depression

The Ache Of Estrangement

rubberbandsandchewinggum9 Comments

Well, I’m sure you’ll all be very glad that there is absolutely no danger of running into any ‘new year, new me’ bullshit here today. I think, all I can say is that from what I know of myself, I will continue to ‘keep on keeping on’ and trying my fucking best to navigate my way through whatever life throws at me…and I hope and pray that 2026 is significantly less shit than 2025 was. Although being realistic about things, I have no expectations that it will be. I don’t want to sound negative but, honestly, my life seems to be one big fucking long struggle and no matter what I do things seem too hard (I hope that doesn’t magically manifest more of the same! – but I am under no illusion that for whatever reason, my life isn’t ever smooth sailing).

I meant to come here and post something over the Christmas break but after my last post things didn’t really get any better and I found myself pretty frozen a lot of the time, so writing or any kind of processing just wasn’t possible. Thinking about it, I spent quite a bit of the Christmas holiday period dissociated because I was soooooo stressed through December that and I guess that’s the default for when things get too much- my brain just shuts down.

Things got really bad with the anxiety after the car accident (probably the most intense experience of anxiety and panic attacks I have ever had) and I fell quite quickly and deeply (and unexpectedly) into another period of not eating. I thought all that was behind me – and it largely is…

I wouldn’t describe myself as someone with an eating disorder anymore, but I don’t think that the eating disordered part of me is dead, she’s just dormant. I haven’t needed her for a long time. But recently my life has felt really out of control in very big and stressful ways and I am not at all surprised that I unconsciously found my way back to that place again – almost on autopilot.

Like I said, this stuff wasn’t triggered by anything to do with therapy or relationships (although therapy has been impacted as a result of my getting so completely overwhelmed lately – I cancelled Elle this week, first session back after the Christmas break, because it all felt too fucking painful…fortunately she was able to reach through to me and I did go in the end). It’s my actual day-to-day tangible life existence that’s the problem. Lack of security and therefore feeling desperately unsafe and like the world is about to blow up around my ears is what’s sending me through a huge loop. The thing is, this time of year is rough on the emotional front, too, and so as that has also landed bit-by-bit I have found that I have zero resilience and haven’t been able to cope.

I wrote last time about money (or lack of it) and all that stuff that is part of it – stress with insecure jobs, financial pressure, the car crash… it’s all ongoing … but there’s more, too, which is completely flooring me. I haven’t been able to talk to Elle about it yet, and I find that really hard because I feel like I am withholding stuff from her and I never want to do that but I don’t feel like there is much of a choice. So, I feel quite alone with what I am grappling with and that feels completely shit.

I hate that I have zero control or power to be able to get us (my wife and I) through what’s going on and I feel like I am just watching and waiting and panicking about an outcome I cannot control or influence. I just have to wait and see how things land and then pick up the pieces accordingly. And for someone who likes to know where she is at, NEEDS stability and security – it’s totally fucking me up. The idea of getting back to work tomorrow feels so heavy. I literally have no idea how I am going drag ‘teacher’ out of the bag when I am barely coping as RB. And yet somehow, I must find a way. I just don’t know how much more ‘digging deep’ I have in me. I literally can’t believe that I am still standing and yet time and again I have to find another level of coping when I am on empty.

Anyway, back to before Christmas. It wasn’t a conscious decision to stop eating which I guess is different from other times I have fallen into a disordered eating pattern. This time, I physically couldn’t eat because of the anxiety. I gagged every time I put something in my mouth and felt sooooo ill. I felt so tense that my body just couldn’t do it to myself and there is a difference between not eating because you ‘can’t’ and not eating because you are deliberately restricting. This was a ‘can’t’ situation.

The days rolled by and before I knew it, I hadn’t actually eaten for five days on the bounce. I know that it very bad. In fact, I don’t think even in my very most severe anorexic periods have I actually just failed to eat anything at all like that. But it really shows me just how overwhelmed I was. I lost quite a lot of weight through December and it was really noticeable to me – clothes were/are hanging off me and I felt weak but the good thing, if there is one, is that because I have been so ‘well’ and in a healthy range for so long now, my initial starting point meant that there was weight to lose and it wasn’t going to harm me…as I said, it has been years now since I was in the grips of anorexia.

So…yeah… it has been rough. But fortunately (weird explanation), over Christmas everything got so close to being too much that Brian shut off altogether and I had a week or so of relief from feeling anything much in any real depth and I got back to eating and breathing and being…but I wasn’t actively enjoying anything but I was at least not hurting myself. Tbh I don’t remember much of Christmas. Well, we all know what dissociation is like, don’t we?! But I’ll take that over the anxiety any day.

When I started to ‘feel’ again it wasn’t great, I got hit with ALL the feelings. Not just the life stress and anxiety that had knocked me for six in the first place but the other stuff too. The usual emotional achy wound stuff reared its head and bloody hell it hurt a lot. Christmas is all about family and connection…and all that I don’t have was thrown into very sharp focus this year. I became acutely aware of how painful this holiday felt compared with others and how desperately alone I felt.

Usually, I might get a bit of separation anxiety from my therapist Elle and the stuff with Em (“like a tick”) ALWAYS rears its head, and the traditional life-long betwixtmas depression hits…but this was different again. Like it had a gazillion extra jingly trauma bells ringing on top because normally this stuff is in the body and centres around attachment to therapist/s and this year it wasn’t that alone…this year I really hurt (it always really hurts!)… but this year I was also hurting for my mum, too. And I suppose that is progress – grieving the original source of the pain? Although it didn’t feel like it in the moment because I still had all the other stuff going on too.

So, this last couple of weeks I wanted to write about the impact of broken connection and estrangement from my mum over the holiday because I’ve really struggled and it had a MASSIVE knock on to how I felt about myself, how I saw my relationship with Elle, and of course it dragged back up all the pain of what happened six years ago over the Christmas period with Em, and then Anita got thrown in the mix…well…it’s four years this week since I met her…. So it’s a bumper season for emotional memories. Ugh. But I haven’t felt able to write because like I say, I’ve been barely functional. Writing this now I can really see how bad it’s been. Survival really. I probably need to find a way to really bring all this to Elle because I haven’t told her about the eating either… and I guess that is a big deal even if it is better than it was.

But to the original idea: estrangement from mum.

Christmas 2025 signalled the fourth year on the bounce where I have had minimal (for the first few years, a card) or no contact from my mum over the holidays. In February last year shortly after my daughter’s birthday, I decided to draw a boundary around my relationship (or lack of one) with my mum and sent her a message explaining how her minimal care and interest in me and my family hurt me and how it was hard for the children to understand why their grandmother no longer wanted to see them or engage. I actually said, “it’s clear that you don’t like them or me much” and so there could be no doubt what I was saying. I told her that she would be better not sending a card at all if she had no desire to see me or the kids under the pretence of maintaining a relationship.

I never heard back and she has had made no contact since.

This is both disappointing and, I guess, validating. It was hard for me to take the bull by the horns and shine a light on the reality and bring what was really happening into sharp focus. But all the while I was letting things go and almost pretending like things weren’t that bad, I realised I was not only hurting myself but allowing my mum to hurt my kids too. And that had to stop.

Of course, it is disappointing that when faced with my side of things my mum was unable to step up, take any form of accountability, or try and make amends…but then why would she? I have no value in her eyes – never have-  and what I have believed to be true my whole life – that my mum doesn’t really like me, is true. I am not insane. It it how it is and has always been and my feelings are correct. My feelings of being ‘not enough’ and ‘too much’ haven’t materialised out of nowhere…and here is evidence. If it were me, faced with the same situation I would have been on the phone in an instant, or better yet, have got in the car and gone to see my kid in person…because there is no way on earth I would ever let my kids disappear from my life but then I am not my mother and actively try not to be like her in any way.

So, yeah. Being hit once again with the reality that my mum is exactly who I think she is, I spent some days feeling really low over Christmas. I feel the absence of a mother so acutely (no shit!). Not my mother. I don’t want mine – she’s crap. But I so badly need/ed a good enough mother. One who could have done the job throughout my childhood and would still be here now to support me. I think that’s what I am struggling with a lot right now, the lack of there being anyone to act as a backstop and hold my hand as my world seems to be so fragile. I really need a parent to be there, someone who I can call up and just say, “I am struggling” and even if they can’t fix it they could remind me that I am ok, that I am safe, and that no matter what happens I always have that loving place to return to.

I don’t though.

It’s all on me and my wife.

There is nowhere to tangibly or symbolically put the bags down and rest for a bit. And I don’t mean financially – I mean emotionally. I think that even if you never ‘need’ to use the support system simply knowing it is there makes things feel better. I miss my dad so much because this is exactly what he was. He was a harbour in the storm… he was there no matter what… and now he isn’t. No one is. And I feel it ALL THE TIME. When things go wrong, I am thrust face first into just how exposed I am. How vulnerable I am. And I can’t always cope…or I do… but it’s taking its toll.

I understand that I go to therapy. And I get to an extent this is a place to put things down a bit and Elle is soooo supportive…but she is only my therapist and she is only physically there in my session/s. She is not available in the sort of way I need right now and of course that’s how it is because she isn’t a friend or family member. The rules of the game mean that I can’t text her at 11pm and ask for a call and cry or turn up at her house and collapse. She is not someone whom I can ask to come over and just help me whilst things crumble and make dinner or deal with the kids. I can’t rot in my bed and get her to come and sit with me and stroke my head and look after me. And don’t get me wrong, I am really grateful for what she does offer me – without it I would be in a very much worse state than I am now, but I am so very aware of what I need right now and how it just doesn’t exist in my life. I have some great friends but even they can’t mend this with me.

My dreams have been off the charts again this week. Two nights ago, I dreamt I was being attacked in the hallway in the downstairs of my house. It was nighttime and completely dark. I was screaming over and over again, “Help me! HELP ME! I need an adult. Please help me!” I woke up so distressed and my throat hurt from trying to shout out in my dream … or should we say nightmare? I think it’s really telling though, how I feel like I am under attack in the place that is meant to be safe and I am crying desperately out for assistance from someone to help me. My young parts are so upset right now…but so is my adult. I just wish, so much that I had … an adult to take care of things. And I know this adult is and has to be ‘me’. It’s always had to be me, even when I was a child and should not have had to be a ‘little adult’…but god. It’s a lot.

I’m just so fucking exhausted from struggling all the time. It never ends. I need a break…and yet all that seems to happen is more shit lands on my plate.

I do really get how much I seem to be moaning. I just am so done with struggling.

At least the lead into Christmas in regard to therapy wasn’t too disastrous. In the last face-to-face session Elle brought in cakes for us and we exchanged presents – although to be opened on Christmas. And then we had our zoom call on the Friday before she went on break. I felt sad that we weren’t able to see each other in person twice that week but I didn’t say anything about it because I got the distinct sense that Elle was running on fumes and if she had have wanted to come in that day she would have. Like she will always tell me if she is able to come in and do Friday session in person (like this week – which was a massive relief!) so there was no point in going down the emotional rabbit hole and entertaining any feelings about rejection or abandonment because that’s not what was going on.

When it finally got to Christmas, I was struggling but it was lovely to have something to open from Elle and she really does keep me in mind. She’d bought me a lovely poetry book, ‘Stars At Last’ by Jessica Jocelyn. It’s all about the mother wound and mothering. My god it hit that super stingy, vulnerable place. Elle gets it. She sees it. But ooooofff – wowzers – I really needed a hug after reading it because I feel like I could have written it myself.  

She also wrote me a story to read on Christmas day and illustrated it -and that felt really lovely for little parts as it was a reminder that we were connected even if we weren’t together and included characters and symbols we often reference in our therapy. It was lovely…but also hit that little part that so needs to be close.

I won’t lie, I really struggled not having any contact with Elle on Christmas day. Last year she reached out to me in the morning and this year she didn’t – not that there is any expectation of contact…but I think to the part of me who was already feeling so upset about my mum I guess I just wanted to know that I wasn’t suddenly too much…that I wasn’t forgotten about…that I wasn’t about to be discarded…that I hadn’t done anything wrong by giving her a gift (I can thank Em for that worry after rejecting the present I gave her all those years ago)…and all the worries that come up time again. Even though all of this fear was covered in her story for the small parts and I should have understood that there was nothing to worry about.

I think part of the issue that got me panicking a lot is that I gave Elle something that was pretty meaningful to the work we have been doing over the course of the year. I made/sewed her a stocking that had figures from the story I wrote her last year for her at Christmas on and filled it with all sorts of things that were relevant to us… and it felt ‘big’ because even though none of what was in there cost very much, it was very clearly from my little heart…and then on Christmas I panicked that it was all too much and that her silence meant that I was going to walk into the same sort of situation when I came back to the room as I did with Em this time six years ago. I was sure I was going to get a boundary talk and be reminded that I am a client and that I don’t need to give gifts because I already pay Elle and that hurt because I had so wanted the present to be received as it was intended.

Anyway, I had a bit of a meltdown over WhatsApp on Christmas night with my friend who did her level best to remind me that Elle is not Em, or Anita, or anyone else for that matter and that she really does care and that I am not too much and ALL THE THINGS. It didn’t really work though. I had got to the place where I felt stupid and ashamed for having bothered and all the old hurts came flooding in.  

Later in the evening, I sent a very short message to Elle on Christmas night thanking her for my presents but it was about as short and to the point as I ever get. But again, I had got myself into a place where I felt like I didn’t want to bother her, or take up time or space, or be seen as an unwelcome intrusion into her time off. Basically, I just wanted to disappear and hope that I hadn’t fucked things up. I shouldn’t have worried, though. Elle sent me a lovely email on Boxing Day in reply and I was instantly reminded that she is there and things were ok and she did like what I had given her.

On Monday Elle sent me her usual pre-session text and I was so looking forward to seeing her on Tuesday like I was sooooo ready to see her and be with her again. But on Monday night ALL the anxiety came flooding back in about ALL THE THINGS. I didn’t sleep AT ALL. Everything felt wrong. I felt completely overwhelmed by how bad things felt and how much I needed Elle but was terrified of seeing her and being too much.

I think when I am overwhelmed I am worried that I must be overwhelming.

Well – that’s exactly what happened with Em isn’t it? I came back from Christmas in a mess and the next thing I know I am being compared to a tick and we are ending. I never ever want a repeat of that and I guess part of me was trying to protect myself on Tuesday when I sent a text to Elle a couple of hours before the session:

I’m having a really bad time and I need to step away for a bit. I’m sorry x

I felt so upset that immediately after sending the message I burst into tears. I went and stood in the shower in a total freeze for an hour and just sobbed under as the water ran over me. I imagined Elle would just accept what I had to say and be glad I was giving her some extra space because who would want to spend time with me like this? Why would she want to come back when she knew what space from me and all my need felt like? Why would she want to connect with me and my mess and have me cling to her like I was drowning?

Elle didn’t just accept my cancellation, though. She replied she told me that she was right there if I wanted to come in and that she could also come in on Friday and that she really hoped that I could tell her what was going on.

It was enough to show me that I wasn’t unwanted, or too much, or any other the other negative things that were running through my brain and I made it into the session. And I am so glad I did because the moment I saw Elle I was reminded that she isn’t any of the things I worry about – and that she does care – and she does see me, all of me, and that she cares for all of me whatever state I am in. She wrapped me up in a massive hug and didn’t let me go as I cried. I could have stayed there all day tbh. And that’s the hard part, isn’t it? Making that time enough when the need is so big and the safety within that room is only available for small window of the week.

I am sooooo aware of not straying into the place where I become too much for Elle, although I imagine if that feels like it is happening she will manage that somehow, and in a better way than those who have come before her. I get the feeling she wants me to tell her exactly what is going on for me because I realise that I actually often don’t ‘tell’ her in words but I definitely ‘show’ her. I talk to her a lot in my head when I don’t see her and forget she has no idea what I have shared with ‘in my head Elle’. When I see her in person so much of what we do is about co-regulation and simply being together that I don’t verbalise a lot of the stuff. So, whilst I might think I am a lot and too much…maybe it’s not the case.

