therapy

Therapy Break Is Over!

rubberbandsandchewinggum21 Comments

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It’s hardly a secret that I find therapy breaks a bit of a (huge) challenge. In fact I think my blog ‘Rubber Bands And Chewing Gum’ should be probably subtitled ‘She Who Falls Apart On Therapy Breaks’! This year’s Easter break has been mammoth by my standards … sooooooo freaking loooooong. I mean seriously it’s not even funny!! I’ve been through the whole range of emotions over the last three and a half weeks. At times I have felt desperately sad and alone; I’ve felt needy and clingy; I’ve been angry and raging; there’s been a touch of not giving a shit ‘meh’; there’s been the odd bit of calm; some days of feeling sick and anxious; nights of feeling tired, small and abandoned… and frankly it’s been completely exhausting/ draining.

Thank god that’s over!

So, last Thursday was a bit of a weird one. I was due to end my therapy break (whoop, right?) by having a Skype call with my therapist. Thursday is not my usual therapy day, that’s a Monday, but given that my therapist was leaving me, ok having a well-earned break, for essentially four weeks – FOUR WEEKS!! – she offered me a session when she got back from her break to cut the length of the break down a bit. Three and a half weeks is so much less than four isn’t it? Grrrr …Ok, yeah, it really is when dealing with attachment pain!

Unfortunately the time my therapist had available meant that I couldn’t actually go and see her in person as she lives 45 minutes from me and I wouldn’t have been able to get back from the session in order to collect my children from school which is twenty minutes in the opposite direction. I took the session she offered anyway (of course) and knew that we’d have to Skype if my wife couldn’t take the afternoon off work to pick up the kids.

I’ve had quite a few Skype sessions now. I don’t mind them when I’m in the normal flow of therapy. It’s better to talk to my therapist than miss a session and it maintains a sense of continuity but by the end of the break I felt so disconnected from my therapist that I had gone beyond the ‘meh’, I’d cycled through anxiety and worry on Wednesday night and was in full on rage and angst mode by Thursday morning that Skype wasn’t exactly my number one choice. I was hoping I’d wake up on Thursday feeling happy to be able to speak with my therapist but actually I didn’t want to talk to her AT ALL. Or at least part of me didn’t.

My therapist had asked me at our last session before the break to text her on Thursday morning to let her know whether I would be seeing her in person or whether we’d Skype. I didn’t even want to text her! I was sooooo resistant to making contact and basically wanted to scream at her to just ‘fuck off’ (anyone got any guesses which part that might be?!). Yeah, so the teen was pissed right off but I could feel something else too and it was powerful. I felt a kind of nervousness and fear about going to therapy. I felt sick in my stomach. I was worried that it would be different now, or that she’d somehow have forgotten me (hello little ones) and was scared that she wouldn’t be ‘the same’.

So I text this:

Can we Skype today? I feel like I have snakes in my stomach and like I am going to be sick. It’s not good. Part of me just doesn’t want to talk to you at all but I’m trying to combat that because there are other bits that do.

It was the best I could manage but I suppose at least it gave her the heads up that things weren’t necessarily going to be straightforward… but when are they ever after a therapy break? It’s a bit of a pattern that therapy breaks disrupt everything and we are lucky if there’s not some kind of rupture that takes a month (or more) to repair!

So, given how fraught re-entry into therapy is after being in orbit for a good while, I wasn’t exactly delighted to be doing my first session back by Skype. I didn’t want to have to try and connect through a screen. I wanted to be there in person and because I couldn’t be I got even more cross and frustrated.

The session wasn’t until 1:45pm and, for once, I had the morning to myself. It was a beautiful day, properly gorgeous, the sky was perfect blue and, finally, that yellow orb in the sky made a decent appearance. I was able to wear shorts and a t-shirt to go walk the dogs. It hardly seems right that it was 23 degrees when only last month we had two feet of snow and a burst water main due to the weather conditions.

Anyway, where I walk the dogs is gorgeous. It’s very peaceful and I rarely see anyone else when I am there. It’s one of my ‘calm’ places. Only on Thursday it was not calm at all. The more I walked in nature the more pissed off I became. I mean not just a bit ugh but fully fucking raging. By the time I was half way on the walk I was all set to text my therapist and not only tell her I wouldn’t be Skyping with her but actually I would not be coming back to therapy. Grrrrrr.

I mean, yeah, there it is again – teen angst!

Fortunately, there is no mobile signal where I walk because it’s in a steep river valley. So I couldn’t text. By the time I got home something had shifted. I still didn’t really want to talk but I was a bit more curious about what was going on with me rather than being engulfed by the feelings.

What was going on?

I was angry about resuming therapy. I was angry that my therapist can just go away and leave me for almost a month and I just have to suck it up and get through it. I was angry that I get so overwhelmed on breaks and need her. I was angry that she’d be the same as ever and unaffected by the break (it’s her ‘holiday’ after all). I was angry that I can’t just leave and ‘show her’ what it’s like to have someone fuck off (not like she’d care anyway). I was angry that every time we have a break it’s so hard to reconnect. I was angry that I cannot hug her or touch her. I was angry that I’d been starving myself and over-exercising in order to cope with the crashing in of difficult and varied emotions that all the parts had been feeling.

I hated her.

I loved her too.

And I hate really that!

To add insult to injury, about twenty minutes before my session the window cleaner turned up… I was annoyed at that too! I had all the windows and doors open and was set to do my session on the IKEA therapy chair (you know the one!) with the patio doors open and then there was Mr Chatterbox with his bucket and ladders. I was polite (because I always am) but told him I couldn’t talk and that I had an important call to make and asked him if he could do the front of the house first.

He finished literally two minutes before my session and I was a bit flustered. I had panicked about being overheard. It was a relief he’d gone but then the computer was a nightmare. I never use Skype unless it’s for therapy and I couldn’t work out how to get the camera on. Yeah. I am a technical whizz you know! So the first couple of minutes of my session were basically me faffing about pressing buttons and wondering why I had a completely black screen. Not good. I disconnected and dialled in again. It was fine that time – phew… but I wasn’t fine.

It was soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo good to see my therapist’s face but sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo bad that it was in my screen and not ‘for real’. I struggled to talk. My therapist was lovely, because she is lovely, and she tried really hard to reach out to me. She acknowledged how troublesome breaks can be and said ‘two and a half weeks is a long time’ and asked me what the different parts were feeling. That would’ve been fine, maybe next session, but on Thursday part of me bristled at the question like, ‘hang on a minute lady, don’t you dare think you can just ask me to open up to you and trust you when you left the vulnerable parts for so long. I’m not going to let you in just like that! And it was three and a half weeks for me…I started the break a week before you went away…grrrr’ and so I said nothing and ignored the question for a bit and then said ‘I don’t know’.

I could feel the little ones crying inside wanting reach out and tell her that they had missed her so much that it hurt and that they had been very very scared that she wasn’t coming back. The thing is, I would struggle to say something like that even if therapy was in full swing and going well – the was no chance on Thursday when I was so defended by various protector parts.

We got about halfway through the session and my dog started acting like it was going to puke…which was on my mind to look out for given that she’d emptied the bathroom bin of tampons the day before. It is way more revolting than you can imagine. Disgusting animal. Anyway, she started behaving like a cat about to bring up a fur ball and I quickly let her out. I couldn’t be dealing with ‘that’ on my carpet. So I got up quick, left the Skype running, and took the dog out where she promptly stopped acting like she was going to chunder and started running around the garden and found her tennis ball! (side note – the dog has cleared the tampons in the early hours of this morning! – uuuugghhhh!)

I went back inside and resumed my session. Something had shifted. My therapist asked me if there was anything that had come to mind that I might want to talk about having previously told her that my mind was completely blank and my body was numb. Dissociated fun times! There was plenty that came to mind: the hell that the break has been; how terrible the attachment stuff has felt; how sad I have felt and how incredibly lonely it’s been at times. But no! The one ‘good thing’ about having ‘so many issues’ is that you can pick and choose something that isn’t the ‘main problem’ and yet it still seems like a ‘main problem’!

I decided to tell her about the issues I have been having around eating and my body over Easter. This is a step in the right direction – kind of. There was a time where there was no way I would have talked about this ‘secret’ but I am steadily getting there ‘bit by bit’ with the topic and so I must be making some progress and I must trust my therapist a bit – right? I trust her with anorexia and self-harm I just struggle to really let her see the young needs and pain around how much I miss her between sessions.

So, yeah, Easter has been weird… I knew early on that my go to coping strategies would be catastrophic with nearly a month to survive without any therapy. I’d felt my mind switch into the place that thinks it’s a good idea to run every day and not eat enough or cut or burn myself. So, knowing this I made a conscious choice – albeit a bit bloody bonkers – that every time I felt like not eating or self-harming, I’d eat Easter eggs and do something nice for myself. Basically I spent two weeks eating and eating and eating and watching TV in the evenings. My wife thought it was great to see me (usually I read in the evenings).

It was all going ok until one day I wanted to put on a pair of jeans that I like…and they were a bit tighter than usual.

No.

Nooo way!

Disaster.

Get on the scales.

Confirmation of disaster.

I had gained 2.5kg.

I had completely let myself go.

And in an instant the critic was back online. I didn’t write about this last blog post because I was so caught up in it that I was in a weird kind of denial about it – that happens. I think having talked about it with my therapist on Thursday I have slightly come out the other side – in that I have eaten a few proper meals and I haven’t run on my treadmill today. But leading into Thursday I had spent 7 consecutive days running on the treadmill and severely restricting my food intake to maybe 500 calories a day (less than I was burning running).

By my session on Thursday that 2.5kg was gone and I felt a little better about myself but I ached, I was exhausted, and by the time I came to open up about this, emotionally spent. I know I am not out of the woods with this stuff. I feel the strong desire/need to keep chasing the numbers downwards on the scales. I want to run. I feel like I need to. There is a lot going on in my day-to-day life right now and I feel a bit stretched. I need to strike a safe balance with the body stuff as I know how dangerous it can be when I get so fixated on my body. I am good at being an anorexic…which is a tragic.

So, tomorrow is my first face-to-face session with my therapist. Part of me can’t wait to see her but part of me is wary. I feel really exposed now – I told her as much at the end of the Skype session. She was incredibly understanding and validating about what I had told her. It felt like we really connected which is amazing after one session and it being via Skype. I am hopeful that tomorrow will build on what was started last week but I am also conscious of the fact that lots of parts are saying and feeling lots of different things so who knows what’ll happen.

I am aware that the break has highlighted to me again some of the basic fundamentals that I struggle with. I really need to discuss her writing me a note for breaks (but after the pebbles….!); I need to ask about some kind of check in in the week; and I need ask about her sitting closer to me sometimes. I can’t even go to the hug stuff again but, hey, baby steps right?!

Anyway, that’s about all for now. I have to sleep! It’s going to be a mammoth week this week and I am already dreaming of Friday and a rest.

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Therapy Break – 2 Weeks In: Lost In The Ocean

rubberbandsandchewinggum3 Comments

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Therapy Break #1

I am not in your presence

but, oh

how painfully aware of your absence I have become.

 

Time and distance

stretch

out

endlessly

between us…

 

You are so far away.

 

The holding place in my mind

struggles hard to keep you whole

 

Are you merely a figment of my imagination?

A hologram, perhaps?

*

Even when within my reach

you always feel so very far away

 

I can see you,

feel you, but

I cannot touch you.

 

That small space

opens up like a vast ocean

I stand on one shore

you on the other

 

You beckon for me to join you

promise to be my guide

and to witness the lessons of the Self

that only I can teach

myself.

 

For the longest time I have waited

warily watching

assessing the dangers that might lurk hidden

in the deep.

 

I believe I will reach you –

eventually

(is it misplaced confidence or simply wishful thinking?)

and so I begin the swim.

 

My muscles relax into a familiar rhythm.

The hardest, aching parts of me begin to soften

as the distance between us lessens.

 

It’s farther than I thought, though, and

sometimes cold

sometimes silent

sometimes strange –

The horizon keeps shifting.

 

I tread water a while

rest and catch my breath.

I look up and discover that

I can no longer see you.

 

Panic.

 

a sudden shiver

a lightning bolt

 

Both sea and sky shift rapidly

calm blues now rage-filled greys

Angry, turbulent clouds roll heavily in

raining hot tears down like shiny silvery bullets.

My fear rises alongside the storm-whipped waves

 

I am exposed

I am scared

 

Is there still safety on your shore?

I can’t be sure.

But it’s swim or drown

and so I keep moving.

 

There’s no going back.

I must have faith in what I feel

And trust in what cannot be seen.

 

***

I’ve posted this poem at the bottom of a blog post before. I wrote it last year when on Easter therapy break. Right now it completely sums up where I am at (again/still!). I haven’t got much time to write at the moment. Time off with the kids is full on. I am putting on a good show on the surface – doing lots of activities and outings but inside/emotionally I feel stuck in that horrible place, stagnant and numb but underneath it’s only hanging together by a thread – not even my usual rubber bands and chewing gum. And so right now I don’t even know what to say in a blog post.

I will find my way out of this fog eventually, so long as a I keep swimming. At the moment I have lost sight of both shores and am tired, cold, and want to be rescued…. and there’s still two more weeks of this break to go. Ugh!

I hate therapy breaks 😉

Oh woe is me! lol!

