without any support at all – there is no safety net. The grief is unreal. It feels like a bereavement… it’s not even funny.
Even now, five years on I still feel sick when I think about Em. I was in therapy this week, not feeling very well, and suddenly I dissociated when I thought about how neither Em or Anita cared enough to stay despite knowing my history – both emotional and physical. It was too much to cope with and my brain vacated the space. Elle was sitting right beside me but I couldn’t feel her. It was awful.
I am not completely overcome by this stuff all the time – thank god. Time is a great healer -or at least gives a bit of distance. But I am not free of it either. I know the pain of what has happened to me in my therapies will never completely go away. It feels to me like shrapnel in my body. I am always trying to move in a way that prevents me from feeling the pain of the sharp waste inside me. Mostly I am successful at it. But not always.
This week, for the first time in a long time I longed for Anita. I wanted to hear her voice, be in her presence, and have her hold me in the way she used to. I know that version of Anita is long gone and another part of me would never want to see her again. But there are parts that still miss her. There are parts that miss Em and wish there was a way of at least getting closure if nothing else. I think that’s the hardest part in lots of ways – having to pick up the pieces and try and make sense of it when the other party refuses to.
So yeah, I get it when these emails hit my inbox. I will never not be moved by someone’s story. I will never not feel sad when I see the same promises that were made to me being broken. I will never not be able to relate to the absolute devastation that this sort of ending causes. I feel it in my body every time I read it. I am just so sorry that so many people are still getting harmed in therapy. We deserve so much better. We have always deserved so much better.
It’s two years this coming week since I walked into Elle’s therapy room completely broken and in pieces, vowing that I would never again allow myself to get close to, or attached to, a therapist. I promised myself that this time, I had one simple focus: I would go in and work through the damage done by Anita (and maybe the others) and get the hell out! Bugger the rest of the trauma – I’d lived with it for my whole life and I’d manage on my own.
Yeah, that really worked, didn’t it?!
Elle and I have come such a long way since that warm day back in August 2023, where I think I turned up in one of my homemade tie dye t-shirts (don’t judge!) and basically talked at her for well over an hour basically giving a high-speed but potted version of ‘all the things’ and praying that whatever I said wasn’t going to be ‘too much’. I remember emailing Elle after that first session and basically apologising for the splurge and telling her I hoped that I wasn’t too much… which is really sad when I think about it – but shows the damage that’s been done in previous therapies…as well as by my mum growing up.
I couldn’t have imagined back then that we’d be where we are now, and I know that could never have happened if I hadn’t have felt safe (enough) with Elle. My runners are so quick out the blocks these days that they’d give Usain Bolt a run for his money! But because it’s been such slow, steady, safe work and our relationship has been constructed so carefully and with consideration my runners never get too far down the track with Elle – it’s almost like there’s an invisible elastic bungee tied to my ankles and it pings me back to her.
I feel like in the last couple of years we’ve built solid foundations and that even when things feel stormy and rough, we can weather whatever comes our way TOGETHER…which I guess is the idea of it all!
I have absolutely no doubt that Elle is holding my hand no matter what (even on days like today when a lot of my system is in a total all out panic about a call we had this morning – I was in a FREEZE and barely spoke). I am hanging on tightly to what I know to be true: Elle cares no matter who shows up, or doesn’t show up.
All the steady months (and years!) of work and reassurance is finally starting to bed in. I think I might finally be getting to a place where I am able to see Elle for her – rather than worry about everyone who has come before her and then believing she’ll repeat their patterns on me. Maybe, just maybe, we are rewriting the script a bit. Or some of my system is seeing things a little differently and it’s tipping the balance in a more positive direction. Actually it’s a lot like trying to coil a spring in the opposite direction. We are doing a good job of it – but occasionally it pings back. Like today, the panic is there- but I know it won’t last for weeks on end…maybe the weekend, or just today (please let it be this!), and sometimes it’s just a few hours.
I think part of the reason things are as strong as they are is because I have a voice that I am not afraid to use now (says the girl who was basically mute in our check-in today! – go figure)…or, if I am afraid, I say it anyway! Being a veteran therapy-goer who’s been through the wringer a fair few times, I know what I want and need now, and I ask for it…I suppose I keep showing up with the map, and the emails, and with my armour off and Elle pays attention to what I am saying.
Elle really listens. And the more I am prepared to share with her the stronger our bond and her understanding of me becomes. She actively invites me to tell her what I need – no shame…and even today’s silence and freeze WAS TELLING HER something is up, because I wasn’t masking or pretending. False Adult wasn’t there… instead, a hurting part of me was, and she may not have a voice but she was on the call at least.
Of course, I’ve still got a bloody long way to go. I feel like we’re four miles into a marathon and so sometimes my old friends Shame and Embarrassment show up at the side of the road to ‘cheer me on’ in the only way they know how (throwing things at me and trying to take my legs out from underneath me) and then a little further along the road Fear Of Abandonment and Rejection turn up and tell me that I am “shit at running and should go home now” but I recognise this is old programming and whilst these protective parts might slow me up, they don’t stop me altogether.
I one hundred percent know Elle can handle what I bring to her and I one million percent have faith that she isn’t going to tap out on me when the going gets tough. Elle sits beside/with me with a softness and care that comes out of her in waves. She doesn’t flinch. Like she’s a pro at unconditional positive regard…or shall we just call it love? I feel better when I am with her…and even if I start off rough, by the time we end I’m in a way better than I was.
But Elle thinks outside the box too…and this really appeals to me. She isn’t rigid and boundaries for boundaries’ sake. After so many years of rigid therapy with Em it’s nice to feel like our relationship and how we work together has a bit of an organic quality to it. It’s different to how things were with Anita, too.
It was recently coming up to the anniversary of my dad’s death which is always a rotten time for me. Elle had suggested a few weeks before that we could have two sessions that week and that maybe we could do something nice to put a different association on the day, make something beautiful out of something heavy. This sounded really lovely to me – and it felt so nice that Elle was looking ahead and thinking about what kind of support I might need rather than just letting a hard time pass by in the usual run of things.
When she mentioned booking the additional session I’d literally just told her about a dream I had had with her in (not a nice one), and she said that she too had dreamt about me that same week but that hers was really lovely dream – because we’d had a picnic together in the room with tiny cucumber sandwiches that I had brought in…and then she said, “I think that would be a really lovely thing to do – let’s have a picnic on the day you come in for the extra session”.
So that’s what we did.
On that hard Monday (I’d cried a lot in the morning – floodgates had opened), we both came in loaded with food, drink, and treats. Elle had brought a proper picnic hamper with her and a picnic blanket and we laid it out on the floor of the therapy room and ate and chatted and laughed. I’d made a YouTube playlist the weekend before, and we played it in the background. And honestly it was just so lovely.
We had a serious feast…much better than the one in the picture!
Elle brought in little ham sandwiches and some cucumber sandwiches (because of the dream she’d had!). We had ginger beer (just like the Famous Five), chocolate, fruit, crisps, dips, homegrown tomatoes from Elle’s garden, Belgian buns (although we were too full to eat those and saved them for the session the next day). Elle even brought me in a can of cherry coke because she knows it’s my absolute favourite. But perhaps most special was that she brought me in sausages and cheese on cocktail sticks. I had said that it was a happy memory from when I was small, and so she brought it to life.
Do you know what that feels like? To be held in the details? To be seen and held with so much care that someone brings your fleeting moments of childhood joy into the present? In that moment time folds in half and you get to be little and loved as well as seen and cared for in the here and now.
It’s everything.
And after years of an eating disorder to actually sit in the therapy room and not be at all self-conscious about eating… HUGE!
I could cry writing this because I can just deeply feel and see the love and I feel like my heart could burst – and so often I lose sight of it when my system goes into freefall (like this morning) when I feel like I am simultaneously too much and not enough and on the verge of overwhelming Elle.
There would be some therapists (Em for one) who would have an absolute meltdown at the idea of what Elle and I did on that lovely Monday afternoon sitting on a picnic rug spitting our cherry pips into a flask and genuinely just having a really nice time together…but in negatively judging, they would neglect to see that Elle and I connecting in a real way, opened up a safe enough space for me to finally be able to open and read some letters from my dad that I haven’t been able to look at in the seventeen years since he died.
With Elle by my side, I felt safe enough to dip into that pain and that is enormous. This particular anniversary is so full of grief and yet I was able to access my grief in a far more helpful way than ever before. I wasn’t drowning in it – because Elle had a life vest for me. She held my hand and stopped me from sinking and as a result I feel like something has metabolised this year. Like I have moved something on that has been stuck for nearly twenty years.