Being a human with a heart is hard, isn’t it?

Anyway, I’ll leave this here because it is long. But the sadness about my mum over Christmas morphed into something else entirely on Saturday when I was out walking the dog…and my anger has a LOT to say! That’ll come next time…be warned.

I hope that everyone is more-or-less in one piece after the shitshow that was 2025… and … that 2026 is…doable! Big hugs xxx

The Cost Of It All…

rubberbandsandchewinggum23 Comments

I’d like to say that the reason I haven’t been blogging much lately is because life is so abundantly filled with exciting and fun and happy things, that things are so smooth and easy, that I simply haven’t had the time to write. I so wish that was the case. But we know that’s not how my life works, don’t we? It’s becoming a bit of a joke between me and my friends that my life just lurches from one big stress to another, and the times of calm never last all that long, or certainly not long enough to regroup and regain my footing, or heal the past. I literally feel like I am endlessly running barefoot through a war zone being shot at and trying my very best not to sustain any more wounds and actually, let’s be real here, just trying very hard not to die. Sometimes I feel like just stopping, giving up altogether, and admitting defeat. Maybe I am just not cut out for this life and this world?

It’s hard navigating the day-to-day fall out of complex trauma: the endless hypervigilance, the lack of a felt sense of safety (both internal and external), the exhaustion that comes from the black void inside, trying to keep all the little parts inside from melting down, feeling broken… but most of the time I am able to manage that – that’s why I go to therapy. Therapy is basically the scaffold I put around my week so that I am able to get on with my adult life and manage all the responsibilities I have as a wife, mother, teacher, friend…blah blah blah… but then sometimes, oftentimes, life throws and extra-large dump of shit on me and I just don’t cope.

That’s where I am right now.

Not coping.

I have spent the last week in a freeze.

I have so many things piling up around my ears because I have literally only managed the most essential tasks- i.e my job because…money (but not enough money). Everything else has fallen apart. My house is a colossal mess. I started putting up Christmas decorations a couple of weeks ago and it’s all ground to a halt midway through, I just can’t find any oomff to do the rest… and yet I have kids, and I want to at least make it look like we are functional even if I feel a million miles away from it. I don’t want me children to be burdened by my failures.

It took everything I had to go to the supermarket this week to buy food, cooking it has been a trial though, and for three days I just didn’t/couldn’t eat at all. I fed everyone else…but stress and anxiety had taken root so deeply that I couldn’t put anything in my mouth without gagging so in the end I gave up trying. I had to be so very very careful not to allow that to trigger the anorexic part of me because when things stressful and out of control anorexia has always been a go to and right now everything is out of control and stressful.

What’s up?

Last week we had a car accident. It was horrible. Noone was hurt but it shook us up, terribly. I keep getting horrible flashbacks and it’s really upsetting me. The car is being written off by the insurers and living rurally there’s no back up for transport with buses. We are in a privileged position that both my wife and I have (had!) cars but it’s meant that I have been doing an hour round trip twice a day to get her to and from work as I also need mine to get around.

We’re in that crap position where the car isn’t worth much because it’s a few years old now but it’s worth a lot to us. It’s reliable and in good condition – or was! What the insurers are offering is nowhere near close to be able to buy a replacement of the same age or mileage and so we’ll have to take out another loan to get another car whilst still paying the loan on the one we had for another three years… of course this is all debt we hadn’t accounted for and really can’t afford…and with my wife’s job being very volatile it feels extra scary as there’s not guarantee her job will be ongoing although she is looking around for something else.

Money.

So yeah.

2025 problems.

It’s always money.

But money = security.

But nothing feels secure when there is no financial buffer. When you live from month to month as it is and still struggle, the idea of not having an income is terrifying and it is filling me with dread and anxiety. I am waking every night with anxiety and last night it escalated into a full-blown panic attack. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. My heart was racing. It was terrifying. And yet I simply don’t know what to do to make things better.

Even when employment is stable, it seems like no matter how many hours you work, or how many promotions you get the cost of living is accelerating so fast that it’s almost impossible to keep afloat – it’s not even treading water, it’s trying not to drown. All my millennial friends are in the same leaky boat. We’ve all got degrees, we all have professional jobs, we have smaller families than we would perhaps have liked, both partners are working, we don’t lead extravagant lifestyles, and yet we are in a cycle of propping life up on personal loans and credit cards just to cover the basics. Kids feet grow and they need new shoes, trainers, and football boots for PE and that knocks you back.

It feels soul destroying to be perpetually chasing our tails and trying to figure out what can be cut to make ends meet in our forties. Like this isn’t the deal we were sold. We were told that if we worked hard at school, got the grades, got the degrees and the professional jobs, that we would be set. Our parents had the luxury of being able to support a family on one average income, buy a house, a car, have a holiday even, and now that is simply impossible.

I fear for the future too. Savings? Pensions? Will we ever be able to retire? Elderly care? I feel like we’ll be on suicide pacts with our friends at this rate and our student debt and loan and credit card debt will be there forever. Like I just feel thoroughly beaten down in the here and now and as I look forward into the future.

I don’t know what the answer is. But it isn’t about cutting coffee and avocado on toast, or Netflix – let’s be real people have already cut that. The issue is bigger, far bigger than the media would have you believe, and it’s frankly insulting to suggest that to anyone struggling. It drives me insane that older people tell young people that that’s the way to be able to afford a house or whatever. I honestly feel like after working all these years I didn’t ought to have to think about buying a treat here and there. But I do. It’s Christmas and my budget is minimal. I will buy for the kids but that’s it because I still don’t know how to sort out the car, the insurance and all the other things that have now hit as a result of the accident.

I get I am moaning and it all sounds like first world problems. And I also get that there is one expense each month that is crippling us: therapy.

But what do I do? Quitting therapy would significantly ease my financial worries but how would that work for the rest of my life? I am barely hanging it together with my rubber bands and chewing gum as it is. As I have said, therapy is the scaffold I have around my life to make my life doable…but then life is not doable right now and the money worries I have are making me ill.

This is the very real cost of trauma. I’ve talked about this before. Not only do we carry the debt in our bodies and nervous systems, we continue to pay for it financially for years and years in the therapy we need just to be able to function enough to work and exist.

I honestly, don’t know what to do. I have a feeling that before too long my circumstances will force my hand and leave me no choice but to quit therapy or significantly reduce my contact with Elle. That fills me with absolute dread and panic… but…what can I do?

At the end of the day my relationship with Elle is a paid for relationship. Without money we do not/cannot exist. And that is reality to swallow. Because whilst we, as clients, have money to pay our therapists we can keep up the masquerade that the relationship is ‘real enough’ to do the healing work we need and that we are safe and not going to be left (ahem!!).

So much of our wounding comes from the early experiences of being emotionally and/or physically abandonment and not feeling worthy enough to be loved and cared for in the way that we so badly needed as children, so it’s totally shit that the moment we can’t pay for therapy we are abandoned. It is cruel really, that we have to once again endure the feeling of an attachment figure leaving us (even though it’s not quite that) because we aren’t allowed to stay unless we have something to offer other than ourselves. And of course it makes sense. Therapy isn’t a friendship. Our therapists are not our family. Therapy is transactional. And that completely rams a knife into the wound when it ends for financial reasons. Because so much of our system needs to believe we matter in spite of the money.

So yeah, right now I feel angry.

And upset.

And deflated.

And lost.

And just really really sad. Because had things not gone so terribly wrong with Em and then Anita, maybe by now I would be far closer to not actually NEEDING therapy. The damage that has been done in the decade with Em and Anita is huge ON TOP of the damage there already was that sent me into therapy in the first place…and the financial cost of all those years of therapy means I am not in a strong financial position now… because let’s be real £500 a month for a decade…is…eye watering. Not only would I be debt free had I not been in therapy, I would actually have some savings…

So yeah.

I feel flat.

And money is only one thing dragging me down right now… but rather than bleat on about the rest of it. I’ll end this here and maybe speak about therapy and the two year anniversary that happened back in August, and the ongoing repair of the rupture that Elle and I had, and the anxiety about Christmas break coming up, and you know…all the attachment stuff next time.

I feel like this is the biggest depressive post I’ve written in a long time. But that’s the reality. It’s all been too hard for much too long.

2025 can do one.

Rupture Patched, Repair Ongoing.

rubberbandsandchewinggum9 Comments

It’ll come as no surprise to those of you that read this blog regularly that I am struggling…when am I not?! Since my last post where I learnt that my therapist, Elle, had lied to me it’s been really tough going and it’s completely caught up with me this weekend. It’s been a month now, and I still feel completely at sea and my system feels really dysregulated even though we have more or less repaired the rupture. This post is an absolutely wild ride of up and down and back to front emotions so…yeah…go me!

At the moment, I seem to swing violently between a flight and freeze response – there is very little sense of feeling safe or grounded, and I guess that’s no surprise because so many parts of my already wounded system have been impacted by Elle’s mistake. Honesty and trust are such important aspects of a therapeutic relationship – and I think this is especially so for those of us with complex trauma who really need to know where we stand, and so to have that side-swiped by an enormous wrecking ball is pretty disastrous, really.

Interestingly it’s usually us, the clients, that are told how important it is to ‘be honest’ and truthful in therapy. We are supposed to be vulnerable and brave and be willing to have the hard conversations and to expose the things we might feel shame or embarrassment about in order to get the work done… a therapist’s honesty is just a given, right? Well, you’d hope. I don’t mean that our therapists should tell us everything about themselves and be completely transparent in that way, all I mean is that they shouldn’t actively mislead us and tell us lies.

Anyway, after my enormous meltdown the other week when Elle told me that she had just been invited away for a last-minute long weekend and so couldn’t do our Friday check (despite my knowing she had something planned weeks in advance due to the shared calendar alerting me to the cancellation). It was time to go and see her face to face. Ugh. God. Just thinking back to that day makes me feel horrible in my stomach.

Having gone quiet and retreated deep into my shell over the course of the weekend while Elle was away – because I wasn’t about to start making a fuss and make Elle’s weekend difficult especially after what happened in May when I had contacted her and thought she was home when she was still away – the next contact we had was when I replied in the afternoon to Elle’s Monday morning ‘personalised session reminder’ in which she acknowledged how fragile trust now was for me and how frightened I probably felt.

I said:

I’m really struggling with all this and I’m trying really hard not to run away but I’ve convinced myself that something terrible is going to happen. I’ll try and be there tomorrow but I feel like I am working against a whole bunch of protectors that absolutely won’t let me. I feel lost and so sad.

And honestly, I was. This whole thing just shattered my trust in Elle, who I thought she was, and I guess most importantly, what I thought our relationship was and what we mean to one another. It’s been totally devastating and had completely derailed me.

Elle replied that she really understood how hard it was and tried to reassure me – she really was trying – and then said that she was on her way home and would be back in a couple of hours if I thought it would help, we could have a call when she got back around five. This was exactly what I needed but there was a part of me that had got into the headspace about being ‘too much’ and not being difficult and needy and demanding or taking up too much space so I replied “Just see how it goes. If you’re back, great. If not don’t worry.” But of course, I wanted to speak with her – needed to speak with her.

So, I moved some stuff around with students to be able to have to call and then shortly before five I got another message saying that whilst Elle was now home, she was tired and was trusting that if we didn’t talk that it would be ok and that we’d see each other the next day.

That felt like a huge sucker punch tbh.

Like I do totally get that my message to her was really open and would totally make her think that it was a take it or leave it sort of a situation. But it really really wasn’t. Having been holding onto all this stuff for six days at this point and not having had any kind of check in before she left what I really needed in that moment was a five-minute call and a tangible reassurance that this was fixable and that I did actually matter and was not just an afterthought or someone who is easily discarded and forgotten about and basically just a bit of an inconvenience.

So not having the call hurt as that’s exactly the messaging I was getting from her having forgotten to tell me about her break and the lie she told to cover it…

And I get she was tired. Had been travelling. All the things. And it was nothing at all about any of my insecurities. But I was also tired, emotionally strung out and hurting and it just seemed to completely replay so many messages from the past. My need isn’t important enough. I am easy to push back or postpone or forget and once again I was left and I just need to find ways to suck that up and cope.

I know it wasn’t lack of care from Elle. Or part of me does. But the young parts that have been so scared by all this just saw it as confirmation, once again, that even when adults hurt me and it’s not because of anything that I have done wrong, it’s still me that has to find a way of holding that for myself – Little Me has always had to find a way to self-soothe and make sense of why the people that are meant to take care of her just don’t, and will always prioritise their need first. And don’t get me wrong. I know what it is to have nothing in the tank at the end of the day, I just don’t understand why Elle even offered the call if she didn’t think she was up to it.

So yeah. That sucked.

With all that on top of the shit pile that was already there, it made even getting myself to go the session hellish. It felt like I wrestling an angry, overtired toddler who didn’t want to put its shoes on but also one who really needed picking up and holding close. The offer of a call had felt like an invitation back to the closeness and safety I had got so used to, and then to have it not happen…well…it felt abandoning on a level.

I felt sick with dread on Tuesday morning heading into the city and was so upset. The teen part of me was fucking angry that I had had to hold onto this stuff for a week, that Elle thought it was good enough to give a symbolic band aid via emails when this wounding had needed a proper bandage – like surely there must’ve been a fifteen-minute window for a phone call somewhere in that week to patch things up and stem the bleed?

Clearly not, or if there had been, I didn’t warrant the time and effort… and yet now I was having to go in and pay to fix a rupture that was not in the least bit of my making. Like fuck that! Don’t get me wrong – Elle does a LOAD for me and gives me a lot of her time, adult me totally sees that but my hurt teenager didn’t.

I ended up being a couple of minutes late to the session because just as I was about thirty seconds away from Elle’s building, I got an overwhelming feeling of nausea and had to stop and sit down on a wall and breathe so I wasn’t actually sick. So, I was pretty worked up by all accounts.

Typing this out now, almost a month on, is really hard because I am so fucking upset that any of this has even happened and that I am still trying to navigate my way through the aftermath of the storm even though the storm is seemingly long gone and to anyone looking in, the sun is out.

I don’t know if things can ever fully repair, some days I think it’s ok and then others I just feel so lost.

It’s like cosmetically the boat looks fine now, but underneath there’s a fucking great hole in the hull and I am really aware that I’m taking on water and slowly sinking – but because the hole is concealed, I think that Elle is blissfully unaware of the situation and I don’t know how to tell her because my confidence in the relationship is so damaged. More than anything I need her to understand where I am at so we can try and really fix this. We need to get the boat out the water and put it in a dry dock and seriously attend to the hole in the hull.

I did ought to be able to tell her. I know this. Two years of steady work and relationship building should mean I can bring this to her. And I want to. My god I’ve been doing therapy long enough to know that the only way out is through.. but …and it’s a huge BUT… I am so aware that it’s times exactly like these where I have pushed myself to talk about my experience of being upset and hurt by a therapist that they often double down rather than accept that they are at fault. They refuse to see how damaging their behaviour has been and because I can’t move on or let it go, it’s now framed as a me problem. It’s my overreaction. It’s my attachment disorder. It’s my not understanding that this is only a therapeutic relationship… and so I’m now braced for the retreat, and the “too dependent” comment or the “like a tick” comment when actually the only reason I ever get super needy and super clingy is due to fear of abandonment and ruptures and in this case I think it’s understandable that I am scared and dysregulated.

Anyway, back to the session.

When I walked into the building Elle was there and honestly, she looked relieved. She said she had been just about to text me and thought that I wasn’t coming. I guess two years of never having missed a session, or cancelled or having been late shows how my not being there on time is a big deal.