 

 

 

 

 

Therapy Break – 1 Week In: Struggling to Find Peace

rubberbandsandchewinggum13 Comments

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I’m really struggling to find peace right now – both literally and metaphorically! It’s very early (5:30am) on Monday morning and I am trying to steal myself a little quiet time to write, collect my thoughts, and drink a substandard cup of coffee before the day kicks in and I am thrown fully into the demands of being a mum and wife with the family all on Easter break – which basically means shelving all my needs and doing my best to put a lid on my issues until bedtime when I can hide under the duvet and let the little ones have some time to be how it is.

This waiting is not as easy as it may sound – waiting all day to allow myself to really feel what’s going on inside feels exhausting, especially when right now my dreams are filled with my therapist and leave a lingering sense of being ill at ease for a good part of the day. I am experienced in ‘hiding’ how I feel, I do it week in week out, but sometimes it feels like a ridiculous amount of effort to keep up the appearance of being fine when I am really not fine at all. I am so not fine. Not at all. And whilst I don’t want to sink deep down into the pit of sadness that the young ones feel about being left, I don’t want to deny them space to express how bad it actually feels.

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Sadly, I am not just a mother and a wife trying to enjoy time off with my wife and kids (that on its own wouldn’t be a problem); I am also a therapy client with CPTSD on a three and a half week long break from my attachment figure (therapist) and I feel lost, alone, abandoned and desperately sad. Or rather, the little ones are struggling massively and all the old wounds are exposed, sore, and weeping; and yet again adult me is a fucking chocolate fireguard when it comes to self-soothing and nurturing the vulnerable parts.

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When it’s like this I need to write. Well, actually what I need is a nurturing hug that holds the child parts but that’s not possible now and even if I were to see my therapist it still wouldn’t happen…not touch rule…argh!… and so here I am, once again, trying to let it all out on my blog! I am not sure what to say, but I absolutely need to try and find words for some of how I feel because I am struggling. Really struggling. Have I mentioned that I hate therapy breaks before?! Ha. It’s so boring now.

It’s not even funny is it? It’s painful. I feel mental and unsettled and generally all over the shop.

Clearly, I’ve not found this last week particularly easy, but I think today is going to be especially hard because, whilst I have now effectively ticked off one week of this mammoth Easter break (well done me!), today signals my first ‘missed’ therapy session. In theory, today is just another day of the break; like any other day, it’s a day to try and make the best of things. I need to live my adult life as best I can, enjoy being with my family, despite struggling with the underlying feelings that the child parts have about being abandoned and their fear that something bad is going to happen whilst my therapist is away.

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It’s just not that simple, though. Today already feels bigger… harder… longer than yesterday because today is the day I usually go to therapy and today I can’t. My body clock is set to be in that therapy room at 10:30am on a Monday and, frankly, being anywhere else feels plain wrong! I can feel the anxiety rising in my body knowing that today I am not going anywhere. That today, I can’t let anything out or take anything in with my therapist.

Today I am here and I have to hold my shit together for myself. Yeah, sure, I know, this is no different to any other time, but usually I have a sense of being supported: I usually have a scaffold around my structurally unsound building (the one that I am steadily dismantling bit by bit in order to rebuild a better, more sturdy structure for the future). The thing is, for some reason the scaffolding has disappeared and it feels like bits of the building are now breaking off and rapidly crumbling away. Some people might say, the scaffold is still there, I just can’t see it right now because I am not looking in the right place; either way, my sense of things is that the building is breaking and it might completely fall down if I don’t get that frame back in place soon.

I wish it felt less desperate.

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Lots of people don’t like Mondays. Monday signals the start of the working week, the end of the weekend, and a stretch of time until the next rest period. For me, however, Monday is the day I hang on for each week, the day I look forward to, the day where I can go and be myself for 50 minutes and have someone listen to me and help me work through my issues (and man there are plenty of those!). It’s more than that, though. Of course, it’s partly about having a meaningful chat and unloading some stuff with a safe and empathic person but it’s about taking some important stuff in, too.

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Monday signals the day that the young parts get to physically see that my therapist/their attachment figure is ‘still there’ that she hasn’t ‘disappeared’ or worse, ‘left me’. It’s the day where I try and top up that supply of care and love and nurturing that leaks away each week between sessions.

Therapy consists of various types of work for me but so far as the attachment stuff goes: 1) is trying to refill my leaking bucket and 2) patch the holes that are in the bucket to stop the leak from happening in the first place. I’m talking just about the need for care and love and my inability to hold onto any sense of it. Of course we do lots of other work too. But right now I’m stuck in the shitty attachment spiral and so, of course, that’s what I am going to talk about today.

Sometimes I manage quite well in the week: the holes my therapist and I plugged in session hold reasonably well and so there is a slower trickling away of the content of my bucket. I feel ok-ish. I miss her, yes, but I can get through the week because there is still some ‘evidence’ of her care left in my bucket and I can see proof that we are ‘ok’. Sometimes, I can have a really good therapy session where my bucket gets filled right to the top and so it takes longer for the contents to slip away – these are the better weeks.

Unfortunately, on breaks I am onto a losing streak because despite plugging holes and filling up the bucket to the brim in preparation for the holidays, there are still areas of the bucket that leak. A longer period of time without a mend and refill opportunity means the bucket has more time to empty out. It gets even worse though, because the bucket is pretty empty there’s a great deal of slipperiness on the floor around me. When I’m approaching the desperate stage where my bucket is nearly drained, it’s not uncommon for me to slip and slide about, lose my footing altogether and then eventually fall on my arse, drop the bucket and lose all the remaining content I have been trying so hard to protect….

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I apologise for the long and winding metaphors today!…essentially, I am shit at breaks, I miss my therapist and I can’t maintain a sense of her.

Ugh.

Shoot me now!

To be honest. I don’t really have much to say other than I am struggling a lot. I know this is not an insightful or interesting read. It just is. It’s how I feel. I am moaning and whiny. I am stretched and struggling. I am very aware that the mother wound is starting to seep through my layers of clothing. To the untrained eye it’s barely perceptible, but for me…well, I’m exposed now.

I am going to try and patch myself up, keep calm and carry on. I cannot afford to sink down into that place where anxiety and depression lie in wait because I know who else is down there…and right now I don’t have the strength to battle the Critic. There’s still 17 days to go of this break and so right now I am trying to dig deep. I need some resources to stop the bucket emptying and the walls from disintegrating.

I’m going to go and grab my pebble and shove it over one of the holes in my bucket to stem the flow, or shove it in a weak part in the wall of my building to replace a crumbling part.

‘When my heart is overwhelmed, lead me to the rock that is higher than I.’

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Saturation Point

rubberbandsandchewinggum9 Comments

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I’m really struggling today. I’ve been sitting staring at this empty screen for almost an hour now and not been able to translate what is going on in my head onto the page. I basically need a page of grey with text that says, ‘I need an adult’ on it and that would probably suffice for this blog today!

I’m not really surprised things feel impossible to write down, I have loads I need to do today and yet have felt unable to do any of it. It’s no wonder the words aren’t coming when I can’t even complete basic day-to-day chores: the kitchen is a mess, the beds aren’t made, and the washing I put on this morning is still sitting in the machine waiting to be hung out. But as is so often the case when I have one of ‘these’ days, I feel totally incapable of doing anything. I hate feeling like this but I just have to sit it out and wait for it to pass.

I have no idea how I am going to snap out of this state and be ready to go and tutor this evening. It feels like a tall order. I know I will manage. I always do. But it’s going to require a huge amount of effort to put the ‘teacher’ hat on tonight (I have no idea how I am going to teach writing skills and selective use of language for effect when all I feel capable of is colouring in!) I am struggling enough with being ‘mum’ today let alone being a professional.

In fairness, probably a large part of this flat lining/depressed/knackered feeling is coming from the fact that I am ill and tired. My wife and son have been poorly for a week and it was only a matter of time until I started sneezing and streaming with a cold. I haven’t been sleeping very well this week as my son has been waking in the night coughing and needing me….11x on Sunday night! OMG!

So, if you like, it could be said that I am suffering from a bit of ‘man flu’. Everything feels worse than it actually is and I am just feeling really sorry for myself. Right now all I want to do is crawl into bed and sleep it all off – the physical and emotional stuff needs rest. I need to recharge. There is, of course, another part to it…yes I’m not well, and yes I am tired, but actually I am also feeling really really sad.

I feel totally unanchored this week and I could really use a bit of nurturing and care. And whilst I ought to be able to go, ‘righteo, then, let’s implement self-care strategies 101 today’ I simply don’t have it in me. My adult has reached saturation point this week through trying to meet other people’s needs whilst simultaneously sacrificing my own and I just haven’t got the energy to ‘do good’ for me. I just can’t muster anything up to help. In fact it’s a big enough battle to not do myself harm.

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I don’t really know how to explain it, but when I feel like this (utter shit mixed with a horrid dose of attachment pain) no amount of jollying myself along, making nice drinks and food, hot baths, reading, listening to music, meditating, visualisation or whatever really helps because (yes, here we go again…) the part that is feeling needy and sad and lost and abandoned couldn’t give a fuck about what I (adult) have to offer it.

My inner child doesn’t want me right now… we all know who she wants don’t we? (ARGH, this is getting so boring!) And there’s a problem because that person, my therapist, isn’t around. Cue screaming of a very young part and that horrendous physical sensation of having been kicked in the stomach alongside the critical voice telling me I am a ‘fucking loser’ and need to lose weight and get a hold of myself.

Last week when I posted, I was absolutely certain that Monday’s session signalled the start of the Easter therapy break. As a result of this I spent a good part of last week feeling miserable and sad about the fact that I had only had one session to patch myself together and try and get enough connection and sense of care to carry me through the hell that is a therapy break. So imagine my delight when I looked at the calendar on Friday morning and realised that I was totally out by a week and that I actually had two therapy sessions before the break. I did a little happy dance!

Don’t get me wrong. I was still very much in the stage of ‘shiiiiiittttt I am hopeless at breaks. Why does she have to go away?!! I can feel the wheels getting loose’ but knowing there were two sessions rather than one felt like a bit of a reprieve. Sadly, I am learning that life seems like throwing big fat spanners in the works where my mental health is concerned…or should I say, the UK weather has been so fucking erratic lately that it seemed perfectly reasonable to dump several feet of snow again over the weekend making it impossible for me to leave my village on Monday. Noooo! The bloody ‘Beast From The East’ reared its head again and blocked the roads.

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I spent the whole weekend being a miserable cow. I just couldn’t help it. There was some severe tantruming going on inside! I was so disgruntled that I wouldn’t be able to make it to my session. The child parts needed to be in that room and get some reassurance that things are going to be ok and that the relationship is safe and solid. I was really hoping that some miracle would happen and some tropical weather would come and melt everything – but no….it’s snowy even now.

The other hard thing about knowing I wouldn’t get to see my therapist was that I couldn’t really let on how devastating it actually felt to my wife. She just doesn’t get it at all and so we never talk about my therapy other than occasionally when she likes to say it doesn’t seem to be making me ‘better’. It’s not easy for her to understand that how I feel towards my therapist is not in any way sexual or even really coming from an adult place.

She doesn’t get what it is to struggle with all this attachment stuff because she is securely attached – lucky her! She can only quantify my feelings within her field of experience and, therefore, this deep love and need I feel for my therapist (not that she knows the extent of it!) must mean I want to have an affair and am being unfaithful. Groan. Totally unhelpful!

The ‘it’s not normal how much you need your therapy and how you feel about your therapist’ stuff has been the source of a few arguments over the years and now we just don’t discuss my therapy at all. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to discuss the finer details of my sessions with my wife (hell no!) but when I feel upset and unsettled because I can’t get to therapy I would like to be able to say what’s wrong and not just have to stuff my feelings down and pretend like I’m delighted that there’s another snow day and it’s all going to be great fun. I’d like to think she might understand that I am doing some deep work with my therapist and trying to repair a lifetime of trauma and that maybe a bit of compassion and care needs extending to me.

It’s not convenient if I am not functioning in ‘mum’ and ‘wife’ and so the sadness of the ‘child’ was heavy inside and made things feel really hard over the weekend. I text my therapist to tell her what was going on (i.e the snow, not the total meltdown I was having – even though I really wanted to tell her about that too! I hate the ‘formal’ texting when actually any time I reach out I want to tell her I miss her and can’t). She responded and suggested trying to Skype and just see how it goes. That sounds fine doesn’t it? We’ve skyped before here and there and it’s been fine. The thing is, I’ve never Skyped when the whole family has been here or when my wife is at the bottom of the stairs making conference calls and working from home.

How on earth could I talk about everything I needed to when there was a strong chance I’d be overheard? It’s hard enough to speak about those needy feelings in therapy or to discuss the issues I have around eating or self-harming or any of the rest of stuff in Pandora’s box as it is, but there was no way on earth I could do it on Monday feeling as though there was an audience.

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The session itself was ok but it was one of those ones that you talk plenty but not about anything particularly important – if my wife was listening in it would’ve been ok. I spoke about my cancer follow up appointment, tutoring, and anxiety about flying (we’ve just booked a much needed holiday) but not the real stuff; not the anxiety dreams I have been having nearly every night about needing my therapist and holding onto her like a tiny kid….I mean I am not sure I would tell her in session because it feels exposing, but there would’ve been a chance had I been there in person; the way therapy has been going lately, and my finding it more possible to show her my vulnerable side, I might have brought it up.