So, tell me how that is a problem, or bad practice? It’s not. It’s meeting a client where they are at and creating the kind of space that is needed for the healing to be done.
There are so many therapists who get bent out of shape even at the idea of a client bringing in their own drink for their session, and aren’t sure whether to have a box of tissues to hand, or you know have strong opinions on moving a chair…so let’s not even go there with between session contact and physical touch!
Yet I can say some of the most connecting moments with Elle have been when we’ve been sitting next to each other and had drinks, or biscuits, or played roulette with jellybeans creating some really weird combos, or recently when we totally overloaded on sugar from some seriously dense cakes from a local shop and neither of us were able to eat for the rest of the day. Or the other day when we tried out the new M&S strawberries and cream sandwich (not a fan!). Like all these little moments work on so many layers of my system.
There’s something really human in those moments. It’s connecting when I bring a coffee from the shop round the corner and it’s fucking terrible. We each taste it and agree it’s a flop. Or recently we were wincing at a crazy bitter lemonade. It’s been north of 30 degrees Celsius here lately and the UK just doesn’t even attempt to do air con – so bringing in cold drinks to share has been a hydration thing…but it’s also therapeutic for me!
Relational wounds need healing in safe relationships and Elle has created an environment with me that allows me to be and do exactly what I want or need in the moment. Sometimes that’s really deep soul and heart work, and sometimes it’s being silly and childish. Sometimes it’s food and drinks. Sometimes it’s playdoh. Sometimes it’s stories. Sometimes it’s saying nothing at all and having a long hug and nearly (or actually) falling asleep. Other times it’s me chewing her ear off for the whole ninety minutes – but whatever it is and however I come to the room, I am very much welcome.
But it’s not just what happens in the room that makes a difference – it’s what happens throughout the week. I can email Elle or text her if I want. I can ask for a check in. I can ask for transitional objects – and Monty has had a really fun year over on Insta since he came to live with me.
And all of that is ok. I am learning that Elle is open to hearing whatever I think might help me – and will always give what I say proper consideration…unlike Em who was a hard “No” on almost everything I suggested…and we all know how the pebble transitional object bombed… six months of hoping and believing she was going to finally give me something close to what I needed…ha. So disappointing.
Turns out that so far, I am pretty good at not stepping over lines and invisible boundaries. Of course, I don’t ring her or turn up out the blue – or whatever it is that therapists seem to panic about happening with clients with complex trauma…because as much I have a lot of trauma, and as much as my inner children are in a state, I do also have an adult self who operates in the world fairly successfully and I know what is and isn’t ok. Of course, I would like to be able to spend more time with Elle. I would love to not be ‘on the clock’ and just spend a day with her where I wasn’t aware of having to squeeze everything into ninety minutes but the only way that would ever happen is if we decided for that to happen.
It makes me laugh, really. I remember when I was working with Em how I would trawl the internet searching and trying to find evidence of what was acceptable or possible in therapy because I felt like my therapy was just … not meeting me where I needed – and more often than not I felt that what I came across was a highly defended, almost paranoid approach to therapy by therapists.
Clients were so often pathologised and infantilised – it was as though if you gave a client an inch, they’d take a mile and the next thing you know you’d be needing a restraining order. It’s total bullshit. To be honest, the longer I have been online blogging and communicating with people in therapy, the real danger seems to be the therapists and not the clients!! #harmintherapy
I know counselling and therapy is all about processing and thinking – but sometimes I feel like therapists get caught in a trap of overthinking a situation and lose sight of the fact that therapy is really just about two people having a relational experience together. Of course, there are boundaries and rules to how it works but it doesn’t need to cold and sterile. If I wanted a sterile experience, I would type my woes into ChatGPT and let it be my therapist for free…or you know, have a relationship with my mother.
Fortunately, there are some therapists who are human and discuss how they work online – and of course clients who write and give a window into their therapy. I guess, what I would say is there isn’t a one size fits all approach and each therapy needs to be co-created between the therapist and client. It should be a collaborative experience, not a place where the client is powerless and ‘done to’. There will always be a power imbalance, but it doesn’t need to be a central tenet of the work. For those of us who had no power or control as children that sort of therapy doesn’t help at all.
I stayed with Em for all those years because how she made me feel was familiar… it wasn’t healing. I gained a lot of insight, for sure…but that came from all the suffering. Ugh.
The thing I love so much about therapy with Elle is that there is space for all the parts of me. The littles who cling and ache and need. The teenage part who hides behind eye rolls and survival. The adult who tries to keep it all tidy but is tired. They all get to show up. They all get to belong. They are all loved.
I am loved – just as I am.
I don’t have to shrink myself into something that I think makes me ‘manageable’ or ‘palatable’ anymore – both literally and metaphorically. I don’t have to apologise for being messy or needy or too much. I can just ‘be’. Although, of course I do sometimes reach out and apologise for being all of the above – but not because I think Elle wants me to. In fact she would say there is never any need to apologise for how I am.
I love Elle and that terrifies me sometimes. When I feel vulnerable and small, sometimes the fear of losing her is too much to bear. Sometimes I carry it around in my chest like a second heartbeat that almost drowns out my own. But I don’t doubt her care for me. I see her gentle, thoughtful love EVERYWHERE. It’s in her remembering, in her words, in the way she sits with me instead of away from me. It’s in the sausages on sticks. It’s stories. It’s in the way she meets me wherever I am and says yes, this too can come in. It’s in the way she holds me – physically and emotionally.
It’s our two-year anniversary this week and do you know what was really lovely? Last session she asked me, “So, are we celebrating our two-year anniversary next week?” and I replied that we were. She said, “Good, because I’ve made something!” So I’m intrigued about that, but also touched – because yet again Elle is showing me in the most certain of terms that what we are doing together matters.
x
And I’ll leave this on one of my favourite Andrea Gibson quotes:
I’ve been in therapy for a long time. Like, a really long time. It’s been ten years solid this time around, albeit with four different therapists (not that I am counting!). I’m not sure how to explain how long that is in soul years, but it feels like a thousand.
I am no stranger to the therapy room. Even before this latest solid run of ‘trying to get my mind fixed’ (or should I say my nervous system recalibrated and the mother wound healed?) there have been some hopeful episodes in the ‘room’ over the last twenty-five or so years. But mostly, as is generally the case when you’re a student in college or university, these were relatively short-term therapies.
I went, then, because I was suffering with anxiety or depression or stress, or my eating disorder, or imposter syndrome or whatever (the list goes on and on). I knew deep down that something was very wrong and those sessions acted like sticking plasters for a wound that was far deeper than I ever could have imagined at the time. Little did I know that I needed far more attention than four or six sessions could ever hope to provide.
I remember feeling like I was fully losing the plot as it was coming up to Christmas when doing my MA. I was twenty-two and I realised that I needed to see someone having not been to a therapist since my A Levels. The university I was studying at had a counselling service and, fortunately, as most people had already left for the holidays there was some availability to see someone.
It was in that room that the dam broke. It was a tiny room in the back of an old Victorian red brick building not far from my seminar building. I started to let out ‘all the things’ and although I only had four sessions with that counsellor it was such a relief to finally have someone say to me that I wasn’t overreacting and that actually they thought I could really use some long-term therapy because ‘trauma’…and no, it wasn’t just the stress of deadlines and they didn’t try and ply me with strategies to get through the immediate stress rather just gave me a space to be heard and collapse a bit after trying to hold it together for such a long time.
I might have walked out of those short-term sessions feeling a bit bereft – like, it would have been so great to be able to spend a few months with that particular therapist as a bit of a scaffold around my crumbling self, but that wasn’t how the service worked…and where was the long-term therapy that a student with no money could afford? I certainly couldn’t access the kind of therapy I need/ed back then and so put everything back in the box on the top of the shelf and continued on with life until I couldn’t do it anymore.
One thing I will say, is that these episodes of short-term therapy never did me any harm. They may not have been long enough, but I didn’t leave those sessions in a worse state than when I started. But then perhaps these therapies were never quite long enough to activate my attachment system. I don’t know. But then, that doesn’t work, because I saw a therapist N, for two years after my dad died and it helped, I was attached to her- and we’re still in contact now seventeen years later – certainly no harm done there.
Harm in therapy didn’t become a reality for me until Em – the highly experienced Clinical Psychologist, the person I was led to believe I stood a really good chance of healing with, and so the person I trusted with my whole story and self. Gosh. What a mess it was.
I met Em thirteen and a half years ago, now. I feel so sad, looking back over my life, that I have been trying so hard for so long to feel ‘better’ and yet here I am still working on undoing damage not just from my childhood, my life, but actually my therapies. It’s tragic.