I had hoped that I would be able to go in and be open and start to process what had happened but I should know by now what deep hurt does to me. We sat down and Elle sat facing me on the couch and started to apologise. I immediately said, “I don’t want to talk to you”. I don’t know which part that was, maybe the teen again, but actually maybe in part my adult self who has felt so incredibly let down and felt as though I have really done my young parts and system a massive disservice by allowing myself to be so vulnerable and exposed with Elle. My guard has been so down for so long that it’s been really hard having this happen. Like I rely on my wise self to navigate relationships for all of my vulnerable parts and here I am again in pain because I haven’t read the room right…or something like that.

I was quiet for a long time but my heart was racing, and I was physically trembling, and it just felt unbearable. I really needed Elle to reach out for me or say something but I think I was giving off the biggest ‘stay the fuck away from me’ vibes because she checked in and asked if it was ok for her to be sitting next to me. In the end I managed to tell her, “I am so upset and angry with you”.

Elle said she knew.

We ended up having a long long talk about lies and the damage they do to my relationships – how when you lie you are deliberately stepping out of connection with someone and denying them an opportunity to respond to whatever the reality and truth is – and how I can’t trust without truth. Even though it was hard, I was able to express at least some of how I was feeling. I didn’t feel connected to Elle, though, and some of what she said made me feel really sad like it didn’t feel like we were quite hearing or meeting each other or perhaps she just wasn’t saying what I needed to hear in that moment. It’s hard for me to tell when it’s like that whether my protective bubble is working or whether it’s actually stopping me connecting.

Either way, I felt like I had listened to what she said and realised that somewhere along the line during these months and years had completely fucking misunderstood what was going on with us. I sat quietly for a bit, thought about getting up and leaving, and then said, “I feel really stupid”. She asked me why. And I said “I thought that this meant more than it does”. My heart felt completely broken in that moment because I have taken so much time and care to build this relationship with Elle and yet I must have been viewing it all through rose-tinted spectacles. Here I was again, so desperate to be loved that I’ll imagine something that just isn’t there.

Elle asked me to explain what I meant by that and I said, “It didn’t matter”. I wasn’t about to tell her how important the relationship is to me, and how I love her and how close and connected I feel to her at times and how much I value her… because what a fucking fool I have been to have believed that this wasn’t a completely one-sided interaction. What a fucking idiot for starting to believe that I actually mattered to her too, and had a space in her heart and that she wasn’t like all the others. I was not about to expose myself in that way.

So, instead Elle asked if she could tell me what it meant to her and that I could choose to believe what she said or not.

And wow.

Ok.

What came next.

That was the gold.

I could feel myself soften because what she was saying is what I had felt to be true…like this was my Elle – the one I had needed all week. I won’t repeat what she said here because it was such an honest and vulnerable moment that I think that stays with us.

But those are the moments I need. I really need the times when she is so explicit and clear with her words that I can be in no doubt what is felt on her side because clearly, I lose sight and hold of that when I am not with her because doubt and fear and shame fill the empty spaces like a thick fog that creeps into every crack and crevice of my being as well as the space between us.

And it’s so funny… I’ve felt so upset and angst filled writing this and then I remember those few minutes and it’s like the dial has been wound back round to low for a minute. Elle does care. She does love me. I do matter to her…a lot. Oh, I so wish I could make that stick.

Elle is truly sorry for hurting me and letting me down. She knew that she had caused a serious amount of damage and that it might not repair but I felt like that mattered to her. We talked a lot about what happened and why. And I really got it. Like it was a real and honest and open conversation and connecting even though it was hard. But, of course, there’s a lot of processing to be done still.

I am still obviously really activated and upset and triggered and all the things at intervals (especially today!) because I have a system that isn’t straightforward for healing and repair. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF MY PARTS needs to be able to hear what Elle said to me last month…or have some kind of reparative experience that is appropriate to them and not all of them have yet.

So, despite it being as good a repair as it could have been in the moment, I’ve been left feeling really lost and alone and disconnected at periods since. I feel like Elle’s stuff is taking up her time and energy (and I do understand why) and so I haven’t wanted to impose or be difficult even though my need has ramped right up due to the rupture. Because I feel more insecure, I need more from her at the moment and yet don’t feel like I can ask. I am not channeling my inner Brene Brown at all!!!

As a result of all this I find that read more into the silences and times we aren’t in touch because I am coming from a place of fear. I sense a distance between us (rightly or wrongly) and part of me worries she is choosing to retreat and pull back even if there is no evidence for it. It’s just that right now the space between us is too much. Friday check ins don’t feel anything like enough online and I feel too embarrassed to ask if we can meet face to face because…I don’t want to take up more space or get a no which would also feel rejecting.

Sadly, I need more of Elle right not, not less. And so, this has been desperately hard for me. We had got into such a good place before this rupture happened and I just cannot believe I am here now. But this is what happens. I have complex trauma. I have a structurally dissociated system. I have attachment issues. This was never going to be a magically repaired in a session because it has hit some of my deepest wounds and fears.

Of course, I don’t want to be doggedly hanging on to mistrust and fear but it’s almost like my survival instinct has been triggered. I can’t help but be hypervigilant. My system feels it’s in danger anytime I am away from Elle. This, I know, is not ideal! There a part of me that is also sort of mad. Here I am flailing around and sounding like an unhinged fucking nutjob and yet this mess wasn’t of my making. I didn’t cause the rupture and yet here I am trying really hard to figure it out without taking up too much space and time and energy.

The thing is, this needs space and time and energy to repair. Because I am freaking out about being abandoned or rejected or unseen, I actually need proof that I am not being abandoned or rejected or unseen.

Look, I know how dramatic that sounds. Elle made a mistake. She has apologised. I’m an adult. I can understand.

Only it’s not that simple, is it?

I wish it was.

Over the last month, our sessions have been ok enough – as in they look and sound fine…but because so much of me is hurting and in hiding at intervals the connection to Elle feels off. Even when she is holding me tightly, I feel far away because I drift so far away between the sessions. I can’t relax into being with her fully, or parts of me can’t. Elle says that she does she all the parts. I think her strategy is just to keep showing up and being there and hoping that at some point my system settles and believes it is safe to trust again. I think that could be a really long road.

I emailed her the other day and just asked “Are we ok?”

Elle replied with a holding message and acknowledged that she recognises that even when we are physically close, I can feel like the space between our hearts is a mile wide but that she doesn’t feel that way and assured me she is right there and that she feels close to me. She knows I feel lost but that I am not lost to her and she is right there.  And that helped…but I feel like at the moment I need that kind of very clear and direct reassurance every day because so much of me is unsettled now. Like we might calm down one part but then another rears its head with its fears and mistrust and it’s back to square one. I get that it’s not realistic and I would never ask Elle for that, and I will just tough this out and hope that eventually things settle.

I think one of the hardest things for me right now is that I feel so incredibly needy and whilst I am able to reach out some of the time and ask whether we are ok or for a metaphorical hand hold and give a flavour of what I need and what’s really going on for me, I probably only do this 50% of the time. The other messages I send don’t seem to need anything at all and yet I would say that right now ALL my communications are really about reassurance and connection seeking.

I totally get that I need to be more direct. I know that Elle is not a mind reader and will go on what she sees from me. BUT it’s not easy to be really and truly how it is in this moment when my fear is that she will burn out or I’ll hit the threshold of ‘too much’.

I hate how awful the disorganised attachment push/pull thing is. I feel so much the need to be close but there’s also the parts that are pulling away and shutting down. All the old stuff with shame feels really potent too. And I hate this so much because it shows me how default programming is hardwired. I’ve been working so hard for that earned secure attachment…but…I don’t honestly even know it that is possible.

So yeah.

It’s a mess.

It’s fixed…but it’s not…

And I can see how fucking screwed up I am right now because I can’t even maintain a consistent fucking feeling in a blog post. But this is how it is, my emotions are all over the shop this is why I am struggling. Ugh.

A Special Picnic And Almost Two Years With Elle.

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It’s two years this coming week since I walked into Elle’s therapy room completely broken and in pieces, vowing that I would never again allow myself to get close to, or attached to, a therapist. I promised myself that this time, I had one simple focus: I would go in and work through the damage done by Anita (and maybe the others) and get the hell out! Bugger the rest of the trauma – I’d lived with it for my whole life and I’d manage on my own.  

Yeah, that really worked, didn’t it?!

Elle and I have come such a long way since that warm day back in August 2023, where I think I turned up in one of my homemade tie dye t-shirts (don’t judge!) and basically talked at her for well over an hour basically giving a high-speed but potted version of ‘all the things’ and praying that whatever I said wasn’t going to be ‘too much’. I remember emailing Elle after that first session and basically apologising for the splurge and telling her I hoped that I wasn’t too much… which is really sad when I think about it – but shows the damage that’s been done in previous therapies…as well as by my mum growing up.

I couldn’t have imagined back then that we’d be where we are now, and I know that could never have happened if I hadn’t have felt safe (enough) with Elle. My runners are so quick out the blocks these days that they’d give Usain Bolt a run for his money! But because it’s been such slow, steady, safe work and our relationship has been constructed so carefully and with consideration my runners never get too far down the track with Elle – it’s almost like there’s an invisible elastic bungee tied to my ankles and it pings me back to her.

I feel like in the last couple of years we’ve built solid foundations and that even when things feel stormy and rough, we can weather whatever comes our way TOGETHER…which I guess is the idea of it all!

I have absolutely no doubt that Elle is holding my hand no matter what (even on days like today when a lot of my system is in a total all out panic about a call we had this morning –  I was in a FREEZE and barely spoke). I am hanging on tightly to what I know to be true: Elle cares no matter who shows up, or doesn’t show up.

All the steady months (and years!) of work and reassurance is finally starting to bed in. I think I might finally be getting to a place where I am able to see Elle for her – rather than worry about everyone who has come before her and then believing she’ll repeat their patterns on me. Maybe, just maybe, we are rewriting the script a bit. Or some of my system is seeing things a little differently and it’s tipping the balance in a more positive direction. Actually it’s a lot like trying to coil a spring in the opposite direction. We are doing a good job of it – but occasionally it pings back. Like today, the panic is there- but I know it won’t last for weeks on end…maybe the weekend, or just today (please let it be this!), and sometimes it’s just a few hours.

I think part of the reason things are as strong as they are is because I have a voice that I am not afraid to use now (says the girl who was basically mute in our check-in today! – go figure)…or, if I am afraid, I say it anyway! Being a veteran therapy-goer who’s been through the wringer a fair few times, I know what I want and need now, and I ask for it…I suppose I keep showing up with the map, and the emails, and with my armour off and Elle pays attention to what I am saying.

Elle really listens. And the more I am prepared to share with her the stronger our bond and her understanding of me becomes. She actively invites me to tell her what I need – no shame…and even today’s silence and freeze WAS TELLING HER something is up, because I wasn’t masking or pretending. False Adult wasn’t there… instead, a hurting part of me was, and she may not have a voice but she was on the call at least.

Of course, I’ve still got a bloody long way to go. I feel like we’re four miles into a marathon and so sometimes my old friends Shame and Embarrassment show up at the side of the road to ‘cheer me on’ in the only way they know how (throwing things at me and trying to take my legs out from underneath me) and then a little further along the road Fear Of Abandonment and Rejection turn up and tell me that I am “shit at running and should go home now” but I recognise this is old programming and whilst these protective parts might slow me up, they don’t stop me altogether.

I one hundred percent know Elle can handle what I bring to her and I one million percent have faith that she isn’t going to tap out on me when the going gets tough. Elle sits beside/with me with a softness and care that comes out of her in waves. She doesn’t flinch. Like she’s a pro at unconditional positive regard…or shall we just call it love? I feel better when I am with her…and even if I start off rough, by the time we end I’m in a way better than I was.

But Elle thinks outside the box too…and this really appeals to me. She isn’t rigid and boundaries for boundaries’ sake. After so many years of rigid therapy with Em it’s nice to feel like our relationship and how we work together has a bit of an organic quality to it. It’s different to how things were with Anita, too.

It was recently coming up to the anniversary of my dad’s death which is always a rotten time for me. Elle had suggested a few weeks before that we could have two sessions that week and that maybe we could do something nice to put a different association on the day, make something beautiful out of something heavy. This sounded really lovely to me – and it felt so nice that Elle was looking ahead and thinking about what kind of support I might need rather than just letting a hard time pass by in the usual run of things.

When she mentioned booking the additional session I’d literally just told her about a dream I had had with her in (not a nice one), and she said that she too had dreamt about me that same week but that hers was really lovely dream – because we’d had a picnic together in the room with tiny cucumber sandwiches that I had brought in…and then she said, “I think that would be a really lovely thing to do – let’s have a picnic on the day you come in for the extra session”.

So that’s what we did.

On that hard Monday (I’d cried a lot in the morning – floodgates had opened), we both came in loaded with food, drink, and treats. Elle had brought a proper picnic hamper with her and a picnic blanket and we laid it out on the floor of the therapy room and ate and chatted and laughed. I’d made a YouTube playlist the weekend before, and we played it in the background. And honestly it was just so lovely.

We had a serious feast…much better than the one in the picture!

Elle brought in little ham sandwiches and some cucumber sandwiches (because of the dream she’d had!). We had ginger beer (just like the Famous Five), chocolate, fruit, crisps, dips, homegrown tomatoes from Elle’s garden, Belgian buns (although we were too full to eat those and saved them for the session the next day). Elle even brought me in a can of cherry coke because she knows it’s my absolute favourite. But perhaps most special was that she brought me in sausages and cheese on cocktail sticks. I had said that it was a happy memory from when I was small, and so she brought it to life.

Do you know what that feels like? To be held in the details? To be seen and held with so much care that someone brings your fleeting moments of childhood joy into the present? In that moment time folds in half and you get to be little and loved as well as seen and cared for in the here and now.

It’s everything.

And after years of an eating disorder to actually sit in the therapy room and not be at all self-conscious about eating… HUGE!

I could cry writing this because I can just deeply feel and see the love and I feel like my heart could burst – and so often I lose sight of it when my system goes into freefall (like this morning) when I feel like I am simultaneously too much and not enough and on the verge of overwhelming Elle.

There would be some therapists (Em for one) who would have an absolute meltdown at the idea of what Elle and I did on that lovely Monday afternoon sitting on a picnic rug spitting our cherry pips into a flask and genuinely just having a really nice time together…but in negatively judging, they would neglect to see that Elle and I connecting in a real way, opened up a safe enough space for me to finally be able to open and read some letters from my dad that I haven’t been able to look at in the seventeen years since he died.

With Elle by my side, I felt safe enough to dip into that pain and that is enormous. This particular anniversary is so full of grief and yet I was able to access my grief in a far more helpful way than ever before. I wasn’t drowning in it – because Elle had a life vest for me. She held my hand and stopped me from sinking and as a result I feel like something has metabolised this year. Like I have moved something on that has been stuck for nearly twenty years.

So, tell me how that is a problem, or bad practice? It’s not. It’s meeting a client where they are at and creating the kind of space that is needed for the healing to be done.

There are so many therapists who get bent out of shape even at the idea of a client bringing in their own drink for their session, and aren’t sure whether to have a box of tissues to hand, or you know have strong opinions on moving a chair…so let’s not even go there with between session contact and physical touch!

Yet I can say some of the most connecting moments with Elle have been when we’ve been sitting next to each other and had drinks, or biscuits, or played roulette with jellybeans creating some really weird combos, or recently when we totally overloaded on sugar from some seriously dense cakes from a local shop and neither of us were able to eat for the rest of the day. Or the other day when we tried out the new M&S strawberries and cream sandwich (not a fan!). Like all these little moments work on so many layers of my system.

There’s something really human in those moments. It’s connecting when I bring a coffee from the shop round the corner and it’s fucking terrible. We each taste it and agree it’s a flop. Or recently we were wincing at a crazy bitter lemonade. It’s been north of 30 degrees Celsius here lately and the UK just doesn’t even attempt to do air con – so bringing in cold drinks to share has been a hydration thing…but it’s also therapeutic for me!