My therapist was really aware how hard I was finding it and did an excellent job of making lots of eye contact (even if I had my face covered and could barely look into the camera) and saying really reassuring things to me, including the fact that she cares about me. Since sending her that letter the other week she keeps reiterating it every session. I am wondering if she really just had no idea how much I have struggled to feel a sense of her care until then? Like it should just be a given? Whatever has changed I am pleased because it is making a difference to how I feel. Although I wouldn’t say I feel secure, I am building evidence to prove that she cares about me…. Uh huh, yes, mental, I know!

We spoke a bit about the break but I didn’t really tell her anything much about how I was feeling because that would’ve meant saying how utterly distraught I feel about ‘being left’ and again with the possibility of being overheard it just couldn’t happen. It was lovely to ‘see’ her and I’d always rather Skype than have no contact, but she said how unfortunate the timing was for this to have happened and how much disruption there’d been lately which wasn’t ideal with the break coming up. I am glad she acknowledged it as being an issue.

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The moment I disconnected the Skype call I felt sick. It was a combination of ‘only one more session’ dread and the young parts not getting enough of what they so badly needed this week- they needed to be seen and heard. I am struggling horribly with my feelings this week. I cannot believe it is only Wednesday. It’s like time is standing still. And whilst part of me wants Monday to get here quickly, there is another part that is anxious that we have one session and then almost a month long break. It feels like such a long time. And whilst I know I will get through it, and am pleased that she is taking a good long block of time to recharge and look after herself, not all of me feels optimistic or glad about it!

Fortunately my therapist is really good at trying cut the breaks down for me as she knows they are an issue. She always offers me an alternative time if she can. She has offered me a session on Thursday 19th April which takes a few days off the length of the break; unfortunately there’s no way I can get there in person because I have to do the school run and can’t get from her place to school in the time I have. Basically, I will take the session, but it’s going to have to be another Skype session. I am not sure how I feel about that.

I know I have a tendency to shut down and push her away after a break. The trust and connection I feel erodes over a break and I often sit there silent for a few sessions whilst the repair work is done. The gatekeepers take a while to let the defences down and so I am not sure how this will work over Skype. I guess we’ll have to see.

Anyway, this is really just a nothing post. There are things I want to say but I will wait until I feel better and more able to formulate my thoughts to write them.

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Connecting In Therapy

rubberbandsandchewinggum13 Comments

So, therapy was frigging excellent on Monday. Yeah. I know, right?! Wtf happened?

Those of you who follow this blog regularly will know that it’s been a really very hard slog for me in my sessions (and life in general) over the last few months. After the rupture (wheels falling off in a big way) at Christmas, being in therapy with my therapist has felt incredibly difficult. In January it felt like things had reached the point of no return and I was contemplating terminating…I even went to see another therapist to get some additional help and perspective!

Anyway, I clearly didn’t cut and run in the new year and I am so glad I didn’t. Despite all the hard feelings and anxiety and various parts of me freaking out in different ways, I have stuck it out with my therapist. I’ve turned up every week hoping that something will shift in me and things will start to feel better. Sometimes all you can do is turn up and keep turning up and steadily, bit by bit, things change.

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It’s funny (not haha), because there’s been a really desperate part of me that has been so wounded by the rupture that it’s felt like it’s needed to run away from the relationship and go hide in a corner; but at the same time there is also a part that deep down knows that my therapist and I are going to be ok, that we can work our way through this block, break down my barriers, and do some good work. It’s almost like despite one (or more) part/s thinking it’s all doomed there is at least one part of me that knows that she is safe.

I know that we have a strong enough relationship now that I can have my meltdowns, act out, shut her out, and threaten to leave but at the end of it, when the storm has blown out, she’ll still be there ready and waiting to work through it with me. I am not used to that. As a child I was never been able to express my anger or rage without huge consequences and so ended up being a compliant little girl who turned all her anger inwards. It is no surprise to me that my inner critic is so powerful and that I have so much capacity to harm myself whether it be through not eating or self-harming. There’s a lot of anger that I’ve internalised over the years!

*(Can I just say that the last paragraph is how things feel right now. I can’t say I always feel sure of the therapeutic relationship. Indeed it is a regular struggle of mine that I feel if I say how I feel I will be told I am too much and get terminated!)

Anyway, I know that it’s recommended, if at all possible, to work through the tough stuff in the therapeutic relationship rather than cut and run because the likelihood is that whatever is causing a bother in the relationship with the current therapist will only repeat in a future therapeutic relationships. Essentially, most of what triggers me in the relationship taps back into some festering wound from my childhood. That’s why it feels so massive and life and death.

So, what am I going on about here? I’m in long and winding ramble mode today!

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It’s no secret that I’ve desperately wanted to reconnect with my therapist since what happened over Christmas but there’s been a lot of resistance on my part (or should I say some of my ‘parts’). When I actually get to session I’ve either felt isolated and alone or sometimes just not really bothered about anything. It’s like all the drama and ache and angst that kills me in the week evaporates when I get in the room. I think some of it is that some parts of me are so very glad to be with her that they almost forget the horror that happens outside the room; but I also think there is a part that just can’t be vulnerable and risk feeling more rejection.

It’s ironic really, I spend the whole week wanting to see her and yet, when I have arrived, I just haven’t been able open up. I can’t trust her, or at least ‘part’ of me can’t, and that part is dominant for the first 40 minutes of the 50 minute session. I can feel unsafe when I see her in person and as though she isn’t there with me, that she doesn’t care, and that I am an annoyance to her – or that’s what critical voice tells me over and over again until I am sat there shut down and frozen. The child parts have no reason to disbelieve the critic; it’s very convincing and does a good job of making the child believe she’s not safe. It’s an exhausting internal battle!

I am fully aware that this is my crazy brain not helping matters; my adult knows that this is all an overreaction and that it’s just one of my parts feeling unsettled. Unfortunately it’s not easy to override those feelings, because even though my head knows what’s going on by my body suggests something completely different. It’s hard to ignore the panic in your gut and rationalise it away. The body is exhibiting a trauma response and it trumps my head.

I’ve known my therapist for six years and worked with her for three of those; she is consistent and she is safe. She does care. She’s told me enough times that she wants to work with me and that she wouldn’t have agreed to see me again if she didn’t like me…but for some reason I can’t hang onto that. The positive affirming message/s she gives me in session slip through my fingers like grains of sand and by the middle of the week I am left standing empty handed. The needy child is distraught and by midweek the critic steps in and steadily erodes all trust in my therapist.

Yeah. It’s a really shitty cycle and one that I am trying hard to overcome. Like everything, though, I am realising it takes a lot of time and a lot of treading the same ground over and over again to find a better path. It’s like I am needing to forge a new pathway in my brain; I am steadily beating my way through thick overgrowth to a place that leads to the ‘she cares’ destination and trying to let the well-worn, easy path that forks off to ‘she couldn’t care less’ to grow over. Sometimes it’s just easier to walk the old path but I know if things are to improve long-term I need to get my walking gear on and start hacking my way through the bracken. The more I clear that difficult path and walk over it, the sooner it will become the easy path.

It’s partly why I am so hell bent on getting some kind of transitional object sorted. I really feel like if I had a tangible reminder that my therapist was out there, that she does care, and that all is not lost, then when the shit starts to hit the fan and I start to lose my way on the new path but still very rugged path and start veering back to the smooth one when the critic starts up I could go, ‘fuck you, you fucking bastard! I know what you’re doing here. I won’t believe your lies because here’s [waves transitional object – functioning as machete to hack back roots] proof! No, I won’t hurt myself. You are wrong and you don’t have the power anymore. Have some of that you sadistic fucker. I’m going this way!’ (apologies for the expletives!)

Look, I do know I am meant to be like ‘hey you, critic, what’s the deal here? Why are you so angry? Why can’t you trust anyone? Why do you think pushing everyone away is a good idea? What do you need to feel safer and to stop attacking? You’re hurting me and I want to understand why. Looks I’m making a new path that will suit us all better in the long run’; but sometimes I also get angry with myself about how long this voice has been controlling me. I know. I know. It’s me. I get it. But jeez it’s bloody exhausting… and relentless… and hellish. I’ll be 35 next week and this has been going on for almost twenty years now. Things need to change!

Anyway, as a result what happened at Christmas I haven’t been sharing the really vulnerable side of me lately. I’ve felt (my projection) as though my therapist doesn’t want to acknowledge or encourage the young parts in session and has wanted me to hold everything myself. As a result of this, I have stopped showing her the needy bits and, because I have done that, I have felt unseen and uncared for. She hasn’t reassured me because I haven’t given her any indication that I need reassurance. I have for all intents and purposes participated in the therapy. I haven’t been silent or stonewalled her. I just have come to therapy and talked about stuff that isn’t the stuff…you know?

The critic has been running the show and silencing all the vulnerable and needy parts that want to reach out and want to connect. A small mercy is that generally we do enough path beating in the session that I feel able to open up and really start tell her what I am feeling in the last ten minutes. The thing is this comes with its own problems because I don’t have the time to explore the issue and then leave feeling frustrated and uncontained. It’s not ideal.

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So, the session before the one on last Monday was tough stuff. I had written my therapist a letter the previous week following the session we’d had (so 2.5 weeks ago now) with a view to reading it to her or handing it over during the next session. Often it’s in the early part of the week where the big stuff comes up for me, but by the time the week rolls around and I get back to therapy the intensity of the feelings has settled down or sometimes I just plain don’t feel them when in the room. Frustrating doesn’t cover it!

I write a lot in this blog and process quite a bit, but obviously unless I take a post with me to session my therapist has no idea what I am grappling with – she doesn’t read this. Anyway, it’s been a long time since I have written to her rather than just show her one of these posts and so I got to writing. It ALL came out. Loads and LOADS. I had subheadings titled: Christmas Break, Child Parts, The Relationship, Texts, and LOVE… So yeah I’m sure you can work out from those that it was quite exposing. I let all the vulnerability out. EEEEEEEKKKKKKK!!

Of course, there’s always something that gets in the way. I took the letter to session and I just couldn’t give it to her. We talked a great deal about the barriers I seem to be putting up, and how she feels blindfolded sometimes. She made an analogy about me being like a baby that doesn’t want to/can’t feed for some reason. That she’s trying to give me something but for whatever reason I won’t accept it. The problem that happens then is that I leave the session hungry and then feel increasingly upset and uncontained as a result. That made loads of sense to me. It also made me realise that whilst I frequently think that she is withholding actually there’s a big part of me that won’t accept what she is trying to provide. I get so caught up in what the relationship isn’t that I sometimes can’t see what it is.

I didn’t give her the letter but I was able to tell her that I have been struggling with eye contact and talking. She did her best to reassure me and told me that she understood how hard it is to look at her when everything feels so tentative and vulnerable. I told her that I had written her a letter but even the thought of what was in it made me want to puke. The anxiety was huge. We talked a lot about how maybe I am being too hard on myself and perhaps the content is not as ‘bad’ as I believe it to be. She asked me how I would feel and respond if a friend of mine who I care about, respect and value had written that letter to me. Simple. I would say that it was ok and not to be embarrassed – so why can’t I do that for myself?

She spoke about the power of the critic and how we need to listen to it and work with it. She also said that sometimes it’s about readiness, i.e I hadn’t given her the letter that session but we had done a lot of talking around it and working out why it felt so hard to share it and perhaps next week things would be different.

I left the session feeling a bit annoyed with myself but also knew that I had done the best I could under the circumstances. I felt way more connected to my therapist, too. I know that the sense of connection always feels better when I am able to show her what’s bothering me and can be vulnerable. She always tries to meet me when I open up (why can’t I remember this?!). I felt like, maybe, I would be able to talk about the stuff, the ‘real stuff’ contained in the letter in the next session.

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And then ‘The Beast From The East’ hit with ‘Storm Emma’. We had a Red Alert weather warning from the Met Office which has never happened in my patch of the South West. Two feet of snow fell in twelve hours. Basically we were snowed in – 2ft of snow. I live out of the city on high ground and it feels really rural on the edge of the moors. We don’t get gritted on the roads and are left until snow melts. It sounds romantic but it’s really not! The last time something like this happened was in 2010 and we were stuck for a week.

I was so annoyed that I had built up a head of steam in therapy and was finally ready to share the stuff I have been hanging onto for sooooooooooo long and now it looked like I wouldn’t even be able to go to my session. Ugh. FFS!!! I text my therapist on Thursday evening to tell her I was stranded and it was probable that we would have to do our session via Skype on Monday unless something miraculous happened. I asked if she would read an email if I sent her one in order that we could talk about it – i.e the letter I had failed to give her last week. She agreed. I sent it on Friday morning and then felt ill!

I knew my therapist wouldn’t respond to the email and that we would address it in the session. The time between sending the email and the session dragged: my boiler broke down for two days; we had a power cut; and then mains water disappeared for 36 hours. I was not happy! BUT despite the utilities going wrong there was one good thing happened; the sun came out and the temperature went up to 8 degrees. The snow melted enough to get out the village on Monday!! … and I could go to session. Whoop!

Of course by the time I actually arrived at her house I was shitting my pants! I was going to see her face-to-face and she had already seen my letter! Eek. No backing out now.

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I sat down and I rambled on about the bad luck that had befallen me over the weekend with the utilities; but I knew that couldn’t last forever and actually I didn’t want to run from the issues I have been struggling with. I reached that quiet place where the outside world was left behind and my inner world was exposed and ready to be discussed. Silence. Eye contact gone.

