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.
According to WordPress this post on Eye Contact In Therapy is six years old today. It’s still one of the most visited posts on my blog, so I think my hunch back then was right: lots of people struggle to make eye contact in their therapy sessions.
This post feels especially poignant at the moment. I wrote it when I was still working with Em…in the time before I started burning through therapists like sand trickling down in an hour glass! The problem with eye contact hasn’t bothered me for years (whilst working with Anita), but I seem be back in the hell zone now with Elle which feels absolutely fucking marvellous – not.
Part of me feels sad about it because it reminds me of what I have lost with A, how easy it felt and safe, but then, actually, I think part of the reason I am struggling so much to let Elle in and to look at her is because of what’s happened with A… because it clearly wasn’t safe at all was it?!
Omfg. Just OMFG! What a bloody few weeks it’s been. Honestly…just once more for festive cheer: OH MY FUCKING GOD! Does the run into Christmas ever get any easier do you think? I’ve been struggling with the ‘season to be jolly’ since I was 14 – or, at least, that’s the first time I really remember feeling like I couldn’t cope and fell face first into the doom vortex on the 26th December before finally getting spat out and back into some semblance of reasonable coping early in the new year.
These days the festive doom and gloom seems to hit hard in mid-November and continue on right through to January…because I like to take my time over these things and really get the full experience of shit for as long as possible (!). To be honest, the moment the Christmas chocs hit the shelves in … October (?)… I start my steady decent into *waves arms around* this fucking mess. It’s gloriously tragic.
Unsurprisingly, this year is/has been terrible – but then it was always going to be, wasn’t it? I probably sound hyper and manic but I am really just trying not to collapse. I’ve been riding the emotional rollercoaster lately and it’s been pretty bad at times like I said last time I came here for a moan.
Tbh It’s hard to know where to begin today. I know I’ve been AWOL here again – for a few reasons that seem completely bonkers but then make sense when remembering my system is a fragmented mess of parts:
1) I have had so much to say but just couldn’t find the words or the time (there’s been a tonne of dissociation which hasn’t helped matters)
2) I have been in survival and have spent a lot of time hiding in my bed just to be able to function on a minimal level and every time I have thought about writing I have shrunk away from it
3) Child parts have been pretty activated at times and they just need cats (and Anita…)
4) I’ve been away on holiday this last week (hooray for sunshine, boo for still having to parent!) and have tried to recharge and find some reserves so been reading a lot of books in order to try and escape my brain and all the attachment shit that’s been thrown up lately
5) My laptop decided to get in a big hot huff and then give up the ghost – bloody marvellous!
I mean that list isn’t exhaustive by any means, but you get the picture.
Also, I haven’t really been able to formulate what I want to say about therapy with Elle. That has obviously been ongoing and last time I was here I mentioned that I had been triggered – honestly, it’s been a fucking hellscape navigating this new relationship after what’s happened with Anita and what’s galling is it’s not Elle’s fault or even mine, and yet here we are dodging fucking landmines that keep activating every other fucking minute.
Therapy has always been sensitive work where I am concerned #trauma but I feel like we are now having to work like the bloody bomb squad. It’s gently gently…and even still sometimes we manage to cut the wrong colour wire and BOOM!
I don’t know how to approach writing about the last six weeks or so because I feel like Elle and I have had some ups and downs but the result is that I think we are getting a better sense of each other which is really good. I really like Elle – and I think she is going to be really good for me. But now we are on a three-week break and ARGH fuck me – all the stuff is coming up. Doesn’t take long to feel like it’s all going to shit, and abandonment is imminent, does it?
Perhaps I’ll come back to all that separately because I feel like there are moments that I want to give proper time and thought to…maybe in between Christmas and New Year when I will- without doubt- be struggling (worse than I am now!).
Last time I was here I was talking about the email I had sent Anita reminding her of the agreement to end and holding her to account having ghosted me for a month – and her fucking ridiculous reply, “I am unsure what it is that you are looking for from me” … jesus.
Anyway, I have really struggled these last few weeks. It was inevitable. Christmas over the last few years has been tough (in the way it is always tough) but I have been held through it by Anita’s love and care. She has made the breaks as short as possible, checked in with me (even sending me messages – iniated by her – on Christmas day itself), bought me some really pertinent/heartfelt gifts, washed my elephant … you know, all the stuff that has meant that the young parts have felt loved and cared for even in her absence.
This year that is gone.
And my god it’s painful.
This last few months has been so hard but until now there haven’t been any ‘occasions’ where there has been something to ‘miss’ or be very different outside the sessions being over but Christmas is the first of those massive ouch moments and being faced with just how ‘gone’ Anita is. I’ve been battling with wondering what to do about getting my books/stuff back from A but resolved that was best tackled in the new year because frankly, getting my stories back is going to HARD and the child parts of me don’t need to feel any more rejected than they already do.
I hadn’t replied to Anita’s email either – I’ve been turning it over in my mind a lot (because that’s what I do) and I just hadn’t known how to reply. There’s been a massive part of me that wanted to send her a card this Christmas – which is a massive distance from the gifts we’ve exchanged over the years – but in the end I decided against it. Part of me wanted to reach out and ‘care’ but there was another part that just feels like I am wasting my fucking time and emotional energy on someone who absolutely doesn’t give a shit.
I’ve had a lot of time to think this week being away from life – and as much as I wish I could leave my troubles back in the UK I haven’t been able to. I have been thinking about Anita, I’ve been thinking about the new relationship with Elle. I have been thinking about what I need and how to move things forward.
Anyway, long story short, after weeks of upset and nightmares and generally just not doing great I sent Anita a text last night:
Tbh I didn’t expect her to reply…but when I woke up this morning I see that she’d replied late – 11pm (clearly her work phone boundaries are as appalling as ever) but what came was honestly just a fucking kicker:
I mean I shouldn’t be surprised – she’s been beyond fucking crap this whole time – but seriously?! All the months of how hard it is for her alongside her total failure to show any kind of care about my experience has been rough… would it have killed her to say, ‘Happy Christmas RB’ –
Anyway, I’m sure none of you are shocked by this. I wasn’t. I don’t really know what I feel tbh. Disappointed? Resigned? Numb? I am sure if I felt deep into myself there’d be a lot of feelings, but I am not going to go anywhere near that right now because frankly what’s swirling in that vortex of doom is painful and if I can not get swept up into it then all the better.
I know for so many of us, this time of year is fucking challenging. I mean it’s a bloody melting pot for emotional chaos isn’t? Even without therapy breaks thrown in for seasoning! There’s all sorts of crap about families and expectations and grief and *all the things*…it’s no wonder we struggle because it is fucking hard. So FUCKING HARD!!!
I hate that every year I wish the festive period away. I so desperately need the time off work, but I find this time anything but relaxing. I have a lovely family – my wife and kids are fab…and I try very hard to be present and enjoy making memories with them. We have started new family traditions. We have begun to do Christmas on our own terms…and all that is really great. But there is also that shadow that lingers and the stuff with Anita has totally exacerbated the core issue…this year I have yet another mother figure who has abandoned and rejected me and I REALLY DID NOT NEED THAT.
My own mum is totally absent and ghosting me, too. I don’t know why. Most of the year I can cope with the absence of a caring mother – but that ‘lack’ is all thrown into sharp focus at this time of year. So many of my friends are spending the holidays with their parents. Their parents are massively involved with the grandchildren… and I know I shouldn’t compare but it’s hard not to. When your working narrative is that you aren’t good enough, loved, wanted, etc…you’re perpetually scanning for evidence to either confirm or deny it. Sadly, all I seem to get is confirmation.
I know my journey now is to be my own parent and to stop looking outside of myself for someone to fill the hole inside me. I need to look after myself and all my parts – because I know what they need and how they need to be loved. It’s hard, though, because those parts still really need the ‘other’ sometimes – not all the time, by any means…but Christmas has always been a holiday for kids…and my littles are…out in the cold…again. I honestly wish Anita and I had never undertaken the work we did. Reparenting is such delicate and long-term work, and you cannot just fuck it up and run away. I’ve seen it happen so many times now and seen the devastation it’s left behind.
Complex trauma and attachment injuries are not easy to heal – but therapy didn’t ought to make it all much worse. I totally get that ‘in the therapy’ it can be bumpy and that is all part of the work…what I mean is these fucking awful terminations that we seem to go through. It’s mind-blowing. It’s devastating. We deserve so much better.
I doubt I’ll get back here until after Christmas now – so I’ll send you all big hugs and see you on the other side.
We’re no strangers to me whining on about therapy breaks here on this blog, are we? And as I find myself staring down the barrel of my first break with Elle I am anticipating a hellish experience this time around and I literally only saw her on Tuesday! Give me strength!
Before my last session I could already feel the anxiety and panic creeping in, and it’s got steadily worse as the week has gone on. My heart rate is up. I feel sick. I have a headache that I can’t seem to shift. My jaw is clenched tightly like a steel trap – it’s little wonder I have a headache! I am sooooo tired, yet I can’t switch off and sleep – mind you that’s nothing new, my sleep has been appalling since Anita and I parted ways. Anyway, all things considered, it’s not great and certainly doesn’t bode well for the next 11 days!
You might be wondering why I’ve got myself so worked up given that I’ve only been seeing Elle for a couple of months and that crazy attachment stuff hasn’t gone live yet…or at least not inside the room (it’s complex but more on that another time)! I had really hoped that I would be unfazed by the prospect of a two week break in the new therapy but my mind just isn’t wired like that – read: my brain hates me! #trauma
I mean, let’s be clear therapy breaks have, more often than not, been a challenge for me so this isn’t exactly new territory. Indeed, this horrid sense of dread and doom is all too familiar to me. There have, of course, been rare occasions (working with Anita) where I have sailed through breaks but they’ve strongly correlated with times where I have felt really settled, secure, safe, and contained in the therapeutic relationship. If I have felt there has been a solid connection and that there is a secure base it’s been great (ish) – but, honestly, I am way more familiar with feelings of disconnection that trigger intense panic and a desperate flailing about in emotional quicksand on therapy breaks.
We all know I am not in the ‘settled, secure, safe and contained’ zone right now. I literally couldn’t be further from that. It’s crap. I guess part of me feels like I am still on a therapy break with Anita, we haven’t ‘properly’ ended and so it’s left hanging open (but clearly closed); Hannah and I never returned to the room after our first break (I still can’t believe it went tits up so quickly); and let’s not forget that everything with Em fell apart after the Christmas break and the therapy ended in the most damaging and catastrophic way…well…not as catastrophic as what Anita has done but traumatising all the same #likeatick. So now that another therapist is going away I don’t exactly feel optimistic about the chance of a safe return with my track record as it is.
When I dig beneath all the awful physical sensations I am experiencing and feel down into the emotions I’ve been running from since… May… well…it’s YIKES! I mean it’s utterly utterly utterly heartbreaking stuff. Unsurprisingly, I’m met with the desperate crying of a really young part who’s been abandoned out in the cold, grey wasteland. She’s small, barely three years old. She has her back to me and as much as I want to reach out and help her. I can’t. It’s as though there is a glass wall between us, and I simply can’t get to her. Adult me feels completely powerless.
This internal landscape is so familiar to me. For soooooo long I’ve found this one of the hardest parts to make contact with. I see her so clearly and I feel the pain she feels so intensely. But I can’t get to her. I guess maybe this has, historically, been because there’s been such a lot of shame around acknowledging this vulnerable part of me. She is so needy, so starved of love and affection, so desperate for connection and a sense of safety and yet feels so unlovable and unworthy that expressing any kind of need for the ‘other’ feels chronically dangerous. If ever there was an exile she is it.
But then, this is the part that is behaving exactly as she should given that her caregivers have repeatedly upped and left. Children at this age do have a lot of need don’t they?…it’s normal… and that’s all been frozen in time because those needs were never met when they should have been by the person who was meant to do it. I’m having a really hard time with my mother wound right now for lots of reasons – it’s not only therapy triggering it, my lack of relationship with my mum has been thrown into sharp focus lately and it’s all just a lot. I might have an adult body but all the parts of me are still there inside, and this little girl especially is waiting for someone to come pick her up and hold her.
I don’t feel shame about this or these feelings anymore, but I do feel lost, and stuck, and have no idea how to begin to get the help I need to work with this now having been so badly hurt with Em, Anita, and more recently Hannah. Like what on earth am I meant to do? I do understand that I am the adult that this young part needs, I just need to find out where the sledgehammer is to be able to break through that glass and get to her…and I have been trying for a long time now!
Anita had done so much work on bringing this little girl out of the cold and into the warm. I mean she literally told me, “You don’t have to stay out in the cold anymore. I am here. You are safe with me. I love you and I am not going anywhere” all the while cuddling me into her chest, reminding me over and over that I was loved by her, reading me stories, showing me that the emotional cupboards weren’t bare anymore…and in doing this, so much of my system settled down – both the fragmented parts of me and my nervous system. I felt so much more capable of living in the world knowing that my inner children were held and contained with a safe adult, and I really felt like I was on the right track finding ways to hold these parts more and more for myself…like I was well on the way to the tool shop for that sledgehammer.
But then Anita left and, with that, she discarded all the parts that had learnt to trust her and who loved her so intensely. Each of these parts are experiencing this abandonment in different ways but today it’s all about the small one. Anita left that little girl and returned her to the wasteland. Devastating doesn’t even begin to describe how fucking awful this has been. We see the word ‘retraumatising’ being banded about a lot – but that’s exactly what this is. It’s such a visceral experience. It’s like a bereavement, only it’s one that I can’t talk about. I have to suffer on my own pretending as if everything is completely fine when it absolutely isn’t. I am so fucking far away from fine. Like I said the other week, I am a million miles away from ok and not waving but drowning.
The wasteland space is so bleak. This toddler part has been out here for too long now, shivering, and sad. Time is such a weird concept for kids, isn’t it? Weeks can feel like years. It feels like she’s been on her own for so long now that she can hardly remember how it felt to feel the softness of Anita’s body, to breathe in her comforting smell, and listen to her steady heartbeat. But then when she does remember the agony of recalling what has been lost comes flooding back and is totally overwhelming. It’s difficult to find words to describe the sense of being completely annihilated but so many of you know this feeling already that maybe it doesn’t need explanation here. If you know, you know.
I totally broke on Monday thinking about Anita and how she was my rabbit that listened. I couldn’t stop crying…I reached out again…and I must stop doing it because these replies are hurting me. I don’t know what to do – we need to meet to properly end but I just can’t face it. I don’t want her to be ‘gone’ forever.