Relational wounds need healing in safe relationships and Elle has created an environment with me that allows me to be and do exactly what I want or need in the moment. Sometimes that’s really deep soul and heart work, and sometimes it’s being silly and childish. Sometimes it’s food and drinks. Sometimes it’s playdoh. Sometimes it’s stories. Sometimes it’s saying nothing at all and having a long hug and nearly (or actually) falling asleep. Other times it’s me chewing her ear off for the whole ninety minutes – but whatever it is and however I come to the room, I am very much welcome.

But it’s not just what happens in the room that makes a difference – it’s what happens throughout the week. I can email Elle or text her if I want. I can ask for a check in. I can ask for transitional objects – and Monty has had a really fun year over on Insta since he came to live with me.

https://www.instagram.com/montys_awesome_adventures?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==

And all of that is ok. I am learning that Elle is open to hearing whatever I think might help me – and will always give what I say proper consideration…unlike Em who was a hard “No” on almost everything I suggested…and we all know how the pebble transitional object bombed… six months of hoping and believing she was going to finally give me something close to what I needed…ha. So disappointing.

Turns out that so far, I am pretty good at not stepping over lines and invisible boundaries. Of course, I don’t ring her or turn up out the blue – or whatever it is that therapists seem to panic about happening with clients with complex trauma…because as much I have a lot of trauma, and as much as my inner children are in a state, I do also have an adult self who operates in the world fairly successfully and I know what is and isn’t ok. Of course, I would like to be able to spend more time with Elle. I would love to not be ‘on the clock’ and just spend a day with her where I wasn’t aware of having to squeeze everything into ninety minutes but the only way that would ever happen is if we decided for that to happen.

It makes me laugh, really. I remember when I was working with Em how I would trawl the internet searching and trying to find evidence of what was acceptable or possible in therapy because I felt like my therapy was just … not meeting me where I needed – and more often than not I felt that what I came across was a highly defended, almost paranoid approach to therapy by therapists.

Clients were so often pathologised and infantilised – it was as though if you gave a client an inch, they’d take a mile and the next thing you know you’d be needing a restraining order. It’s total bullshit. To be honest, the longer I have been online blogging and communicating with people in therapy, the real danger seems to be the therapists and not the clients!! #harmintherapy

I know counselling and therapy is all about processing and thinking – but sometimes I feel like therapists get caught in a trap of overthinking a situation and lose sight of the fact that therapy is really just about two people having a relational experience together. Of course, there are boundaries and rules to how it works but it doesn’t need to cold and sterile. If I wanted a sterile experience, I would type my woes into ChatGPT and let it be my therapist for free…or you know, have a relationship with my mother.

Fortunately, there are some therapists who are human and discuss how they work online – and of course clients who write and give a window into their therapy. I guess, what I would say is there isn’t a one size fits all approach and each therapy needs to be co-created between the therapist and client. It should be a collaborative experience, not a place where the client is powerless and ‘done to’. There will always be a power imbalance, but it doesn’t need to be a central tenet of the work. For those of us who had no power or control as children that sort of therapy doesn’t help at all.

I stayed with Em for all those years because how she made me feel was familiar… it wasn’t healing. I gained a lot of insight, for sure…but that came from all the suffering. Ugh.

The thing I love so much about therapy with Elle is that there is space for all the parts of me. The littles who cling and ache and need. The teenage part who hides behind eye rolls and survival. The adult who tries to keep it all tidy but is tired. They all get to show up. They all get to belong. They are all loved.

I am loved – just as I am.

I don’t have to shrink myself into something that I think makes me ‘manageable’ or ‘palatable’ anymore – both literally and metaphorically. I don’t have to apologise for being messy or needy or too much. I can just ‘be’. Although, of course I do sometimes reach out and apologise for being all of the above – but not because I think Elle wants me to. In fact she would say there is never any need to apologise for how I am.

I love Elle and that terrifies me sometimes. When I feel vulnerable and small, sometimes the fear of losing her is too much to bear. Sometimes I carry it around in my chest like a second heartbeat that almost drowns out my own. But I don’t doubt her care for me. I see her gentle, thoughtful love EVERYWHERE. It’s in her remembering, in her words, in the way she sits with me instead of away from me. It’s in the sausages on sticks. It’s stories. It’s in the way she meets me wherever I am and says yes, this too can come in. It’s in the way she holds me – physically and emotionally.

It’s our two-year anniversary this week and do you know what was really lovely? Last session she asked me, “So, are we celebrating our two-year anniversary next week?” and I replied that we were. She said, “Good, because I’ve made something!” So I’m intrigued about that, but also touched – because yet again Elle is showing me in the most certain of terms that what we are doing together matters.

x

And I’ll leave this on one of my favourite Andrea Gibson quotes:

I Was ‘The Good Girl’ In The Therapy Room And I Hurt All The Time

rubberbandsandchewinggum3 Comments

I’ve been in therapy for a long time.
Like, a really long time.
It’s been ten years solid this time around, albeit with four different therapists (not that I am counting!). I’m not sure how to explain how long that is in soul years, but it feels like a thousand.

I am no stranger to the therapy room. Even before this latest solid run of ‘trying to get my mind fixed’ (or should I say my nervous system recalibrated and the mother wound healed?) there have been some hopeful episodes in the ‘room’ over the last twenty-five or so years. But mostly, as is generally the case when you’re a student in college or university, these were relatively short-term therapies.

I went, then, because I was suffering with anxiety or depression or stress, or my eating disorder, or imposter syndrome or whatever (the list goes on and on). I knew deep down that something was very wrong and those sessions acted like sticking plasters for a wound that was far deeper than I ever could have imagined at the time. Little did I know that I needed far more attention than four or six sessions could ever hope to provide.

I remember feeling like I was fully losing the plot as it was coming up to Christmas when doing my MA. I was twenty-two and I realised that I needed to see someone having not been to a therapist since my A Levels. The university I was studying at had a counselling service and, fortunately, as most people had already left for the holidays there was some availability to see someone.

It was in that room that the dam broke. It was a tiny room in the back of an old Victorian red brick building not far from my seminar building. I started to let out ‘all the things’ and although I only had four sessions with that counsellor it was such a relief to finally have someone say to me that I wasn’t overreacting and that actually they thought I could really use some long-term therapy because ‘trauma’…and no, it wasn’t just the stress of deadlines and they didn’t try and ply me with strategies to get through the immediate stress rather just gave me a space to be heard and collapse a bit after trying to hold it together for such a long time.

I might have walked out of those short-term sessions feeling a bit bereft – like, it would have been so great to be able to spend a few months with that particular therapist as a bit of a scaffold around my crumbling self, but that wasn’t how the service worked…and where was the long-term therapy that a student with no money could afford? I certainly couldn’t access the kind of therapy I need/ed back then and so put everything back in the box on the top of the shelf and continued on with life until I couldn’t do it anymore.

One thing I will say, is that these episodes of short-term therapy never did me any harm. They may not have been long enough, but I didn’t leave those sessions in a worse state than when I started. But then perhaps these therapies were never quite long enough to activate my attachment system. I don’t know. But then, that doesn’t work, because I saw a therapist N, for two years after my dad died and it helped, I was attached to her- and we’re still in contact now seventeen years later – certainly no harm done there.

Harm in therapy didn’t become a reality for me until Em – the highly experienced Clinical Psychologist, the person I was led to believe I stood a really good chance of healing with, and so the person I trusted with my whole story and self. Gosh. What a mess it was.

I met Em thirteen and a half years ago, now. I feel so sad, looking back over my life, that I have been trying so hard for so long to feel ‘better’ and yet here I am still working on undoing damage not just from my childhood, my life, but actually my therapies. It’s tragic.

Em and I initially did sixteen months in the NHS — it was the kind of therapy where the clock ticks louder than your voice and the radiator only half-works and my god, those awful shiny yellow gloss-painter woodchipped walls were really something!… but finally getting a space to delve into my psyche with someone who (on paper at least) really had the skill to help was much-needed.

But like every therapy before – the time I had wasn’t long enough. NHS work, even when it’s extended (which mine was) is still time limited. There is only so many sessions you can have and then that’s it – there’s a huge waiting list (three years for me back then) and you can’t clog up the system forever even if you really need the therapy. And surely you should be grateful to get a long stint of therapy in the first place. It’s kind of laughable, because it took me a year to even get close to the work or for my system to activate. In reality a little over a year of once-a-week therapy is nothing for Complex Trauma and quite honestly, the NHS just isn’t at all equipped to help with these kinds of issues.

And my god, opening my version of Pandora’s Box and then being left with no therapy at all really really messed me up. The nightmares. The panic attacks. The eating disorder and self-harming behaviours were triggered again. My child parts (and my structurally dissociated system – not that I knew that that was what it was then) had a complete meltdown. The feelings of abandonment and rejection felt huge. And I didn’t cope at all. But I was completely and utterly alone and without any kind of support…because I’d used it up.

Em had agreed that we could see each other in her private practice when our sessions finished but the NHS had stipulated that there needed to be a three-month break between ending there and commencing with her again. At the time I accepted that as how things had to be – but knowing what I know now about my system I can see how very wrong it was to leave that work wide open and leave me essentially hanging. What I should have done then was reach out to Em and let her know what was going on, but of course, I didn’t know that was possible. I was just following the rules…because I have always followed the rules.

After two months on my own without therapy, my graphic nightmares finally stopped in their tracks and I didn’t even dream again for nearly three years– I basically shut off/dissociated my entire system and lived my life in ‘false adult’ I think. And so, I didn’t go back to Em for three years.

You could call it a ‘break’. I call it surviving without witness – but I think there was always a part of me, a child part or five, that I had exiled who was desperate to find my way back to Em. The little parts of me that had been so activated in her therapy room, and all the trauma too, needed a place to go.

And so when I finished my cancer treatment and all the wheels fell off – I went back to her…because… well…to parts of me she was mum, and a kind of safety, and I very badly needed someone because I was very much not ok.

In the intervening three years since I had sat with Em a lot had changed in my world – but underneath or inside I was just the same – all those little parts were frozen inside needing to be seen, held, and attended to. The trauma was there still, unresolved.

I remember the first day I walked back in the room and how hopeful I had been and how excited I had been to see Em again. And yet, it fell flat. I guess there was a part of me that wanted her to welcome me back with open arms or some kind of acknowledgement that it was good to see me again now that we weren’t in the sterile hospital. But she was ever the blank screen, and although my child parts came alive again the moment they saw her, they knew too that the rules were still the same.

And I am nothing if not the girl who follows the rules.

I came to my session/s every week.

I paid on time.

I was never rude.

I never cancelled on her until we were right at the end and broken (but then why would I, my sessions never felt enough and so I would never enact a break willingly).

And I tried so hard to do therapy ‘right’ – and stick within the confines of Em’s very very rigid boundaries (although occasionally failing and texting her – god forbid).

I tried so hard to be grateful for what was on offer. I tried to make it enough. I tried to be insightful and brave and DO THE WORK…and bring everything to the room even when I felt terrified and physically unwell.

I tried not to be too much.  

But man, I felt small and disempowered.

I was the good girl in the therapy room and I hurt all the time.

I could never understand why it felt so painful to be with her…and so painful to be away from her, too.

I guess I  thought I had to earn tenderness and care, and prove myself worthy of it because of course that’s been hard-wired into me from day dot.

I thought being easy to work with would make me lovable – or at least palatable.

It didn’t.

But then why would it?

That strategy had never worked with my mother so why on earth would it work in the therapy room? And yet here I was unconsciously repeating the same pattern with my therapist.

It seemed being the quiet good girl wasn’t ever enough.

So, I changed tack. It took a really long time for me to bring my pain about the relationship with Em into the room unwashed and unedited. Em had said she felt “blindfolded” with me and I thought this meant that my caution and hiding my feelings was stopping us being able to really connect. And man did I want to be connected to her and so I took a leap towards her around about the time I started this blog.

I wrote things down when I couldn’t say them out loud (because shame was so ever-present and dissociation never very far away). I folded pages of typed letters or blog posts inside my pocket like secret spells. Sometimes it would take weeks for me to build the courage to hand them over. Every time I did, I felt like I was giving her the map to the world inside me — it felt like I was screaming over and over, “Please, please just look. Please see what it’s like in here. Please help me not be lost anymore.” And perhaps in also written between the lines was, “Please love me”. But Em would sit and read my words never giving much away as I sat squirming opposite her and then carry on like she already knew the way and didn’t need my map.

And so, I walked alone over terrain that felt like barbed wire and cold rain and shame.

It felt in some ways like I was in the Truman Show – but no one told me what the point of it was, and the lights were much too bright, and whilst I could see Em she was always sitting behind her glass screen taking notes about what I was (or not doing) on her clipboard – she wasn’t in the scene with me. Every now and then she’d tell me where I was going wrong, “Like a tick”. It was as though she was some nasty film director coaching an actor who was absolutely doing their best to act the ‘right’ way but failing miserably time and again.

The thing is, I shouldn’t have ever had to have acted in that room. I should have been able to go and be me – exactly as I was and have that met with kindness, compassion, and curiosity. I should have been able to remove my various masks.

I wish.

I feel so sad when I look at how small I made myself in the room with Em – I don’t mean falling into my child parts small, I mean how little space I took up and how little I asked for from her and yet even that was made to feel like ‘too much’. I feel so sad that I tried to bend and fit to be the client she wanted me to be and it breaks my heart that for all those years my small parts couldn’t get anywhere close to what I needed. There was no we in that therapy- just me…flailing around and hurting.

I took big elephant with me in my bag for years but was never brave enough to take her out even when I had told Em about the many many child parts that were inside me and how they felt and we both knew how much hurt was inside. There was never an invitation from Em to be anything other than my very competent adult self…and that was really hard when my young parts were so very present. Part of me feels angry at my adult self for not doing more to protect my young parts – but I genuinely thought at the time going to therapy was me looking after myself.

I am not the same client I was back then. I have learnt such a lot about myself over the last decade and there is simply no way I would put up with what I did with Em now…or even Anita. And so although this growth and understanding has come at a heavy emotional (and financial cost)…I do at least know myself and have boundaries around how I will let myself be treated now.

But back then, I felt ashamed and embarrassed asking for anything from Em and her NOs to my very few requests cut so deep. Object constancy has always been a massive problem for me and I remember reading an article online by a therapist about how to stay connected to therapists on a break. They’d suggested a simple three dot text message in the week – like it’s bare minimum effort, no words to misunderstand, just a reminder that they are there. But no, she wouldn’t do it.

I remember asking for a simple transitional object – I wanted a short note written on a pebble that I had found on the beach near her house – and that became a torture project for well over six months. But in reality, I didn’t want a rock… I wanted a soft toy like Monty…only I never asked because I knew that was way out of the realms of acceptability for Em…and I was right. We couldn’t even get a few words on a pebble right, a toy for my young parts would have been simply outrageous!

I was made to feel like there was something desperately wrong with me because I wanted her to sit closer to me. I would dissociate so badly when I felt like she was far away but there was never concessions on Em’s part to make a move to adjust how we worked to make things better for me. I wrote in a letter once that I wished I could hug her. Somehow that was really inappropriate and uncomfortable and was addressed only once, “You know I don’t do that”. It felt like a sucker punch to the gut.

And heaven forbid we go anywhere near the ‘L’ word. Love was made to feel like a dirty word and I never once uttered it aloud…I only alluded to it in my maps/letters. And yet it is so much part of the work… talking through human emotions in all their forms is the work. And it shouldn’t matter if they are directed towards the therapist or anyone else. But also, I struggle hard to understand how if you spend years and years of your life with someone picking apart your most vulnerable stuff that love wouldn’t become part of the fabric of the therapy.

Ugh.