My therapist asked me if I wanted to talk about the letter and was I ok to given that I’d had such a tiring weekend. I said yes but I didn’t know where to begin. Fortunately my therapist had written a load of notes when she had read the email and said maybe we could go through what she’d come up with to get us started. She said there was a lot of big things and it was important to take time to give everything space; and that it must’ve taken a lot of thought and effort to get it all written so coherently.

Anyway the long and short of it is that we talked about sooooooooooooo much stuff that has been eating away at me. We talked about the suicidal thoughts I had had after the rupture, the eating disorder and self-harm and what triggers it. Usually I run away from those topics. I always feel too embarrassed to let her know I am hurting myself or not eating – particularly because it’s the attachment to her that triggers the feelings of inadequacy, abandonment, and rejection that start me on the spiral of punishing myself in one way or another.

She addressed all the parts of me and every part felt seen and understood. She was so attuned. And that felt really great even though the conversation was really tough and incredibly exposing. She spent a lot of time telling me that she cares about me and my well-being and I actually heard it. I believed it. There wasn’t any part of me that wanting chip in ‘yeah, whatever lady, it’s all lies’ which is what often happens. The child parts want to absorb her care but there’s generally the teen and the critic ready to rubbish what she says and that didn’t happen this time.

Better yet, is that this week has been fine. Good even. Of course I miss my therapist but I don’t feel like my world is falling apart because I can’t see her. I don’t feel like she is gone/dead. I don’t feel like some desperate, pathetic loser who has latched on to some poor unsuspecting therapist. I don’t feel ridiculous. The little parts feel contained and settled because they know she cares. I feel like she is in the relationship too. I (adult) know she cares about me. And that is huge. Until now I haven’t really felt it – or maybe like the baby that’s hungry but refuses to feed, haven’t allowed myself to feel it.

I am looking forward to seeing her on Monday. And, amazingly, I am ready to talk more about the very hardest things.

I know. What on earth has happened here?!

So, what’ve I learned from all this?

I’ve learnt that allowing yourself to be vulnerable in therapy is important. It’s fucking scary, I won’t lie! Telling someone how you feel is terrifying when you can’t be sure of their response especially when it relates to core attachment wounds. It’s not just the adult involved; there’s a bunch of traumatised kids too. I know I can trust my therapist. I know she wants to help me. She can handle all the parts that show up and she does want to know about all of them. I know I’ve got to dare to take risks even when there is a strong critic trying to shut me down.

 

 

Don’t get me wrong- I know that the feelings I am writing about here won’t last forever. I’m not naïve enough to think I’ve turned the corner with this stuff and I’ll never doubt the relationship or have an enormous rupture. I’ve had lots of great connecting sessions over the years but somehow always find my way back to that well-worn, dangerous path. But what I am saying is this: even when you feel like you are swimming against the tide and barely holding on in therapy, things do eventually shift and change. There are moments of connection and care and love and they are worth every second of the struggle that goes before. You’ve got to take the rough with the smooth; it’s all part of the work.

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Crisis of Confidence: When Will I Feel ‘Good Enough’?

rubberbandsandchewinggum8 Comments

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It’s a bloody battle in my head right now; so many parts are activated and playing up! I’m (well a dominant part of me at least) having a bit of a crisis of confidence at the moment and this is fuelling the internal anxiety fire in a big way. I’ve been feeling pretty overwhelmed and useless these last couple of days – which was not helped at all by my inability to talk about what I wanted to in therapy on Monday – and got stuck in procrastination mode for most of the morning.

For those of you who don’t know, back in the days before I had kids (also read ‘when I was young and vibrant’) I was a secondary school English teacher (Oi you! Don’t judge the poor writing, spelling, punctuation, and grammar!). I went back to work after my maternity leave when I had my daughter but resigned almost immediately. My little girl was really unsettled in nursery and was so upset that she would wake every half hour through the night crying; all that would settle her back to sleep was breastfeeding.

I was completely knackered after a month of being up pretty much all night and we felt terrible seeing her so distressed. It’s heartbreaking to see a baby in distress and to know it is you that is causing it. We found a childminder who could do one day a week and my wife took days off on leave each week to reduce the time our daughter needed to be in childcare but things weren’t right and it was just horrid.

The last thing I ever want for my children is for them to feel alone or abandoned – I guess that comes from being all too familiar with those feelings myself. Our confident and happy little girl was not herself at all. People said ‘she’d get used to it’ and ‘to give it time’, but I think you need to trust your instincts as a parent (and as a human being) and do what feels right to you.

I know a lot of people thought I was insane when my wife and I made the decision that I would take some time out of teaching whilst we had our family in order that I could be at home with the kids. I know they thought we were being soft and pandering to a grumpy baby. But I know that little girl better than anyone and she was not ok. She was not a fractious baby and she was a good sleeper – until I went back to work. I know what it is like to be shoved from pillar to post, after school club to childminder, to empty house with a key, and I have never wanted that for my children.

It’s not been easy. Losing my salary has meant life has changed massively. We used to go on big holidays twice a year to 5* hotels – skiing in the winter and sunshine in the summer. I had a new car. I would shop a lot, eat out a lot, just not really worry about money at all.

Since I stopped work the best we’ve managed is basic holidays in the UK in static caravans, my car is falling apart (I actually reversed into a granite post this week so it’s proper fucked now!), and shopping is a thing of the past. Credit cards groan under the pressure but hand on heart I can say that prioritising my child’s needs has been the best thing I have done. Why? Because not only have I done what was right for her, it looked after my needs too. I couldn’t bear knowing my baby was unhappy each day when I left her and knowing that I have a securely attached, confident, little person now is just the best. In fact I have two of them.

Some kids handle nursery with no bother and that’s brilliant, but my kid didn’t. I don’t judge people that put their kids in care at a young age, most people have no choice, and so it seems strange that it is ok for people to judge my choices. As it turns out my daughter took to preschool like a duck to water at three years old and my son has been going since he was two. They are both well-adjusted (if not slightly bloody irritating!) kids. It’s all about timing and knowing what is right for your child. Blah blah. Don’t get me wrong I am not a model parent. I do the best I can – sometimes it’s good enough and sometimes I fall short.

Anyway, that’s enough of that. This isn’t a bloody parenting blog!; it’s a mental health rant! So what’s the story here? I’ve been out of the classroom for five years now. I miss it. I miss the kids. I really miss the money. I miss feeling like I have a purpose other than being a mum (although the fact that I am personally trapped in a perpetual cycle of trying to find a mother in my therapist shows just what an important job being a mum really is). I miss the banter with my colleagues. I miss feeling like I am good at something. Don’t be fooled, though, there’s a great deal I don’t miss: politics, parent/teacher evenings, not being able to pee when I need to, report writing, staff meetings!

For the first couple of years when I left school I did some private tuition for students who were heading into their exams. Then I got sick with Lymphoma and took a break from it all. It’s been two years since I finished my treatment and I very recently (the last month or so) decided it was time to get back into the tutoring. Basically an ex-colleague set up a tutoring agency and was looking for English teachers. It makes sense. I can work around being there for the kids as the work is largely in the evenings. It’s pretty good money for an hour’s work, too.

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Anyway, I dusted off my teacher persona, went and had a chat with my friend, and signed up to share my knowledge with kids again. Ha! Poor little buggers! It’s funny, whilst ‘teacher’ is a hat I can put on with ease, I was really aware of how heavy it feels on my head the moment I put it back on – ok that’s a bit of a shite metaphor but there you are. Whilst part of me loves talking about English and helping kids there is also another part that needs to be great and that is a huge pressure. And yes ‘great’ is the right word.

I am a perfectionist by nature. I like things to be right. I have high expectations of myself but at the same time I am crap crap crap at getting down to work. I am basically a perfectionist with a huge procrastination streak attached. I know why this is. If I don’t give myself enough time to do something and it goes wrong, or I fail, then I can blame it on time management rather and being lazy rather than actually being useless. I am so afraid to fail that I daren’t even really try. How sad is that?

The ironic thing is, I have never failed at anything really. I am capable and competent. A high achiever. But I put myself under a great deal of unnecessary pressure and stress. For example, I always leave things until the very last minute. I didn’t do any research/reading for my Masters thesis until three days before the deadline and then wrote the entire thing from scratch in 24 hours. I was absolutely shattered having not slept.

I was anxious for the few weeks leading into the deadline but it still didn’t feel possible to actually get down to work. It’s always been the same. I sometimes wonder what life would be like if I gave myself adequate time to do things and put myself under less strain? Although part of me wonders if I thrive under pressure and just need to accept I am the way I am.

So, last week was when I suffered a massive crisis of confidence. I was due to see my first student on Wednesday evening and gave myself the day to get sorted. Since I taught last the whole exam system has changed – or the grading has. We no longer have A*-U and instead have 1-9. Same same really. Anyway, I knew that the syllabus this kid was studying was all new and so I would have to find out about the structure of the syllabus and familiarise myself with how the exam papers were set up and what was being assessed and how. Basically, nothing I haven’t done a million times before in my job.

But for some reason on Wednesday morning I felt anxious and panicked. What if I couldn’t find what I needed on the exam board website? What if I didn’t understand the syllabus? What if I couldn’t work out how to apply the mark scheme? What if I couldn’t plan anything useful to teach in my session?…

I literally felt sick to my stomach. It felt like I had loads to do and that I just couldn’t do it. I was frozen. I had no self-belief.

That is fucking insane.

Like literally fucking insane.

I hate that my mind sabotages me like this.

I trained to teach in 2005 and taught for seven years before leaving the profession. I have trained and mentored trainee teachers. All my teaching observations have been either good or outstanding. I used to teach 150 different kids each week of all abilities including those with SEN. I would plan and deliver 23 lessons a week. My results were always great – the kids made good progress. Why on earth would I not be able to make sense of a sodding syllabus and plan a frigging lesson/tutoring session? After all English is always English. It’s the same skills just examined in a slightly different way.

I don’t know what happened.

All I know is that feeling helpless and useless activated the inner child and the inner critic simultaneously. The critic was berating me for being pathetic and incapable telling me I shouldn’t eat and to hurt myself; the little one was screaming that she needed my therapist ‘right nowwwww!’ I ignored the critic and told the child that I understood, and that I (adult) wanted our therapist too but we had to wait until Monday. She didn’t like that at all!

As it turned out, when I did manage to drag myself out from under the duvet, having spent a good while hiding with my soft toy rabbit, I was really productive. I found exactly what I needed, printed out and read everything I needed, and planned some work and made some resources. It was fine. I can do this stuff. Why then do I doubt myself so much?

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The session (teaching, not therapy!) went fine, too. What else did I expect? Or more to the point why would I expect that it would be rubbish and I would be lacking or not up to the job? Why do I have this deep-rooted sense of not being good enough? Everything I have done and achieved over the years has come about through my work and my ability and yet, somehow I feel like a fraud. Part of me is certain that the next thing I do will expose me for who I really am. Someone will see through my façade and it’ll all come crashing down.

Part of me knows that it’s a distorted view of myself but there is another part that is adamant that it’s correct. That part is the one that fears being seen in therapy. I don’t want to be seen and be judged to be lacking, not good enough, inadequate. I want to believe that if I show myself to my therapist that she’ll see something that I simply don’t. It just feels incredibly risky because I don’t think I can cope with having my worst fears confirmed – no matter how unrealistic they actually are.

It’s tragic that, essentially, there’s a little girl inside me that feels desperately unloved. No matter how ‘good’ she is she can never get what she wants- and that is a physical demonstration of her mother’s love and care -her mother’s holding and containment. I have spent my whole life trying to be the good girl in order that I might get my mum to notice me and want to touch me. I have tied my sense of self worth to my academic achievements and being able to be self-sufficient when really my low self-worth comes from feeling unlovable. #motherwound

No matter what I achieve or how high I jump nothing has ever been enough to change how my mum is with me. Sure, she’s proud. And I am sure in her eyes I am ‘good enough’ but the damage to my sense of self was done so long ago that I can’t seem to get out off the track I am on. I can’t divorce myself from the idea that no matter what I do it is not enough to be loved…. and that’s why I am a fucking disaster.

How long is it til Monday? I could really use a therapy session! … but it’s set for blizzard conditions as of tomorrow morning so who knows if I’ll even get there.

This post is really just much ado about nothing!

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Rainbow Bridge

rubberbandsandchewinggum16 Comments

I’m going to apologise in advance for the rambling nature of this. I’ve a lot to say and yet my mind is struggling to formulate my thoughts in a clear way. I guess that’s what grief does to me. So, you’ve been warned, if you choose to stick with me, here’s wishing you some good luck for bouncing along and coming out the other end of this with some kind of picture of what’s going on in my brain. I can’t make any promises though, you may reach the end and still be none the wiser.

What’s up?

I am heartbroken.

Devastated.

So very sad.

Why?

Yesterday I had to send my lovely golden retriever off to play in the fields on the other side of the rainbow bridge. On Thursday at a routine check for his steroids (he has a long term skin problem) we discovered that he had a large tumour on his stomach (when will cancer please just leave me, and those I care about, alone?). The vet allowed him home with us for the weekend, to spoil him and give him the best few days of his life, and he was booked in to be put to sleep this coming Monday at 9:30am.

There was nothing that could be done for him. He was an old dog, we knew we were on borrowed time with him before this, but it hasn’t made the feelings of loss any less severe. Just because you know you are going to lose someone it doesn’t it any less painful than when it’s an unexpected loss. I should know. I’ve experienced both now and I’m not just referring to the dog here.