My goodness! – this post is meant to be about my therapy break with Elle and yet here I am banging on about Anita again. But it’s because Elle has gone that the void that Anita has left behind is all the more apparent. My young part doesn’t want Elle (but I think she’d like to be seen by her), she wants Anita (sooooo much), but now that Elle is gone there is literally no one there to help. And whilst the young parts have not made it into the therapy room with Elle yet (they’re hiding behind the sofa but I don’t think she has realised), Adult me at least has been getting some space to offload some of my day-to-day crap.
The other day I was texting a friend about all this and she suggested that Elle has been like a shelter from the storm, or an umbrella, she’s not Anita’s cosy snug holding place, but that time and space in the week with Elle has at least offered a window of time to stop me from completely disintegrating. I actually think it’s been like a sticking plaster on an open wound. It’s been just about enough to stop me bleeding out…only that’s been ripped off now and I am really not ok. Like sooooo not ok. I feel like I am screaming for help and yet there’s no sound coming out. I dreamt this week that I was repeatedly telling Em, Anita, Hannah, and Elle that I was suicidal and not one of them could hear me. For the record, I am not suicidal – but I would say that some parts of the system are.
Anyway, none of this feeling of discombobulation has been helped by a couple of things that happened in the last session before the break, either. It’s funny. I’ve been seeing Elle a couple of months now and yet I haven’t really spoken about what it’s been like in the room with her at all yet have I? I don’t know why. I don’t know if it’s because I feel quite protective of this new relationship. I so desperately want it to work out but I am so terrified of fucking it all up after recent events with Anita and Hannah. Although, I didn’t fuck it up…
Perhaps there’s an anxiety about writing about the therapy knowing how Hannah upped and left at the thought of making it onto the blog – and although Elle and I have discussed my blogging and she is fine with me writing in an anonymised way I do wonder how it might actually land if she ever sees posts like this where I actually talk about things that she’s said or done that have landed badly. I know I would struggle. I also think on a level I really don’t want to hurt her feelings just because I am clearly having a massive reaction to not a lot this time.
I know how my big feelings about small things can make it feel impossible for people to make mistakes and I really don’t want to create a situation where it feels like Elle is having to tread on eggshells because I’m so fucking sensitive. I keep going back and forth over whether what’s bothering me is something I just process on my own or whether it’s something that I should share with her. I don’t want to seem critical because that’s not it at all. This is all about me and how I react to things.
I know I have mentioned on repeat here about how I need to find a way to talk about Anita having avoided the topic like the plague since the first session where I outlined some of what had happened. I am obviously no further on than that. Every week I think ‘this is the week’ and then I get there and that False Adult (maybe it’s her) turns up and just rattles on about ‘stuff’ for ninety minutes. Oh yeah, that’s something new too. I asked a few weeks ago if we could do a longer session – and it’s become a thing. I find that length of session MUCH better but obviously still not enough to bring out the heartbreak. Ugh.
Anyway, let’s cut to the chase shall we? – 1600 words in! Concise as ever RB! So, I have been super conscious of wanting to find a way to really connect with Elle. I feel like we get on really well as adults (although tbh I don’t trust anything I think or feel now after what happened with A). I really like spending time with her. She is absolutely someone who if I had met them under different circumstances I would want as a friend (ha – that’s just fucking typical!) and I feel like she’s someone I really respect. That sounds so daft doesn’t it and a bit gushy? But I feel for the first time in a really long time that this might be someone who will be able to cut through my avoidant bullshittery once she gets to know me a bit better. At least I hope so … that is, of course, if I don’t frighten her away with the crazy first!
So, yeah, this last session I was so determined to go in and say, “Look, I really need to take off my armour and have you witness what’s hurting inside because I feel really alone and I can’t carry on like this. The thing is, I have been encouraged to take off my armour before. Things have been ok when I have taken my helmet off and just exposed my head, but when I have taken off my breast plate the person who told me my heart was safe has run at me with a dagger and stabbed me. There’s a serious wound that needs attention but the thought of exposing that makes me very scared because I think I’ll die if it happens again. My heart just won’t survive another dagger through it.”
I wanted to tell her that I was nervous about the break and a bit embarrassed that I didn’t want her to go away. I wanted to ask her if it was still her plan to go to working online in December and talk about how that might feel (bad!). I wanted to talk about the dreams I’d had and what I thought they meant (eek!). Like I had such a lot to say and had psyched myself up for it. It was going to be a massive exercise in the vulnerable parts of me taking a step towards her and seeing how it played out but I was hopeful nonetheless.
I think up to now our sessions have been all about what I have bringing from outside the room (obviously useful) but I think I’m needing to feel into what is going on in the room between us too. Like what is this relationship (aside from the obvious)?- How do we connect? – What is going on? – How is it all going to work? And I guess, really importantly, does it feel safe? Basically, it’s the relational stuff… the fucking scary bit!
Right, back to what spooked me…
Whilst I was waiting for the session I buried my head in a book I’d just started that I have totally loved called, ‘Enchantment’ by Katherine May (big recommendation from me – it’s lovely and all about reconnecting with the world around us). Elle came out, noticed I was reading and asked me what it was. I walked into the room, sat down and began to tell her – meanwhile, she had picked up her phone as she sat down and then started texting.
Ummmmm.
She apologised immediately for this and explained that she had made a mistake and had sent one of her clients the wrong time for their session (she sends out text reminders). She told me that she works with a lot of neurodiverse clients and was really aware that this fuck up would send this particular client into a spiral so she needed to quickly sort it out. She was also pretty vulnerable and told me how she experiences it when she makes mistakes with this client group and part of me was glad to see she really does care about the environment and container she creates for her clients BUT in that moment it felt like we were talking like peers and I feel like this is a trap we could easily fall into. Like it’s good. I don’t want there to be a massive power imbalance but equally I need her to realise that I am not maybe as together as I seem (like really not together at all, actually)!
Adult me really gets why she needed to send that text. Teacher me TOTALLY gets it as about half my work is with neurodivergent students. Parent me gets it – both my kids are neurodiverse.
But do you know who doesn’t get it?
Complex trauma client me.
The traumatised child parts DO NOT GET IT at all.
Because whilst it’s really marvellous that Elle is super concerned about her neurodiverse client’s needs what about the complex trauma one sitting right there in the room in her actual session?
And look I really know how much ‘brat’ teen is coming out here, but I need to say it because it really fucked how I thought the session would go because I immediately switched into ‘super competent adult client’ and I closed down all the parts that wanted to reach out and put some trust in her. Because in that moment when she was texting, the message that was being sent to my parts was I was less important than this ‘other’ client, my need was less, and oh my god it just triggered all the stuff about being unworthy of care and attention which are so live after what’s happened with Anita. The little girl suffering out on the wasteland’s hope of being seen was dashed again and I felt that intense tension in my stomach take root.
I had been so ready to connect, needed to connect, and the cues that it was safe to do that weren’t there. I know how massively explicit a therapist needs to be to coax these parts out and that’s part of the battle – Elle doesn’t know any of this, yet. I sometimes feel like Monica in Friends – externally she is super organised and together (if not a little neurotic!) but then there’s the cupboard that’s full years of clutter and tat and she is absolutely mortified when Chandler discovers it. That’s kind of where I am. Only I don’t just have a small closet full of emotional shit it’s a massive great warehouse!
To add insult to injury I quickly noticed that the recorder wasn’t out to record our session. Elle had suggested early on that we could record our sessions when I had shared a blog post with her about the problems I have with object constancy. She has been sending these to me so I can listen to them afterwards as a way of connecting. It’s been good. Only she forgot this time, probably because her mind was elsewhere trying to sort of this other client, or maybe she was heading into holiday mode – and of course that stung too because if ever there was a time to need to feel connected it was now – on a break.
Perhaps I should have said something when I noticed, but I was already lost when she text the client…which by the way was literally only seconds. I know I am making a massive deal over something really small but this is the nature of Complex Trauma isn’t it? We are so quickly triggered into painful states when there is so much of a whiff of feeling abandoned or rejected. It’s extreme. It happens in a split second and we are gone. The smallest misstep can feel like the vinegar being poured on third degree burns and unfortunately for Elle and I, there’s not much of me left that isn’t burnt after recent events with Anita and Hannah…and then, Em. In lots of ways she doesn’t stand a chance.
All I can say, is in that moment I felt painfully unseen. The young parts felt so fucking alone it was awful. Elle would never have known because I talked at her solidly for the entire 90 minutes because I’m so good at hiding in the room and taking us off somewhere else and allowing a capable, competent part to front. I hate that. I am not a massive fan of being plunged into a dissociative silence but I think this might sometimes be easier for the person opposite me to figure out something is amiss. Anyway, the session was ‘fine’ for Adult me but not at all for the parts that needed to be seen that day…or now as the break becomes more of a problem.
Of course, I haven’t been sent a recording – because there isn’t one to send but I don’t think Elle has realised that it’s even a thing. Or if she has, she hasn’t got in touch to say, “Hey RB, I’m sorry, I dropped the ball here”. This hurts because when she’s dropped the ball with a more established client she makes the effort to rectify it in MY session. And I do get it’s different – scheduling is different to this.
If she has realised what’s happened then maybe she’s not wanting to open that up over an email when we are on a break. The thing is, ignoring it doesn’t mean it’s gone away. I am still here holding it and that vulnerable part is upset. I think there’s a part of me that worries that it won’t even have hit her radar and that shows me just how far away we are from really getting into ‘me’. I so miss having a therapist who knows ‘me’ intimately. I miss the things that Anita and I would do to make breaks as easy as possible for these parts. My elephant is sat in my wardrobe now. It no longer smells like Anita’s washing powder and I have had to put it out if sight because the reminder of what I had is just too much. It’s such a huge loss. As I keep saying, it’s like my emotional scaffold has been taken away and I am trying not to crumble.
I so want this relationship to work out because I really like Elle – like I really like her. I really don’t want to be ‘this’ client again. Adult me is really ok about this but those others, the ones who especially need the therapy aren’t. I am just so bloody exhausted by all this now. I hate that this situation feels so much worse than it should because of the state things have been left by Anita. I hate that I have to start over again. I hate that I feel so ungrounded and unsafe inside. It’s massively shit and feels too much…or I feel too much.
I don’t really know what to do. I guess though, this isn’t going to work out unless I find the courage to be brave and vulnerable – like I really am going to have to start talking to Elle about this because … she needs to know. And as much as this is, on the surface, a tiny rupture – it has all the key ingredients of what causes me difficulty. It’s not a big deal but to parts of me it really is…and it’s not just this – I have to address the elephant in the room (A) before it makes its home there like all the others before.
I hate that I know that returning to therapy is going to feel really hard because by the time it’s time to go back I won’t be just be dealing with the young one out on the wasteland – I will have the depressed teen and the sadistic critic to contend with, too. I’ll have gone through the wringer and then end up just about normal by Tuesday. Honestly, I am so over it.
Things aren’t great here, still. I am really struggling. I feel more and more like the swimmer in Stevie Smith’s poem ‘Not Waving But Drowning’. I’ve been here before, clearly. Sometimes when it’s like this I feel so fucking hopeless. Like will I ever stop circling this drain at intervals throughout my life, or is this just me and do I need to learn to accept the fact that I just won’t ever really be fully, ok?
I’m forty now, and yet here I am again in a state of utter hell feeling desperately alone and unsupported. It’s all too familiar. My inner world is in collapse. I feel like I am a walking shell and yet no one knows. No one notices. It’s hard to notice, though, when I’m such a good actor. How can anyone see beyond what I put in front of them? I keep thinking about Brene Brown and all her work on vulnerability and connection and I really buy into it -but it’s hard isn’t it? Being exposed is hard. The potential for rejection is huge…but hiding prevents connection. It feels impossible sometimes.
So, right now it feels as though everyone is standing on the shore watching me, believing that I am having a wonderful time because I appear competent and to have my shit together – I look like a good swimmer, and I tell people a lot of the time that I am a good swimmer – but it’s all lies- a distorted version of reality. On closer inspection, if anyone really dared to look beneath the surface, they’d see my legs are tied together, I’m being attacked by sharks, and I am sinking.
I honestly don’t know how much longer I can keep this up. I am thoroughly exhausted and there just is no sense of there being any relief/rescue any time soon…or ever. I feel so incredibly isolated, unseen, and frankly – desperate, just like the swimmer in the poem:
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
I know I sound like a broken record here, lately – but I spend such a lot of time in my life looking as though I am waving – and the reality is, I am not … not by a long stretch. I am desperately hanging on by a thread and hoping that someone will finally see that I need assistance and step in quick to help me. I need a lifeguard.
This blog space is, at least, somewhere where I can let it out a bit and the support I get here means such a lot to me– honestly, it’s been a lifeline after what’s gone on with Anita. However, I really need to be with someone in ‘real life’ in person who gets it, too. Of course, there is therapy – but as I keep saying, it’s early days and really isn’t getting anywhere near ‘this’ stuff.
I guess I must look like I am waving in the therapy room too, and Elle doesn’t know that because my ‘waving’ can look like I’m doing ‘the work’ so it adds in an extra layer of complication. It’s not like I sit there and talk about nothing – but it’s not the really painful stuff that is impeding my ability to function – it’s not about the loss of Anita and the fears I have about therapy going forward. It’s not about Elle and I and how this relationship is going to work…or not.
I mean, I’ve always had this problem in therapy to an extent – or certainly before a therapist really knows me. I can take the therapist off on a journey where we seem to be doing ‘the work’ and I appear to be letting them in to my world, but actually the ‘trauma’ or ‘issues’ I bring are not the most pressing things; they’re simply a smoke screen and so I frequently leave a session feeling unseen and lost.
There’s such a massive back catalogue of hard shit to choose from that I can be thoroughly avoidant and yet seem like I am opening up about deep stuff. Add to the fact that my day-to-day life is quite bloody challenging and there’s plenty to talk about there, too, means we’ll never get to the really raw stuff in an hour a week. It’s so frustrating. This is part of the reason I need more than one session a week. I almost need a session to process my week and a session to process my pain…whilst also keeping a sense of a solid container and building the relationship. Ugh. I hate this so much.
I can’t stand the disconnect. Being alone with this stuff is bad enough but being with someone else and them not seeing it when you so desperately need them to is really really tough. Don’t get me wrong – this is definitely a ‘me’ problem – I don’t/can’t expect Elle to be a mind reader – she doesn’t know me yet and she can only work with what I bring to her. But it’s just so hard not having a person who can see right through my front and reach down into the vulnerable parts and take their hands and help them feel safe. Anita would know what I needed and I miss that…I miss her.