I’m not here to talk about her though – although I seem to have gone down the rabbit hole a bit today – I guess I am still reeling from the hurt… and we can totally skip over Anita, and Hannah because – well – I want to talk about now – 2025…

I want to talk about Elle…I want to talk about how I can be who I am, not who I think I need to be with her. I want to say how that the ‘good girl’ part of me has been allowed to rest a bit and that I no longer hurt in the way that I used to – but given this part alone is 2000 words I’ll break this post into two…and believe me, the next part is far more uplifting!…there’s even a picnic to tell you about!!

Update: Life Is A Shitshow

rubberbandsandchewinggum14 Comments

Where do I even start with this? Seriously, why oh why is my life so endlessly fucking challenging? I often wonder if I must’ve been a colossal asshole in a previous life because the unending piles of shit that land over and over seem just really too much. Surely, life isn’t meant to be an ongoing struggle that involves jumping hurdle after hurdle without ever having much time to recover and breathe before the next? But that’s how it feels.

It’s little wonder I am always so strung out – even when things seem to be going relatively well, I feel as though I am waiting for the next barrage of shit to hit…and it always always comes without fail. It might sound dramatic but I really feel like I have had more than my fair share of crap in this lifetime. Like living with an abusive parent, the death of the safe parent, and cancer at 31 was enough thank you very much… ugh.

So, it’s been a little (long) while since my last post where I was having a meltdown about the group email that Elle sent out about her fee increase in April. I honestly wish I could go back to that time and only be dealing with that level of shit in my life – you know, alongside having a chronically sick kid and all the other bits that I navigate on the daily…but I was just about head above water then even though it’s felt like I have been drowning emotionally for the best part of six months.

As it turned out, I never got round to telling Elle about the meltdown I had about being ‘one of many’ and her group email, because as life would have it, my life got turned upside down AGAIN and that seemed really insignificant in the big scheme of things . Ironically, the thing that wasn’t a worry at all in that message, i.e the fee increase has now become a real and present stress alongside the not wanting to share Elle. What’s happened you might wonder? Well, let’s just say, it doesn’t seem pay to speak up when things are wrong – or to care in this world.

My wife recently took on a new role in a new organisation in order to be able to work closer to home now that one of our kids has been diagnosed with a chronic lifelong condition. She’d been in post for a week when she had to escalate some serious findings to the CEO and rather than listen to what she had to say they got irate and told her to leave…basically they didn’t want to know. This was shocking… like honestly, mind-blowing…you just wouldn’t quite believe that companies run like this…especially when people’s lives are in the mix but it is all too common unfortunately.

So, what does that even mean? Well, this is the sixth week she’s been out of work and no money coming in. She has several ongoing interviews at the moment (at her level most jobs have a minimum of three interviews and some kind of presentation to the directorate), but these things take a loooonnnggg time and meanwhile our main earner isn’t earning.

Can you imagine the stress? For someone that has a bit of a scarcity complex it has really triggered me.

Of course, my system is in absolute meltdown about it. I am hardly sleeping, my back seized up the first week, then I came down with a stinking cold/flu which has lasted the best part of a month now and I have had to work through it when had I not been self-employed I’d have been in bed sick.

It’s not surprising I got pummelled with this though and just haven’t been able to bounce back, as alongside all of this we spent most of the first week post ‘no job’ in hospital with our son who is immune suppressed due to his medication regime and had developed an infection.

It’s been exhausting.

I am exhausted.

Burnout is real.

And it is nigh on impossible to hang it all together when so much feels so out of control and dangerous. This post has actually been half-started and languishing in my laptop for ages now, and really I thought about deleting it as it’s not even really about ‘therapy’ – but I want to post so that my next ‘therapy’ post will make some kind of sense…when I get round to writing it… because no surprise, I have hit huge skids with Elle this week (not that she knows it yet) and it has felt like the biggest rupture to my system.

My inner world is in turmoil and I think it must have at least something to do with my external world going tits up…but you can figure that out with me next time. Maybe I am overreacting or maybe Elle has just been unconsciously insensitive and maybe I am justified in feeling really hurt. I don’t know.

Still, back to the shitshow that is my day-to-day!

As we all know, life doesn’t happen for free… gotta love capitalism! lol. I have juggled some bits around for now – taken on some extra debt to cover the immediate expenses, but there is a real worry that this can’t go on for too long before I’ll have to make some hard choices about my therapy with Elle. And whilst it would be me putting things on pause for financial reasons, my system won’t understand that at all especially given the recent ‘rupture’ stuff that’s just been triggered.

The universe has been delivering a total avalanche of shit since my wife became unemployed… not only were me and my son ill… but the car got a puncture and needed a new tyre, the dishwasher blew up, the boiler broke and flooded the bedroom – because – why??? Then my car engine light came on last week and was an £800 fix…umm….HELP!! There’ve been a few more of these unexpected financial sucker punches but I can’t remember what they are…dissociation is such fun! But it’s meant the safety net I put in place to tide us over whilst my wife gets a new position is spring huge tears left and right.

Not seeing Elle would feel like an abandonment to my young parts who already struggle such a lot because of what’s happened in previous therapies. How many times have I heard that “I’m with you for the entire journey. No matter what.” Or “It’s not about money to me” or “I will keep showing up for you.” And then something happens and oh look, it’s Me, Myself and I figuring things out alone – it certainly doesn’t help that we are rapidly approaching May and two years since Anita went on holiday and then came back and ended the therapy…or you know, didn’t actually end or say goodbye…

FFS.

As much as I’d love to pretend that Elle and I have a relationship that is important and matters no matter what – the reality is, my time with her is a paid for slot and … well… if things don’t shift for the better in the next few weeks then… Elle and I don’t exist. And that is super painful and is sending me into freefall. It’s hard to imagine the person that has been so present and available and just plain loving and kind mightn’t be there for me for much longer – and I do wonder if I have latched on to this ‘rupture’ this week to make it easier for me to detach from her if I have to.

I’d like to think I was better at navigating ruptures now – but I think my ability to be able to bring hard things to the room depends largely on how solid and safe I feel – not only with Elle but in life…and frankly – safe isn’t a feeling I am tapping into right now. Ugh.

I won’t keep you hanging for months on end with the next bit…I just haven’t been well enough to write until now.

xx

Not Doing Brilliantly Well: Breakdown And Burnout

rubberbandsandchewinggum11 Comments

So, it’s been a while since I have been here to update the blog…months in fact…

I guess it was inevitable, but I had a total breakdown in January, folks, and just couldn’t do anything with it or myself at all. I was barely functional let alone able to write. It’d been coming on steadily for months, well, let’s be real, since May 2023 when everything with Anita disintegrated before my very eyes. Something had to give sooner or later – and that something was me.

I have been muddling through, hanging it together with rubber bands and chewing gum for such a long time, but then, OOooofffffff  November was ROUGH, December was BRUTAL, Christmas was UGH, and January … well… FUCK ME!! …The crash was real!

Somehow, we are almost at the end of February now, and I’m more or less functional again but it’s VERY tentative – cue full blown anxiety attack earlier today and the realisation that I am probably less ok than I think. Yikes.

I am floundering around and trying to put one foot in front of the other and not fall flat on my face again because there just isn’t capacity for me not to be ok any longer. The reality is that work kicks back in tomorrow after half term break (and several weeks preceding this of cancelling lots of work) and people need me to be on my ‘A game’…or at least ‘present’. The GCSE and A Level exams are looming and I simply can’t get away with any more sick days. I need to be the calm and supportive person that my students need – but it takes a lot. Somehow or other I need to pull something out of the bag – even if the bag has a fucking great hole in it and its contents have long been lost.

When things went south last month, Elle and I were on a therapy break (what a surprise)! I wrote a bit then to try and process and make sense of what was going on for me, but then I shut the laptop and it’s been sitting there as an open tab of shame ever since.

So, I guess maybe, I’ll post that here now and then try and get back to filling in blanks of what’s been happening more generally in another post – i.e bring things up to speed and talk about what happened when Elle and I met face-to-face after Christmas and her being sick and all the stuff since…but I don’t have the brain for that right now.

However, I feel like if I don’t try and post something now despite being overwhelmed with ‘everything’ another month will roll by and I’ll lose sense of where I am at. So apologies that the chronology is off but I’ll get back on track eventually.

It’s so hard when my brain stops working properly writing is the one thing that just falls away. I just can’t do it. My attention span is minimal and my ability to hold anything in mind just goes. I feel like I have been stuck in procrastination and freeze for pretty much the last six weeks and it’s been hard. Everything has suffered…self-care…everything.

So… buckle up for what was in the laptop and written in the height of the meltdown.

This was mid-January and Elle was away, it was all kinds of tough with anniversaries and bleurgh – it’s not pretty but is exactly how it was in the moment – my poor poor brain, system, self:

The fast acceleration into the place that is super scary happened this last week again. I could feel the wheels starting to fall off, the nightmares were relentless, the feeling of intense panic and overwhelm were all consuming; my system activated so massively (including all the protectors) and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I couldn’t regulate AT ALL and the spiral down into total meltdown and collapse happened. It’s hardly surprising, though, what with all the ‘shitty’ anniversaries landing: five years since I met Anita (and she’s no longer part of my life) and therefore also five years since Em called me a ‘tick’ and my therapy with her blowing up. There is so much hurt and grief. Like I don’t think I will ever get over this… it’s too much and sometimes it just catches up with me.

I always feel so vulnerable around now, understandably, but it’s been made a million times worse by the fact the Elle has been on a break this last week, too. It’s been two weeks between sessions at a time where, in all honesty, I could have used two sessions each week AND check ins not her absence and physical disconnect.

Instead of a feeling of safety and connection, it’s been the complete opposite of the level of holding and containment I needed. I’ve felt so far away from her and, of course, that’s also further triggered my system around the abandonment and rejection stuff that is already so live at this time of year. I have been certain that something bad is coming on Tuesday when we meet again, and have been in a place where I was really and truly considering leaving before I get left (god I am so sick of this horrid process!). There’s no evidence to suggest anything is wrong between Elle and I, but my system doesn’t understand that, all the alarms are blaring and it’s full-scale panic. It’s a total system malfunction.

Truthfully, Elle being away for this particular week in the year could not have been worse timing. Like it just felt like an absolute sucker punch. I felt my heart sink when she told me she’d be away, but’s it’s been especially tough having this happen on top of all the bumping along and disruption with the therapy pattern around Christmas holidays. Not seeing her face-to-face as planned on Christmas Eve was hard, and finding out that she had this current break coming the same day she let me know I couldn’t see her on the 24th was really painful, and then there was the cancellation on the 31st because she was sick which really unsettled me. Like it’s been a lot…even though we did end up speaking on the phone on Christmas Eve and seeing each other on the 1st January which was so needed (I’ll come back to this ‘good’ stuff next time).

On paper it would seem like not a lot changed, then, like Elle has really done her very best to minimise the disruptions and accommodate me. The fact that she came in on New Year’s day whilst still clearly unwell because she knew how much I needed the session shows she cares and gets it. And sane and rational me really sees it and appreciates it such a lot… but the rollercoaster my system has been on around all this at a hard time of year has been insane.

I’ve been holding on so tightly to what is left of my sanity and coping for such a long time now that I guess it was inevitable that something would give sooner or later. And so, this break on top of all that has gone before has just been too much and the final thread that was holding me together just snapped on Saturday in the BIGGEST way.

I am usually able to keep what’s going on internally (even if it is horrific) fairly locked up inside and suffer my way through alone whilst appearing largely normal and ‘functional’ in my day-to-day life but as this week has gone on my filter between my inner world with the distress I am feeling and my outer presentation has totally crumbled.

My mask has slipped, not just slipped- shattered – and this weekend I just completely fell apart. My usual relative calm disappeared and the snappy, angry, hurting parts of me were on full show and then shortly after that I broke and just sobbed and sobbed for hours – ugly crying, snot, convulsive sobs…you know? Full mental collapse. This wasn’t a ‘healthy’ release of emotion. I was completely out of control.

It’s hard to really explain because I think most of the time, I seem to be pretty unhappy and struggling, don’t I? So how is this any different? The last time I was here I was at a pretty low ebb. I spend so much time writing out my feelings, trying to process, doing the self-care, doing the therapy, blah blah fucking blah tick box of survival strategies, but sometimes I get so sick of how hard everything feels. I try so hard to drag myself through and into a better place but I feel like I am dragging the weight of the world behind me. It’s exhausting.

Like at what point do I just stop and admit defeat? I honestly can’t keep going like this anymore. I do get that I am neck deep in a depressive episode at the moment, and that it’s winter, and that this is the very fucking worst week of my calendar year but ugh…just really, when will it get easier?

As I said to Elle the other day in a message, “surely life isn’t meant to be this hard” and it shouldn’t. To find myself back in a place where self-harm seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do and suicidal thoughts are coming through my mind like buses- it’s not good. Like it’s really fucking shit in fact. It all just feels desperately bad and I can’t seem to get out of it. I feel like I am screaming underwater.

I was meant to go away this weekend, alone, but I realised that this would be a very bad move and as much as being around people feels intolerable, I am at least safe.

So yeah, I’m having all the fun of the fair right now! I know if I wait it out things will get better. I just wish there was a magic wand I could wave to make all the hurt and distress stop and allow some space to breathe and settle. I feel like I just can’t land in my window of tolerance at all…or letterbox.

I was feeling fairly connected to Elle at the start of this break even if I was overwhelmed but the steady sense of disconnect started as the first weekend approached, the panic kicked in, and from Tuesday (the day of our usual session) onwards it’s felt like any connection we have has been completely severed.

I was so painfully aware of needing my session with Elle on Tuesday because so much was being activated around the old stuff with Anita and Em, so to not see her or even check in via a message felt really difficult. I could have reached out – I am sure she wouldn’t have minded – but then she’s on a holiday and look how many times things have gone to shit with therapists during or directly following a break. I don’t want to do anything that might make Elle get fed up with me and so I have backed right off. The fear of history repeating is huge.

Sadly, my mind can’t seem to differentiate that this disconnect from Elle has come purely from my side. All it knows is that disconnect feels terrifying and that if it goes on for long enough it’s hard to come back from it. This horrible feeling has got worse and worse through the course of this week. I have been steadily drifting away on the ocean in my little boat and now I can’t see the land at all and the seas are getting rougher and rougher and Elle has no idea.

The sadness of the little parts is big but there’s also some anger coming up from the protective parts who I think have just about had enough of feeling ‘left’. It’s hard enough getting through the regular week and only having a single session after so many years of two sessions a week with Anita and Em. It feels like I am always stretching just that little bit too far between sessions and it takes its toll. I wish that I could land in a space where I wasn’t hitting a panic on a Friday each week and then hanging on by the skin of my teeth to get to Tuesdays.

Holidays are very necessary, but my god they suck balls too! That probably makes me too needy or too dependent or whatever else – but it is how it is right now. Parts of me are so mad that it’s like this again but part of me really gets it. It’s all been a lot for too long and there is only so much I can hold on top of the demands of my exhausting day-to-day life.

I feel like I have mentioned this struggle between sessions in so many different ways over the last eighteen months but it feels really hard to ask for more from Elle. I think we need a Friday check in… I mean, I’d love to see her twice a week in person but I don’t think that’s on the cards. I get the sense that she is carefully managing what she can cope with and probably two sessions would feel a lot of me… and that’s hard isn’t it?

Thinking you’re only tolerable for a certain amount of time each week but any more than that risks burning them out is hard. Again, Elle hasn’t said this AT ALL and so it could be my projection given what’s happened before with other therapies but I am just not willing to reach out and ask for something and be told no. Elle has invited me so many times to ask her for what I need and has said she would try and give me what I need.

I just wish it felt easier to make requests but I know right now my reluctance is due to how live the memory of stuff with Em is. Like, all the times I braved asking for things: transitional object (ugh pebblegate), three dots in a text mid-week, sitting next to me, playing games, ANYTHING AT ALL REALLY, and getting no…it’s hard to feel like I want to brave more of getting that feeling of rejection and shame that arises.