Em and I initially did sixteen months in the NHS — it was the kind of therapy where the clock ticks louder than your voice and the radiator only half-works and my god, those awful shiny yellow gloss-painter woodchipped walls were really something!… but finally getting a space to delve into my psyche with someone who (on paper at least) really had the skill to help was much-needed.
But like every therapy before – the time I had wasn’t long enough. NHS work, even when it’s extended (which mine was) is still time limited. There is only so many sessions you can have and then that’s it – there’s a huge waiting list (three years for me back then) and you can’t clog up the system forever even if you really need the therapy. And surely you should be grateful to get a long stint of therapy in the first place. It’s kind of laughable, because it took me a year to even get close to the work or for my system to activate. In reality a little over a year of once-a-week therapy is nothing for Complex Trauma and quite honestly, the NHS just isn’t at all equipped to help with these kinds of issues.
And my god, opening my version of Pandora’s Box and then being left with no therapy at all really really messed me up. The nightmares. The panic attacks. The eating disorder and self-harming behaviours were triggered again. My child parts (and my structurally dissociated system – not that I knew that that was what it was then) had a complete meltdown. The feelings of abandonment and rejection felt huge. And I didn’t cope at all. But I was completely and utterly alone and without any kind of support…because I’d used it up.
Em had agreed that we could see each other in her private practice when our sessions finished but the NHS had stipulated that there needed to be a three-month break between ending there and commencing with her again. At the time I accepted that as how things had to be – but knowing what I know now about my system I can see how very wrong it was to leave that work wide open and leave me essentially hanging. What I should have done then was reach out to Em and let her know what was going on, but of course, I didn’t know that was possible. I was just following the rules…because I have always followed the rules.
After two months on my own without therapy, my graphic nightmares finally stopped in their tracks and I didn’t even dream again for nearly three years– I basically shut off/dissociated my entire system and lived my life in ‘false adult’ I think. And so, I didn’t go back to Em for three years.
You could call it a ‘break’. I call it surviving without witness – but I think there was always a part of me, a child part or five, that I had exiled who was desperate to find my way back to Em. The little parts of me that had been so activated in her therapy room, and all the trauma too, needed a place to go.
And so when I finished my cancer treatment and all the wheels fell off – I went back to her…because… well…to parts of me she was mum, and a kind of safety, and I very badly needed someone because I was very much not ok.
In the intervening three years since I had sat with Em a lot had changed in my world – but underneath or inside I was just the same – all those little parts were frozen inside needing to be seen, held, and attended to. The trauma was there still, unresolved.
I remember the first day I walked back in the room and how hopeful I had been and how excited I had been to see Em again. And yet, it fell flat. I guess there was a part of me that wanted her to welcome me back with open arms or some kind of acknowledgement that it was good to see me again now that we weren’t in the sterile hospital. But she was ever the blank screen, and although my child parts came alive again the moment they saw her, they knew too that the rules were still the same.
And I am nothing if not the girl who follows the rules.
I came to my session/s every week.
I paid on time.
I was never rude.
I never cancelled on her until we were right at the end and broken (but then why would I, my sessions never felt enough and so I would never enact a break willingly).
And I tried so hard to do therapy ‘right’ – and stick within the confines of Em’s very very rigid boundaries (although occasionally failing and texting her – god forbid).
I tried so hard to be grateful for what was on offer. I tried to make it enough. I tried to be insightful and brave and DO THE WORK…and bring everything to the room even when I felt terrified and physically unwell.
I tried not to be too much.
But man, I felt small and disempowered.
I was the good girl in the therapy room and I hurt all the time.
I could never understand why it felt so painful to be with her…and so painful to be away from her, too.
I guess I thought I had to earn tenderness and care, and prove myself worthy of it because of course that’s been hard-wired into me from day dot.
I thought being easy to work with would make me lovable – or at least palatable.
It didn’t.
But then why would it?
That strategy had never worked with my mother so why on earth would it work in the therapy room? And yet here I was unconsciously repeating the same pattern with my therapist.
It seemed being the quiet good girl wasn’t ever enough.
So, I changed tack. It took a really long time for me to bring my pain about the relationship with Em into the room unwashed and unedited. Em had said she felt “blindfolded” with me and I thought this meant that my caution and hiding my feelings was stopping us being able to really connect. And man did I want to be connected to her and so I took a leap towards her around about the time I started this blog.
I wrote things down when I couldn’t say them out loud (because shame was so ever-present and dissociation never very far away). I folded pages of typed letters or blog posts inside my pocket like secret spells. Sometimes it would take weeks for me to build the courage to hand them over. Every time I did, I felt like I was giving her the map to the world inside me — it felt like I was screaming over and over, “Please, please just look. Please see what it’s like in here. Please help me not be lost anymore.” And perhaps in also written between the lines was, “Please love me”. But Em would sit and read my words never giving much away as I sat squirming opposite her and then carry on like she already knew the way and didn’t need my map.
And so, I walked alone over terrain that felt like barbed wire and cold rain and shame.
It felt in some ways like I was in the Truman Show – but no one told me what the point of it was, and the lights were much too bright, and whilst I could see Em she was always sitting behind her glass screen taking notes about what I was (or not doing) on her clipboard – she wasn’t in the scene with me. Every now and then she’d tell me where I was going wrong, “Like a tick”.It was as though she was some nasty film director coaching an actor who was absolutely doing their best to act the ‘right’ way but failing miserably time and again.
The thing is, I shouldn’t have ever had to have acted in that room. I should have been able to go and be me – exactly as I was and have that met with kindness, compassion, and curiosity. I should have been able to remove my various masks.
I wish.
I feel so sad when I look at how small I made myself in the room with Em – I don’t mean falling into my child parts small, I mean how little space I took up and how little I asked for from her and yet even that was made to feel like ‘too much’. I feel so sad that I tried to bend and fit to be the client she wanted me to be and it breaks my heart that for all those years my small parts couldn’t get anywhere close to what I needed. There was no we in that therapy- just me…flailing around and hurting.
I took big elephant with me in my bag for years but was never brave enough to take her out even when I had told Em about the many many child parts that were inside me and how they felt and we both knew how much hurt was inside. There was never an invitation from Em to be anything other than my very competent adult self…and that was really hard when my young parts were so very present. Part of me feels angry at my adult self for not doing more to protect my young parts – but I genuinely thought at the time going to therapy was me looking after myself.
I am not the same client I was back then. I have learnt such a lot about myself over the last decade and there is simply no way I would put up with what I did with Em now…or even Anita. And so although this growth and understanding has come at a heavy emotional (and financial cost)…I do at least know myself and have boundaries around how I will let myself be treated now.
But back then, I felt ashamed and embarrassed asking for anything from Em and her NOs to my very few requests cut so deep. Object constancy has always been a massive problem for me and I remember reading an article online by a therapist about how to stay connected to therapists on a break. They’d suggested a simple three dot text message in the week – like it’s bare minimum effort, no words to misunderstand, just a reminder that they are there. But no, she wouldn’t do it.
I remember asking for a simple transitional object – I wanted a short note written on a pebble that I had found on the beach near her house – and that became a torture project for well over six months. But in reality, I didn’t want a rock… I wanted a soft toy like Monty…only I never asked because I knew that was way out of the realms of acceptability for Em…and I was right. We couldn’t even get a few words on a pebble right, a toy for my young parts would have been simply outrageous!
I was made to feel like there was something desperately wrong with me because I wanted her to sit closer to me. I would dissociate so badly when I felt like she was far away but there was never concessions on Em’s part to make a move to adjust how we worked to make things better for me. I wrote in a letter once that I wished I could hug her. Somehow that was really inappropriate and uncomfortable and was addressed only once, “You know I don’t do that”. It felt like a sucker punch to the gut.
And heaven forbid we go anywhere near the ‘L’ word. Love was made to feel like a dirty word and I never once uttered it aloud…I only alluded to it in my maps/letters. And yet it is so much part of the work… talking through human emotions in all their forms is the work. And it shouldn’t matter if they are directed towards the therapist or anyone else. But also, I struggle hard to understand how if you spend years and years of your life with someone picking apart your most vulnerable stuff that love wouldn’t become part of the fabric of the therapy.
Ugh.