Knowing we were to be saying goodbye on Monday we all went out for a special walk with just him (not all our other bonkers hounds) to his favourite spot and took photos of him with the kids. The amazing thing about this dog is that even when he isn’t well he never really lets on; he’s stoic. Had we not already known he was unwell we’d never have suspected anything inside him was wrong on the walk: he swam in the river; found and destroyed a tennis ball; was able to jump in and out of the car; his tail wagged throughout. He was happy.

We had expected to have the rest of the weekend with him, giving him lots of love and cuddles, and generally just being with our super soft old boy and slowly saying our goodbyes. It wasn’t to be, though. I woke up yesterday morning to find him lying on his bed with a reasonable amount of blood on the fur round his back end and he was looking very sorry for himself. I think the tumour had perhaps started to rupture his stomach as the vet had said could happen – I wasn’t going to take any chances if that was the case.

I called my wife down and she cleaned him up while I called the vets to take him in. It wouldn’t have been right or fair to keep him here until Monday. I would never have forgiven myself if he’d have started haemorrhaging or been in pain. I spent the next two hours waiting to go to the vets sitting on the floor with his head on my legs, stroking him as he drifted in and out of sleep. He was ready to go even if I wasn’t ready for him to leave.

The time at the vets was calm and peaceful. My dog likes the vets and was none the wiser as they catheterised him ready for his injection. I cried and cried knowing what I was about to do, even though I knew there was no choice. It’s part of the responsibility of owning animals, knowing when it is the right time to help them die and ensure they are not suffering or in pain. I told him that he was the best boy and that I loved him, stroking him as the vet administered the anaesthetic. And then he was gone. I can’t get over how one minute he was there, the next not.

I’ve never had to euthanise an animal before. This dog was my first dog, and even though we have four others now this boy was my favourite. He was special. He’s been through the mill with me. I’ve never had to experience the loss of losing a dog and I really wasn’t ready for the hit of grief. I thought with an animal it’d be ok. Turns out it’s no different to losing a human you love. Some people may think that sounds insane but grief is grief and love is love. And I bloody loved that dog and the grief is huge.

I was never allowed pets when I was growing up and had always longed for a dog. I remember that I used to leave notes round the house begging my parents for a dog when I was about ten years old! As I child I desperately wanted/needed something to love that would love me unconditionally and would always be there (looks like that need hasn’t gone even now).

I remember that I used to have a video of cartoons that I would watch over and over. One of the episodes was of a child being given a bouncy puppy by its parents – a yellow dog with a red collar. The child was really happy. And that was what I wanted. I wanted a dog and to be happy.

Being an only child with a mum that was away when I was small and a dad that was away when I was bigger, I craved that consistent presence of an animal that would be there through thick and thin. I didn’t want to be perpetually alone and I knew that at a really young age even if only subconsciously. That hole that I have inside, the mother wound, the deficit in love and care, developmental trauma, call it what you will has been there a long time and I think back then I though it could be filled by a dog.

Once, when I was almost eleven, and believe me this has stayed with me as a particular kind of trauma and grief, my mum agreed that we could get a dog. YAY!! HAPPY DANCE! EXCITEMENT! JOY! She took me to the local dog rescue centre and I found ‘the’ dog – it was a medium sized, short haired, cross-breed – to be fair any of them would have been fine! We took him out for a walk round the compound and I was delighted with him.

We went home and I waited until the day we could bring the dog home. You can see where this is going can’t you? The dog never came home. My mum had changed her mind and didn’t want a dog.

Ouch.

Grief.

I was going to be alone still.

It’s no surprise to me that one of my child parts is an eleven year old girl who has basically given up hope.

Anyway, flash forward 13 years and I finally owned my own house. The moment (ok the day after) I got the keys I started filling it with furry creatures – as you do. I got two kittens and then started searching for a litter of yellow pups. I found my boy’s litter down in Cornwall just a mile from my dad’s house on the beach. Seemed like fate.

I remember the day, five weeks after I met him, when it was time to pick up the little golden bundle (red collar at the ready) and how instantly I fell in love with him. We stopped in at my dad’s before going home in order to introduce him to the pup. The doglet peed on the rug but dad didn’t care! He was as taken with the boy as we were.

He’d always wanted a dog but his work and travel commitments hadn’t allowed for it. He was delighted, however, to now be a ‘grandad’ and would be able to have the dog for us when we were away. The last photo I have of my dad is of him holding my seven week old pup – I have it framed in my house and it is all the more special to me after yesterday.

My dad died on holiday abroad less than three months after I got my puppy and that unexpected loss sent my world into freefall. I have CPTSD and that month after my dad died did nothing to help that. I still feel sick when I think about it and have horrible nightmares even almost ten years later. I didn’t know in May 2008 when I collected my furry beastie that this puppy would be the dog that essentially saved my life.

Three months after my dad’s death I had a massive, and I mean MASSIVE mental breakdown. I don’t know how I had managed teaching the term between September and December – all I can say is that I think I was in complete denial about what had happened. I was surviving pretty much on thin air and looking back now I can see how poorly I had become.

My fuse had been getting shorter and shorter and my tolerance for the kids’ usual behaviour was lessened as the term went on. I had started to dread going to work. I didn’t have the resources to hold everything together. I made it to Christmas, somehow, but life outside work was crumbling because I was having to throw everything I had into surviving the day at work.

Between Christmas and New Year I had been steadily working on marking GCSE mock exams. I had gone down to my dad’s (now my) house to do my work because my wife was working long days in the hospital and I thought being at the beach with my dog would be soothing. The beach was great and the dog, my constant companion, was all the company I needed. I am a bit of a loner but I never felt alone with him.

I had just completed the marking and planning and was all up-to-date and ready for the next school term with a couple of days until term started and then reality hit. When I actually stopped and looked around me I realised what had happened and it felt instantly as though I couldn’t function any more. I crashed.

I can remember my wife came down after she had finished her block of shifts; we’d planned that I’d get my work done so we could have a relaxing couple of days walking along the coast and snuggling up by the fire before heading back home to work. The moment she arrived I burst into tears in the kitchen and started shaking. I couldn’t stop.

It was then that she told me I wasn’t fit for work and that we’d be going to the GP when we got home to get me signed off. So January 2009 was when I entered into the world of NHS mental health services. I was so desperately anorexic, suicidal, and terrified that it all became a bit of a circus in the end (I’ve written about it before). From that point I started living on a cycle of appointments which actually just massively increased my stress and anxiety levels.

The interventions with my GP, crisis team, psychiatrists, oh and bloody ‘wellbeing at work’ really did very little to help me heal. Part of the problem was worrying every other week that my GP was going to ‘make me’ go back to work as she only ever signed me off for two weeks at a time. I used to feel sick leading into the appointment because I categorically knew that I was not safe to go back into the classroom but was terrified that she would only see the high functioning articulate person in front of her and not hear the words I was saying.

I have never been the ‘stereotypical depressed person’ (which, by the way, is a complete pile of shit anyway). I don’t stay in bed all day, cry in front of people, or fail to shower and neglect myself (as if that’s all that is valid) and I think in part that’s why I’ve never really got the help I have needed. I have been ‘too ok’ when actually it’s just a front I put on for that ten minute window and it takes an enormous amount of effort. I wish I had the insight I have now back then about being seen or not being seen, about trauma, and about my coping strategies!

I didn’t feel able to advocate for myself back then and got swallowed up by the system and was beholden to it. It’s weird how these things work but I think when you don’t know what to expect that you just imagine that the system can do things to you and that you have no choice in it. I was young and all I knew of these services was that they locked you up… my auntie was in and out of psychiatric units her whole adult life and I just assumed that I had to comply with whatever was being thrown at me.

I think, too, that I was so desperate for things to get better that if I kept attending appointments then somehow things would just somehow get better, that they could ‘do something to me’ and it would take away the pain and I would be able to go back to normal.

I wanted my life back.

I wanted my dad back.

I saw my GP every week but wasn’t until about four months into being signed off on a two week rolling basis that I was able to tell her that it was really stressing me out (I’m crap at expressing my needs…nothing has changed!). I had lost about another stone in weight and I could see that she was wondering what the hell was happening with me.

I still remember when she said, ‘people as young as you don’t usually need so much time off work’… but agreed then to sign me off for an eight week spell and referred me for an eating disorder assessment as the graph on the computer showed that things were not going well. I can’t tell you how much the anxiety lifted at that point (not having to go to work) but landed on me at the same time (ED assessment).

Anyway the mental health stuff is neither here nor there really it’s just part of a narrative about my current feelings of loss.

I was off work for a total of 17 months and I can categorically say that had it not been for my dog I would not be here now. It was the routine of walking him every day along the canal that kept me here when all I wanted was to disappear. It was sitting on the sofa or lying in bed and him being beside me that helped me feel safe and understood and loved when humans weren’t capable of making me feel that way. It was my dog that sat with my tears when everyone else got silence or ‘I’m fine’.

I shut everyone out at that time but I feel that dog knew my soul and accepted all the broken parts of me. I loved him unconditionally and I know he loved me too – in the only way a dog can. I realise that to a non-animal person this all sounds really saccharine and over the top. I guess before I had him I would’ve thought something along the lines of ‘yeah it’s sad but it’s just a dog’ but I know differently now.

I know that my grief is magnified, too, because this loss is not just about my dog. Losing my dog has activated all the unprocessed grief from nearly a decade ago when I lost my dad. The grief from back then that has been fairly settled but not fully processed. All of a sudden my dog, my protector, isn’t here and all the emotional pain is flooding in. I knew this would happen and have been dreading this time coming for the last couple of years.

I have therapy tomorrow and even that has been an emotional rollercoaster! Initially I had thought that I’d be taking my dog to the vet on Monday and so I text my therapist late in the evening on Thursday to tell her what had happened and that I wouldn’t be able to get to my session. I didn’t ask to reschedule or Skype even though I wanted to see her. Why do I do that to myself?!

She responded almost immediately with a very understanding message (far better than anything she’s sent previously) and said she’d see me on the 26th. The message was containing enough but I went into a meltdown about having to wait until the 26th to see her!

I knew I couldn’t see my therapist in person but the idea of not being able to talk with her for another week with Easter around the corner was just hideous (I found out I have a four week/three session therapy break this Easter in the last session), particularly as I left the session on Monday telling her that I was annoyed with her about the pebbles/transitional object and felt like she was avoiding talking about our relationship!

Ah, this is a bit of an aside but now I am talking about it I may as well bring things up to speed…

The session had been ok and then she’d brought up talking about the pebbles and she said something along the lines of: I find it difficult to tell her what I need and perhaps if we tried a different angle talking about nurturing, protective, and wise figures rather than about us then we might get some useful material. I shutdown immediately (not that she’d have known) but I could feel the rage rising in me when she said that.

I was annoyed for a couple of reasons: 1) that she was asking me to engage with the pebbles when actually nothing I say really matters. It has no impact whatever I say because if she doesn’t feel it to be genuine on her side then she won’t say it or write it. I said as much and she picked up on the fact that I had lost trust in the process after the texts at Christmas; 2) I feel like I spend such a lot of time avoiding talking about the therapeutic relationship that I didn’t want to do it again, ie talk about ‘figures’ rather than ‘us’ because when we do talk about us it might be hard but it is way more connecting.

I guess it’s the thing I was talking about last post again about what I hear and what is said. She was trying to find a way for us to connect with this stuff in order to move forward with the break coming and all I heard is that we weren’t going to be talking about us and that she was fucking off for a month. Ugh. RAGE!

Anyway, I sat there silent and stony and listened to what she said. Basically she wanted me to tell her what qualities I associate with different kinds of figures. We began by talking about nurturing figures. I came up with two points and then sort of gave up and sat there.

She asked what was up and told her I was annoyed because we are avoiding the issues in the relationship. She tried to explain why she thought what we doing was good idea and that it wasn’t ‘instead’ of talking about the relationship and asked what I thought was going on between us. I said I had no idea. The session was up and I left feeling disgruntled and pissed off. As I left she said, ‘it’s ok to be annoyed, and it’s ok to be annoyed with me’. I didn’t respond and walked out the door. Petulant teen? Or disappointed child? Frustrated adult? ALL OF THE ABOVE!

I drove home feeling grrrrr and arrrgghhhh and then went through the usual shit about feeling like she doesn’t care and that I am wasting my time and ….

… and then I came out of that (!) and thought it might be worth engaging with what she had asked me (don’t roll your eyes, I’ve already done it for you!). So I came up with this and then sent it to her:

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I don’t know exactly know what will come of it but I would like to think the text exchanges we’ve had the last few days haven’t come about by chance. They feel warmer and more responsive…but it could just me being more willing to see care where there is some. I don’t know!

Anyway back to the communications via text -I waited until Friday morning to text her (usual rambling style!):

I’ve gone into total meltdown overnight (bad dreams etc) about not being able to see you until the 26th alongside the reality that dog is actually going to die. I really want to talk to you on Monday (I’m not annoyed now) but as Wife is home all day on dog leave I don’t think it’d feel very easy doing Skype with her in the house – although I would be home from the vets by our session time so maybe it’d be ok. Wife says I should just go to our session and let her deal with dog but I think I’d feel awful if I’m not there at the end with him. I don’t know what to do. I don’t really know what I am asking but if we can find a way of talking on Monday I would like to. I feel so sad right now but also completely pathetic that I am not ok with not seeing you…which makes me feel anxious about Easter too. Ugh. The shame! X

She responded quickly again and said she understood my dilemma and maybe we should just try skype anyway and see how it feels. That she’d be there and to let her know what I would like to do.