Elle is not Em, or A…she’s really great…and I really want to trust Elle – I do trust her- but when I feel vulnerable, I just can’t get out of my shell or ask for help. I hide.

I have been especially conscious of all the soundbites that haunt me during this break, “adhesive like a tick”, “too dependent”, “you want more than I can give” etc and have been so terrified of being ‘too much’ so as I say, I have really backed away from contact with Elle despite needing it. I don’t want her to feel the need to escape my neediness. I really want her to be able to have a break … just not in January 😉.

I think it would have probably helped if when the wheels had started to fall off I’d have been able to reach out and ask for some reassurance that we were still ok…but I was set dead against it in my head. I just told myself to tough it out…get your shit together RB! I see now that that was an error because it’s much harder to get back on track from this point although I guess at some point I am going to have to make a choice – to either continue on in this misery or reach out and ask for support because this isn’t just a small wobble that I can handle on my own, this is a scary crisis point that I haven’t found myself in for several years.

I am trying to hang onto the good… because there is and has been such a lot of it. But it’s hard to remember that when your brain is working against you and all your body knows is terror. I honestly hate how when my system gets hijacked and adult me loses the capacity to hold it all that it gets so bleak so quickly. I guess this really is a reminder of a patterning that must have been forged early on in my childhood. This terror – it’s visceral – and so familiar.

It feels really bonkers to be here because even in the last session before the break, Elle demonstrated that she clearly had my littles in mind and was doing everything she could to settle them before she left. I had been waffling on in false adult moaning about some daily life shit and she stopped me when there was a natural pause. It was about half an hour before the end of the session and she asked me if I wanted a story and a cuddle…yep…

I think in the sessions before a break I am always preparing to be left and almost pretend like I am fine, and coping, and adult … but inside it’s a different story. I’m so glad she knows this about me now and reached for me rather than allowing me to run down the clock and then feel awful and unseen afterwards. I just need to remind myself of this when I feel like I have been abandoned.

After the story, Elle had asked if she could take Baby-Elly and Monty away with her on her break and send me photos of what they got up to, she thought it might be a nice thing for them to do. She then asked me if I would take Hare Bunny (that I gave her for Christmas) home with me so that he didn’t get lonely in the office whilst she was gone. Like that’s really lovely isn’t it? And I really really loved that she thought of that. It’s a world away from the no contact breaks with Elle, or even the texts from Anita.

Like how nice to take our transitional object away, and include the little elephant that’s been held hostage all these months with Anita. Adult me can see how hard Elle is working to keep my system in connection with her… it’s just a lot when I need a big cuddle, some reassurance, and to hear her voice.

Elle sent me a picture of Monty and Baby-Elly waiting to go on their holiday last week and on Monday one from their break. It made me smile. But then as the week went on it felt so so hard for me and I felt so far away and as much as I wanted to reach out and send a message ‘how is everyone enjoying their holiday?’ or ‘I miss you all’.

I didn’t. Because I can’t forget when Anita went on holiday, sent me messages, sent me photos, told me she was thinking of me….and I literally sent, ‘Looks lovely, I miss you’ back…that I was told that when she’d read the message she felt pressured and stressed and that this was probably part of what led her to end the therapy. I know this says more about her than me, and her mental state and how she’d allowed herself to burnout…but it was me that was taken out in the crossfire and it is me that is now terrified of a repeat.

I still wonder how I was supposed to glean from the messages from A that we were in serious trouble and that she was going to terminate. Before she left, she told me everything was fine, that we were going to be ok, that she would come back… and even the night before that hideous ‘I need to bring the counselling with you to an end’ session she sent me a message telling me she was looking forward to seeing me…. Looking forward to seeing me so she could end???? Like make it make sense!

So it’s little wonder that I am reluctant to reach out – because even when things look fine on the surface, the amount of times I have walked back into a problem is… staggering really.

On top of the absolute emotional hell I am navigating my way through during the day, I’ve been absolutely plagued by nightmares. They’re really something and don’t take a lot of unpicking. One particularly distressing one that apparently had me screaming in my sleep was me standing on a cliff near my house and the waves were ENORMOUS. It was grey and stormy and lashing it down with rain. Despite the cliffs being at least 100 feet high the waves were flooding over the top and the buildings were flooded and being completely attacked by the sea.

I commented to whoever I was with that “I have never ever seen it as bad as this before” and that’s when I heard screaming to the right of where I was standing. My attention had been so focused on the town and the buildings that I hadn’t noticed what was going on to the right of me. A child about four years old, was clinging on desperately to the rocks and crying. There was no way down to it and I saw it get washed off the rocks and into the sea. I reached for my phone in order to call the emergency services and no matter how I tried I couldn’t unlock my phone to make the call. No matter what I did it just wouldn’t work. All the while I could see this tiny kid being pummelled by the sea and hitting up against the rocks. I felt so completely powerless.

It’s hardly surprising I woke up screaming and crying and in a drenching sweat. I can still feel the complete panic I felt just typing that. As I said it doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out but it is a real indicator of just how distressed I have felt.

The week has been lots of that sort of thing and by yesterday I had worked myself up into a right state. The protectors were so vocal and honestly, I just wanted to know that I wasn’t going fucking mad…because that’s what it’s felt like.

I just want to say, too, that I haven’t just been head in the sand this break letting the shit come at me, knowing Elle was away I booked in for a two hour massage, I have really careful to take proper breaks, eat well, sleep (!), and get out in nature…but you know, sometimes there is only so much you can do. My system is in freefall, it’s been flashback galore on top of regular therapy break shit… I just … well… didn’t have enough resource in the tank to get through it.

I ended up sending Elle an email yesterday:

I’ve got myself stuck in a deep hole and as much as I’m trying to claw my way out there’s some really vocal and aggressive bastards stamping on my hands. I’m sending this now because I think by Tuesday I might actually not turn up at all.

Elle usually responds with pretty holding and containing stuff and I hoped so much that she would send something like, “I am sorry that it’s so tough Sweetpea. Tell Brian and the bastards to behave themselves. I am looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday but until then the biggest of hugs to you.”

Or any variation on the kind of thing she usually sends.

But this came…and honestly I just felt so sad.

I really really hope you do. Elle xxx

Like, it’s not terrible is it? Not by any means, but I guess having not seen Elle for a while, or heard her voice, or any of the things that we usually do to connect, and my being in such a desperate headspace it just felt distant and triggered total panic.

Like, this is it then – she’s had enough hasn’t she?

And then because I felt so upset about it, the protectors have really stepped up their game – of course they would.

Sometimes if I have felt a response from Elle has missed the mark I will email her back and clarify how I am feeling and she generally replies with something holding. I held off this time and continued to suffer. This really tells me how scared I have been feeling. I had been messaging a friend all week and she encouraged me to reach out to Elle again and let her know exactly what was going on. On Sunday I did… I screenshot some of my conversation with my friend and sent it…and this is what came back almost immediately:

Oh my poor love, I’m so sorry you’ve been struggling so badly this week, and I feel very grateful that you trusted me enough to send me all this.

We are always ok, and I promise you with my hand on my heart, I would always talk to you if there was anything going on between us that I felt needed addressing. I see you struggling here with the idea that you can do the same, and you can, and I will do my best to offer you what you tell me you need in terms of reassurance and care, however that looks like for you. 

I’m imagine you feel asking me for specific things that would help you to feel more cared for feels unreasonable, and I would really love you to ask me for them, and let me decide if it feels like something I’d be willing to do. I know that probably feels like a very risky thing to do, and I want you to know you can ask and I will do my utmost to offer you what you need. You are loved and respected and giving you whatever you need to feel safe is my priority.

Please do come in on Tuesday, and we can try and talk through what might be helpful to you in future, or you can just snuggle up to me and cry for a full 90 minutes and be broken in complete safety.

And honestly, that’s the Elle I have been trying to find inside myself all this break.

I responded to her:

💜 thanks. 

I’ve just got really panicked because coming back from Christmas break and into this time now in 2019/20 was when it all went to shit with Em – sometimes I think it would be useful for you to see what happened back then but anytime I even think about going back to dec/jan posts to send you the links to what I wrote it has such a massive physical reaction just remembering that time and how bad it felt that I can’t do it… And as much as you might think it’s ok to ask for things it’s hard to really put into words what it feels like to ask for actually not much at all and get hard nos. There’s a lot of really shit stuff that’s happened over the years and my brain doesn’t let it go. 

And breaks are bad for lots of reasons – I mean it doesn’t help that after a few days there’s a panic that people are actually going to die on me – I’ve got my dad to thank for that one, dying three days into a holiday… and then there’s all the shit from my mum being away from Sunday-Friday when I was small and how insane and volatile she was when she came home…like those things have always been problematic… but breaks have certainly been exacerbated by the fact that three times I’ve been on a break and come back to discover that actually:

Em – Nothing is too big that we can’t work through it

A- I’m only going away for two weeks, nothing is wrong with us and I promise you nothing will change and I’m coming back 

H- I think it’s great that you write, I’ll take how I’m feeling to supervision and see you in a couple of weeks

Were all lies. 

And as much as things might look ok … apparently they weren’t. Like I don’t get how I was ever supposed to know that there was a problem, particularly with Anita. But apparently my saying I missed her felt overwhelming (see the screenshot)… but then literally the day before I saw her to be told she was ending she said “I’m looking forward to seeing you tomorrow”. I don’t really know how that works.

So it’s not easy navigating anything when my experience is that people say things that suggest one thing and then the reality is quite different… and not only that but it’s me that’s misread the situation or been too much despite CHECKING so as not to end up being a problem.

It’s all just a lot and so live right now and it’s hard because I try really hard to not get things wrong and somehow still manage to fuck things up. And it’s hard to not think it’s a me problem.

I could really use a big hug and a lobotomy 

X

And once again the Elle I know and love came back with such care and holding that my system just settled right down and I wondered how I had got myself in such a fucking mess again:

My lovely girl, will you believe me if I say I always have all of those things in my mind whenever we have a break? 

I think about how A gave you no clue about what was going on for her, and how Em reassured you, and how H wasn’t confident enough to say how she felt, and I think “what can I do differently?” And the only answer I ever come up with is to just be consistently me; honest about how I feel, open to hearing anything you believe will help and support you, and reassuring you that I am capable of telling you if I feel anything other than happy and calm about any of it.

And I am genuinely confident that – in time – you will trust that what I say is what I mean, but that earning that trust is going to be that much harder – both to build and maintain – due to all of that damage that was done. 

And enormous all-encompassing hugs are always available and in plentiful supply.

Lobotomies however, are only available on request every second Weds.

Elle xxx

PS I read the message you sent to [friend] about you finding the automated texts triggering, and so tomorrow…I will send you something just for you! 😀

And so, since then in January…I’ve had no more automated reminder texts about sessions and perfect personalised ones…and our sessions have been lovely (as always) and I’ve muddled along.

We’ve literally just been on ANOTHER BREAK now because I have been on holiday but I’ll get to that next time.

So yeah – big meltdown was had since I was last here. I am steadily finding my feet again…and ugh…life eh? Thank you for everyone that has messaged to check in and I am sorry I haven’t had the bandwidth to even reply. And amazing work if you got to the end of this – it’s almost the length of my undergrad dissertation!! xxx

“A Memory-cake Covered In The Sparkly Frosting Of Multiple Crushing Disappointments”: The Last Face-to-face Session of The Year,  The Phonecall, And A Cancellation…

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When I was staring down this Christmas period at the start of December it looked like it might actually be one that would be almost doable – or at least one where therapy and the therapy break would not be complicating factors. Elle and I had a session together booked in the room for Christmas Eve (I was so excited about this) and then we’d be back in on New Year’s Eve…so really there was not even a break (yay!). This year, I’d only have to get through the Christmas stuff with family and all the mess that entails, plus the usual hell of the crap with Em and Anita being thrown into sharp focus…but otherwise it should be fine, right?!

Having had my therapy with Em blow up so spectacularly in December ‘19/January ‘20 I now suffer really bad anxiety about my therapy ending, or being rejected by my therapist after a break…this hasn’t been helped at all by Anita ending our therapy when she came back from a break, either… but despite all this, I felt like it would be ok this year because Elle and I are ok…I think. I was ready for what was inevitably coming, but confident that the scaffolding that was around me with the sessions with Elle would be strong enough so that I didn’t fall apart. Or that was the plan… only… you can so guess where this is going can’t you?

Elle wasn’t wrong when she referred to the Christmas period as “a memory-cake covered in the sparkly frosting of multiple crushing disappointments.” This insight came a few weeks back in response to the email I sent with the extended metaphor about the roundabout of death that I seem to be stuck spinning on. I have been struggling a lot after getting the box of things back from Anita and if I am honest, I’ve been hanging on by my fingertips for most of this year. I certainly can’t do another year like this one. I simply don’t have it in me.

I sent that message about my struggling to Elle the night before the news that we wouldn’t be able to see each other on Christmas Eve as planned. It was bad. Like what timing! I obviously had my massive meltdown when I found out I wouldn’t see Elle face-to-face (fuck me that was a rotten few days) but recovered a bit when we scheduled in the phone session for Christmas Eve instead. It’s obviously nowhere near the same as being together in the same space, but it was something at least…and of course we’d still have the final face-to-face on the 17th.

On the day I learnt that Christmas Eve was off I also got the added and unexpected news that Elle was going to be away in January – neatly coinciding with the time when it all went to shit with Em, “Like a tick”. Eek…never my best week and honestly, I can already feel a massive sense of dread being ‘alone’ that week. It’s hard to put into words the kind of response those words trigger in me even now but I find January really rough because it was such a horror show ending with Em. And what if Elle doesn’t come back?

I know that I am really bad with disruption and change, anyway, but I had no idea back in early December just how fucking many crushing disappointments would materialise in this window of glittery Christmas hell… but Elle’s words have continued to ring so ear-piercingly true it’s not even funny. Like really? Is the universe taking the fucking piss? Or do I just have a ridiculous amount on negative karma that I am working out in this lifetime because really, sometimes, it just feels so unfair.

It’s that bleurgh period between Christmas and New Year, the time where I traditionally fall into a bout of deep depression and freeze…and guess what? Yep. Here I am again. Same shit, different year. I’ve had the laptop beside me for a couple of days thinking that I would write…I’ve got plenty I could be working on (including my story for Elle) but nope. I’ve been completely stuck in overwhelm and instead of being productive or actually just being at (much-needed) peace – I’m doom scrolling and fitfully sleeping and generally beating myself up for yet again not making the most of my time off work.  More than anything I really need proper rest and care – and I don’t mean more of the self-care, I actually just need taking care of. I could really use a week of mothering rather than being the one doing the mothering… that’s it.

I know I am not alone in finding this time of year tough. Christmas is a lot. And even though I actually managed to pull off a pretty decent Christmas Day and Boxing Day, I have both emotionally and physically crashed and burned since then. I am in the place where I want to be completely away from people – at the beach in my hideaway but know also that I can’t go and escape and run away because ‘it’s Christmas’. The only person I want to see right now is Elle…and I think that is because I have done such a lot of adulting that the parts of me that need a bit of nurture and attention are starting to get really restless….they’re desperately upset, in fact.

These last few days I have been riding massive waves of anxiety. It’s got so bad that I have dreams that I am being physically sick and throwing up and the experience is so visceral that it wakes me up and I am instantly aware of the sick feeling of high anxiety in my body. If I didn’t have an empty stomach, I most certainly would be sick at that point. Talk about somatic response to emotional upset. Ugh.

As much as I have tried to keep my mind away from the usual triggers, it’s nigh on impossible not to be reminded of what happened with Em or to drift into thinking about all that has happened with Anita at this time of year. I don’t miss Em in the least but I am still reeling from the hurt she caused. And Anita, well, I miss her but I have let her go now. This year I didn’t bother to text her over Christmas. Although I know she’d reply there’s no point in trying to keep any channel of communication open with her. Her behaviour towards me this last year tells me everything I need to know about her feelings towards me and I need to find a way of moving through the pain of it all.