I’m not here to talk about her though – although I seem to have gone down the rabbit hole a bit today – I guess I am still reeling from the hurt… and we can totally skip over Anita, and Hannah because – well – I want to talk about now – 2025…
I want to talk about Elle…I want to talk about how I can be who I am, not who I think I need to be with her. I want to say how that the ‘good girl’ part of me has been allowed to rest a bit and that I no longer hurt in the way that I used to – but given this part alone is 2000 words I’ll break this post into two…and believe me, the next part is far more uplifting!…there’s even a picnic to tell you about!!
This is loooonnnng – so grab a snack, a drink, and a cuddly blanket and settle in for the ride!!
So last time I was here I was trying to catch up from all that happened with the BIG RUPTURE and get back on track more-or-less to the here-and-now on the blog… I’d just come off a phone check in with Elle that had come about because, once again, I had fallen head first into a doom spiral and had, at least, had the bravery (and sense) to ask to talk rather than to continue on down a path of emails where I was getting myself more and more panicked. But, how did I get to the point where I was requesting a phone call and what was the panic about this time???!
Well, you might remember I said it had been a about a month since Elle and I had repaired the BIG RUPTURE, things felt fine, the sessions since then had been connecting, but because we hadn’t doubled-back to what had happened during the break and the rupture my brain was starting to wonder if things were really ok or not. Part of me was looking for a bit of reassurance – you know, just in case behind the scenes Elle was harbouring something and I didn’t know about it. I think when things go wrong, I need to re-tread the ground several times just to be sure nothing terrible is lingering beneath the surface. I don’t want to find myself down in a hole unexpectedly.
Elle has always told me that if I need to reach out and check that she’s ‘still there’ then that’s absolutely fine to do that anytime. In various ways I do this a lot, but maybe not in quite so explicit a way as asking, “Are we ok?” We maintain a connection between our sessions but this will usually be by my communicating everyday stuff. I very rarely say, “I am feeling disconnected and need to know we are ok”. That sort of thing generally happens in the big splurge emails that come after protracted periods of ‘light’ when all the feelings bubble up and it all spews out in a huge vulnerable mess. Those messages are not a very regular occurrence…but they’re often enough.
A couple of weeks after the rupture/repair I did find myself asking for the tangible reassurance via a text. My Monday morning text reminder for our Tuesday session had come through and even though it was most definitely my lovely Elle, I wasn’t able to feel into it or find her in it. It had been Father’s Day that weekend and I think I was just feeling really vulnerable and sad and disconnected. So, I replied, “Are we ok? I totally get that [ref to message] should mean yes, but I’ve wandered away and got lost.” Elle assured me that we were completely fine and I felt lots better.
It really doesn’t take a lot to settle things down but even now, almost two years in, I still struggle to ask for the support and reassurance I need. I think after so many years of feeling the fear of disconnection (that comes with disorganised attachment) so acutely in my therapy with Em where I was actively chastised if I ever reached out outside of the session and then completely ignored, there’s a part of me that still feels like I am doing something wrong when I ask for something from Elle.
It’s not just Em’s legacy that impacts how I relate to Elle. Anita wasn’t like Em. I was able to message her, but there’s a different kind of fear that comes from this. I think in some ways I find it hard to trust Elle is genuine and means what she says because Anita made promises and then suddenly things changed and I was left high and dry. Anita was warm, and accepting, and encouraged me to ask for what I needed… until the day I was “too dependent” and there was a definite pulling back.
So, with both these therapy experiences always bubbling away in the back of my mind, it’s hardly surprising I struggle to ask for what I need with Elle. It’s no fun feeling like you’re ‘too much’ and I am so mindful of not wanting to overstep the ‘boundary line’ – although I am not entirely sure where that is. I guess I hope I don’t find out the hard way one day although I think it is entirely possible that at some point it will happen.
Having asked for reassurance the day before the session I knew that my internal world wasn’t functioning at its best and I was so glad to get into the room that week. I cried quite a lot – there’s a lot of sadness floating around at the minute with loss and grief and it’s coming out a bit – not full-on sobbing, but just slow tears…which for someone that never really cries in session, that is huge. I still can’t fully let go and let it all out but I feel like I’m edging towards that place. Elle says that she thinks there’s a lot of crying inside, from the young parts, but that I only let it out in small amounts – she’s right of course.
It’s felt like I am holding a lot lately and my need for safety and holding feels enormous and therefore the feelings of shame have built up around that. I don’t want to be as needy as I am…and as much as I try to remind myself that we are only as needy as our unmet needs, I have a hard time feeling compassion for those parts of me, when I know that they are the ones that seem to make therapy explode in my face.
In that session, Elle asked me what had prompted me to check if we were ok. I was cuddled in to her and I didn’t say anything, I don’t think. Sometimes there aren’t words in the moment. I was feeling so so sad and not because of anything between us, but I think sometimes when I feel safe with her, in that space, I stop defending myself against my feelings and they come…and bloody hell…it’s a lot. Sometimes an extra wave of grief comes up as I realise that the time with Elle is only short and before too long I will be on my own back in the world. The young parts of me feel devastated.
Elle asked me where I was feeling the sadness in my body. I didn’t answer again – I just cuddled in and clung on even more tightly to her. She understands now, that my silence isn’t avoidance or shutting her out. Actually, it’s really me minus the armour and often when a very small part is there…pre-verbal probably. Part of me really needs those very small parts to have space and time in the room but another part of me is terrified that it’s all too much.
After the session, I had time to think about everything, adult was back online rather than the littles being front and centre and I came up with this and sent it as part of a longer email to Elle:
I feel like I am almost drowning in shame at the moment or in a spin cycle with it. You asked me what had happened to text you on Monday to see if we were ok and if something had happened. Aside from more shit dreams, which don’t help, nothing had happened. The reality is I could send you that message every week, and don’t because … I am trying really hard not to be too much (not massively successful in that right now). But actually, by the time it gets to Friday my entire system is falling down a hole – and it’s all the time not just every now and again.
I try and remind myself that this isn’t new – like I know where the panic comes from – being left when I was small for so many years and then my dad dying after being away for three days … like it’s just really hard because my brain sort of knows that things are ok but how I experience it in my body is a different matter. So, I spend a lot of the weekend in a horrible place of feeling like something is wrong or bad is going to happen. And that’s shit…and then we head back into the shame thing because… I really get how clingy I am and well, then that takes me off on another path of doom…so it’s a lot.
The feelings reside in lots of places. There’s the pain/ache in my solar plexus, the big black hole in my chest that feels like its edges are ulcerated and burning, the tight feeling in my throat, the heaviness but also tingling in my legs that makes me feel like I need to run, pins and needles in my hands…. the hot feeling behind my eyes….sometimes all of those all at once… I think that’s probably why I would dissociate for the longest time. It’s far easier to feel nothing and sit outside your body than actually be in it.
So there was that… another big splurge of the vulnerable and more pieces of the road map offered up.
Elle and I remained connected as another week rolled around and then I left another lovely holding session with Elle on the next Tuesday. We had talked about a lot of things. Elle had bought a book I had mentioned and brought it to session for us to read together. You’d think that that would more than show that she wasn’t experiencing the heebie-jeebies post rupture… nope.
Almost as soon as I got out the room, I realised I had neglected to bring up the main thing I wanted to talk about that week…it wasn’t conscious avoidance, though. It just totally left my brain. I do think this is a form of dissociation. Like, part of my system is worried that something is wrong and so wants to protect me from poking at it just in case my fears are confirmed. After the session I felt ALL THE FEELS – you know the big loving ones? – ugh – and decided to send this email – let it all out RB! – looks like this last month or so has been big on the big emails, actually! haha:
I really missed you this week and it felt hard 😞 . Before today I wanted to ask you some things and tell you some things but actually by the time this morning got here I just really needed a cuddle and for the panic in my system to settle down and to feel safer and to reconnect with you…when I am with you I feel like I just want to soak it up as much as I can because the ‘leaky non-existent bucket that’s only just a handle now’ situation means that that feeling is quickly gone when I can’t see you. It’s like trying to hold water in my hands or it’s like sand slipping through my fingers… and it’s really difficult.
And although it was meant in totally different kind of context today, when I was talking about *friend and her wanting a relationship with me and you said about how hard it is when someone hands you their heart and you have to gently give it back to them…reminded me of something I said to *best friend a few months ago about how I feel really pathetic and sad with you. Like I feel like I have taken my heart out the bottle and am handing it to you like it’s a gift and actually it’s so broken and in pieces and damaged that no one in their right mind would want it. And yet, it’s all there is left…and I feel like I’ve exposed this really vulnerable bit of me, there’s no protection whatsoever, and it is so terrifying because given the state of it, I don’t think it will survive being dropped, stamped on, or in a hit and run again.