I know I need to be patient. I can’t expect miracles after only five sessions with Elle. But I need something to shift soon because I’m crumbling, and I can’t afford to. I really need an explicit cue from Elle when we meet that it’s safe and ok to bring the very young and painful experiences to the room. I need those parts to be actively invited and welcomed into the space at the start of a session because they are so scared right now.
It’s been so so hard lately. The three month anniversary of leaving Anita hit me like a tonne of bricks – I mean I had a total collapse that day, ended up reaching out to her (mistake) and ended up in a right state after her lack-lustre reply:
I really needed some physical/tangible support that day but of course, there was no therapy, Elle wasn’t there, and so my online friends patched me up as best they could. I feel like everything Anita and I had is lost. I know she’s not ok but I guess I had hoped she’d reply with, ‘The invisible string never breaks. I still love you.’ But she’s not in that place. And that is why we can’t work together.
I feel absolutely broken by this…and it feels like there is nowhere to put it down to breathe. And the longer I don’t get ‘help’ with it the more shame and embarrassment I attach to what’s happened. Like the longer the topic is avoided the more I feel like it’s something that makes me seem weird or too much. Basically, the Inner Critic is starting to get vocal, and I really don’t need that.
Therapy has not been made any easier due to some issues with my schedule (kids not back at school and wife working away). This meant there was a ten-day break between sessions with Elle – which of course really doesn’t help matters when a week between already feels like too long a gap. I am really struggling with how It feels like everything is stretched so thin and I just can’t seem to get a sense of the relationship being real at all. I just can’t hold it in mind. It’s not enough.
After our last session (31/8) I emailed Elle to ask her to read the last two blog posts I had written ‘Three Months…’ and ‘Dear New Therapist’. She emailed me back thanking me for sending the link and said she would try but couldn’t guarantee she’d always get to read what I write before a session (Adult knows this is fair enough) and she suggested that we maybe begin sessions checking in about anything I have written as she thought that would be better than replying in writing as we’d be more in connection with one another. And I get she’s just trying to manage expectations and boundaries, but it felt distancing in a way…even if it’s not.
Like yep, fine, I get it – but sometimes when you tell someone you’re falling down a hole you just need something a bit more back, you know? Like sometimes you just need, “I really hear this is tough and I want to reassure you that you can bring all of this to the session, and I am not worried about your big feelings”. Of course, I don’t know when she will have read the posts over those intervening ten days – maybe just before the session and so perhaps she wouldn’t/couldn’t reply to the content because she probably hadn’t read them… but I did say in my linked email that things weren’t good.
The result of this ‘long’ break/lack of contact is a greater sense of disconnect and heightened feelings of rejection and abandonment. It’s felt like I am left drowning in hell that whole time. And this is where I am at. This is the legacy of what’s come before. This isn’t Elle’s fault. She’s just working how she works. I get the sense that she will be really businesslike outside sessions – will respond to queries or whatever but not really reach out in a relational/holding way. This is another thing I am going to have to grieve about Anita and I also need to try really hard not to be triggered by it because it feels like this is a step back towards Em…and that sends my system into a massive freak out.
We could go on and on about the pros and cons of between session contact until the world ends – and I don’t necessarily think there is a right way to do any of it and needs to be looked at between client and therapists together – although ultimately, it’s one of those boundaries that we as clients don’t get much say in.
I think I am just finding such huge changes in the way I now have to work incredibly unsettling and upsetting. I genuinely don’t think people can understand what it’s like going from two sessions a week with someone that knows you intimately with between session contact to one session with someone that doesn’t know you at all and isn’t really ‘there’ outside that hour. It’s a lot. As I said in my last post, my emotional scaffold has been ripped away. More than anything I need one of Anita’s warm hugs and to hear her steady heart beat. I need co-regulation.
I think it’s harder too, because the parts that need to be in therapy aren’t even making it into the room in the hour I do have. So ultimately, it feels like I’m on an endless struggle trying to keep all the young parts from melting down without any help. And they are melting down. Big time. That’s the issue. And they need their safe adult and she’s just gone and the new adult isn’t even aware they exist…not really. It’s beyond exhausting.
When I finally saw Elle on Friday, I told her that I was not doing well and had had a terrible time since I had seen her. She asked how she would know that if I’d seen her and she was looking at me. I said she wouldn’t know; she wouldn’t be able to tell at all. She asked if anyone would know. And I said “No”.
Actually, though, there is one person that would know – but she’s gone and that’s the fucking problem, isn’t it? I know it’s getting boring, but I just can’t express how fucking devastated I am about what’s happened with me and Anita. She was the safe person, the life raft where I could catch my breath and now it’s all gone.
Elle made reference to one of the posts I had written at the beginning of our session (so I guess she’d read them) in which I had said I found it hard to keep the therapy in mind. She asked me if I’d like her to record the sessions and send them to me in a MP3 afterwards, so I had something to return to – so I do think she gets it to an extent. I also get that this was her attempt to show me that it’s ok and she’s not weirded out by me. The problem is I need so much reassurance now…and I didn’t take it as an opportunity to discuss either of the posts – although I really think we do need to talk about what’s going on in the room with us together…even if it’s fucking terrifying.
So, yeah, that’s where I am. Not in a great place.
It’s coming up to three months since I last saw Anita and I can honestly say that the feelings of grief, hurt, rejection, abandonment, anger…the list goes on…aren’t getting any better, easier, or more manageable. I remember angrily spitting “Oh shut up!! -What would you know?!” at Anita when she told me, “You’ll get through this, you know”, as she was physically and emotionally peeling herself away from me in May.
Her meaningless platitudes infuriated me at the time, and seemed to completely miss how big a deal our termination would be given where we were in the work and the nature of what we had been working on for more than three years. I mean you can’t do deep attachment work with so much focus on young child parts and trauma and then just walk the fuck away leaving all those young parts rejected and abandoned AGAIN. It’s fucking retraumatising, which in case anyone is in any doubt, that is not the aim of therapy!
I remember how I felt really upset that Anita couldn’t/wouldn’t truly acknowledge/understand just how devastating the end would be for me in that really horrible couple of weeks where we just weren’t able to find a way to resolve things. She kept repeating “I know this is hard for you.” Hard? This isn’t fucking hard. It’s been completely catastrophic…and that’s not me being hyperbolic, it’s completely floored me.
I honestly can’t find the words to describe just how utterly horrific this has been on so many levels. ‘Hard’ feels insulting, frankly. But then I think if she truly entered into the reality of what she’s done, the guilt and shame would have been overwhelming for her. She always prides herself on working ‘ethically’ but in so many ways what’s happened this last year or so has been miles away from ethical. And by the very end, she simply didn’t have the capacity to hold anything of my experience. She couldn’t even hold her own.
Still, the downplaying or avoiding the magnitude of the situation felt shit even if what she was saying was meant to appeal to the resilient part of me that refuses to give up and powers on through regardless. Of course, I’ll ‘get through it’ because I have no choice but to get through it. I have kept going, but it has come at a massive cost. What I really needed was for those young parts, the ones that have been left feeling so hurt and confused, was to be seen and held in what has been one of the most distressing emotional experiences of my life.
Instead, I was left and had to watch the person who has seen more of me than anyone else and mothered me and loved me in a way that I’ve never experienced before, walk away with what seems like not so much as a backward glance.
As a child I had to wave my mum off on a train every Sunday and wait until Friday for her to return…for six years… I seemed to spend my whole life hanging on for her to come back. And what/who came back was not the mother I needed…she’s never been able to be that from the beginning. I know that’s partly why time between sessions has always been so difficult for me, that an my dad dying suddenly out of nowhere three days into a holiday. I haven’t got a secure base. And yet now, I feel like I am standing on the platform staring down the track and Anita just isn’t coming back. It’s breaking my heart.
I just can’t get my head round it after all the promises and reassurances…the relationship…like how can this even be happening? I feel like a total idiot a lot of the time for thinking that what we had was special or important but then I look around me and see so much evidence of the relationship in a physical form in my house that I just don’t know how to make my brain make sense of it all. Like tell me I am insane – do your therapists give you things like this?
I said in my last post, I think, that Anita had text me the morning before I met Elle for the first time. That was the same day I got the pretty empty message from H too. Anita and I have had a weird kind of contact here and there since we stopped meeting. Invariably, the messages have been pictures or quotes or very short ‘I miss you’ type things and Anita has generally replied with something short and then a heart. It’s been confusing to the young parts because … well, it is confusing! The young parts don’t know what’s going on, or why A has left them. They see the hearts and think, maybe there’s still some love there…an Invisible String…but then… how can there be?
I had sent a message to A on a Monday night – midway through another of my epic convulsive crying episodes. On the Wednesday I got this message from A:
Ouch. More mention of how ‘hard’ it is. Groan. Reading between the lines she’s not coming back. She’s changed her work. She still isn’t ok. And I don’t fit her ‘criteria’ anymore… but where does that leave me? We said we’d come back to do a proper end at some point but there’s no reference to anything about that. I guess she’s still not in a place to do it. So much of it is about her experience – how things are for her and how broken she is. I’ll admit, I feel pretty sorry for her clients in couple’s work. I know it’s probably not the same as the relational depth of long-term work but even so…who needs a therapist who is hanging by a thread and emotionally checked out? Of course, there’s the rescuer in me who desperately wants to try and make things better for her…but can’t because she’s shut me out…not that it’s my role anyway, but I have been let into so much of what’s going on for her over the years that this is a really weird space to inhabit.
This message came in three weeks ago and I haven’t responded to it at all. I don’t know how to respond. I’ve never not replied to her – or had this long in radio silence…but things are so fucked that I feel like there is nothing I can say that won’t end up hurting me more in the end. I guess asking to see her to end makes it so final that part of me can’t bear it. Asking for clarification of what she means is really just asking for another sucker punch. It just feels so utterly shit. I miss her such a lot and can’t believe it’s got to this point. You can probably understand how I ended up crying in the swimming pool changing room for ten minutes after that combined with Hannah’s message.
I absolutely hate this.
Having been in similar territory with Em (well – an unexpected end – and I’m still not recovered from that) I knew that losing Anita was going to be totally disastrous for my system…for me – all of me. And it has been. I’d like to say that I’m doing better, that the pain is less intense, that I no longer find myself sobbing face down on my bed for hours at time – but that simply isn’t the case. Of course, grief, comes in waves, and there are some days that feel more doable than others, but ultimately, when I stop and feel into where I am at rather than avoiding and trying to hold myself together, the truth is, it’s really fucking bad.
I think I spend a lot of my time in denial or dissociated where this stuff is concerned. It’s simply too much, too big, too overwhelming to deal with on my own – and whilst I am not quite ‘on my own’, I am still only four sessions in to work with Elle having had it all go tits up with Hannah after eight sessions, and so I feel like I am right back at the beginning again. It’s not ideal. I feel like I am in a spin cycle in a washing machine and just don’t know which way is up…and am drowning too. Awesome.
The kind of holding and space I need to really deal with losing A isn’t there yet – and probably never will be simply because one session a week just isn’t enough – but it’s what I can afford. Honestly, I really feel like people like us have been dealt a massive heap of shit. It’s bad enough experiencing the debilitating trauma related stuff in the first place, but not being able to fully access what we need to heal it is total bollocks. This is another horrible side effect of ending work with Anita. We had agreed a payment that worked for both of us and enabled me to access the frequency of therapy I needed. Two sessions a week makes life feel just about doable for me and so losing that, and her, is such a massive blow on so many levels.
Elle is ‘there’ in the session, and I really like her, but she’s new to me and she’s not Anita. Of course, the outside session contact has disappeared too… and with that, another level of holding and containment has just evaporated overnight. It’s massive really how much of my emotional scaffolding has been ripped away from me. It’s so hard because I just really struggle to hold any sense of Elle being real from week to week and so I guess I feel like I am almost starting afresh every week…and we kind of are because it’s so new, but this is also the fall out of complex trauma and the whole lack of object constancy stuff. It’s utter shit. But I just don’t have the energy to broach any of it. Any ‘no’ right now is just going to feel epically rejecting and I just can’t go there.
I am struggling such a lot in the week right now and really really need to be ‘seen’ but then there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to be viewed as some pathetic blubbering mess who can’t cope with a therapeutic relationship ending (although we all know it was so much bigger than that) even if that’s exactly what the most pressing issue is. I don’t want to overwhelm Elle with my massive feelings. I don’t want her to freak out and go, “Oh shit, this is going to be a right fucking mess in a few months!” and exit stage left because, let’s face it, ‘stage left’ is getting kind of cluttered with exiting therapists now!
I guess, I don’t want to lose yet another therapeutic support by being too much, albeit in a different way to how it was with H. At least I still have my writing! What happened with H has thrown a massive spanner in the works and I feel like I have had my legs taken out from beneath me again – mind you I wasn’t standing, merely trying to get back up after what’s happened with Anita. It feels like being a contestant in that gameshow ‘Gladiators’ from the 90s. I feel like I am running the gauntlet being repeatedly pummelled…I mean I guess I should be grateful that it’s not being done by anyone in a scary Lycra number, but it’s shite all the same!
Sorry, I am really rambling today…I could have just written a sentence today:
This is killing me.
But hey, let’s keep going with too many words!
Part of me is desperate to take off my armour when I see Elle and just cry in her presence – because thirteen weeks carrying this stuff on my own is too much. Thirteen weeks without Anita is…just…soul destroying. Part of me wants to turn up to Elle’s with my soft toy, take off my shoes, and just let that stuff be there in the space because it is so fucking heavy carrying this alone. But I can’t seem to go anywhere near what’s happened with Anita when I get in the room. I outlined a bit in week one but since then I go anywhere but there. I guess there’s a part of me that is anxious and has no idea how she’d respond to my uncalibrated emotion because I don’t know her…and she doesn’t know me. I literally have no idea what her opinion of me is. Does she even like me? Who knows? Could I ask? Yes – but would I want the possible answer? Nope. Not right now.
I think there’s a part of me that worries if I am really vulnerable and exposed, she’ll be like Em and leave me stranded in agony and so right now it’s easier to suffer on my own because I can manage that pain (sort of). Showing someone the reality of just how terrible this all is and for them to sit there like they’re watching a spectator sport would make me feel even more alone and isolated than I already do. I’m not saying any of this because of anything that Elle has said or done to make me think she’d do that – it’s purely my own fear driving this. I am scared. And ultimately, who I really want to be there with me in this and to hold me through it, is gone.