Parts of me have wanted to reach out to Elle and forewarn her that I am not in a great place. I have been really conscious of wanting to see her the last few days, especially having not seen her in person last week, but there is also another part that’s really prominent and activated and is just full of shame and terrified of reaching out because what if something has changed?

I have been really conscious that when I see her, I could end up being totally shut down and avoidant and pretend like everything is ok when it really isn’t. I haven’t told her how it is, because it’s Christmas, it’s a break, and also…there’s that heightened awareness of everything that went wrong with Em playing out in my brain. I so badly don’t want to be perceived as ‘adhesive’ and ‘like a tick’, ‘pushing boundaries’, ‘trying to get inside her’ being ‘demanding’ and ‘intruding’ and make her feel like she can’t get away from me because my need for her is ‘all the time’ etc. And I know none of these are Elle’s words but they are branded into my brain…thanks Em! But maybe I am ‘too dependent’ (the words that Anita denies ever having left her lips) and so I have stayed quiet and suffering.

It feels like with all this being so live at the minute it would be a really good time to talk to Elle about it when I see her – because the feelings are right here on the surface rather than pushed down in the depths. Of course, Elle knows a bit of what happened with Em but largely we’ve been firefighting the Anita stuff. Part of me was almost tempted to share the blogs from the time when Em and I ended with Elle so she can really see exactly what went on…but I haven’t…because it’s a lot.

I had decided last night that when I woke up this morning I would send Elle a text after I got her reminder text about our session and let her know that I needed her to stay close tomorrow because things are hard. I’m sure she knows this already. I had a terrible night of nightmares and was up a lot through the night so didn’t end up waking up until 10:30 this morning. I looked at the clock and mentally felt the relief of knowing it was only just over twenty-four hours and then I’d see Elle. When I checked my phone Elle’s normal message wasn’t there. Instead, there was a message telling me she was sick and that she didn’t think she’d be ok for tomorrow.

You can only imagine how that landed.

Of course, I am really sorry that she is poorly and I more than anything hope she gets better soon because she’s not immune to how fucking hard this year has been either, and I think she desperately needed a break. There’s some horrible viruses going around at the minute and it’s not exactly restful being sick even if you are laid up in bed is it? It’s just like being pummelled. Adult me wishes there was something I could do to help her feel better. I hope there is someone looking after her but I get the impression she is the one who looks after everyone else.

Aside from my big feelings of care for Elle there is absolutely the hugest feelings of sadness and disappointment again. To have hung on so tightly to get to tomorrow to see her and for it be taken off the table at the last minute is just gutting – especially after what happened with Christmas Eve. I had just about got myself in a place to handle the January break thinking we at least had two sessions before that to reconnect and put something holding in place…and yet here we are… I feel like I am running on a track that keeps crumbling just ahead of me.

I just can’t.

I am really out of coping at the moment.

I wish I could say it wasn’t like this, but I’m devastated. I just want a cuddle.

And then of course I feel ashamed and embarrassed that this has affected me the way it has because I know that none of this is intentional. I know Elle can’t help being ill. It happens. But the little parts of me that so badly needed to see her on Christmas Eve are still hurting about that, and here we are again…another disappointment. The littles don’t understand the ‘reasons’ that they haven’t been able to see Elle they only feel what it is to be ‘left’. It feels abandoning and rejecting. AND I KNOW IT ISN’T but we’re not dealing with Adult Me, are we?

Elle even told me in her message this morning “please don’t see this as a sign of anything more than the worst kind of luck […] I know this is horrible timing”… like I know she will get how this has landed…or at least, she might have a bit of an idea…but it’s just so painful. This sort of thing taps deeply into the bit when I was a kid always waiting for my mum to come back. She was away Sunday through to Friday and I would always feel so disconnected and lonely in the week. And this is the same. I am always on a countdown to see Elle, and it’s hard, especially as I only see her once a week and that feels it’s too long as it is.

I just feel like I am stretched so far beyond my capacity right now…because Christmas did, of course, throw up shit. My wonderful mother failed to acknowledge me or my kids for the third year running, and didn’t even send a text to acknowledge the gift I had sent her. I just can’t even. What kind of person doesn’t even send a ‘thank you’? Or a ‘happy christmas’? Well, I know the answer to that, but it doesn’t stop it from hurting. The original wound was right there with the spotlight on it. My mum doesn’t care about me and … well what more is there to say? Well, plenty, actually, just not today.

Ugh.

So, this has all got a bit out of chronology, hasn’t it? I was meant to talk about the last face-to-face session and the phone call. What can I say. Feeling like I do right now? And please don’t read this as ‘spoiled brat’, it’s ‘desperately sad and hurt little parts’.

Actually, I don’t remember a whole lot about the last time I ‘saw’ Elle. I know that I was massively conscious that it would be the last time I would see her for a while and it triggered the smalls a lot which meant that False Adult was pretty present for a fair bit of it, I think.

In the few days leading into the session, I had finally begun writing the story I wanted for Elle but it was nowhere near finished or even edited by the time it got to Tuesday. Despite this, I printed it off and wrapped it with part of the gift I had bought Elle for Christmas. It was all in my bag but there was a part of me that feared giving Elle the present – yet again another throwback to Em when she rejected my gift of a snowflake and copy of ‘The Velveteen Rabbit’. Again, there was absolutely no reason to think that this would happen with Elle. I have given her all sorts of stuff over the last eighteen months but this time of year is so ridiculously triggering – ESPECIALLY after recent events with Anita.

It was quite a bit of time before I allowed myself to relax into being with Elle in the session. I always find it hard when there is going to be a break. Part of me longs for closeness and connection but part of me is so painfully aware that it/she is going to be taken away that I rarely ask for what I need before a break and pretend like I am fine. I think this is also a hangover from working with Em where my needs were never met and so I stopped asking.

Still, I did eventually cuddle into Elle and stop jabbering on about meaningless shit. I felt sad. And empty. And far away…even though I was now close to Elle. I could almost feel the clock running down and with every passing minute the deep sadness seemed to get bigger and bigger.

I hate breaks.

LOL.

After a period of quiet, Elle told me that she had something she wanted to give me, a present to open on Christmas Eve when we would have our call. She said that the thing she had given me is very special to her and that she really liked the idea of my having it and that she also really wanted to talk to me on Christmas Eve to check that I was ok.

I could feel tears coming in my eyes but pushed them away. I don’t think I said anything to Elle. She must think I am really rude sometimes. Like she had been so thoughtful and taken a step towards me and there I was silent. If anything, I was completely overwhelmed. There is always such a lot I want to say but I can feel myself pulling back…afraid of being ‘too much’.

Can you all see how much the young parts are struggling right now?

After a while I told Elle I had something for her and that she could open part of it then. I felt really exposed and stupid handing over the present – which is really really sad. I suddenly felt really idiotic having tried to write Elle a story and embarrassed giving her the soft toy that went with it. I gave myself a really hard time all the next week about it.

There wasn’t time for Elle to read the story in what was left of the session and she asked if she could read it at her leisure. Of course. I didn’t hear anything all the last week about it in the few interactions we had but it wasn’t surprising, that week was like groundhog week and I think everyone was hanging on by a thread. It didn’t stop the inner critic having a good old taunt, though. The erosive power of that part of me is so strong and it takes away anything good.

I had really badly wanted to write the story – and it got fucked by my wonky brain having a meltdown over the change to Christmas Eve, then what I did finally write was ‘ok ish’ but not ‘good enough’…and so my brain decided to really go to town on me. Elle’s silence seemed to confirm that I was a fucking moron for trying. I am trying to think where all this comes from but all I can think is that there must’ve been times when I have tried to do something like paint a picture, or write something, and it’s been disregarded. Highly likely tbh.

So yeah, that week leading into the call was a bit rough.

Because everyone was at home and sound travels in my house, I couldn’t do my session at home. The ideal would have been to have been alone in the house, snuggled up in bed. Instead, I made up a little den in the backseat of my car with pillow and blankets and Monty and my soft dog toy and took the car across to the park to where there is a reasonable mobile signal. Sadly, the signal isn’t really strong enough for a video call – or at least I didn’t want to ty that and it not work, so opted for a voice call.

It was ok- certainly better than not talking at all that’s for sure. Elle mentioned a couple of times how it was not to be able to see each other…and it was hard because I really would have liked to have seen her face (and hold her hand!). Although, tbh there’s a chance I might have dissociated. I work 100% online in my job and video calls are all that I do, and yet I think seeing Elle over a screen might have made me feel even further away. I don’t know. I don’t exactly have a good track record with Em and Anita but then I don’t know how it would feel with Elle and maybe I need to try.

Again, I don’t really remember much of the call. Elle said that she liked the story – I think – although don’t really know what she said. I think I may have said something dismissive or shut the conversation down. I think I was probably embarrassed to talk about it – especially as I had convinced myself that it was utter shit and that she hated it in the week since I had given it to her.

I think I told her a bit about how sick I have been feeling and the anxiety stuff. I think there was mention of my mum… and some past Christmases but honestly, I don’t know. I know there was a huge part of me who was trying very hard to stay present but kept wandering away. There was a part of me that felt very very sad. I think November and December have just been really hard and I so badly wanted to be near Elle…and whilst she was trying really hard to be there…it’s just not the same is it? I have spent so many years on the phone as a kid trying to connect with my mum on a Wednesday when she’d call home but never being really given space to express how it felt. I was ‘fine’…. But I wasn’t.

Anyway, there’s a lot stirred up and going on BUT I was really glad to have spoken to Elle because even though it wasn’t the same as face-to-face, it was still contact, I could still hear her voice, and know on a level that she was still there even if I couldn’t see her and it made me think that this is an option for the future for sessions if they need to be moved or maybe just check ins. I actually think if we could talk on the phone in the week just for ten or fifteen minutes it would make things feel a whole lot easier than they have been.

Near the end of the call, I opened the present that Elle had given me and it was just lovely. It was a beautifully bound folio copy of her favourite childhood book…and really it was just one of the most special things anyone has given me. This was especially the case this year where Christmas was the usual of me arranging my own presents – and this year even wrapping them. It felt really lovely that Elle would share something that felt so meaningful and important to her with me. She directed me towards her favourite chapters and I read them on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day which felt really connecting.

It was surprising how fast the ninety minutes went and I could feel a massive pang of sadness come as I realised it was time to hang up. Elle told me she would message me on Christmas Day when she had opened the other things I had given her and that she was looking forward to seeing my face next week…

It was lovely to receive a really warm connecting message on Christmas morning, then. She seemed genuinely to really appreciate what I had given her and so that felt nice.

I am trying really hard to hang on to all of how this lovely connecting stuff has felt today and am really trying not to let the sad take hold…but it’s hard. Tomorrow is going to be hard.

I won’t get to post again before the new year (relief!)…but I guess I will just round off with the Counting Crows lyrics that always resonate so much at this time of year:

A long December and there’s reason to believe, maybe this year will be better than the last. I can’t remember, the last thing that you said as you were leaving, now the days go by so fast.

When The Container Isn’t Big Enough: How Much Therapy Do You Need?

rubberbandsandchewinggum25 Comments

I’ve been struggling a lot with therapy, lately… Actually, no, that’s not quite right -therapy is fine, good, really good (when I am there!)… but what isn’t so good is the *time between sessions* and the shitstorm that can (and does) blow up in the gaps between seeing Elle.

My system seems to be perpetually activated these days, and I find it thoroughly exhausting and stressful navigating the nightmares (usually with Elle in), the intense panic, and the heightened fear of being left or abandoned that escalates in intensity as the week goes on.

There’s always the huge separation anxiety that builds and builds during the week before triggering the protectors at the weekend which sends me through a whole other set of loops. I don’t know what’s worse, the small parts sad, lost, and crying or the angry protectors wanting to burn everything to the ground.

Like today, Monday, I feel like I just want to quit therapy altogether because this emotional cycle feels so painful and too hard. I feel thoroughly disconnected from Elle and the idea of even going tomorrow feels impossible because my mind has convinced me that I am set for rejection and that there is no solid base or relationship and so I am wasting my time.

The sensible thing would be to reach out and tell her that this is happening but what’s the point? (Is that the teen? Probably).

I will go because I know that I need to, but pushing through the wall of protectors to even get there means that there will there will be consequences. I will struggle to sleep tonight, mind you my sleep is appalling anyway so I guess that’s nothing new. When it feels bad like this, there is always a total and absolute physical terror in my body. Sometimes it’s just on the day of the session, but today it’s really live, too, and I feel horrible.

To get to my session I have about a ten minute walk across town from where I park my car, and the whole time my heart races, I feel physically sick, and my mouth is dry even though parts of me are desperate to see Elle…it’s honestly fucking horrific. When I am waiting for Elle to come and get me, I feel completely terrified and like I will burst into tears and often my body trembles. It’s so hard. My entire system is in chaos at that point – and yet you’d never know. Externally I appear completely fine – but that comes from years of hiding how I am really feeling in order to survive in the world.

Let’s be clear, this hellscape isn’t because of anything that Elle is or isn’t doing – like there’s no suggestion that she’s suddenly going to end, or leave, or suddenly be horrible and attacking and do something to hurt me (I need to make a big sign with this on!) – it is simply because my system has been triggered off its tits after what happened with Anita and Em. Because of what’s happened with them I can’t get a sense of feeling safe or ok in myself at all – let alone safe with Elle when I am not with her – and of course I am not with her for quite a few days at a time. I know it’s only a week between sessions, but my system just doesn’t cope at all – it’s too long.

Part of the problem is that I struggle a lot with ‘forgetting’ Elle between sessions even though we have a reasonable amount of contact during the week. When I finally see her after a week it can feel like I don’t really know who she is, or whether she’s safe, or… basically it’s the object constancy stuff isn’t it?! Not only that, even if I can hold onto Elle as someone who is safe there is the constant worry that she might change…I think probably we need to do some work with the scared parts so they understand she isn’t Anita or Em…teens particularly just see her as ‘therapist’ and therapists cannot be trusted.

Because of all this, it can take me quite a while to settle into the session because I feel like I am doing my fifty-point check to assess where we are at. Thankfully, generally speaking, when I am actually with Elle it feels fine – especially now that she sits on the sofa beside me rather than in the chair across the room. This, at least, removes the need for any additional mental gymnastics about whether or not she feels disgusted by me and wants to keep her distance which of course are all part of the internal narrative that gets super loud during the week.

I am really glad that we do a ninety-minute session because it can take a good half an hour to relax into the space when I have got myself so worked up (I have no idea how I used to cope with 50 minute sessions with Em- oh of course, I didn’t cope at all!!!) .

It obviously takes a while to trust that the person in the room with me is the same one that I saw last week (and for the previous fourteen months) and that nothing has changed – because therapists do change and drop unexpected bombs (mentioning no names!). I guess to the protector parts it’s important not to remove my armour prematurely in case I get an unexpected grenade launched at me – you know the type that rolls and lands just under my ribcage and stops just where my heart lies – Boom! It’s happened before and I really hope it doesn’t happen again.

If False Adult doesn’t take my session, then it’s all good. At least in the session it feels safe and connected. But no matter who turns up to the session, I feel like when I leave, I almost instantly fall into a panic, not because anything is especially wrong in that immediate moment, but more because I know what’s coming. I only see Elle once a week despite us having a really decent length session (and I really know that I am so lucky to have that), by the time it gets to Friday it’s really not great inside. The wheels on my mini-bus have pretty much fallen off and all the littles have unclipped their seat belts and someone has to take charge – and that’s the dream team of protectors. It’s awful.

Basically, by Friday, my ability to hang it together feels massively reduced and the days until I next see Elle seem to stretch out endlessly. I feel like I am always stretching that bit too far between our sessions and so never really feel properly settled/safe. It feels a bit like a fuck tonne of water is building up behind the emotional dam but the release valve is never activated early enough and so there’s always going to be a flood – despite the high-tech flood management system I have in place.