And I think the saddest thing is I feel like love is perhaps the biggest gift we can give or receive and yet I feel like my version of it is like an unwanted Christmas gift, that’s quickly discarded or seen to have no value. I imagine it a bit like when a kid makes something at pre-school out of air-drying clay and brings it home and although it most certainly is the most magnificent snail in their eyes, unfortunately they’ve selected brown clay and the coiled-up shape resembles a turd. It’s ok because I always know it’s a snail – but not everyone does… and then of course it doesn’t take long until it’s starts dissolving into dust and parts start breaking off.
Part of me doesn’t even want to say this because ugh huge shame 😳 but also there’s a bit that feels really sad when I feel like this and I don’t say. Like it feels a bit like there’s all these parts of me in the room watching and wondering why I don’t let you know they’re there or how it’s been. Although I think you probably do see them because I think these days rather than being locked in a cupboard or hiding behind the couch they’re really just hidden under a flimsy piece of fabric. Or maybe more like when kids cover their eyes and think you can’t see them…🙈
So, I wanted to ask how things are after last month 😬 and I wanted to talk to you about what’ll happen if we end up in that place again. And also, I think we need a code word for when things are bad or a symbol. And then just for added fun content I was going to mention that Brian is having a bit of a meltdown about living in my body right now and whilst I’m on top of it I thought I was over this shit – or maybe it just goes dormant. 🫠 There was something else but I can’t remember now… which bodes really well for teaching – I feel like a hologram.
Elle sent a really lovely expansive reply – here’s some of it:
Hello my sweet girl 🙂
I think you’re right about all of that stuff being totally present in the room, even though it’s not explicitly stated. I absolutely do feel the responsibility of holding your beautifully broken and fragile heart, and I think take that responsibility as seriously and with as much sensitivity as that warrants. I don’t imagine me telling you that holds much weight at all, given that you’ve been told almost the exact same thing many times before, but I always hope that is something you can feel in the room.
She went on to tell me that she promises that she’ll never ‘blindside’ me because when she takes any kind of action it comes from ‘months of consideration’. There was reference to what we spoke of at the time of the rupture. And then she talked about how we got to where we did. Then came:
I think seeking out information about each other that hasn’t been given freely is never helpful in terms of deepening connection, and instead of building closeness I think it has the potential – for you – to create an even more profound sense of isolation, rather than the closeness that is so badly wanted. If there are things I can provide for you between sessions to help you feel connected to me when you feel distant – I was thinking recordings of me reading our stories for example? – then let’s come up with some that feel like they might work. You also mention notes to open, and I think that’s a beautiful idea. Maybe I could write some affirmation cards that feel like they are uniquely special to us? I really like that idea.
The entire email was actually just really considered and thoughtful and lovely … could my brain take it in?
HA! Could it fuck?!
It fixated on two small areas of the message and went into full scale panic.
Firstly, I was wondering what kind of ‘action’ was coming? What could that mean? Was she turning something over in her mind and waiting to see whether or not to act based on what I was doing?
And then I locked on and fixated on the part about “seeking out information about each other that hasn’t been freely given” and it sent me into outer space in terms of panic and shame. I felt like this was a thinly-veiled comment about what had happened with our recent rupture and that she was in some way mad that I had been overstepping boundaries because there are some things I have found out about Elle that she hasn’t expressly shared with me – but then, it was information that was freely available online or that she had reference in an oblique way and I had found as a result.
Great.
So, I decided to reply to her with details of what I was worrying about – it couldn’t wait a week.
Elle replied and tried to address my concerns and she is really considered and careful in how she responds to me.
At the end she wrote:
I can feel myself getting tense as I was writing that, and am now worrying that I’m not communicating all this to you in a way that will land as I want it to, so I’m going to stop now.
I found out when we were in the thick of the big rupture that she has a thing about being misunderstood and says she can sometimes overcompensate to try and be clear and then feel like she’s making it worse. So, the message that she was going to stop didn’t feel like she was refusing to engage with me, rather that she was trying to reassure me but wasn’t sure if it was working and recognised that she didn’t want to make it worse.
I was still pretty activated and overnight had horrible nightmares but had a word with myself and realised that none of what I was experiencing was desperate… but that tying myself up in knots trying to explain what I was feeling in an email wasn’t actually meeting the need underneath. What I needed was to ‘hear’ that Elle and I were not running off in different directions, that she wasn’t annoyed with me or harbouring something from before, and that I hadn’t done something wrong… child parts much??!!
There was absolutely no way I was going to make it to Tuesday in the state I was in and so I text Elle first thing on Thursday morning asking if she might have time for a phone check in sometime before the weekend.
She got back to me immediately and said we could talk that morning… and we fixed up a time. Phew.
I felt nervous picking up the call, but as soon as I heard Elle’s voice, I could hear that there was nothing wrong between us. I could feel that that she was there. She asked me how I was feeling in my body and I replied that I felt like I was locked in a vice and tensing in a brace position. She said she really got that, and the actually she felt the same.
The talk we had was really really helpful. The instant connection and the honesty and being able to ‘feel’ Elle and the safety settled my nervous system so quickly. I felt my body starting to relax, the tension in my solar plexus went and I was able settle into the call.
As we talked, I was able to recognise that I am really good at latching onto the tiniest bit of ‘scary’ and lose all sense of the good in our communications – but it all comes from a place of fear. Elle said that she, too, can worry that she’s getting it very wrong with me when I let her know about the bits that don’t land in our communications and then she worries she’s making it worse for me.
I told her that it might seem like I am taking the whole message as ‘wrong’ but the reality is I am genuinely only looking for clarification and reassurance on the small bits and that at least part of me knows we are ok to be able to keep going over things with a fine-toothed comb otherwise I wouldn’t bring it to her to begin with and that her messages really really do help me. I am aware, though, that my attention to small details might come over as my being critical at times. But really, I’m just overthinking.
I think this is not just a complex trauma thing; I think there is an element of neurodiversity playing out here, too. Both my kids are autistic and the more they grow the more and more of myself I see in them (both as ac child and now) and so understand how my brain works. Talk about little mirrors! It’s complicated. There’s trauma and there’s neurodiversity, or neuro-complexity, and then there’s the space where it all overlaps… no wonder it’s fucking hard for me sometimes!
The good news is that Elle works with a lot of neurodiverse clients, and has close family members who are also autistic so I know I am not too much for her. When we first started working together, I said about my sensitivities to noise, and smell, and all the other various ‘things’ I struggle with and she said she was definitely somewhere on the bell curve, too. We connect on a level that I don’t with other people. Like I don’t really need to explain some of my ‘weird’ because she’s the same and gets it. Thank god.
One of the reasons I like working with Elle is because I think we are both very invested and committed to deep, authentic, clear communication. Like whenever I bring it to her, she more than meets me in it. I just wish my brain could remember this! – but my trauma history keeps jamming sticks in the spokes of my bike wheels time and again.
Speaking on the phone, then, was so good because it allowed us to clear things up so I wasn’t sitting with my panic and getting more jumbled and disconnected over the weekend.
After the call I sent this, and then carried on with my day like a normalish person!:
Mainly, I think I want to say that when I’m focusing on my scary 1% that absolutely doesn’t mean that I don’t see the 99% and that what you say to me doesn’t land. Because it does. Like it really does. And I am also really conscious that my saying I’m freaking out about the 1% can make you feel not enough – and that really really isn’t my intention at all because actually it’s not about you, it’s me panicking about thinking you’re going to disappear… and you are so right about the too much/not enough runners. I feel like I have magic jet pack running shoes when I think I’ve done something wrong, or that I’ve upset you, or mainly that I am going to lose you because I’ve said or done something off.
And when I get in that place it’s really hard to remember that things are ok – even though part of me knows it – and I can just disappear off like the Roadrunner leaving a dusty haze in my wake.
So, speaking to you really helps because it reminds me that Brian is frightened but his version of what’s happening isn’t necessarily the reality.
The weekend after the session was much more manageable than how weekends usually are. Cutting the time down between actually talking made a massive difference despite the panic situation I had got myself into. The emails and texts definitely do help but actually it was speaking made all the difference.
I know I have been talking about it for a while, the need for an extra session or a check in, and this really highlighted to me how needed it was, and I resolved to ask for us to see if there was a way of building a check in to our weeks going forward.
The next Tuesday came along and OMFG it was hotter than hell and I thought I was going to melt when I went to my session – like blimey the UK is in a serious heatwave right now and I hate it. I can’t concentrate and it’s absolutely terrible for cuddles!!