There’s probably another part of me that is reluctant to get too close to Elle because she is looking to move to purely online work in December and as much as I thought I would be just about ok with that (I am actually delusional aren’t I?!) , I really won’t be if I get too used to being with her in person and feeling like that room and that space with her is my safe place. The idea of having that taken away would be too much so it’s probably best not to go there, not to get to used to it, and not be reliant on it/her – whatever. Yeah, yeah, I know I am meant to be my own safe space, place, person…but let’s be real here – I am not! Yet.
So, instead of falling apart… and letting Elle into that part of my experience…I find myself talking about stuff that, I guess, lets her get to know me (because there’s significant back catalogue of shit), or a side of me – but it’s not the broken, vulnerable, utterly desperate part/s of me. It’s not false adult, either. I think it’s my actual adult-self that’s turning up, but it’s an adult self that is now so fucking fragile that I’m using every adaptive skill and strategy I have to make sure I don’t fuck this up. I imagine I come over as competent, emotionally intelligent, and generally ‘reasonably’ together (don’t laugh!). In fact, Elle wondered in one of our first sessions why I am not doing her job. H said exactly the same thing. K says it all the time, too. But being told I’d make an excellent therapist – or that adult me would (!) – doesn’t really do much for the little parts who are just crying out to not be left alone any longer. There are so many ‘not together’ parts that need attention.
I mean, it’s tough. It takes me such a long time to build trust and feel safe in a relationship and that isn’t going to get any better after what’s just happened, is it?! As much as I need somewhere and someone to process this with, I am so fucking wary now. I obviously want to do the work. I want to build a relationship with Elle. I just also know I don’t have it in me to be hurt very much more. I know at some point I’m going to have to take a step towards her…but I actually feel a bit sick thinking about doing that. That’s the level of anxiety and fear I have around this now.
Oh, fuck me. This is beyond exhausting. And yeah, I think I am circling the next trapdoor as I fall into a deeper depression. Most excellent.
So, after the break in May I was feeling a bit anxious but largely just really looking forward to seeing Anita and reconnecting. I’d had a bit of a wobble during the break and the mishap with the return to sessions wasn’t ideal, but the fact Anita had rescheduled so I didn’t need to wait until Friday meant that I felt ok enough and was just really ready to process some of my stuff. I’ve been holding onto such a lot for such a long time.
When I arrived on the Wednesday I sat down and took a minute – you know what it’s like after a break. It takes a while to ground back into the space, to settle, to let the parts know things are ok and safe. I began by telling Anita I was a bit stressed, told her a little a bit about something that had happened with my kids, students etc and then think it must have been a couple of minutes in when I dropped False Adult and said, “It’s been hard.”
There was a little bit of silence and then Anita said, “Well done for coming this morning…” I didn’t reply but it felt like we were getting on the page quickly to start to work through the break…wrong! There was maybe fifteen seconds and then she started, “I also need to have a difficult conversation with you – I ended up in A and E when I was on holiday because I couldn’t breathe, they thought it might be my heart. The Doctor says I can’t take any more stress…and my mum’s in hospital, she might die… I am really sorry and I know it’s not we wanted and we hoped I would get through this, but I am going to have to bring the counselling with you to an end…”
I tried really hard to take it all in and not disappear. Whilst part of me had feared this (ending) for a while, there was another part that was utterly stunned. I felt completely pummelled. The night before she’d sent me a message to tell me she was looking forward to seeing me and now this? Wtf?
Anita went on, “I know it’s not what either of us wanted. It really isn’t what I wanted.” And then she told me more about her health concerns, what had happened to her mum, and her very real fears about the future. Her voice was strained and I could hear the wheeze in her chest had got much worse since I had last seen her. She looked utterly exhausted. Broken, if I am honest.
I went through the whole range of emotions in seconds. I was sad, angry, upset… you name it. The parts were going insane. How I didn’t dissociate I have no clue. There was another part, though, that is really good at problem solving and that wanted to fix everything for her and strategically find a way forward – although I know I can’t.
Anita said she was happy to work with me until I found someone else. This sparked Teen off and I angrily responded – with “Shut up!…Have you any idea what you’re saying? What this feels like?…”
Anita replied, “Pretty shit. Devastating. Rejecting. All of it. I don’t know how to change it. I know this isn’t what either of us wants. I’m so sorry.”
I just sat there. It might not be what we want but it was going to happen regardless. I couldn’t believe this was happening.
I don’t know who said this – maybe all of the parts, but I whispered, “What even was this?”
Like honestly? What had this relationship even been if it was so easy to walk away from it now?
Anita was defensive and felt closed down, “It’s not easy for me as well, you know – I haven’t wanted to do this. This is last thing I have wanted to do.” There was a definite sadness in her voice but also, I felt like she was removed – probably in self-protect (which is something she later admitted to).
There was a period of silence. My mind was all over the place. “I just didn’t think you’d do this to me” I sighed.
“I tried not to, but I can’t help it. I can’t carry on like this. I have to get better…”
Adult me stepped up and in. I took her hand and held it for the rest of the session. It was a complete role reversal and at one point Anita even said, “This is meant to be your session, not mine.”
After more of Anita telling me basically that she’s utterly fucked I asked, “Does this have to be for forever?” Anita said she didn’t know. She was so … I don’t know … just in a state of collapse that it was really difficult to get anywhere. All these ending sessions have been impossibly hard because I’ve been dealing with someone who is having a breakdown not with a therapist who is doing a proper ending based on client need. She has no idea what she’s doing or how to get from one minute to the next so she has no idea of the future because right now she can’t even cope with the minute in front of her.
At one point a young part came forward, “What have I done wrong?” I’ve been really struggling to get my head round what’s happening given the quality of the relationship we had. Like how do you go from everything we’ve got to nothing?
Anita replied, “Nothing – you haven’t done anything wrong. It’s my situation, my ability to cope. It’s me. Not you. It really isn’t you. I am broken. My soul is broken right now. I have nothing left to give. I was hoping it wouldn’t have to come to this. I really did hope it wouldn’t come to this. But I don’t know what else to do…It’s a shame we met like this because if we’d have met as friends we could stay friends. Ethically, we shouldn’t have anything to do with each other for two years after we end. It’s all a pile of shit basically…”
“This doesn’t feel right,” I said.
“I don’t know what to do” replied A, “I can’t carry on. I’ve got to cut the stress out of my life.”
There was another silence. “I can’t just go” I sobbed. “I can’t just disappear. It’s not nothing to me” and I broke down in big tears.
“It’s not nothing to me either,” said Anita.
“…Unless I am completely delusional? If that happens it undoes everything that I thought that this was.”
It was absolute agony. Both of us just hanging on by a thread. There is so much in this relationship but also… not enough it seems.
I haven’t gone into the detail of this session because honestly 90% of it was about Anita and her situation – which isn’t relevant…it doesn’t add anything.
It was coming to the end of the session. I had no idea what was going to happen. Was it just going to end? Earlier in the session I had said there was no point in continuing but at the end Anita said, “Let’s find a way of still connecting. I think we need to come back to this and figure something out”.
I left the session sad but hopeful – like maybe there would be a way to not completely sever the relationship altogether even if the therapy had to stop.
There has been so much up and down, push and pull, connection and disconnection…it’s been an absolute head fuck if I am honest. Part of the problem is Anita didn’t come at these endings with long-term clients with a clear vision of how it would look. I don’t think she and her supervisor have really properly thrashed out what needs to happen and … it’s felt like she’s been winging it on burnout. I feel like she got really scared on holiday, literally thought she was going to die, her mum is really sick in hospital and she’s just panicked and felt like she has to stop. She does but she needed to go off sick – not try and botch endings.
After two sessions of pain and … well… just going round in circles, I realised we were getting nowhere. She was increasingly checked out. It wasn’t intentional – she is very ill. But it means that when I tried to say things she couldn’t hear me and would react from a place of defensiveness. Also, I was trying to rescue her. I’ve been trying to rescue her for a year, really.
It reached a point, though, where I needed to get my feelings heard even though I knew it wouldn’t make a difference. The pain I was going through was/is off the chart and I was not going to leave this therapy silent and suffering like with Em. I at least needed to give me and my parts a voice even if it wouldn’t change things. I sucked up so much of my hurt with Em and although this situation is different this time, and perhaps Anita in less of a place to hear me than Em was, I was still paying for this mess… don’t let’s get started on that!
So, I wrote a letter and recorded it as a voice note. I knew I wouldn’t be able to read it in session on the Monday (3rd session of trying to figure out what the hell to do) so I asked A to play it on her phone. It was twenty-five minutes long. We cuddled the whole time (it’s so hard when there is so much love there) and I sobbed. I was wondering if this would be the last time she’d ever hold me. If this would be the last time I would hear her heartbeat, be able to breathe in her safe smell. To say that it was utter agony is an understatement.
I still don’t know how I will survive without this… this proximity, closeness, intimacy – call it what you will. How do you replace that? I can’t and don’t want to.
I’ll leave that here. I have the voice note letter ready to go in another post which I’ll post soon (check me out with my organised blogging… lol!). And big thank you to everyone for your support. Yet again this tribe have my back. Big hugs. x
A couple of years ago I left a therapy session with Anita and as I walked towards the gate, her son had his head in the bonnet of the car on the driveway. He was fixing something for A. Fortunately, he didn’t look up and I was able to leave without being seen. I didn’t feel much about it at the time, and I have literally only just remembered that this had even happened as I lead into the main bit of this post! Isn’t it weird, then, that a chance viewing of one of Anita’s children had absolutely no impact on me at all…and yet seeing the other (her daughter) set all kinds of shit off?! Hmmmm, I wonder why that might be?!
Let’s be clear, Anita is not a blank screen in my therapy AT ALL. Indeed, she is the complete antithesis to Em who revealed absolutely nothing about herself during the time we worked together. I know Anita has two adult kids and some grandkids – she mentions this on her website and occasionally mentions them in session. Most of the time that’s fine…ish (!). It really depends how I am feeling in myself and in the relationship with Anita in the moment.
If I feel settled and secure, then it really doesn’t bother me for her to reference her kids or something she might have done with them but other times (when the young parts are feeling vulnerable) it feels like she’s pouring salt directly into the mother wound. This feeling has got significantly worse in recent months, in part, due to the fact that her adult daughter has moved back in with her so she’s there nearly all the time working from home when I am having my sessions.
As I said in a recent post, sometimes I can hear her daughter moving around the house and it can feel … I can’t really explain it… awkward, I guess. There’s a kind of jealousy, perhaps, too. I feel jealous that I get so little of Anita’s time and attention these days, and so I really don’t need to be reminded of her daughter being there. I think I also feel a bit weird if Anita is reading me a story and I then hear daughter moving around. Because let’s face it, whilst we are working with my child parts in those sessions – it must sound a bit fucking weird hearing your mum reading kids’ stories to an adult.
Anyway, it is what is and I don’t let this get in the way of me getting what I need in the sessions – I just wish she wasn’t there (read into that what you will!). I try not to bristle when A says something about her family. Her family are clearly really important to her – as they should be. I guess, for lots of us though, when we know our therapists are close with their family, and involved with their kids and grandkids, it can feel like another reminder of exactly what we don’t have.
Like, “Look what you could have won… but didn’t.”
Therapy, at times, can feel like a brief escape into a fantasy world of what it might have been like had things been different (what we needed) when we were kids. Having someone who actually pays attention to us, listens, sees, and responds to us and meets some of our needs, is in so many ways the basics of interaction and caring for a child, but when it’s been missing our whole lives it feels like a magic balm receiving it as an adult! Having an attuned therapist has done such a lot for me…even if I am, yet again, whining about something that’s happened!!
Of course, therapy isn’t just playing at getting the mum we wanted. Well…it’s not only this (LOL!), there’s tonnes of work and pain to sift through as well. Often, it’s the fantasy relationship that triggers the sore points in us so that are then ready to be worked through and with (so long as the therapist is open to that and can cope with attachment stuff). I mean mine and Anita’s relationship is real, not just in my head, not only fantasy, but the child parts definitely see her as a mother figure. Adult me knows she’s my therapist but that’s an important role too and that client therapist relationship is valuable.
I am phrasing this really badly– wandering as usual! – but basically because Anita and I laid some pretty robust foundations at the beginning of my therapy, when the child parts and attachment stuff finally went live in summer 2020, we were well placed to deal with it. All the work we’d done at the beginning when I went to her when Em and I were hitting the skids and then terminated really left a clear map of what was likely to come up eventually between A and I. Anita’s absolute calm, care, and empathy hearing the absolute state of it when we first met meant that I knew that there was space for whatever might come AND THERE HAS BEEN A LOT!
I think this is really different to when I worked with Em and the aching need and attachment stuff came up and I had no idea what was going on, or why, or how to even deal with it. I was just drowning in shame week in week out. But Anita could see from the get-go that I had gone headlong down the hole with Em and triggered all my wounding in the relationship with her. Transference 101.
Anyway, get to the point RB…
So, we all know that my relationship with Anita is…deep? Yeah. It is. It’s close. It’s human and it’s fucking MESSY at times. We work through stuff in the room and it’s very specific to me and my need and my trauma. As we also know, a significant amount of my trauma stems from my mother wound…which leads to fun times! The bits that hurt the most are the bits where the young parts are triggered and feel unseen, unloved, inadequate, ‘less than’ – [insert endless negative feelings list here]…
Sooooo, a few weeks back it was absolutely pissing rain and I arrived at therapy at my usual time. I never arrive early – always bang on 10am – because I know what it’s like when students rock up early and I am still doing something else. Also, I figure if I arrive on time then Anita should be ready for me. So, that particular morning I had driven to therapy feeling a lot of feelings. It was right smack in that time when Anita’s wheels were falling off and my child parts were going wild inside but I had been keeping it to myself for fear of sending her over the edge. I had intended to go to that session and try and articulate what was happening for me because I was out of coping – I was in the zone and ready to go.
So, imagine my shock when I was head down trying to keep dry, little parts on the surface, and I walked through the gate, looked up, and there was Anita’s daughter coming out the front door.
Fuck.
I mean what a fucking fuck?! Of course we know these people exist. Of course I know she bloody lives there! But there’s something really different between having the knowledge of someone or hearing them moving about to being face-to-face with them unexpectedly. I instantly snapped into adult and pasted on a friendly smile and said “Hi”. A’s daughter smiled back and apologised for being there and then carried on out. All the while Anita was at the door – so she saw the whole thing.
Ummm.