I am really conscious of not being ‘too needy’ or ‘too much’ or ‘too dependent’ and I really don’t want to run the risk of burning Elle out or, probably more apt for this metaphor, drowning her! So, what do you do when the container isn’t big enough to hold everything from week to week?…or rather, what do I do when I seem to be too much for the container I’ve got?

I have no fucking idea.

It feels like an impossible bind. I don’t want to stop the therapy because actually what all this is telling me is that I need more therapy at the moment, not less…but making what there is ‘enough’ is a challenge especially when I am already exploiting every self-care strategy I have available to me. I don’t just sit and mope about in the week (well, perhaps I did a bit this weekend!) and still this stuff is activated in the biggest way.

I guess part of it is that it feels like there is never quite enough time to get through all the things that I need to talk about or that need space and attention. For example, it might be that we do some really great work on big important stuff. Last week we spoke at length about Anita (which stirred a lot up on its own), but because of this, the young parts that need a degree of reassurance and a different kind of interaction weren’t attended to (even though I was leaning against Elle the entire time and she held my hand…ugh…make my Brian function better please!) and that has unleashed carnage inside this week!

Whereas the week before last, I was in a right fucking mess and so we read a lovely story and had a really calm, nurturing session. It was absolutely what I needed, but then there was all sorts of adult stuff that didn’t get space that really could have done with some time, too. Neglecting adult is far less problematic than neglecting the little parts – and it’s not even neglecting, it’s simply time – but it all needs space and time and there just isn’t enough…even with ninety minutes (talk faster and get to the point sooner, eh?!).

So this is why there is always too much building up behind the dam wall… then throw in the hideous attachment shit on top and frankly, I’m fucked.

This would be a really useful conversation to have with Elle, wouldn’t it? But the problem is, I can’t see a solution to my problem. Elle only works face-to-face two days a week and is always busy. So, what I think would help (i.e another session) and what is actually possible just doesn’t align at the moment and so I have to keep trying to make this work as it is.

The feelings of shame are huge right now. I am so sick of being like this. I hate that I seem to need so much more fucking input and care than everyone else. Like, part of me gets there’s been a lot of trauma and then all the more recent shit on top with therapy going wrong really hasn’t helped…but still. Like why can’t I just be relatively fucking normal and behave like a fucking adult and be bloody fine on a session a week. Why do I seem to spend my life in the fucking hole? Like this week I feel like I have got my legs dangling over the edge of another trapdoor and rather than edging away from it, the protectors want me to jump in the next dark pit.

Ugh…

I used to see Em and Anita on Mondays and Fridays and that spacing felt really good. Like there was enough time between the sessions to process whatever was going on, but there wasn’t too much time until the next session for things to get too much or go too wrong.

I feel a bit like a toddler that’s learning to walk. I can do quite a few steps on my own but by Friday I need a hand to hold for a minute to stop me falling on my arse before I can carry on again. But there is no hand on Friday and so I find that I fall down and it is pretty painful over the weekends.

Every now and then when things are hard, I have asked about seeing Elle for an extra session on the Wednesday but she is always booked up. To be honest, Wednesday probably wouldn’t really help with this problem long-term, as it’s the longer time between sessions that is the issue and this would still leave a big gap the other side.

Elle has offered to so a Zoom session on a Friday before – but I have a feeling (given my online therapy track record) that this might actually make things worse. When I am struggling with distance and connection seeing Elle through a screen rather than in person would likely only intensify the feeling of being far apart and left and lost and all the other shit. Perhaps I need to suggest it here and there, though, because I don’t think I can do many more weeks like this one and perhaps I am only basing my expectations of what online sessions were like with Em and Anita.

This weekend has been terrible. I’ve felt so tired and overwhelmed but I couldn’t seem to rest or sleep because it’s felt like all the little parts of me are crying. There is no soothing that. And I have really tried. I get that this week has probably felt harder because Elle and I properly ventured into the Anita territory in the session and of course that would send seismic waves through my system because there is such a lot of pain there that needs to be looked at. The saga is ongoing with A and it’s just so upsetting.

It feels really difficult. Like I know when I avoid the ‘big’ stuff I am much better equipped to manage the week between sessions. The thing is, I am in therapy to work through this ‘big’ stuff and it feels really helpful to look at it with Elle. I can’t avoid it for much longer because it has a way of catching up with me, anyway. I don’t really know what to do though, because the moment we go there the whole fucking place is underwater as a result. I’m equipped to deal with high tide but this is a fucking tsunami heading my way.

I have no idea what to do. Maybe I should write more? Try and process more that way? Although that doesn’t solve any of the internal panic about Elle, does it? The more we look at Anita and Em the more wobbly I am going to feel about Elle.

I just don’t know. what to do.

What I do know is that this level of activation and upset is crazy-making and exhausting and scary because when this stuff isn’t contained enough I know that I am much harder work, more demanding, more likely to end up in rupture territory because everything is out of control inside…and you don’t have to go too far down the path to see where this can lead. I don’t want to be difficult or create a dynamic where Elle dreads seeing me… I just wish I had a different brain and the ability to make one session and a week between enough!

Right, that’s enough of that… I don’t think there’s much more I can say tbh. Does anyone have any ideas to help with symbolically increasing the capacity of my container??…Any ideas that don’t actually involve me having to bring this to Elle and see me die in a big pit of shame and embarrassment would be lovely! 😉

I get that at some point I am going to have to bring this up because I know the longer I don’t the worse it’s going to get… ffs! HELP!!

Mental Health Crash: Stuck In The Hole

rubberbandsandchewinggum10 Comments

Well, shit, I have been stuck deep down in the emotional black hole this last week (again). Tbh, I am always in the hole somewhere, it’s just distinguishing in which part of it and at what depth of it I am located. Sounds cryptic but it’s not really. You see my ‘hole’ (not a euphemism so stop that!) has a very particular quality to it– it’s like a bloody endless underground cave system these days rather than an open pit! Awesome. What a gift long-term and enduring mental health issues are!

I imagine a lot of people when they hit the skids with their mental health probably feel like they tumble and fall into a dark hole. These pits all look slightly different – we all have our own personal holes that come with our own specific and individual décor! It would make for a really great issue of an interior design/mental health magazine if people submitted plans and images of their nightmare hell zones wouldn’t it?…  

Anyway…

When we fall in, I guess it’s common to get stuck at the bottom for a bit, feel pretty hopeless and alone, and then try and scrabble our way back up and out to ground level when we feel able to – maybe with the help of someone else. Assistance can certainly expediate things but unfortunately a by-product of landing face first in the hole is that we often don’t believe there is anyone else who can see us or help us. And even if there is, there is a very real fear that we may inadvertently end up dragging that person into the hole with us, and if/when we do manage to get out together, they’ll leave/abandon us because they’ll be so horrified by what they witness in that hole alongside us. (It happens, sadly).

The hole is a bit like ‘Fight Club’. You do not talk about the hole. What happens in the hole stays in the hole. Because even though the hole itself is fucking terrifying enough on its own – how we behave in the hole can also be problematic. It can be a place where we fall into self-harming behaviours, self-neglect, and addiction to name but a few issues – and let’s keep that shit secret! Well, that’s what our shame would tell us, anyway.

We are not always our best-selves down in the hole – we’re simply trying to survive using whatever tools we have available to us in the moment and, honestly, even after years of therapy, my go-to self-care strategies often feel completely out of reach when I am suffering in the depths. It’s amazing how quickly I can slip into negative coping strategies just like a comfy pair of slippers…only, actually, these ones are full of thorns and hurt every time I move!

The goal, then, when you find yourself stuck in this cess pit of doom is to get the fuck out of the trench as quickly as you can. Of course, that’s much easier said than done. There can be a lot of slipping, sliding, and stumbling on the way back up because the way out isn’t easy and it’s fucking exhausting work trying to drag your dead weight back to relative normality.

I really feel like the struggle isn’t understood or appreciated enough, and I think sometimes people make the assumption that we must like being down in the hole, or that we are deliberately careless because we keep tumbling in and spend such a lot of time in there. It’s hard enough when friends and family might hint at this sort of thing but it’s especially awful and shaming when therapists comment on how “stuck” you are and that maybe you’re not trying hard enough to get out… FUCK OFF!! (I’d forgotten about this until now, and so that’s just given me the rage when I am already in a rage!!!)

Of course, if and when you successfully make it out the hole, it’s super important to try and be mindful going forward. I really try and scan the path ahead. I’m constantly trying to spot any future holes so that I can try sidestep them should any come into view – but we all know it isn’t that simple! My life has been riddled with concealed hole entrances and at times it can feel like an endless landscape of craters waiting for me rather than solid ground. It’s inevitable that I will, at intervals, be unlucky and end up in the dark…and actually, I have been consistently feeling my way through the dark for almost two years now and so it’s hard to imagine what it’s like not being in the hole.

So, what’s my hole like? (stop it!) Well, I suppose my hole isn’t really a hole at all, rather it’s a series of holes or dark rooms stacked on top of another linked by unseen trapdoors going deep into the depths of the earth. The further down we go, the spaces stop being dark rooms with manmade walls and instead become cold, dark, damp caves almost like prison cells buried deep into rock. I’ve spoken about falling through endless trapdoors before, and this analogy far better fits my experience of being in the dark depths for me than in a singular sticky shit hole.

So how do I end up in this place?

Imagine being at ground level, wandering along the street, minding your own business, living your day-to-day as best you can, occasionally getting your foot stuck in a puddle that actually turns out to be a pot hole, twisting your ankle, but generally maintaining momentum and keeping in touch with the world and people around you. You’re functional even if you have a bit of a limp. You can usually feel the sunlight on your skin – well, more likely it’s a dark and cloudy day, but you at least have sense that it is daytime – it’s ‘good enough’. Life above ground isn’t perfect by any means but it isn’t terrible, either.

Then imagine, unexpectedly, falling down an open hole – you know, like how pubs have cellar trapdoors outside in the street? Well, that first fall down into the dark is bloody shocking and painful and you want to scream “OUCH!” but generally it doesn’t take too long to assess the situation and start looking for a way out. You brush yourself off, check for any broken bones, and start shouting up to the world above “HELP ME!!!” because you can very clearly see the sky and the people walking along outside and you believe that there is a way out. You’re probably only 12 feet below ground at this point and a return to the world above is completely possible.

The problems really start to come when you repeatedly fall down the hole. Bones break. Bruises never quite seem to heal before you fall again. Fatigue kicks in from the endless effort of trying to escape. It gets harder and harder to crawl back out the more times you fall. At times it can feel completely pointless even trying as you know it’s only going to be a matter of time until you’re back in the dark and honestly, I feel like maybe I should just accept that the hole is where I actually belong and make the best of it.  

Sometimes, there’s a complicating factor – especially for those of us with childhood trauma and relational injuries. I can be doing absolutely everything right. I’m checking every step I take and can be wandering along quite happily and then some fucker (who I really trust) deliberately pushes me down into the hole and runs off! I mean that’s just fucking horrific.

That’s where I am now. Only, it’s worse than that because I wasn’t at ground level to begin with when I got pushed. I had Anita in a mid-level hole with me having worked our way up through quite a few levels after Em had done a fab job at leaving me for dead down in the depths in 2020. Anita was holding my hand and it felt like we were successfully navigating our way through the dark…and then she decided to leave me, but not just leave me on level -5 of the hole, she forcefully pushed me down through another trapdoor.

As I have fallen, I have kind of rolled and rolled and unfortunately found more and more trapdoors. I’ve passed the place where Em left me and have kept tumbling and tumbling. Surely, I must be pretty close to rock bottom now. There simply can’t be any more trapdoors to fall through, can there?

The saddest thing about all this is that it isn’t just adult me in the hole. I could cope with that. But there are all the child parts too – and they are so scared. Every single one of them is terrified of the dark and it is totally pitch black. There’s not even the tiniest bit of light where we are. It’s like their worst nightmares playing out in waking time and as much as I try, I don’t always have to ability to contain them all. No matter how I try to reassure them and say we are safe and that it will be ok, it just doesn’t land…because I am not sure I really believe that either, now.

To say that it’s really not nice in the cave/pit/hole would be a huge understatement. My brain can attack me/us with some pretty shit messages about being “a burden” and “unlovable” and “too much” or “not enough” – the list is literally fucking endless…! If you’re reading this, then you’ve probably been there. You know the drill. Basically, you’re stuck in the dark with a sound system that only plays your Inner Critic’s hit list on full volume and on repeat the whole time you’re down there.

Just glorious!

I mean who doesn’t love their deepest wounds and insecurities coming at them on loop? Who wouldn’t want to be told that “you’d be better off dead” or that “no one would miss you if you were gone” and that “even your ‘friends’ only tolerate you” or that “you’re disgusting” or “pathetic” or “worthless” or a “fraud” or that you “deserve this” and “what kind of loser can’t even pay someone to stay and care?”… and then of course throw in real life soundbites from people who have really hurt you, “you’re so sensitive and defensive”, “you’re too dependent”, “your child parts are adhesive like a tick” and … well… it’s not brilliant is it? I could go on and on and on but you all know your soundtrack and will be familiar with how hearing it makes you feel. I mean it is a total immersion in the shit and shame isn’t it?

The messages of doom and isolation have never really changed much since I first found myself in my dark place back in my early teens – perhaps the messages are more insistent and louder than they were initially, and the shape and dimensions of my hole (honestly, every time I type that I am giggling like a fourteen-year-old kid!) have definitely changed. As I say, these days it’s not just a hole or cellar – it’s a much more complex subterranean structure. It’s not a dark hole with a consistent depth and bottom – I’d take that any day of the week.

Despite how crap it is, I’ve come to accept that this multi-floored/roomed/cave system is just part of my internal landscape now. I know that I can’t avoid it, it can’t be filled – there is not enough concrete in the world for that! – all I can do is tread carefully and try my best to keep feet on solid ground if I do ever make up to ground level and I will continue to put things in place for the next fall.

When I am in the dark, feeling scared and really suffering like I am now, it’s really really important to try and remember that the Inner Critic is only trying to protect me. As loud and terrifying as it is, it really doesn’t want to harm me – it’s scared too, it just doesn’t know how best to express it. Perhaps there is a little bit of comfort in knowing that all my system is ever trying to do is look after me – it just has some pretty fucked up ways of doing it.

When it is awful, like it is now, I need to trust that it is always worth taking the chance on screaming and asking for help even if I believe that no one can hear me, because there are people who care and who do want to help…and have ladders and torches… I just need to let them know where I am rather than cowering silently in the dark.

Last week, before our session, I pre-warned Elle that I was in the hole and unravelling – which felt like a big thing to do. I needed to do that, though, because False Adult is so skilled at pretending that everything is ok and denies that there even is a hole (A ‘Fight Club’ hole pro!), let alone that we may be stuck in it. As I result of letting Elle know quite how bad it feels, I’ve been hit with some huge feelings of shame and panic. I feel like I’ve dragged her down into the hole and am terrified that she, too, will freak out and run off, but not before giving me a hearty push down through another trapdoor. She’s given me absolutely no sense that this would happen…but my brain can’t help but worry.

It’s really sad that I feel this way and it hurts a lot to know that my trust is so fragile. For now, Elle and I are just sitting together, waiting for some of the painful injuries to heal a bit before trying to make a plan to find our way out of this mess. It doesn’t feel quite so cold and scary with her sitting beside me and the dark doesn’t feel quite so overwhelming when I can physically feel her holding my hand. The problems happen when I lose contact for a bit (you know, like the six days between sessions!) and can’t immediately find her…it doesn’t take long for the Critic to get back in my head and the panic to take hold.

I will write a post about why things are particularly hard right now, next time. But needless to say, it involves Anita… bleurgh.

Sending love and light (candles, torches, flares!) down into your holes. Whatever your Inner Critic may have you believe, you are not alone and you are worthy of love and care. x