We weren’t many minutes into our session when Elle told me that she had enjoyed talking to me on the phone and she wondered whether I might like to figure out a time when we can speak each week. I said that would be lovely and she said we could talk about it the following week when we had two face-to-face sessions booked in. Yes two!
Why?
Well, during the rupture repair session when Elle came back from break, I had commented how ropey May and June felt due to the Anita ending anniversary stuff and how that had undoubtedly made our rupture a billion times worse… but that July was a different kind of hard due to the anniversary of my dad’s death and the month following that had some very complicated shit happen. Elle asked me then when the hardest bit of July was and I told her. She said, that we would book in an extra session on that day (the actual anniversary of my dad dying) and have two sessions that week if I wanted.
So that’s what we did, last week…and I’ll tell you all about it next time. We had a picnic! It was lovely.
I realised something this week – and that is, because I blog way less frequently than I used to (although my summer resolution to myself is to make time to write again), that often I post about HUGE OUCH things that happen in therapy and then don’t come back here and talk about the ‘what happened next’ for ages, if at all. For example, a couple of my more recent posts have been about ruptures in my relationship with Elle (remember the slogan t-shirt debacle and then finding myself on a therapist forum? – groan) and this is the first time I have returned to discuss the repairs Elle and I have made, and so these ruptures are sort of left hanging on the blog.
I imagine it’s starting to look like Elle and I are lurching from one terrible mishap to another without any sense of there being a resolution in between. That would be fucking terrifying, wouldn’t it?!…and it simply isn’t how it is. Thank goodness! Let’s be clear – I am not the same client I was back in the day with Em where she would say or do something to upset me, we’d be in massive rupture territory, and I’d just tough it out on my own because I was so frightened of her reaction to what I might say and the potential for abandonment and rejection that it felt safer to keep it inside (or here on the blog with you guys!) than talk to her. I didn’t dare raise my head above the parapet for years – turns out that wasn’t completely stupid given what happened when I did! #likeatick
It’s so funny – not funny haha, just funny TRAGIC looking back on that total mess (shitshow) with Em. In therapy, so much of the work is about building trust and working through/round your defences and so the main advice we generally see online for people when they are struggling about something in the therapeutic relationship is, “Take this to your therapist and try and have the difficult conversations because THEY WILL BE ABLE TO HANDLE IT. They are trained professionals, have done their own work, and see this stuff ALL THE TIME.” Only it’s not always the case, is it? How many of us have had therapists who have shit the bed the moment you challenge them, or tell them you’ve been hurt by them, or tell them you love them? How many of us know what it is to feel the walls go up, the air in the room drop to below freezing, to get the ‘boundary talk’, or worse – terminated?
So, the advice to bring the tough stuff to the therapist ‘should’ absolutely be correct – but I think really it also needs a caveat: if you think your therapist is safe enough to hear it.
The thing is how do we know if a therapist is safe?
Blimey, isn’t that a question?!
There should be that ‘felt sense’ of safety with your therapist (eventually), but sometimes that doesn’t come…and then all we are left with is a therapist saying, “You can trust me” – #Icallbullshitonthat – and a desperate hope that it’s an ‘us problem’ rather than a ‘them problem’.
Safety never came with Em – even though the really strong attachment (disorganised of course) did. The parallels between her cold, detached personality and the almost literal begging for evidence of care mirrored my relationship with my mother so perfectly that it’s little wonder I stayed for so long. Therapy felt horrible but so fucking familiar to me. This is how relationships were, right?
I was stuck in a place of paralysis waiting for my protectors to stand down, wanting to trust her, and after a few years of feeling more and more unsafe I found myself forcefully working against my protectors – hitting override again and again – making myself jump into the shark infested waters… and no doubt that might work (in a safe therapy where there are no sharks)…but it can be catastrophic in a ‘disaster therapy’. I used to laugh about getting the ‘therapy shits’ before sessions – but what a ridiculous situation to be in week in, week out – anxiety was sooooooo high that I felt physically sick before every session… and yet I wrote that off as ‘part of the process’. Fuck me. That’s never right.
I think one of the things I regret most about working with Em was that I went against my gut ALL THE TIME. I felt her frustration at how little I shared with her and how strong my protectors were (queen of dissociation!)…but I realise, now, that I must’ve had a sixth sense about how things would eventually go because when I did push myself to BRING IT ALL to her, the shit hit the fan on high speed didn’t it? My bravery and vulnerability were met with stone cold still face, topped with thinly veiled psychobabble insults “adhesive like a tick, taking whatever it wants, like you almost need a permanent breast, pushing the boundaries with no regard for what I want” … Ouch.
So – yeah – building trust and feeling safe is so hard, especially when you’re in therapy working with core messaging from childhood about being ‘too much’ or ‘not enough’ and perhaps never having even known what safety would feel like.It’s understandable that sometimes we, as clients, are scared stiff and the idea of being vulnerable freaks the living daylights out of us. It’s hard sometimes when we hit the skids to figure out how much of what we are feeling is because, “I recognise on an emotional and somatic level that this person is not safe!!!” and how much is the wonky brain making you think past patterns are repeating when actually things are fine.
It’s all the harder when you have also experienced harm in therapy as well. My therapists ALWAYS trigger complicated mother transference in me (ugh!) – but poor Elle also bloody triggers SHITTY THERAPIST transference too!
After my recent experiences with Em and Anita, Elle is basically doomed because in so many ways she isn’t like them but SHE IS A THERAPIST and Brian (my brain) doesn’t really trust therapists anymore. Thankfully, enough of my system does trust Elle…wholeheartedly…and so this means I can bring ALL OF THE THINGS TO HER EVEN IF IT FEELS SCARY OR UNCOMFORTABLE.
It’s taken a while but we have built a strong foundation of trust that can withstand my wobbles. It feels like I can safely show up and work through the ruptures or miscommunications we have because every time I do it’s more evidence that I am safe to be me, bring my feelings, and that Elle is committed to working whatever it is through with me. As she said the other day, “I’m here for it all”.
Thankfully, I am not in that horrible place that I was with Em where I felt that there was no choice but to hide my feelings and hope that things would work out without my saying anything…and to be honest, that’s how it got with Anita towards the end. I was so conscious of her wheels falling off that I tried to be as little work as possible for her. Didn’t exactly work out, though, did it? That’s definitely a throwback to my early years – suffer alone and get over it – but it’s so sad when you think that I have been paying for therapy for so long and been in hiding for so much of it trying to make it so the other person can stay. UGH. I am still really mad with Anita…but that’s for another blog post as this is sure to be lengthy enough as it is.
It’s no secret that I absolutely am still ridiculously sensitive to perceived rejection and abandonment but the difference is I ALWAYS tell Elle when I feel there is something wrong between us – even if it’s just that she’s turned up in my dreams and hurt me – and even then, she’s kind and lovely about it and not weirded out! But it’s all these little moments of connection and understanding that ultimately build the trust so that when there is something bigger, I have the confidence to tackle it.
Bear with me, I’m circling back round to the point – of ‘WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?’ – slow burn…
So, as I said earlier, I think at the moment my writing here makes it look like my therapy is just one long protracted shit show/mess when actually it’s mostly just steady, consistent, safe work but also it’s not really all that interesting. I mean, it is interesting to me, but the safe, familiar, connected, conversations and sessions aren’t really exciting to read about. We talk, we connect, sometimes we read stories, we laugh, we cry, we cuddle, we do the work…mostly.
Week in week out I show up, she shows up, and we keep going deeper and deeper into the deep darkness of my psyche, but we’re holding hands and, generally speaking, there’s a candle to light the way and so it feels safe because I am not doing it alone anymore.
I think, therefore, that ruptures take me all the more by surprise these days because Elle and I have such a solid relationship and so it completely knocks me for six when things go wrong. When we lose connection it feels like our hands separate and the candle blows out for a minute and it’s fucking scary because I really don’t like it in the dark on my own.
But I guess there are ruptures in any therapeutic relationship – I mean there’s so much written on rupture/repair in therapy that it would be naïve to think that any therapy is perfect. The important thing, though, is that ruptures aren’t too frequent and that the repair is effective and fast. Just like parenting, therapy on balance needs to be ‘good enough’. Elle is really good like this. She doesn’t leave me hanging when I tell her I am in a pickle and to date, she has always received whatever I have to say with openness and curiosity.
Until recently there hasn’t really been anything ‘major’ happen outside the normal run of me getting angsty and upset around breaks, or feeling disconnected and so the rupture has been triggered by my attachment issues rather than something being properly amiss. I might be activated and upset but not because of anything that Elle has done ‘wrong’. This last couple of months, however, has seen us step up a gear in working through some big rupture content. Like it’s not “Like a tick” (Em) or “too dependent” (Anita) – but it’s felt like it was in that sort of sphere and that triggered the shit out of my system.