Let’s be honest. This completely threw me. I got into the room and expected A to make some reference to it. It can’t just be me that thinks that’s a fairly big deal knowing exactly what we work on? I mean basically I saw the ‘sibling’. The favourite one. In the normal run of things I would have said something to Anita but given how it was then, and her total lack of capacity to hold anything I wasn’t about to bring the, “Seeing your daughter and talking to her felt really weird and it’s upset me a bit because the young parts want you to themselves and I feel like these days I get less and less of you”. Basically, it was the fantasy meeting harsh reality. And of course I know the reality – I guess I just didn’t want to be faced with it like this.
So, that was weird.
Really weird.
But then it happened again a few weeks later.
Are you fucking kidding me?!
This time we had a bit more of a conversation – nothing massive but she recognised me. She must be thinking, ‘There’s that client that’s here all the fucking time and never leaves my mum alone!’
So yeah. That was unexpected and uncomfortable. I mean, I guess sometimes parts of us would like to feel more included in parts of our therapist’s lives – but I can categorically say, that the part I am absolutely not wanting to know or come face-to-face with is her beloved children!
Anyway, I don’t have much more to say on that, I just thought I’d let you know as at this point I don’t think you can make it up! I mean I could unpick the psychology behind it but we know it don’t we? Ugh.
Anita is now away on holiday so it’s a three-week break – just marvellous. I’ve got another post swirling in my brain, so I’ll get to that sometime soon – suffice to say my internal mini bus isn’t in great shape.
So, it’s been another while since I have posted again… This is mainly because life is so unbelievably busy that I simply haven’t had time to sit and write – but it’s also because really I haven’t found my feet back in therapy since the Christmas break (yes – I know it’s almost March!). It’s felt like there’s been a catalogue of ‘mini-disasters’ in the room with Anita since the holidays which has made it feel difficult to drop into feeling completely safe – or at least safe enough to address some of the lingering murk that always rears its head in the early part of the year – namely the catastrophic end that Em and I went through three years ago … THREE YEARS AGO!!
Because that stuff around Em (and by extension the mother wound) is so huge, and so painful, I have to feel so completely contained and safe in the relationship with Anita to be able to go anywhere near it….and I just haven’t. Parts of me have gone into hiding and it’s not helped things in the room at all. I mean it’s been ok, but just not ok enough for me to get to the parts that are requiring attention and care…and because time is rolling on and those parts are not getting what they need, it’s making it feel crappy inside. I feel abandoned and rejected – and part of that is my doing because I haven’t let Anita in, she doesn’t know what’s going on.
My system is having a bit of a malfunction and it feels really disappointing to be in this place tbh. I am trying not to judge myself and just accept that whatever is coming up is just part of what needs to happen right now – but I can’t lie, I am not enjoying the levels of upset and dissociation that has crept back in. I know that I need to find a way to get properly back to A this coming week because I can feel myself starting to fall down a hole that I haven’t been in for a long while and I know that if I don’t send out an SOS cry then I am going to be…well…I just can’t go there again. I feel really lost. And the young parts – particularly the teen is not ok.
I tend not to write mid ‘crap’ on the blog these days. I prefer to write and process things a bit after whatever was going on has run its course and things have resolved a bit…basically when things feel a bit more together. I want to reflect from my Adult self rather than post in a triggered state – but the rate things are going it could be 2024 before I am able to do that so I guess I’ll just do a quick catch up before this blog dies altogether. I know I keep saying this, but I think I need to carve out some time somewhere for me to be able to write – even if it’s not blogging- because it has been such a helpful tool over the years…I just don’t know where that time will come from!
Anyway, here goes…
It’s clear as day to me that I am swimming (drowning) in the shit infested emotional seas right now. I feel like I am lost. And where in the past I’ve used the analogy of Stevie Smith’s poem, ‘Not Waving But Drowning’ – where people on the shore mistake the drowning swimmer for someone who is waving at them so they don’t respond. However, right now I feel like I am not even trying to get noticed – I couldn’t be mistaken for waving because I’ve almost resigned myself to drowning. Well not that, exactly, but I am not sending up the signal to show that I am not ok because the fact is there is no one standing on the beach watching. There is no one to notice the distress to come and help. There is no one to save me, and so I am trying hard to muster the energy to save myself but it’s not easy when you’re exhausted.
We’ve all been here.
We know we need to do better but sometimes all you can do is just keep treading water until things ease off…but it’s hard. Fortunately, I am a strong swimmer and I have been in choppy waters and rip currents enough to know that the sea will calm and I will find my way out of it…eventually.
I seem to be triggered left, right, and centre- and just as I feel like I am getting my head above water I get hit with something else. I really don’t think perimenopause is helping with this– and that’s not me playing the crazy hormones card, but honestly I am finding that my emotions are very heightened alongside my cycle now. I feel so bonkers around ovulation, and even paranoid at times – so, I am sure that’s an exacerbating factor in all this, too. Unfortunately, there’s not a great deal I can do about that other than up the self-care, be mindful, and take the supplements, eat better, and try and get the sleep in. Ah sleep…that elusive balm. Again, I am sure this is perimenopause. ARGH!!
Anyway, I am struggling a bit and the reality is, the anniversary of mine and Em’s end really hit me hard this year. I don’t know why – you’d think the further I get away from that the easier it would be, but sadly, “like a tick” is stuck deep in my young parts’ psyche and whilst Adult me knows what she said was completely out of order, as we well know, a hurt young part holds onto these negative soundbites like a security blanket confirming why we are unworthy of love and care.
Christmas was especially hard this year, too, when my mum failed to acknowledge me, my wife, or my children. And whilst our relationship is patchy at best these days, it felt like a deliberate and calculated kick in the teeth – a punishment for I have no idea what…?
Let’s be clear – I am in therapy because of my mother wound and whilst events in the here and now aren’t the end of the world (and they really aren’t) what these rejections or abandonments tap into is all the pain I experienced as a child and it seems to pour petrol on the fire. And that’s when it all goes wrong!
So, my mum not really engaging with me anymore is what it is – no worries – I have a wonderful little family unit and we are happy as we are – but to the little parts that are so hurt it just twists the knife again into that wound…and of course that then plays out in my therapy with Anita as I search and scan for evidence that she, too, doesn’t really care and would rather not be around me. And of course, breaks do this. Again, breaks are just breaks to Adult me…but breaks to the young parts…well, it’s not great is it?! #therapybreakhell
I think sometimes as an adult you can really sometimes doubt your childhood experience and wonder if you are just stuck and locked in victim mode and perhaps it wasn’t really that bad. I mean, seriously, I am getting really bored of navigating this emotional territory over and over but I am not doing it on purpose! I am not choosing to be here. I am trying hard to heal this stuff so I don’t keep falling flat on my face…and it’s working…I think. But some weeks are better than others. Today just happens to be part of one of the bad weeks but there have been months of much much better weeks.
Adult is gaining power, but the young parts are obviously still very much part of the system and I think will continue to be. I don’t see the goal as ‘getting rid’ of those younger parts – they are there to give me information about my feelings and need listening to – and dare I say it, are welcome…even the critic! The more I can give them space whilst being able to keep a foot in adult the better.
The biggest difference that I feel now is that where previously the young parts could completely steam roller me and almost take Adult hostage (kind of how it feels this weekend), there is a move towards Adult being able to communicate with those small parts and hold and soothe them to a degree. I mean obviously I am not the preferred Adult/parent but this is a million miles further forward from when I was working with Em. Back then I could see and feel these distressed young parts but I could do absolutely nothing to help them. Because of the work I’ve done with Anita I know what it is to feel held, loved, cared for and can now copy that, sort of.
Anyway, back to actual therapy:
The first session back after the break was 9th of January…which felt like an eternity after Christmas. So, it had been a looooooooong break – not ideal. My mum had been shit – again, not ideal. It was knee deep into the anniversary period of the notoriously bad time when Em and I colossally collapsed – not ideal…and so, yeah, I was very fragile, sensitive, and hypervigilant heading back to A… I was desperate to see her. I mean the little ones were absolutely in need of hugs and stories and reassurance that everything was ok.
It’s been such a long time since those early sessions that I can’t even really remember the details of what happened and I can’t be arsed to go back and listen to see what happened. What I can tell you is that there have been a few hiccups that have meant I haven’t been able to quite settle into the therapy. You’ll laugh when you read this, because I think on their own these things perhaps aren’t a big deal – but cumulatively they’ve felt big enough to stop me doing the work I really need to do. It’s felt like the safe container is a bit of a leaky bucket and so I’ve been waiting, poised in false adult a lot of the time waiting for ‘safe Anita’ to be there consistently.
Tbh I can’t quite remember the chronology of the little things that happened with Anita but I know the first session back she opened the door and her hair was still wet. “Big deal” I hear you say, but what that signalled to me was that she wasn’t quite ready for me, had been rushing, and probably wasn’t in the zone. Perhaps she was not wanting to be back to work and would not on her A game. I know that’s a lot of projection but that’s what we do isn’t it? When we feel vulnerable and uncontained, we really badly need our container (person and space) to be robust and any hint that they may not be sends things off.
The next session her dogs barked loudly for almost the entire session and I just couldn’t relax at all. I was jumpy and stressed out. I’d needed to talk the first session back but it was just filler and False Adult and now it felt like she wasn’t providing a safe, calm therapeutic space. I felt angry that day. I had stuff I really needed to dig into and I was left feeling like she didn’t really care enough to make sure the space was ‘therapeutic’.
In another one I could hear her adult daughter wandering around in the corridor right out outside the room which again made me not be able to relax (I think this is the one that pissed me off the most!).
In another she’d forgotten to put our stories out, which again signalled that she wasn’t really ready – or more over, didn’t have the young parts and me kept in mind. She forgot the books once before a long while back and I went belly up about it. It was a big rupture. This time I didn’t say anything – teen me was just thinking “what’s the point?” because we were traversing this weird not quite right space and quite frankly, I didn’t have the energy for it. But of course, the little parts were upset and disappointed.
In and of themselves these things above don’t seem like that big a deal but as I have said, cumulatively I just felt so off – such a departure from the Anita I used to see. So, False Adult turned up to lots of the sessions because I just did not want a rupture…but inside there was a lot up upset and unrest. The head injury I sustained at Christmas really affected me for most of the month of January too. I felt dissociated but not. My short term memory was awful and I would forget trains of thought and words and….well basically it was a nightmare. There was one session where I just sat there. My mind was completely empty. Peaceful even (Wow!). But it meant that there wasn’t really much therapy. I wasn’t sad about it though because I was so cognitively zoned out. I literally had no fucks to give!
Then anniversary of ending with Em rolled around and I didn’t speak about it despite the fact it was swirling inside. It was mine and Anita’s three-year anniversary but I felt awkward somehow. I gave her a gift, but it just felt a bit…I dunno…strange this year. I think that’s definitely me, not her.
That’s not to say during this period A and I haven’t connected. We have had a few hugs and stories – it’s not been completely distant…but I just haven’t felt quite right. Stuff was building up and up and up and then I had a very bad dissociative day and it hit me afterwards that it was the actual day of ‘tick gate’. The body remembers even if the mind isn’t quite on it!
The next session I was determined to go and talk things through with Anita. You know when it’s just built up to a point where you have to? Avoidance is out. You just need to do the work. You need to take a risk and oftentimes when you do that that’s when things feel most held and connected. Anita is not a mind reader and so if I come in in False Adult I think she can think I am ok…enough. If I actually show her or tell her I am struggling then she’s there. Sometimes I think I don’t give her the opportunity to meet me, but then there’s another part of me that feels like by now she should know me and my patterns well enough to spot when I might be hiding away.
So, that day a few weeks back (the ‘let’s do it’ day) it felt like the internal fog had lifted, the mistrust and crap about not feeling held or contained was gone. Anita and I have been together long enough for me to know that she’s there. She cares. And she’s human. (Am still fucked off about the disruptions though!) But it wasn’t serving me to keep stuff to myself. The child parts needed to be seen and held and to talk through the break and all the feelings of being left and abandoned.
It’s a 45 minute drive to Anita’s and I had just arrived in her town when I got a phone call from my wife telling me she needed to go to hospital urgently but didn’t think she could drive. So, that was therapy out. I text Anita just 15 minutes before my session and cancelled. I was gutted, but obviously my wife’s health and well-being take precedence. When I arrived home, I saw a message from A saying she hoped everything was ok and she was sorry not see me. I spent the day in hospital with my wife and it triggered a lot of the trauma from being young and also when I had to have all the chemo and radiotherapy for cancer- I wasn’t in a very good place and also so sad about not being able to see Anita when I had REALLY needed to and was REALLY ready to let stuff out.
I text Anita in the afternoon explaining what was going on (bad) and asked if she might have time for a quick check in before Friday and…she didn’t reply until the afternoon of the next day. That triggered me. Ugh. But not only that she said she didn’t have any space for me.
Ouch.
I wasn’t asking for a f-2-f session, I literally just wanted a five minute phonecall to touch base and she was too busy.
I was really upset about that. I mean really upset.
The next session was quite shutdown I think until I started crying and told her I had really needed to see her on Monday and then all the stuff about hospital trauma and stuff from being little came out. I thought Anita knew about this part of my story, but I think I must have shared it with Em (this is one thing I really hate about having switched therapists – I feel like so much of my story is held with Em). A responded with lots of love and care but, despite this I wasn’t able to tell her how hurt I felt about not having a check in. She’d brought it up and said she was sorry…but I was hurting a lot and the young parts just felt like she would have made time in the past.
I was due to go on holiday in half-term and so that was creeping ever closer…another break. Another disruption. I was flying on the Friday before half-term and I had asked again in a text if we might be able to check in. Again she said she was full. When I saw her in session she said she was sorry that she had no space in the week. I moodily replied, “I don’t want to see you, I don’t have time this week either, I just wanted to talk to you.” Anita hadn’t realised the check in I was asking for was a phone call and said that she could talk to me on the Wednesday evening before I went. It’s a day she has her grandchildren overnight but once she’d got them in bed we could talk. That sounded good to me.
So I left on the Monday feeling sad that it would be two weeks until I saw A, but grateful that at least we would talk and the child parts would get a bit of reassurance on the Wednesday.
Wednesday evening rolled around…and my phone didn’t ring. There was no text. Nothing. I went to bed upset but also kind of resigned to the fact that she’d not remembered me. On Thursday my phone remained blank. No contact.