I downloaded the Skype app to my phone and thought worst case scenario I could Skype in my car. When I told my wife I was going to do my session by Skype she said she’d go out and meet me in town afterwards. It’s weird. It was no bother for her to do it and yet I felt like if I had asked her to go out I would have been asking too much or in some way making the therapy seem a secret. I don’t know. I mean ultimately what goes on in my sessions is secret but I don’t know….

I text my therapist and told her I’d like to Skype and she replied again. Good. That makes things feel easier. It doesn’t take a lot for me to feel settled and contained when she is responsive.

As it turns out none of this is an issue now because I now don’t have to go to the vet tomorrow. I am looking forward to seeing my therapist in person. I just hope that the session is as connecting and nurturing as I need it to be. I hope I can show her how sad I am and not shut her out like I did when my friend died last year.

I know part of the issue is that I want to be held by her and to let my emotions out but am scared of doing so knowing that she’ll just leave me sitting there crying. I’d rather hold everything in than feel like I’ve been left alone with it when it’s all coming out.

I know that if I could ask her to sit closer to me then that would help, but unless I am able to tell her that I know it won’t happen because the last time she moved closer to me I dissociated and started crying….and although I was crying because I wanted her to be close, closer than she was, I know she thinks that she has intruded into my space and upset me. Ugh.

So that’s about where things are at right now.

My darling boy is gone and I am bereft.

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Artwork above from: RedandHowling

Fight. Flight. Freeze. Or all of the above?!

rubberbandsandchewinggum6 Comments

So, Monday’s therapy session was supposed the hail the start of the Christmas therapy break. No prizes for guessing how it went. Ugh! Same old pattern: I started off quite chirpy and present and then somehow when my therapist suggested that perhaps the dream I was talking about might actually be about how I felt a sense of loss around the break and how I was worried about things falling apart…. well, it took me by surprise and I felt a massive shift in myself.

I thought the dream was about grieving the loss of my friend…which it also probably was. Damn why are dreams so multi-layered?!

Up until that point I had been sailing through the session firmly locked in my adult. I’ve notice that I try and do this as I head into a therapy break. I think it’s something about wanting to try and ground myself firmly in a coping place before I am ‘left’ (or abandoned!). I don’t want to dredge up hard feelings, awaken the child parts, or really even let my therapist in when I know I am going to be left without contact for a period of time.

Sometimes this strategy works just fine and sometimes it really doesn’t at all! If I don’t have complete control over the conversation, then my therapist can say things that trigger a response in me and override the adult’s ability to keep things surface level. That’s exactly what happened when she brought up how I might be feeling about the break.

It’s not as though I didn’t know we would be addressing the time away from therapy in some capacity. I mean Monday was going to be the day to do the pebbles, to create a holding message for the therapy break. But before we even got to talking about them I had shut down.

As soon as she mentioned the break there was a part of me was really raging and angry. I think my therapist even commented that I might be angry about the coming disruption. I hate it when she says ‘maybe you are angry’ because it’s one emotion that I am not very good at expressing and it’s only recently that I have noticed what the feeling is. My way of feeling and expressing anger up until very recently has been against myself: self harm and anorexia are the products of internalised anger!

Usually I say, ‘I’m not angry’  but when I think about it, yep, there is always a part of me that is and of course she is right. I think in part it’s the frustrated teen part who knows that it’s going to be her job to run the show and protect the little ones but there is a far darker more pervasive part, too, that steps up and that’s the inner critic. That voice is terrifying and scary but it has also acted as a protector (of sorts) over the years.

The problem with the sessions before breaks is that if I can’t hang on to adult then team ‘Fuck You’ turn up. They simultaneously want to fight and run. I know I sat for a very long time in silence in the session desperately hoping that my therapist would reach out to me. I know she tried repeatedly to find a way to connect with me but when I am like that she has no chance because the critic has me on lock down. The parts of me that crave closeness (mainly little ones) are imprisoned by the hard one.

At one point I could hear its voice saying, ‘Just leave. She doesn’t care about you. Fuck this. You don’t need her’. My therapist asked what was happening in my head and I finally said that a voice was telling me to leave. She asked why hadn’t left and I replied, ‘because that voice has even more power over me when I am not here’. And that is frightening for me. I told her that I knew that the moment I left the room it was going to be very difficult. She said ‘because there are things that need to be said?’ and I nodded.

To be clear, I have never attempted suicide and yet recently there have been several occasions where I have mentally planned out how many pills I would need to take to put an end to feeling this way. I don’t think I would ever act on the plan. Although I am writing this from a place of feeling ‘okish’ and I don’t think suicide attempts usually come from this place.

Ultimately, there are several reasons why I can’t see myself taking an overdose. First and foremost: I just will not do that to my kids. I know what it is like to lose a parent and I will never willingly put my children through that, or put them through a failed suicide attempt. Even when I looked, and often felt, like I was dying when I was going through chemo I drew on every last ounce of strength to keep it together and present an ‘I’m ok’ front for my kids.

My daughter still worries every time I have to go to the doctors, even if it is totally unrelated to the treatment. That’s a hell of a burden for a five year old to carry and I am not going to deliberately add to that. With my history of cancer and the heavy duty treatment regime I underwent it is not beyond the realms of possibility that I will get ill again, either through relapse or as a side effect of the treatment. One day I may not be here for them anyway so I will not take myself away from them through my own volition.

This time two years ago I was being radiated to my chest every day for three weeks. I had a two day break from radiotherapy over Christmas but by which time I couldn’t swallow anything that was in any way crunchy because my oesophagus was essentially microwaved and red raw. Christmas dinner was a disappointment!

As much as I don’t like to look back at what I went through then because I just find it totally overwhelming, I do have to remember that when I got diagnosed there was a part of me that was terrified and part of me that dug deep, really deep, and that’s what I have to do now.

I made it through, bone marrow biopsies, CT guided biopsies through my chest wall to reach the tumour, multiple PET and CT scans, several lung function tests, heart echo tests, oh, and don’t forget twelve chemotherapies and radiation!

The treatment stripped me back and my immune system is still knackered. Which is why I am almost always ill now. I lost all my hair. I knew I would lose the hair on my head but nothing quite prepares you for it coming out in your hand in huge clumps and blocking the plug hole as you shower.

Even when I made the choice to shave my head there was something about sitting in the salon watching my lovely long hair fall to the floor that was awful. I wasn’t prepared to lose my eye brows, my eye lashes, and ALL MY BODY HAIR. I am sure there are some women who would like to look like a nine year old downstairs – indeed I know many pay for the privilege, but I hated the whole thing.

So, what am I saying?

If I made it through all that and survived then I must survive what I am going through right now. I have to believe that things will get better. Experience tells me that it will be the case. Each time that I hit the deck emotionally and/or physically, there is something that picks me up or I, at least, navigate my way to a more secure space to catch my breath a bit.

Ok, I’m not soaring through the clouds by any means today, but the sense of feeling like I want to die isn’t there. It doesn’t ever last. It’s just an extreme response to some really difficult feelings. It’s almost as though I feel like I cannot hold the emotion and so the only way is out. But it’s not. The only way is to go through it and wait to come out the other side because it happens eventually.

I’ve said a few times when I have commented on other people’s blogs that I liken therapy and life to the story of Michael Rosen’s, We’re Going On A Bear Hunt. It’s a great young children’s book. A group of children set off on an adventure to find a bear and on the way they encounter several obstacles:

‘We’re going on a bear hunt. We’re going to catch a big one. What a beautiful day! We’re not scared.

Uh-Uh! A snowstorm! A swirling whirling snow storm. We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it! Oh no! We’ve got to go through it.’

And that’s how I see it. I journey through life on my ‘bear hunt’ and a lot of the time it is a ‘beautiful day’ and when things are good I don’t feel ‘scared’ at all. But then sometimes I am faced with obstacles, sometimes it’s ‘thick oozy mud’ and other times I am caught up in the ‘swirling whirling snowstorm’.

What I do know for sure is that the obstacles are all part of the journey and I can, and will, overcome each and every one that is thrown at me….ok, a cancer relapse may be a bit out of my control, but barring that I will keep going forward because there is always the chance of the beautiful day in between the challenges.

It’s all about trying to hang onto that knowledge when it feels bleak. It’s not at all easy because when things feel bad I suffer from optimism amnesia. Last Monday, in session, I was caught up in an emotional storm and part of me felt frozen. Actually, I did. I was physically stone cold. But what I mean is, the fear, or shame, or whatever it was made me freeze. In the moment I couldn’t find a way out of how bad it felt. It was impossible to imagine that things could ever feel better when I was locked in that headspace and I just couldn’t talk. So rather than run from it, I just sat with it.

I used to get really annoyed with myself when I would shutdown and freeze in session but my therapist is great (gush, I love her!) and is really working with me to notice when this happens and how it feels when I leave the window of tolerance…or as a friend and I joke ‘letterbox of tolerance’ (because that space is so narrow).

I used to feel like these responses: fight, flight, freeze were a barrier to the therapy but now I see that it is all part of it. Processing how it feels when I get to that place, not necessarily in the moment because it is not always possible, is important and bit by bit we are doing that.

We didn’t do the pebbles. We touched on them briefly and I said that I was feeling anxious and stressed about them. I can’t really remember what we said, actually. I know I said something about how it was difficult for me to express the need for them (or the message) and part of me was really attacking that part of me for being needy. I think my therapist asked me if I had any ideas what to put on them and said she’d had some ideas but didn’t elaborate on what they were. I think I just went so deep into my shell that we didn’t get anywhere with it.

On reflection I know what it is that has been bothering me about the pebbles. It’s fear. I am scared that she isn’t going to say what I feel I need her to. Above all, I want a message that comes from her, not one that I have crafted with her. I don’t want to help script the words. Essentially the message I am asking for/need is a demonstration of care on her part. I am asking her to prove that there is a connection in our relationship.

Sounds ok? Well, it did ought to be after all these years but there is a big part of me that is terrified that what she will write will prove something entirely different to me – a lack of care and connection. Part of me can’t bring myself to go through that. Part of me would sooner live in the hope that just maybe she cares rather than have my heart broken by her showing me in black and white that I don’t actually matter at all to her.

I totally get how dramatic that seems.

I felt a bit frustrated at the end of the session because the critic/(asshole protector) part had taken so much of the session and had side lined the little ones that needed holding and containment in preparation for the break. But my therapist told me that the part that had shown up in session was as valid as all the others, and had a place there. She acknowledged that it often shows up around breaks and disruptions and that she has a far clearer picture of it now….which I guess is a good thing.

Leaving the session felt pretty awful but actually this week hasn’t been too bad at all. I have been really really busy and really really ill. I haven’t had capacity to look inwards or think too much. I can feel there are some little ones feeling a bit upset and in need of a cuddle but generally they are coping ok.

At the beginning of this I said ‘Monday’s therapy session was supposed to hail the start of the therapy break’ and perhaps that’s why I am not in full blown meltdown about last session.

A few weeks ago my therapist offered me a session on Thursday 21st to see her (because she couldn’t do our regular Monday slot on the 18th). Usually she works in the NHS in the middle of the week but must have started her Christmas leave by then and so had a session slot available if I wanted it.

Of course I wanted it!…but I knew the moment she said it that it was going to be pretty much impossible. I went home to check but I knew my wife is in meetings that morning and wouldn’t be able to work from home. Both my kids are off school as of Wednesday and so as much as I would like to have cut the break down a bit by having that session it wasn’t going to happen. I considered Skype but to be honest it would have been a nightmare with a 3 year old and 5 year old tearing around.

Then I had an idea.

Is it wrong that I invited someone to come and stay for three days under the guise of a ‘Christmas get together/catch up’ because I knew they would be here to look after my kids on Thursday morning so I could go to therapy??!

I know.

This is not one of my proudest moments.

It’s also a time where I really hope that my therapist doesn’t read this blog! Because that’s a whole other level of crazy right?!

Don’t get me wrong I am very much looking forward to seeing my friend and spending some quality time with her and her son (my kids’ half brother) in the lead up to Christmas. I am excited about taking the kids out to do fun things together. I am looking forward to chatting and watching Christmas movies. But I won’t lie. I am fucking delighted that I can go to therapy on Thursday and have another stab at a decent, connecting session to get through the remainder of the break!

Right, I’m going to go hang my head in shame now before I go and see Father Christmas!

I am shining my weird light brightly today so the rest of you know where to find me! 😉

 

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Remain Sane This Christmas

rubberbandsandchewinggum4 Comments

So, it’s rapidly approaching the start of my Christmas therapy break. Eek! I have one more session on Monday and then that’s it for almost a month. As a therapy addict, the last thing I respond well to is a break in the supply of my drug/therapist (argh attachment issues!). As of Monday I’ll be going cold turkey (and it’s not even boxing day yet which is really the only acceptable time to be facing cold cuts) and that is actually pretty terrifying.

Despite there being a huge part of me that has been dreading the Christmas break since returning from the loooong summer break (I tend to do this – work on a cycle of dread counting down to each inevitable separation from my therapist) there has also been a part of me that has also tried to pretend that it isn’t going to happen, or that it will be fine, or that I don’t really mind that there is a break at all…denial, basically!

A couple of weeks ago I said to my therapist that ‘I think maybe the break will be a good thing as maybe a bit of distance might get me out of this rut of silence and being awkward with you’ and I meant it at the time…or, at least, whichever part of me was talking did.