The good news is Elle has been so receptive to what I have to say when I bring it to her. She doesn’t run and hide. She knows how to apologise and take responsibility/accountability for her part in things. She never shames me (which is huge), and as much as we have had some really BIG conversations lately, it’s honestly really refreshing to be working with someone who is able to reflect and is always wanting to do the best by me and really invites me into bringing EVERYTHING to her even if I am swimming in shame and embarrassment.
This is especially helpful after Anita became so incredibly defensive and avoidant in the last year of our work together. Of course, I would rather not have had these ruptures with Elle but at the same time it feels like we a doing some serious rewiring of the system when I see that I can bring my big feelings to her and she will do her best to repair. She shows me again and again that I am important to her.
I won’t lie. The most recent rupture when I found reference to my work with Elle on a therapist forum (albeit anonymous on both sides) really floored me and it was a right fucking mess. I truly believed that the person I thought I know and loved was someone other than she had presented herself to be – and that felt so upsetting and dangerous to my system. To think that Elle was feeling like I was some kind of pathetic client who refused to see that we were in a therapeutic relationship was so painful…even though that isn’t what it was at all.
My ability to take really small snippets of info and join a handful of dots and turn them into a spectacular constellation of horror is nothing if not impressive. I wish that I could see the 99% of brilliant alongside the 1% of terror – but when I am in the scary zone I can’t remember anything good at all. My fear takes over and all my stories about being too much, and being unlovable, and that I can’t trust anyone get really loud…but mostly I feel my system collapsing internally because this is how we get left isn’t it? This is the start of the abandonment playbook.
Elle being away on holiday and it all tying in with the anniversary of the end of seeing A was just the icing on the cake really, like if I was ever going to be primed for being sensitive to perceived abandonment and rejection – this was it.
So, what happened after I posted the blog?
OMG RB are you actually going to cut to the fucking chase? – after 2000 words?!
Well, I sat on my hands for a few days, tried to keep myself busy, and basically got more and more upset at the idea that I had misread the relationship that I have with Elle. I know I am client but I had never imagined that she felt that I was a problem, or that I didn’t understand the boundaries of the relationship, or that she saw me very much in a black and white way as a ‘client’ that needs to understand I am just paying for her time.
Seeing that online post title (but not being able to see the actual post as it was deleted) and the replies from other therapists hit me so hard because…well, it sounded so much like something Em would have said…and nothing at all like how I have experienced Elle in the room. It confused me, but mainly it devastated me, because in that week I was completely unable to reference any of the last nearly two years of work with Elle where she has demonstrated care and that she is a safe person…and instead my Inner Critic went, “See, this is it, behind the mask, it’s all just a façade to get you to part with money each week and make you keep coming back. The reality is you’re a fucking loser and here’s another therapist that can’t tolerate you.”
As we all know, part of complex trauma means it takes me a very long time to trust people and yet I really and truly believed that I could trust Elle…and now here I was…once again falling face first into the reality that there’s something wrong with me. I felt like my barometer for safety had royally let me down. Like, given EVERYTHING that has happened with Em and Anita, you’d think I’d spot inauthentic communication and relationship a mile off…and yet I hadn’t. In fact, I’d completely missed it. If anything, all I have found with Elle is someone who seems to be really honest and real.
So yeah.
It stung.
Then I started down the spiral. Maybe I’d just let my guard down too much. Maybe I was hurting so badly after what happened with Anita that I would overlook anything to feel safe and held. Maybe my search for ‘mother’ meant I’d latched onto Elle’s care that simply wasn’t there and created a version of her that simply wasn’t real – it was all just wishful thinking that maybe, just maybe this time someone would see me as I am and love me for it.
But that simply isn’t the case because she is real and I feel her care. If anything, Elle has had to work three times as hard to earn my trust BECAUSE of the damage that has been done by others that have come before her. My protectors are elite level royal marine commandos at this point, not sleepy security guards.
I wrote that post about what I’d found on the Saturday and by Thursday night I was … down in the depths of the spiral. I was swimming in shame. I was so hurt. I was so badly disconnected that I had no idea how I would come back from it…and my runners were ready to run.
So, thinking Elle would be more or less back from her time away because the thing that her and my friend do together was happening that evening, I sent the blog by email because I just couldn’t wait another five days to see her or start to try and fix it.
And then I heard nothing.
Fuck.
This was not like Elle AT ALL.
(Of course, I didn’t know she was still away with patchy signal up a mountain…)
Twenty-four hours after I sent the email I got a long email in my inbox. It spooked me a bit because well, there was a lot and my scared little heart was scanning for rejection and also I know that that post was A LOT. I can see now that she was really trying to reassure me and explain as best she could what had gone on whilst also being aware we were not in the room and that this wasn’t going to be an easy fix via messages…
The end of the message said:
I feel sorry you don’t believe that I love you and that my care for you is anything other than a real human emotion grown from knowing everything about you that I do, but I think I really do understand why.
And just because you don’t believe me, and even try to find evidence that I don’t, that doesn’t mean I’ll stop, or punish you for it. I am a person who loves you and wants to support you, that’s all I’ll ever be, and every decision I’ll ever make is based on that.
And you can ask me anything you want about any of this on Tuesday, and I promise I’ll answer you carefully and honestly from that same place.
And I can see that this, and the paragraphs that came before it all come from a really caring place. But because my system and runner ducks had had almost a week’s head start on her, my protectors, my teen, all the hurt parts simply replied:
I don’t want to see you anymore.
Fuck.
And then there was more silence from Elle’s end which freaked the absolute living shit out of me because what if she took that at face value and was so hacked off with me that she would let me go.
When she finally did reply, it didn’t sound enough like the Elle that the littles needed – and it panicked me. I realise now what was going on but in the moment the fear was massive on my part. She didn’t do an Em on me, by any means, and she did tell me that she felt sad and heavy and that she understood that it felt too much for me but that she was there and would always want to see me if I wanted to and that she very much would want to see me on Tuesday if I felt able to… it didn’t land how I needed it to, but I was able to see enough that she was trying and not giving up but I could also read that she was struggling too.
Fortunately, her message was enough of a way in for me just do the vulnerable and tell her what I needed in no uncertain terms – that I was scared, that I needed a hug, for her to hold my hand and to hear her voice – and then she replied with exactly what I needed and it sounded like her:
I’m super conscious that – halfway up a mountain with shitty reception, broken glasses, and just my phone – I’m in the worst place to be reassuring you that I’m close to you right now, but I am, and yes, very very definitely holding your hand.
I’ve had lots of feelings about this, but not one of them has been to let go of it. I also wish I could be there for an all-encompassing hour-long hug, but I absolutely promise from the side of a windswept mountain that I will be again very very soon. xxx
It wasn’t until this point that I realised that she wasn’t actually home yet and had been communicating with me as best she could from a tricky location. I felt bad because the one thing I had wanted to avoid was encroaching into her holiday time with this mess…and it turns out I had.
On the Monday morning, I got my personalised session reminder telling me that she was just home and looking forward to seeing me the next day. I felt way more settled even though we were still going to have to talk it all through…and repair…and it wasn’t going to be an easy session by any means.
As I said earlier, this whole thing was made so much worse because we were on a break and the break also coincided with the anniversary of Anita telling me she had to end therapy…I was looking for danger and seeing it EVERYWHERE. If we could have sorted it out immediately when it was happening it would have been so much better, but that’s the sod’s law of therapy (and my world) the shit rarely hits the fan at a point where it can be contained and not cause much damage! It ALWAYS comes about when I am a million miles away from a shower.
I braved up when I had seen Elle’s morning text and sent her a message which alluded to something she wrote in her original email response to me where she has said something about how it was her job to always think carefully about what she shares of her process and only telling me what she thinks is beneficial for me to hear:
Glad you’re back safe. I feel really anxious and like I have inadvertently thrown a grenade in between us that’s just about to explode. I need you to be honest with me tomorrow. Not ‘honest but couched with a “this is beneficial for you to hear”’ like the actual truth even if I might not like what you have to say because I’d rather that and know exactly what’s going on rather than some half-truth and also it’s absolutely fine to walk away if that’s easier.
At the exact moment I sent the text I got a notification came up on my phone that Elle had sent me an email.
And talk about synchronicity – what she sent me couldn’t have been more real and honest if it had tried. I knew from that email that we were going to be fine, and actually will continue to be fine as we bump along down this road together.
By the time it got to Tuesday I was just desperate to reconnect and sort things out.