By the evening part of me was panicking that something had happened to Anita…but more voices were shouting, “She’s forgotten about you. She doesn’t care. Out of sight, out of mind! You’re just not that important anymore.” – that stuff on a loop. I felt really sad. I went to bed on Thursday ready to fly on Friday and when I woke up at 3am there was a message from Anita on my phone sent at 11pm Thursday night:
I am so sorry about last night. Not only was it children, but our electric kept tripping off on the sockets, so (partner) had to come down to sort it. I hope you have a lovely time away and can fully recharge xx (heart).
I looked at the message and was just really fucking mad. Like, really? Sure things go wrong and perhaps it all got chaotic that evening. But the thing that really hurt me was that she was only acknowledging this more than 24 hours after we were meant to check in. It hurt because the reason I had asked for the check in in the first place was because there was a break coming up and the little parts get so distressed. Anita knew this. And so that message just felt shit on so many levels.
In the past I would have replied to that message and fired something back showing just how hurt and upset I was. But I didn’t. I just didn’t reply at all. I was sick for the first part of my holiday which was a real pisser and I was having nightmares with Anita in them. By Monday evening I was really struggling with the little parts. I sent Anita a message with something from Carolyn Spring about shame and the link to a song, a friend had shared with me by Sia which really encapsulated how I was feeling.
I heard nothing from Anita.
In the past when I have been away and it’s been our session time she’s sent me a text to tell me she’s thinking of me. Not this time.
On Friday she sent me a text wishing me a safe journey home and sending a hug…but by that time I just felt really cut off. Like, really? Can she really not know how upset I am.
Ugh.
Monday ended up a complete shitting disaster. I could barely speak to her and dissociated so badly that it felt like there was literal grey fog in the room. I couldn’t see properly. I was quiet. I was hoping Anita would say something early on about the missed check in but she didn’t and this shut me down even further. I had expected her to say something – surely that text wasn’t adequate and she couldn’t feel like that was the matter closed? The pain inside was intense and A just seemed to leave me in it. She didn’t reach out, ask to hold my hand, see if I wanted a hug, enquire which parts were there. At around the half hour mark she asked if what was going on was due to gap or her not calling on the Wednesday.
I couldn’t speak.
And then she said, “In hindsight, I won’t do that again. I should have said no in the first place.”
With that I got up and said, “I’m so done. That’s not fair.” And walked out.
I was so upset.
Maybe she shouldn’t have offered the check in, and maybe with hindsight it was a mistake but the mistake has been made and surely it’s up to her to try and find a repair and allow the hurt parts to talk about what it felt like to be let down and seemingly forgotten about. Instead, it felt like I was being punished for her cock up. My reaction was making her uncomfortable, obviously another example of being ‘too dependent’, and so rather than look at that, just withdraw yet another thing that helps. We don’t do longer sessions anymore, now check ins are off the cards. I am waiting to see what happens with bank holidays. Previously, we’ve always rescheduled to another time in the week but I am guessing now I’ll just miss the session…that I have paid for.
Oh, and don’t get me started on that. She’s upped her prices too.
So, yeah. It’s all been a bit bumpy to say the least. We have managed to repair things a bit. I went back after walking out and a glimmer of old Anita was there. She had softened a lot and told me she cares, loves me etc etc and held me in tight hug for the remainder of the session…
But…
Ugh…
It feels like we are a long way off base right now.
Part of me is wondering how much of this has been triggered by all the stuff I am carrying emotionally and so I am just being over sensitive. Another part is wondering if I just need to be realistic and adjust my expectations of the therapy. Anita’s capacity has changed. She isn’t the same as she was, but I still get a lot… I dunno. And after all, she is just a therapist.
I guess we’ll see. Apologies that this is just a moaning rant of nothing. I don’t have much reflective capacity right now. I just feel sad. I’ll get through it, though, I always do.
So – it’s been a very BIG month, or so, with Anita and therapy. I mean, wow – talk about rupture! I will try telling you all about it as ‘calm me’ after you first see the ‘not calm me’ below, in a sec (which was written in the thick of it) but since ‘calm me’ is now back online all that transpired has all gone a bit hazy – or deliberately dissociated?! I feel like I might be a bit of an unreliable narrator now (no change there, then!). And since things are largely resolved and settled again it is hard dragging my mind back to the stress of the rupture and the detail of it.
I’m in that post-Christmas fog of procrastination and borderline depression, too, so I need to be careful not to pick at a scab (throwing myself back in to remembering details of the horror) when it’s still a long time until I actually get to see Anita again because man, I am really feeling the ache right now. I really miss Anita (no surprises there!) and am consciously trying to ensure I don’t fall down the hole of doom when there’s still 10 days until I see A again…10 DAYS. Argh!
Still, I thought I would write a post today (beware it is absolutely mammoth) to try and keep a log and update where I am at because it all moved so fast, is more-or-less resolved, and I realise that I won’t have logged this at all. Next week work will be back up and running and I’ll be busy, busy, busy again so it’s now or never. This blog was always intended to be an online therapy diary, but over the last year I have had less and less time to write and so I don’t really know what it is anymore…a webspace I pay for?! Lol! I have noticed that lots of people I follow are writing less regularly these days, but I am always glad to see their posts when they show up on my reader, so I hope that that is still the case with this blog.
Anyway, I have just got to the computer and seen that this is not the first time I have tried to start a post about the rupture. Ummm, that’s news to me! Shit… I know I was dissociated and it’s been a very bonkers time with two sick kids, a broken-down boiler, car packing up… [insert endless list of mishaps HERE]… as well as my therapy falling out its arse all before Christmas break, but really? What the actual fuck is/was going on in my poor little brain? Ah, yes, system meltdown. My absolute favourite.
This…this…’mess’..below…well I don’t even remember typing it! I can see how disjointed it is. How panicked it feels…and yet, as I said, I have no recollection whatsoever of writing it. So, here it is. It won’t make sense, it doesn’t even make sense to me! But I think it’s interesting to see just how bad it gets on an unfiltered level. So, bear with me – I’ll, (usual blogging RB) be back after this:
Honest to fucking god, I think I’ve done it this time. Just lock me up and throw away the fucking key where therapy is concerned because, frankly, I’m shit at it and shouldn’t be let loose on therapists… I feel sick. I’ve had the ‘therapy’ shits (ffs!). My heart is racing. Basically, my nervous system is in free fall and my body is freaking out.
So, here I am again. Facing down a massive rupture. But this one feels really scary…usually I meltdown and Anita is solid – but she’s wobbled this week. She doesn’t feel grounded. She is frustrated and that doesn’t feel safe AT ALL. The end of that session was – bizarre, to say the least. I can’t believe she just cut it dead like that. How did she think I would react? You can’t just randomly drop information like ‘I know I’m going to be getting married at some point and I don’t know what I’ll be doing’ in an argument, three minutes before the end of an already hideous session -and there not be some fall out.
I’ve listened to the session on my way home, and she says all the right things, but it just feels like empty words. Like it’s therapist 101 not the Anita I have a relationship with. To the outside world it probably feels and sounds fine…but it’s not…It feels like she’s distancing. And the end – well that was just a fucking disaster.
And that was where it ended….my typing in the moment freak out. But how did I get there?
I had been having a panic about something that had happened between a friend and her therapist– I was basically fearing that the same would happen to me and Anita and it had sent the child parts into a right state. I didn’t tell A about it in the week between sessions because I felt it could wait. But by Thursday evening I was really desperate to reconnect with Anita and see her in person to ‘confirm’ everything was still ok and to settle those panicking parts…and basically have a cuddle. The week had been hard – everything was tough, you know? Like every day was like trudging through treacle. I even managed to slam my finger in my car door! It was just one of those weeks.
Then, Anita cancelled our session Friday session last minute late Thursday night. I didn’t actually see the message until I woke up on Friday morning. I was gutted. And so I think that maybe acted as a catalyst for the acceleration into this rupture but it wasn’t the reason for it. I wasn’t angry that she was sick or anything, she can’t help that, and I really understood her need to cancel. In fact, that day I ended up taking a nap on the couch for two hours when I would have been driving to and from therapy, so it wasn’t like I sat crying about it. However, what the last-minute cancellation meant was that I had more time to work myself up about whether A and I were still solid because there was now going to be a longer gap between sessions.
The Monday session was a bit meh, it was hard to connect, and I left feeling disappointed because I think essentially ‘False Adult’ had taken over when I really really needed for A and I to be close. It was that annoying thing where the momentum of the therapy was interrupted and the need had ramped up, but alongside that so had the fear of being too much and so I failed to allow A in.
Things felt really crap and on Tuesday I sent Anita a message that on reflection didn’t make it massively explicit what was wrong as it was wedged between nothing stuff. Anita didn’t see it and didn’t reply. But from my side all I got was radio silence from her. No, “I hear you, I am here, let’s talk about this properly on Friday” or “We’re fine, I promise”. Just nothing. On Thursday night I was worked up and texted – “Are you ok?” No reply. Then in the morning a few minutes before our session, “Yes, just really busy”. Ffs we’ve been here before. Too ‘busy’ to pay attention, running about like a headless chicken, dropping balls…I sent a message, “I don’t want to come today”…and she obviously didn’t check her phone.
The message wasn’t an “I’m not coming” it was really a “I don’t want to come because I can’t face any more of the feeling of you letting me drift away and us not connecting”. I did go to session, though. I hoped that at least being in the room would enable us to talk things out. I arrived both angry (teen) and anxious (little ones). I sat down and just froze. Silent. Ugh. Not this again. I reached for Anita’s hand and started crying. Told her I felt like I was drowning, and she was just standing watching. I told her that it felt like everything was broken. “It doesn’t have to be broken” she soothed. But it just felt so fucking crap – I was too far gone.
In a barely audible whisper, I asked for a story and of course Anita got the pile of books from the table and asked me which one I wanted. I said I didn’t mind and she selected, ‘Dragon Loves Penguin’ which is a REALLY lovely book that we’ve had for a couple of months now. We’ve read it quite few times and the child parts ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT. The story is really beautiful, and it’s been so connecting. BUT not this time.
FUCK!
Why?
Well, simple.
SHAME.
Yep. My longstanding best-friend decided that today was the day to bulldoze the very thing that is so helpful in connecting young parts to Anita.
It all started to go wrong when Anita didn’t invite me in for a cuddle when she opened the book – or I didn’t shuffle in like I might usually…I was already in a state of freeze, though, and really needed her to reach out to me. As Anita began to read, I felt more and more distant from her and more and more distressed.
But why?
Why did I suddenly feel shame listening to a story with Anita after so many years of listening to stories snuggled in close to her? Even after listening to this very story several times in the last couple of months? Well, the previous week we’d been reading and cuddling and generally just talking and she’d said something about me having a massive inner child. It wasn’t meant unkindly, rather it was acknowledging the vulnerability of the young parts and the need. But you know how it is. There’s always that internal searchlight scanning for change in the relationship, change in Anita, change in how she feels towards me…and my system clocked ‘massive’ as a potential negative and obviously put it in the bank for later.
That later was this story time. I wish I had been able to tell Anita what was going on when she asked what was wrong/happening – but I was deep down in the shame zone, drowning in the dark by then. And so, it all started unravelling from there. RB was triggered and off we went down a road that really wasn’t a lot of fun. I felt upset that Anita didn’t seem to be ‘there’ (she was there) and trying to ‘connect’ (she was trying) but you know how it is when things feel really bad. It can feel like you’re on the other side of the world to the person sitting barely two feet from you and there seems no way to bridge the gap. This distance always makes me feel abandoned even when Anita isn’t abandoning me and so EVERYTHING she says gets filtered through a lens of mistrust and fear.
I’d been sitting there silent internally crying out for her but externally stonewalling her. At one point Anita asked me what I get from therapy – it was an open question but it felt accusatory. Like “Why are you even here?” A snarling, angry, (hurting) teen part replied, “Oh, I don’t know, nightmares, anxiety, and panic attacks!” Anita took that and seemed to run with it without realising it was coming from the hurt teen who felt unseen and abandoned and was lashing out.
Anita said it wasn’t ok, and if therapy is detrimental to me then we needed to look at that. Which is all perfectly reasonable but to the part that was freaking out it came over as if A was about to dump me/us. Anita later asked, “What keeps you in therapy?” – this kind of question made me wonder what the fuck is going on and who the hell is sitting in front of me. Like she surely knows, right? Surely, she must know after all these years WHY I am there. Because I love her, am attached to her, and want to heal my mother wound through our relationship. Because therapy is helping me work through this EXACT shit. That her steady, consistent support is allowing ALL of my parts to come to therapy and do the work (even if it is fucking cringey). But when she asked the question, I could say nothing. When the child parts are feeling like abandonment is imminent there is no chance of me saying that to her.
And then it went SOUTH in a big way. I said that I felt she’d changed (she has changed the boundaries this year and is less responsive than she used to be due to changes in her personal life) and she said she hadn’t changed, that she didn’t feel like she’d changed. Then said that perhaps there was a pattern developing because I had felt similar with Em. She said that I had been anxious and panicked whilst seeing Em and stayed. What Anita meant by that and how I received it were worlds apart. She was coming at it from a place of not wanting me to stay in something that was damaging for me (if that was what was going on) BUT how I heard it? Oh my fucking god!
I was absolutely raging. I felt so upset that she seemed to be suggesting that this was a ‘me problem’ and that the common denominator is me and therefore it must be me that’s causing these issues and ruptures. I was silent for a bit but also so fucking angry. I told Anita I felt insulted because the relationship I had with Em and the relationship she and I have built are poles apart. Yes, the same issues are coming up but fuckkk it is just not the same. Anyway, my angry teen part went to town. It escalated and after telling me she might not be around forever, and that she was going to get married soon (great time to throw that in the mix!), A shut down the session really abruptly at the end (SHE HAS NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE). I told her it was bullshit and left. She was clearly frustrated, and a bit rattled at the end – actually it turns out she was anxious.
Looking back now, actually I think what I can see coming from all this is two people converging on something that escalated and there was a lot of transference and countertransference. I don’t like ruptures AT ALL but having now worked our way through the bracken and weeds and back onto a clearer path I can see that really it comes from care: my not wanting to lose A, and A not wanting to hurt me. But being human can be incredibly messy at times and things got worse before they got better.
When I got home, I decided to make a voice note to send to Anita trying to outline what the fuck had just happened and why I was so upset. Despite it feeling really bad it wasn’t so bad that I thought we were done. I guess that’s the one thing I can always land on or take comfort in. No matter how bonkers I feel, or what I throw at Anita, I don’t think she’s ever going to do an Em on me. I feel safe enough to really ‘bring it’ to her and feel confident enough that we will come out the other side.