Simultaneously there was a voice inside my head losing it, shouting, ‘What the fuck are you saying this for?! The break is not a good thing you stupid moron! Why would you say that to her?! Why can’t you tell her how bloody awful it is and how much it hurts just thinking about not seeing her? Why pretend that a month with no contact isn’t going to have you crying into your pillow every day?! You do my head in! FFS!’

I think, maybe, what was happening was that part of me, possibly the teen, was basically trying to tell my therapist, ‘I don’t need you, I don’t want you, and I can cope without you’. Breaks stir up a lot of feelings in me and really affect the therapy for quite some time both before and after a break. They really absolutely are the pits. I can’t help but feel abandoned and rejected.

I (adult) know that therapists need holidays just like the rest of the population but the child can’t really understand why her safe adult is fucking off for almost a month and leaving her to fend for herself when she is at her most vulnerable. It hurts a lot.

Every time there is a break and I can’t see my therapist it dredges up some really painful feelings from when I was little. My mum used to disappear from Sunday through to Friday. She was away at university studying, but as a four year old there is no rationalising that information when all you want is your mummy at bedtime….and this is what plays out time and again with breaks, and actually the time between weekly therapy sessions. When I want/need safety, nurturing, and care from my therapist and can’t access it, it feels utterly crushing. I have another ‘mummy’ that isn’t there when I need her and so I feel abandoned.

How I communicate how I feel about ‘being left’ to my therapist varies. Sometimes I am able to be vulnerable and open and tell her how I feel before a break.  More often than not, though, I shut down. I think my saying that the break was ‘a good thing’ to her was my way of shutting her out from my emotions. It was almost me saying, ‘I have to manage it regardless. I have no choice in this, so I am not going to let you see how much it bothers me’. 

The Teen part of me is so hurt, angry and rejected that it seems sensible that I stonewall her or say stuff that I don’t really mean. In some way if I don’t let her in then maybe it shows her how it feels to be excluded too. Yep, it’s not totally rational, but this is an emotional response and it’s just how it is sometimes.

Anyway, the following session my therapist asked me again how I was feeling about the break after her having read the 10 things I wish my therapist knew… post which clearly indicated that the break was a problem for me! She asked if I felt the same as I had suggested the previous week’s session. My simple answer: ‘No!’

The remainder of that session became a huge splurge about why Christmas break is so hard for me … but nothing about missing her or any of the therapeutic relationship stuff – just my life: my dysfunctional family; the weight of expectation to be someone who I am not anymore; missing my dear recently dead friend whose birthday falls a few days before Christmas; the anniversary of my spectacular mental health breakdown; two years since going through radiotherapy over the Christmas period; fear of spiralling down into self harm because things feel tricky….it went on and on and on but I kept tight lipped about the biggest issue: managing all that stuff without her support and the vulnerable parts of me struggling to maintain connection to her.

So then it got to Monday, and this week’s session. I’d been struggling all week with feeling lost and alone. Basically the attachment pain stuff had really kicked in massively. I’d shed the cloak of denial and was fully immersed in the reality of the feelings that go with a disruption to my weekly sessions. I knew that I couldn’t bury my head in the sand any longer, and I had a choice to make when I sat down: avoid or connect?

This week, I am delighted to report that I chose to connect. It mightn’t seem like a big deal but after months of being really closed off it was huge.

I’d had a quite disturbing dream earlier in the week where I had killed myself and so took that in to talk about. It was a good way into the session and stopped me just sitting there getting anxious and saying nothing! We did lots of unpicking and then once I thought we were done with it, she said, ‘I also wonder if this has anything to do with the break?’ I looked at her incredulously, ‘how?’ I asked. And she said something about how I have told her that I feel like she is dead when I can’t see her. I felt myself shut down and hide.

She noticed immediately and asked me what had changed? I explained that my body was really tense and she asked me when it had happened. I told her, ‘when you mentioned the break.’ She did one of those really warm and understanding ‘ahhhh‘ sounds and said, ‘breaks are massive and stir up loads. We need to pay attention to this so it doesn’t get ignored. We need to give it more attention than we have done in the past, I think. The break maybe feels different this time?’

Then she asked about the pebbles (honestly, those frigging pebbles will be the end of me!!) and we talked about how it’s been hard to get to it/them on both our parts. I think after the failed internalising visualisation that she sent me for the summer break that I had a had a meltdown over she’s probably worried about getting it wrong again.  She asked if I had any ideas about it and what kind of message she could write that would help and I said ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what you can write to make it feel any better’. She agreed and said she didn’t know either because it was complex.

She said that she was aware that the adult didn’t need these pebbles (transitional object) but the young ones who are more fragile really did, and maybe a few of those young parts, not just one, needed a particular kind of message. She asked me what it was that all of them respond to. I wanted to say ‘knowing you are here with me and aren’t going anywhere’ but sat still and said nothing (look, I can’t always say what’s on my mind!!). She said, ‘I think maybe they need to know they are kept in mind and are held, something along those lines?’

Basically from the moment she had mentioned the break when unpicking my dream my little ones inside lost it. It was tears and tantrums. I could feel at least three separate child voices inside me screaming. Usually I keep that kind of thing to myself and banish the inner child to the corner of the room or gag her, but seeing as my therapist seemed to be inviting a conversation about what the young parts needed and knowing the break was coming I said, ‘it’s really noisy in my head’ and somehow from that we got moving along a path that I have been wary of treading before now.

She asked if I recognised the voices of the children? Were they my children? I said ‘no’. She asked if it could be my inner child/ren in distress? And I said ‘yes’ (I am sure you are all marvelling at how eloquent I am in my therapy sessions!). She said that these types of conversations really stir up lots of difficult feelings and overwhelm me. I said it was ‘hell’. She asked me if the voices felt contained inside my head. I said ‘no’. She said ‘it’s huge, isn’t it?’ I nodded, ‘I hate it’. She looked right and me and gently said, ‘I know you hate it, but there’s a need, there’s someone inside that needs a lot of care. She is very distressed.’…and then the doorbell rang!

Embarrassed, she quickly answered it (the therapy room is right next to the door and she had obviously seen her neighbour coming up the driveway) and came back in. She asked if the crying noise was loud still in my head? And wondered if the disruption to my session had amplified the noise?: ‘The little one doesn’t understand why there has been a disruption, she just doesn’t like them and it mirrors what happens in the break.’ She said that I (adult) know what’s going on but the little one can’t understand why she is not there with me.

I felt really exposed but equally really held and contained and said, ‘I don’t know what to do with this’ and she said ‘I think this is where we often get to. It’s really hard to talk about it. It’s overwhelming. It’s hard to find the words to talk about it. But the need is huge. The little one inside you, however old she is, she needs something, and so if one of your children were telling you this, what would you give them?’

And then I replied (a bit – a lot- frustrated!) ‘I know what you are trying to get out of me but it’s not as easy as just giving myself a hug and holding myself. It doesn’t work! I’ve tried really hard. It’s great knowing that there is that need but what the hell am I supposed to do with that?’ and she was really understanding. It’s one of the things that I really struggle with, knowing there is a all this sadness and pain inside and yet not seemingly being able to do anything to make it feel any better. I just feel like a powerless spectator watching small children suffer.

I told her about how I had emailed my friend some activities for our child parts and said ‘as nice as all that is, and as aware as I am about needing to attend to the needs of those parts, it doesn’t hold them, it doesn’t contain them. I try really hard but it just doesn’t work. I can’t make it feel like there is holding’. She said she understood and suggested trying something different.

She said ‘these little ones need an adult to be with them and soothe them and settle them down emotionally. It might be you or another adult. The little ones need holding and probably so do the teenagers. Maybe that is something we could develop together. It’s not just about knowing about it (holding), it’s about feeling it bit by bit. Can you imagine how that would feel?- starting with the youngest, most needy one, because she needs it. The adult can kick in and organise everything but the little one needs to feel held and loved and emotionally there with someone’.

I said, ‘yes, I get that, but the little ones don’t even know I exist. The smallest one doesn’t want me!’ In my head I was willing myself to say, ‘she wants you!’ but didn’t. She said ‘they can meet you and we can work together to help introduce you to each other. We need to be able to soothe the little one, just a tiny bit to start off with’. She asked if I thought it was possible. I said ‘no‘ because I know that little me really only wants to be cared for and held by one person…and we all know that right now, that isn’t me!

We talked about what the little girl was feeling and how it would be if I tried to sit her on my knee and hold her. I said, ‘she doesn’t want me. She doesn’t trust me’. She asked who she trusted. I said ‘no one’…which is kind of true. I want to trust my therapist but since the no touch thing I don’t fully feel like I can say ‘my little one wants to sit in your lap and for you to soothe her and tell her that she is loved‘….because it just feels toooooo much. But that’s what I wanted to say.

She asked me if the ‘little one could imagine being cuddled?’. I said ‘no’…because I have no memory of it. Holding and touch have been so lacking in my upbringing that I honestly can’t tell you of a time when I remember being ‘held’ by mum. Of course we’ve had awkward hugs now and again when we say goodbye, but there’s never been any of that closeness that I crave. There has been no snuggling at bedtime after a story and softly saying ‘I love you more than anything’  or ‘you are the most special girl in the world and I love you’ which is what I say to my daughter every single day.

It’s a running joke. Each day when she comes home from school I say to my little girl, ‘guess what?’ and she laughs and rolls her eyes at me, ‘I know mummy- you love me- you say it all the time!’ And do you know what?-that fills me with utter joy because that is exactly how it should be. She is so secure in knowing that I love her that it is almost boring to her. Win!

After my therapist’s ‘cuddle’ question – big ouch – please, please cuddle me! I jumped out of the situation, detached from the young part and wondered aloud, ‘why can’t the little part of me trust?‘ and she said some affirming, validating stuff about how things have been and yet I had somehow survived it. She said, ‘this is the place where the change is going to come. it’s a lot of work and effort and it hurts but when you take your mind to this place this is where things change. the more you can be in touch with your need and your feelings, as hard as it feels, the more possible it feels for things to be less bad’ and she is right….because despite how tough it was it was a great session.

BUT. Oh and there always is a giant BUT isn’t there? Since having such a deeply connecting session I have been left with the most enormous therapy hangover. It’s Thursday now and I am still feeling it. I’ve been so sad all week. I can’t tell you how many times I have considered picking up my phone and sending a text to tell my therapist that I miss her, am struggling and try and get some kind of reassurance that things are ok.

I haven’t sent that message because I know that she doesn’t respond to texts that are about anything other than scheduling. I literally cannot bear the feeling of being so vulnerable, reaching out and then being ignored – it feels so rejecting. I’ve done it enough times to know that texting doesn’t end well but god, this place that I am in right now is hellish. I really cannot bear the thought of the break.

So in order to try and get some extra support and sense of holding during the break I have just signed up to Sane’s Text Care again:

http://www.sane.org.uk/what_we_do/support/textcare/?task=thankyou

It’s a really great service. Basically you fill out a really quick form online with some info about what you struggle with:

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and then they send a weekly support text message to you at a time of your choosing for five consecutive weeks.  I’ve done this over several of my therapy breaks now and I have to say it really helps:

With the Christmas break coming up I figure it’s worth doing everything possible to try and make the weeks without therapy a little more bearable. Having my feelings acknowledged in this way is really helpful because, like a lot of you, it’s not easy to share these feelings with family and it can feel incredibly isolating struggling in silence with attachment pain. Of course, you can get support with whatever your issue because all texts are tailored specifically to what you write in the text box on the request form.

Usually they only need 72 hours notice to begin the text messages but I noticed when I filled out the form earlier that the deadline for requesting Christmas messages is 10th December. So if you are thinking this might be something that’d help you over the festive period to stay sane then get online quick.

Anyway, that’s about all for now. School run calls! …

The Mother Wound

rubberbandsandchewinggum53 Comments

Oh man, where do I start with this one? The Mother Wound. It’s a biggie isn’t it? Part of me feels like I should just throw this out there to all you therapy bloggers and we could do one of those exercises where we each write a single line on the paper, fold it, and then pass it on to the next person and by the end we’d have collected a story about the Mother Wound. The paper part would be tricky but maybe we could do it in the comments box?

I’m referring to a ‘Mother Wound’ here, but essentially what I am talking about is the damage inflicted on a child by the lack of one, or more, caregiver’s reliable care, emotional holding and containment. It could be a deficit in care or sometimes abuse/neglect by mum/dad/grandparent/other guardian or the entire family (I guess). It’s the damage that is caused by lack of safety- either emotional, or physical, or both. It’s attachment/relational trauma.

Even though everyone’s life experiences are different, and their relationships with their mothers/primary caregivers unique, from what I can work out there are quite a few of us battling very similar demons caused by this early emotional injury. I can only talk accurately about my own experiences and causes of my particular Mother Wound but I will also try and bring in some of my observations from hearing/reading the stories of others too.

The effects produced by the mother wound on an individual seem fairly standard on first inspection: at times intense feelings of anxiety and/or depression, a fragile sense of self, difficulty with trust in relationships (attachment issues), fear of rejection and/or abandonment, low self-esteem, an over-developed self-critic which often has led to the development of one or more negative coping strategies: eating disorders, self-harm, alcohol abuse, drug dependency to name but a few things. And sometimes it gets really very dark and the thought of suicide or even possible attempts at suicide become part of the fabric of life. Oh, and the shame. I can’t forget that! A deep deep sense of shame around the expression of feelings and emotion.