And we did.
It was a proper digging in deep, honest, raw session that felt really connecting. We talked about such a lot of stuff. Elle apologised for the post and explained where she had been coming from. And of course, her intentions and my version of her intentions couldn’t have been further away from each other.
I won’t go into lots of detail about the ins and outs of what was said but what I will say is that it is incredibly refreshing to be able to bring the biggest scariest fears and hurt to someone and for them to own their part in it, and be completely present and willing to talk about ALL of what has happened. No blaming, no shaming, no putting it squarely back on me, no clipboards, no withdrawal or freezing me out – just getting in the tough stuff together and forging a deeper understanding of how we impact one another and what that means for us going forward – and how to manage things in the future.
I don’t like ruptures… but I am confident in Elle’s ability to make repairs. And this is a lot of my work having grown up in an environment where I could never speak up about how hurt I was, or if I did so much as show hurt or dissatisfaction it would bring on another barrage of abuse.
One of the things that Elle and I have committed to is trying to bring stuff up in closer connection to each other. I write a lot, and it is helpful, but I think we both find it hard reading about ourselves in the third person… I mean, she’ll never write about me again and has shut down that social media account altogether now, but I know she doesn’t find it especially easy reading what I have to say without my being there either… because just like I focus in on the scary 1% rather than being able to hold in mind the 99% she’s human and does the same sometimes especially if it looks like she’s really hurt me and HASN’T MEANT TO.
She’s really good at doing her own internal work but we’ve figured out that we have similar stories around being too much/not enough. So, my ‘too much’ can often trigger her own countertransference about being ‘not enough’ or being ‘misunderstood’. And so sometimes sending things in written format can make it so we don’t see the entirety of what’s really happening. The good thing is we are now both really conscious of this and so can work with that explicitly.
And this week, yet again, this stuff was tapped into.
It’s been a month since we repaired the rupture, but we haven’t returned to it explicitly and I think sometimes I need to keep doubling back and checking in on this kind of thing. So, after my session last Tuesday (which was lovely and holding and connecting) part of my system piped up and started wondering where we were at now. Was everything really ok, or was anything festering on Elle’s side. So, I decided to ask Elle where we were at and what would happen if we found ourselves in that place again in an email.
I’ll write about that next post because this is insanely long already. But one good thing to come out of the haze was that rather than continuing down a road of trying to find her in the fog, I just asked for a phone call to check in…and that was gold. So, that’s my next plan – try and build in a regular check in at the end of the week regardless of where we are at.
I’m sure this post is vague…and frustratingly lacking in detail about the rupture… but mainly I wanted to come back and say that it’s all ok. I wanted to write this sooner, but I have been really struggling with going anywhere near the laptop to write about it even though it’s fine. It’s weird. Sometimes I can just write and it comes freely and other times my brain just won’t allow it.
Have you ever wished there was a space where you could see the real experiences that other clients have had with your next/potential therapist rather than relying solely on unverified ‘glowing’ testimonials that therapists place on their own websites to help you decide whether they’re the ‘one’?
Shopping for a new therapist isn’t easy. You can do all the due diligence in the world: research, ask questions about their practice, their modality, how they view the therapeutic relationship etc… but you’re rarely going to get a therapist admit to their previous mistakes, difficulties, or lack of competence in the early days (although it would be really great if they did!!).
Not very many therapists open themselves to Google reviews (unsurprisingly!) as they have no control over what’s posted and it’s almost impossible to get a Google review removed. The thing is, you’d think on balance if these ‘professionals’ are even half of what they promote themselves to be online then their ratings would even out over time. The odd unfavourable review pitted against a stream (tsunami) of gushing five star ones wouldn’t be enough to paint a wholly negative picture would it?
There surely can’t be all that many of us out there that have been so harmed in therapy that we want to give our honest zero star reviews and warn other clients off can there?
I think we know the answer to this question 😆.
So, given that ‘Trust Pilot For Therapists’ doesn’t actually exist, we’re left with no option but to try and trust and put faith in what we see online. Most unwitting clients take therapists at face value from the glossy bios on the BACP website, or other therapy advertising page, or a therapist’s own personal website (cue soft lighting, benevolent smile, a nice cardigan, or some outdoor woodland scene) and the likelihood of us ever finding out what might have happened in the past that might be – how shall I put it? – less than optimal remains concealed in the shadows.
I think it’s tricky, too, when we do take steps to book a session and go and meet someone new because although we might get a ‘gut feeling’ about someone from the off it can take a while to get a sense of whether someone might be a good fit or not. This is especially the case if we’ve been hurt in therapy before. Our antennas are looking for it feeling ‘wrong’ but there’s also a part where we think we should override doubts because it’s probably our defences.
Meeting with Elle for first time was hard. I’d just come out the long-term therapeutic relationship with Anita and then done eight sessions with Hannah that crashed and burned. Therapy wasn’t ever going to feel safe and part of me hated Elle because she wasn’t Anita and she didn’t know me.
Still. We made it through to where we are now- almost two years in.
Last night I decided I’d write my own therapist reviews for some of the ex-therapists I’ve had and let my claws out – it was more Wolverine than cute kitty. Can’t see these ever making it onto their testimonial pages, can you?!!
Enjoy. 😉
P.S – If anyone feels like they’d like to write their own (positive or negative) and ping them into the comments, I’d love to see them! You’ve got to laugh otherwise you’d cry…and man, I’m all too familiar with the crying.
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EM:
As a highly trained and experienced clinical psychologist, I had high hopes for my therapy with Em. She said she specialised in trauma as well as many other of my presenting issues. It turned out that Em is frightened of entering into relationship with her clients and thinks that any move on the client’s part to try and discuss the therapeutic relationship or feelings that arise in the relationship is getting away from the therapy and is in fact ‘pushing the boundaries’. Em is unwilling to meet the client where they are at and operates from a one size fits all model (although she would call herself ‘integrative’). As a therapist, Em says that she is able to handle all the feelings a client might feel and welcomes them – only I wouldn’t recommend expressions of love or anger should you enter into therapy with her as these may trigger her into calling you an adhesive parasite as well as suggesting that you may secretly want to fuck her. If you have any feelings of compassion for those with mental health issues – she is not the therapist for you, as she believes that the majority of her NHS clients are ‘playing the system to get their PIP’ and if this isn’t enough to put you off- I found out much too late that she is a tory (as well as a class A cunt). 0/10
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ANITA:
Anita presents herself as an ‘ethical’ therapist who takes great care and pride in her work. This could not be further from the truth. She is, in fact, more damaged than the clients she professes to help. Indeed, she is the equivalent of an emotional wrecking ball. Her avoidant personality means she is unable to take accountability for her actions and behaves very much like an ostrich. Anita is neither emotionally intelligent or competent enough to be working as a therapist and it is laughable that she believes her services are worth £60 an hour. My advice would be take your money and set fire to it. It’ll do less damage to you in the long run. Don’t be fooled by her website and the extensive list of glowing testimonials. The truth of the matter is that Anita has left a trail of devastation in her wake and justifies her serious failings by repeatedly citing her ill health and ‘situation’. Her situation is of her own making, and her health has been steady enough to get married as well as sustain her counselling business. If you are seeking a therapist with integrity and honesty – Anita is not the therapist for you. Steer well clear. 0/10
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HANNAH:
Hannah is an inexperienced therapist who really should only focus on light work – she is certainly not equipped to deal with trauma. As with many therapists, her ego is far larger than her capability and she is prone to bite off more than she can chew. As much as suggestions of practising ‘yoga’ and going on a ‘retreat’ would maybe be welcome from a friend when sharing your struggles, it is hardly helpful advice from a therapist talking with a client who has been in therapy for many years who has a complex trauma history and recent trauma from therapy harm. This is straight out the playbook of CMHT suggesting a warm bath and cup of tea to people suffering suicidal ideation and self-harm. Chat GPT would dish out more helpful strategies than this at no cost and from the comfort of your own home and phone. Hannah does, however, have a nice set of colouring books and pens. 2/10 Give her five years and she might be worth a visit.
Musing on counselling-related issues in the UK. I am a counsellor/psychotherapist and a client too. As the blog title suggests, my counselling journey began in the client's seat. For information about my counselling and psychotherapy practice see my website: www.erinstevens.co.uk
holding it together as I journey through therapy - a personal account of what it's like to be in long-term psychotherapy navigating the healing of C-PTSD, childhood trauma and neglect, an eating disorder, self-harming behaviours, as well as giving grief and cancer an occasional nod.
Rubber Bands and Chewing Gum 
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