By the time I had done that and sent it I saw a message on my phone from Anita:
I feel really sad that we ran out of time this morning and wondered if you would like to speak on the phone later today or I have a free slot at midday tomorrow?
That went some way to alleviating the panic of needing to wait until Friday to begin to sort stuff out but also showed me that A recognised that how things had been in that session/how we had left it wasn’t great and that it wouldn’t be ideal leaving it for the rest of the week. This was also sent before I had sent her my voice message. Basically, it showed me that even when it is messy and difficult, she’s still there and still cares. I asked to see her in person on the Tuesday as it really felt like we needed to be f-2-f to work this stuff out and I didn’t think a phone call would cut it when a sense of physical connection is so important to be able to even talk.
The session on Tuesday began with a long cuddle the moment I arrived. I started crying and felt so sad but also really relieved to be there. Anita and I sat down on the sofa, she opened her arms up and welcomed me in for a cuddle. If only that had happened in the last session! We said nothing for ten minutes, I just listened to heartbeat and eventually our breathing was in time and it felt calmer. Then I said, “I don’t want to lose you.” She replied, “I know.” Which did absolutely nothing to allay my fears about things going down the shitter and her wanting to find a way to end. My heart started to race again, and I felt a sense of panic flood my system.
Everything was so easily triggered.
Anita said she was concerned and was worried that the therapy was becoming detrimental for me. She then said something about wondering about growth. This pissed me right off, but you’ll see why in the letter that I wrote later…because in my view there is a LOT of growth. She was trying to find words and basically said the absolute kicker – that lodged like a thorn in my brain for weeks. She said something about wondering if I had become “too dependent” and then corrected herself and said “no, that’s not the right words.” But this ‘thinking out loud’ at that particular time was not what I needed to hear. She told me a bit later that she had thought that this rupture had been caused wholly by her cancelling the session the other week and had run off down a path of thinking that I was stuck because I was freaking out over her having one day off sick and that her not being available had sent me into a massive spiral and it that she felt like it was going backwards. Of course that wasn’t the case at all!!
At this point I didn’t know where all this crap was coming from. All I had heard so far was “where’s the growth”, “I feel like we’re stuck” and “maybe it’s become too dependent.” I felt really hurt but also really confused because ostensibly my needs haven’t changed. It has been Anita that has changed, her life that’s become more demanding, her that has become more thinly stretched – and as a result it is my therapy that has suffered the consequences of that. We don’t do the longer sessions anymore (that were so containing and helpful) and we have way less between session contact than before (again removing a level of containment).
These changes haven’t happened because I no longer need longer sessions or contact. It hasn’t been something we’ve contracted for or mutually agreed. It’s been something that’s been done because Anita’s life and capacity changed so dramatically last year. I realise I still get a lot more than most people in my therapy and so I would never leave based on those changes, but it seemed really unfair to say I was (potentially) too dependent when actually she gives me less now and I have stop asking for what I used to have.
To be honest, when it was all coming out it felt ‘off’ but it still hurt because I couldn’t really work out where this was all coming from. What was going on really didn’t feel like it was about ‘us’ in lots of ways. On my side it was certainly a re-enactment of stuff around my mum. I was feeling unseen, unimportant, and just vulnerable as hell. It’s also a shit time of year because it’s around this time that the wheels started to massively fall off with Em. Naturally I am hypervigilant, but at this time of year I am poised for another ‘tick’ situation. And a ‘too dependent’ came pretty close, I can tell you!
And for Anita, the stuff she was saying (it turns out) wasn’t about me. Really it came back round to her family’s endless demands on her, and her feeling trapped by her mum’s level of need. It was countertransference 101. It’s easier to make a client who you see 2 hours a week and has a need the problem though, rather than fully acknowledge that the family member who has made your life unrecognisable from what it was a 18 months ago and now lives with you makes you feel trapped and stuck. It wasn’t me and Anita that were “stuck” and it wasn’t me that was making her feel “trapped.” Anita is usually so ‘together’ and ‘grounded’ but she wasn’t – but I can understand it. I guess my needing her or my feeling like she’s not there when she feels like she is giving me all that she can probably feels frustrating when she has such a lot going on.
Arguably, this shouldn’t have happened. But at the same time, it is a very real and human relationship, and it takes place in real time. As much as we’d like to think therapists have completely got their shit together and are totally ‘on it’ so far as knowing what’s going on with them, I do think we all have blind spots. Fortunately, like I say, there is a strong enough foundation to our relationship that we can weather the storms and talk things through and afterwards it feels like we’ve made another load of progress.
It’s not comfortable by any means but it is another lesson in ‘you can go through hard things, act up, act out, shout, and it doesn’t mean the relationship will end…and not everything that happens is always about you and not everything is your fault’. I would rather Anita be able to put her hands up and tell me what’s going on when we have these things happen (when she is aware of it!) than have a situation like with Em where stuff would happen and I’d be completely in the dark and left thinking everything was always my fault because she was such a blank screen – or the fact she’d blame me for everything!
Anyway, we limped along for a few sessions. I was so exhausted with work, end of term, life…that there was one session where I just turned up and said, “Can we just be together today. I am too exhausted for this, and it can wait.” And so we had a lovely hour of cuddles, gentle chat, and stories. I get how nuts that sounds. To be in the thick of a rupture and then go, “Ah fuck it, it’ll work out, we are ok really, let’s just catch our breath!” But that is the lovely thing about where Anita and I have got to. It is safe enough to do this. We can have a rupture. I know it’ll repair. On a core level no matter what’s being thrown up, and what chaos I am working out, underneath Anita is there, my rabbit that listens.
I do wonder if I sound completely unhinged. Like how can I hold so many seemingly opposing ideas at the same time?! Ruptures used to absolutely terrify me. My nervous system still gets thrown through a loop even now. It’s old programming. But there is a toe out of the water that knows there’s dry land and I am not going to be fully swept away by the storm. So, yes, parts of me freak out, have their reactions, go through the motions of it all…but there is another part that’s like, “RB you are ok. No matter what happens, you’ll be ok…because you have YOU now.”
Anyway, after a gentle couple of sessions I built myself up to tell Anita that she had hurt me with her comment about “too dependent”. It was about three minutes before the end of the session (nice one RB!) and I was snuggled into her chest when I said it. Anita went rigid and then swore blind she hadn’t used those words. But of course, she had…even if she’d corrected herself immediately and there was no intention of hurting me. The session ended and I went home and typed up a letter than I decided I would send as a voice note. It had been several weeks since everything had started and I felt like I wanted to get stuff of my chest.
It is not always easy to do that in session. Especially when young parts are so present. So, here’s what I wrote and sent to her:
What I’m left with-
Is it really only since you got sick you feel we’re ‘stuck’? Has it really just gone to shit in two weeks?
You said I was “too dependent” and although you backtracked and said “maybe that’s not the right words” that’s sent waves through my system because I don’t know how to fix that other than take myself away and I really don’t want to do that because that is the very last thing I need. I know you said it because you thought my meltdown or struggling to reconnect had come from you being poorly – it wasn’t – but even if it was that it feels like a really shaming thing to say. I do know that’s not how you would have intended it to come across but also using words like “unhealthy” as well just really hurt me. And adult me can sidestep it but the younger parts do feel hurt and so I need to tell you.
I can already feel the protectors stepping in to protect the vulnerable parts from being hurt more- I already feel a lot of shame about my “huge” inner child (again something I don’t think was meant to be shaming but it’s how I received it and that impacted how it felt reconnecting after you were sick) but I genuinely thought it was ok with you to work with this really vulnerable needy stuff.
I was struggling to feel like I was in the room with you the other Monday when it all blew up. I asked for a story because I felt like I was floating away, you started reading, and I could just feel myself face plant in shame and instead of feeling closer to you, I dissociated – because I felt too much, and that the inner child need was too “huge”, and it really went downhill thereafter. I really like listening to you read stories and so this felt absolutely hideous because it’s been something that’s really helped, does help, but in that moment it felt like I was pathetic and too needy.
I feel stupid. I’ve heard that “too dependent” (and you did say it) as young parts are not welcome, that I’m not ‘growing up’ quickly enough and obviously it’s all too much. I now really worry it’s going to be a problem this Christmas if I so much as struggle with the break (and of course I will struggle because duh – two weeks at this time of year always feels hard – it’s a time when I am acutely reminded of exactly what I don’t have). I’m worried that my missing you or having a reaction to you being gone now makes you feel ‘trapped’ and want to get away from me and so then that sets off a panic you’ll take the care away/step back even more.
This happened on Friday just gone – you told me about your Christmas break and I felt myself freeze – not because you are will be away but I was panicking that you will find me having any kind of reaction to it “too dependent” or “unhealthy” and that’s just fucking awful. I feel I have to hide what I am feeling so that I don’t get branded negatively and that sucks.
Even if I had have had a meltdown about the cancelled session the other week in the way you think I did (rather than panicking about what had happened to my friend maybe happening with you)- I think the issue is less about being too dependent but what or who is being triggered by you being gone suddenly. Why is that young part so affected and impacted by separation? Is it really being too dependent and therefore deficient – or does it make sense in the context of a caregiver being unexpectedly absent, unavailable, and un-contactable. We both know this comes back to my mum and my childhood – years of hanging on for Friday and feeling profoundly lost and lonely in the week…and then of course, my dad just dropping dead and never seeing him again three days into a separation doesn’t help.
I have spent a lifetime hanging on to see people I love and then being overlooked or forgotten about or worse, them never returning. It might not seem logical or proportionate of a response when I struggle with your absence but it is rooted in trauma and it feels really shaming to think there are things I might do that are seen as ‘too dependent’ and ‘unhealthy’ because I can’t help how I feel and I should be able to bring that to you if it was the case – it doesn’t mean you have to do anything about it. You can’t help getting sick, you are more than entitled to take time off, have holidays – be a human – but equally my reaction (if there was one) doesn’t make our relationship suddenly unhealthy, stuck, or problematic. And again – adult me can see how much of a reaction I am having to all this and that it’s all going to be ok…but the young parts are less certain.
And this is really evident – with this bit I wrote a couple of weeks ago because I know that you are still here- mostly, it’s felt fine the last couple of sessions, but it really didn’t the other week – and this is what I said:
I feel embarrassed and ashamed to have let you see that need for you when it’s now seemingly ‘too much’. I don’t know where you are. Where is the Anita that talked about going to the beach and having an ice cream so the little parts could just play and be kids for once, the one who said she wanted to tuck the young parts up in bed safe and take all the pain away, who said I didn’t need to stay out in the cold anymore, that her cupboards were full of chocolate, that said she understood trauma doesn’t always work on a timetable, that said I was easy to love and who kissed me on the head and held me close and said she didn’t want to let me go and could hold me forever, who noticed when I felt cold or shaky, the A who washes my elephant and bought me a beating heart necklace because you know separation is hard and hearing your heart beat makes me feel safe, and the squishmallow, the bunny that represented the rabbit that listened, a salt lamp to help me sleep… so many things… the A that reads stories- where did she go this week? Part of me feels like I’m insane and imagining a relationship that simply doesn’t exist. But those things have been said and happened – so what happened this week?
All that steady acceptance and reassurance and relationship building that you did, we’ve done, made it feel safe to bring the small parts to session so why am I now too dependent? Why is it now stuck? It’s years of relational trauma that needs working through in this therapy. I’m not getting a divorce! I’m not a bit stressed out at work. I’m not feeling a bit lacking in self-esteem. And there are loads of parts and therefore lots of perspectives, fears, and triggers. It will take time. There will be hard times it doesn’t mean it’s stuck or unhealthy.
Do you still love me… and the parts you worked so hard at connecting with? And if so, can you please explain that to them again and reassure them because right now they’ve got another mother figure who can’t tolerate their need and is leaving them alone and seemingly feels trapped. And I know you’re not my mum, you’re not my family, I wish you were. As I’ve said lots of times, you’ve given me a better experience of mothering than I ever had growing up which is why this all feels so confusing and painful now.
And yes, I get I need to parent these parts by myself but I am trying but I have needed it modelled to me. I’ve needed your care and compassion to begin to feel any compassion towards myself. But whether you like it or not- you are my attachment figure. And right now, I don’t want anyone else and I don’t think we’re done. And unfortunately for you, I do think you are the right person for me.
When you asked me what I get from this- I was upset and hurt and told you it was anxiety, panic, and nightmares. That’s definitely something that teen part experiences and has been really present at times lately. But there’s clearly more than that. If it was only that I wouldn’t have stayed. There is no way I would stay if I genuinely thought a pattern was repeating and it was heading the way things with Em went. But how things are with you and how they were with her couldn’t be more different. What do I get from this? I thought I was getting a relationship with you. I believed you loved me. I believed that you were safe to heal wound with, venture into that egg yolk with… and now I’m not sure if I’m even welcome and would you just let me go?
One day are you just going to tell me it’s over?…because I don’t get how we can have been through all this together and it just be in my head that this relationship means something – that this is just run of the mill therapy. I don’t believe it for one second. This therapy doesn’t look like anyone else’s I know. But then perhaps I am just delusional.
Also. Please know you are interacting with lots of parts right now. I can even feel the shifts as I’m writing this now. As I said, the teen has been about in a massive way that week and she is fucking angry but underneath she’s just really hurting and crying “please not again” and wants to connect. Yes- I have had nightmares and panic attacks and God knows what else but it doesn’t mean that’s all there is- but in that moment for that teen that’s how it felt. I need you to recognise that, and not panic that suddenly everything is detrimental for me and that this isn’t working. That teen needs to be heard but also, I need you to hold that in the wider frame of all of me. Sometimes I think it isn’t very clear who is in front of you but maybe ask. Because my quiet can be for lots of reasons…or for none at all! And whilst I can be really grumpy – there’s plenty of times when I tell you how much I value you, and love you, too because more than anything they are the dominant feelings.
And so, here’s some questions- Why does it make me too dependent to want you in my life? Why would I actually choose to have to not have you in my life when I have experienced so many losses already? It feels human to need to connect not wrong. I can’t help that you’re ‘just’ my therapist. I wish I could turn myself into a robot so not care about you or the relationship we’ve created and turn off my feelings when I’m not in the room …but I am not a robot, I’m a person and you’re a person too. I’m not wrong for how I feel and yet all of a sudden something that felt so good feels dangerous – and that’s how it spirals down. I don’t want to be too much. And I don’t want to feel like we’re broken. You usually sound so steady and certain when I am wobbling but you didn’t the other week.