I understand that it’s not the case for everyone and not all elements I’ve listed above are relevant to all people and, of course, there are more issues that I haven’t mentioned. I, for one, don’t drink alcohol or do drugs anymore but this is largely because I think I have quite an addictive personality and would probably end up in real trouble if I did now. I think it is quite telling that I am so controlled where drugs and alcohol are concerned. I think people must think I am quite boring but actually I just know what I can manage and remember what I was like in my early twenties. The idea of a hangover is enough to put me off!

We are all different but when I read these blogs the one thing that stands out is that that there is so much vulnerability and longing out there. There is so much emotional pain. People, fundamentally, just want to be loved, and to love, and yet the pursuit of this ‘love’ is anything but straightforward because of what has happened in the past. The lens through which we view intimacy is faulty and distorts everything. Our perspective is tainted, even as adults, and it negatively impacts on our ability to form and maintain healthy relationships. I find all that information both comforting and utterly devastating.

I have no problem whatsoever with forming friendships but I struggle to really let people in. I am that reliable person that others turn to in a crisis, the level-headed one, the grounded and sensible one, the one that throws a good party but is also the person that sits listening to heartbreak on the phone at midnight. I am a good friend to others but I can count on one hand the people who ‘know’ me and I have let close to me.

I am not interested in making hundreds of acquaintances. I can be life and soul of the party (when I can be bothered) but more often than not must seem aloof or stand-offish in social settings. I just really don’t like big crowds and small talk. I just don’t see the point in it. I’d rather be on my own.

Since I started blogging in the summer, for the first time I feel as though I am not completely alone in my feelings and as though I finally have a space where I can express exactly what feels so wrong with me/in me. Not only that, that what I have to say is accepted and met without judgement but actually, more often than not, a huge amount of empathy and compassion. That’s massive.

To be able to finally start getting the words out after all these years and say how it feels is, in itself, enormous but for other people to go, ‘yep, it’s really tough, and I get it. You are not alone’ is life-changing, because frankly sometimes these feelings feel terribly frightening and unsettling and isolating. I really want to be able to talk stuff through with my therapist but it’s not easy when so much of what I feel is triggered by being in therapy with her. It’s so difficult. There are parts of me that desperately want to connect with her but other parts that are too scared to for fear of being mocked and then abandoned.

Sometimes it is easy to be swept up and away with how bad it all seems. It can feel like there is no light at the end of the tunnel, and there is no point in continuing. It can quickly become a negative downward spiral. A (perceived) bad therapy session can leave me feeling desperate and helpless and adds fuel to the fire of intense and difficult emotions I’m already battling.

To know that I am not alone in this kind of struggle makes me feel less weird, a little less like there is something very wrong with me, and is helping me move towards the realisation, that ‘f*ck!Things weren’t right when I was small and IT WAS NOT MY FAULT!’ How I am now is a product of what was done to me. What an enormous revelation that is!

It’s also comforting to know that other people are struggling with the constraints of therapeutic relationship (argh boundaries!), feeling deeply attached but also terribly vulnerable, repairing ruptures, having good and bad sessions, cancelling and uncancelling sessions, sitting in silence, raging and longing, moving and stagnating. We’re all giving it a good go and it really isn’t easy! I certainly never imagined therapy could be like this when I entered into it years and years ago.

Over the years, I have seen so many therapists and yet I have never got to this place with any of them – which is both a blessing and a curse! I am finally connecting with emotions after years of talking about the events of my life in a detached way – like whatever I am talking about has happened to someone else. But now I feel like I am caught up in something that I am entirely unprepared for. That’s unnerving.

I like to be in control and therapy doesn’t feel like that right now because adult me isn’t there all the time. There are young ones in the mix now and they are not quite so adept at filtering the feelings that come up. They act out. They are clingy and needy at times and at others completely shut down and avoidant. I really struggle with disorganised attachment: sometimes I totally trust and feel safe with my therapist and at other times I feel like the therapeutic relationship is dangerous and is ultimately going to hurt me.

Reading your blog posts is comforting but also totally harrowing at times: how can it be that there are so many incredibly lovely people out there feeling this way? Why should it be that such vibrant, intelligent, caring individuals who have so much to offer are living day-to-day struggling to exist in the wider world trying to pretend that they are not wounded? The attachment wound it so big it is overwhelming and yet it’s as though it doesn’t exist, or isn’t allowed to exist.

It’s like Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet when he has been mortally wounded by Tybalt. Benvolio asks if he is hurt and Mercutio replies:

‘Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch’

(Romeo and Juliet Act 3:1)

And that’s what we do most of the time. We play it down. We cover it up. This is not for our benefit, but rather to try and keep up appearances, to not rock the boat, to not let people down…and strangest of all, to not let the perpetrator of the damage know we are even hurt.

We don’t ever allow anyone close enough to show them how damaged we really are because somehow the culture in which we have been raised makes us feel that there is something inherently wrong with us. So we try very hard to carry on with life, and we do a pretty good job at living with the wound (indeed some of us have even managed to block it from our consciousness). It’s always there, though, and depending on how we move and flex our minds and bodies dictates how able, or not, we are to go on with the show.

My goodness aren’t we great actors and don’t we have insane levels of stamina? But sometimes it gets too much doesn’t it? It’s too real, too painful, too exhausting, too bloody gory and we just cannot carry on. We finally reach a point where we must discover and face our own truth. We can’t live like this any more. We need to be honest and tell someone about our injury. We need help.

In Mercutio’s case it’s his best friend Romeo to whom he tells the truth:

ROMEO: Courage man, the hurt cannot be much,

MERCUTIO: No tis’ not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but ‘tis enough. ‘Twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me grave man.’

Mercutio admits that he has been injured and that he will die as a result.

Sometimes it is not immediately apparent to us where our wound has originated from because over the years there have been many, many wounds inflicted and so that the attachment wound gets overlaid with other things and becomes simply ‘depression’ or ‘anxiety’ or ‘stress’ or ‘self harm’ or ‘x y z’.

Eventually the inevitable happens: we can’t really function. We reach a time where it becomes almost life and death and we are teetering on the edge. Sometimes the breakdown is averted and other times a breakdown is exactly what drives us into therapy.

Often it is in therapy that we finally realise what the problem has been all along. Sure there are loads and loads of other life experiences that we work through and process. I would hazard a guess and say that most people don’t walk into the therapy room for the first time, sit down and say, ‘So here’s the thing, I am suffering with the fall-out of developmental trauma and my attachment systems are causing me to struggle in relationships and in my life in general’. How wonderful it would be if we did though?! I’d have saved thousands of ££$$ if I’d have really known what I was dealing with in the beginning.

Instead, over time we gently peel back the scab layers that have sort of healed over but not quite. And then we reach it. The core wound. And my god it’s fucking enormous. It’s like staring down into the abyss. How was this level of injury ever survivable? How could a small child endure such damage and still live? Well in my case it came through shutting down/dissociating, repressing memories, and freezing that little girl back in time as well as attacking myself, in various ways, for years.

I have grown up now. I have an adult body. From the outside I have the trappings of a successful adult life: some decent qualifications, nice house, wife and children. But there are certainly parts of me that have not emotionally matured. There are several parts loose and unhappy inside.

When faced with the wound, instinct tells you to run far away and try and forget about what you’ve seen. It’s too much.  At the same time another part of you awakens the moment that gaping wound is exposed to the air. Despite everything, the child is alive still. Its need for love and care and holding is still there as much as it ever was back in the past and it is terrifying to the adult. The feelings are enormous. The need is overwhelming. What on earth do you do with that?

How can you care for that smallest part of you when it isn’t your care that the child wants? Indeed, that child has no idea that you even exist. The child wants the love and care of the person who has helped uncover the hidden it. It is that caregiver to whom the child is now attached. They want the person who has taken the time to draw that wounded small child out to rescue them. Session after session of steady work, of calm, understanding, validating conversations lead to this moment. The child loves the therapist how could it not?

The child’s hopes of being loved, held, and contained unconditionally reawaken in a flash, and there it is. Hope is ignited. Maybe this time that hole, the wound can be filled with the therapist’s love. If we can just get enough of it…

Oh, if only it were that simple!

It’s only natural that when you realise that you are severely injured that you would want to pack the wound, fill it, and close it over. The desire for the wound to heal is huge and it often feels like the only way to heal it is for the therapist to pour more and more love, and time, and evidence of care into it. If we could only get more contact with our therapist, more sessions, contact between sessions, more tangible verbal reassurances, physical holding, and emotional containment then perhaps this wound will heal up. We scream out for ‘more more MORE!’ of the good stuff…

There’s a problem, though. This wound is like a bottomless pit isn’t it? No matter what you throw into it, no matter how you try and pack it, it never fills. It can’t be filled by the therapist’s love alone. We can’t sit back and watch and hope that this person can magically fix us. We have to turn around and look deep into that hole and see how it is constructed because it is us that holds the tools to be able to heal and mend it.

It is agony staring down into that dark place. Realising just how much pain it contains is enough to send you insane. Somehow bit by bit that hole will fill and we won’t feel so empty, one day. We will learn to love ourselves and feel good enough and steadily those edges will close in. There will always be a scar, though. We can never fully take away the injury. I’m nowhere near healed. In fact writing this I can feel that hole gaping wide.

From what I can tell, not many of us feel comfortable exposing this wound to friends and family in any real depth. We might be able to talk about feeling depressed, or even allude to how bad things were when we were growing up. But when it comes to the intense feelings we feel towards our therapists and how much that impacts us on a day to day…well, it’s little wonder we don’t share that. It’s totally cringeworthy.

A lot of the time we struggle to admit the feelings we have about our therapists even to them in a therapy session so there’s not much hope of letting that out to others! We can’t face the shame, embarrassment, or the pitying looks but also the lack of understanding we are so often faced with.

Despite all the recent publicity and trying to normalise mental health issues in the media it just doesn’t always filter down into families. It feels like this in my wider family: ‘yeah, mental health issues need to be talked about and there needs to be more funding for it. Isn’t it terrible? It’s lucky that no one in our family struggles with their mental health. We’re all jolly and normal aren’t we?…what breakdown? Oh no, that wasn’t a breakdown it was a gap year, she didn’t want to work. She’s fine. Anorexia? No, no, she’s naturally thin and athletic…’

There is so much denial in my family about what has and hasn’t happened, who does or doesn’t struggle, that it’s almost funny. I can sort of accept the wall of pretence from outside the house and notch it up to ‘my dysfunctional blood relations’. I find it far harder when I face criticism and/or lack of understanding at home.

I’m sure it’s not just me that gets these kind of wonderfully helpful soundbites directed at them when the blood starts to seep through a bit and the ability to hide the gaping hole is lessened:

‘What have you got to be depressed about?’

‘You need to learn to let this go.’

‘You can’t change it so don’t let it bother you.’

‘Why can’t you see all the positives you have in your life?’

‘Why am I not enough for you?

‘Why don’t you let me in?’

‘Your depression isn’t getting any better.’

‘I won’t watch you destroy yourself again.’

‘How much therapy does one person need?’

‘Your relationship with your therapist is unhealthy.’

‘I don’t see any improvement in you since you’ve been in therapy, if anything I think you are worse.’

‘You need to try harder to be happy.’

‘I feel like there’s a huge part of you that I just don’t know, why won’t you talk to me?’

‘Can’t you just put it all in a box and forget about it?’

I could go on and on and on but I’m sure you get the idea and have several of your own to throw in there.

When, periodically, faced with those kind of statements it makes it incredibly difficult to open up and be honest about how things are. I think this is, in part, why the therapeutic relationship becomes so important to so many of us. We just do not have anyone who really, genuinely, can listen without judgement. It’s hard to be your real self when your true self isn’t what people want to deal with. They like the one that hides the wound and soldiers on.

Sure, our loved ones love us and care deeply about out wellbeing, but it is also so hard for them to witness how bad things can be for us. It’s not easy witnessing so much pain and being powerless to really help. They can’t fix us. They don’t really understand us. They don’t see the child inside or if they do, what on earth are they meant to do with it? They are desperate for us to be well and happy but it’s not a quick solution…and often in therapy things get worse before they get better. I think that must be terrifying for them and so it is understandable that, at times, frustrations air.

The problem for a lot of us is that we fear abandonment and rejection so much that these kind of statements can make us hide and build our walls even higher. I, for one, am a highly sensitive person and so any kind of criticism like that really hurts me. I feel like the emerging self is not the one that people want to know. The high-functioning adult is far more appealing than the vulnerable one who can’t just cope with anything that’s thrown at it.

I’m aware that this is a massive ramble and I haven’t really said all that I want to. It is certainly a subject to come back to at some point. As I have been writing this I can feel the little parts have really started to stir. I felt very much in my adult when I began and now I feel very small and sad and lost.

The little girl inside realises, yet again that Mummy isn’t coming and the idealised replacement mummy isn’t really a ‘mummy’ to her at all. Ouch!

And so, I guess, this is the bit where my therapist would say that I somehow need to summon up my adult, the one that is a mummy to two beautiful small people, and get her to pick up that little girl and hold onto her tightly, tell her she is loved, and that she is safe. I so want to be able to do that for her. I absolutely want to soothe that part of me but right now all I seem to be able to do is watch her suffer. I have no idea how to make things better for her. I know before long I will end up attacking myself because the pain is so overwhelming and that doesn’t help anyone.

The mother wound is gaping today.

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