And the thing about growth or lack of it- really feels quite shaming and insulting too. On Friday you said it was about ‘reviewing’ but when it was all going off it didn’t feel like a review, it felt like a threat or an ultimatum – your ‘concern’ came across in a way that made me feel like you didn’t see me or understand where things were. I shouldn’t need to justify why I am still in therapy or explain- and for you to insinuate or worry that there’s no growth because you thought I’d had a meltdown about our session being cancelled feels really shit. I shouldn’t feel like I am taking too long or not doing therapy right or not working hard enough – but that’s what that implies to me. Where is the growth? It’s fucking everywhere!
I’m sorry if my fear of abandonment flares up and my child parts still need stories and hugs. I’m sorry if I like being with you and feel like these hours each week help me actually just survive in the world. I’m sorry I’m not someone who rapidly transforms and fucks off into the sunset after six neat, easy sessions. I’m sorry that I need a deep and authentic connection. I’m sorry that my trying to repair a completely broken and fragmented structurally dissociated system has led to you feeling me too dependent and you now seem resentful of that.
Where’s the growth? I came to you with an eating disorder that had been rife for twenty years, where I had never once achieved a healthy BMI and been stuck in chronically underweight anorexic state. My body image was so screwed up. I had systematically starved myself for years, used exercise as a weapon and my inner critic was rampant. That voice has settled so much and I’m now in a healthy weight range. I eat what I want when I want and even though I’ve put on loads of weight I just bought bigger clothes – I didn’t try and go back. I accepted it. That’s huge on its own.
I haven’t self-harmed in years – even when the urge has been there, I’ve chosen a healthy option. I have reached out for help believing I was worthy of love and care rather than punishing myself.
I am able to work and manage my kids despite the stress of it all and always being up against it.
The constant fear of my cancer returning has eased a bit and I feel like I am more present in my life and can enjoy things where I never used to feel anything other than ‘I should enjoy this. I should feel something’.
I can actually tell you how I feel rather than keeping everything inside – you may think I don’t talk, or shut down and keep you out, but I have told you such a lot. I can be angry with you – I genuinely believed I wasn’t ever angry as it wasn’t an emotion I connected with but I do now. Not because you make me angry(!) but I feel safe to express anger with you. So that’s good- even if you don’t like me shouting at you and telling you everything is bullshit … that is massive progress and growth. I could never express that kind of thing as a kid. I’d have been flattened. But growth too is also telling you all the feelings – it takes a lot to tell someone you love them, especially when there’s a good chance they’ll reject you for it. I’m scared now that my telling you that ‘I love you’ is my being too dependent and that actually makes me want to cry.
I had started to believe what happened with Em was not my fault – that I’m not actually a tick because you loved me and therefore there must be good in me. Now I’m not sure- so perhaps that is a sliding back but it’s not surprising when it’s been like this this week.
So growth? My growth and healing isn’t necessarily obvious (although lots of people say they see a big change in me). It’s the deep deep wounding that’s repairing. I didn’t come to therapy with a surface wound. You can’t see a scab forming. But deep inside there’s so much change. It’s like a tree in winter. It looks fucked and dead above ground, but so many roots are stretching out beneath the earth ready to send nutrients up in spring to grow and create a canopy of leaves and fruit. It’s not spring yet but it’s not stuck or dead. I want to be an oak with huge, strong roots that can weather any storm rather than a tree with a shallow root system that will get battered by the slightest bit of wind…and that is what is happening…even if you can’t see it.
From James Norbury’s ‘Big Panda and Tiny Dragon’
Sometimes stuff happens and it looks like I’m back to square one…but I’m not. I would hope you would know all this and I’m sad that my expressing upset and telling you how stuff has been has made you think it’s crap. I don’t know what to say but I need you to recognise my growth even because sometimes I can’t and be proud of that and celebrate that change with me. I don’t need you to shame me because there’s change and growth that hasn’t come yet. I’m a tortoise not a hare. And I know you aren’t shaming me, it’s my response…
You asked what keeps me in therapy? I do. You do. How I feel about you keeps me in therapy. My attachment to you keeps me in therapy. But not because I am stuck but because I feel like our relationship does me good. I love you. And the love has made huge shifts in me and how I perceive myself. And I’m sorry if that’s too much or makes you feel trapped or that I’m too dependent. I never wanted to make you feel like that.
You said once you were like a boomerang because no matter how much I push you away you’ll keep coming back. I am worried I have broken you in half and now you’re just a stick. I hope not.
So that was an outpouring from so many different parts – you can clearly see how fixated I got on some of the words Anita had said even though Adult me knew what she meant and her intention. The issue, though, is therapy isn’t just for my adult self…and that’s why it gets so messy.
Anita listened to the message. She really heard what I had to say. And we really processed what’s happened together. I mean talk about ‘the work’. Fortunately, we got the bulk of this out the way before Christmas and left feeling connected and safe. And to be honest, writing this out and reading it all…I think I just feel a bit like, ‘WTAF happened?!’…I think another thing I am going to have to really look at is my menstrual cycle…because guess when this all kicked off? Yeah – ‘then’.
Humph!
I am not enjoying the Christmas break AT ALL. I have been struggling quite a lot but also really conscious of not reaching out to Anita unnecessarily (I will talk to her about this on the 9th). However, what was really lovely was that on Christmas day she reached out and sent me a message on WhatsApp first. It was a GIF saying Merry Christmas and a message sending ‘lots of love xx’ This in addition to the lovely Christmas gift she sent really helped settle the young parts that just miss her A LOT. Yesterday I sent her a message with a quote from a book that I gave her for Christmas called ‘The Journey’ by James Norbury, the second book in his series about the two friends Big Panda and Tiny Dragon (I highly recommend both):
and today she has sent me some photographs of a place she’s been. It feels good…although obviously I wish I could see her in person!
Anyway, this was a really long long post which really could be summarised by this:
RB wobbled in November/December. It should have been called ‘Rupture Season’ not ‘Christmas Season’ 2022. This year RB and Anita had a humdinger. But it’s all ok. They got through it. Oh, and C-PTSD is hardwork!
If you made it to the end of this – there really did ought to be a prize. Wishing you all a happy new year…let’s see what 2023 brings eh?!
As 2022 draws to a close I just wanted to pop in and wish you all a …well, I guess I want to say Happy Christmas/Happy Holidays and a fabulous New Year…but I know for many of us this time of year is really difficult and sometimes that upbeat message can fall flat or feel almost like a full-on smack in the face dose of toxic positivity (and I really don’t want to do that!). We look to be happy at this time of year, long for it even, but the truth is this- Christmas can be massively triggering and for many of us it can feel more like survival than the joyous time the movies would have us believe it is/should be. At this time of year, we spend a lot of time trying to look ‘fine’ when we are anything but.
I’ve worked hard over the years to create a Christmas that I want rather than one that feels obligatory (with family)- but it’s been hard won! Really, for as long as I can remember, Christmas has always felt tough – well certainly since my parents separated when I was a kid. Splitting Christmas between mum and dad was tough. Feeling like my loyalty was split. Then being carted off to my mother’s boyfriend’s parents’ house on Christmas day and feeling like an outsider as the ‘real’ grandchildren were spoiled by their grandparents and I sat there feeling like a cuckoo in the wrong nest – it was hard.
Then there was returning to my actual family on my dad’s side a couple of days later and being overlooked by my own grandparents. I was frequently gifted things from charity shops that didn’t fit or were so well-worn they had to go in the bin. Yet, at the same time, I’d get dragged around the city Christmas shopping with my grandmother who would gift herself diamond jewellery and expensive perfume: “Don’t tell Grandad, if he asks say it’s Cubic Zirconia.” I’m not knocking charity shops at all, what I am saying is that my grandmother always put herself first no matter what. And in a family that couldn’t express love in words they were also pretty shit in deeds…but then of course it wasn’t love. As much as I wish it wasn’t the case – sometimes family is just biology and blood doesn’t mean love.
Looking back, there was no Hallmark quality to those childhood/pre-teen years.
Then as an older teen I felt just…what?…desperately lost and alone, isolated, unseen – and that, of course wasn’t solely restricted to Christmas but I think it all becomes glaringly apparent in the holiday season doesn’t it? It’s a time when you look around you and see ‘seemingly’ happy families enjoying time together and there I was…out in the emotional wasteland. It feels a bit like that 80’s show Bullseye, when the host would say, “Look what you could have won!” as the contestants stared at the speedboat and ‘his and hers’ shell suits disappointedly having failed to answer a question correctly. Only we didn’t long for the speedboat – for us the prize was that… magical thing, the bond, the love, the feeling of belonging, being safe in ourselves and held safely by others…it’s the absence of that thing that has left that gaping hole inside us all these years that seems impossible to fill or repair. And the laugh is, it shouldn’t be a prize to be won, something that some people are blessed with, and others aren’t. But it is. And the fall out is hard to put into words…but if you know you know.
OMG I am really a Debbie Downer today aren’t? Thanks RB for the uplifting Christmas post!
Thankfully, meeting my wife changed things up massively so far as Christmas goes and having my kids has been a massive game-changer, too. But despite the special family Christmas and the new traditions I have created with my little family I still find this an incredibly tough time. I am already bracing myself for the period between Christmas and New Year which I guess I should really refer to as my ‘Signature Depression Zone’ because without fail, that lull point hits me really hard. I am much better at self-care for all the parts of me now but no matter what I do, there is a still a little voice in there somewhere that wants someone else to bring the love.
This year’s Christmas build up has been hard, too. Anita and I found ourselves navigating a complicated rupture over the last month (fucking wonderful!). It has dragged on a bit and has taken a lot of talking and processing. I haven’t got around to writing about it yet and I didn’t want post anything whilst we were in the thick of it because it seemed to be so dense and hard to make sense of and at times I was really triggered and didn’t even make sense to myself but I will get to it now that we seem to have come through the thick of it (just in time for the CHRISTMAS THERAPY BREAK!)
I think (now that I have come out the other side a bit) the ‘Mother Wound’ stuff all started coming to a head with Anita because once again the relationship with my own mum was thrown into sharp relief. Or should I say the lack of the relationship? Oh and of course it’s the anniversary of the shit hitting the fan with Em (ex-therapist) which is essentially ‘mum’ stuff. So, yeah, it’s been a tough month, really. Of course I got to play out stuff with Anita that was maternal transference 101 – which I guess is the work. I just don’t think I realised quite how much my relationship with my mum is hurting me even now.
I genuinely thought I was getting better at managing how she (my mum) affects me. But this year, once again, I feel like that little girl who’s been left: not important enough, not valued, not kept in mind. As I say adult me does a cracking job of looking after my kids and as part of that, I give my inner child all kinds of experiences that I know she would have loved and it goes some way to a repair for that sad little part of me. A visit to see a Father Christmas show and meeting the Big Guy in his grotto this week was enjoyed by me probably more than my kids!…but it doesn’t completely take the edge off for that little girl that just wants her mum to fucking show up and care.
The end of November and December have been hard (not just the rupture with A). We’ve been running the gauntlet as a family with various illnesses – the flu-like cold from hell was bad (still dragging on) but then norovirus was the absolute fucking pits. I won’t drag it out here but basically, it’s been another occasion where my mum just hasn’t been there in any tangible way. I have told her how hard it’s been and how much of a struggle we’ve had. Silence. Asked if there’s anything she wants for Christmas. More silence. Adult me doesn’t care – but I feel her lack of interest and care for my kids acutely. Her disregard for them feels like a repeat of the disregard she had for me.
It’s sad.
It’s also really compounded when I’ve been going to see K and she’s said she is so sad for me and wishes she could be a mum/granny to my family as we deserve so much better. And despite the recent wobbly bits with Anita, again she has, as I repeatedly say, given me a more consistent and positive experience of mothering than anyone else. She has been there now for nearly three years and seen and held more of me, my pain, than anyone.
Today is Christmas Eve and yesterday I finally received a reply to my messages to my mum from mid-December (one of which was about my brakes completely failing on ice on the school run…literally had nothing!) “Sorry for the delay…” to tell me she’s bought a present and will get it to us in the New Year. Again, adult me doesn’t care…but kids at Christmas? You have grandkids. Do better. That’s what Amazon is for. Tbh I am just so done now. And to be honest it’s not even about gifts. We don’t need things. We don’t need money spending on us as proof of care. Like I said the other week my love language isn’t gift giving. All we have ever needed is quality time, care, to be celebrated for who we are… a relationship. But it isn’t forthcoming.
I realise the only person that can break this cycle of pain and disappointment is me. I have to find a way to stop letting this stuff hurt me over and over – because I am repeatedly allowing my young parts to be hurt and keep in a pattern that was forged long ago – but the one I am in the therapy trying to heal. And I have to make it so that my kids don’t end up hurt too. I’m not sure how to do it though? How do you stop caring that your mother really doesn’t want you?…even as an adult.
Anyway, this wasn’t a therapy post was it? But it’s the core wound again. I won’t babble on too much longer as it’s just morose and depressing.
Thankfully Anita is solid. We had our final session of the year yesterday which was really nice, settled, calm…which I am very glad of (you’ll see why once I post about the rupture stuff!). We had a story and a really lovely long cuddle and easy chat that felt really connecting. It felt like just putting everything to bed for a bit…or at least trying to. Anita is off until the 9th so it’s a pretty long stint and I know it’s not going to be easy this year.
It’s sad that my therapists both gave me Christmas cards sending their love and presents this year – and my mum hasn’t. I am trying really hard to take on board that I am valuable and worthy of love and care, and am recognised by people that mean a lot to me. But the stab of rejection feels so acute by my mum. Does anyone else feel this way at this time of year?
When I opened the package from Anita yesterday, one of the items was this coaster:
And honestly, I love it. I love it because it’s true. And I love it because she gets it. And I love it because it represents so much of what we have built together and shows how simple a need it is. There is no shame to be had from needing that or expressing love through touch. And I am so lucky to have found her. However, she’s not my mum, she’s not family, I can’t access her when I need her. I can’t call her up and say, “A I don’t feel good can you come?”…because it’s therapy. But then I don’t have that with my family either so…it’s better than nothing isn’t it? A lot of the time it is easy to get caught up in what therapy isn’t or can’t be…but actually what it IS is A LOT.
Anyway, sending so much love to you all this holiday season. Take good care of yourselves wherever you are and whatever you are doing. Solidarity to those of you in complex family situations, trying to fit in and yet feeling like you stand out like a sore thumb. Love to all your young parts who are reminded of the pain of your childhood and navigating triggers whether through being in contact or not. And sending care to everyone who feels alone whether in actuality or emotionally. We’ve got this – our adult selves can be there hopefully enough to hold the hands of the little ones that feel so sad x
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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